“Oh, Mr. MacDougal, it’s all my fault. Oh, God, Mrs. Bartlett is gone and it’s my fault.”
I pulled out my firm, very matter-of-fact voice that sometimes worked to calm things down. “Let’s go someplace quiet, Mrs. Himmel. I need your help.” I followed her to the nurses’ lounge. There were two nurses inside, drinking coffee. I heard one of them say, “People said that she’d tried to kill herself. Well, now she just left to do it right this time.”
The other nurse jumped to her feet when she saw me. “Oh, Mr. MacDougal.”
“Excuse us, please. Mrs. Himmel and I need to be alone for a moment.”
The nurses were out of there in under two seconds. I led Mrs. Himmel to an old brown vinyl sofa that had seen better days maybe three decades ago. “Tell me what happened,” I said, sitting down beside her.
She drew a deep breath, her fingers curling into a fist. I saw that she was a strong woman. Her biceps rippled as she clenched and unclenched her hands. She was regaining some healthy color, thank God. “Mrs. Bartlett was very quiet,” she said finally. “I just thought she had a lot on her mind, and no wonder. I’ve heard a lot of the stuff that’s been going on, so many questions, so much that people wanted her to tell them. I heard her say today that everything from that night was blurry. Well, I suppose that’s possible, but I really don’t think so.
“Oh damn, let me just get it off my chest. It is all my fault. If I hadn’t eaten shrimp for dinner, I would have been at my station just down from Mrs. Bartlett’s room or actually with her in her room, tending her, and nothing would have happened!”
“Shrimp?” I must have blinked because she leaned over and patted my hand. She was in control again. “How could you possibly know? I’ve had a bad reaction to shrimp in the past, but it looked so good that I wanted to eat just a little bit. Well, I did and it hit me really hard. I was in the bathroom most of the time, sicker than Mr. Peete down the hall who just had a chemo session. Because I wasn’t at my post, Mrs. Bartlett could have just walked out with no one stopping her or asking her questions, probably with no one even noticing her. And of course she had her own clothes. Dr. Bartlett brought her a suitcase this afternoon. She’d been fretting about it, you know, so he gave in and brought her the clothes she wanted.”
Paul could describe what Jilly was wearing.
“When we walked in here just a few minutes ago, I heard Brenda Flack, one of the ICU nurses, talking about Mrs. Bartlett leaving to kill herself. I hate to say this, Mr. MacDougal, but it’s possible.”
“No,” I said. “Jilly told me very clearly that she lost control of her car. She didn’t try to kill herself. I believe her. Why did she walk out of here without telling anyone? I don’t know. But count on it, I’m going to find out everything. Can you think of anything that happened today or this evening that wasn’t quite right?”
“Well, there was a phone call from that young lady who was here yesterday.”
“Laura Scott?”
“Yes, that’s her. She asked to speak to Mrs. Bartlett, but there was a foul-up and she never got through to her. But why would that be important? They were friends, weren’t they?”
At three in the morning we still had exactly zilch. No one had seen Jilly. No one had seen anyone carrying her out of the hospital or carrying much of anything, for that matter. Maggie Sheffield had an APB out on her. Since we had no clue about a car, there wasn’t much to say other than to give a description of Jilly, and from Paul, a description of the clothes she was wearing, a gray running outfit with black trim and black-and-white running shoes.
I put pressure on the phone company and found out that there’d been a phone call to Jilly’s room from the single pay phone on Fifth Avenue, downtown Edgerton, at 8:48 P.M. Laura’s call had come in about eight, but she hadn’t spoken to Jilly.