At exactly 3:10, the door slammed and hard-soled footsteps clattered across the floor. Timmie and Meghan met in the middle like those freight trains in the infamous math problem. And Timmie did it looking much saner than she felt.

"Hiya, punkin, how goes it?"

"Look who I found outside!" Meghan crowed, swinging around in Timmie's arms like a carnival ride.

"Not Renfield again," Timmie begged. "I just put him back upstairs."

Meghan slid out of Timmie's reach. "You let Renfield out?"

Timmie tousled the dark head of hair and thought again how much she wanted her little girl to belong to her. "Funny, that's the very same question I was going to ask you. I don't think I'm the person he always talks into breaking him out of stir."

Meghan straightened with outrage. "I would never let Renfield out. He might get lost or run over or eaten by a cat!"

"I did it," Cindy announced from the hallway. "Disguised him as a tree frog and bribed the guards to look the other way."

Meghan giggled. Timmie wondered if Murphy knew how lucky he was that he'd missed this. "Hi, Cindy. How's it going?"

"You didn't answer my calls," she said, clacking across the hardwood in the new red-leather cowboy boots she sported with her studded denim dress. "I thought something was wrong."

"I just got home myself. Anybody for milk and cookies?"

Meghan pulled quite a face. "Really, Mom. That's so retro."

"Retro?" Timmie echoed. "Where the heck did you learn that?"

"Billy Peebucket."

Timmie turned her little troop for the kitchen. "That's Parbagget, young lady... ooh, Cindy, eau de Betadine. You working today?"

Cindy sniffed her armpits, which made Meghan giggle all over again. "Half a shift. I didn't know I carried it home."

"My mom has the best nose in the West," Meghan boasted.

"How was it?" Timmie asked because she didn't want to talk about boyfriends, which was what Cindy had come to talk about.

"Biker heaven. I think I'm in love."

"Which means, I guess, that you're over your loss."

Cindy's grin was fierce. "You don't want Meghan to hear what I think of that. There's some hot gossip at the hospital, by the way. Word's going around they're trying to hush up some patients getting intentionally stiffed." She snorted unkindly. "Like with the doctors we have they'd need any help."

Timmie opened the refrigerator and pulled out sodas instead of milk and apples instead of cookies. "Who says?" she asked, trying hard to be nonchalant.

"Ellen, I think. She heard it over in Restcrest. They're all on full alert over there. Seems to me, somebody should man the ICUs first. You ever worked with some of those Nazis up there? They'd drop you with a look."

"Why Restcrest?" Timmie asked as she passed out the snacks. "Have you seen anything up there to make you suspicious?"

"You want the truth?" she asked. "Mary Jane. She creeps me to the max, and she's always around when something happens."

"It's her job to be around when something happens."

"I don't know," she said with a shrug. "Ellen said to tell you, though, that she thinks your dad's safe. She doesn't think his unit's involved."

"I'm heading over to see him now. Might not be a bad idea to make sure. Want to go along to see Grandda, Megs?"

Meghan didn't exactly stop in her tracks. She did dip her head and clutch her apple with white-knuckled hands, though.

"I'll be happy to stay with her," Cindy offered.

Meghan said not a word. Timmie got the message, though. Meghan did not like Restcrest. Not for her grandda.

"That would be fine," Timmie allowed. "I'll pay you in pizzas. You call, I'll buy."

The offer was met with enthusiasm, and Timmie was caught between the dread of visiting Restcrest and staying home to hear about the boyfriend Cindy had decided to stop mourning.

"I should tell you who he is," she said, as if Timmie had asked, which made Timmie decide. Restcrest it was.

* * *

It could have been worse. By the time Timmie arrived, dinner was over and Joe was washed and clean and smiling from a beanbag chair in the main room. Timmie knew the chair kept him from wandering off, but she couldn't imagine trying to get him out of the thing.

"Hello, Da," she greeted him, crouched down on her haunches.

He blinked at her.

"He's been kind of quiet today," one of the nurses admitted. "We've been watching him for a fever or a urinary tract infection, but we haven't caught anything yet."

Timmie did her own laying on of hands and came away with the feel of cool, papery skin. Her father blinked again and turned away. Timmie fought that stupid sense of abandonment that hit every time he failed to recognize her and climbed back to her feet.

"No recitations?" she asked. "No obscene army tunes?"

The nurse, another young soul named Tracy with tidy brown hair and small hands, actually patted Joe on the head. "Not even a limerick. He may just be a little tired. He's still trying to settle in."

"I understand."

Timmie found herself looking off toward the fifth wing, where Mrs. Worthmueller waited in silence for that last graduation party. She needed to check on her. Make sure nobody was shoving something lethal into her IVs. Even so, Timmie curled up on the floor next to her father for a requisite twenty minutes or so, all the while trading aimless chatter with other residents who wandered through.

It wasn't until she got ready to move that she realized she'd wrapped her arm around her father's leg, or that he'd rested a hand on her head. The customary position they'd assumed all those years ago when he'd ruled story hour at the Brentwood Library up in St. Louis.

Timmie could still call up the sensual memory of it: the scents of lemon wax and binding glue and paper; the hush of reverent voices and careful feet; the tactile joy of those first books her father had placed in her hands. It had been a magical place, set to the music of her father's voice and the laughter of the children he'd enchanted on Wednesday afternoons. And Timmie had spent every one curled up at his feet like a faithful pet waiting her turn.

Only it had never been her turn.

"Going already?" the nurse asked when Timmie lurched up.

Timmie started. Why had she told Murphy? What good had it done? Now he was confused and she was ashamed and her father was still her father. And she had some investigating to do.

"Uh, no," she said, straightening her clothes. "I thought I'd go check on a couple of folks I took care of the other night."

The nurse looked surprised, then relieved. "Oh, that's right. Mary Jane told me. You got pulled from ER, didn't you?"

"Yeah. I'm amazed, but I kinda got attached, ya know?"

The nurse patted the top of Joe's head again as if he were a Labrador, which made Timmie want to tell her to stop. "I know. I can't imagine doing anything else."

Timmie couldn't quite take her gaze off her father, whose eyes were closed to the touch of the nurse's hand. "I wish I had your talent."

She didn't mind the bald lie so much when Tracy smiled. Nurses like Tracy were needed. Nurses who walked that slow walk and didn't mind repeating an action a thousand times a day because the person they were working with forgot. Nurses who didn't have to carry the baggage of an imperfect life for the patients they liked. But Timmie wasn't that kind of nurse, so she smiled, checked her father a last time to find his eyes still closed, and headed off the hall.