Last Licks

“What?” Mike almost looked offended. “Of course not.” Mike might not particularly like Ollie, but if he was in the hospital, he was supposed to be visited. That was the Kittery Harbor Way, the tradition that Sunny had grown up in, even if afterward she’d taken off for foreign parts like New York City.

Back in the Jeep, heading north along tree-lined roads, Sunny put on her headlights. In the woodsier areas, it had probably been dim even while the sun had still been higher in the sky. She could see all too easily how an accident could have happened.

Sunny kept a careful eye on the road ahead, fighting her impulse to hurry. Ollie was already in the emergency room by now. There was probably nothing they could do but offer moral support.

Elmet County General was up near the county seat in Levett. As they drove northward and inland, Sunny passed along the info Will had told her.

“Broken leg?” Mike repeated. “Could be worse. A fella can get killed, stepping out onto a road.”

As a former long-distance trucker, delivering road salt all over the Northeast, Mike knew what he was talking about. He’d lost friends to accidents like that, pals who’d left the cabs of their trucks, trying to warn others about dangerous situations—an accident ahead, a flooded-out road, black ice. Some had been struck even while they were laying out safety flares. And the worst, when Sunny was in college, her mom had died in a road accident during a huge ice storm.

Neither of them brought up the topic now. Instead, Mike went out of his way to shrug off Ollie’s situation as inconsequential.

“Eh, a broken bone? That used to get people laid up. But nowadays, they’ve got all sorts of new stuff they do—putting in pins and suchlike. He might not even get a cast.”

Sunny was willing to take her dad’s word for it. Certainly a lot of their older neighbors had suffered broken hips and made decent recoveries.

“Yeah, the way they do things now, he’ll be back on his feet fast enough. But walking is another thing. I betcha he’s going to need physical therapy. Rehab. The boss probably won’t be back in the office to bother you for at least a month—maybe two.” Mike grinned at her as they arrived at the hospital.

They walked over to the security guy at the emergency room entrance, who wasn’t exactly helpful. “Supposed to be family members only,” he told them. Sunny inflated her position at MAX to almost-partnership with Ollie, but that still only got them into the waiting room.

After a while, though, a harried-looking doctor in surgical greens and her hair pulled back in a bun came out to talk with them. “You work with Mr. Barnstable?”

“Yes.” Sunny wasn’t about to get all editorial and suggest for instead of

with. “I’m Sunny Coolidge, and this is my father, Mike. We just heard about what happened to Ollie—Mr. Barnstable. Is he all right?”

“Physically, he’s doing about the best we could hope for. We’ve given him something for the pain, and if he lies quietly, he shouldn’t suffer.” The doctor took a deep breath. “Otherwise . . . well, he’s threatened three times to buy the place and have us all fired.”

“Only three times?” Sunny managed a smile. “For him, that’s being fairly mellow.”

“Well, a lot of the other patients—and staff—would appreciate it if he were a little less loud.” The doctor pulled back a wisp of hair that had gotten loose from her bun and fallen onto her forehead. “Does he have a wife? Any family?”

Sunny shook her head. “He was an only child, and his folks died years ago. He never married”—for obvious reasons

, that snarky voice in her head chimed in—“and the only relations I know of are a couple of cousins who live several hours away.”

From the look on the doctor’s face, several hours was longer than they could put up with. She came to a sudden decision. “I’m going to let you in,” she said. “Maybe you can calm him down.”

Sunny and Mike followed the doctor into the emergency room proper—a good-sized area with flooring, tiles, and walls in various shades of muted green. Maybe the color was supposed to be calming, or maybe the doctors hoped their surgical scrubs would blend with the walls and make them invisible. But if the colors were quiet, the ambiance wasn’t. Machines gave off all sorts of blips, blurps, and beeps; doctors, nurses, and aides all seemed to be talking together; and of course, visitors and patients had questions and requests for help. And then the public-address system came on, announcing some mysterious code.

Gee, I can’t imagine why Ollie couldn’t calm down in the middle of all this serenity, Sunny’s sarcastic side commented.

The ER patients all lay on gurneys separated by curtains with suitably soothing patterns (in green, of course). The curtains didn’t do much to block out sound—like the moaning that got louder as the doctor led them to a completely curtained-in space.