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It was the last thing Peter had expected, or wanted, to hear. “Henry, no.”
“Yes,” Henry said gently. “I’m old, Peter. Older than your father was.” A lot older, he thought. “And I’m tired. Tired of wrestling with hospital policies, tired of wondering how we’re going to be able to fund this program or that—”
Peter cut in. “You’ve always done a fantastic job. We all thought you were part magician.”
“It’s time for someone else to pull a rabbit out of a hat,” Henry said wearily. He loved the hospital, loved the people who were there, but his health wasn’t what it used to be and it was suffering. He couldn’t do as good a job as he had been doing and he refused to be in a position where the board voted to release him from his contract. “To struggle and lose sleep over ends that just refuse to meet.”
Peter looked at the man closely. Henry did look tired. And there had been that late-onset diabetes that he knew Henry felt confident no one knew about. But he did. That was why he didn’t press, even though he wanted to.
Still, he had to ask, “Your mind’s made up?”
“About the retirement? Yes. About everything else? No.” Henry shook his head again. “In theory, I agree that NHC should keep its sticky fingers off us. But we’re not going to do anyone much good if we have to close our doors because the funding’s not there to keep us going. Doesn’t matter how good our reputation is if we can’t get supplies because there’s no money. Even when we don’t charge some of the poorer patients who can’t afford us, the services aren’t really free, you know. Somebody has to pay for everything from a swab to a suture to everything else. Every department wants more and I just can’t find a way to get it.”
Peter squared his shoulders, as if ready to do battle with some invisible force. “I refuse to believe that HMOs are the only answer.”
“Maybe they’re not,” Henry gladly conceded. “But I for one don’t have any other answer.” He rocked back in his chair. “Except to retire.”
Resigned to the inevitable, Peter asked, “So, how soon?”
Henry glanced at the calendar on his desk and flipped a few pages. He was grateful that Peter wasn’t calling him a coward and accusing him of running away from the battle. “April, maybe May. I’ve already half been scouting around for a replacement.”
Whoever came wouldn’t be nearly as good, Peter thought sadly. “Won’t be the same without you.”
Henry smiled, appreciating the kind words but knowing better. “You’ll manage, Peter. You’re a Wilder. The Wilders always manage.”
The man’s words echoed in Peter’s head long after he’d left Henry’s office. He knew his father had felt that way, as had his grandfather. He only wished he could feel half as confident about it as they had.
Chapter Six
It was hard not to fidget. Even harder not to let his eyes shut.
Peter couldn’t help thinking he had more important things to do than sit here, trapped in this airless room, held prisoner by what felt like an endless board meeting.
For the better part of the week, his schedule had been entirely filled with patients. The rest of the time Peter found himself looking over his shoulder in an attempt—successful for the most part—to duck the very woman that fate now had him sitting next to in this so-called official meeting of the board of directors.
Larry Simpson, the current board secretary, had all but put him to sleep, reading the minutes in a voice that could, hands down, easily replace the leading medication for insomnia.
Part of the reason he was struggling to keep his eyes open was because he’d put in an extra long day yesterday. It had actually extended into the wee hours of the next morning—today. Too exhausted to drive home, he’d slept in his office. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the misshapen sofa was not the last word in comfort. He was now paying for his impulsive choice with a stiff neck, not to mention the various other parts of his body that felt less than flexible today.
After Larry had finished droning on, the first order of business had been the formal announcement of what he was already privy to: Henry Weisfield’s pending retirement. That led to an impromptu testimonial by Wallace during which he listed Henry’s skills and accomplishments.
“He’s going to be a hard man to replace,” Wallace predicted, using the exact words he had employed when he’d spoken about the passing of James Wilder. “But I charge each and every one of you to keep your eye out for a suitable candidate to at least partially fill Henry’s position.”
“We could try offering Henry more money,” suggested Gladys Cooper, a fifteen-year veteran of the board.
“Not everything is solved with money.” The words slipped out of Peter’s mouth before he realized he was actually saying them aloud rather than just thinking them.
“No,” the redhead at his elbow agreed. “But it certainly does help pave the road and make things a lot easier.”
Not wanting to get caught up in another confrontation with Bethany, Peter replied, “Can’t argue with that.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can,” she countered with a smile he couldn’t begin to fathom.
Damn, but he wished she’d stop wearing that perfume. It wasn’t overpowering. It was very light, actually, but it left behind just enough scent to stealthily slip into his senses, blurring things for him.
He had opened his mouth to respond when the sound of a cell phone playing a shrill samba reverberated through the room. The next second, Wallace’s wide hand covered his jacket breast pocket.
“Sorry,” he apologized with a sheepish expression. “Forgot to turn off my phone.” But when he took it out to shut off, he looked at the number on the tiny screen. His expression turned to one of curiosity. He held up his hand as if to beg an indulgence. “I need to take this. Why don’t we just take a break for a few minutes?” he suggested. Not waiting for the members to agree, he quickly left the room.
Everyone around them rose from their chairs, taking the opportunity to stretch their legs. Bethany watched the man at her left for a cue. Now that she had him in her sights, she intended to follow his lead in order to finally be able to say more than a handful of words to him regarding the takeover.
Peter remained seated. So did she.
“You didn’t go home last night, did you?” Bethany asked quietly.
The question caught him off guard. But then, he thought, it really shouldn’t have, given the fact that she had been popping up all over since Monday. “Are you stalking me, Ms. Holloway?”
She maintained a mild expression, as if tracking him down had never even crossed her mind. “No, I just noticed where you were parked when I left last night.” She didn’t add that she’d waited a quarter of an hour, hoping he would appear, since it was already after-hours. But sitting in her car on a cold January evening was her limit. “It snowed last night.”
Where was she going with this, he wondered. And why did she have to look so damn attractive going there? “So I hear.”
“You car had snow all around it this morning—as if it hadn’t been moved,” she said, explaining how she’d come to her conclusion.
“Very observant.” Peter looked at her for a long moment, wondering whether to be amused or annoyed.
She smiled and something definitely responded within him. He vaguely recognized what was going on. This wasn’t good, he thought.
“Look, Dr. Wilder, let’s talk openly. What will it take to get you to listen to arguments for the other side?”
All around the table, people had begun to return to their seats, drawn in by the verbal duel.
He tried to make it as clear to her as he could. “You can’t possibly tell me anything about NHC’s motives that I don’t already know.”
Oh yes she could, Bethany thought. She had access to the latest studies, something she highly doubted this throwback bothered with. “There are statistics, Dr. Wilder.”
He waved her words away with an impatient hand. “I deal in patients, Ms. Holloway, not statistics.”
“Patients make up the statistics, Doctor,” she insisted, and felt color rising in her cheeks. “Where do you think they come from?”
He banked down his impatience. The woman probably didn’t know any better. Wiser people than she had been led astray by the hocus-pocus of numbers if they were juggled just right.
“Ms. Holloway,” he began in a patient, quiet voice, “statistics are very flexible. In the hands of someone clever, they can be bent to support almost anything. The good done by a bloated, fat-cat conglomerate, for instance.”
Her eyes blazed, reminding him, he suddenly realized, of Lisa. Of the woman he’d once thought—no, knew—he’d been in love with. The one he’d made plans to spend the rest of his life with. The one who’d left him in his senior year for a medical student who was “a better prospect” because once Steven graduated, he was slated to join his father’s lucrative Manhattan practice.
A chill worked its way down his spine as the realization took root. Bethany Holloway had the same coloring, the same full lips, the same slender figure.
And the same take-no-prisoners ambition, he thought.
“Everyone I know at the hospital thinks that you’re this kind, gentle, understanding man,” she retorted. “So far, I’m not convinced they’re right.”
At that moment, the silence in the room was almost deafening.
And then Peter said quietly and with no emotion, “I have no desire to convince you about anything that has to do with me, Ms. Holloway.”
But he knew it was a lie. What people thought of him did matter to him. He didn’t like being thought of in a bad light. It bothered him.
Bothered him, too, that the sensual fragrance she always wore was really filling up his head, undermining his senses. It gave her an unfair advantage because it made him think of her during the course of the day when his mind was supposed to be on other things. And then his mind would wander. Wander in directions he was determined not to take. Not with her.
Where was all this coming from? Peter silently demanded. He was arguing to preserve the hospital, not fantasizing about his opponent. He wanted to save the place that had been a second home to James Wilder. Walnut River General was his father’s legacy. And if NHC came into the picture, that legacy would be changed, if not eradicated entirely.
And Peter needed to do everything he could to keep that from happening.
“Sorry, sorry,” Wallace announced, coming back into the room. He made a show of turning off his phone. “I hope you all got to stretch your legs for a moment, before we launch into part two of our agenda this morning.” He chuckled at some joke he thought he’d made, then paused, waiting for the stragglers to be seated. Moments later, he began again. “First up, I’m told that the radiology department desperately needs a new MRI machine. The old one, according to Mrs. Fitzpatrick, the department’s head technician, has been down more than it’s been up in the last few months. Any ideas?” he asked, looking around the table as he threw open the matter for discussion.
He no sooner asked the question than Bethany’s hand went up. The chairman nodded toward her. “Yes, Ms. Holloway?”
“If we take NHC up on their offer when they formally present it, we won’t have to worry about how to pay for the new MRI machine. The money—” she slanted a look in Peter’s direction “—would come from them.”
“Yes, but at what price?” Peter countered, struggling to keep his temper in check. This should have been a no-brainer, if not for her, because of lack of experience, then for everyone else seated at this table. They all knew what HMOs, no matter what they called themselves, were like.
Obviously trying to keep the peace, Wallace asked him, “What do you mean?”
Was the man playing dumb for Bethany’s sake? Heaven help him—maybe it was the lack of sleep talking—but he had no patience with that. “You know what I mean, Wallace. We’ve all heard horror stories about HMOs—”
“Yes, but those are all from the nineties and earlier,” Bethany cut in. “Things have changed since then.”
“Have they?” Peter challenged. “Instead of sitting around, waiting for NHC to come sniffing around, why don’t we investigate some of the other hospitals that have become part of their conglomerate in, oh, say the last five years or so? See what they’ve become in comparison to the way they were.”
Wallace cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Our resources are limited, Peter,” he protested. “We can’t afford to do that.”
Didn’t the man understand? If he was going to actually entertain this proposition, then he needed to know what might happen to Walnut River General.
“We can’t afford not to,” Peter insisted. “Now, as for the new MRI machine—” he knew how costly those could be “—why don’t you have Henry Weisfield put together one of his fund-raisers? He’s still not leaving for another three months or so. He could do it easily.”
“That’s your answer?” Bethany demanded, her voice rising. “A fund-raiser?”
The angrier she seemed to get, the calmer he became. “It’s worked so far.”
“And when we need to modernize the operating rooms?” she posed. “What then? Another fundraiser? Just how many of these things do you think we can swing before we wind up losing donors altogether?” she asked.
“We’ll tackle that when it comes,” he said, smiling.
Was he laughing at her? “If NHC oversaw us, we wouldn’t have to tackle anything. We would just make the request in writing.”
He looked at her, stunned, not really sure she believed what she was saying. Was she just saying it to convince the others?
“Are you really that naive? Don’t you realize that a company big enough to give you everything, is also big enough to take everything away if you don’t dance to the tune they play?” He was tired of this. He was beginning to understand why Henry felt the way he did, why he wanted to retire. “If I’m going to have my strings pulled, I want to be able to see who’s pulling them.” He addressed his words to Wallace, not Bethany. With Wallace he had some hope of getting through. “Not having some conglomerate versed in buck-passing doing it.”
Just then, his pager went off. Glancing down at the device clipped to his belt, Peter angled it so that he could read the message that had just come in. “Sorry, Wallace.” He rose to his feet. “There’s been a car accident. I’m wanted in the E.R.”
Wallace nodded. “Of course.”
As he left, Peter couldn’t help thinking that the chairman sounded rather relieved to see him go.
“Talk to me,” Peter urged the E.R.’s head nurse, Simone Garner, a slender woman with brown hair and a ready smile, when he arrived in the emergency room several minutes later. As he questioned Simone, one of the other nurses helped him on with the disposable yellow paper gowns they all donned in an effort to minimize the risk of spreading infections amid the E.R. trauma patients.
The paramedics had left less than two minutes before, so Simone quickly recited the vital signs for the three patients, then added, “It was a two-car collision. The police said the brakes failed on the SUV and it plowed into the other car at an intersection.”
“Where did it happen?” he asked as he took out his stethoscope.
“Less than two miles away. The paramedics got them here quickly. Those two were the drivers.” She indicated the first two gurneys. “The little boy was a passenger. Sitting in the front, I gather.” The little boy was crying loudly. She pushed her hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist and leaned in closer. “It’s going to be all right, honey,” she told him, then raised her eyes to Peter’s face. “No child seat in the car,” she said. It was obvious what she thought of the driver’s negligence. “I think the little guy got the worst of it. He’s pretty banged up. There might be internal bleeding.”
“Get him to X-ray as fast as you can,” Peter instructed. She motioned to an orderly and, between them, they took the gurney away.
Peter turned his attention to the other two victims. Before he could say anything, the man on the gurney closest to him grabbed his forearm.
“My little boy,” the man implored hoarsely.
Peter looked down into a face that was badly cut up and bruised. One of the man’s eyes was swollen shut and he looked as if he was barely able to see with his other one.
“Your son’s going to be all right,” he said with the conviction he knew the patient needed to hear. Long ago he’d been told not to make promises he might not be able to keep, but he knew the good a positive frame of mind could do. “Now let’s make sure that you are.” He pointed to the first empty bed he saw. “Put him in trauma room two.”
He’d had to remove the boy’s spleen. Then he’d gone back to the boy’s father to explain at length everything that had been done. It had taken a lot to make the man believe his son was going to make a full recovery. Peter had never seen such concern, such guilt, displayed by anyone the way it was by Ned Farmer.
Farmer, a self-employed auto mechanic and former racer, berated himself over and over again for being so busy working on other people’s cars that he’d neglected to check out his own.
“My fault, my fault, it’s all my fault,” Farmer kept saying over and over again, working himself up almost into a frenzy. It got to the point that Peter finally authorized an injection of diazepam be given in order to calm Farmer down.
The other driver, it turned out, had some traumatic bruising to his spine. So much so that the swelling was pinching his spinal cord, causing his lower extremities to become numb and unresponsive.
He called Ella and asked her to come down for a consultation. He thought his sister’s soft voice and gentle manner might help quell the second driver’s fears. She was there within the quarter hour.
The last he’d seen, Ella was at the man’s bedside, calmly reassuring him. “In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the victim walks as soon as the swelling on his spine subsides. You just have to be patient.”
The man looked anything but that. “But I’ll walk again?”
“Most likely, as soon as the swelling there goes down,” she repeated.
“But what if it doesn’t?” he pressed nervously. “What if it doesn’t go down?”
She took his hand in hers and said without wavering. “We’ll do everything we can.”
Peter smiled to himself and thought how proud his father would be if he could see her.
NHC, Peter was certain, would never approve of all this handholding on the part of their doctors. The patient would be swiftly examined, given his diagnosis and then sent home to recuperate. And to nurse fears of never being able to walk again. Who knew how much damage that would ultimately create?
It made him more determined than ever to block the takeover.
