Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Three whole days.
That’s how long it took before Margaret Trout was moved out of ICU and non-family members—and shopkeepers with their nosy researcher boyfriends—were allowed to visit her.
It was a long three days of Natalie’s mind working overtime. Wondering. Could Margaret see ghosts now too? Worrying. Was Harper really to blame for the heart attack? And would Margaret blame Harper even if she wasn’t responsible?
But finally Mary Brimley, who’d made it her mission to call Margaret’s husband twice daily for an update, reported to Alice who called Agnes who told Harper who texted Natalie. Margaret was now on a normal floor and was receiving visitors other than family.
Natalie weighed her options. To tell or not to tell Liam Margaret was out of ICU?
She could keep the news to herself—conveniently forget to tell him—and then she wouldn’t have to go to the hospital and visit Margaret at all.
He’d been so busy in the lab with his brain he’d probably forgotten.
And working cloistered away in the lab as he did, behind that locked steel door, town gossip usually didn’t reach him.
At least not as quickly as it did everyone else in the village.
But Liam had been right. Someone had to ask Margaret what happened. And it was better if Natalie did the asking, just in case Margaret’s answer was, Harper happened.
So she opted for option number two. Tell Liam… and make him go with her because hospitals were not her favorite place to visit, even for someone she loved, which Margaret was not.
Liam and his relatively new-found quest for knowledge in the field of study regarding a living’s ability to see ghosts is how Natalie came to be sitting in Liam’s Jeep at six-oh-five that evening.
Pretty much the moment she’d locked the door of the shop and switched off the lights, he’d shoved a bag containing a sandwich, napkins and a bottle of iced tea at her for her dinner and hustled her out the door.
Binghamton was not nearly far enough away. In just forty-five minutes, in spite of traffic, they were walking toward the main entrance of Binghamton General.
Natalie noticed the sterile smell first thing, the moment the automatic doors slowly swung wide to admit them.
How could clean smell so… bad?
As she and Liam walked across the tile floor of the lobby the specific smell ratcheted up her already existing anxiety—chemical disinfectant mixed with something else impossible to pinpoint exactly but familiar to anyone who’d ever been at any hospital at any time.
If human suffering came with a cup of stale bad coffee and an artificial lemon scent, it would smell like a hospital.
She didn’t want to face Margaret Trout at all. But doing it here specifically, the hospital where the ambulance had driven her after her own near-death experience, made it seem all the worse.
While she’d been dragging her feet, trying to ignore the visceral memories of her own internment in this institution as well as to delay the inevitable visit to Margaret’s room, Liam had gone up to the desk and checked them in.
He returned to her holding two stickers that largely proclaimed them as VISITORS. “I got the number and floor of Margaret’s room,” he told her while applying his own sticker to his broad chest.
Damn his efficiency. “Great.” She pouted and picked at the corner of the backing on the sticker without much success. Her nails were short but her patience was shorter. With a frustrated sigh, she thrust the sticker at Liam. “Can you help me?”
Without comment, except for the lift of one cocky dark brow, Liam peeled off the backing like it was nothing.
“It’s just a quick visit. It’s not going to be that bad,” he said while pressing the sticker to her jacket.
“Says you,” she mumbled with a scowl.
As if he didn’t trust her not to bolt, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and steered her in a path toward the elevator and their inevitable destination. Margaret Trout’s room.
In the handful of years Natalie had known Margaret Trout, she’d felt loathing, ire, judgment, and a whole host of other things radiating off the woman.
But today, for the first time, Natalie felt something different from her. Underneath the visible exhaustion and obvious discomfort in her slow gingerly movements, there was something else.
If Natalie had to pinpoint it, she’d have to say it was fear.
The way Margaret’s eyes widened at the sight of Natalie and Liam. The way her gaze kept shooting past them at the doorway, then to the corners of the room. The way she held her body, like her nerves were strung too tight.
More than fear. Terror.
Something had frightened Margaret Trout to death. Literally. The woman’s heart had stopped and if it wasn’t for luck and timing, and some good Samaritans with medical skills and a defibrillator, she wouldn’t be alive today.
The situation almost exactly mirrored Natalie’s own history, except she’d been electrocuted… which led her to Liam’s hypothesis.
Did Margaret’s fear here in the hospital room stem from the fact she could now see ghosts too?
Natalie glanced at the corners of the room. Then out in the hallway. There was nothing to see there. At least nothing she could see.
In fact, the only spirit she’d seen since entering the building had been an old man pushing a broom down the hall—and through the wall.
Aside from that, it had been a ghost free visit.
Which would seem odd, given the hospital had seen more than its share of death, except for what Gabe had told her once.
That the Mudville ghosts avoided going into funeral homes on principle. Perhaps hospitals were the same.
But that didn’t mean Margaret hadn’t seen a ghost in her days here. Watching that janitor sweep through the wall would be enough to freak out a novice ghost conduit.
And if that were the case then Natalie, as a veteran in this area, should help guide Margaret… even if she did have mixed feelings about the whole thing.
As Natalie lowered herself into the chair near the bed, Margaret frowned as if she couldn’t figure out why Natalie was there.
“Margaret. Hi. We came to see how you’re doing,” Natalie said with what she hoped was a sincere sounding mix of upbeat cheer and empathetic commiseration.
“Why?” Margaret asked, then shot another terror-filled glance at the doorway.
Natalie twisted in the chair to look for herself but again didn’t see anything. She met Liam’s gaze and raised her shoulders in an I-don’t-know move.
He pressed his lips together. She recognized his go-to expression. He was fighting the urge to take over the conversation and she knew from experience he was going to lose that fight.
“Margaret, I’d like to ask you some questions,” Liam began.
Yup, there it was.
Natalie leaned back in the chair. She might as well relax. This was the Liam show now.
He didn’t talk much, or to many people, but when it involved science and research and he got on a roll, they were all in for a long haul.
“What kind of questions?” Margaret asked, suspicion coloring her tone and features, until her gaze shifted again toward the darkness outside her window and her expression turned once again to fear.
“Are you seeing things?” Liam asked outright.
Natalie cringed at the direct question.
“Are you accusing me of being crazy?”
“No. I’m a doctor currently researching the field of brain science.
I know what oxygen deprivation can do to a brain.
And I know you. Not well, but well enough to see something happened.
Something is bothering you. I’ve encountered things, Margaret.
I’m wondering if you have too. I’m here to help you. ”
Damn him and his handsome face and warm sultry voice. It melted Margaret’s cold hard heart right in front of Natalie’s eyes.
She watched as the tension left Margaret’s shoulders until she slumped against the pillows looking more like the old, frail woman she was and not at all like the sharp-tongued contrarian Natalie knew.
“I’ve been so afraid to say anything to anyone. Even my husband.” The tears began to fall, prompting Liam—deep in chivalry mode now—to reach for a tissue and deliver it to Margaret as he perched one tight butt cheek on the edge of the hospital bed.
“Tell me,” he said in a voice that sounded like honey warmed by the sunshine.
The damn man was practically wooing Old Lady Trout into confessing all to him and Natalie wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
Luckily she managed to keep her mouth shut on the subject and let Liam do this thing. She needed answers as much as he wanted them.
Natalie’s primary motivation here, now, in this horrible hospital room with this horrible woman, was to prove that Harper didn't scare her, or Doug, to death. And if Liam could somehow manage to do that, she had to let him.
Liam leaned in closer, putting him nearly eye-to-eye with Margaret, his gaze calm in direct opposition to hers as it continued to dart around the room.
“Margaret, what are you seeing?”
“Nothing… here.”
He nodded. “Then where?”
“On the sidewalk,” she breathed barely audibly.
“What did you see on the sidewalk?” he asked.
“Something. I don’t know what,” she said shakily. “But it wanted to kill me.”
Something?
And it had wanted to kill her?
Natalie’s questions over Margaret’s recounting of the final moments before her heart stopped was interrupted by a nurse entering the room.
Make that a ghost nurse, because the closed door had never opened but the nurse was now inside checking Margaret’s vital signs on the monitors.
This spirit was an early twentieth-century era ghost judging by the uniform. She wore a full apron and a tiny hat perched on her head, both which made her look more like a maid than a medical professional to Natalie’s modern eye.
But apparently decades of being on duty for an eternally long shift at the hospital that had modernized around her must have taught her something.
She nodded at the numbers on the twenty-first century monitors like she understood them perfectly, then exited the room…
Meanwhile Natalie kept her gaze lowered, tracking the ghost nurse in her peripheral vision while staunchly refusing to make eye-contact with the spirit and tip her off to the fact there was a living in the room who could see her.
A living in the room. One. Not two. Because during the whole encounter, Margaret’s eyes never left Liam, who still sat on the bed holding her hand in both of his. And she had to ignore he was in bed with the woman.
The annoyance of that was overshadowed by the knowledge Margaret didn’t notice the nurse. Not her arrival or exit through the closed door. Not her circling the bed to check the monitor. Not even when the nurse pressed a palm against her forehead.
Still, Natalie needed to be sure. Perhaps Margaret was so mesmerized by Liam’s extreme hotness at this close proximity she was simply ignoring the movements of the nurse altogether.
She seemed the type to expect people to wait on her in the background while she remained undisturbed. Waitstaff. Hospital staff.
“Margaret,” Natalie began, standing and moving closer to the bed.
She reached out and placed one proprietary hand on Liam’s shoulder. A signal to the patient currently clutching Liam’s hand that her boyfriend was on loan only.
“Have you seen anything strange here in the hospital at all since you arrived?”
Margaret frowned through the tears. “No.”
Natalie realized she might need to define strange for Margaret. Her own level of strange had altered quite a bit in the past few years. “Hey, did you see that nurse wearing an old-timey apron and one of those little caps?” she asked, touching her own head where the cap would have rested.
The frown deepened. “No.”
“Okay.” Natalie sent Liam a glance that she hoped told him Margaret was not seeing ghosts. At least not in the hospital.
But the question remained. If it wasn’t the prior argument with Harper that had caused her heart to stop, if it was something with evil intent, what in the world—or in Hell—was it?