“Those are the actual records?”
“Yes. Lucky for us, Hasell’s multiple hospital visits were pre–HIPAA regulations, so her family’s private doctor kept all her records in his office, and when he retired he moved them to the attic of his house. Just as we thought, he passed away a few years ago, but his elderly widow still lives in there. She said I could borrow them. Took some convincing, but she eventually caved.” He smiled brightly, and I could only imagine what the poor woman endured in terms of endless charm and flattery. He continued. “I’ll probably pull an all-nighter tonight taking notes because I have to return them tomorrow. I’ve already had a chance to go through them, and it’s pretty perplexing.”
We both sat down on either side of my desk as he began to flip through the pages. “The records begin when Hasell was only three months old. She got pneumonia and was responding well to antibiotics and was sent home, but then came back with antibiotic-resistant pneumonia and bronchitis. She stopped breathing several times while at the hospital, but was revived because her mother was there and administered CPR.”
He turned a page so I could read. “This is a note from a nurse, commenting on how Anna, her mother, refused to leave the girl’s side and slept on a cot by her incubator for five months until Hasell could go home.”
I thought of my rosy-cheeked babies, full of good health and smiles, and despite what I suspected Anna had done to us in the attic, I felt a stab of sympathy for her. “Did she get better after that?”
Jack replaced the page in the stack and shook his head. “No. Things got worse. She had recurring bouts of respiratory issues, but she also developed problems with her digestion. Couldn’t keep solids down until she was about five years old. Her mother had to feed her with a feeding tube. One of the doctors noted it was the worst case of gastroesophageal reflux disease he’d ever seen in a patient. She was so weak she didn’t learn to walk until she was three and even then could walk only short distances without tiring out. By the time she died, she was bedridden.”
I tried not to think of the room with the beautiful mural and snow globes and of the girl who’d once planned to travel the world but never made it past her bedroom door. “But they don’t know what she died from specifically?”
“According to her death certificate, no. But I talked to one of my doctor friends who said that her body just gave out, that her organs simply shut down one by one. Her brain would have been the last organ to go, so she would have been aware that she was dying.”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a freshly laundered handkerchief and handed it to me. “It’s hard to hear.”
I touched my face, surprised to find it wet, then dabbed at my eyes with the cloth. “It makes me angry, in a way. That all the advances in medicine couldn’t fix what was wrong with her. But that doesn’t explain why she’s still here.”
“Isn’t unfinished business usually the reason?”
“Sometimes. But what kind of unfinished business could an eleven-year-old shut-in have? Which makes me think that maybe it’s not her ghost up in that attic. I mean, the house is more than two hundred and fifty years old. Lots of people have lived and died in that house. She’s just one in a long list of candidates.”
His eyes met mine for a moment before returning to the pile of paper. He pulled out a loose sheet from the very bottom and handed it to me. “This might change your mind.” It was a photocopy of a South Carolina death certificate that he’d shown me before. “I was looking at this again to see if there was anything I’d missed, and there it was.” He pointed his finger to a spot on the form.
I squinted, unable to see the really tiny print.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Mellie.” He reached around the desk and pulled out the top drawer. “Just put them on already.”
Feeling chastened, I put my reading glasses on and looked down to see the name Hasell Chisolm Pinckney on the top line, and then moved my gaze to the spot he indicated. I put my hand over my lips, unable to speak. The words “Time of Death” were printed above bold, black numbers typed neatly in the little box: 4:10 a.m.
“That would be a little too coincidental if that weren’t Hasell’s spirit trying to reach you, don’t you think?” Jack asked quietly.