QED Read Free Page B

isn’t as if it were two in the afternoon.”
    But Mum Caswell shook her head stubbornly. “I’m going to look in his room.”
    â€œWhat a bloody bore.” Ellen’s impatience turned nasty. “What about my breakfast? Am I expected to get it myself?”
    â€œPerish the thought!” said Christopher, anticipating Jo.
    Nevertheless, Mum hurried out. Ellen brandished her empty coffee cup, ready to behead the peasant who had failed to refill it. Christopher appeased his hunger by devouring Joanne, who was trying valiantly not to let her dislike for Ellen show.
    Silence poured.
    Until the cry from upstairs.
    It was a cry raucous with urgency and terror. And then it became a shriek, and the shriek repeated itself.
    Joanne bolted for the doorway and vanished, Christopher at her heels. Ellen trailed behind, her face a curious study in dread and hope.
    She came on the others midway up the staircase. Her aunt was clinging to the banister, her dumpling features the color of old dough. She managed a jerky thumb-up gesture, and Jo and Christopher sprang past her and disappeared in the upstairs hall. In a moment Jo was back alone, running down the stairs, past her mother, past Ellen.
    â€œI’ve got to phone the doctor,” Jo panted. “Ellen, please take care of mother.”
    â€œBut what’s the matter?” demanded Ellen. “Is it father? Has something happened to him?”
    â€œYes …” Jo flew for the phone. Ellen, ascending with an arm around Margaret Caswell’s waist, heard the dial clacking, and then Joanne’s urgent voice: “Dr. Farnham? Jo Caswell at the Mumford place. Uncle Godfrey’s had a stroke, I think. Can you come right away?”
    Dr. Conklin Farnham took the stairs two at a time. Mum, still dough-faced but recovered from the first shock, had insisted on returning to her brother-in-law’s bedside; the doctor found her there. Christopher and Ellen, acting like trespassers, hung about in the hall outside their father’s room, Joanne with them. They waited without words.
    When Dr. Farnham emerged, his shoulders elevated in a chilling shrug. “He’s had a stroke, all right. He’s paralyzed.”
    â€œPoor pop,” said Christopher. He had not called his father that in twenty years. “What’s the prognosis, Doctor?”
    â€œIt depends on a number of things, most of them unpredictable.”
    â€œAny chance of a recovery from the paralysis, Dr. Farnham?” Joanne asked in a tight voice.
    â€œThe paralysis will gradually lift, but just how soon or how completely I can’t say. It all depends on the extent of the damage. He ought to be in the hospital, but we’re absolutely jammed just now, not a bed available, even in the wards. And I’d rather not risk the long jaunt up to Connhaven on these winter roads. So it looks like a home job, at least for now. He’ll need nurses—”
    â€œHow about me?” asked Margaret Caswell, materializing in the doorway.
    â€œWell.” The doctor seemed doubtful. “I know you’ve done your share of patient-care, Mrs. Caswell, but in a case like this … Although it’s true we haven’t got an R.N. available right now, either …”
    â€œI’ve taken care of Godfrey for over a quarter of a century,” Mum Caswell said, with the obstinacy she showed in all matters pertaining to Godfrey Mumford. “I can take care of him now.”
    January 4–5: The first forty-eight hours after a cerebral thrombosis, Dr. Farnham told them, were the critical ones, which was all Mum had to hear. For the next two days and nights she neither took her clothes off nor slept; nor was there anything Joanne could do or say to move her from Godfrey Mumford’s bedside, not even for ten minutes.
    When the crisis was over, and the patient had survived—and was even making, according to the doctor, a sensational recovery—Jo