Part 15 (1/2)
”Yeah, sure!” everyone hooted.
”-I decided I'd better try to catch him. Now that cat and me, we never did get along too good, and I called till I was purple before he came out from under my car. Then I had to chase him all over the parking lot and when I finally grabbed him, he gave me such a scratch it dripped blood all the way home. But I'm a special agent for the SBI, right? And he was just a dumb old cat, right? So I did eventually throw him in the car and off we set. He stomped back and forth on the backseat and snarled at me the whole way home. Well, we get home and I pull into the driveway and there's the real old fuzzball sound asleep on the roof of my wife's car.”
Before he could tell us what he did with the feline doppelganger, a white-coated doctor appeared in the doorway. ”Mrs. Knott?” he asked. ”Mrs. Herman Knott?”
Instinctively, we fell silent and cl.u.s.tered around Nadine.
”We've confirmed the cause of your husband's condition,” he said briskly. ”It isn't his heart or a stroke.”
”Then what?” asked Nadine.
”Chronic poisoning,” said the doctor. ”Somehow or other, your husband's ingested a good deal of a.r.s.enic over the past week or so.”
CHAPTER 14.
SAFETY RULES.
”The posted or promulgated rules for the safe operation of all power equipment must be strictly followed, unless an unavoidable suspension of a rule is authorized by proper authority. The suspension must end as soon as the necessity for it has pa.s.sed.”
”a.r.s.enic?”
The word ran around the room and bounced off the ceiling.
Nadine seemed bewildered. ”Where would he get a.r.s.enic?”
The doctor flipped to Herman's admittance chart. ”His occupation is listed as an electrician. Is he also engaged in farming where he might handle insecticides or other poisonous chemicals?”
Nadine shook her head. ”Sometimes he has to crawl up under old houses where they've put out rat poison. Maybe-”
”No, that's warfarin, an anticoagulant.”
”But he's going to be all right, isn't he?” asked Annie Sue. She pushed close to her mother, as if seeking physical comfort and her big blue eyes were frightened. ”He's not going to die, is he? Is he?”
”Now hush that kind of talk,” said Nadine, but she, too, was shaken. ”Doctor?”
He shook his head. ”I wish I could give you a cut-and-dried answer, Mrs. Knott, but chronic a.r.s.enic poisoning's a tricky thing. We don't yet know how much neurological damage there is. The lack of paralysis is encouraging, but the anesthesias in his legs and extremities, the liver involvement-”
We stood numbly as all that medical terminology flowed over us. What it boiled down to was that Herman would probably recover, but it was going to be long and slow-six months or longer-and he might never recover full feeling in his fingers and feet. A wheelchair could not be ruled out.
Nor was treatment itself going to be a simple thing. Some doctors advocated doing nothing. Let the body heal itself. If a more aggressive course were taken, the antidote might be as dangerous as the a.r.s.enic itself.
Yet even as we listened, we all kept circling back to the central question: how the devil was he getting a.r.s.enic? Because on that point, the doctor was quite clear: Herman had ingested the stuff more than once in the last ten days.
The doctor finished outlining the treatment they planned to use. As he rose to go, he c.o.c.ked his head and looked around the circle of faces surrounding him. ”You live close to one another? See each other every day? Then perhaps I should check. Is everybody healthy? Any stomach cramps or nausea that won't go away? Summer flu? Dizziness, pins and needles in your fingers or toes? Numbness?”
We all shook our heads, although I saw a considering expression cross the face of Nadine's sister. Her robustly healthy body imprisoned the soul of a hypochondriac.
”Great!” He closed Herman's chart with a snap. ”Oh, one thing more, Mrs. Knott. Someone from Environmental Health will probably be in contact with Mr. Knott and you to try to trace the source of the a.r.s.enic. They'll want you to think what you two may have eaten or drunk differently, any places where he eats that you and your family don't, maybe a list of all the locations he's worked lately that might have old a.r.s.enic-based paint or wallpaper, things like that. Okay?”
The family milled around as he left, so simultaneously worried and t.i.tillated that no one else seemed to notice the looks Dwight and Terry exchanged before following the doctor from the waiting room. I slipped out, too, and hurried down the hall after them. As they rounded a corner, I heard the doctor say, ”Well, yes, I suppose there always is that possibility, Major Bryant.”
”What possibility?” I asked, halting them in their tracks.
The doctor turned and frowned, Terry immediately went into his official secrets mode, but Dwight said, ”I don't believe you've met Herman's sister. This is Judge Deborah Knott, Doctor.”
”Judge?”
”Judicial District Eleven-C,” I said. ”What possibility?”
”That your brother's poisoning was not accidental,” he answered bluntly.
”That someone poisoned Herman? On purpose?”
The three men shuffled their feet and I could have laughed if it hadn't been so outrageous.
”I almost forgot. Yeah. Her husband was treated here, wasn't he? Well, you can push that notion right out of your heads,” I said hotly. ”Nadine Knott is no Blanche Taylor Moore. Come on, Dwight! Terry? You guys have known Nadine forever. Can't you see how upset and worried she is?”
”The Reverend Moore was never my patient,” the doctor said carefully, ”but I'm told Mrs. Moore was a loving wife right up to the minute they arrested her. And they say she was real attentive to the boyfriend who did die. Brought him potato soup when he was in Baptist Hospital, even spoon fed him. Held the straw for him to sip iced tea. The nurses thought she was a real sweetie.”
”I know, I know,” I said impatiently. ”And later they found out that there was a.r.s.enic in the soup and a.r.s.enic in the tea.” I turned to Dwight and Terry. ”But this is Nadine!”
”Wives aren't the only ones who do things like that,” Terry said soothingly. ”Besides, it'll probably turn out to be a contaminated well or something at some old house that's being renovated.”
”We're just touching all the bases,” Dwight chimed in. ”Laying the groundwork for the public health guy.”
”Long as you don't forget this is Herman, for G.o.d's sake.”
The doctor had his hand on a door marked STAFF ONLY, but I asked, ”While we're laying groundwork, Doctor, can you give us any idea of when he first got the a.r.s.enic? Didn't I read somewhere that you could tell by the hair or fingernails?”
He looked amused. ”Well, yes, but the simplest way, if the patient is still alive, is just to ask him when he first started feeling rotten. Mr. Knott said he went to a party or something about ten days ago-the second of July? -and that night he experienced stomach cramps. At the time, he thought he might've eaten too many cuc.u.mber sandwiches or drunk too much lime punch.”
Cuc.u.mber sandwiches? Lime punch?
”Wasn't your swearing-in reception on the second?” asked Dwight.
We were allowed to go in and see Herman, a few of us at a time; first Nadine and her four children, then his brothers and me. He was groggy still and pasty-faced and looked so vulnerable lying there in a hospital gown that I had to go straight over and hug him.
”Now, now,” he said with a ghost of his old gruffness. ”I'm gonna be fine. You don't need to cry over me yet.”
Technically, I was no longer Herman's attorney, but neither Dwight nor Terry said anything about my being there when they came in to question Herman about Tuesday night. Nadine had insisted that he not be told about Bannerman's attack on Annie Sue until he was stronger, and she wasn't real happy that he even had to know that Bannerman had died there that night.