Linwood Barclay: The Twenty-Three

He ran back into the house, grabbed his car keys from the hall table. Arlene spotted him, asked, “Where you off to?”

“Out,” he said.

Before he dropped into the seat of his Mazda, he stood and listened, trying to pinpoint just where the sirens were coming from. One sounded as though it was off to the east, but another seemed to be coming from the west.

Did that make any sense? If there’d been a major accident, wouldn’t all the sirens be coming from one place? Had two or more accidents happened almost simultaneously in different parts of the town? But then again, ambulances could be on their way to a single scene, approaching from disparate locations.

Didn’t matter, he decided. If what he was hearing was, in fact, ambulances, they’d all be headed to the same place: Promise Falls General.

That’s where he would go.

He did a quick glance up and down the street before he started backing the car out of the driveway. He had the rear wheels on the street when he heard a blaring horn. A blue van, coming out of nowhere, swerved, tires squealing, and went screaming past at, David guessed, nearly seventy miles per hour on a residential street where the limit was thirty.

The van was headed the same way David was going. It made a fast left turn at the next intersection, nearly going around on two wheels.

David tromped on the accelerator. As he was coming out of the neighborhood, the hospital a couple of miles ahead of him, he saw smoke. Rounding another corner, he saw three fire engines and flashing lights at the Exxon station, which was ablaze, the charred remains of a car visible straddling the island where the pumps stood. It looked to David as though the car had plowed straight into one of them. Was this what all the fuss was about? An explosion at the gas station?

He heard a siren approaching from behind him. He glanced in the mirror, saw an ambulance bearing down on him. He swerved over to the curb, screeched to a halt, figuring the emergency vehicle would be stopping a safe distance from the gas station.

But it raced right past the fire.

David took chase.

As the hospital came looming into view, he saw, crammed outside the emergency entrance, at least a dozen ambulances and enough flashing lights to give someone with photosensitive epilepsy a seizure. David ditched the car along a No Parking stretch on a street that bordered the hospital, and ran.

Back in the day, he’d have had a notebook in one hand and very likely a camera in the other. In a strange way, he felt naked. But even without those tools of his trade, he still had his observational skills, and one thing immediately struck him.

It was generally accepted procedure for paramedics to bring a patient into the ER, confer with admitting staff, make sure the person they’d brought in was being looked after, before departing.

That wasn’t what David was seeing.

Two paramedics from the ambulance that had passed him moments earlier were pulling out a woman on a stretcher, taking a few seconds to tell a doctor standing at the back of the vehicle what was wrong with her, then jumping back into the ambulance and taking off, tires squealing, siren engaged.

David ran past the cluster of ambulances into the emergency ward.

Bedlam.

All seats were taken, half with people waiting to be seen, the others occupied by desperately worried family members. There were moans, people crying, others shouting for help.

A man in his sixties struggled to stand and vomited on the floor in front of him. Several seats to the left of him, a woman in her thirties who’d been breathing rapidly suddenly stopped. A man with his arm around her screamed, “Help! Help!”

In addition to paramedics and hospital staff, there were uniformed police pitching in, but David could see a kind of helplessness in their eyes, as though they were overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do.

He spotted a woman with a child no more than six who was doubled over in pain. “What’s happened?” he asked.

The woman’s eyes brightened briefly with hope. “Are you a doctor?”

“No.”

“We need the doctor. When are we going to see the doctor? How long do we have to wait? My girl is sick. Look at her!”

“What’s wrong with her?” David asked.

The woman shook her head frantically, ran her words together hurriedly. “I don’t know. Kathy seemed fine, and then all of a sudden she just started feeling faint and she started breathing really fast and getting dizzy and-”

“Mommy,” Kathy whimpered, “I think I’m going to be… The room is all weird.”

“How fast?” David asked.

“It was, like, out of nowhere. She’s a perfectly healthy child! I’ve made sure she’s had all her shots and-” She stopped herself, as if she’d just thought of something. She reached into her purse and came out with her phone. “Why can’t I get service in here? My husband is in New York on business and I can’ t-”

“Which part of town do you live in?” David asked.

“What?” she said.

“Where do you live?”

“On Clinton,” she said. “Near the school.”

David definitely knew where that was. His girlfriend, Samantha Worthington, sent her son, Carl, to that school.

“I hope the doctor comes soon,” he said, and moved down a few seats to where a man was sitting, leaning over, elbows on knees.

“Sir?” he said.

The man looked up. His eyes were glassy and lacked focus.

“What?”

“What’s your name?” David asked, thinking he recognized the man.

“Fisher,” he said, struggling to swallow. “Walden Fisher.”

David hadn’t worked on the Olivia Fisher murder case but followed it closely online while he was working at the BostonGlobe . There’d been several pictures of the dead woman’s parents, and he believed this man was Olivia’s father. Not that he was going to bring up the fact.

“You need to give me something,” Fisher said. “I think… I think maybe I’m gonna pass out.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not a doctor.”

“… throat’s raw… throwing up… heart going a hundred miles an hour.”

“When did this happen?”

“… morning… breakfast. I felt okay. Had some coffee… started feeling funny. Stomach feels like it’s doing backflips.” He gave David a desperate look. “Why aren’t you a doctor?”

“I’m just… not,” he said. David asked him the same thing he’d asked the mother of Kathy. “Where do you live?”

Fisher mumbled an address, which was nowhere near where Kathy and her mother lived.

“Do you know any of these people?” he asked, pointing to all the others waiting to be seen. Maybe, he thought, they’d all been to the same fast-food restaurant the night before. Some mass case of food poisoning.

Someone collapsed onto the floor. A woman wailed.

Fisher said, “Should I? Is it my birthday?”

David was no epidemiologist, but it wasn’t stopping him from trying to figure out how all these people from all corners of Promise Falls would come down with similar symptoms at exactly the same time. Something in the air, maybe?

Had some coffee… started feeling funny.

Bad coffee? How could everyone in town suddenly get bad coffee? David glanced back at the sick girl.

She was too young to drink coffee. But-

David went back to the little girl’s mother, who was trying again to get reception for her phone. “What did she have for breakfast this morning?”

The woman, who was busily scratching her hand, looked up, tears in her eyes. “What?”

“What did Kathy have?”

“Nothing. She never eats breakfast. I try to get her to eat something, but she won’t.”

“Nothing to drink?”

The woman’s eyes danced. “Orange juice.”