FRIGHTENED BY HOW SICK SHE was feeling, Duffy appealed to her doctor the following morning.
She knew there was no point in sharing her suspicions with him. He wouldn’t believe that someone had switched her antibiotic with the missing digoxin any more than Amy had. She would have to try a different tack.
“I think the new pills are making me sick,” she said as he glanced at her chart. “I feel sicker than I did when I came in here. Maybe I’m allergic to them. You’d better give me something else.”
Dr. Morgan tugged at his earring and frowned. “That’s just the drug fighting your infection,” he said brusquely. “There’s a war being fought in your system and I guarantee the medication is winning. We’re pretty sure you’ve got the flu. The blood tests rule out anything more serious. You’ll feel like new in a day or two. Just hang in there, okay?”
And without waiting for an answer from Duffy as to whether or not she was willing to “hang in there,” he left.
“Those pills are making me sick!” she cried after him, but it was hopeless. He wasn’t listening.
No one was listening. Where Duffy Quinn’s fears were concerned, the whole world had gone stone-deaf.
The ceiling light blinked down at her coldly, its strange little halo reminding her that there was something very wrong with her “system” and it wasn’t a war being waged by an antibiotic. There was no antibiotic in her system. She was convinced there was only digoxin.
A clattering sound out in the hallway preceded Smith’s curly head appearing in the doorway.
Something about the sound made Duffy tilt her head and listen carefully. It was probably just one of hundreds of ordinary hospital noises, but…
“How’s it going?” Smith inquired, leaning against the doorframe. “You recovered from the heebie-jeebies?”
“Go away,” she said rudely. “I don’t want to talk to people who think I’m crazy.”
“Hey,” he said, moving into the room, “I never said that. You’re sick, that’s all. You’d be surprised by some of the stories we hear from patients on heavy doses of medication. I know you think what happened was real, but—?
“It was real,” Duffy said, but her voice lacked conviction. She had tried during the night, throughout the long, sleepless hours, to think of a reason why someone would want to harm her, and she’d failed.
That was the biggest stumbling block to believing and accepting that someone was deliberately trying to hurt, even kill her. Didn’t the police always look for a motive? Wasn’t that the most important thing? The “why” of a crime? And there wasn’t any “why” here.
So, unless there was a crazed psychotic killer in the hospital, one of those weirdos who didn’t need a reason to commit murder, there shouldn’t be anyone after her.
Maybe Smith and all the others were right. Maybe it was the fever.
She would try not to think about it. No point in making herself even crazier when no one was willing to listen. They’d whisk her off to a padded room if she wasn’t careful.
But she was still going to find a way to check what was really in her capsules. She didn’t know how yet, but—
“What was that noise out in the hall?” she asked Smith. “That rattling sound. What was it?”
“Oh, that. A gurney. One of its wheels is loose. Dylan was supposed to fix it, but…”
“A gurney? One of those rolling tables?”
Smith nodded. “Yeah. Taking it downstairs. To the morgue. Why?” He said “morgue” as easily as he might have said “mall.”
Duffy shuddered. The morgue. Where they kept the patients who had…died. Had someone planned to send her there yesterday?
“Why?” Smith repeated. “Why do you want to know what the noise was?”
She shook her head. “Oh, it’s just…” Her voice drifted off. She was positive that the sound was identical to the last noise she’d heard that night.
Why would someone be moving a gurney out of her room? Why had it been there in the first place?
“It’s just that I heard that sound the other night,” she said thoughtfully. “In my room, I think…”
His reaction was the same as Dylan’s had been when Duffy recognized the soft slap-slap of rubber-soled shoes. “Yeah? Well, the hospital is full of them, Duffy. It would be weird if you hadn’t heard that noise before.”
“Yes, but…” Oh, what was the use? Trying to explain was a waste of time. “Forget it.”
Had she learned anything new? Anything helpful?
The gurneys were used sometimes to take patients who had died down to the basement morgue.
Did that mean anything?
“What are you thinking about?” Smith asked, his eyes on her face.
“Nothing.” Why had that gurney been in her room? If two people had been fooling around, as Jane suggested, they wouldn’t have needed a gurney. They had the bed.
Could the rickety old gurney have been outside in the hall and not in her room at all?
Maybe. Sound carried better late at night when the hospital was quiet. Maybe the gurney had been out in the hall, passing by her room.
But it sounded closer than that…
If she’d heard it at all. How could she be sure?
She couldn’t.
“You’ve got that look on your face,” Smith said, snapping her back to attention. “You’re thinking weird things again, I can tell.”
“Did…did anybody die a couple of nights ago? The night everyone tells me was just a bad dream?”
Smith sighed and shook his head. “No, Duffy, no one died. We had a couple of emergencies, just like we always do at night, but everyone pulled through just fine. If you did hear a gurney, it was probably bringing a post-op patient back up from surgery. Or maybe someone was just being moved to another floor.”
No one had died that night.
Then she remembered something Amy had said, about someone dying recently. The man with the missing digoxin…
“What about Mr. Latham? Amy said he’d died. When was that?”
Smith tilted his head, thinking. “Old Man Latham? Pillar of the community, member of the hospital board…I’m not sure exactly when he died…Couple of days ago, I guess. Just before you got here. I wasn’t on duty that night. Everyone was freaked out the next day, though. The old guy had donated mega-bucks to the hospital. Had a bad ticker, I heard.”
Latham had died before Duffy was admitted. So his death couldn’t possibly have anything to do with what was happening to her. Not that she had really thought it did. She hadn’t even known the man.
After admonishing her to “get some sleep, you look awful, Duffy,” Smith left.
When he had disappeared through the open door, a depressed Duffy rolled over on her side and stared out the window. As she turned, the sheets coiled around her legs, imprisoning her. Panicking momentarily, she began kicking out, desperate to be free of the scratchy cocoon.
“What on earth…” Cynthia cried as she entered the room and found Duffy wrestling with her bedding. “Duffy, what are you doing?” Then she added more quietly to Jane, who was directly behind her, “Oh, Lord, she’s lost it! I knew this was coming!” and ran over to grab Duffy’s wrists.
“Leave me alone!” Duffy shouted, her face scarlet. “I’m just tangled, that’s all.” She yanked the last bit of sheet away from her bare legs. Glaring up at the blue-uniformed Cynthia, she asked caustically, “Did you really think I was losing it? Did my doctor warn you to watch out for weird behavior in room 417?”
When Cynthia’s cheeks reddened, Duffy knew she’d hit a nerve. The doctor had warned them all to keep an eye on her.
“I brought you some magazines,” Jane said cheerfully, in an effort to ease the awkwardness of the moment. “I hope you haven’t read them.” She was wearing lime-green pedal pushers and a hot-pink short-sleeved T-shirt with the slogan, GO AHEAD MAKE MY DAY GIVE ME A CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE slapped across it in blazing scarlet.
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Duffy said bitterly. “You brought me the American Journal of Psychiatric Medicine and the latest copy of Guide to Mental Health Facilities, right?”
A bewildered expression crossed Jane’s face. “What? What are you talking about?” She plopped herself down at the foot of Duffy’s bed.
“They all think I’m crazy here,” Duffy said heatedly. Then she filled Jane in on the shower incident, leaving nothing out, ending with, “It happened, Jane. But no one believes me. They all think I was hallucinating.”
She didn’t add that there were moments when she agreed with them. Right now, talking about it, reliving it, she was convinced that every second of it had been real.
“Oh, Duffy, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard!” Jane declared, her eyes wide with horror. “Didn’t anyone call the police?” She swallowed a sob, “You could have been killed!”
“No one called anyone. I told you, they all think I made it up.”
“You wouldn’t do that.” Staunch loyalty filled Jane’s voice. “Why would you lie about something so horrible?”
“No one claims she’s lying,” Cynthia said. “It’s just that everyone on the hospital staff knows what fevers can do, that’s all. People see and hear all kinds of weird things when their temperature is sky-high.”
Jane looked doubtful. Duffy could see that she didn’t know what to believe. How could she blame Jane for that? She didn’t know what to believe herself.
“The shower room door was locked,” Cynthia pointed out. “Duffy said so herself. And the extra key was at the nurses’ station. So how could anyone have gotten into the room?”
Duffy thought about explaining her key theory and decided against it. Jane looked very upset and confused. What good would it do to keep harping on the same old thing when she couldn’t prove anything?
“Never mind,” she said despondently, “forget I said anything.”
Discouraged, depressed, and exhausted from lack of sleep, Duffy was such poor company that Jane and Cynthia stayed only a few minutes. Jane, worry clouding her features, promised to come back later, which gave Duffy an idea, and Cynthia said she would stop in later before she left the hospital.
As they reached the hall, Duffy heard Jane say, “Cyn, Duffy doesn’t invent things. I can’t believe no one is taking her seriously.” Then their voices faded and Duffy couldn’t hear Cynthia’s answer. She was sure it was a calm, sensible one.
But that didn’t matter right now. Duffy had thought of a way she could learn something about what was in her capsules.
If Jane was willing to help.