The Missing Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Handoff

Gwen hands his care to the hospitalist because she keeps looking for him, and the detective says a man with a Swiss crown and Florentine shoes does not sleep in a chapel.

By the fourth day I had caught myself doing it three times.

I looked at the clock at six, at nine, and at noon, and each time I was wondering whether he had eaten.

That was when I stopped pretending my rounds on him were routine. I read his neuro checks twice and signed them, and I did not need to read them at all. He was my patient and I was his attending, and every morning I was the first face he saw. I knew exactly what that made me. I was the one person in the building with a say over his chart, his bed, and his discharge. He did not know his own name, and he looked at me like a fixed point on a map. I wanted him anyway. I had stopped lying to myself about it somewhere between the third check and the fourth.

Bev was waiting at the desk with her arms folded.

"Administrator's been in again," she said.

"He wants the bed by Wednesday."

"Can he have it?"

"Not unless he wants to read about it in the paper."

She leaned in.

"I've been looking at the free-care log.

That's the fund the Everhart Foundation pays into so we can treat people with no insurance.

Gwen, it hasn't paid a dime since summer."

"That can't be right.

They fund the whole thing."

"The binder says what it says.

I put the invoices in myself.

Somebody stopped paying."

I frowned.

"Is that why he's pushing so hard?"

"Maybe.

It's why I'm pushing back."

She stuck her chin out.

"Two more days, observation status.

I already wrote it."

I wanted to hug her.

Instead I said, "You're a menace."

"I'm a charge nurse," she said.

I found him at three in the morning in the old wing.

He was standing in front of the broken vending machine with his cast tucked against his chest.

He was in the gray scrubs.

His hair had begun to grow back in, a soft dark gold against his scalp.

"It ate a dollar," he said without turning around.

"I borrowed the dollar from the chaplain.

I'm now in debt to a man of the cloth for crackers."

"Move."

I put my shoulder against the machine and hit it under the coin slot with the heel of my hand.

A packet of peanut butter crackers fell into the tray.

He stared at it.

"That is the most impressive thing anyone has done in front of me."

"You've been awake four days."

"Five, if I count the one before."

He handed me half the crackers and sat down on the floor with his back against the wall.

I sat beside him.

It was quiet in the way hospitals are at three, a long hum with nothing under it.

"You skipped my noon checks," he said.

"A man came in with a tractor on his leg."

"I know.

I asked the nurse.

I was only checking that you were alive."

"That's my line."

"I'll write you a note for it."

He turned his face toward me in the dim light.

"Gwen, you look at me when you think I'm not looking."

My mouth went dry.

"You're my patient," I said.

"I know exactly what I am.

I'm a man who borrows crackers.

You're the one with the pen."

"That's not an answer."

"It isn't."

"I like not being managed.

I like it very much when you don't manage me."

His shoulder was against mine.

It was warm through the thin gray cotton, and neither of us moved it.

"I think I'm the kind of person who likes things said out loud," he said.

"I don't know that.

I just notice that I do."

"What else do you notice?"

"That I hate rain."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

He smiled, a little crookedly.

"I'm collecting them like stamps.

You're the best one so far."

We both laughed, and it turned quiet, and his eyes dropped to my mouth.

Then my pager went off.

It was Bev.

"There's a detective here for your boy," she said.

"He wants you in the conference room."

The detective was a heavyset man in a rumpled raincoat, and he had a folder in front of him on the table.

Micah sat across from him with his good hand flat on the wood.

I took the chair beside him and he glanced at me, once, and looked away.

"Mr. Doe, we ran your prints this morning," the detective said.

"You gave us permission, and I appreciate that."

"I'd like to know who I am," Micah said.

"So would I.

You're not in any database we have.

Not arrests, not military, not a government job, not a license.

It's as if nobody ever printed you."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

The detective opened the folder.

Inside were three photographs.

One was of a tooth.

One was of a shoe.

One was of the pale band of skin on Micah's left wrist.

"Your dentist," he said to Micah, "put a crown in your back molar, and it's Swiss.

The dental work cost more than my car.

Those shoes are hand-lasted in Florence and run about two thousand dollars.

And that mark on your wrist is where a very heavy watch sat for years."

He closed the folder.

"I've worked this city twenty-two years, Mr. Doe.

A man like you doesn't end up in an emergency room with nothing in his pockets by accident."

Micah went very still.

"Then who am I supposed to be?" he said.

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