Chapter 11: The Night Nurse

Dock Street Hospice Supply was a cinderblock warehouse with one yellow light over its loading bay.

At four-thirty in the morning the roll door was half up.

A woman in a navy coat was dragging a duffel bag out of it.

She stopped when she saw Donovan's car.

She stopped harder when she saw me get out.

"Ms. Ferrand," she said, very softly.

She had sat at my father's bedside through the nights of his last month.

She had brought me tea.

I had never learned her name, only the two initials on her badge.

"R.T.," I said.

"I was going to call you."

"With a bus ticket in your pocket?"

Her mouth worked.

Noreen came around the car with her thermos and stood on the nurse's left.

The heavy man with the gold watch stepped out of a second sedan and stood on her right.

He was the table's witness, as the rule demanded.

Donovan stayed back at the car, with his hands in his coat, and let me walk up alone.

"I want to hear it from you," I said. "All of it. Right here."

"I can't."

"My father was dying anyway. Is that what you tell yourself?"

"He was." She said it fast, as though she had practiced.

"Eight weeks, the doctor said. Six. I didn't hurt him, I swear to you. I made him comfortable."

"Who paid you?"

Her eyes jumped to the heavy man, and then to the duffel bag at her feet.

I crouched and unzipped it.

Empty glass vials, dozens of them, cushioned in newspaper.

Each had a pharmacy sticker, and each sticker said Ferrand.

"Forty thousand dollars," the nurse whispered. "In an envelope. A man came to my house in June.

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