Chapter 10
Maggie had a few hours free until she had to return to the station, so she headed back to the hospital in hopes of questioning some nurses before they started their shifts. I decided to make my own way over in hopes of picking up something useful on the missing boy along the way. I detoured down side streets, into neighborhoods, hoping to pick up a trace of Tyler Matthews. My search uncovered nothing. But I’d had to try. After a while I gave up and drifted over to the hospital to see if Maggie had done any better gleaning information about Fiona Harker.
I found Maggie in a staff lounge, talking to two tearful women who had clearly known Fiona Harker. They were dressed in fresh scrubs and waiting for their shift to begin. One was from Trinidad, I guessed, given her accent and the fact that half the nurses in our town had been recruited from there. “Fiona was one of the good ones,” she was saying in a musical lilt. “She never crossed nobody, ever.” The other nurse was a pale, little bit of a thing with curly brown hair. But she must have had strength in there somewhere if she was a nurse. I’d never met a weak one.
I loved nurses. They were the one good thing about the hospital. Even though you ran across the occasional gorgon like the one who had turned Maggie away earlier, most of them led lives connected to dozens of other lives and reveled in their connections. There was such beauty in their willingness to be a part of other lives. I had seen people in great pain have that pain eased when a nurse walked into the room; put a hand on their brow; and, without even realizing it, took some of the pain onto themselves. Their ability to accept the humanness of others put the rest of us to shame.
Of course, those bonds could hurt when they were severed. The two nurses dabbed at their eyes with tissues as they answered Maggie’s questions. Taken together, their comments allowed a portrait of the dead nurse to emerge:
No, Fiona had not been involved with anyone. They would have known if she had. It was impossible to keep your personal life private at the hospital.
No, they had never even heard of her being involved with anyone in the past, which was odd when you stopped to think about it, given how lovely she was. But then Fiona had always been a very private person, and she did not gossip. She did ask people questions about their lives and she was a wonderful listener. It was only after she’d left that you realized she hadn’t offered any information about herself.
Yes, she had family, they thought, somewhere on the West Coast. They did not know why Fiona lived so far away from them. She’d grown up in San Francisco. Or was it Sacramento? Neither could remember. They only knew this detail because once, when an earthquake in California had been reported on the news, Fiona had excused herself to phone her family to make sure they were safe.
All the doctors loved Fiona. If you were a good nurse, they never had to ask twice for an instrument or for a test to be run or a patient to be checked on. With Fiona, you never had to ask at all. The instrument was there, waiting for you to take it. She had written down the tests you wanted before the words were out of your mouth. She gave everyone special treatment, so you always knew your patients were in good hands.
It was enough to make some nurses resent her, sure, but not enough to kill her. Nurses don’t kill, they insisted to Maggie. Nurses healed.
A third nurse joined them just before the current shift ended. She put her feet up and waited to hear more about Fiona’s death. She was a big woman with an upturned nose and a jolly smile. Her breasts were enormous but, I imagined, comforting when you were sick and in need of motherly care.
“I liked her,” the new woman declared in a booming voice. The other nurses seemed awed by her volume. They glanced at Maggie with a look that clearly said, Don’t get her started.
“Was that unusual?” Maggie asked with a straight face. “You liking someone?”
“Hell, yeah,” the nurse boomed. “I can’t stand a soul. Just ask those two.”
The other two nurses nodded rapidly, eyes wide.
I decided I liked the new nurse, big mouth and all. She was only testing Maggie’s mettle.
“What did you like about Fiona?” Maggie asked.
The big nurse did not hesitate. As she took off her shoes and massaged her feet, she counted off what she had liked about Fiona Harker. “Fiona minded her own business. Fiona knew her job. Fiona liked her patients. Fiona had a sense of humor.”
The other two nurses looked startled at this.
“Yes, she did,” the big nurse insisted, seeing their expressions. “A great sense of humor. She just saved it for patients. They’re the ones who need it. And she was kind. When my mother died, she came to the funeral.”
“Your mother died?” the thin nurse asked faintly.
“Three years ago,” the big nurse shouted back, then laughed at their expressions. “It’s all right. I didn’t tell anyone. But Fiona found out and she was there. It meant a lot to me, more than I thought it would. I don’t know why, but it did. Just seeing her made me feel like everything was going to be all right. That life would go on and I could make it through and that better things were ahead. Fiona calmed you. She let the bullshit roll right off her. And believe me, we get a lot of it around this place. Especially from the hallowed doctors.” She looked up at her fellow nurses with a solemn expression. “Let us all now kneel and pray.”
Maggie looked up, puzzled, but the big nurse was laughing again. “That’s what Fiona used to say when the doctors would sweep through and leave us with a shit pile of work to do. Because that’s what the doctors acted like they expected us to do. Kneel and pray to them and hail them for gracing us with their presence. They all act like that. Fiona hated that about them.”
“Fiona Harker was having an affair with a doctor.”
Everyone in the room looked surprised at this declaration. The voice had come out of nowhere. We all looked around and there, standing against a row of pink lockers along one side of the room, stood an older nurse, maybe midfifties, who was taking off her ID badge and storing it in her locker.
“Get out of here!” the big nurse boomed, not believing a word of it.
“She was.” The older nurse was tall and thin with gray hair cut short and not a dab of makeup on her rather pretty face. She had strong, almost masculine hands. Now, I’d want her beside me if I were dying, I decided. She had not pronounced judgment on Fiona, and I don’t think she was in the habit of pronouncing judgment on anyone, ever. Her demeanor was matter-of-fact and her energy shone like silver steel. I could tell she seldom questioned life. She accepted the world as a series of irrefutable facts and then set about to do what she could with them. She would have made an awesome doctor.
Maggie stood up, as impressed with the newcomer as I was, and introduced herself. She took the nurse’s name and invited her to sit.
“I’d just as soon stand, thanks,” the nurse explained. “My back hurts from lifting two-hundred-pound patients.”
Before Maggie could ask her to tell them more about Fiona Harker, the big nurse blurted out the questions on everyone’s mind. “Give us the dirt already. What doctor? For how long? How did you know?”
“I don’t know which doctor. Is that important?” The older nurse crossed her arms and looked the other nurses over as if they were failing to measure up to her high standards, and could they all not try just a little bit harder?
“Hell, yeah, it’s important,” the big nurse said. “She was probably killed by him.”
The older nurse looked at Maggie. “I thought Fiona killed herself.”
Maggie shook her head. “We don’t think so.”
The older nurse looked a little relieved, as if her world had been disturbed but could now resume its regular orbit. “I wondered about that. I didn’t think she was the type. And I’ve met a lot of people who tried to kill themselves in my time.”
“What do you know about her personal life?” Maggie prodded. “It’s very important. Not many people seem to know anything about her.”
“I don’t know all that much either,” the older nurse admitted. “I think she’d been having an affair for about a year. At least that was when she changed, a year ago.”
“Changed how?” Maggie asked.
“Went from being very self-contained to reaching out more to patients and others. She was always an excellent nurse, but she held herself back before then. Kept it very, very professional. People in here are scared. They need more than that. Fiona began giving more of herself about a year ago. Smiling, telling the young patients stories from her own childhood.”
“Why the change?” Maggie asked.
“She was happy. Happier than she had ever been in the twelve years we worked together.”
“What makes you think it was an affair?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah,” the big nurse said. She was a human echo. “What makes you think it was an affair?” The look Maggie gave her was quick, but it was enough to cause the big nurse to sit back in her chair and drag her fingers over her mouth in the universal “zipped up” gesture. The younger nurses exchanged a glance—Maggie had impressed them.
“I knew it was an affair because Fiona was secretive about it,” the older nurse explained. “I was her shift supervisor for almost a year, so I noticed the difference. Sometimes she’d take phone calls on her cell while on duty, which she’d never done before, or excuse herself to make calls outside the hospital. Which everyone is supposed to do, of course, but no one ever really does, unless they want privacy. She’d ask for time off at the last minute, which I tried to give her, because she rarely took time off otherwise.”
“Who was she involved with?” Maggie asked.
“I have no idea. It wasn’t any of my business, and I didn’t want to make it my business. What people do to each other as consenting adults is their business.”
“Was there a pattern to her time off?” Maggie asked. She was hoping to match it to the still-unknown doctor’s schedule once he was identified.
The nurse shrugged. “Not that I could tell. When she was working for me, the only pattern I could see was that the other person was calling all the shots. I know how it goes. I’ve seen it before. She rarely asked for time off in advance, it was always at the last minute. Which meant one thing to me: when he asked her to take time off, she did. Which is why I figured it was a doctor. Probably a married one.”
“Fletcher!” the big nurse almost shouted.
Maggie looked alarmed, the two young nurses were scandalized. And me? I felt a stab of satisfaction at the news that maybe the good doctor was not so good after all.
“Christian Fletcher?” Maggie asked. “The emergency room head?”
“I bet it was him,” the big nurse decided. “His marriage broke up. No one really knows why. He was married, and now he’s not and, besides, the guy’s a catch!”
This pronouncement caused the small, curly-haired brunette to turn a deep scarlet. “Dr. Fletcher is very nice,” she protested. “He would not cheat on his wife. He flies to Honduras and Afghanistan each year to help people who need medical care, and he does it for free.”
“He is a good man,” her friend agreed.
“He’s not a good man if he killed Fiona,” the big nurse pointed out.
“I don’t know who she was having the affair with,” the older nurse said loudly, sending the big nurse a definite glare. “I have no idea if it was Dr. Fletcher or the man in the moon. And I should think the last thing the detective needs to hear is gossip.”
Maggie looked like she’d take anything, including gossip, but the older nurse was already on her way out the door. “Call me if you need more from me, but honestly, I’ve told you everything I know.”
“That’s right,” the big nurse called after her. “Drop a bomb and then leave so the rest of us have to clean it up.”
“Do you really think it was Dr. Fletcher?” the youngest nurse asked breathlessly. Her own dreams for Dr. Fletcher had just taken a nosedive.
“No,” her friend said scornfully. “Why you listen to her?” She cocked her head at the big nurse and shook a finger at her. “Stop messing with people’s heads.”
“Oh, come on,” the big nurse protested as she pulled vigorously on her toes. “Who in this place is worth having an affair with besides him?” She went through a litany of doctors and why they were unworthy. The reasons ranged from halitosis to wearing a toupee to several cases of extreme narcissism, and there was also one wife-beater and a small circle of closet cases. When she was done, I had to agree: the pickings were slim at County General.
“What can you tell me about the breakup of Dr. Fletcher’s marriage?” Maggie finally interrupted—and part of me wondered whether she had asked out of professional or personal curiosity.
“No one really knows, but it broke his heart when it happened,” the young nurse said, looking at the others. “He did everything he could to hold it together, but . . .”
“Oh, I’ll say it for you,” the big nurse volunteered. “His wife is a grade-A bitch, intent on becoming the most famous and beloved doctor this hospital has ever produced. She wants it all. Fame. A foundation named after her. More money than the rest of us will see in a lifetime. And she wants a husband just as driven as she is, though not one who overshadows her, of course. But Dr. Fletcher likes working in the emergency room. He feels he can make a difference there, and he does. That’s not good enough for her. She should’ve married a cardiologist or a brain surgeon when she had the chance. She could have, too, believe me. She’s one of those tall, thin blondes you just have to hate on principle.” The woman laughed merrily at this and the others even smiled their agreement.
“Dr. Fletcher’s wife works at this hospital?” Maggie asked.
“In pediatric oncology,” the small brunette nurse told her. “She’s the head of it.”
“She is a very good doctor,” her friend added. “But an unpleasant woman. She’s always very friendly to big donors to the hospital, but she treats us like dirt. And she can be cold to her patients and very patronizing to their parents, like they don’t know what’s best for their own children.”
“One of those,” the big nurse said.
“One of those,” the brunette agreed.
“If you ask me, Dr. Fletcher left his wife because no one in his right mind could live with her,” the big nurse added. “That’s my take on the situation.”
“Why are you so certain Fiona was having an affair with a doctor?” Maggie asked. “It could have been with someone outside the hospital.”
“Who else could we get involved with?” the little brunette asked Maggie. “It’s not like we have lives.”
“True that,” her friend agreed with a nod.
Maggie was ready to ask more questions, but a new shift was starting, and her cell phone was ringing. She stared at the number calling and flipped it open. “Something happen?” Her frown was immediate. “He what?” I could feel her frustration grow as she listened. “I’ll be right there,” she told the caller, and snapped the phone shut angrily. My Maggie was pissed off.
The nurses eyed her, hoping for an explanation. They did not get one.
“Thank you,” Maggie told them. “I’ll be back.”
“We’ll be here,” the big nurse said with a sigh as she massaged the heels of her feet. Just for fun, I sent a puff of air straight at the arches of her size elevens. She jumped and then giggled, an oddly disconcerting sound coming from such a large woman. The other two nurses looked at her blankly.
“Don’t ask,” she boomed.
They didn’t.