I felt better even before Mrs. Lee put the kettle on. I took the thick white china cup in both hands and blew on the tea. It held just the faintest aroma, although I could see small bits of leaves on the bottom of the cup.
"Thanks for having me over," I said softly. "I just couldn't stand sitting at home doing nothing."
Mrs. Lee set out homemade oatmeal cookies without replying. I realized that I'd probably just summed up her past eight years. We sipped and munched while I gave my painfully thin summary.
"I want to find this Michael Martinez," she said, setting her cup down.
"I guess Tucker and Ryan are working on it, although they haven't told me much."
"It's not enough." Her eyes were nearly black in the dim kitchen light.
I understood. "What were you thinking of doing?"
"Tracking him down myself," she said immediately, before grimacing. She picked up a cloth and wiped down the table. "Do you have any ideas?"
"I think they're covering the usual leads. I was thinking about your file, though. You put an ad in the papers."
"Every year." She nodded and sat down again, the cloth still crumpled in her hand.
"What if we put an ad out for Michael Martinez, offering a reward? Someone might come forward. From the borderline group, or someone who knew him."
Her brow creased in thought. "That's a good idea. I've been asking for information about the accident, but if we could track down the perpetrator, I'd like that even more."
"We don't know if he's the perpetrator."
She scrubbed at the table with new zeal.
My usual guilt kicked in. "Of course, a newspaper ad may just be a waste of money. Let me put up some free ads online and post a few flyers around McGill. He'd be twenty-seven now, a bit old for college, but—"
"I will pay for it," said Mrs. Lee. "All of it. The advertisements and the reward for information. I want to do it in every city paper and the Internet, too."
I shook my head. "I think that would be pretty expensive. I could probably pay for two ads, one in English and one in French."
Her barely-there eyebrows arched in amusement. "How would you afford it? You know you hardly get paid as it is."
I'm the first to complain about our meager residency salaries, especially when I get ten grand less than my Ontario classmates, pay higher taxes, and have to cough up tuition fees, rent, and food to boot, but I was not about to take advantage of Mrs. Lee. "I don't know that this'll turn up any information. It's a stab in the dark. I can't take your grocery money for that."
She threw back her head and laughed, but her laughter had an edge. "Laura had a life insurance policy."
"She did?" I don't have one. You never expect to kick the bucket below age thirty, minimum.
"All this time, I've been investing the money, unwilling to touch it, hoping that..." She shook her head. "Never mind. I can afford a few hundred dollars better than you can. If I can spend the money on anything that has to do with my daughter, so much the better. In fact, I would like to give you an honorarium."
I held up my hand. "No way."
"But you've been spending all your spare time on Laura."
"It's the least I could do for you." I sipped the tea and changed the subject. "We never talked about money before, though, Mrs. Lee. Is it possible someone else wanted Laura's inheritance?"
She sucked her bottom lip. "I don't see how. She had no will and the money came back to me and my husband."
"What happened to your husband?"
"He died of a heart attack two years after Laura died. He was only 62 years old. I like to say he died of a broken heart." She managed to smile. "She was always his little girl."
My dad said the same thing about me. I shoved the pain behind my heart, where it could haunt me later. "What do you want the ad to say? I could put it up online tonight."
***
Sunday morning, still furious and restless after zero calls or messages from Tucker or Tori, despite their promises, I decided to do something unprecedented: go to the hospital on my weekend off.
I marched over to St. Joe's instead of biking. I wanted to feel the sidewalk under my sandals. I wanted to glare at the people sun-tanning bare-chested on their balconies with their feet planted on the railing and a phone cradled against their ears. I wanted to stomp past the soft-bellied middle-aged women who tended their gardens. I wanted to shake my head at the drivers blocking the road, four-way flashers going, so they could dash into someone's apartment.
Oh, and I wanted to put up some signs asking for information on Michael Martinez. Mrs. Lee might be shelling out the bucks, but I had a computer and a printer and packing tape a'plenty.
I crossed through HEC, l'École des hautes études commerciales. I'd kind of avoided the Université de Montréal's business school because of the whole aforementioned massacre deal, but now I needed to affix notices, and it was possible that Michael Martinez was a business dude. I added a poster to the closest lamp post. As an environmentalist, I wasn't about to plaster them everywhere, but with every sticky-kiss of packing tape, my mood lifted.
I hadn't gotten any more mysterious phone calls or letters overnight. Maybe I'd scared Wendy off.
Fifteen minutes later, I cut through St. Joe's emerg, wondering if I might run into Tucker. Neither of us was on, but you never knew. I put up two posters in the waiting room before the fluorescent lights and the smell of iodine made me reconsider my folly. Before I could back out into the sunshine, Nancy beckoned me over to the psych corner. "What are you doing here? You're not on call."
"Yeah, I know."
"Get out of here. It'll still be waiting for your tomorrow."
"Yeah." Now I felt silly. "Well, I hope you have a good day." In emerg, it's bad luck to say the word "quiet," because it seems to guarantee the opposite. Of course, some people, like me, crave the excitement and say it on purpose, but I wasn't working today.
"So far, so good. Nothing much going on. I thought I'd rearrange the office and check over some old charts that finally came in." A peculiar smile plucked the corner of her mouth, so I had to ask.
"Like what?"
"Like Reena Schuster's old chart from the Douglas. They sent it here instead of to the floor."
"Maybe I could take a look," I said quietly.
She shrugged and pointed at the psych office. "It's on the desk."
I licked my suddenly dry lips, paging through Reena's chart. I noticed something very interesting about the dates of her visits. The rest of her records were on the internal medicine floor with her, so I took the elevator to 5 South and skimmed through the complete box set of Reena's charts from St. Joe's. Finally, I walked over to see the woman herself, in room 5312.
It took me a minute to realize that on the H-shaped internal medicine floor, odd numbers were on one side of the hallway and even on the other. I cut through the middle of the ward, the horizontal bar in the H, past the nurses' lounge, and only spotted 5312 because of the the woman coming out of it.
She was wearing sunglasses and a short-sleeved taupe blouse with an A-line skirt. Her highlighted blond hair was drawn back in a sleek ponytail. I assumed she was a social worker or something, but a woman yelled from down the hall, near the nursing station, “Jodi! Hey, Jodi!”
Right, Reena's old emerg friend, Jodi. Now I recognized her, but she'd come a long way from chomping gum. Like the surgical residents said about colleagues who went from greens to gorgeous, she sure cleaned up well.
Jodi swept into the horizontal hallway in the middle of the H without turning to look at me or the woman calling her.
Wendy, red-faced, stormed after her. "Wait!"
I ignored them both and slipped into Reena's room. With any luck, I'd be gone before Wendy or anyone else returned.
Reena lay alone in bed in her private room. She looked much the same as the last time, except her lips had cracked and, on closer inspection, she breathed a little too evenly and seemed to wear a purposefully blank expression on her face. I couldn't put my finger on why, but I bought the coma act even less this time around.
I glanced around the room, at the bedside tray pushed along the wall and the telephone resting on a bedside table, reflecting how useless most of the stuff was for someone in a coma, even a fake one. They hadn't bothered to hook up the TV. I pulled the one padded armchair up to the side of the bed, making sure to scrape it along the tile floor.
She didn't wince at the screeching or crack open her eyelids. Not bad.
"Hi, Reena," I said in a friendly way. "It's Dr. Hope Sze."
No reaction.
"That's a better reception than you gave me in the emergency room. Remember, I'm the resident on psychiatry." My voice crept up as if in a question. I paused to tame it. "I understand you've been in a coma."
Stillness. Really, she was pretty good at it. I darted forward and lifted her arm up over her head. She let me. I released her arm pointed straight up in the air, at ninety degrees from her body. Slowly, her arm fell down the same path it had come up.
A truly comatose patient would have let it fall down and hit her face.
"That's a pretty good act, but not good enough. I heard they're transferring you to psych."
Her lips tightened a fraction before relaxing again.
"What are you so afraid of, Reena? What makes you rather stay here, in the hospital, with your eyes closed, not talking or moving 24/7? That's the 'life' you want?"
Her left eyelid twitched. Maybe she was getting tired of faking it.
"Talk to me, Reena. Tell me what it is."
I sat in silence, watching her, for five minutes. It doesn't sound like long, but if you've ever tried to meditate or otherwise remain completely silent and still for that long, it feels like eternity.
I was pretty comfortable in the armchair, of course. I wasn't the one faking the coma. But I didn't particularly want to run into Wendy, either.
So I leaned forward to whisper in her ear. "I have an idea why you might be doing this. I read your old chart from the Douglas."
Her nostrils flared. Her breath caught up short before it restarted.
"In the chart here, it says you threatened or attempted suicide in 2003, 2005, twice in 2007, and again in 2008. Slashing your wrists. Overdosing on Advil. Overdosing on Tylenol. Threatening to jump out your second-story window. But until I got your chart from the Douglas, I didn't know the exact dates: August 6th. August 7th. August 8th. August 10th. In other words, always on or around August 8th, the day Dr. Laura Lee was killed."
Her eyelids clamped down but didn't open.
"Lots of people try to kill themselves, Reena. But I doubt most people have your burden of guilt. It must be terrible, holding that inside for the past eight years."
Were those tears beading the roots of her eyelashes? I was too close to pull back now, but a tiny needle of compassion for Reena pricked me. "Talk to me, Reena. That's what I'm here for."
Her lips cracked open. Her breath puffed out, hot and fetid. I waited for her to speak.