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
