Undone Read Free Page A

Atlanta — so that she would no longer have the constant reminder of what had come before?
    “Promise me you’ll try to go to church next week.”
    Sara mumbled something that might sound like a promise. Her mother was no fool, and they both knew that the possibility of Sara ending up on a pew this Easter Sunday was highly unlikely, but Cathy didn’t press.
    Sara looked at the stack of charts in front of her. She was at the end of her shift and needed to call in her dictation. “Mama, I’m sorry, but I need to go.”
    Cathy exacted a promise of another phone call next week, then rang off. Sara kept her cell phone in her hand for a few minutes, looking at the faded numbers, her thumb tracing the seven and five, dialing out a familiar number but not sending through the call. She dropped the phone into her pocket and felt the letter brush against the back of her hand.
    The Letter. She thought of it as its own entity.
    Sara normally checked her mail after work so she didn’t have to drag it around with her, but one morning, for some unknown reason, she had checked her mail as she was heading out. A cold sweat had come over her as she recognized the return address on the plain white envelope. She had tucked the unopened envelope into the pocket of her lab coat as she left for work, thinking she would read it at lunch. Lunch had come and gone, and the letter had remained unopened, traveling back home, then out to work again the next day. Months passed, and the letter went everywhere with Sara, sometimes in her coat, sometimes in her purse to the grocery store or on errands. It became a talisman, and often, she would reach her hand in her pocket and touch it, just to remind herself that it was there.
    Over time, the corners of the sealed envelope had become dog-eared and the Grant County postmark had started to fade. Every day pushed Sara further away from opening it and discovering what the woman who had killed her husband could possibly have to say.
    “Dr. Linton?” Mary Schroder, one of the nurses, knocked on the door. She spoke in the practiced code of the ER. “We’ve got a P-O-P-T-A female, thirty-three, weak and thready.”
    Sara glanced at the charts, then her watch. A thirty-three-year-old woman who had passed out prior to admission was a puzzle that would take time to solve. It was almost seven o’clock. Sara’s shift was over in ten minutes. “Can Krakauer take her?”
    “Krakauer
did
take her,” Mary countered. “He ordered a CMP, then went to get coffee with the new bimbo.” She was obviously perturbed by this, and added, “The patient’s a cop.”
    Mary was married to a cop; hardly shocking considering she had worked in the emergency room at Grady Hospital for almost twenty years. Even without that, it was understood at every hospital in the world that anyone in law enforcement got the best and quickest treatment. Apparently, Otto Krakauer hadn’t gotten the memo.
    Sara relented. “How long did she lose consciousness?”
    “She says about a minute.” Mary shook her head, because patients were hardly the most honest reporters when it came to their health. “She doesn’t look right.”
    That last part was what got Sara out of her chair. Grady was the only Level One trauma center in the region, as well as one of the few remaining public hospitals in Georgia. The nurses at Grady saw car wrecks, shootings, stabbings, overdoses, and any number of crimes against humanity on an almost daily basis. They had a practiced eye for spotting serious problems. And, of course, cops usually didn’t admit themselves to the hospital unless they were at death’s door.
    Sara skimmed the woman’s chart as she walked through the emergency department. Otto Krakauer hadn’t done more than take a medical history and order the usual bloodwork, which told Sara there was no obvious diagnosis. Faith Mitchell was an otherwise healthy thirty-three-year-old woman with no previous conditions and no recent trauma. Her test