Rupture Page 23

  In the corner of the porch, Eli reached up and felt along a two-by-six oak beam. He brought the key down and showed it to Meg. “At least some things never change.”

  Meg held the screen door while Eli inserted the key. Just inside the threshold, Eli said, “Stay right here,” and he disappeared into the dark house.

  Meg heard cabinet doors open, then saw a flicker of flames down the corridor. Eli returned holding a lamp that illuminated the room. It was a den of sorts, wooden floors, sparse furniture.

  “I really did need my sleeping bag, huh?”

  “There’s a couch for you,” Eli said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  He put the lantern on an end table and sat on the couch. “My leg’s killing me.” He peeled back his torn jeans. He imagined Meg washing and dressing the injury and wondered where that might lead. “Wish we had some gauze,” he added. “This looks nasty.”

  Meg gave a slow shake of her head and said, “Nice try, Romeo.” She sat on the couch beside him. “I don’t do fresh wounds. Not the living kind, anyway. Grosses me out.”

  Eli lay his head on the back of the sofa.

  “Ever thought about leaving it all and coming out here?” Meg asked.

  “What. For good?”

  “Yeah, fix the place up, buy some more land, plant cotton.”

  Eli sighed. “I’ll admit, it’s crossed my mind a few times this week.”

  “Show me your leg,” Meg said.

  Eli propped it on the coffee table.

  Meg barely lifted the frayed edge of his jeans and said, “Too dark. I can’t even see it.” She leaned across Eli, reaching for the lamp.

  Eli felt the softness of her chest pressing against his lap.

  “Oh, you’ll live.” Meg said as she scanned across his shin and set the lamp on the table. She leaned back hard against the couch, her arm wedged against Eli’s shoulder. “You thought I’d be charmed by this rustic place, didn’t you? With your chickens, and your storm cellars, and candlelight.” With each rise and fall of Eli’s breath, Meg nestled deeper into the couch. “I’m a city girl, don’t you know?”

  She waited for a response.

  “Eli?”

  His breathing had slowed, deep and rhythmic.

  “Eli,” she whispered, because she knew he had fallen asleep.

  Outside, she heard the rustle of leaves and a branch scrape against the window. Thunder grumbled far in the distance.

  “Oh well.” Meg rested against his arm. She thought of her babysitter. Jessica sure will be disappointed.

  Meg had curled up, her head in Eli’s lap, when a crash of thunder awakened them both. She bolted upright and Eli smelled the sweetness of her hair, like ripe peaches. A gust of wind slapped the window shutters against the wall.

  “It’s just a storm,” Eli said and stood up. But they heard the rattle of the door handle. At the next strike of lightning, the door flew open to reveal the silhouette of a man holding a shotgun.

  “What do you want,” Eli shouted. The man shined a flashlight in Eli’s face.

  “Eli? Is that you?”

  Eli let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Silas, you scared us to death.”

  “I saw the car in the driveway. Sometimes high school kids sneak over here.”

  “Come in, get out of the rain.” Eli said.

  Silas removed his floppy leather hat, nodded, and said, “Ma’am.”

  Meg saw deep wrinkles in the side of his face under a gray stubble beard.

  Silas turned to Eli. “Did your truck quit on you?”

  “What truck?”

  Silas pointed behind him. “The one back under the trees.”

  Eli glanced at Meg and he went to shut the front door. This time, he locked it. “Someone must have followed us out from Memphis.”

  “Followed you? Who?”

  “I don’t know,” Eli lied. “But they’ve already taken shots at us.”

  This confused Silas, but before Eli could explain, the silence was broken by a wood-splintering blast through the rear of the house. Then the beam of a flashlight reflected off a hallway mirror.

  “Follow me,” Silas said, and he led them toward the central stairway. At the base of the stairs he opened a cubby hole and pushed Meg toward it. He handed the flashlight to Eli. “Circle back to the car and get the hell out of here.”

  “But you —”

  “I’ll keep them company,” Silas said, raising his shotgun. “Go!”

  Eli pulled the door behind them and turned on the flashlight. They walked down four wooden steps to a small room carved out of the dirt. The air was cool and smelled of dry, dusty earth. Crickets jumped from the rocky floor ahead of them.

  Meg ducked her head and followed the light. “Where are we going?”

  Eli turned toward her. “Remember that cute little door?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  BRANCH HOME PLACE

  5:01 A.M.

  They escaped the storm cellar in a deluge of rain. A layer of muddy water covered the ground between them and the Civic, twenty yards away. Eli held to Meg’s hand and pulled her across the yard. He fumbled with the keys and just as he opened the car door, three quick gunshots rang from inside the house. Meg climbed in through the driver’s side, but Eli stood in the drenching rain and looked back at the house.

  “Eli, don’t,” Meg called from inside the car. “Please, come on.” They were at the end of the driveway before Eli got the wipers on. As they passed the partially hidden Range Rover, Eli saw the letters RBI stamped on the side.

  Saturday’s sun was breaking the horizon as Eli turned onto Highway 51, the rapid cracks of gunfire replaying in his head. They had not spoken since leaving his grandparents’ house. Meg broke the silence.

  “Those shots we heard? Wasn’t a shotgun, was it?”

  “No, it was a handgun.”

  “I’m sorry, Eli.”

  From the console, a cell phone beeped from a low battery.

  “Must be yours,” Meg said. “Mine’s already dead.”

  Eli flipped his phone open and punched in some numbers.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “I assume that they never moved Henry, but what if —”

  “Hello,” someone answered. “Green Hills State Home.”

  “This is Dr. Eli Branch, I need to ask about my brother, Henry.”

  “What about him?”

  Eli hesitated but his phone beeped again, his battery dying. “How’s he doing?”

  There was a brief pause. “Your brother was moved out three days ago, you know that.”

  More silence. “Dr. Branch, are you there?”

  “Yeah I’m here.” When he asked the next question, he already knew the answer.

  “What about Henry’s roommate?”

  Just before his phone went dead, he heard the woman’s reply. “They moved Jimmy out at the same time.”

  As they approached the Memphis city limits, Meg began to worry.

  What if there’s been a problem and Jessica couldn’t get me?

  Her cell phone had been dead all night and it was time for Margaret’s morning shot of insulin.

  “I’m not sure where to go,” Eli said.

  “What?” Meg asked, drawn away from her dreadful daydream.

  “The police will be watching my house, my truck’s probably towed, and security is waiting for me at the hospital.”

  “Why don’t you stay at my place, it’ll be safe there.”

  Eli thought about Meg’s tempting offer. It had been thirty-six hours since Scott Tynes’s operation. His abdominal packs needed to be removed today. If no traumas were left over from last night, his operation would be scheduled as the first case.

  Eli turned on a side street off Madison Avenue, stopped at the loading docks behind Gates Memorial Hospital, and got out of the car. “Go home to your daughter, Meg. I owe you one.”

  Meg immediately knew that something was wrong when she pulled in her drivew
ay. Bobbie Stafford, her widowed neighbor, came running out of her house.

  “Dr. Daily,” she yelled, visibly upset. “They took your daughter in the ambulance, early this morning.”

  Meg got out of her car. “What happened? Where’s Jessica?”

  “She went with them in the ambulance,” Bobbie said, and pointed in the direction it took, her hand shaking. “Little Margaret, I don’t know.”

  As Meg jumped back in her car, she heard her neighbor say, “I’m so sorry. She tried to call you all night.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  GATES MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

  SATURDAY

  7:07 A.M.

  Biohazard waste containers, stacked in columns, lined the back wall of Gates Memorial. Eli was becoming very familiar with back entrances and alleyways. Large rectangular troughs were filled with trash, waiting for pick up near the loading dock. Days that reached nearly one hundred degrees had turned the liquid waste into a boiling, infectious soup that ran out of the containers and collected on pavement in thin custard pools. The putrefied smell hung in tiny droplets compressed by the humid air. He had read in the hospital’s monthly newsletter about the tons and tons of trash that Gates generated in the course of a day. And here it is.

  Just before he reached the loading ramp, a car accelerated in the lot behind him. A blue Chevy Impala came to an abrupt stop a few feet behind him. A young man in a yellow tee shirt and golf visor jumped out of the car.

  “Dr. Eli Branch?”

  Eli looked up the ramp. Only thirty feet to the door.

  No way this guy can catch me. It’ll be easy to lose him inside the hospital basement.

  But he didn’t appear to be a cop or a reporter.

  “Please sir, I’ve been looking for you for more than twenty-four hours.” He handed Eli a business-sized white envelope and a clipboard that held a signature form. A pen was stuck under the clip. “Sign for me, please,” he said while waving the odor away from his nose.

  “What is this?” Eli asked.

  “I’m just paid to deliver it, Doc. Now if you could just sign, I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Eli held the envelope. The paper felt thick in his hand as though woven from cloth. The address was embossed in the left upper corner:

  BELOSI AND MCCRUMB

  ATTORNEYS AT LAW

  PARK AVENUE

  GERMANTOWN, Tennessee

  “What kind of doc are you, anyway?”

  Eli remained silent, distracted. A certified letter from a law firm could mean only one thing.

  “You a Ph.D. researcher?” he asked again.

  Eli looked at him. “No, I’m a surgeon. And I’ve got to see a patient, right now.” Eli shoved the papers toward him, but the man held up both hands and stepped back.

  “I’m not taking it back. You got to sign or they’ll just keep coming after you.”

  “Okay, fine,” Eli said as he signed the paper and pitched the clipboard back to him.

  “Thanks, Doc.” The man retreated to his car. Just before shutting his door, he yelled out, “Hope you got some good malpractice insurance.”

  Eli entered the hospital basement through swinging doors. He had managed to avoid a lawsuit throughout eight years of surgical residency. He thought about the Tynes case. He had done all he could.Scott’s brain damage had occurred well before I took him to the operating room. Roger Tynes seemed to understand that. But he wants someone to pay for his devastated son. Just what I need. What a time to get sued.

  He found a stairwell that he thought would lead to the back of the ICU. He leaned against the rail, staring at the folder and thinking of the last words of its deliverer.

  If they changed the lock on my office, I’m sure they canceled my malpractice insurance as well.

  It was too much to think about; with Henry missing and both the police and the RBI thugs after him, this would have to wait.

  The stairwell opened adjacent to the nurse’s lounge. It was shift change, so all the intensive-care nurses were in their assigned rooms giving reports. Eli walked through the empty lounge. The coffeemaker sat on a cabinet that stored paper towels and cleaning supplies. He dropped the certified letter behind two bottles of ammonia and shut the cabinet doors. Eli poured a cup of old black coffee and started toward Scott Tynes’s bed.

  From the nurse’s desk, he saw that the boy’s room was full of medical personnel. The nurses were transferring IV bags to an empty bed. Kanter, the anesthesiologist, stood at the head squeezing an Ambu bag. To Eli, this was a familiar scene; they were in the process of transferring Scott Tynes and all his intensive-care equipment to the operating room. His instinct was to go in and help with the transfer. But a lot had changed in the past forty-eight hours. He wondered if the nurses knew that he was no longer a member of the medical staff. It would take only one call to the authorities, and Eli would be shut out. He decided to meet them in the OR.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  GATES MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

  7:35 A.M.

  Fran Lankford held onto her daughter in the family room of the pediatric ICU. This time, Fran did not cry. She had returned from St. Martin after making arrangements to transport the body of Bernie Lankford, her husband, back to the states. Upon arriving in Memphis, she learned that RBI had already replaced her husband as chief medical officer with a young surgeon from the medical center.

  She cradled her daughter’s head to her chest and stared through the glass doors, watching doctors and nurses continue to care for other critically ill infants and children. Just minutes before, a doctor had entered their room, sat on the soft ottoman, and informed both mother and grandmother that the severity of the rare, infantile form of leukemia had been too much for their fragile baby. The medical staff had tried through extraordinary means to keep her alive. In the final hours, they had tried to reschedule, from Sunday morning to Saturday, the risky stem cell operation, which would be a historic first for the nation and a long shot for their child. But as the infant’s body decompensated, she was no longer a candidate for the highly experimental procedure.

  Fran was both angered and in a state of disbelief. Less than a week before she had lost her husband, right after he had delivered a ground-breaking presentation at the International Conference on Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy, the culmination of his life’s work. Although the details of the autopsy report had not yet become available to her, she sensed that Bernie’s aortic rupture was a complication that should never have occurred. Then, the comfort that her first grandchild brought dissipated with each worsening report of the pediatric specialists.

  They should never have made my daughter consent to the stem cell operation. It had been a blip of false hope that now made their valley of despair much deeper.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  GATES MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

  OPERATING SUITE

  7:40 A.M.

  From his hideout in the supply room, Eli watched Scott Tynes’s processional pass and enter Operating Room Six. There were two IV poles to push, each loaded with bags of fluid and pumps. An orderly pulled at the foot of the bed while Kanter squeezed air into the patient’s lungs. Eli noticed that Scott’s face appeared twice as swollen as when he had last seen him, thirty-six hours ago. Susan Morris, the chief surgery resident, walked beside the bed, trying to untangle a wad of tubing and wires. She would be able to perform the operation, Eli thought, even if he wasn’t there.

  He was most glad to see his circulating nurse, Virginia. She would know if the staff had been warned about his suspension of medical privileges. Eli waited until the bed was being pulled through the doorway before he stepped from behind a rack of sterilized instruments.

  “Virginia.”

  She turned to him and pulled down her mask.

  “Eli?” she said and looked down the hall each way.

  Not a good sign.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “My patient’s going to the OR.”

  Virginia pulled him back into the supply r
oom, behind a rack of suction canisters.

  “Don’t you know? They’ve told us to call the police if anyone sees you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  MADISON AVENUE EPISCOPAL CHURCH

  11:30 A.M.

  Sunlight filtered through magnificent stained-glass windows, a kaleidoscope of colors peppering the wooden pews. The temperature in the sanctuary was cool compared to the boiling asphalt heat. Eli appreciated the contrast between walking alongside traffic from the medical center and entering this sanctuary, with its quiet reverence. The sanctuary was the same as he remembered it all those years ago when the church staff forced Henry to leave.

  The pews appeared empty, but as he moved down the center aisle he saw a man laying on his side, asleep, a stuffed garbage bag molded into a pillow. Midway toward the altar, Eli slipped into a pew. He was unsure why he was there, but when he left the medical center that morning, he was certain of his destination.

  In the pulpit, a priest quietly prepared the Communion dishes. He nodded to Eli and continued in his work. The man seemed young for a clergyman, not much older than Eli. Eli thought about the difference in careers they had chosen. For the first time, Eli considered how a physician was limited in affecting life changes compared to a priest who bore daily, life-changing witness in ordinary lives. Eli focused on the flame of a candle that burned on the offertory table. He closed his eyes.

  A few minutes later, Eli heard someone enter at the back of the sanctuary. He turned to see a young man in a wheelchair pushing himself down the handicapped ramp. The man stopped at the far edge of a pew and locked the chair in place.

  Eli stayed a few more minutes, then stood to leave. He noticed the young man again, his head bowed in prayer. Eli thought of Henry, years ago, the torn dollar that fell to the church floor. The priest who criticized them. The reaction of his father.How did that one event cause my entire family to turn away from the Church?