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Karen felt a prickly sensation in her ears.

  “Dad,” she said, “Jake has a job. He works five nights a week, six hours a night.”

  “Playing jungle music in a bar.”

  Jake sipped his coffee calmly. Pamela giggled. Karen craned her head forward.

  “He also teaches,” she asserted, “saxophone and guitar.”

  “Don’t make it sound like he’s a professor,” Mr. Decker responded.

  “Hmm,” said Jake, smoothing his brown goatee with the knuckles of his left hand, “maybe I should raise my rates.”

  Gene leaned back and wiped his tortoiseshell glasses on his napkin. “In my day the man went to work and the woman stayed home and raised a family.”

  “For one thing, Dad,” said Karen, raising her index finger over the untouched cranberry sauce, “you sound ridiculous talking as if you grew up in the horse-and-buggy era. You were my age in the ’70s. You’re about fifteen years away from being a baby boomer, so cut the Old Time Religion crap. For another thing, Jake is a songwriter and arranger. A composer.”

  Karen’s father put his glasses back on, slid them down the bridge of his nose, and peered over the top of them at Karen. “One song does not a songwriter make.”

  “Good title!” said Jake. He improvised a tune.

  Gene turned to Karen. “Is he ridiculing me? Is he sitting at my table, eating my food and ridiculing me?”

  “Actually,” said Jake, “I didn’t eat that much.”

  “Come on, guys,” interjected Pamela, riding to her brother-in-law’s rescue. “Dad, have you forgotten that the royalties from ‘Disco Blues’ paid off Karen’s law school loans and made the down payment on their house?”

  Jake winced at the mention of the title of his minor hit.

  “Worst song I ever wrote.”

  Pamela continued, “Speaking of songs, want to hear Dante sing one? He learned one all the way through. The kindergarten teacher says he has excellent pitch.”

  “What song?” her son asked.

  “The Over the River song,” said Pamela.

  “Forget it,” whined Dante.

  “Come on, now, sweetie,” Pamela encouraged him, “here we go, ‘Over the river and through …’”

  “No!” yelled Dante.

  Pamela arched one carefully sculpted eyebrow. “Don’t you want that Lego Space Station for Christmas?”

  Dante considered this for a moment. “Over the river,” he began in a quavering and slightly off-key voice.

  “Oh, wait,” said Pamela, “stand up while you sing.”

  Dante stood up and ran out of the room. Gene Decker continued to examine Jake. “I would think it would bother a man to be supported by his wife. Might bother him so much he couldn’t get a family started.”

  The remark left a tense silence in its wake. Pamela surreptitiously checked Jake’s face for a reaction.

  Karen smacked the table with the flat of her hand. “You know, Dad,” she said, “I think you envy Jake. I think it bothers the hell out of you that he’s secure about his masculinity, which you’re not.”

  “You have a vicious tongue, young lady, just like your mother. That’s why I walked out.”

  “Dad, please. You didn’t walk out, Mom did. And it wasn’t because she was vicious, it was because she was bored out of her mind, and depressed.”

  “It was because she was going through menopause!” shouted Mr. Decker.

  Dante galloped back into the room and stuck a plastic Wrestlemania figure up to its neck in the mashed potatoes. “Mom, what’s menopause?” he asked.

  “You don’t know anything,” sneered Suzanne.

  “Shut up, Suzanne,” ordered Pamela. “You don’t have to worry about that, sweetie,” she said to Dante, “it’s just something that happens to women.”

  “If it happens to women, why is it called men-opause?” asked Dante.

  “That’s so cute,” said Pamela.

  Suzanne took issue. “How come every time he says something stupid, you say it’s cute?”

  Karen broke in. “Mom was depressed long before she was menopausal, Dad.”

  “She didn’t know she was depressed until you came home from college with that feminist propaganda.”

  Karen placed both of her hands on top of the table and took a deep breath. “So you’re saying the divorce was my fault? Fact is, she never would have left if you hadn’t ignored her for twenty-five years, like you did the rest of us.”

  Karen’s father balled up his napkin and flung it on his dessert plate. He went into the family room and turned up the volume on the football game. The Bears were losing by two touchdowns. Karen stood and addressed her sister.

  “Gotta go.” Pamela shrugged her shoulders.

  As Jake brushed the heavy, wet snow off the hood and windshield of the Volvo, Karen fumed in the passenger seat. “I hate my father,” she said to herself, “I hate him!” Why does he invite us, she wondered, if all he’s going to do is show disapproval? Does he lie awake at night thinking of cruel things to say? Next year, we’re going to the Bahamas for Thanksgiving! Then he can sit around and insult Pammy and Brett for a change.

  The car windows were nearly opaque with frost, adding to Karen’s discomfort. She had been claustrophobic since childhood. She told herself that her claustrophobia was somehow her father’s fault, either genetics or something he let happen to her when she was little.

  Jake got in, started the engine, and turned on the windshield defroster. Two small peepholes appeared at the bottom of the windshield and grew with glacial slowness.

  Karen was rigid in her seat, feet pressed against the floorboard, the back of her head hard against the headrest. As she dug her fingernails into the vinyl sides of the bucket seat, she heard Jake’s baritone voice, doing a respectable imitation of Perry Como, singing, “There’s noooo place like hoooome for the hol-i-days….”

  Karen’s tension held her for a moment, then she burst into laughter. Jake joined her, and the two of them laughed until they were wheezing.

  Jake pointed at the windshield, which was completely refogged. “We’d better modulate our breathing or we’ll never get away from this House of Horrors!”

  He shifted the transmission into first gear. Karen put her hand over his.

  “Jake, what would I do without you?”

  He looked at her and wiped tears from the corners of his eyes. “Probably get along with your dad,” he said.

  At 11:30 P.M. on Thanksgiving Day, Dietrich Heiden struggled to emerge from a disturbing dream. In the dream, he sat on a toilet in the house where he lived as a child. His parents strode in and out of the room. He felt like he was under water. His head hurt. He was small and his feet did not reach the floor. He looked down at the pink squares of tile and saw that his toes had fallen off and were scattered on the floor. He fought to pull his eyes open to escape the dream, but the effort was painful.

  His eyes opened but he did not yet remember where he was. Earlier that day, Dietrich had fallen from the roof of his house while attempting to set up a life-sized plastic reindeer decoration. He was in a patient bed on the third floor of Shoreview Memorial Hospital. An IV bag was connected by a long, serpentine tube to a needle in his left arm. He was awake, but his head still hurt.

  A man with short graying hair and a port wine birthmark on his temple, wearing a white coat and khaki pants, stood by Dietrich’s bed, bent over as if drinking from a water fountain. Dietrich’s head was elevated, so he could see the fleshy shaft protruding from the fly of the man’s pants. The man’s left hand held his own penis. The thumb and index finger of the man’s other hand were wrapped around the base of Dietrich’s penis. And the rest of Dietrich’s penis was in the man’s mouth.

  CHAPTER

  9

  The master bedroom in Jake and Karen’s house faced east, making it less than ideal for sleeping when the first rays of light from the rising sun streamed through the blinds. Friday morning, the sunlight illuminated Karen’s eyelids, which were dan
cing with the rapid eye movement of her dream state. In her dream, she was standing waist-deep in foamy, azure seawater while a warm tropical rain fell on her face and shoulders.

  She opened her eyes and was startled to see a figure looming over her. It was Jake, up on one elbow, staring at her face.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Nothing’s the matter,” said Jake. “I’m merely gazing with admiration upon the visage of my beloved, revirescent in the soft, morning light.”

  Karen noticed a familiar expression around Jake’s wide-set brown eyes. She glanced at the digital alarm clock on the nightstand.

  “Isn’t it a little early for that?” she asked.

  “For what?” he said.

  “That,” she replied.

  “I object,” said Jake, feigning indignation. “Can’t a man merely gaze with admiration upon the visage of his beloved, revirescent in the soft morning light, without it being assumed that he’s thinking about that?”

  Karen lifted the bedsheets and peered underneath.

  “The evidence strongly indicates,” she said, “that you’re thinking about that.”

  Jake moved closer to her. “The question is,” he said, “will the evidence be admitted?”

  “I’ll allow it,” said Karen.

  “May I approach?” said Jake.

  “Knock off the double entendres,” said Karen, “and get to it.”

  Jake leaned over and kissed her on the place where her neck, earlobe, and jawline intersected. She reached down and slid her fingers under the waistband of his boxer shorts.

  The telephone on the nightstand rang, jarring them both. Jake flopped on his back and groaned. Karen sat up and grabbed the phone. It was Anne Delaney.

  “You know I don’t work the Friday after Thanksgiving, Annie,” said Karen. She yawned and flopped back on her pillow. “What can’t wait until Monday?”

  “An alleged sexual assault. By a doctor. On a patient.”

  “Ho-hum,” said Karen, accustomed to such reports. “Another one of the residents give a pelvic exam to some eighteen-year-old girl with a back injury?”

  “The patient was male,” replied Anne.

  “Ho, ho! And the doctor was … ?”

  “Also male. Carson Weber, an emergency room physician,” said Anne.

  “I know him,” Karen commented. “Nice guy, good-looking. What’s the patient’s story?”

  “Patient presented at the ER at 6:50 P.M. yesterday with a head injury. Guy fell off his roof putting up a Christmas display in the dark. In that weather, can you believe it? Lucky he didn’t break his neck. X-ray showed a small skull fracture. Weber examined him in the emergency room, diagnosed a concussion, admitted him to the hospital for observation. Patient calls the floor nurse in the middle of the night, says the doctor who examined him in the ER came into his patient room and, uh… performed fellatio on him.”

  “Wow!” Karen exclaimed. “That’s a new one!”

  Jake rolled over and shielded his eyes with his hand.

  “Who is it?” he whispered.

  Karen covered the receiver. “It’s Annie Delaney. Some patient complained that one of our ER docs gave him a blow job last night!”

  “And overcharged him for it?” asked Jake. He rolled away and scrunched a pillow over his head.

  Anne continued. “Patient also claims he was drugged, that the doctor put something in his IV bag. We need to decide if we’re going to suspend Dr. Weber immediately pending an investigation, and if we do, you have to direct the procedure.”

  “I don’t know, Annie. Sounds pretty wild to me. Is this patient credible?”

  “He had a pretty severe head injury, he may have been hallucinating. He’s a bus driver, has a foreign accent. From the way he got hurt, I’d say he was a little cracked to begin with.”

  “What’s Weber say?”

  “He adamantly denies even being in the patient’s room. His shift was over at 10:00 P.M., and he says he left the hospital before 10:30 P.M. The patient called the nurse a little past midnight. He says the assault took place approximately a half-hour before.”

  “Why’d he wait a half-hour to report it?”

  “I don’t know,” Anne conceded. “That’s all we have so far, except I did do a survey of the newspapers and magazines in the patient room and ER waiting area to see if the patient might have gotten the idea from something he read. Found a newspaper article on a study from Canada reporting that ten percent of Canadian doctors have sexually assaulted a patient.”

  “Nice work, Annie.” Karen thought for a moment, her eyes roaming around the floor. She was reluctant to have a physician suspended from the medical staff based on the unsubstantiated allegation of a patient with a head injury, but she knew that if the patient was telling the truth and Shoreview took no action, it might happen again. She thought of a way to test the patient’s story.

  “Do we have a security camera in the doctor’s section of the parking garage?” she asked.

  “No, but there’s a camera right at the guardhouse that videotapes every car that leaves the garage.”

  “And the tape has a date and time display, doesn’t it?”

  Anne confirmed that.

  “Call Max Schumacher in Security,” Karen directed, “and get the tape from last night to check out Weber’s story.” She thought quickly. “And get the security cam tapes from the cameras at the front door to the hospital and the ER, too. Weber could have parked outside and sneaked back in. Look at the tapes and call me back.”

  “Aren’t you coming in?” Anne asked.

  “I’m not getting out of bed,” said Karen, replacing the receiver and reaching for Jake under the covers.

  Anne called Karen just before noon. The security cam tape from the parking garage clearly showed Carson Weber’s silver Alpha Romeo leaving at 10:28 P.M. The tapes of the only two unlocked entrances to the hospital showed Dr. Weber had not reentered the building from 10:28 P.M. until after midnight. Karen concluded that a suspension of Dr. Weber was unlikely.

  “May I ask one more question about hospital business?” Anne inquired cautiously.

  “Fire away.”

  “Did you get the report from Gilbert Austin on Larry’s catheter?”

  “I did. Not good news, Annie. On Monday I want you to look into who might have resterilized that catheter. And, Annie …”

  “What?”

  “Don’t work on it over the weekend. That’s an order.”

  Friday afternoon in Baltimore, Maryland, Karen’s college friend, Dr. Carl Gellhorn, reviewed the medical record and the angiogram from Larry Conkel’s catheterization that Karen had shipped to him. He shook his head in disgust and disbelief.

  Later that afternoon, Jake was at his drummer’s house, rehearsing for the evening’s performance at the Caledonia Club. The band was going to try out some new, ambitious chord changes on a couple of numbers that had become shopworn. Karen made herself a mug of herbal tea, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and sat by the bay window in her kitchen, looking out at the small, frozen backyard and the bleak western sky. Eight inches of snow had fallen Thanksgiving Day. Leaden, slate-gray clouds blanketed the city. As she contemplated Larry’s death, the engineering report on the catheter used in Larry’s procedure, Paula Conkel’s lawsuit, and Larry’s upcoming funeral, she tried to suppress her sense of foreboding. She shifted her thoughts, vacillating between concrete possibilities and fanciful intrigues, finding herself unable to draw a bright line between the two.

  Concrete possibilities. Larry’s investigation had been thorough and workmanlike. Karen was prepared to accept as reality that some of the Jefferson Clinic doctors were engaged in large-scale billing fraud. As for the engineering report, it was clear on one point: the catheter had been damaged. If the damage had occurred accidentally, then Larry’s death was an accident. Accidental death in the hospital was normal reality. But the possibility that the damage to the catheter voided the warranty, and that a colossal
uninsured liability would bankrupt Shoreview Memorial—that was hard to accept as real. Shoreview had been in Jefferson since long before Karen was born. She had put years of her life into it. Could it go out of existence? It seemed unlikely that any powerful force like the state would intervene to save it. Jefferson could get along with one hospital. No point in getting panicky about it, something would happen to divert the disaster. Wouldn’t it?

  Harder yet to accept was the idea that Larry’s death was not accidental. No point in even thinking too much about that. Too awful, too… histrionic. Yes, but if it wasn’t accidental, who was responsible? Dr. Bernard, who inserted the damaged catheter into Larry’s heart and who happened to be one of the targets of Larry’s investigation? Dr. Herwitz, who had performed the surgery during which Larry died? Herwitz was not targeted in Larry’s investigation, but he was the president of the Jefferson Clinic. He had a lot to lose if Larry went public. Or, maybe, Bernard and Herwitz were in it together—a conspiracy. And what about Paula Conkel, looking to get rich on a lawsuit, retaining Ben McCormick before Larry was even embalmed?

  Fanciful intrigues.

  As she finished her second mug of tea, Karen identified the source of her sense of foreboding. It was a premonition that the responsibility for straightening out this imbroglio was about to land on her. All the ugliest problems at the hospital ended up on her desk, it seemed. Jake called it “the curse of the capable.”

  Karen considered a third cup of tea, but opted for a glass of wine instead. She moved from the kitchen to the living room, considered lighting a fire, and decided against it. Why wasn’t Jake here to light it? Why wasn’t Jake here to distract her so she could stop thinking about the mess at Shoreview Memorial?

  At least it was better than thinking about her parents.

  Friday night was a mixed bag for Jake and his band at the Caledonia Club. Musically, Jake thought they were bad, which is to say, very good. The rhythm section was uncommonly tight, the lead guitar was on fire, and the new chord changes had flowed like the River Jordan. But during the second break he overheard the club owner talking to one of the regulars at the bar about karaoke machines, how much people enjoyed them, and how much they cost.