LITMIR.BIZ

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Her hands moved expertly over the smooth skin of the newborn, checking muscles and bones, small fingers and toes, legs, neck, spine, buttocks, head…. “Wait a minute…” She flipped the switch of a brighter light and noticed the yellow pallor of the whites of the baby’s eyes. “He appears jaundiced and—” she touched the downy hair again, carefully prodding “—there’s some swelling on the back of his head. Maybe caput succedaneum or cephalhematoma…yes, there’s a slight bleeding from the scalp, and it appears only on the right side of his head. I don’t think it’s serious. The swelling isn’t too large, but you’d better have a pediatrician look him over the minute he gets there.” She continued to examine the infant as if he were her patient, her gaze practiced and sure. “I can’t find anything else, at least not here without medical equipment. Did you get everything?”

      “Every word,” the dispatcher replied. “You’re being recorded.”

      “Good.” Chandra shone her flashlight in the baby’s eyes, and he blinked and twisted his head away from the light. “Notify the sheriff’s office that apparently the child’s been abandoned.”

      “You don’t know the mother?” the dispatcher questioned.

      Chandra shook her head, though the woman on the other end of the line couldn’t see her. “No. I have no idea whom this guy belongs to. So someone from the sheriff’s office should come out here and look through my barn again and check the woods. I called out and looked around for the mother, but I didn’t have much time. I was more concerned with the child.” She glanced to the windows and the cold night beyond. “My guess is she isn’t far off. You’ve got the address.”

      Chandra didn’t wait for a response, but hung up. She pulled a blanket from her closet and rewrapped the tiny newborn. He was beautiful, she thought, with a shock of downy black hair that stood straight off his scalp and a voice that would wake the dead. But why had he been abandoned? Had the mother, perhaps homeless, left him in the relative comfort of the barn as she searched for food? But why not stop at the cabin? Why leave him in the barn where there was a chance he would go unnoticed, maybe even die? Chandra shuddered at the thought. No, any responsible mother would have knocked on the door and would never, never have abandoned her child. “Come on, you,” she said to the baby, “we’ve got work to do. You can’t just lie there and scream.”

      But scream he did until she swaddled him more tightly and held him in her arms again. Only then did his cries become pitiful little mews. Chandra clutched him even tighter; the sooner she got him to the hospital the better.

      Sam was sitting at attention near the couch. She looked in his direction, and the big dog swept the floor with his tail. “You,” she said, motioning to the retriever, “stick around. In case the mother wanders back or the police show up.”

      As if the dog could do anything, she thought with a wry smile.

      She found more blankets and tucked the child into a wicker laundry basket which, along with several bungee cords and the baby, she carried to her suburban. After securing the basket by the safety belt in the back seat, she crisscrossed the bungee cords over the baby, hoping to hold him as tightly and safely as possible.

      “Hang on,” she said to the infant as she hauled herself into the driver’s seat, slammed the door shut and switched on the ignition. She rammed the monstrous rig into gear. The beams of the headlights washed across the side of the barn, and Chandra half expected a woman to come running from the shadows. But no one appeared, and Chandra tromped on the accelerator, spewing gravel.

      * * *

      “DR. O’ROURKE. Dr. Dallas O’Rourke. Please call E.R.”

      Dallas O’Rourke was writing out instructions for a third-floor patient named William Aimes when the page sounded. He scowled menacingly, then strode to the nearest house phone and punched out the number for the main desk of Riverbend Hospital. Checking the clock at the nurse’s station, he realized he’d been on duty for the past twenty-two hours. His back ached and his shoulders were stiff, and he felt gritty from lack of sleep. He probably looked worse than he felt, he thought grimly as the receiver of the phone rubbed against the stubble of beard on his chin.

      A voice answered, and he cut in. “This is Dr. O’Rourke. I was just paged.”

      “That’s right. I’ll connect you to E.R.”

      The telephone clicked and a familiar voice answered quickly. “Emergency. Nurse Pratt.”

      “O’Rourke.” Leaning a stiff shoulder against the wall, he scribbled his signature across Aimes’s chart, then rubbed his burning eyes. How long had it been since he’d eaten? Six hours? Seven?

      “You’d better hustle your bones down here,” Shannon Pratt advised. “We’re swamped, and we’ve got a live one coming in. The switchboard just took the call. Something about an abandoned baby, a newborn with possible exposure, dehydration, jaundice and cephalhematoma.”

      Dallas scowled to himself. What was the old saying? Something about no rest for the wicked? The adage seemed to apply. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.” God, what he wouldn’t do for a hot shower, hotter cup of coffee, and about ten hours in the rack.

      He only took the time to leave the chart in the patient’s room and give the third-floor nurses’ station some instructions about Bill Aimes’s medication. “And make sure he takes it,” Dallas warned. “It seems Mr. Aimes thinks he can self-diagnose.”

      “He won’t fool us,” Lenore Newell replied, and Dallas was satisfied. Lenore had twenty years of nursing experience under her belt, and she’d seen it all. If anyone could get Bill Aimes to swallow his medication, Dallas decided, Nurse Newell could.

      Unwilling to wait for the elevator, he took the stairs to the first floor and shoved open the door. The bright lights and frenetic activity of the emergency room greeted him. Several doctors were treating patients, and there was a crowd in the waiting room.

      Shannon Pratt, a slim, dark-haired woman and, in Dallas’s opinion, the most efficient nurse on staff, gave the doctor a quick smile. “They’re on their way. Mike just called. They’ll be here in about five minutes.”

      Mike Rodgers was one of the regular paramedics who drove ambulance for Riverbend Hospital.

      “How’s the patient?”

      Shannon glanced at the notes she’d attached to a clipboard that she cradled with one arm. “Looks like the information we received from the first call was right on. The paramedics confirmed what the woman who called in already told us. The baby—only a couple of days old—has some signs of exposure as well as possible jaundice and slight swelling on one side of the head—the, uh, right,” she said, rechecking her notes. “No other visible problems. Vital signs are within the normal range.”

      “Good. Order a bilirubin and get the child under U.V. as soon as I finish examining him. Also, I want as much information from the mother as possible, especially her RH factor. If she doesn’t know it, we’ll take blood from her—”

      Shannon touched Dallas lightly on the arm. “Hold on a minute, Doctor. The mother’s not involved.”

      Dallas stopped. He glanced swiftly at Nurse Pratt—to see if she was putting him on. She wasn’t. Her face was as stone sober as it always was in an emergency. “Not involved? Then how the hell—”

      Pratt held up a hand. “The woman who found the child—”

      “The woman who found the child?” Dallas repeated as they passed the admitting desk, where Nurse Lindquist, a drill sergeant of a woman, presided. Over the noise of rattling gurneys and wheelchairs, conversation, paging and computer terminals humming, Dallas heard the distant wail of a siren.

      Pratt continued, “The mother isn’t bringing him in. This is a case of abandonment, or so the woman who called—” she glanced down at her notes on her clipboard again “—Chandra Hill, claims. Apparently she’s saying that she discovered the baby in her barn.”

      “Her

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