The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [44]
For that matter, maybe Doris should be complimented.
She went at her next question obliquely. “Ellis has never mentioned your sister. Is that the aunt Rose who gave you the pendant?”
Doris’s expression was rueful. “Good sister, not so good at life. That’s what threw Ellis and me back together—they fell out once he got to be a teenager. No surprise there. She’s gone now, so I’m all he has left, and as adults we’re pretty good. But bad as I would’ve been, I wonder if I couldn’t’ve done better than Rosie, now that it’s all said and done.”
She glanced out the window and sighed. “God, what a life it’s been. I’m not really sure why I’m bothering to hang on. Scared, I guess.”
She looked back at Nancy. “Rosie drank herself to death. She took Ellis in, but she never treated him as her own, and he was real sensitive to that as he got older. He had to pretty much figure out growing up by himself, and he didn’t have very good examples to go by. I give him credit for still being alive.”
“He’s better than that,” Nancy said, finally seeing a place for her own insight. “He’s gentle and kind and thoughtful.”
Doris smiled at her. “That’s nice to hear. I think so, too. He learned it all the hard way, that’s for sure, and it cost him a lot, but he’s a good man. I realize now how smart I might have been not having that abortion.”
Nancy nodded, but the words kept rattling around inside her, taking on more complex and contradictory meaning with each lap. Maybe it was better enjoying how Ellis and his mother had finally ended up than analyzing how they’d gotten there.
In the hospital’s basement, Ellis and Ann Coleman walked down a sterile, windowless hallway clearly designed for employees only, with all the doors labeled with numbers and letters, until they came to one with nothing on it whatsoever.
Coleman slipped in her key and turned the door’s lock. “Discreet, huh? You’d never know what this one led to.”
She swung it back, and they entered a small corridor. There were three more doors leading off from it.
“That’s the dangerous one,” she said, pointing to the end. “Even I’ll admit that. The stuff they keep in there’ll kill you before you reach the lobby. They lock it in a huge lead safe called a pig.”
She stopped at the first door. “But that’s not for us, so we don’t need to worry. The iodine treatment trash is all in here.”
As she put the key in again, he stepped back a foot.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, laughing. “I wouldn’t do this if it was dangerous. Like I said, they’ve overreacted a little. Occasional exposures like this one amount to less than if you stepped out into the sunshine. Radiation is all around us, after all.”
She opened the door to reveal a small room filled with a towering pile of thrown-together semitransparent plastic garbage bags. It looked like the very clean interior of a rental moving truck.
“Jesus,” he said softly. “How’re we gonna find it in there?”
“Simple,” Coleman answered, stepping in amid the pile and looking around. “Each bag is labeled with a date and a room number. All we have to do is find your mom’s room number and the latest date, which”—she laughed as she reached out—“should be right on top.” She turned with the small bag in her hand. “Voilà.”
“Cool,” he complimented her.
She held the bag up to the light. “If it looks like what I think it does, and it’s loose, it should have settled to the bottom. There. What’s that? What do you think?”
Ellis squinted through the cloudy density of the plastic. He could dimly make out a hint of gold sliding around, a little bigger than a dime.