Waking Rose: A Fairy Tale Retold (39 page)

“Why study philosophy? Or literature? Or even go to a liberal arts college?” Alex asked. “You figure it out.”

Fish’s investigation slowed down as classes began in earnest and he found other things pressing around him besides tracking down the three medical personnel Rose had interviewed.

The nursing home doctor she had talked to answered all of Fish’s questions but couldn’t tell him very much. And after what seemed like a dozen phone calls, the Indian doctor whom Rose had interviewed returned from his winter vacation, and Fish interviewed him. For something that had taken so long to accomplish, the interview yielded disappointingly little. He, like the nursing home doctor, was new to the area, and didn’t know anything about Daniel Brier or the anonymous nurse. However, he did agree somewhat cautiously with Dr. Murray’s assessment of Robert Graves Memorial Hospital.

“I have heard rumors,” he said in the end. “And that is all I can say.”

 “Rumors about what?” Fish asked patiently.

“That is all I prefer to say,” the doctor repeated.

And the last doctor, Sister Genevieve, was away in Rome for some reason. Fish waited for her to return and focused on his studies. But he still saw Rose’s friends every Friday.

Donna returned to Mercy College this semester, and Fish started to find it impossible to talk to Kateri without finding Donna in her company. The tall blond girl still was uncomfortable around him, as he was around her. She was more reserved than she had been in the past, not pushing herself forward. Mostly, she worked diligently at her studies and helping Kateri in her activism work. Kateri was now the newly-elected president of the campus Human Rights group, but she continued to research the question of the mysterious nurse informant when she had a chance.

The first Saturday that started to feel faintly like spring, despite the snow that was still on the ground, Kateri called Fish on his cell phone around five o’clock.

“We found something,” she said, and Fish could feel the excitement in her voice.

He cradled his cell phone. “Where are you?”

“I just got back from the library. I’m in my room.”

“Then come over and tell me about it. I’m over at Sacra Cor. I was on my way out to visit Rose.” He had been sitting in the courtyard on the rock, talking with A.J. and Paul.

“You want to make an extra stop?”

“Sure. Where to?”

 “To visit the children of the late Tennille LeBlanc? I got her son on the phone this morning, and he agreed to talk to me.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Her son still lives at her original home. Her daughter lives next door.”

“I’d be more than happy to come along.”

“Then come and pick me up.”

Fish said goodbye to the guys, who were too busy that day to go visit Rose, and drove over to Kateri’s dorm. He found Kateri and Donna sitting outside on the edge of the raised flower bed outside the dorm. When he drove up, Donna got up quickly and stood aside, but Kateri came forward, her hair almost twitching with her energy.

She swung into the front seat. “I got the directions,” she said.

“Donna, are you coming?” Fish inquired, looking at the blond girl.

She looked away and shook her head. “I have to go study,” she said, and turned away, red-faced. It was obvious she still wasn’t comfortable around him, but Fish didn’t particularly mind. He didn’t enjoy being with her either.

“Donna actually found the information,” Kateri told him, spreading out a folded photocopy on her lap. “She’s been working hard at this.”

I can understand why,
Fish thought. Either a desire to redeem herself, or a desire to throw suspicion away from herself. Most likely, a mixture of both.

As they were driving, Kateri showed Fish a copied photograph of Tennille LeBlanc. A middle-aged black woman with an agreeable face. “This article was written when she was honored for being the first black nurse to head up the emergency room at Graves Memorial Hospital.”

“Interesting,” Fish murmured.

Kateri directed him to a neighborhood in the center of Meyerstown, where the houses were tiny but well-kept, with fenced-in yards creatively landscaped. Not a wealthy neighborhood, but a good one.

Mark Leblanc met them at the door of the small frame house and welcomed them into the living room, where he introduced them to his sister, Frances. Both of them were in their fifties. They showed Fish and Kateri pictures of their mother, and were quite willing to reminisce about her.

Both of them knew that their mother had begun to have difficulties with her job at the hospital. They recalled some strange goings-on. The daughter, Frances, said, “One night, she came home from work looking real bad. I asked her what was wrong, and she said a bum had been hit by a truck and brought into the emergency room. She was starting to take care of him and got called away. When she came back, she found he had been pronounced dead and a surgeon was removing his vital organs for the hospital organ bank. She said she was sure he couldn’t have died in that quick a time, and was just sick at heart.”

“Do you think there’s any chance she would have tried to speak to a reporter about what she saw?” Fish asked.

The progeny of the deceased nurse looked at each other dubiously. “Only if she could do it anonymously,” her son predicted. “She wouldn’t have done it if her name was going to be in the paper. She was shy, Mom was. When the local chapter of the NAACP honored her, she didn’t want to even go to the ceremony—she just couldn’t stand being noticed. But she was real smart. When she died, at her funeral, other nurses came up and told us how smart she was on the job, and how sharp. ‘Knew as much as most of the doctors,’ one of them said.”

“Do you know if she worked with any particular doctors?” Kateri asked.

“I think most of the time she was in the emergency room. She moved around quite a bit,” Mark said. “For a long time she was head of the emergency room staff.”

“Yes, for a long time, till Dr. Prosser was made director and demoted her,” Frances said, a little sourly. “I think Mom was too old-fashioned for her.”

“We keep on hearing the phrase—‘abuse of patients’ regarding what your mother told Rose’s dad,” Fish said. “Any ideas on what that means?”

Mark looked a bit apprehensive. “I’m not too sure, but I have a feeling Mom thought they were using patients for their organ banks—or maybe, something worse. Like, to sell.”

“They were selling organs?” Kateri asked.

“I think so. I just overheard her talking with dad one night, and she was saying something like, ‘It’s all about the money.’ And that only makes sense if the doctors were selling the organs. It’s against the law to sell organs, you know. People have to donate them.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Kateri said, and shivered.

“But that’s all we know,” Mark said. “Suspicions, nothing more. I guess I’m not ready to make an accusation against the hospital or anything.” 

Fish decided to change the subject. “Before I forget, do you recognize this phone number?”  He wrote out the phone number Kateri had found on the piece of paper in the barn.

“Oh sure,” Mark said. “That’s our old number, before they switched the area codes around. Dad had that phone number until he died last year.”

Kateri and Fish both nodded. “Thanks very much for your time,” Fish said courteously.

“Well, that was a match!” Kateri said, raising an eyebrow as they got in the car.

“Certainly was,” Fish said. “Unless Dan Brier was interviewing her for some other reason, I bet she was our informant nurse.”

“Dying unexpectedly—and conveniently—in a car accident fifteen years ago,” Kateri pointed out.

“I wonder though,” Fish said abruptly. “Dan couldn’t get the interviews published. Could it be because Tennille might have been a ‘hostile witness?’  In other words, she was mad with Dr. Prosser about being demoted, and set out to slander the hospital, using a young green reporter to do her work for her?”

“I don’t think so,” Kateri objected.

“But the fact is, the story was never published,” Fish said. “Maybe her information was tainted by her prejudice against her new boss, and the editor picked that up.” 

Kateri sniffed. “If anyone was prejudiced, it was probably the editor,” she said, a little bitterly. “There’s still a lot of that around this town.”

It was at times like these that Fish remembered that Kateri was Vietnamese, and deferred to her knowledge of prejudice.

 “Besides, the story Frances remembered about the bum having his organs harvested doesn’t sound like something vindictive to me. It sounds sick,” Kateri said. “There’s something seriously wrong at that hospital.”

“But maybe she misdiagnosed him. Maybe he actually was in more critical condition than she thought, and he just died naturally and wanted to have his organs donated. That happens too.”

“But why would the hospital send someone to threaten Dan Brier at his daughter’s christening party if the story he was writing wasn’t truthful?” Kateri asked.

“Slander can be damaging. They said that Dan couldn’t expect to get optimum medical health care if it was published. If he had been about to write false accusations about them, they might well have been ticked off.”

“But his mom dying...”

“Might just have been a coincidence, as Jean said,” Fish said. He sighed. “I’m just playing the devil’s advocate here. What would really help is if we had the interviews themselves. Then we’d know what they were about, and whether anything in them was true. Or at least, we’d have a better idea.”

“True,” Kateri said. “But they seem to have vanished.”

“Along with Rose’s notebook of her interviews, and Rose’s ability to serve as a legal witness,” Fish said dryly. “It’s still suspicious, I grant you. Threats made to Daniel Brier, Tennille LeBlanc dying, Grandma Brier dying, Rose getting nearly killed—I suppose we do have a trail of corpses, assuming they’re all related somehow.”

“Rose isn’t a corpse yet, thank God,” Kateri said.

With that idea in his mind, Fish drove them out to Graceton Hall as it was nearing seven o’clock. To their surprise, they found Paul and Alex there.

“We just came out for a visit,” Alex said. “I had to run to the mall.”  He was sitting next to Rose, who lay sleeping peacefully, as usual. Paul was out in the hallway, talking to Dr. Murray about some kind of drug research.

“We had some interesting conversations,” Kateri said to him quietly. “Really?” Alex dropped his voice. “With whom?”

Fish related the substance of their visits with the children of Tennille Leblanc. Alex shook his head.

“Fishier and fishier,” he said. “You think this is evidence enough, Ben?”

Fish shrugged. “There are still missing links. Even if Dr. Prosser was responsible for getting rid of Tennille and Grandma Brier, there’s still the jump of twenty years to get to Rose.”

“Fifteen years,” Kateri reminded him.

“All right, fifteen years. Still, it’s a long time. We have no idea if Dr. Prosser knew anything about Rose’s research, and she’s not a suspect unless we can prove that.”

“And why would someone like Dr. Prosser care if someone was digging up fifteen-year-old dirt?” Alex asked quietly. “Sorry to be critical, but there it is. Unless it was a crime with no statute of limitations.”

“Like murder,” Kateri put in.

“I was just going to say that.”

 “Or unless it was documentation of something she had done that she was still doing,” Kateri said. “She could still be harvesting organs from poor patients. Maybe she’s selling them on the black market. There’s a lot of money in that, from what I understand. Some doctors will buck the penalties to keep their practices out of debt, to line their own pocket, or whatever reason.”

Fish turned to the comatose girl. “Rose, what do you think? Were you the victim of foul play, or was it an accident? Wish you could tell us.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know,” Alex said. “She might not have seen it coming.”

“No,” said Fish. “She saw it coming, beforehand. She didn’t know what would happen, but she saw it.” And he added to himself, “And I saw it, too.”

They talked for a bit more time, until a technician came by and reminded them that visiting hours were about to end.

“Where’s Paul?” Alex said, getting up. “Isn’t he back yet?”

“Haven’t seen him,” Fish said.

Alex checked his watch. “I have a proctor’s meeting in a half hour. I’m going to go find him.” He thrust his hands in his black trench coat and hurried down the hallway.

Fish waited for Kateri to finish saying goodbye to Rose and said, “Ready to go?”

“I was going to get a ride back with Alex and Paul,” Kateri said. They lingered in the hallway a moment, waiting for the two Cor guys to come back, but no one returned.

“Come on,” Fish said at last. “Let’s go find them.”

He and Kateri walked up the hallway in the direction where Paul, and then Alex, had gone. There was no sign of either in the downstairs lobby, but they caught Alex on the stairs going up.

“Where’s Paul?” they called to each other simultaneously, and Alex made a face.

 “He’s not out in the car—I already checked. He’s going to make me late for my meeting. Can I use your cell phone?”