But when I get to my mom’s office, she’s not there. I go inside, sit on her desk chair and wait. I’ve never in my whole life felt so completely exhausted.
I’m almost asleep, my head on my arms, when she comes back.
“Franny.” She touches my shoulder lightly. “We should find you an empty bed.”
I shake off the sleepiness. “Where were you? Were you with Dad? Is he out of surgery?” I notice the dark circles under her eyes. “You look worse than I feel.”
“It’s been a hell of a day,” she says.
“Is Dad okay?”
“Fine. Doped to the gills but fine.” She hesitates.
“What?”
“The call you got. Was it right before you called me?”
“Yeah. Like, literally just a few seconds before. Why?”
“Because right after I got off the phone with you, I got a page from security. The hospital received a threat and—” She breaks off at a knock on the door. “Come in.”
Two cops enter. One is a man, young, black, heavyset. The other is female and about Mom’s age, with short gray-blond hair and wire-framed glasses. “Dr. Green?” she says.
“Yes.” My mom beckons them to take a seat. “And this is my daughter, Franny. She answered the call at our house”—she glances at her watch—“almost an hour ago.”
The female cop nods, introduces herself and her partner and asks me to repeat word for word what the caller said.
I do my best. Baby killer. You’ll burn in hell. Lethal force. The female cop, whose name I’ve instantly forgotten, writes it down, but it all sounds silly and melodramatic—like something on a true-crime special. But when I get to the part where he said, There’s a target on your back, Heather Green, I break down and start crying again.
“Very upsetting,” the male cop—Barnwell? Bromwell? Browning?—says. He says it kind of tersely, though, like he really just wants me to toughen up and get on with it.
He’s right too. I take a deep breath, clench my fists and get on with it. “He said maybe they should kill my kid—I mean, my mother’s kid. He thought I was her—and they knew my name—”
“Did he say your name? Or just claim to know it?” he asks.
“He said it. He said, It’s Franny, right?”
My mom looks pale, and her lips are pressed together so tightly they’ve almost disappeared. She squeezes my shoulder but says nothing.
“And Franny, did he say they? Or I?”
“What?” I don’t understand.
The female cop leans forward. “He means, did the caller refer to himself as a single person? Did he say we should kill your kid, or I should kill your kid? Try to remember. It could be important.”
It’s like some bizarre sentence-diagramming exercise: pronouns and verbs. The pronoun seems rather unimportant, compared with the verb kill and the object me. But I think back, trying to recall his exact words. “I think he said we,” I say slowly. “But I’m not 100 percent sure.” I meet her eyes, which are pale and blond-lashed behind the glasses. “Does it matter? I mean, couldn’t he just be lying anyway? Trying to make us think he’s part of a group when he’s just some lone nutcase?”
“It’s possible,” she says. “But at this point, we want to get as much information as possible. Tell us about his voice. How did it sound? High-pitched? Low? Did he speak slowly or fast? Did he have an accent?”
“Low,” I say. “Well, lowish. A man, for sure. And not fast or slow. No accent—at least, not that I noticed. His voice was kind of muffled, like he was trying to disguise it. Speaking with something over his mouth, maybe.” I try to imitate him, putting my hand over my mouth and speaking in a deep voice. “Like this.” I take my hand away. “Only he didn’t sound like that. Obviously.”
“That’s helpful, Franny,” she says, making a note. “Thank you.”
“What was the threat to the hospital?” I ask. “Was it a phone call?”
“Yes.” She exchanges glances with the other cop, who nods, and then looks at my mother.
“You can tell her,” my mom says.
“The phone call was made by a male caller.” The cop leans forward, elbows on her knees. “He told us he’d left a package in one of the third-floor restrooms near the women’s clinic. A warning package, he said.” She shook her head. “We would have treated it like a bomb threat, but someone had actually found the package right before he called and opened it—stupid thing to do—”
“They opened it? Not staff, then,” I say. “They’d know better.”
“No, no. A fourteen-year-old girl who was supposed to be in bed in the pediatric ward but was in fact pissing around the hallways with her boyfriend.”
I laugh, but stop quickly. It could have been very unfunny. “And it was nothing?”
“Just a box wrapped up like a gift. Inside, a doll with its arms and legs pulled off. And a note saying the next one will be a bomb.” She shakes her head. “At least the kids had the sense to report it.”
“You think it’s the same person? The guy who called our house?”
She nods. “It seems likely. The phone call to the hospital came right around the same time as the call to your house. Right after, we think.”
“So he made one phone call and then the other…” I break off. “But he must have come here first. To leave the box. So maybe someone saw him?”
“We’re going to go public with this,” she said. “Ask for people who were at the hospital this evening to come forward if they saw anything. Someone carrying a wrapped gift in a hospital—you wouldn’t think anything of it. But if we’re lucky, someone will remember and we’ll get a description. If he’s working alone, maybe someone saw a man going into the women’s restroom.”
Given the fact that I’ve had people freak out in women’s restrooms more than once because they think I’m a guy, this seems likely. I don’t even look like a guy. I’m just not as girly as most girls. As Leah—
“Wait,” I say. “This’ll be on the news?”
“In the morning. Yes.”
“Will our names be used?” I ask.
“I made a statement,” Mom says. “As department head, I thought it was important. So my name will be, at least. And I suspect the media will make the link back to the threats in the past… Jennifer Lee resigning…”
She’s still talking, but I’ve stopped listening. All I can think about is that Diane Gibson is going to find out what my parents do after all.
I’ve always been so proud of my parents’ work, and I know how important it is—but right now I wish they did almost anything else.
And I hate myself for feeling that way.