Read an Excerpt
Robak in Black
By Joe L. Hensley St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Joe L. Hensley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7704-7
CHAPTER 1
(NOVEMBER)
In the Beginning
Jo became ill just before Thanksgiving. That happened during my fifth year of being Mojeff County circuit judge.
We were recently moved into our new home with its Ohio River view, getting adjusted, liking it. The summer before we'd moved had been the best time for us since an early two weeks of honeymoon time in a beach motel at Grand Cayman years before.
We'd taken son Joe and wandered Canada in July, mostly sightseeing, impressed by the big, clean cities of our northern neighbor. We didn't drive far or fast on any day and most late afternoons found us in a motel with an indoor pool for swimming-fanatic Joe. We were well enough off financially for him to have his own motel room while we had ours.
I'd allowed my life to appreciably slow during that vacation. When I returned to work I didn't rush back into a heavy trial schedule. Instead I concentrated on keeping up with routine court matters, doing the things that a judge seeking reelection next year needed to do, dissolutions, estate work, the things that kept my local bar happy and the docket up-to-date.
Jo, on our return, went back to her own routine, that being good golf, lots of ladies' bridge luncheons, and evening parties, the last with both of us invited. Plus she was president of the library board and held memberships in half a dozen other local organizations.
She was bursting with health, strong and vibrant, a stunning woman.
We were into the small-town life of Bington, Indiana.
I knew I loved her and believed she loved me.
I'd decided during vacation that being a judge was something you could do either full-out, as a few judges did, or at the lower speed most of the trial judiciary seemed to favor. I settled back at three-quarters ahead. I kept up religiously with the routine and, now and then, when an interesting case came along, I pursued it.
I'd had times in my life when all I had enough hours for was work. I found I didn't want to move at that pace anymore.
Jo liked the schedule. It made extra time for both the two of us and the three of us.
Then she became ill.
In its first hours Jo's illness seemed to be a cold or some kind of hard flu. First there was high fever. Then there were bad aches and strong pains. The sickness mutated and became a raging heat bomb. It colored her usually fair skin red, reflecting the fire inside her. It was accompanied by severe muscle pains. Her blood pressure jumped high, then skidded low, and she went in and out of consciousness.
All I could do after we arrived at the hospital was sit by her in an isolation room and hold her hand. The doctors didn't want me to do that, but I pointed out that I'd been with her when she became sick and had stayed with her at all times after. I also told them that our son had been exposed to her for he had been in our bedroom the night before discussing his high school adventures with us.
The disease both puzzled and alarmed my medical friend Dr. Hugo S. Buckner.
"What's happened to her, Robak? You and your son haven't caught it yet and so maybe something toxic she ate or drank or breathed made this happen. Think, Robak."
I thought hard and told him all I knew. I did my best to answer his questions. Where had we been in Canada? Well, mostly Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec, but that had been four months back. Did I know any place where Jo might have been recently exposed to any sickness, even someone's bad cold? What exactly had we been doing the past two weeks? Had she cooked and eaten any locally caught fish? Could she have gone swimming in the Ohio River or eaten fish taken from any other area river, creek, or lake? Had we purchased our vegetables and fruits from roadside stores? What canned foods had we eaten? Had she toured the local Macing Drug Company at its fall open house?
I had to ask others about the last question because it set off a small alarm inside me, but I soon found she'd not done the tour.
I remembered nothing that helped Buckner. I tried hard because I knew he hated sickness and death far worse than any sin.
I recited her schedule. There was nothing important or out of routine. Some parties, most recently an annual golf banquet at the end of the season. Jo had collected two trophies. Who had been there? Other golfers, a large crowd of them. And before that banquet there'd been lots of bridge with various groups. Some civic and club meetings including her library board meeting.
Questions, answers, frowns. Nothing appeared to be suspicious.
And yet I was suspicious.
All this was happening as Jo's life burned away in high fever.
I told Buckner I'd awakened early the first morning of her sickness. Outside I'd heard a cold rain scrubbing more of the autumn leaves out of the trees.
The night before, a Tuesday, we'd each had two small glasses of merlot at the crowded country club bar, then gone through a dinner buffet table with perhaps a hundred others, both of us drinking iced tea with the meal and eating sparingly. We'd gone home after the golf ceremony, talked at length with our son, Joe, about his excellent report cards and his piano playing and the perils of being a high school sophomore infatuated with three or four girls.
We'd then turned down the furnace, kissed as chastely as we could manage, and switched off the bedroom light.
* * *
"It's hot," Jo complained beside me in the early morning. She wasn't talking to me, but instead dazedly explaining her problems to the room around her. She looked up at the ceiling, breathing quickly, and eventually sensed me lying next to her.
She said: "My ears are ringing like church bells, Don. I feel ghastly."
She arose looking as if she'd had far too much to drink the night before. She walked into the bathroom, showered a few moments, and came back to stand beside our bed.
"I've got a sick something that's built a blaze inside me," she said. "I took my temperature before I had my shower and it was over a hundred and three. I hope you and Joe don't catch this bummer. It hurts inside my head and stomach and my throat is raw. I feel bad all over, outside and inside."
I looked her over. Her face was flame-red, her fine hair lay wet and lank from her abbreviated shower. Her eyes were dull red and lost in their sockets. She was unlovely, something hard for her to be.
"Tell me what you'd like me to do, Jo. Like, I maybe could call Doc Buckner to come to the house or we could meet him at his office. If you feel you need treatment right now I could drive you to the hospital emergency room. We could probably meet Buckner there. You decide."
She looked down at me. Her hands were crimson and her lips were only slightly more red than her fevered face. She shivered with the beginning of a chill.
"I guess the emergency room." Her voice held something in it I'd never heard before. She was afraid.
She normally shunned doctors and hospitals.
I became afraid also.
I woke son Joe and told him where we were going and why.
"Should I go along?"
I didn't think he wanted to go, but he was willing if I wanted him to or thought his mother needed him there.
"It only needs one of us to get her there and you've got basketball practice after school today. Isn't it the last practice before Thanksgiving vacation? I'll call our voice-mail number after the emergency room doctor sees her and let you know what's going on. Check the phone for a message when you get home. It's probably just a virus or maybe one of the hot Asian influenzas that have been around this fall. I mean, the kind people can't seem to easily get over." I tried to make my voice sound more confident than I felt.
I helped Jo out to my eight-year-old Ford, holding tight to her arm, leading her through the rain. The last of Indian summer was gone and another unpredictable Indiana winter was soon to come. It had turned cold early, then warm, then cold again. The leaves were nearly all down. I could look down our denuded hill and see the Ohio River at pool stage. The brown, sparse lawn bore ruts, smelled dead, and I thought we might have to reseed in the spring.
Jo's almost new Olds was parked in the pull-off spot in the asphalt driveway. There was a basketball hoop above the open door of our two-car garage. We parked both cars away from that door to make room so that son Joe and his boisterous rooster pals could drive under the basket and whoop all the way into the empty garage.
I drove Jo to the hospital emergency room. Soon Doc Buckner was present as were lots of nurses and other doctors moving here and there, fast.
It got worse. Jo's temperature continued to climb.
They put her into isolation and covered her body with tubes and needles. They gave her shots and pills. She slept fitfully. Soon she didn't recognize me even though I thought her eyes sometimes saw, followed, and then discarded what she saw.
The doctors watched and talked softly among themselves. Son Joe and I waited. They rolled her in and out of rooms and placed her under complicated machines. They took X rays and CAT scans. They put her in ice baths.
There was a time on the second night when Buckner thought they'd lost her, but they got her back. Her heart stopped for a long moment and then was started again. They talked about a ventilator, but then decided against it.
Had she died that second night I believe I would have questioned the undiscovered cause, but not vigorously. A virus. A new Ohio River influenza. A dark, weird something coming at my Jo from out of the changing disease world, scythe in its bloody hand. We humans have managed to dirty the world around us and now medical things are uncertain and changing because of it.
Instead she lived. She lived after a fashion and in a different way, wounded deeply, but still alive. She was young. She was strong.
She lived.
During this time Joe and I were spending most of our time pacing and worrying in the private contagion waiting room located near Jo's isolation unit. I'd ordered Joe away, but he hadn't followed my orders. Because he'd also been exposed to whatever Jo had Doc Buckner had taken his side. We'd all then smiled at one another, allies.
For days we saw few people other than doctors and nurses. The medical people who visited our room wore masks, latex gloves, and white gowns. Friends coming to the hospital to visit Jo were turned away, not allowed to see any of us. Flowers arrived and were kept in the hall or placed in other rooms in the hospital. There were dozens of get-well cards and letters. They were left unread and unanswered although later we did politely answer all.
"What is it, Pop?" Joe kept asking me, at times teary-eyed. "What's got Mom?"
I knew nothing to tell him.
For a long time no one would even guess for us what was wrong, not Doc Buckner, not the other doctors who were helping, not the lab people.
Buckner said softly that he thought it might have been some allergic reaction, but then withdrew that answer. He also mentioned our huge local drug company, Macing Drugs, with the thought that something there might have "escaped." If it was that way it had only escaped to attack Jo.
"Don't hold me to anything," Doc said. "There are some alarming allergies I've read about in the medical journals and Jo's symptoms resemble some of what I read. And there's some high-powered stuff they work on at Macing Drugs. Lots of locals work there."
Whatever it was, Jo was sick. Lots of people get sick. Lots of times the sickness is communicable. We found out that what Jo had wasn't readily communicable.
Flu, crazy new viruses, pneumonia ...
New ways for people to die.
Guesses.
I kept wondering if there was anything I could have done to prevent the circus that was now occurring around Jo, Joe, and me. I went over and over things, remembering small details.
Nothing useful came to me.
I got two lawyers from my old law firm to send a letter threatening to sue the country club for Jo in a kind of res ipsa loquitor suit. They obtained a list of guests for that golf banquet night. I studied the list and tried to remember if anyone had been there who wasn't on it. They also got a list of employees who worked at the club that night, but that didn't lead to much, either.
Libbie Macing, from the drug company, was on the guest list. She and Jo might be enemies because of me, but that feud was inactive and now twenty-plus years old. Now they played golf and cards together. They weren't close friends, but they weren't enemies, either.
Joe and I tried to get used to the sour smell of Jo's sickness. At first I wore the mask they gave me and Joe wore his. Soon neither of us wore masks, but instead dabbed Vicks near our noses.
The smell became ever present in our clothes.
They packed Jo in ice half a dozen times.
Buckner shook his head when I asked about that.
"The fever inside is trying to cook her, Don. Her brain can only stand so much heat. Her temperature has to come down. We're treating her symptoms, not having identified her disease."
Eventually the fever did come down. Some. Then more. Then it returned to almost normal.
Judges pro tem ran the business of the court and the superior court accepted all new criminal charges. Civil cases and hearings awaited my return for trial dates.
Joe and I ate the hospital food that was delivered to us or carried in by us to our solitary waiting room. It soon mixed with Jo's room's smells and made us nauseous. We had our clothes cleaned and we showered at home, but the smell was ever present when we entered Jo's room.
Hooded, gowned, and gloved doctors and nurses watched us, waiting for us to become ill, asking us questions about how we felt, taking our vital signs. Then they told us we didn't need to wear the masks and the gowns. They muttered things about past incubation periods (I asked for what diseases).
They still wore sterile uniforms.
We remained well.
A wet, heavy snow fell outside on the tenth of December. It became icy and the snow froze and more fell on top of it. Winter came in dead earnest.
On the twenty-second hospital day Buckner said to Joe and me: "She seems stabilized. The fever's gone and has been gone for five days. She'll likely live, but she'll never be the same as she was. I'm sorry about that. We'll just have to wait and hope about how much she can come back from the state she's in now. For at least the near future, after she's finally released from the hospital, she'll need a lot of assistance."
"She sees me and Pop in her room and sometimes she smiles up at us," Joe said. "She tries to talk."
"My guess is that part of her brain still recognizes you. Has she said anything to either of you?"
"No," I said.
He knew that. Why was he asking it again?
"We'll try to locate a place for her," Buckner said. "You two can't take care of her without at least semiskilled help. She's incontinent, for one thing." He shook his head and I saw he had tears in his eyes. "No way."
"What did she have? Tell me what it was?" I asked for the hundredth time.
"I'm not sure. We took blood and urine and did tests. We sent specimens off to various labs. We've found nothing in our hospital lab reports that explained her problems and we've heard nothing yet from any other lab. We may find out something and may find nothing. What I'm saying again is that our lab tests were puzzling and didn't pick up anything definitive we could blame for the onset of the high fever. It might have been an allergy to something unknown. It also may have been some new virus or a new Ohio River variation of an old virus. Her white count was almost nil. It also could have been some very nasty kind of influenza or something poisonous to Jo we've never encountered before."
"But we didn't catch it," Joe said.
Buckner shook his head. "I was surprised."
I asked him other questions privately. He escorted me to the hospital lab and stood by silently as I asked more questions of the technicians there.
What did the tests done in the hospital show?
White blood cells depleted plus other indications of a massive illness.
What was the cause?
Unknown.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Robak in Black by Joe L. Hensley. Copyright © 2001 Joe L. Hensley. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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