"You wanted me?" Timmie asked her supervisor.

Not in any sense of the word, she was sure. Angie had all but hissed at Timmie from the minute it had been suggested she'd make a lovely addition to her staff. Not a thing had improved in the three weeks Timmie had worked there.

"Mr. Van Adder came in today to look at William Mayfield's chart," she said, swinging a little in her seat. "Then he heard you had it."

Timmie considered the sour look on her supervisor's flushed face and decided it wasn't a good day to piss at fences.

"As a matter of fact, I do," she admitted easily. "I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything when he was here. After all, how many forty-four-year-olds die of the flu, ya know?"

Angie squinted as if trying to assess Timmie's hidden agenda. "And all that noise about the coroner?"

Since Timmie had just remembered that Tucker was the coroner's first name, she figured it would be unwise to do anything but keep smiling. "You mean about the fact that I couldn't understand why he didn't question a death like that?" she asked. Van Adder darkened noticeably, and Timmie said agreeably, "Aw, heck, what do I know?"

So she wasn't immune to temptation. Besides, she wanted to know why Mr. Van Adder had shown up at the hospital for the chart of somebody he'd turfed off his jurisdiction like a fourth-down football.

Van Adder glared. "You're Joe's daughter?"

She smiled evenly. "Yes, sir."

One of the backroom boys, she diagnosed. The late-nighters, who always had some town function or benevolent meeting as a cover for the hours spent in smoky, beer-fogged rooms.

His scowl deepened. "I'm Tucker Van Adder."

Timmie nodded. "Yes, sir, I know."

He shook his head. "And you think you can teach me my job, little girl? That right?"

Timmie came so close to telling him off her tongue bled. This guy was an asshole. He was also a local power broker. Not to mention, evidently, close personal friends with her easily threatened supervisor.

Timmie was outspoken. She wasn't an idiot. "I was just a little perplexed, sir. It seemed so unusual."

"Find anything?" Van Adder asked with no little sarcasm.

Considering the fact that she hadn't even cracked the chart, Timmie figured she could be pretty honest. "Not a thing."

"Well, give it to me," Angie demanded. "You don't have any right to it. And Mr. Van Adder wants to review it."

"It's in my locker," Timmie lied blithely. "If I can finish my patient, I'll bring it right out to you."

"Give the patient to somebody else. And clean up all those flowers. I don't think they're funny, either."

"Okay."

And then, before she got into real trouble, she walked out.

* * *

Timmie got back to the hall and did a quick check on her patients, who were in various stages of the ER holding pattern. Mrs. Winterborn was waiting to go to X ray, the cheerleaders were still in X ray, and the man with the flu was getting IVs. Which meant Timmie had ten minutes to sneak off with Billy's chart.

She didn't go far, just the empty trauma room, where she knew nobody'd bother her. She scanned the chart once, quickly, then reread every lab result, every path report, every X-ray finding as carefully as she could, looking for some kind of anomaly that would account for what had happened.

What she found was nothing.

No arrhythmias, no toxic levels of anything. No liver failure, no heart failure, no kidney disease. Out-of-whack electrolytes, but nothing that wouldn't be expected from somebody with the two-bucket flu. Nothing, certainly, that should have killed a healthy man that fast.

It should have made her feel better. She hadn't screwed up, at least not in something obvious. Instead, it made her feel more unsettled. Especially considering the fact that the coroner was sitting in Angie's office waiting for that very chart to close it out once and for all.

"Help!... Help... He—"

Timmie lifted her head at the change in that old voice.

"Fuck! Call a code!"

She left the chart on the table and ran. Barb's voice she couldn't mistake anywhere.

"Code blue, emergency room three. Code blue, emergency room three."

"Do something!" the sisters were screaming as Timmie slammed into the room to find Mrs. Winterborn frozen in position with that last quavering "help" stuck halfway down her throat, her eyes bugged, her skin mottling. Barb was at the cart cranking up the defibrillator, and footsteps and equipment already thundered through the halls. And all Timmie could do was stand flat-footed in the middle of the room wondering just how she could maneuver those old ladies out so she could screw up a code.

"Mother! Oh, God, save her!"

"Are you sure?" Timmie asked, even knowing the answer.

Barb turned with paddles in her hands. "Do you spawn disaster?" she demanded.

"Do something!" the sisters screamed, now harmonizing like bad opera.

Shit, Timmie thought to herself. Shit and double shit and triple shit. "Don't let Mr. Van Adder leave!" she yelled out to the desk and ran for an airway.

* * *

They didn't need Mr. Van Adder after all. Gomers never die, the old hospital adage went. And since Mrs. Winterborn's picture would have been beside the term "gomer" in a medical dictionary, neither did she. She survived her fifteenth cardiac arrest to be hooked up to the latest machinery in the unit where her daughters could happily hover, and Timmie handed over Billy's chart, worked the rest of her shift in a funk, and walked home.

The house looked quiet from the outside. Lights spilled like warm milk over the carefully tended lawn, and trees nodded in a small breeze. Inviting. Comforting. Peaceful.

Maybe in some other house. Timmie looked up at hers and faltered to a halt at the edge of her yard. She damn near turned around and went back and volunteered for another shift, even knowing that Meghan waited for her.

As predictably as drunks on New Year's, the depression smacked into her like a high wall at sixty. A lot of good escaping does, she thought, just staring. Just wishing the place into atoms and herself and Meghan back on the beach at high tide. Her mother had been right after all. Whatever you're escaping just waits for you in the dark. Well, it was dark, and it was waiting for her.

Finally dredging up the energy, Timmie pulled out her keys and walked on up to the porch, her shoes squidging on the cement and the trees rustling overhead. She heard Jack Buck's voice drift out from the back as she slid her key into the lock and remembered the pharmacy stop she was supposed to have made.

She could go now. Sneak back out and not be seen. Keep on walking until she got to the river and follow it south, moving on until nobody knew her. Nobody needed her. Nobody closed in on her and weighed her down and picked her apart like a leftover roast.

That made her think of Mrs. Winterborn, up in the unit bound and gagged by machinery and her daughters, and she felt guilty. So she headed in to check on things before escaping to get the prescription for Haldol, which she knew wasn't right, either.

"Hi, honey, I'm home," she called as she shoved open the front door.

The outside of her grandmother's house was picture perfect, because it had been her father's joy to work in the dirt. The inside hadn't mattered as much. Not only that, Timmie's grandmother had abhorred throwing things away, which meant that Timmie had inherited a nine-room storage facility. Newspapers, magazines, books, bank statements, catalogues. Anything and everything. In fifty years nothing had been thrown away, and it all remained to create the fire hazard of the century, teetering on unstable furniture, crammed into dusty corners, stacked to twelve-foot ceilings in places. In the five weeks she'd been home, Timmie had managed to clear a path through four of the rooms, and enough space in the living room to take a good swing with a bat at the Nerf ball hanging by a rope from the light fixture. Everything else was going to have to wait until she could afford to rent a Dumpster.