A Man to Die For Page 3

  "Let me talk to the medical examiner first," she said, knowing that he was wrong. Knowing that it didn't make any difference. "Then I'll be in."

  He didn't even answer. He just nodded and headed toward Mrs. VanCleve's room, stopping on the way to get close to a couple of the other women in the hall. Casey took several slow breaths. Then she picked up line one and greeted the medical examiner.

  * * *

  Casey had never heard anyone whine and coo at the same time. Somehow, that was exactly what Mrs. VanCleve was doing when Casey walked back into her room. Hunsacker was holding the woman's hand, assuring her that the pelvic was perfectly necessary, and the woman was batting her eyes at him like Scarlet O'Hara while complaining that she was just too sore for a pelvic. They were so uncomfortable—even, unfortunately, when Dr. Hunsacker did them.

  Casey busied herself setting up for the exam. Her mind was, in truth, still with all her other chores more than this one, and most particularly with Billie, who, it seemed, would die unmourned. No relatives, no close friends to notify. The hospital had been her life. A frequent target of Billie's ire, Casey suddenly wanted to go in and apologize to her for having to die alone.

  Too late now, she wanted to talk to her, to ask how she'd come to be like she was. She wanted to ward that wasted, bitter ghost away from her, because that lonely, unmourned body looked too suddenly like her own, and she wasn't sure she could bear it.

  "Okay, now, Vivian," Dr. Hunsacker crooned, speculum in hand. "This will only take a few minutes."

  Casey wasn't really paying attention. She stood behind Hunsacker and to his right, directing the light and thinking of the pile of paperwork that still waited for her before she could redirect Mr. Ricks. Then Mrs. VanCleve yelped.

  "Come on now, Vivian," Hunsacker was saying, his tone reminiscent of a father chastising a recalcitrant child. "Be a big girl. That doesn't hurt."

  Casey's attention was caught. Not just by his words, or the curt tone of voice, but his actions. Maybe it was her imagination. Maybe she just wanted to find fault with him, but he sure did seem to have a rough hand at the old check and see. The next time Mrs. VanCleve protested, Casey almost did, too.

  Asshole OBs. Sometimes they had the sensitivity of gorillas. Casey wanted to see somebody do a rectal on him with that much finesse and see him be a big boy.

  "Now, stop it and hold still, Vivian." For a minute there, he even looked angry. Casey could only see the corner of his jaw from where she stood, but it clenched tight. A tendon popped up along his neck, and his fingers seemed to dig a little too deep as they palpated.

  Vivian held still. Hunsacker finished and flipped the sheet back down over her knees. "Good girl," he praised her and climbed back to his feet to head for the sink.

  When Casey saw his expression, she thought she must have been mistaken. He looked as genial as a big brother, smiling and friendly and at ease.

  "Am I all right?" Mrs. VanCleve asked in a curiously small voice.

  "Just fine," he assured her, rinsing his hands for the second time. "Nothing more than a bladder infection."

  Casey didn't say a word. She did watch, though, as Hunsacker methodically dried his hands and returned to take hold of one of Mrs. VanCleve's as he gave his instructions.

  "I want to see you in the office on Monday just to check," he said, his voice soft. "You'll be there, won't you?"

  Mrs. VanCleve was back to simpering. "Of course I will," she promised, her eyes glowing.

  Hunsacker nodded and patted and talked about the party Mrs. VanCleve was to attend, the people she knew. Casey finally lost interest and walked on back out. He followed her within a few minutes, drying his hands yet again.

  Dropping the paper towels in the waste can, he met her at the desk where her paperwork still lay in a disordered heap. "Thanks for the help, hon," he acknowledged with that same silky tone of voice.

  Casey didn't bother to sit to write on Mrs. VanCleve's chart. She just bent over the desk. Hunsacker came right up alongside her and leaned in close, as if the two shared a secret. His Dock-Sides bumped against the back of Casey's nursing shoes and he settled a hand on Casey's shoulder.

  Casey wasn't sure why she reacted the way she did. Maybe the close contact, maybe the force with which he'd conducted that pelvic. Maybe just the sense that Hunsacker never questioned Casey's attraction to him. For whatever reason, the hair stood straight up on the nape of her neck at his touch. Shying away, she walked to the other side of the desk.

  "Do you have her script so I can dismiss her?" she asked, surprised at the chill in her voice, a little confused about her sudden antipathy.

  For a moment there was an uncomfortable little island of silence in that crowded, noisy hallway. When Casey looked up at the doctor, it was to discover a curious flatness in his expression. A distance, as if he'd just disappeared, even standing right before her. He held a notebook in his right hand, but didn't even seem to notice it.

  "Dr. Hunsacker?"

  It was like hitting a switch. One minute his eyes were as animated as Billie's, the next he was smiling as if Casey were his best friend. "Sure. You know the routine, I'm sure." Picking up one of the script pads, he quickly scribbled. "What do you like on your pizzas?"

  Still trying to catch up, Casey blinked. "Huh?"

  Hunsacker ripped the prescription off the pad and handed it over, smiling and relaxed. "Mushrooms? Anchovies? I owe you a pizza for putting up with Mrs. VanCleve for me."

  "Mushrooms," she answered instinctively, wondering at the odd, niggling little feeling in her chest.

  "Casey, do you have any empty rooms?" Barbara asked in that tone of voice that relayed to everyone that Casey was goldbricking.

  "I'm dismissing twenty right now," Casey assured her, the frustration bubbling close again.

  "Thanks, hon," Hunsacker said, his attention on his notebook. He seemed to be carefully scratching out notations and adding more. A list maker. "Next time I'm here I'll ask for you especially. You've been a doll."

  Shutting the little book, he returned his attention to Casey. Flipped on the voltage and laid a hand on her arm whether she wanted it there or not. And Casey, knowing that at least four women in the room envied her, didn't like it.

  * * *

  It wasn't until the end of the shift, when the bunch of them were scattered over the nurses' lounge like shaken rag dolls, that Janice even had the chance to bring up the subject of the wonder doctor.

  "So, Casey," she said, head back against the chair, eyes closed. "Have you asked Hunsacker to bear your children yet?"

  From where she sat sprawled on the threadbare old couch in the corner, Casey couldn't even manage a shrug. She was measuring her visual acuity by trying to read the notices on the bulletin board across the room, or as they'd dubbed it, the BOHICA board, for Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. Three new forms were displayed that needed to be filled out for every surgery patient. A sign said no change-of-shift parties were allowed in the lounge. The refrigerator was for patient food, and the microwave for the doctors.

  "He sure did seem to like you," one of the other nurses admitted, pulling off her shoes to massage her toes. "Damn it."

  "I'm not sure I like him," Casey answered quietly, trying to analyze the discomfort she felt about Hunsacker's friendliness.

  For a moment she didn't notice the stunned silence around her. She was still thinking of that pelvic, those clenched fingers. That smile. All that familiarity.

  Another notice said that Libby Kelly had been replaced as head nurse on telemetry. Word was that she'd bucked one of the doctors up there and lost.

  "Are you crazy?" Barb demanded. "How many other doctors would have taken Mrs. VanCleve off your hands?"

  "How many doctors would have smelled that nice doing it?" Janice countered, taking a last, long drag from her end-of-shift cigarette and grinding it out in an ashtray on the table they'd stolen from the fourth-floor waiting room. "Why in heaven's name don't you like him?"

  When Casey
looked over to answer, it was to discover the degrees of outrage that met her words. There wasn't a sympathetic face in the room.

  "I don't know," she had to admit anyway. "I just don't know."

  Nobody agreed with her. Nobody really understood. And Casey couldn't think how to make them. She just had a hunch and a set of nervous neck hairs, and nobody in their right mind would count those as irrefutable evidence of anything. All the same, Casey couldn't shake the suspicion that Dr. Dale Hunsacker wasn't the person everybody thought he was.

  Chapter 2

  Casey didn't dwell on Dr. Hunsacker. In fact, once she got past the mushroom pizza he sent the next day, she barely thought of him in the weeks that followed. He showed up in the emergency room on occasion, but never found reason to work with Casey. The closest Casey got to him was as amused spectator to his elaborate game-playing and the general adulation that met him wherever he went.

  The whispering about him persisted, with the rumor machine inevitably gearing up. Hunsacker was handsome and he was single, and that was more than enough to stir the hospital grapevine interest, not to mention imagination.

  All except Casey's. She had enough on her plate without having to deal with anything new.

  "It was so nice of you to fit us into your busy schedule."

  Flat on her back beneath the first warm sun of the year, Casey lazily lifted a hand. "I try not to forget the little people."

  It was a Tuesday. Casey was off, and as far away from the hospital as possible. Well, as far away as she could afford at the end of her paycheck, which was her backyard five miles away.

  When she'd heard the weather forecast she'd vowed to waste her only day off this week offering obeisance to the spring sun. When she'd found out that two friends were also available on short notice, she'd decided to share her task with them.

  The sunshine was warm. Spring had returned to Webster Groves with its old Victorian homes and lush, tree-laden lawns. Fruit trees spilled petals and perfume, and bulbs exploded into bright chains of color along walks and drives. The first lawnmowers of the season droned like heavy flies. A fresh breeze rustled through the huge old oak trees that ringed the yard, and in the distance a siren that didn't need to be answered. The three women were stretched out around the pool, cool drinks in hand, romance books open, music drifting from the stereo. A day made in paradise.

  Of course, since the pool was a four-foot wader, the drinks tea, and the music rock and roll from a jam box with only one working speaker, it took a little imagination to come up with the good life. But then, if Casey hadn't had a vivid imagination, she wouldn't have been such a sharp trauma nurse. It was a gift she'd inherited from her mother.

  "I'm tellin' ya, Casey," Poppi Henderson insisted, "it's the chance of a lifetime. I really think this is the one."

  Casey didn't move. "Of course it is, Poppi." It was always the chance of a lifetime with Poppi. Casey had known her since fifth grade, and Poppi had never changed. There was always something grand and wonderful about the world, marvels just beyond our reach, mysteries to untangle for the betterment of mankind and Poppi Henderson.

  Of course, it might have made a difference that Poppi had wasted much of her misspent youth on marijuana and acid. It was bound to affect somebody's views of the world. Especially since Poppi hadn't completely moved on into maturity.

  "You weren't tripping when you came up with this idea, were you?" Evelyn Peters asked from the third lawn chair.

  Poppi didn't even bother to express denial. "Some of my best ideas come then," she said. "And I'm tellin' you, this one's a natural."

  Casey just smiled. To anyone who didn't know her, Poppi looked just like all the other Baby Boomers who strolled the sedate, shaded lanes of Webster. A pageboy blonde with big blue eyes and a taste in Laura Ashley, she looked like she'd just stepped out of a Junior League meeting. And to make matters even more fun, the Muffies and Buffies in the decidedly upscale Republican neighborhood took her diminutive as one of their own. It didn't seem to dawn on them that Poppi had metamorphosed from Pauline sometime around 1970 when names like that meant something completely different.

  Poppi never bothered to correct misconceptions. She was perfectly happy with her facade. Nobody looking at her would guess that she was still heavily into experimentation.

  "When do you get any work done?" Evelyn asked.

  "That's all relative," Poppi assured her with a languid wave of her arm from where she was sprawled in the pool.

  Taking a sip from her tea, Casey had to laugh. "Relative's the word, Poppi. I'd probably have the time to work up board-game ideas if I worked for my father, too."

  "Not just any board game," Poppi insisted. "Nirvana. The game of reincarnation. I'm tellin' you, it's the game of the nineties."

  God, Casey needed this after the last week. There was nothing like Poppi to scatter reality like a storm cloud. After eight straight days on, Casey felt battered, abused, and overwhelmed. She was getting too old to take it anymore. She was too tired, too strung out from trying to keep up, too experienced to expect relief. As predictable as spring thaw, her seasonal depression had hit.

  Most people dreaded the cold, the darkening days of winter where the primitive mind still expected death. Casey dreaded the sun. Like most emergency-room staffers, she looked to the summer and only saw the crush of numbers, the unrelieved burden of exhaustion and dread.

  Mother Mary was particularly susceptible, having situated itself at the merger of highways 270 and 44 in the county, favorite routes for summer escape, and having decided with its refurbishment to court the injured and sick everywhere with billboards and public-sponsored events. It had worked, and it now had the second busiest ER in the metropolitan area.

  The patient load was already beginning to geometrically increase. Children fell from bikes, homeowners committed suicide with a variety of lawn implements, motorcyclists steered for grease spots. Swimming pools were open for drownings and rivers for boating accidents. Heat shortened tempers and increased recklessness.

  And as much as she dreaded it, Casey couldn't think of anything else she'd rather do. Well, except for one. And thirty-two was just a little late to become a lead singer for a rock band.

  "You'd invest in me, wouldn't you, Mrs. McDonough?"

  "Of course I would, Poppi. God bless you."

  Casey hadn't even heard her mom come out into the yard. Squinting against the glare of the sun, she caught sight of her mother as she headed down the path toward the garden with her bucket and scrub brush, almost oblivious of the company only feet away.

  A small, birdlike woman, Helen McDonough walked with a stoop, dressed only in dull brown, and always wore a matching scarf over her hair. Casey had seen her in nothing else since her father had died twenty-four years earlier. She closed her eyes again, much too familiar with the sight.

  "What's your mom doing?" Evelyn whispered.

  Casey didn't bother to open her eyes. "What day is it?"

  She heard the small pause before Evelyn managed an answer. "Tuesday."

  Casey nodded. "Then it's Mary's day for a bath."

  "Mary..."

  "Around the back," Poppi offered. "The madonna in the garden."

  "Oh."

  They heard the first, tentative notes of "On This Day, O Beautiful Mother" as Casey's mother began her chore. Casey just concentrated on the gentle harmony of America and the fresh sweetness of apple blossoms from the neighbor's yard.

  "Is that why you came back here?" Evelyn asked. "Because she's getting... uh..."

  Casey had to laugh. "She's not getting anything, Ev. She's been like that as long as I can remember. She chose my dad over the convent and never forgave herself for it."

  There was another stiff silence, then another small "Oh."

  Poppi, as usual, jumped to Mrs. McDonough's defense. Poppi related to Mrs. McDonough, especially when she was stoned. "Oh, she's okay," she protested. "You just don't have any patience with her anymore, Case."

  Casey
got one eye open and leveled it on her closest friend. "And you don't have to live with the Chapel of Eternal Vigilance in your attic," she countered.

  Evelyn was even more confused. A friend from Casey's days at St. Isidore's, another hospital in the area where Casey had worked right out of training, Evelyn had never before crossed the McDonough threshold. They'd always met in neutral territory, and much less often since Casey had defected for newer pastures at Mother Mary some four years earlier.

  "The chapel—"

  "Third floor," Poppi answered. "Lots of candles and holy cards. Didn't you smell the incense when you walked in the house?"

  Evelyn lifted an eyebrow. "I thought that was you."

  Poppi offered a particularly insulted scowl, which, coming from a woman reclining in six inches of water and surrounded by Donald Duck and Goofy, lost some of its impact. "I have much better taste than that. What do you think I am, a channeler?"

  Evelyn was obviously at a loss for an answer. Casey couldn't blame her. One had to become acclimated to Poppi, kind of like cold water or weightlessness. Evelyn had met her enough times over the years to know the basics. That didn't necessarily mean she was used to them.

  To add to that, Evelyn was one of the most blatantly normal people Casey knew. An earth mother by temperament, she was a great hand-holder and commiserator. She'd also been one of the lousiest ER nurses Casey had known. ER nurses were aggressive and decisive. Evelyn was not. She was much happier lavishing support on young mothers in St. Izzy's high-tech postpartum unit.

  "You could just move," Poppi nudged. "Like you've been threatening to for the three years you've been back."

  Casey waved off the objection. "If I moved, who'd whitewash the statues?"

  It wasn't something to discuss on a warm, bright spring day. Casey had only this day off, and she didn't want to spend it on recriminations and frustration. If she wanted to do that, she could just go back to work and get paid for it.

  Pulling herself up, she swung her feet over the side of her chair and settled them into the cool tickle of the new grass. "How about if we change the subject?" she suggested abruptly, trying to ignore the tremulous voice that still drifted from the other side of the garage.