When I woke again it was to the full bustle of morning hospital routine—blood pressure, temperature, rounds—and no questions answered: doctor will tell you. After the nurses came a brisk intern who looked at my eyes and stuck pins into my feet. The pin seems to be neuroscience’s most advanced piece of technology. Another intern was busy with my roommate, a woman my age who’d just had cosmetic surgery. After they’d finished Lotty herself swept in, dark eyes bright with nonclinical feeling. My intern hovered at her elbow, anxious to tell her his findings on my body. She listened for a minute, then dismissed him with an imperious wave.
“I’m sure your reflexes are all in perfect order, but let me see for myself First let’s have your chest. Breathe. Hold it. Exhale. Yes.” She listened to me fore and aft, then had me shut my eyes and touch my hands together, get out of bed—a slow, lurching process—and walk on my heels, then my toes. It wasn’t much compared to my usual workout, but it left me panting.
“You really should have children, Victoria—you could produce a whole new breed of superheroes. Why you are even alive at this point is a medical miracle, let alone that you can walk.”
“Thank you, Lotty. I’m pretty pleased myself Tell me how I got here and when I can leave.”
She gave me the details of Peppy and the ambulance men. “And your friend Mr. Contreras is waiting anxiously down the hall. He stayed here all night, with the dog, totally against hospital policy, but the two of you are well matched —stubborn, pigheaded, with only one allowable way to do things—your own.”
“Pot calling the kettle black, Lotty,” I said unrepentantly, lying down. “And don’t tell me the dog didn’t stay here with your connivance. Or at least Max’s.”
I frowned and bit off my words, remembering my last conversation with the hospital’s executive director. Lotty looked at me sympathetically.
“Yes, Max also wants to talk to you. He is feeling a bit remorseful. And that is no doubt why the dog spent the night in the hospital. But she must go home now, so if you will tell your tiresome neighbor you’re going to live to tilt at more windmills, we’ll get them to leave. Meanwhile, since your brain is no worse than usual, I’ll get someone to take that needle out of you.”
She whirled off at her usual forty knots. Mr. Contreras came in a minute or two later, his eyes filled with tears, his hands shaking a little. I swung my feet over the side of the bed and held out my arms to him.
“Oh, cookie, I’m never gonna forget the way we found you yesterday. More dead than alive, you was. And that young snot not believing you could be down there and me having to practically knock him out before he’d drive us. And then I couldn’t get the nurses here to tell me anything about how you was doing, I kept asking and asking and they wouldn’t say because I wasn’t family. Me, not your family. Who has more right, I’d like to know, I says to them, some cousin in Melrose Park who don’t even send her a Christmas card, or me who saved her life. But Dr. Lotty showed up and straightened it all out, her and Mr. Loewenthal between them, and put me and the dog in an empty room down the hall from you, but we had to promise not to disturb you.”
He pulled a giant red handkerchief from a back pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Well, all’s well that ends well, and I gotta take her highness home and feed her, but don’t go telling me to mind my own business anymore, cookie, not when you got guys like this on your case.”
I thanked him as best I could, giving him a tight hug and a kiss. After he left I lay back down again, cursing my lack of stamina. Lotty wanted me to stay here another day—she said I wouldn’t rest if I went off on my own. She was right: I was already in a pretty fretful state, made more irritable by my sore shoulder muscles. But she’d thrown out all my clothes and wasn’t going to bring me any more until Friday morning.
As it turned out, most of the people I would have tried to see came to visit me, along with a few I could just as well have done without, such as the police. Lieutenant Mallory arrived in person, a sign not of my importance but of his angry concern—angry because I should have stayed clear of police business, concern because he’d been close to both my parents.
“Vicki, put yourself in my place for a change. One of your oldest friends dies and every time you turn around his only kid is thumbing her nose at you. How do you think I feel?”
“I know how you feel; you’ve told me six billion times,” I said churlishly. I hate having to talk to people in a hospital gown—it’s like you’re a kid in bed and they’re tucking you in for the night.
“If you’d been killed, I would have carried that responsibility to my grave. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you see when I give you orders it’s out of concern for your safety, because of what I owe Tony and Gabriella? What will it take to pound some sense into you?”
I glowered at the bedclothes. “I’m self-employed just so I don’t have to take orders from anyone. Anyway, Bobby, I did agree not to go to the state’s attorney about Nancy Cleghorn. And I agreed to tell you if I ran into anything that looked like a lead into her death. I didn’t.”