The Unexpected Hero Read online

  A tear ran down Linda’s cheek. “Who’ll take care of my kids?”

  “Your husband can make arrangements. Family? A friend? We’ll help you get that sorted out first.” He glanced at Krissie.

  She stepped forward and smiled. “Of course we’ll make sure your kids will be taken care of. How about I call my mom? She’ll see to it.”

  The tiniest of smiles lifted the corner of Linda’s mouth. “That I believe.” But then her smile wavered and more tears fell. “How bad is it?”

  David never hesitated. “I’ve seen a lot worse. It’s just that, with the blistering, we have to start worrying about infection.” He didn’t mention the likelihood of skin grafts. She didn’t need to hear that right now.

  “Okay,” she said weakly. “Can you call my husband?”

  “Right now,” Krissie promised. “Right now.”

  “I want to see him before I go.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Then the morphine carried her away.

  Chapter 4

  “Tough night, huh?”

  Krissie looked up in surprise as David entered the break room. The ward had settled for the night, and now, in the wee hours, she was trying to find any desire at all to eat the tuna sandwich she’d packed earlier, and drink her coffee. David was the last person she expected to see.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked.

  “Do you?”

  She caught the drift. “Sometimes I even manage it without nightmares.”

  “Yeah.” He poured a coffee and sat across the table from her. “I had a friend years ago. He was a priest.”

  She waited, staring at her sandwich. Just last night, this man had berated her the instant he clapped eyes on her. Now tonight, he was treating her with trust and even friendship. Unfortunately, when you put those two things together, you might be looking at trouble, at a natural-born manipulator. She couldn’t trust him yet, and probably never would. But she could listen anyway.

  “Anyway, this friend of mine never seemed to sleep. All day long he was doing his priestly thing, and then at night he would ride with ambulances to help out. I thought he was a man with a huge need to help people.”

  “But?” She looked at him.

  “I figured it all out a few years later when he left the priesthood. He was a man running from demons.”

  She nodded slowly. “Want half of my sandwich?”

  “No, I’m fine. And you need to eat.”

  “I already have a mother.”

  He chuckled. “I’ve met her. You better eat.”

  Whatever her other thoughts, Krissie had to smile at that.

  “So,” he said, “is that why you took the night shift?”

  She frowned at him. “Is that why you’re always here?”

  “Touché.” He continued to smile faintly. “You did good catching that burn.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of burns.”

  “I know.”

  She met his gaze then, and once again saw echoes of her own demons.

  He leaned forward a little. “Is this what you expected when you came here?”

  “How so?”

  “That you’d feel helpless?”

  “I’ve been feeling essentially helpless for a long time.”

  He stared at her, then nodded. “I know. When I was a corpsman I kept thinking that if only I was a doctor I could do more. Then I discovered I can do more but it doesn’t always help.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I had to get out of trauma. I think you know what I mean. There’s just so much you can take, even on adrenaline. So I come to this little hospital, thinking I’ll be practicing the better side of medicine, the tummy aches, the broken arms, all the little things that life dishes out, and I’ll get to know my patients as families.”

  “And have you?”

  “To some extent, it’s exactly what I wanted. Then we have a night like tonight and I feel my hands are tied behind my back, and I reach for equipment that isn’t there, and want to order tests I can’t and…” He shrugged. “Nights like tonight are a different kind of nightmare, that’s all.”

  She completely understood. An ache squeezed her heart, as she realized he was talking to her because she had a similar background. There probably weren’t a whole lot of people in the county who’d seen the war from inside a medical unit. Unfortunately, she hadn’t gotten far enough past her own problems to offer much help.

  Finally, she said the only thing that occurred to her. “Maybe there’s a difference in degree and quantity.”

  He nodded as if he were weighing her evaluation. “Perhaps that’s it. Most nights aren’t like tonight.”

  “That’s what I’m clinging to.”

  “Exactly.” He stared into space for a moment, then stirred. “Sorry, I guess I should go. You probably don’t even feel as if you’re getting a break.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m just sitting and chatting with a colleague. It’s better than sitting in silence and staring at the walls.”

  “And thinking,” he said, almost to himself.

  Krissie forced herself to take a bite of her sandwich, chew and swallow. Ordinarily she loved tuna, but tonight it might as well have been sawdust.

  “I’m just beginning to realize,” she said, surprising even herself, “how much damage there’s been.”

  “To yourself you mean?”

  She nodded reluctantly, wondering why she had entrusted so much to a man she wasn’t sure she should trust.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that it comes to us a little at a time, because we can only handle so much mentally and emotionally. A little here, a little there, only as much as we can take at a time.”

  “It makes the process endless.”

  “I know.” He sighed. “Better than a meltdown, I guess. And now I’ll leave you to your meal. I need to catch a catnap.” He rose and walked out of the break room, a tall, slender man surrounded by question marks and private demons.

  Krissie forced down another bite of sandwich, and remembered something her father had been fond of saying: You can go anywhere you want, but you always take yourself with you.

  Amen.

  She put her head down on her arms and let the silent tears seep out between her eyelids.

  Just as dawn began to fingerpaint the eastern sky in shades of red and rose, they lost another patient. A man, who had appeared to have no complications from the accident other than a broken leg and a cracked rib, went into cardiac arrest.

  Krissie stood in the now-empty room, surrounded by the detritus of a code, and stared at the covered patient, fighting the strongest feeling that this shouldn’t have happened. Unable to just walk away, she started wandering around, picking up scraps of sterile packaging, discarded gauze, used needles. She couldn’t let go.

  It wasn’t right.

  And then she saw it: the same doll that had been on Mrs. Alexander’s bed only the night before. It lay half hidden under the patient’s bed, probably shoved there during the fight for his life. At once, she picked it up at looked at it.

  Ugly little thing, shoddily made. What the hell was it doing here?

  A thought grabbed her, causing her to gasp. Then, clutching the doll, she ran out of the room and jogged to the nurses’ station.

  “Call Dr. Marcus,” she told Julie. “Call him now and tell him to meet me in the break room.”

  Julie gaped at her but reached for the phone. The page was going out even before Krissie reached the break room.

  As soon as she entered the empty room, she tossed the doll on the table, wanting to get it away from her. Her revulsion seemed extreme even to her, but she couldn’t brush it away.

  Standing with her arms tightly wrapped around herself, she stared at the doll and waited.

  She didn’t have long to wait. David practically burst into the room despite looking as if he was drained of energy.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “Julie said you seemed upset.”

  Wordl
essly, Krissie pointed to the doll.

  David walked over to it and bent for a closer look. “Wasn’t that the doll Mrs. Alexander had? I don’t understand.”

  Krissie licked her lips. “I found that doll under the bed of the patient who just died.”

  David straightened as if jerked upright by strings. “What?”

  “Exactly. I saw it and…maybe I’m crazy, David. But why would Mrs. Alexander’s doll be under the bed of another cardiac arrest patient? When I found it, I thought…I thought…” She couldn’t even bring herself to say it.

  “God,” he whispered, catching her implication. “Is it the same doll?”

  “I don’t know. I just know it looks the same. As if somebody is leaving a message. David, we shouldn’t have lost that patient tonight. He wasn’t that badly hurt. And Mrs. Alexander was getting better. I don’t like what I’m thinking.”

  “Neither do I.” He looked at her, his dark eyes pinched.

  Then she saw it, and backed up a step. “What are you thinking?” she demanded, horrified. “You can’t possibly think I had anything to do with this. My God!”

  “I don’t know what I think,” he said tautly. “I just know you’ve been here two nights, this damn doll shows up again tonight and you find it, and two patients have died. How would you put it together?”

  Krissie shook her head and took another backward step. “No…no…”

  He turned to the phone on the wall. “I’m calling the cops.”

  Cold and heat rolled through her in waves, and her vision narrowed. Weakly, she bent forward, hands on her knees to keep from fainting. The shock of what he was suggesting shook her to her core.

  All of a sudden, strong hands gripped her shoulders. “Sit down,” he said brusquely.

  He pushed her into a chair and forced her shoulders down until her head was between her knees. “Breathe.”

  A cold sweat beaded on her brow even as the faintness began to pass. “I didn’t…I couldn’t…”

  “Do yourself a favor,” he said, his voice gentling. “Keep one of the others with you at all times.”

  A surge of relief washed through her, leaving her shaking. Cautiously, she raised her head.

  “You don’t think I…did anything?”

  He squatted in front of her. “Honest to God, I don’t know. I know how it looks, how it’s going to look. But what I think…I don’t know. My instinct says no. Hell, at this point we don’t even know that anything did happen.”

  She nodded slowly. “Okay. Okay. Call the sheriff. Gage will know what we need to do.”

  Gage’s arrival was low-key. Dressed in civvies, he came with Deputy Micah Parish and took over the hospital conference room. Krissie’s relief had arrived to take over the day shift, so she was free to go talk to him.

  She and David joined Gage and Micah at the long table, coffee and the doll in front of them. Gage’s scarred face regarded her impassively. Micah, on the other hand…well, the Cherokee lawman had long been like an uncle to her. His usually impassive face expressed kind encouragement.

  Gage spoke. “So do we know we have a problem, or do we just suspect it?”

  David motioned to Krissie. “At this point, she knows more than I do.”

  The two lawmen looked at her. “Go ahead,” Gage prompted.

  “Well, it was just one of those things that strike you. Yesterday, when Dr. Marcus and I made rounds, he found that doll—” she motioned to the one on the table “—or one very like it, in the bed with Mrs. Alexander. I thought maybe a family member had left it, but Dr. Marcus thought it best to remove it from the bed because we didn’t know what might be in it.”

  “Possible allergens,” David said.

  Gage nodded understanding and scrawled something in his notebook.

  “Anyway,” Krissie said, “a few hours later, Mrs. Alexander went into cardiac arrest and we couldn’t revive her.”

  Gage made a note and looked at David. “Was that highly unlikely?”

  David gave a small shake of his head. “Actually, no. Mrs. Alexander was recovering from congestive heart failure that resulted from an arrhythmia caused by a prior myocardial infarction.”

  “English, please?”

  “It was within the realm of possibility that she could suffer a cardiac arrest because her heart was diseased. I wanted an autopsy, but her family refused. She’d been sick for a long time.”

  “So it’s possible she died naturally.”

  “Yes,” David agreed. “But I can’t say for certain without autopsy results.”

  “Okay.” Gage made a note. “I’ll see what we can do about that. Then what happened?”

  David looked at Krissie. “We lost another patient tonight, one from the auto accident. He wasn’t that severely injured. Broken leg, a cracked rib. Prognosis was excellent, although there’s always a possibility that he threw a clot as a result of his injuries.”

  Another scratch across paper. Gage looked at Krissie. “What do you think?”

  “I was thinking pretty much the same thing. A clot probably. And then I saw that doll under the bed. It’s just like the doll in Mrs. Alexander’s bed.”

  “What happened to the first doll?”

  “I have no idea. This could be the same doll for all I know. It’s very similar, and I didn’t look that close. But when I saw it, I was just so struck. What’s the likelihood we’d lose two patients on successive nights from the same apparent cause and that that doll would be in their room?”

  “Slim to none,” Gage agreed. He tapped his pen on the table, thinking.

  Finally Krissie could take the silence no longer. She hesitated and drew a deep breath. “One of the first thoughts I had was that maybe it’s a message. Maybe these patients didn’t die naturally. And Dr. Marcus pointed out that it looks very odd that I’ve been here only two nights, lost a patient both nights, and found the doll…”

  She couldn’t go on. Pressing her lips tightly together to hold back the urge to cry, she just stared out the window, waiting. Waiting.

  Gage spoke. “Do you think that?”

  David answered. “Gut instinct? No. But factually, if someone killed those patients, it doesn’t look good, either.”

  Gage sighed. “No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. And maybe that’s precisely the point.”

  Krissie turned her head on a stiff neck and looked at him from eyes that burned. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if I were going to go around killing patients, I’d want to point the finger at someone else.”

  “True,” David said. He almost leapt at the possibility. “I certainly wouldn’t come to me with the doll and the suspicion.”

  Krissie spoke tensely. “You’re assuming I’m sane.”

  “Aren’t you?” Gage smiled faintly. “Okay, the first thing we want are autopsies on the two patients. They need to be carried out by a forensic pathologist, so I have to come up with a way of arranging that so we don’t start a stir in the county.”

  Krissie understood that all too well. In Conard County, the grapevine worked at lightning speed.

  David spoke. “Let’s just say I requested an experienced pathologist. We don’t have one here, and it would make sense that I’d want to transport these remains to another facility.”

  “Except,” Gage reminded him, “Mrs. Alexander’s family refused an autopsy.”

  “True.” David rubbed his eyes.

  “So,” Gage continued, “we’re sitting here with a suspicion, no foundation except a doll, and a lot of questions. I’ll figure out a way. In the meantime, it looks like you both need to get some sleep, so get out of here and let me think.”

  Out in the parking lot, Krissie stood beside her car, letting the morning sun beat on her shoulders and ease the tension. She was wrong, she had to be wrong; that doll couldn’t mean anything at all.

  She only wished she could believe it.

  Chapter 5

  Krissie had the night off. It would have been so easy to call her par
ents and go over to visit them for the evening, totally avoiding the silence that made room for too many unhappy thoughts. She had no television yet to turn on for distraction, and reading was the last thing she felt like doing tonight.

  Instead, she sat in her living room on a lawn chair as the impossibly long summer evening continued its slow waning. She’d slept and could sleep no more. She didn’t want to think, but couldn’t stop. She ought to make herself dinner, but couldn’t rustle up the energy.

  She despised herself when she got like this. She was a doer by nature, always busy, always involved. But periodically these dark moods would infect her, and the memories would start rolling, and she couldn’t seem to do anything except give in.

  A rap on her door startled her, causing her to jump. She wasn’t expecting anyone, and hadn’t been home long enough to have developed a drop-in-anytime circle of acquaintances.

  Probably a salesman, she thought, and considered not answering. But finally, in the name of self-distraction, she went to the door.

  To her amazement, David stood there holding a pizza. “I hope you’re hungry,” he said, “because I don’t want to eat alone.”

  She stepped back, inviting him in.

  “Sorry I didn’t call first,” he said, looking around her sparsely furnished place and finally realizing there was no place to put the hot pie except on the kitchen counter. “Uh…are you planning to hunt for some furniture, or do you just prefer minimalism?”

  She gave him a wan smile. “I never had much, and what I had I left behind in Denver. I keep thinking I should take some time to go shopping.”

  “I highly recommend it.” He opened the box, and wonderful aromas wafted out. “Plates?”

  “Let me get them.”

  She pulled two out of a cupboard, then got two glasses and a couple of cans of cola from the fridge. They sat on her two lawn chairs at the battered card table she’d borrowed from her folks and ate tasty vegetarian pizza.