She was smiling now. “Does the toilet still flush?”
Jeffrey got a sinking feeling. He hadn’t been able to hire a professional inspector. No one would return his calls. Eddie Linton had put out a plumber’s omerta on him.
Tessa said, “That old clay sewage pipe is full of tree roots. You’re going to be shitting in a bucket this time next month.”
Jeffrey could barely afford the mortgage. His savings had been wiped out by the down payment. “Come on, Tess. Help me out here.”
“You want my help?” She stepped off the curb. Her father’s van was in the street. “Buy a metal bucket. Plastic absorbs the smell.”
Jeffrey struggled to close the umbrella as Eddie pulled into the parking lot. He knew the man kept a .380 Ruger in the glovebox.
The van swerved wildly in front of the building.
Jeffrey dropped the umbrella. He yanked open the door. Inside, he almost slammed into Nelly Morgan.
“Hm.” The clinic’s office manager tutted at him before turning on her heel and walking away. Jeffrey suppressed a sarcastic remark. Nelly was immune to sarcasm.
Dr. Barney was not. He told Jeffrey, “Looking good, son,” as he pointedly closed an exam-room door behind him.
Jeffrey studied his reflection in the mirror over the hall sink. The rain had done its work. His shirt was soaked through. The back of his hair stuck up like a duck’s butt.
“What are you doing here?” Molly Stoddard, Sara’s nurse, looked the least happy to see him.
Jeffrey smoothed down his hair. “I need to talk to Sara.”
“Need or want?” Molly looked at her watch, though she was one of those women who always knew what time it was. “She’s got back-to-back patients. You’ll have to—”
“Molly.” Sara’s office door slid open. “Go ahead and start Jimmy Powell’s nebulizer. I’ll be right in.”
Molly got in another unhappy glower before shuffling down the hallway.
Sara asked Jeffrey, “How is the girl?”
“In surgery. She—”
Sara disappeared into her office.
Jeffrey debated whether or not to follow. He smoothed down his hair again. He passed a disapproving mother in the hall. Her toddler was frowning up at him, too. Jeffrey needed a diagram like the kind that were printed at the front of Russian novels to figure out how people related back to Sara and to what degree they hated him.
He found her sitting behind her desk, pen in hand, filling out a prescription. Sara’s office was the same size as Dr. Barney’s, but she had made it feel smaller by taping pictures of her patients on the walls. There had to be more than one hundred. Soon, there wouldn’t be a bare section of wood paneling. Most of the images were school photos. There were some candids with cats, dogs, and the occasional gerbil. The chaotic decorating style extended around the room. Her in-basket was overflowing. Textbooks were laid out on the floor. Charts were piled into the two chairs and on top of filing cabinets that contained even more charts. If Jeffrey didn’t know better, he would’ve assumed she’d been robbed.
He scooped up a stack of folders so he could sit down. “I ran into Tess outside.”
“Close the door.” She waited for him to stand again, close the door, and sit back down before asking, “Are you finally going to get rid of Lena?”
Jeffrey had his own question ready. “How long did it take you to find a pulse?”
“At least I checked.”
“Lena checked when she arrived on scene. I saw it written in her notes.”
“Was it in the same color ink?” Sara waved off a response. “Tell me what the hospital said. How is the girl doing?”
Jeffrey let her biting tone hang between them. Over the last year, he had become intimately familiar with the two different Saras. The one in public was tragically silent, ever-respectful. The one in private ripped a knot in his ass every chance she got.
Jeffrey dropped the stack of charts onto an already teetering pile. “The girl’s name is Rebecca Caterino. She goes by Beckey. The hospital can’t release her information—”
“But?”
“But.” He paused to slow her down. “I spoke with her father. The neurosurgeon is going to perform a—”
“Craniotomy to release the pressure inside of her skull?” Sara asked, “What about the material in her throat?”
“The pulmonologist said it looked like—”
“Undigested pastry?”
Jeffrey gripped the arms of the chair. “Are you going to finish all of my …”
Sara didn’t play along. “Why are you here, Jeffrey?”
He had to wade through his irritation to remember. “Did you notice that her legs were paralyzed?”
“Paralyzed?” Sara was paying attention now. “Explain.”
“The surgeon told Beckey’s father that her spinal column was ruptured.”
“The vertebral column or spinal cord?”
Jeffrey took his time retrieving his notebook from his pocket, flipping to the right page. “During the evaluation, her feet and legs did not respond to stimuli. An MRI revealed a small puncture on the left side of her spinal cord.”
“Puncture?” Sara leaned over her desk. “Be more specific. Was the skin punctured, too?”
“That’s all I’ve got.” Jeffrey closed his notebook. “The father was understandably upset. The surgeons weren’t offering much information. You know how it is at the beginning of these things. They don’t know what they don’t know.”
“They know more than they let on,” Sara said. “Did you get the location of the puncture?”
He went back to his notes. “Below C5.”
“No ventilator, then. Small mercy.” Sara sat back in her chair. He could tell she was running through the possibilities. “Okay, spinal cord injuries. The majority are a result of physical trauma. Sports injuries. Car accidents. Gunshot and knife wounds. Accidents, too, but not generally trip-and-falls. You’d need a tremendous amount of force to rupture the spinal cord. Or a vertebra could fracture and puncture it? Or maybe she landed on something sharp? Did you find anything at the scene that could cause a penetrating wound?”
“By the time I talked to the father, our scene was washed away by the rain.”
“You didn’t think to cover it with a tent?”
“For what?” Jeffrey asked, because this was the crux of the problem. “Why would I take extra steps for what looked like an accident? Did you see something that made you think otherwise?”
She shook her head. “You’re right.”
Jeffrey cupped his hand to his ear, as if he couldn’t hear her.
She gave a reluctant smile. He hated the way he felt when he got a positive reaction out of her, as if he was in junior high school trying to impress a cheerleader.
He said, “This case feels hinky, right? It’s not just me?”
She shook her head, but he could tell she shared his trepidation. “I want to see the MRI. The puncture is strange. It could change everything. Or it could be explained. I need more information.”
“I do, too.” Jeffrey felt some of the pressure start to lift off his chest. One of the things he missed most about Sara was being able to talk out what was bothering him. “Kevin Blake is pushing me to make a statement today. He wants to calm fears. Part of me thinks he’s right. Another part of me thinks that we’re missing something. Then I ask myself, ‘What could that something be?’ There’s no physical evidence that asks a question that an investigation can answer.”
“I doubt the girl will be able to help,” Sara said. “Even if she survives the surgery, even if she’s able to communicate, post-traumatic amnesia will probably render her useless as a witness.”
“I’m going to talk to Leslie Truong. She’s the one who found Caterino. Maybe she remembered something.”
“Maybe.”
Jeffrey studied Sara’s face. She looked like she had more to say. “What is it?”
“We’re just talking here, right?”
“Right.”
Sara tapped her pen against the desk like a metronome. “You should ask for a pelvic exam.”
“You think she was raped?” Jeffrey was puzzled by the leap. “We’re talking about a good kid here. You saw how she was dressed. She wasn’t even wearing make-up. She’d spent the entire night before at the library. She’s not the kind of party girl you’d expect to get assaulted.”
The pen had stopped tapping. “Are you telling me there’s such a thing as a rape-able woman?”
“No, that’s crazy.” She was purposefully misunderstanding him. “I’m saying look at the evidence. Caterino wasn’t bound. She wasn’t showing signs of bruising. Her clothes were still on. Nothing looked disturbed. It was broad daylight in the woods about two hundred yards from a packed street.”
“And she was at the library last night instead of a bar. And she wasn’t dressed like she was asking for it.”