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“Heather. Heather Corrigan.” Even those few words seemed an appalling effort for her and Rachel had to lean close to hear.
“Hello, Heather. I’m Dr. Browne.”
Heather’s lips curled in a faint smile and she half nodded before her teeth clamped again as another labor pain hit.
Rachel swabbed her forehead while Lydia prepped her belly. “Who’s your doctor, Heather? Do you have an OB? An obstetrician?”
Heather rolled her head back and forth in a negative response that obviously cost her. “Haven’t seen a—a doctor. I need to see…” Her already weak voice faded into nothingness as another wave of pain swept her body.
Katya raced into the cubicle carrying the FHD–100—a portable fetal monitor that ran on batteries. “I’ve got another orderly coming down,” she said. Then Reid covered Heather’s mouth with the mask.
“All right then,” Rachel said, putting on rubber gloves. “Let’s be on top of this, people. Everything’s going to be fine.”
ONLY, EVERYTHING WASN’T fine.
Rachel peeled off her paper scrubs and threw them furiously into the trash. She never got used to losing a patient. At least the baby would live, although his heartbeat was irregular and his jaundice was advanced. If only Heather had seen an obstetrician when she’d first gotten pregnant. Or even come to the hospital a few hours earlier.
Desperate for some coffee, Rachel headed toward the call room, but John Wilkins flagged her down from the other side of the hall. She stopped wearily and waited for him to reach her.
“Sorry, Doc. EMTs are bringing in a guy who had a roof cave in on him in the storm. They’ll be here in five.”
“Oh, Lord. Okay, when he gets here, can you get him cleaned up and into X ray and then come get me?”
“Sure, Doctor.” He paused midturn. “You okay?”
She looked at her watch. Almost 3:00 a.m. She’d been on duty for nearly seventeen hours. “I have to be, John. There’s nobody else.”
He nodded sympathetically. “I’ll take care of it.” He turned and hustled down the hall.
This time, Rachel made it to the coffee machine. She practically guzzled the first cup and was halfway through the second when John returned.
“He’s in X ray, Doctor. Whoa. They need you, stat.”
“That bad, huh?”
The orderly nodded.
Rachel slugged back the remainder of the coffee. “Well, let’s hit it.”
As she and John reached the X-ray room, the technician was just wrapping up. Rachel nodded and smiled at her, then approached the body lying on the gurney.
She noted approvingly that John had installed a saline drip and oxygen feed on the patient. She understood the orderly’s reaction. The face of the man on the gurney was in worse shape than many of the traffic accidents she’d seen—a palette of cuts, bruises and swelling distorting the features beyond recognition. “What’s his name?”
“Bruce Nepom.”
The man’s salt-and-pepper hair was matted with blood and he showed no signs of consciousness.
“Let’s get him in one,” Rachel said. As they walked, she pulled a small flashlight from her pocket and gently pried the man’s eyelids open, one at a time. She flashed the light across his eyes, but the pupils were blown—dilated and unresponsive to the light. “Bruce—Mr. Nepom. Can you hear me?” As expected, there was no reaction.
Rachel examined the man’s mouth. Three of his front teeth were broken, but he hadn’t bitten his tongue.
Once they were in the exam room, she pulled the sheet back to expose a well-developed chest with a smattering of graying hair, and a massive bruise along the ribs.
She noted John had already put in a catheter, and that most of the man’s injuries were upper body. She ran a finger along a tattoo on the man’s left shoulder—two dragons entwined around a Celtic cross. The tattoo had once been colorful, but the tints had faded and darkened.
“According to the EMTs, the whole roof fell on him,” John repeated.
She pulled on a fresh pair of rubber gloves. “Let’s see what we can do to help Mr. Nepom.”
RACHEL HANDED HER NOTES to the admitting nurse in the E.R. “Hang on to these for me, will you, Karen?”
“Sure, Doctor.” She gave Rachel a quick once-over. “You look beat. About time you went home.”
Rachel glanced at the half-filled seats in admitting. Aside from the two serious operations, she and Amy had treated dozens of broken limbs, stitched up God knows how many cuts, and even treated a man whose foot had been caught under a falling tree by poking through his toenail with a red-hot paper clip to relieve the pressure. She smiled at that one. “That’s my plan, Karen. I’m hoping to sleep uninterrupted for a good twenty-four hours.”
“Good night, Doctor. Or rather, good morning.”
“See you later.” Rachel headed out the double doors to the parking lot, still worried about Nepom. The surgery had been a success, but that didn’t mean the patient would live. Even if he did, his head wounds were so severe she doubted he’d regain anything like normal consciousness.
Although the sun was actually rising behind her, she felt as if she were coming out of a movie matinee. It was as though she’d forgotten what natural sunlight was like. Standing on the steps a moment, she took a deep breath. Clean air, sunlight.
Great time to go to bed.
With leaden feet and a killer backache, she made her way across the debris-strewn lot to her car. It would take her ten minutes to get home. Twelve minutes to be in bed.
DR. GUY GIROUX CLIMBED over a fallen palm tree then up the rise at the edge of his property. From there he could see the road and, thankfully, the city maintenance crew hard at work disentangling the trees and cars that had prevented him from getting to the hospital the previous night.
The last he’d heard from the E.R., before his cell had gone dead, was that they were critically understaffed. As head of the E.R., he should have been there. Thank God Rachel had made it in, but with this kind of storm, the injured would be more than any one doctor could handle.
They should have been better prepared, given the run of bad weather they’d been having. It was only a couple of months ago that the last severe storm had come through, causing major mudslides that had washed away houses. Now this.
He headed back to his house, which mercifully had been spared the worst of last night’s storm. His neighbor’s ground floor had been flooded, and Mrs. Allen had come to him for help, but all he’d managed to do was get her and her three annoying Pomeranians into the warmth of his spare room.
It was the only thing that had gone right. Without television reception or phone service, he’d relied on his radio for any word of relief, but it hadn’t come till about an hour ago.
The storm was the worst recorded in the history of Courage Bay, California, and he knew firsthand how far back that history went. His great-great-great-grandfather, Pierre Giroux, had been the captain of an American twenty-one-gun sloop of war, the Ranger, which had blown off course during the U.S.–Mexican War and been shipwrecked in Courage Bay. Perhaps in a storm like this.
Guy heard the dogs yapping before he crossed his threshold. He liked dogs and ordinarily wouldn’t have minded their incessant barking, but not today when he was suffering from lack of sleep and a rare feeling of helplessness.
“Dr. Guy?”
He inhaled deeply and let the air out slowly, trying to ease the headache that had been building steadily from four this morning. “Yes, Mrs. Allen?”
“The babies are hungry. Do you think it’s possible to get into my house and get some food for them?”
“No, I don’t believe it is. But I have some ground beef in the freezer.” He closed the door behind him and headed for the kitchen, avoiding the small woman still dressed in her housecoat and curlers.
“They’d like that very much,” she said.
As he got the beef out, he turned to her. “I’m going to have to leave. The road is open, and I’m needed at the hospital. The power’s back on, and I’m sure they’ll have the phone service turned on shortly and you can call your sister.”
Mrs. Allen nodded. She was eighty if she was a day, and her sister was only a few years younger.
“Then you call your insurance agent. He’ll help you with the house.”
The woman sat down at the dining room table, and the dogs, none of them puppies, swirled around her legs, panting heavily. “Thank you for last night. I don’t know what we would have done without you.”
“It was my pleasure.” He put the beef in the microwave, hit defrost, then excused himself with a reassuring smile to get ready for work.
His shower, although too brief, revived him somewhat, and the three aspirin would help even more. By the time he’d dressed and returned to the kitchen, the dogs were gobbling up their breakfast, eating out of his cereal bowls. Mrs. Allen stood watching them, and he was glad that she had them. Everyone needed someone to care for.
She looked up at him with a coy grin. “Have I told you about my great-niece, Lilly?”
He nodded. “You have.”
“She’s a very beautiful girl, Doctor. And she can cook like a dream.”
He grabbed his coat from the back of his dining-room chair and slipped it on. “I’m sure she can, but I’m already married—to my work.”
“Oh, I’m sure—”
“If you don’t believe me,” he said, “you can ask my ex-wife. Turns out I don’t share well with others. So save your niece the grief.”
Mrs. Allen sighed. “It’s such a shame. You’re so very handsome, and especially nice.”
He touched the older woman on the shoulder. “Thank you. You have my phone number if you need anything, right?”
She nodded.
“Please let me know when you reach your sister. If I’m not available, you can tell my secretary, Connie.”
Mrs. Allen went back to the pleasure of watching her “babies” as Guy headed toward the garage. He pressed the door opener as he stepped inside. The garage was neat as an operating room, which was the only way he’d have it. Inside, his baby, a 1958 Corvette, sat shiny and polished as the day she was born. But he wouldn’t take her out today. Not with the roads so torn up. Instead he climbed into his Range Rover and prepared for a slow twenty miles to the Courage Bay E.R.
When he arrived at the hospital, his headache returned full force. He went to his office first, but the usual piles of reports were missing. As was Connie. He played back the messages on his private line, and after two calls from a pharmaceutical house in Boston asking him to speak at a symposium next spring, Connie’s voice came on, letting him know that she’d been stranded and would get in as soon as the streets were cleared.
Guy sighed as he went to make coffee. His office wasn’t large but it had its pluses, the main one being the private call room. He busied himself with coffee grounds while he thought about the missing reports.
He’d have to give the staff the benefit of the doubt. Considering the conditions last night, reports weren’t the top priority. Saving lives was.
Which meant that he would take his coffee to go. He’d do rounds, assess the situation in the E.R. But first, more aspirin.
The scent of his Kona coffee made him feel better as he went back to his desk. He kept meaning to replace the old thing, with its battered sides and stiff top drawer, but whenever he had any time off, he made his way to the boat.
Just thinking of the Caduceus relaxed him more than anything else in the world. His ’44 sloop was everything a man could want in a boat, and his only regret was that he had so little time to sail her.
Thank God she’d been in dry dock during the storm. She was getting a new mast, aluminum. He was to have taken her out next week, but with this damn storm…
He’d call. After rounds.
Coffee cup in hand, Guy walked toward the admitting desk, all thoughts of sailing firmly stowed away. Before he reached his destination he was stopped twice, once by Karen, the admitting nurse, then by Mike Trailer, the head of maintenance, both of whom had tales of woe. Karen was concerned that the computers had been down for two hours during the night, and Mike told him about some window blowouts on the third floor. He listened patiently, although he was sure the information had already been given to Callie Baker, the chief of staff. He was more concerned with what was happening now in his domain.
Surprisingly, there were only four people in the admitting area, none of whom presented serious problems. Two of the E.R. bays were occupied, one with a woman who had broken her left hip when she fell on a toppled tree, and the other with a heart-attack victim, who was now stabilized.
He went back to admitting, and when Karen gave him the charts, he flipped quickly through the various cuts, bruises and breaks. He stopped when he got to Bruce Nepom. After reading the chart, Guy put the stack back and headed for the ICU.
He found the man in room C. There wasn’t much to see. Nepom was hooked up to a heart monitor, IV, respirator. Bandages covered his face and head, and his ribs had been taped.
There wasn’t much hope, but he was glad to see Rachel had been so thorough. Everything that could have been done had been done. What he didn’t see on the chart was that Nepom’s family had been contacted.
After putting the chart back, Guy returned to admitting one more.
Karen gave him the rest of the night’s paperwork, and he headed for his office and another cup of coffee.
He flipped through more notes. Damn. Rachel and Amy must have stitched, sewn, patched, splinted and put casts on nearly a hundred people since the storm started.
The name on the next report stopped him cold. Heather Corrigan. He did a quick check on her vital statistics: age eighteen, blond hair, no wedding ring. It was the Heather he knew. His stepdaughter. And she was dead.
Guy put the papers down on his desk and closed his eyes. Heather was supposed to be in Europe with his ex-wife. What was she doing here? Pregnant?
He focused his gaze with some difficulty, but as he read, the words became horrifyingly clear. Preeclampsia. Heather was healthy, strong. For God’s sake, she was only eighteen. And she’d died in his E.R. What the hell had Rachel done?
He picked up the phone with shaking fingers and dialed.
“Hi. You’ve reached Dr. Rachel Browne. Leave your number at the beep.”
“Dr. Browne, this is Guy Giroux. Pick up the phone. Right now.” He sat stiffly, a well of anger making it difficult to breathe, then slammed the receiver down when she didn’t answer. He stared blankly at his desk for a moment, then pounded his fist on it so hard his pen holder fell over.
Rising slowly, Guy put on his coat, retrieved Heather’s chart and headed for his car. He needed to talk to Dr. Browne—now.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DRIVE TO RACHEL’S did nothing to calm Guy’s mind. He wavered between the respect he had for her as a doctor and the pain and rage he felt as a parent. He simply didn’t understand how she could have been so incompetent.
His tires squealed as he came to a stop in her driveway, and once the keys were out of the ignition he was heading for her front door.
He rang the bell several times, then beat on the wood with his fists, almost hitting Rachel as the door suddenly flew open.
“What is it?”
Guy’s tirade stopped before he was even able to start it. Dr. Rachel Browne, aka the Iron Lady, well known for her strict code of ethics and her somewhat aloof manner at the hospital, stood before him in a loose robe and tiny, see-through red nightie.
“Put your eyes back in their sockets, Guy, and tell me why you’re waking me up two hours after I got off the seventeen-hour shift from hell?”
He tore his eyes away from the vision she presented and looked straight into her eyes. “What the hell happened in there last night?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Heather Corrigan. Healthy eighteen-year-old. And she’s dead, Rachel.”
