3
Dr. Ingleford was not exasperated, although Gregor would never understand why. He was sitting at the nurse’s desk at the end of the small ward on the third floor, looking through papers and not seeming much interested in moving. Gregor had expected an older man, retired now, and happy to put his hand in on the very few cases that were likely to come his way in Oscartown—or a young one, with a distinct air of incompetence. Instead, Michael Ingleford looked and acted like a big-city surgeon with an operating schedule the length of Orlando Furioso, and he couldn’t have been more than fifty-two.
Dr. Ingleford looked up when Clara, Bram, Linda, and Gregor got off the elevator, and put down the folder he’d been holding. “Ah,” he said. “The cavalry has arrived. Linda said she’d gone to get you out of the ocean.”
“Just from the Oscartown Inn,” Clara Walsh said. “For goodness’ sake. What the hell is going on around here? Mr. Demarkian didn’t even get to register and park his suitcases.”
“Tim Haling said that to me not an hour and a half ago,” Dr. Ingleford said. “I think that’s why Linda went to get you.” He turned to Gregor and held out his hand. “You must be Mr. Demarkian. I’m Mike Ingleford. Tim Haling is our guy in the emergency room today. You can’t blame him, you know. He knows he’s out of his depth. What we get mostly up here are drunks, heart attacks, and kids on dope. And the kids bring the dope from Boston.”
Gregor raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t go any further than that. The ward was like the lobby had been: almost too clean, and almost deserted. He saw no sign of the nurse or nurse’s aide that Elyse had spoken of downstairs.
Linda Beecham had started to pace, back and forth in front of the tiny nurses’ station. It was the first sign of emotion Gregor had seen in her. “You know as well as I do that kids have drugs up here even in the off-season,” she said, “and they don’t go to Boston to get them. Elyse said you said somebody gave Jack a drug, which I find interesting, because you didn’t say it to me.”
“You’d have probably gone storming off before I knew,” Mike Ingleford said. “But to make you feel better, I’m getting ready to send samples of blood out to Boston as we speak. Stan Miltern is going to run them over to the mainland on his boat. Which is what we have to do, since we don’t have the ferry much this time of year.”
“They came over on the ferry this time of year,” Linda Beecham said, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her voice had gone flat again. She had even stopped pacing.
Gregor watched Mike Ingleford give Linda Beecham a long, steady look, then turn his eyes on the rest of them. “Well,” he said. “We got this far, anyway. Not that I didn’t know what it probably was when he came in, but then we’ve gotten some experience over the past few months. It’s interesting, really. It’s what I came up here from New York to get away from.”
“You’re from New York?” Gregor asked.
“I’m from Oscartown,” Mike Ingleford said. “But I went to Yale to college and then to medical school at NYU, and I just stayed in the city. And then I got tired of it, and tired of the way my children were turning out, so I came back here. I know you think I’m an idiot to think the kids here go to Boston for their drugs, but by and large it’s true. And that means that drugs can be hard to come by during the winter.”
“But not this winter,” Clara said.
“We’ve got movie stars,” Mike Ingleford said. “I’ve been running this hospital for a decade, and the first time I ever saw Special K, it was after the barbarians invaded. Lucy Guthorn showed up at two in the morning, a complete mess, and Sheri had to wake me up out of a sound sleep to come and fix it. Which I did, barely.”
“And you’re sure that was the fault of the… barbarians?” Gregor said.
“Of a guy named Steve Becker, yeah. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on him yet. He’s not actually part of the movie anymore. I think he got canned. He used to work on the crew, same as the guy who was murdered.”
“Jerry Young tried to find a way for me to charge Steve Becker with rape,” Clara said, “but it was too late. Sheri had never had a rape case before. She didn’t know what to do. And Lucy, of course, Lucy just wanted to clean up. They all do.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
Mike Ingleford shrugged. “It’s one of those things. You don’t know where the better part of valor actually was. Maybe Lucy was better off with it turning out the way it did. This way, there was no publicity. She didn’t have to get hammered by that asshole’s lawyers. She didn’t have to have her face splattered all over the news—”