Make Quilts Not War - By Arlene Sachitano Page 0,46
is that it’s not Carla’s fault.”
“Excuse me for caring about my friend.”
“Why are you here, anyway? What’s wrong with your arm?” As if he had only just noticed she was lying on a gurney with her arm wrapped in ice packs.
“You need to wait outside, sir,” a dark-haired nurse said as she came through the curtained entrance to the cubicle. She gently tried to guide Aiden out. He pulled his arm away from her grasp.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me what happened to Ms. Truman.” He returned to her bedside. “Are you okay?”
Harriet felt a flutter in her stomach in spite of her pain as his ice-blue eyes searched her face.
“Are you family?” The nurse raised one eyebrow, and she kept her gaze on him as she checked her patient’s pulse. Finally, she looked at her watch.
“What happened?” Aiden asked.
“I had an accident,” Harriet finally said. “Not that it’s any of your concern.”
He started to protest, but a different nurse stuck her head into Harriet’s space.
“There you are, Dr. Jalbert. Your sister is asking for you.”
He hesitated, resting his hand on Harriet’s leg.
“I’m fine, really,” she said. “You better go, your sister needs you.”
A muscle in Aiden’s jaw twitched. He hesitated, looked at Harriet, then turned and followed his sister’s nurse.
Harriet’s nurse reached into a cabinet and pulled out two white paper-covered packages. She set one down and opened the other, revealing a sterile syringe.
“This will be a little pinch,” she said.
“My arm is on fire. Do you really think I’m going to feel your needle?”
“I suppose not, but it’s what they teach us to say. It seems like a better thing to say than ‘I know you’re in pain, but let me add a little more,’ don’t you think?”
“I guess,” Harriet said and only then realized the nurse had efficiently drawn two syringes of blood while she was talking.
“These will go to the lab just to be sure there wasn’t anything nasty in whatever was splashed on your arm. They’ll check to see if you absorbed anything into your bloodstream.”
“We recovered enough liquid from the bottle to test,” Detective Morse said as she came through the curtain.
“Great, so I didn’t need the blood test?”
“I’m sure they need to test your blood in any case, but we sent the bottle and liquid to the forensic lab for analysis.”
“I suppose you’re going to yell at me for being involved in yet another crime,” Harriet said and leaned her head back on her pillow.
“Actually, no. From all accounts, you were an innocent victim in this little drama. And the perp seems pretty upset that she got you and not whoever she intended to attack. Given the rather specific location, and the events of the last few days, I’m going to assume Jenny was her intended target.”
“Did she say she was trying to hit Jenny?” Harriet asked.
“She’s talked nonstop since we took her into custody, but none of it makes sense. She hasn’t mentioned Jenny by name, but it’s clear she was the target. I talked to the nurse who helped you and her daughter, but now I’d like to hear what you saw.”
Harriet described the blue-suited woman and the sequence of events that led to her being burned.
“Did you see or hear anything else that might shed some light on this incident?”
Harriet thought about Bobby and the story he’d told her but then rejected the idea of telling Morse before she’d had a chance to talk to Jenny. She should be the one to tell Morse about her brother, if she thought it was relevant, not Harriet.
“There was an incident of bleach being thrown on a show quilt a few years ago in Houston,” Harriet said. “It turned out to be a case of a sore loser in a civil lawsuit. Maybe this is something like that.”
“Maybe, but that would imply a relationship between Jenny and the perp.”
“Unless the woman got the wrong quilt altogether. Everyone involved in this show is in costume. Lots of people are wearing Afro wigs and big sunglasses with granny dresses.”
“Hopefully, the woman will calm down and tell us what this is all about. She wasn’t carrying any ID, so we don’t know who she is or why she might have done this. So far, she’s yelling something about her father. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Not at all. I’ve never seen that woman before in my life.”
A tall man in green scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck came into the curtained room.