to look out for his interests. No wife. No girlfriend. No parent. No friend. Just his lawyer.
She found that incredibly sad.
It wasn’t long, however, before it became apparent that she was the only one inclined to feel compassion toward him. It had literally taken general anesthesia and a walloping dose of narcotic to end his insistence about needing to make his call. And while use of a phone no longer seemed to be a problem, Alex had the distinct impression when she left another emergency surgery the next morning that at least one member of the hospital administration and part of its staff would love to have him re-anesthetized.
Or, maybe, it was euthanized.
Chapter Two
“I’d appreciate it enormously if you’d see him and get back to me as soon as you can, Doctor. He’s not cooperating with me and I’ve been getting calls all morning from reporters and wire services wanting to know his condition and what he’s doing in Honeygrove. I simply can’t release the statement he gave me,” Mary Driscoll, the dedicated assistant to the hospital’s administrator, implored Alex over the top of her silver-rimmed half glasses.
Dressed in a dove-gray business suit with slashes of black that somehow managed to match her bobbed hair, Mary looked perfectly coordinated, as always, and enormously capable of handling the myriad crises she intercepted for her boss. Alex knew the administrator, Ryan Malone, personally. The dashing and diplomatic man who’d gone out of his way to make her feel welcome at Memorial had just married one of her friends. And she knew he trusted Mary’s judgment implicitly.
If Mary was finding Chase Harrington difficult, Alex thought uneasily, then he was definitely presenting a challenge.
“What did he tell you to say?” she asked, her voice low so it wouldn’t carry beyond the corner of the hallway Mary had cornered her in.
“He told me to say nothing about him other than that he’s in excellent condition following a minor accident.”
“Excellent?” Alex repeated, stifling the urge to laugh. “I don’t think so.”
“My point exactly.”
“I wouldn’t call it a minor accident, either.”
Looking vindicated, Mary murmured, “Thank you, Doctor. I tried to tell him that it’s hospital policy to issue the truth about a patient’s condition, even if it’s just a statement like ‘guarded’ or ‘stable.’ Or we could go with ‘no comment.’ His response was that rules are bent all the time. That was when I offered to let him discuss the matter with Mr. Malone,” she continued, as Alex’s eyebrows arched, “but he informed me that he’d already given me his statement, and that the hospital administrator was the last person he wanted to see. He doesn’t want anyone in his room other than necessary medical staff.”
The murmur of voices drifted toward them when the wide doors of the surgical department swung open. Stepping back so the gowned attendants could bring out a patient on a gurney, Alex could practically feel the weight Ryan’s assistant carried shift to her own shoulders. It was something in the woman’s eyes. The encroaching relief, probably.
“If that’s what he wants, we’ll do our best to maintain his privacy,” Mary said confidently. “I just need something I can give the press. You’ll call me after you’ve seen him to give me his official condition?”
Alex had been on her way to the med-surg floor to do her rounds when Mary had intercepted her. Mentioning that, she then assured her she’d call as soon as she could and started down the beige-walled hall.
She hadn’t made it a dozen steps when Mary paused at the stairwell door.
“I almost forgot,” she began, looking apologetic now. “He asked for a fax machine. A plain-paper one. Not the kind with thermal paper. He said he doesn’t like fighting the curling sheets. Anyway,” she continued, having dispensed with the details, “I told him I’d have to defer to you on whether or not he could have one. Since we have no specific policy regarding office equipment in patients’ rooms, I believe that decision would be entirely up to the physician.”
Alex thought the woman looked entirely too cheerful as she opened the door and disappeared. But then, she’d just unburdened herself of any further dealings with the man Alex was now on her way to see.
The med-surg unit was on the opposite side of the floor from the surgical suites. Working her way through the labyrinth of halls with her lab coat thrown on over her scrubs, Alex could hear the whine of a saw grow louder the closer she came to her destination.
A small crew was framing a doorway near the third-floor elevators, presumably to lead to the roof garden on the new wing presently under construction. The noise was awful but unavoidable, and undoubtedly contributed to the agitation of the nurse who bore down on her the moment she stepped through the unit’s doors.
Everyone knew Kay Applewhite. And everyone knew the irascible nurse hated disruption. When she was on duty, she ran the floor as tightly as any sea captain ever ran a ship, and she didn’t tolerate anything that upset hospital routine or her patients. Despite her grandmotherly appearance, she was a stickler for schedules, did everything by the book and had little compassion for whiners, slackers or malcontents. With her family grown and gone, her work was her life and she didn’t hesitate to let everyone know that forty years of nursing had taught her that those who helped themselves, providing they were capable, healed far faster than those who were coddled.
The nurses called her General Sherman behind her back.
She took it as a compliment.
Figuring she was about to get a reminder to shut out the noise, Alex leaned against the heavy door to get it to close faster while Kay, her gunmetal-gray curls permed too tightly to move and elbows pumping, kept coming down the wide, door-lined hall. Below the cuffs of her white scrub pants, her orthopedic shoes squeaked like a pack of chattering mice.
“I’m so glad you’re here, Dr. Larson.” Lowering her voice when she reached Alex, she turned with a squeak to accompany her to the nurses’ station. “I need to talk to you about the compound femur that came through Emergency last night,” she muttered, referring to the patient by injury the way staff often did. “But before I forget, Mr. Malone’s assistant has been looking for you. She needs to talk to you about him, too. That woman’s the epitome of patience and tact,” Kay said, speaking of Mary Driscoll, “but when she came out of his room, I could tell he even has her exasperated.”
“We’ve already spoken.” Looking as unruffled as she sounded, Alex stopped at the nurses’ station with its computers and banks of files. “What kind of trouble is he giving you?” she asked, watching the short, stout woman slip behind the long white counter and hand over a chart.
“Beside the fact that he’s demanding and uncooperative,” the woman said, her tone as flat as the metal cover of the chart Alex had just opened, “he’s now refusing his pain medication. He was due for it over an hour ago.”
Alex’s head came up.
“He says he doesn’t want anything but aspirin,” Kay continued, seeming gratified by Alex’s swift frown. “We tried to explain that he needs something stronger, and that even if we wanted, we can’t give him anything his doctor hasn’t ordered.” Her expression pruned. “He also wants some financial newpaper I’ve never heard of and a fax machine for
