Next: Untitled Collaboration Number One | Previous: Fragments
An Interlude of Murder
Drummond and Dolly stuck their heads up, wondering about all the commotion on the raceway outside their offices. Hurriedly tugging their clothes into a slightly lesser level of dishabille, they stumbled out of Drummond's office door and into a scene of frantic activity.
A crew of uniformed EMT's from the Med Center had an area cleared and a stretcher down next to a seated and very pale Prof. Clotho, who was clutching a bleeding forearm with the other hand.
One of the EMT's was reaching for the arm with one hand while the other unreeled gauze bandages from a large roll in her kit. Another had an eye flushing kit out and was gingerly instructing the professor to tilt her head back while she reached with a moist towelette to wipe off a clear, gelatinous substance from Lara's face.
"Lara!" Dolly cried, breaking free of Drummond's frantic grab and lunging to the professor's side.
"Ma'am, you'll have to clear away from the patient," the heavier EMT said briskly.
"It's OK," came Pru Mills's voice in overriding command mode as the Nursing Chief shouldered her way through the crowd. "She can help soothe the patient while you guys work." Pru Mills gestured to Dolly, who knelt behind Clotho and told her to relax against her small but sturdy frame. "Mitchell," the head nurse said, "Can you do something about clearing away this crowd?"
"Sure," Drummond said, nodding numbly. He gulped and looked one more time at Lara, wondering what the hell had hit her. Then the responsibility hit him, (as Pru Mills had doubtless intended), and in hitting him helped stabilize him.
"OK, folks. To coin a cliché, the show's over. Everybody back to work."
Almost everybody obeyed right away and drifted off at varying rates of speed. In short order there were only a few standees who apparently felt they were privileged characters. Drummond knew he'd have to sort out the malingerers and the self-important from the true PC's.
He did a quick scan of the dozen or so people standing on the raceway and started moving toward them, taking elbows and shoulders and ushering those who--in his judgment--didn't need to be there. One of those was Callisto Dolly, who shook off his grasp and gave him a dangerous scowl.
Judging that she could make more of a scene than it was worth to have to deal with if she were thwarted, he let her stay, tapping Terry on the shoulder and indicating the young Enforcer with a subtle nod. Terry accepted the tacit request to keep an eye on the dolly with an equally subtle touch of a forefinger to the side of her nose.
That done, Drummond took up a position out of the way but handy to be able to divert any potential interruptions or further disturbances.
He tucked in his shirt and fastened his belt while he was waiting and noted that Dolly looked more rumpled than was her wont and that in her rush to aid Clotho, she'd not had a chance to straighten herself out at all, and her brisk suit was all awry, the silk blouse untucked and half-open, her pants hiked down around her hips, the waistband unhooked and the fly half open, hidden by the tails of her blouse. Her hair was a red-gold cloud of flyaway tresses and her lipstick was smudged a bit. Her stocking feet, sticking out from under her butt, reminded him that the doll's shoes were under his desk and he ducked back into his office to fetch them out for her, just in case.
As he emerged from his office, he ran into Xe Doll coming up the raceway with a sheaf of papers in her hand, a pencil behind one ear, and a distracted air about her. The tall woman reached behind him to dump the papers into his in-basket and glanced at the tableaux on the tiled floor outside the office. "Gabrielle OK?" she asked, demonstrating her priorities.
"She's fine. It's Lara that's hurt."
"What happened?"
"Dunno. It just happened. I don't want to create any idle speculation, but they were wiping slime off of her, so I'd guess she was attacked by a free-moving apparition with a high PK factor and a good slime coefficient."
"Hmm." Xena nodded distractedly. "Well, tell her I asked about her," she said shortly and slouched off the way she'd come.
By which time, the EMT's had the Professor on the stretcher--protests and all--and were wheeling her toward the back elevator.
"Mitch," Lara called, "Come down and see me as soon as you can. I've got something you need to see."
At the same time, Dolly rushed up and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. "I'm going down to Medical with her. Tell Cally lunch is off. I'll have to take a rain check."
"OK," Drummond said. Things were moving too fast for him. All he could do was turn back into his office and try to get his clothing set to rights.
He almost got to his desk when he realized he had Dolly's shoes in his hand. He made it to the back lobby just as the elevator doors were closing. He held the shoes up questioningly to Dolly, who just shrugged and grinned at him. He sighed and turned back toward his office.
#
Drummond ambled into the Dean's Med Suite room with a practiced diffidence that he hoped would obviate disturbance to the woman's possibly fragile equilibrium.
The room was dark, with only the bedside lamp throwing a circle of golden light from under the green shade. With all the overhead lighting off, the officious gaiety of the medical decor was muted somewhat. The effect was warm and friendly, and he was glad to see his and Dolly's mutual friend propped up on a pile of pillows and looking little the worse for wear.
A wisp of white and green gauze encased Clotho's left forearm where the ha'nt had slashed her with a knife--(an amazing thing, that ... an apparition able to move that much weight--it almost tempted Drummond to suspect some less-than-supernatural agency in the incident). The arm was bound up in a cheerful blue cotton sling and there was an I.V. tube stuck in the vein on the back of the Dean's hand. The woman looked rather pale and wan, but she was holding up well.
Drummond stopped there in the doorway for a brief moment to take the scene in. Dolly was, typically, perched on the edge of the bed, facing the older woman, leaning in with body language that conveyed her eagerness. She was explaining something, reinforcing her points with fluid, graceful motions of her slender, long-fingered hands. Clotho sat regally.
That was the only word Drummond could come up with to describe her manner: regal. But not cold and distant, like Elizabeth, but warm and friendly, like he imagined Victoria, or whatsername, Juliana of Holland, would be. The golden glow of the table lamp threw a nimbus of light around her that shone through her titian curls and deepened the tones of her incredibly fair skin. He knew it was silly, but he couldn't see the Dean in this kind of light without being reminded--due solely to her name, he was sure, as there was no other possible connection--of the musical piece "Lara's Theme", from the old movie Doctor Zhivago. It was a piece that he considered one of his guilty pleasures, as sappy romantic light string pieces were long out of fashion and it would never do for him to admit to such a soft spot in such a cynical age.
Then she looked up and saw him and beckoned him over and the spell was broken. She was just another woman, younger than he by some few years, more than moderately attractive, but one he admired for her intelligence and scholarship more than her looks. And anyway, she was married. And then there was Dolly.
Dolly.
She knew he was there. He could see it in a subtle change to the set of her shoulders as he rounded the foot of the bed and pulled the chair up next to it. But she kept up her babbling story to Clotho. Babbling in the sense that she spoke in one continuous run-on sentence, not that what she was saying was unintelligent or incoherent. Babbling in the sense that her voice and her speech were like the sound of water running over rocks ... to his ear, a sweet and pleasant sound that soothed him soul-deep.
He sank into the chair and leaned against Dolly's leg where it hung over the edge of the bed. He threw an arm around her hips. She draped an arm across his shoulders and gave him a little squeeze.
She was relating to Clotho what they knew of Taylor Covington, the young betrothed of Lewis Beaufort, and the tragic Cheryl East.
#
The girl Cheryl was not of the local branch of the East family. Those had all died out in the war and from illness. All save Gabrielle Francesca the First, who was a spinster and never married or had children.
She had, instead, agreed to foster a cousin's daughter. Cheryl was the youngest child of one of the Newport Easts. That branch of the family had settled in the Rhode Island town long before Mrs. Astor made the place the place to be for the East Coast establishment.
(To the Easts, the Astors were nouveau riche, arrivistes, and it was said--only half in jest--that the East Coast had been named for this particular branch of the family.)
Cheryl being a younger child and a daughter at that, had prospects that were never so great that being fostered in as the heir to another branch of the family could not improve them. And so it went.
It had been quite a shock for the young debutante to go straight from her Swiss finishing school to her coming out in--of all places--Columbus, Ohio. And the family residence there was a ... a farm! Of course, all of the family residences were farms. But on this one, the scion of the line actually worked the land.
So the first thing Gabrielle Francesca had had to do was knock an overdeveloped sense of self-worth out of the girl's skull and inoculate her with that portion of reality that she, at her young age, could absorb. But she was, like most of the East women, headstrong and prideful and would not submit to anyone's bridling, so there was a constant war in the Groveport household from the moment of her arrival in 1865 to the day of her untimely end.
But there was so little of her in the annals of the family that it was wondered, sometimes, if she had ever existed. In fact, the twins had vehemently denied that she had never existed. That the headstone on the jetty was the fruit of Gabrielle Francesca's senescence, and not a grave marker for a real flesh-and-blood human being. There were certainly no photographs or paintings of her in the East family archives, and it had not been until they had found an entry in an obscure journal of Felicity Warren's that Drummond and Dolly had finally been able to believe that the girl had actually existed.
And now, Lara had found mention of her in the records of the Beauforts, and an explanation both of her untimely end and--just possibly--her expungement from the records of her own family.
It had been one of GF the First's few blind spots that she didn't think much about marriage. She wasn't unalterably opposed to it. She just never meant to marry herself, and didn't think all that much about it as a state or an institution. So when Cheryl announced that she had settled on one of her myriad beaus and meant to become his bride, it came as something of a shock to the nearly forty-year-old Gabrielle Francesca. She had just assumed that she had all the time in the world to mold this young female into a miniature version of herself, one that would devote herself to the increase of the family's fortune and, when it came time to produce an heir, would adopt one as she herself had done, or would bear one, (preferably without the inconvenience of gestation), by immaculate conception. So she saw the impending nuptials as a sign of her own failure. It was one of the very few things she had ever not succeeded at brilliantly, and it rankled her.
So here was Lara with the ultimate results in her hands of the search on which their curiosity had driven them. Dolly fairly vibrated with the intensity of her anticipation, and Drummond--for once--found himself truly affected by the excitement. As if some of Dolly's excitable temperament had rubbed off on him.
This is gonna be good, he thought.
(Continued in A Dynasty Divine and A Doll's Odyssey)
(Also continued in LZ Clotho's Murder at Besser Creek)
Next: Untitled Collaboration Number One | Previous: Fragments