Inside the third door we were met by Daisy—Nurse Lundgren to us—the ward head. She looked coldly at Ms. Paxton and demanded to know what the problem was.
“These people are concerned with the escape of that color—that girl, that young person who got away last week.” Ms. Paxton’s realization that the colored girl’s grandfather and lawyer were present flustered her. “I want them to see that this ward is very secure. And that however the girl got away it wasn’t through any negligence on our part.”
Nurse Lundgren frowned. “Are you sure you want me talking to them? The memo from Captain Ruzich was very clear on the subject.”
Ms. Paxton smiled with more menace than a mere frown could convey. “I’m relying on your discretion, Daisy. But the grandfather has driven all the way from Chicago. I’d like him to see that we do take proper precautions when prisoners are entrusted to our care.”
“Very well,” the nurse said. “I’ll take them onto the ward. I expect you have enough work of your own without needing to come with us.”
Ms. Paxton seemed to be of two minds whether to fight Lundgren in front of us but finally swiveled on her motionless hips and stalked away.
“How many escapes have you had from the hospital?” I asked as we followed the nurse into the locked ward.
“Five,” the nurse said. “But that was before this wing was built. It used to be fairly easy to jump out a window, even if it had bars, because the girls knew how to finagle their way into the cafeteria or some other place they weren’t meant to be.”
I glanced in a room as we passed. It was empty; Lundgren didn’t object when I asked to inspect it. It had the tiny arrow holes of the prison, and no bathroom: Lundgren said the women had to use a bathroom in the hall, which was kept locked and was opened by a correctional officer. The hospital couldn’t afford to have hiding places in the room where an inmate could either lie in wait to attack—or kill herself in private.
In the next room a woman was lying in bed, sleeping heavily, wasted as my mother had been by her cancer. Across the hall a young woman with dark curly hair was watching television. It was only when I looked closely that I saw she was handcuffed to the bed.
“How are you feeling, Veronica?” Lundgren called as we passed.
“I’m okay, Nurse. How’s my baby?”
Veronica had given birth early that morning. She’d be returned to the prison in another couple of days, where she could keep her infant for four months. Coolis was progressive that way, the nurse explained, releasing the lock on the door that separated the nurses’ station from the ward. She cut short a flirtation between one of her subordinates and the corrections officer assigned to guard the hall, telling her junior to pay attention to the ward while she talked to us.
“It’s hard for them to work here—it isn’t like real nursing, and then they get bored when the ward is as empty as it is right now.”
She led us into a tiny room behind the nurses’ station that held a table, a microwave, and a small television. It was the one room on the floor with actual windows, but as these were made of wire–enforced glass they didn’t offer much of a view.
Lundgren took us through the statistics of the floor without any hesitation. There were twenty beds, but they never had more than eight or ten of them filled, except one disastrous occasion when there was a major food–poisoning outbreak at the jail and some of the patients with heart trouble came close to dying.
As to how easy or hard it was for an inmate to get to the hospital, she wasn’t privy to prison decisions, but in her experience, women were pretty sick before they were brought over. “Girls are always trying to get over here. The hospital food is better and the routine is easier to take. In jail there are counts every six hours, and lockdowns and all the rest of it. For someone serving a long sentence the hospital can seem like a vacation. So the prison makes it hard for anyone to malinger.”
“And Nicola Aguinaldo? How sick was she when she came here?”
Her lips tightened, and her hands moved uneasily in her lap. “I thought she was quite ill. So ill I was surprised that she was able to move enough to leave.”
“What was the problem?” Mr. Contreras demanded. “Was it some kind of woman problem? That’s what the cops told me, but she never said nothing about that to her ma—”
“A doctor didn’t actually examine her before she left. I was told by the prison nurse that they suspected an ovarian cyst. But before a doctor could see her, she was gone.”