“What do you mean, we?” Gaynor said. “Why do you have Matthew? What have you done?” His head turned toward the kitchen. “You did that? You? Did you—”
“No!” I said quickly. “I can’t explain what happened here, but your son, he’s okay. I’ve been trying to find out—”
“Matthew’s in the car? Is that Sarita with him? He’s with the nanny?”
“Sarita?” I said. “Nanny?”
“That’s not Sarita,” he said. “Where’s Sarita? What’s happened to her?”
And then he started running toward my car.
SEVEN
AGNES Pickens was very not happy with the muffins.
There were two dozen, arranged on the platter in the center of the massive boardroom table. Coffee and tea had been set up on a table along the wall, and everything there looked fine. Decaf, cream, sugar, milk, sweeteners. Plus, copies of the hospital’s latest progress report had been distributed around the table where everyone would be sitting. But when Agnes scanned the muffin selection, she did not find bran. She found blueberry and banana and chocolate—and let’s face it, a chocolate muffin was just cake shaped like a muffin—but bran was noticeable by its absence. At least there was fruit.
When you were a hospital administrator and called an early morning board meeting, you had to at least make an effort to offer healthy choices. Even if the bran muffins were passed over in favor of the chocolate, she could at least say they had been made available.
The meeting was set to begin in five minutes, and Agnes had stopped in here to make sure everything was as it was supposed to be. Finding it was not, she went to the door and shouted, “Carol!”
Carol Osgoode, Agnes’s personal assistant, popped her head out a room down the hall. “Yes, Ms. Pickens?”
“There are no bran muffins.”
Carol, a woman in her late twenties with shoulder-length brown hair and eyes to match, blinked hurriedly. “I just asked the kitchen to send up a selection of—”
“I specifically told you to make sure that there were some bran muffins.”
“I’m sorry; I don’t recall—”
“Carol, I told you. I remember quite clearly. Call Frieda and tell her to send up half a dozen. I know they have some. I saw them down in the cafeteria twenty minutes ago. Steal them from there if you have to.”
Carol’s head disappeared.
Agnes set her purse on the table, removed her phone, and realized it was not on. Her HuffPost app had been loading slowly that morning, as well as some of her other programs, so she’d turned the phone off with the intention of turning it back on immediately. A quick reboot. But then her rye toast had popped, and she’d neglected to restart it. So now she pressed and held the button at the top right, but flipped the tiny switch on the left side to mute the ring.
Agnes set the phone on the table, then tapped her red fingernails impatiently on the polished surface. This was not going to be a pleasant meeting. She had not been looking forward to it. The news was distressing. The latest hospital rankings were in, and Promise Falls General had come in below average for the upstate New York region. The closest hospitals in Syracuse and Albany had ranked in the high seventies and low eighties, but PFG had been saddled with a sixty-nine. A totally unfair and arbitrary figure, in Agnes’s estimation. Much of it had to do with perception. The locals figured that if you needed top-quality health care, you had to go to a hospital in a big city. Bigger, at least, than Promise Falls. That meant Syracuse or Albany, or even New York.
Sure, PFG had some trouble eleven months ago with an outbreak of C. difficile. Four elderly patients contracted the bacterial infection, and one of them had died. (Too bad the Promise Falls Standard was still printing at the time; it was front-page material for the better part of two weeks.) But that was the sort of thing that could happen to any hospital, and almost invariably did. Agnes Pickens had instituted even more rigorous hand-washing and cleaning procedures, and had gotten the outbreak under control. And where was the Standard’s front-page story on that?
Ask anyone in town if they’d be happy to be treated at Promise Falls General, and invariably they’d say, “Uh, if you think there’s even a chance of one in a hundred you can get me to Syracuse or Albany before I die, I’ll take a pass on PFG.” Changing that perception was proving to be a challenge for Agnes.
A woman in a pale green uniform and a hairnet walked into the room with a plate of bran muffins.
“Here you go, Ms. Pickens,” she said.
“Frieda, take them off that plate and arrange them with the others,” Agnes said. “And I hope to God you washed your hands before you touched the food.”
“Of course, ma’am.” She added the new muffins to the platter and slipped out of the room as Carol entered.
“They’re here,” she said.
“Send them in,” Agnes said.
Ten people filed in, nodding greetings, making small talk. Local businesspeople, two doctors, the hospital’s chief fund-raiser.