She punched in a code on an electronic lock and let them into a small kitchen. Within minutes he had a styrofoam cup filled to the brim with steaming black sludge – what his residents would have called a real stomach-stripper. Not even a triple milk and double sugar helped tame it any. He took a sip to be polite, trying hard not to wince.

“I want you to know Bessie was fine when I went off duty that night,” she said, pouring a coffee for herself.

“Okay,” he said, indicating with a shrug she should elaborate as they continued down the corridor.

“It doesn’t strike you as odd? The newspaper article confirms that Kelly’s remains are found, and within twenty-four hours, Bessie is in a coma.”

“Now wait a minute. Surely you’re not insinuating-”

“I don’t like coincidences!” She ran a hand over the stubble on her scalp. “Especially convenient ones.”

Earl didn’t like coincidences either. Most doctors didn’t. But he’d also an ingrained aversion to melodrama. “If you’re suggesting what I think, isn’t it a little over the top?” He’d lowered his voice, passing a couple of nurses who seemed to have stopped what they were doing and grown very quiet. “Could we perhaps have this conversation where it’s a little more private?”

Tanya’s drawn face relaxed into a smile. “Of course. Sorry.” She turned her attention to the gray, loose-skinned inhabitants who wandered the place like ghosts, greeting them by their first names as she made her way along the corridor.

An old lady, drooped over in a wheelchair and mumbling to herself, lifted her head and responded, “Morning, Tanya.” A food-spattered hospital gown lay draped over her like a drop cloth.

An elderly man wearing oversize trousers held up by red suspenders leaned against the wall, his hands resting on the head of his cane. He gazed blankly at her, clearly not recognizing who she was, or perhaps it was the sound of his own name he found perplexing.

All along the hallway wrinkled features brightened into wispy, almost hopeful smiles, as if the sound of someone calling them had penetrated the gray limbo where they lived and ignited the flicker of a shared dream. At last someone they knew had come here and would take them home, back to where they could remember.

Heartbreaking as this was to witness, Earl liked Tanya’s tenderness toward her patients. She could engage the remnants of whoever they once were with a warm hello or bestow a moment of dignity on them simply by addressing them with respect. Too many doctors and nurses burned out in what the cynical called “exit medicine.”

“As to what I’m suggesting,” she whispered, once they reached a section that was free of her coworkers, “I know it sounds off the wall, but I’m just so upset. She was my patient for the last three months, and I really grew to like her. We don’t get many who can actually make it out of here, and she had a chance to end her days in style, compared to the dead ends that await these other lonely souls. Around here, that’s like a little miracle, and I got caught up in it.” She turned and stared him right in the eye, her intensity startling him. “So let’s just say I want to make sure you consider all the possibilities before you conclude what happened to her.”

Strange woman. Intense, even a touch paranoid perhaps, but sincere. Maybe she thought she’d missed a subtle clinical sign or dismissed something Bessie McDonald had said that might have warned of another stroke being imminent. Sometimes grasping at impossible scenarios was easier than admitting a mistake, especially a near-lethal one. “You’re positive Mrs. McDonald was okay? The harbingers of throwing off emboli can be very subtle, as I’m sure you know – a little shadow on the visual field, transient numbness or weakness in a limb-”

“She would have told me. She was a physician, a GP.”

The news took Earl by surprise. “Nothing on her chart indicated she was a doctor.”

“She wouldn’t allow it, nor us calling her doctor.”

“But why?” Any patients he’d ever had who were physicians usually trumpeted the fact to everyone and anyone who came near them, as if it was a Visa or MasterCard for special treatment.

“ ‘Makes people nervous, and that’s why things always go wrong when an MD is the patient,’ she used to say.”

Earl shook his head. He felt the same way, but had never prevented his profession from being stated in a medical file.

“She was so set on getting to her son’s,” Tanya continued, “she never would have ignored any warning symptoms.”

Earl nevertheless resisted joining her flight of fancy. “There also might not have been any warning symptoms.”

“I know.”

“And she had a lot of risk factors. Another stroke isn’t improbable.”

“I know that, too.”

“So why the suspicions?”

She quickly glanced around. A few steps away a woman stood with a blank, dark-eyed stare on her face and her gray hair in wild disarray.

But no staff were in sight.

“Because I think Chaz Braden is a slimeball who’s capable of anything,” Tanya said, and continued down the corridor.

Earl hurried after her. “Care to elaborate?”

“Not really. If I get caught bad-mouthing the bastard, I’ll be out on my ass.”

“Then will you answer some specific questions by ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”

“Depends on the question.”

“Did Mrs. McDonald indicate she knew anything about Kelly McShane’s death?”

“No.”

“Did she insinuate anything incriminating about Chaz Braden?”

“No.”

“Did she ever express having any fear of him?”

“No.”

“Did she indicate to you she had anything at all to tell about her admission under Chaz Braden in ‘seventy-four?”

Tanya spun about to face him again. “Yes. She said she didn’t like the man, and wanted to talk about it, but I was too busy at the time. And I repeat, when I left her that last night she was fine.”

Sounded as if Tanya did feel a tad guilty. “So you didn’t listen to an old lady go on about a former doctor she’d disliked twenty-seven years ago – not exactly a cardinal sin.”

“If I had taken the time-”

“She still would have had her stroke. I don’t see why you’re so quick to suspect foul play.”

Her shoulders rose, a sign that he had irritated her. She stopped at a closed door and gestured that he should enter. “See Bessie McDonald for yourself, Dr. Garnet,” she said through clenched teeth. “Then let’s talk about what you think happened.”

They walked in on an elderly woman laid out still as a corpse in a hospital gown. An orange tube stuck out of her mouth from which intermittent gurgling noises came as her chest rose and fell. An IV tube ran from a clear bag of fluid into her left arm. A transparent catheter protruded from between her legs and carried urine to a bag strapped on the railing at the side of the bed. A multiscreened monitor flashed continuous readings of her vitals.

At a glance Earl took in that she was breathing on her own, had been receiving sufficient hydration to keep her kidneys functioning, possessed a normal heart rate, rhythm, and blood pressure, and, according to the information relayed from a clip on her finger, just about perfect oxygen levels in her blood.

So why wasn’t she sitting up and waving at him?

A young man in a white coat looked over from where he’d been methodically tapping at her knees with a reflex hammer. He had bushy red hair, and his name tag read DR. P. ROY. When Tanya made the introductions, he practically clicked his heels.

Earl got down to business. “So what happened?”

“The night staff found her unresponsive on the floor at the entrance to her room around 4:00 A.M.,” Dr. P. Roy began. “They immediately called me.”

“She was seizing when you found her?”

“No, but there was a lot of blood in her mouth and tooth marks on her lips and tongue. Grand mal was obvious.”

“Vitals?”

“As you see now.”