Devil's Waltz Read Free Page A

away from me.
    “What hell,” I said.
    “Yeah — and it was a chance thing. They were Rita’s private patients, but she was out of town and I was on call. I didn’t know them from Adam but I got stuck doing the death conference, too. I tried to do some basic counseling, gave them referrals to grief groups, but they weren’t interested. When they came back a year and a half later, wanting me to take care of the
new
baby, I was really surprised.”
    “Why?”
    “I would have predicted they’d associate me with the tragedy, a kill-the-messenger kind of thing. When they didn’t, I figured I’d handled them well.”
    “I’m sure you did.”
    She shrugged.
    I said, “How’d Rita react to your taking over?”
    “What choice did she have? She wasn’t around when they needed her. She was going through her own problems at the time. Her husband — you know who she was married to, don’t you?”
    “Otto Kohler.”
    “The famous conductor — that’s how she used to refer to him: ‘My husband, the famous conductor.’ ”
    “He died recently, didn’t he?”
    “Few months ago. He’d been sick for a while, series of strokes. Since then, Rita’s been gone even more than usual and the rest of us have been picking up a lot of the slack. Mostly, she attends conventions and presents old papers. She’s actually going to retire.” Embarrassed smile. “I’ve been considering applying for her position, Alex. Do you see me as a division head?”
    “Sure.”
    “Really?”
    “Sure, Steph. Why not?”
    “I don’t know. The position’s kind of… inherently authoritarian.”
    “To some extent,” I said. “But I’d imagine the position can adapt to different styles of leadership.”
    “Well,” she said, “I’m not sure I’d make a good leader. I don’t really like telling people what to do…. Anyway, enough about that. I’m getting off track. There were two more passing-out episodes before I brought up the psych thing again.”
    “Two more,” I said, looking at my notes. “I’ve got a total of five.”
    “Correct.”
    “How old’s the baby by now?”
    “Just under a year. And a hospital veteran. Two more admits, negative for everything. At that point I sat mom down and
strongly
recommended a psych consult. To which she reacted with… here, let me give you the exact quote.”
    She opened the chart and read softly: “‘I know that makes sense, Dr. Eves, but I just
know
Cassie’s sick. If you’d only seen her — lying there, cyanotic.’ End of quote.”
    “She phrased it that way? ‘Cyanotic’?”
    “Yup. She has a medical background. Studied to be a respiratory tech.”
    “And both her kids stop breathing. Interesting.”
    “Yes.” Hard smile. “At the time I didn’t realize how interesting. I was still caught up in the puzzle — trying to arrive at a diagnosis, worrying when the next crisis was going to be and if I’d be able to do anything about it. To my surprise it didn’t happen for a while.”
    She looked at the chart again. “A month passes, two, three, still no sign of them. I’m happy the baby’s okay but I’m also starting to wonder if maybe they’ve just found themselves another doc. So I called the home, talked to mom. Everything’s fine. Then I realized that in the heat of everything, the baby had never had her one-year exam. I schedule it, find everything intact, with the exception that she’s a little slow vocally and verbally.”
    “How slow?”
    “No retardation or anything like that. She just made very few sounds — in fact I didn’t hear anything from her at all, and mom said she was pretty quiet at home, too. I tried to do a Bailey test, but couldn’t because the baby wouldn’t cooperate. My guesstimate was about a two-month lag, but you know at that age it doesn’t take much to tip the scales, and given all the stress the poor thing’s been through, no big deal. But brilliant me. Bringing up language development got mom worried about
that
. So I