John Lutz - Spark

“You see this as an emergency?”

Carver stirred the clutter of mail with his cane. The girl with the exerciser between her thighs smiled up at him, trying to reassure him there was nothing in the world worth his worry. “Maude mention to you she was taking a trip?”

Mildred looked uncertain, sliding her glasses higher on her sweat-glistening nose as if to see Carver better. They immediately slid back down. “She usually tells me when she’s gonna be gone more’n a day,” she admitted.

Carver said again, “I’ll wait out here if you want.”

Mildred hefted the screwdriver in her hand. “Who’d you say you were?”

“My name’s Fred Carver. I’m working for a woman named Hattie Evans.”

Something shadowed Mildred’s face. She’d heard of Hattie. “Don’t know her,” she said.

“I need to talk to Maude,” he said simply. “Maybe she’s sick in there and hasn’t been able to get to the door or phone. It happens, doesn’t it?”

“It happens.” She glared at him as if sizing him up finally, then moved over a few feet and stooped down and picked up one of several rocks lining the flower bed near the porch. It was about six inches in diameter. Apparently she’d found him wanting and decided to crush him.

But instead of hurling the rock at Carver, she opened it like a hinged box and removed a key.

“Looks real, don’t it?” she said, as she replaced the now obviously lightweight fake rock.

“Fooled me.” He stood back as she unlocked the door and shoved it open, poking her head inside to yell for Maude Crane.

Immediately she backed reeling out onto the porch, as if someone had punched her in the face. The screwdriver clattered on the concrete floor and she stood gaping at Carver, sickened and terrified.

He caught a whiff of the stench that had struck her like something solid.

Mildred tried to speak but no sound emerged, only a string of saliva that glistened on her chin in the sun. Carver helped her walk twenty feet away from the door, where she sat down with her legs spread wide on the hard ground and vomited.

After a while, he rested his hand on her damp back. “You gonna be all right?”

She nodded, staring at the mess on the grass between her legs. Her glasses had somehow gotten spotted.

“Don’t try to get up,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Another nod.

He set the tip of his cane and limped toward the open door, a metallic taste at the edges of his tongue.

Ten feet away he took a deep breath and held it, then quickened his pace. He shoved the mail aside with his cane and hobbled into the house.

The air-conditioning was off and the place was even hotter than outside. In here, the faint buzzing he’d heard on the porch was a din, with a frantic rising and falling pitch. This time of year especially in Florida, he knew what it was.

A dark cloud of flies swarmed relentlessly in the center of the dining room, feeding on something dangling from the chandelier.

The something was Maude Crane.

Carver parked the olds in the wide lot of the medical center the next day and limped toward the circular four-story buff building. The morning sun pressed hotly on his shoulders and he knew the top of his head was getting burned. Virility could be a burden. Maybe he’d have to borrow one of Hattie’s lids.

When he got inside the building, he saw the practicality of its architecture. On each floor, the rooms were off short halls leading like spokes from a hub that was the nurses’ station, so that each patient was only steps and seconds away from the healing hands of mercy.

The elevator reached the fourth-floor offices, and he limped out and told a redheaded receptionist at a long curved desk he’d like to talk to Dr. Billingsly. She smiled and asked him to please have a seat, which he did, for almost an hour.

Just as he reached the very brink of Muzak madness, a short, stocky young man wearing a wrinkled green surgical gown and cap entered the waiting area and smiled at Carver. He didn’t look old enough to be a doctor, which made Carver wonder how old he might look to Dr. Billingsly.

“William Billingsly,” he said, shaking hands firmly with Carver. He had blond hair and a smoothly chubby and intelligent face with shrewd blue eyes, like a grown-up cherub who’d somehow figured it all out. “Mrs. Evans phoned and told me you were coming by.”

Carver said he wanted to talk with Billingsly about Jerome Evans, and the doctor said, “Sure,” and led him to a tiny waiting room equipped with a small sofa, three chairs, and a TV jutting from the wall on an elbowed metal bracket. There was also a Mr. Coffee on a table in a corner, its round glass pot almost full. The wallpaper looked like burlap. Carver noticed that Billingsly sneaked a glance at his wristwatch as they sat down, Carver in a brown vinyl Danish chair, the doctor on the beige sofa. It was cool and quiet in the room.

“I don’t think we’ll be disturbed here,” Billingsly said.

“I’d have gotten here sooner after Hattie Evans’s phone call,” Carver told him, “except for Maude Crane.”

At first Billingsly didn’t seem to know what Carver was talking about. Then it registered in his canny blue eyes. “Ah! You know about that.”

“I’m the one who discovered her body.”

“Ah!” Billingsly looked over at Mr. Coffee and pointed. His hands were small, with stubby, manicured fingers. “Care for a cup, Mr. Carver?”

Carver told him no thanks, then watched as Billingsly got up and poured himself some coffee, tore open a paper packet and added powdered cream that had probably never known a cow, and sat back down. “I’m afraid suicide’s all too common here in Solartown, as it is in all retirement communities of this size. The old get despondent.” He took a sip of coffee and made a face as if it didn’t taste good. “Sometimes I don’t blame them.”

“How long had Maude Crane been dead?” Carver asked.

Billingsly shook his head. “I wasn’t present when she was brought here, only heard about it. They say several days. Death by hanging, and with an electrical cord. Asphyxiation, accompanying severe subcutaneous and cartilage trauma. The family wants an autopsy, which will be performed tomorrow. Then more will be known, but I’d guess not much more. Suicides by hanging are rather obvious. Discoloration, ruptured eye capillaries. The indications were observable, even with the damage inflicted by the flies and the heat.”

“Do you know as much about Jerome Evans’s death?”

Billingsly smiled boyishly at his coffee. “Oh, yes. I was his personal physician, in the operating room when he expired.”

“Hattie Evans said he died at home at the kitchen table.”

“For all practical purposes, she’s right. But there were still faint vital signs when he was brought in. Nothing could have been done for him, Mr. Carver.”

“Did you sign the death certificate?”

“No. Dr. Wynn, our chief surgeon and hospital administrator, signed it, as he signs most death certificates. He was in the O.R. at the time of death, too.”

“Hattie Evans has doubts about her husband dying of a heart attack.”

“I’ve heard her express those doubts. And I can understand why she might feel that way, since he had no history of coronary problems. But I saw the evidence, and it was classic. A massive blockage resulting in fibrillation and rupture of the aorta. In other words, a heart attack brought on by a blood clot. The postmortem confirmed that beyond doubt.”

“Is something like that common in a patient Jerome’s age?”

“All too common, coronary history or not. Mr. Carver, we have only so much time on this earth, and some of us have more difficulty than others accepting when it runs out for us or those we love. Believe me, Jerome Evans’s death was caused by a massive coronary. I’ve seen it before, and I’ll probably see it again within the next few weeks. And, like poor Mrs. Evans, the widow will wonder how it could have happened. For a while she might resist believing it.”