Dangerous Alterations (2 page)

Margaret Louise pulled the key from the ignition, reached into the backseat for her tote bag, and dropped her keys inside. “Sort of, I reckon. Only this time she’s tryin’ to prove somethin’ about her age.”

“Her age?”

“That she’s not dead yet. I think this stuff with Rose has unsettled her a bit. Makes her realize that she’s gettin’ to be old, too.”

Tori considered her friend’s words as they set out across the parking lot on foot, their arms laden with everything from crossword books and sewing magazines to photographs and the invisible weight of the latest gossip making the rounds of Sweet Briar. Anything and everything they could think of to make Rose’s latest treatment more bearable for the elderly woman.

“Give her a chance to show you she’s changed. That she still has something to offer the library, too.”

Margaret Louise was right. Dixie Dunn might be prickly, even downright rude at times, but she adored the library just as much as Tori did. It was the one common ground, beyond sewing, that bound them together. “Okay. I’ll try.”

“Good. Now let’s find Rose—oh, there she is.” Lifting her hand into the air, Margaret Louise wiggled her fingers back and forth. “Woo-hoo, Rose, we’re here.”

“Woo-hoo? Woo-hoo?” Rose rolled her eyes skyward and blew out a frustrated exhale. “I may be shrinking, Margaret Louise, but I don’t need to be confused with one of your grandbabies, you hear?”

Tori felt the corners of her mouth lifting upward as she closed the gap between the entrance and the waiting room. Leaning forward, she planted a kiss on Rose’s cheek, the feel of the woman’s frail body transitioning her residual tension into worry. “Are you up for this today?”

“Doesn’t seem as if I have much of a choice, now does it?” Patting the empty cushion beside her, Rose met Tori’s smile with one that trembled ever so slightly. “I’m glad you’re here, Victoria.”

Surprised by the rare admission, Tori settled into the seat beside Rose, noting the colorful flower arrangements and inspirational wall hangings around the room. “I like the pictures with the little sayings. Helps with the positive thoughts, you know?”

“If you’re fit enough to climb a mountain or to sail around the world, I suppose they do,” Rose mumbled. “But if you’re here, you’re probably not.”

Tori studied her friend closely, the woman’s downtrodden demeanor catching her by surprise. “You’re climbing a mountain right now, Rose. Everyone in this room is. And you’ll get to the top. Soon.”

“You want to know what the worst part of being here is?”

“What’s that?”

“It makes me feel old. And weak.”

Tori reached for Rose’s hand and patted it gently. “You’re one of the strongest women I know, Rose Winters, you really are. And remember … the nurse said it’ll only take a few hours. The same goes for everyone else in here.”

Rose pulled the flaps of her cotton sweater close. “I’m not sure some of these folks can
spare
a few hours.”

Following the path made by Rose’s bony finger, Tori turned toward the opposite end of the waiting room, her gaze falling on a woman in her mid-to-late fifties with a bandana wrapped around her head and a small pillow on her lap. Any trials the woman had endured were overshadowed by the determination that lit her eyes.

“I don’t understand. She looks like she’s been through a lot but she doesn’t look like she’s about to—”

“Not her, Victoria,” Rose hissed. “
Her
.”

Anxious to appease her friend, Tori pulled her focus from the cancer patient and trained it, instead, on the gray-haired woman seated two chairs to the left—a woman hunched at the waist and staring at Tori as if …

She heard the gasp of disbelief as it escaped her lips, felt Margaret Louise’s hand on her arm and Rose’s breath on her cheek as her gasp was echoed from the other side of the room—a gasp that brought the hospital staff running.

She knew they were staring. She could feel it as surely as Rose could feel the nurse rooting around her hand for a vein. But like her elderly friend, Tori said nothing.

The fact that Rose’s silence came from courage and hers came from utter disbelief was something that needed to be addressed. Especially in light of the worry she could see tucked around the edges of Rose’s bravery.

“Finally,” Tori mumbled as the nurse declared victory over Rose’s vein. “For a moment there I thought she’d become a human pincushion.”

The nurse nodded a smile and then reached for the drip pole that stood poised and ready to administer relief to Rose’s arthritis-ravaged limbs. “It happens sometimes. Especially for our elderly.” Hannah—as her name tag stated—opened Rose’s line and then gave her a gentle pat. “This’ll take about two or three hours. If you need anything, press the button right next to you.”

“Thank you, Hannah, but I’ll be fine. I have some angels with me today … even if one of them looks as if she’s seen a ghost.”

Tori swallowed.

Hannah’s hand moved to Tori’s upper arm. “Ms. Calder has been sick for quite some time. Weak heart.”

Tori closed her eyes and willed her breathing to steady.

“Would you like to talk to one of our chaplains? I know that watching someone go into cardiac arrest like that can be upsetting. Even if it’s a stranger.”

“But she wasn’t a—” She stopped and opened her eyes, the nurse’s kind face coming into focus once again. “I’ll be fine. Really. Margaret Louise and I will look after Rose.”

“If you’re sure …”

“She’s sure.” Slowly, Rose lifted her hand and pointed down at the bag by her feet. “Victoria? Can you hand that to me?”

“Of course.” She leaned over, scooped the lavender bag from the tiled floor, and handed it to Rose. “Do you need something?”

Rose reached into the bag and extracted a small notebook and pen from inside. Holding it toward Hannah, she gestured her chin toward the woman with the bandana. “Would you give this to Lynn over there? She said she’d jot down the directions for her pillow for me today. Might get her mind off things.”

“I don’t know, Rose,” Margaret Louise protested. “She looks like she’s sleeping to me. Besides, I think she might have known that woman out in the waitin’ room based on the things she was sayin’ to the nurses as we were bein’ ushered out of the way.”

Tori followed Margaret Louise’s gaze to the woman now reclined in a cubicle directly across from theirs. Try as she could, she couldn’t place the woman’s face from any photograph she’d ever seen or any party she’d ever attended …

“Nonsense. She’s resting her eyes is all. Besides, life goes on and she—more than anyone else—realizes how important it is to keep on living.”

“She has some sort of cancer, doesn’t she?” Tori asked.

Rose nodded. “Breast cancer.”

Silence engulfed them as they peered, once again, at the woman seated across from them, a pale pink pillow nestled between her arm and her chest. Finally, Margaret Louise spoke, her normally strong voice somewhat muted. “That pillow helps her, don’t it?”

Again, Rose nodded.

“Is that something we can make in our circle?” Tori asked, the reason behind Rose’s notepad and pen becoming clear. It was, after all, one of her favorite parts of the Sweet Briar Ladies Society Sewing Circle.

Rose watched Hannah cross the open space between the cubicles and set the notepad and pen beside Lynn’s chair. “I’ll answer that
after
you tell us what went on out there in the waiting room just now.”

She gulped. “You mean the part about the woman going into cardiac arrest in front of us?”

“No. She means the part about you darn near hyperventilatin’ when you saw that woman,” Margaret Louise offered from her spot on the patient recliner in the empty cubicle directly next to Rose’s. “And the part about that woman hyperventilatin’ herself into bein’ admitted when she saw you.”

A chill shot down her spine. “You don’t think Vera—I mean … you can’t seriously think seeing
me
caused
that
, can you?”

Rose’s eyes, illuminated to nearly twice their size behind bifocal lenses, bore into Tori’s. “
Vera?
”

“I knew it! I knew it! I told you she knew her, didn’t I?”

Ignoring the woman to her right, Rose simply waited for Tori to come clean.

She toyed with the notion of waiting Rose out, hoping against hope that the medicine dripping into the woman’s too-thin arm might lull her friend off to sleep. But even if, by some miracle it did, she’d still have the woman on the other side of Rose to contend with.

And Margaret Louise didn’t give up.

Ever.

Not that Rose did, either.

“So tell me about your friend’s pillow.”

“No,” Rose and Margaret Louise echoed in unison.

Surrounded on all sides, Tori lifted her hands into the air in surrender. “Okay. Okay. Yes. I know her.”

Rose rolled her eyes. “We may be old, but dumb we’re not.”

“Good thing my twin isn’t here. She’d protest that statement.”

“If Leona was here, Margaret Louise, I’d have left off the part at the end.”

It felt good to laugh. It helped to relieve some of the tension that had started with Dixie and grown exponentially at the sight of Vera Calder.

“So how do you know her?” Margaret Louise prodded.

Tori glanced up at the IV bag hanging from Rose’s pole and took a long, deep breath. “Would you believe she’s Jeff’s great-aunt?”

“Jeff?” Margaret Louise pushed the green button on the side of her chair and reclined as far as she could go, a look of contentment settling across her face. “Jeff who?”

With her gaze locked on Tori, Rose offered the clarification Tori wasn’t up for giving. “Victoria’s former fiancé.”

Ignoring the button that would reverse her original decision, Margaret Louise bolted upright, the afghan she’d secured around her body falling to the floor. “You mean the one who was tomcattin’ around on you while your family was toastin’ your engagement in the next room?”

In an instant, Tori was back, standing in the hall her family had rented to celebrate her upcoming nuptials. She could still hear her cousins laughing … her grandfather’s stories … the songs her brother had compiled as a sort of musical time line of her relationship with Jeff.

And, of course, her friend’s giggle from a nearby closet as Jeff—

Closing her eyes against the memory, she forced a carefree smile to her lips. “One and the same.”

“You never told us she lived in Sweet Briar,” Margaret Louise accused.

“That’s because I didn’t know she—”

“She doesn’t live in Sweet Briar. She lives in Lee Station.”

Tori’s head snapped up as Lynn reached forward and grabbed a white Styrofoam cup from the snack table beside her chair. “Lee Station? You mean the Lee Station that’s five miles south of here?”

“That’s right. It’s the summer home she had with Garrett’s dad, the one she moved into permanently after her husband passed away about two years ago.” Lynn took a sip of her water then set it back down.

Garrett.

Tori remembered that name.

“Who’s Garrett?” Margaret Louise inquired.

“My soon-to-be ex. And Vera’s—”

“Stepson.” The relationship rolled off Tori’s tongue with barely a pause, bringing Margaret Louise’s attention squarely back on Tori.

“You know this Garrett person, Victoria?”

“I met him. Once.” She heard her voice morphing into a mumble but she couldn’t help herself. Painful memories were painful memories no matter how much time had passed.

“Yes you did,” Lynn confirmed. “At your engagement party.”

Rose waved away Lynn’s statement. “They broke it off.”

“I remember.” Lynn tucked her pillow close to her chest and released a soft cough, a grimace of pain marring her otherwise pleasant features. “And I’d have sent my condolences only we’d never met and, well, Vera wouldn’t have been too pleased with me if I had. But I knew you were better off. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in that family.”

“Is that why this woman’s stepson is your
ex
?”

“My wish-to-be-ex, actually.” With her gaze still trained on Tori, Lynn addressed Margaret Louise’s inquiry with a wry, yet tired, smirk. “Every day I sent him off to work to count pills, believing he was tired at night from standing on his feet dealing with sick and cranky people all day long. But I was wrong about him just like
she
”—Lynn lifted her needle-pierced hand off the armrest and pointed in Tori’s direction—“was wrong about Jeff.”

Margaret Louise made a face. “He was cheatin’ with one of your friends, too?”

Lynn shrugged. “Was, is, it’s all the same. She’s one of his little pharmacy techs. Young, pretty … you know the drill.”

“Then why not make it official and give him the old heave-ho like he deserves?” Margaret Louise retrieved the afghan from the floor and tossed it over Rose.

“Because Garrett’s money management skills leave much to be desired and without money and his health insurance, I’m kind of trapped.” Lynn looked down at the clear, narrow tube that penetrated her leathery skin. “It’s either stay or die.”

“I’m sorry.” And Tori was. She hated to hear of people struggling financially. Especially when they were sick. It seemed overly cruel. “But I see you’ve managed to accomplish something I couldn’t.”

“What’s that?” Lynn asked.

“Your tension with Garrett didn’t put you on Vera’s Most Hated List the way my breakup with Jeff did.”

Lynn nodded, a knowing smile twitching at the corners of her lips. “You know the reason for that as well as I do.”

“What’s that?” Margaret Louise inquired as curiosity pulled her left eyebrow upward. “What are you leavin’ out, Victoria?”

She shrugged. “Nothing really. Except that Jeff could do no wrong in his great-aunt’s eyes.”

“Not even carryin’ on with another woman durin’ his own engagement party?”