An Accidental Life (41 page)

Back at the office, Peter sat at his desk staring off. Mac was right—it would be difficult to get that Chicago nurse’s testimony on record even if they found her now. The only chance he’d have was through rebuttal of the case put on by the defense, starting on Monday. The prosecution had the advantage in trial of having both the first word and the last.

Still, in order to introduce new evidence at this point, the defense would have to raise some new issue—a new issue that he could use new evidence to rebut. Just then the telephone rang. He picked it up.

“Peter?” Rebecca sounded tense, strung tight.

One hand flew to his chest and his pulse began to race. He glanced at his watch. “I can be there in fifteen minutes. Is it time?”

“No. It’s not that. But you need to come home. There’s someone here that needs to talk to you.”

Peter was silent.

“Dr. Matlock’s nurse. She’s the nurse you’ve been looking for from Chicago.”

“Alice?” Peter was stunned.

“Yes,” she said. “She came to me because she knows me. She wanted to talk to me first. But now she’s ready, Peter. She’s ready to tell you the whole story of what happened three years ago in Chicago with Charles Vicari.”

44

Peter, Rebecca, Mac, and Dooney all
watched Alice as she began, again, to tell the story. She’d been right to come to Rebecca, she realized. Rebecca had listened without interrupting when she’d told what happened that day in Chicago, and then she’d folded Alice into her arms as if she were Rebecca’s own mother. Alice had felt the warm comfort flowing from this young pregnant woman and for the first time in three years, she’d known that everything would be all right.

Now, looking at the faces around the table she also knew that she could never have done this any other way.

“It happened at New Hope Hospital in Chicago. It was three years ago, December 1979, about six o’clock in the evening. I was on duty, but I wasn’t supposed to be working with Dr. Vicari on that night,” she began. “Not on any night, actually.”

Alice Hamilton, a.k.a. Alice Braxton, had turned out to be older than Mac had imagined. He’d assumed that she was Eileen Broussard’s age, or Lucy Ringer’s. Mac studied her face, the fine, striated lines that would deepen in the next few years, the gray strands woven through her hair. But there was a grace about this woman that softened the lines, and she had good features—high cheekbones, a firm chin, a good smile. He figured Alice was in her midsixties, and she looked good for her age.

He settled back and crossed his arms as she got started. He thought her eyes were pretty; they were blue, bright and alert as she looked around at all of them. She was what he sometimes thought of as a woman of the forties, that generation of young men and women that had been through the war, so bright and ready to rebuild everything back when the battles were over. During the war women like Alice had taken their men’s places in the factories and shipyards. They’d struggled hard through those years and when it was all over in 1945, they’d been ready to dance and laugh and have a little fun.

He glanced over at Peter, still feeling elated. Peter’s eyes were riveted to Alice while she talked. Mac smiled. He figured once Alice told her story, she’d turn this case around.

Alice’s eyes dropped to her hands which were planted firmly before her on the kitchen table. “The hospital had a policy that anyone working in obstetrics and pediatrics could abstain from working on abortions if we stated on record that our conscience prohibited that. But that night we were in a crisis mode. There’d been a horrible accident on the freeway involving an overturned tanker and explosions and fire and cars skidding into the fire.”

She hesitated and her eyes landed on Peter. “So the emergency room was a disaster zone.” He nodded that he understood. Alice was nervous he saw, but still she was able to maintain a calm, self-confident demeanor. She’d be a good witness if she had something to say.

Alice swallowed and looked at her hands again. “Dr. Vicari’s patient that night was a late termination. She was twenty-four weeks, as I recall, so he’d used induction and she was already in hard labor when Vicari found me in the hallway. Eileen Broussard, the nurse he usually worked with, wasn’t around. I’d just arrived on shift and no one was around. Everyone else was down in the emergency room, pitching in. And . . . so, Charles Vicari grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the labor room and just took for granted that I would help him.”

“Even though he knew that you were exempt?” Peter asked.

She nodded. “I’d probably have left anyway, but when I saw that young girl, I felt sorry for her.”

She pressed the back of her hand against her cheek as if she could see that room right now before her. No one said a word, and she went on, her voice turning flat. “I don’t want to go through all the details, now. Just let me say that the baby was born alive. You could see the little heart beating in her chest while the doctor clamped the cord and cut it. Then he wrapped her up in the towel and handed her straight to me.

“I stood there holding the baby, not knowing what to do. She was breathing, struggling for breath, but breathing. I knew that when live births survived an abortion on that floor they usually died within a few minutes in the operating room—”

Her eyes flicked up to Peter’s and away. “Or they were taken to the utility room off the hallway and left in a bedpan to die. Let them die a natural death; that was Vicari’s protocol. And the hospital permitted it. Looked the other way. Sometimes if a nurse had the time, she’d ask Eileen Broussard if she could hold the baby ’til it died.”

Alice lifted her head, her face contorting as she said, “Expired, was how some of the nurses would say it. Until the fetus expired.”

She stopped talking and looked off. “So I was standing there holding the newborn, and he”—she gestured with distaste—“Vicari, suddenly looked around and asked me what I was doing still standing there. He needed assistance, he said. He said to get rid of it and come right back.”

“I suppose I gave him a stupid look, because he started shouting that I was to take the fetus out of there, to get rid of it and get back in a hurry. So, I fled, holding onto the baby.” She looked up and Peter saw tears in her eyes, and her voice grew husky. Her hands tightened their grip on each other and her knuckles turned white.

“I could feel the little heart beating as I held it, and I fled and I just didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t bring the baby to that utility room, I knew that. I just could not. And I wasn’t going back into that operating room with Dr. Vicari. So I sat behind the station, holding her for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do.”

She banged both hands down on the top of table, now, looking down. Everyone was quiet, waiting for her to continue.

Seconds passed, and then a minute. Then she looked up, at Peter. “I don’t remember how long it was that I sat there, holding that newborn. A few minutes, maybe. Not long. I was afraid Dr. Vicari would come looking for me. And then without really making any kind of decision, I took her on down to the NICU, the neonatal intensive care unit.” She sat back and dropped her hands into her lap as if exhausted.

Rebecca reached over and rested her hand on Alice’s. “Tell them what happened next. Tell them everything you can remember, Alice.”

She nodded and looked back at Peter. “A friend of mine was on duty in NICU that night, another nurse. We’d been friends for a long time.” She paused.

“Lucy Ringer?” Mac asked.

She gave him a surprised look. “No. But I know Lucy. She told Nan, my friend, that you were looking for me.”

Mac nodded. “Sorry to interrupt. Go on.”

“Well, I knew Nan was on duty that night, so I went into NICU and called her over. I’d worked intensive care rotations myself many times. We both knew what to do. She called a resident on duty and we suctioned her throat and lungs, her air passages.” She looked off. “It wasn’t easy; they’re so tiny.”

Alice gave a shuddering sigh. “Then we put her in a warm incubator to get her body temperature up, and put her on a ventilator. Hooked her up to the monitors.”

She shivered, breathed in and out, and went on. “Then I started a chart for her. I wrote that I’d found her abandoned in a bathroom on the second floor, a public restroom not far from the cafeteria. When Nan went off shift she signed the chart, verifying what I’d written. All night I sat beside that little girl. And the next day I went through the paperwork with intake.”

Peter leaned forward. “She lived through the night?”

Alice looked at him. Her face lit with a smile. “She lived, Mr. Jacobs.” Her voice trembled as she spoke.

“How long?”

“She’s still alive.”

Peter stared. As Alice continued, her voice seemed to him to separate from her body and come from a long way away, disembodied, strange. “She’s adopted now,” he heard her say. He heard a name.

“Abigail. She’s three years old.” Alice smiled at him. “Her parents, the Gordys, call her Abby, I understand. I talked to them yesterday. Asked if they would testify in this trial.” She hesitated. “If you need that.”

Peter sucked in his breath, and slowly nodded.

“Good. Well.” She folded her hands on the table before her. “When they heard it was Charles Vicari on trial, of course they said, yes.”

Fireworks exploded in Peter’s mind—how to get this new evidence before the court, trying everything together, making arrangements for Abby’s parents, the arguments he’d present to Calvin Morrow. But he could do this. This was truth.

Mac reached over and slapped his back, and Dooney burst into tears. From across the table, Rebecca looked at him and smiled.

Suddenly a thought struck Peter. He looked at Alice. “Does Charles Vicari know that Abby survived?”

She shook her head. “He thinks I did what he told me to do, so far as it went. I just never went back into that operating room. He was furious about that. We had an enormous argument the next day, but I was able to get a transfer to NICU, and after Abby was healthy and her family took her home to Cincinnati, well, I left. Came home. Here.”

“So far as New Hope Hospital knows, the baby was abandoned and I found her and then she was adopted.”

45

Alice was resting in the guest
room. The morning’s stress had exhausted her.

Peter, Dooney, and Mac sat together at the kitchen table, planning the weekend. It was already five o’clock on Saturday afternoon. They had forty hours to prepare before court resumed at nine o’clock on Monday morning, when the defense would begin presenting their case. To get Alice admitted as a witness, and hopefully, now, Abby’s adopted parents, they had to move fast.

“Call Shauna at home and tell her what’s going on,” Peter said to Dooney. The paralegal was quick and efficient enough to coordinate an army. “Tell her we’ll need her to set up travel and hotel arrangements for the adopted parents, and then ask her to go on up to their home in Cincinnati and travel back with them. Put them up in the Royal Orleans. Take them out to dinner. Stay with them. We can’t take any chances on losing them now.”

Dooney nodded and he turned to Mac. “When Alice feels better we’ll call the Gordys together. I’ll ask them to provide a formal consent to New Hope Hospital for release of Abby’s medical records. We’ll need to link Abby to Alice, and Alice to Vicari. Go on up to Chicago, Mac, so when the consent arrives you can walk it through the procedures and get those medical records back here pronto.”

“I’ll leave this afternoon,” Mac said.

“You’ll need to work fast. My feeling is that McConnell’s pretty confident right now. Morrow seems to be leaning his way, so he won’t chance stringing things out too long. He’ll put on a few witnesses to counter ours and get that on record, and he’ll call a character witness or two—”

“If he can find any.” Dooney rolled her eyes.

“And he’ll rest the case sometime on Monday night or Tuesday. Monday afternoon’s our working deadline. Morrow holds to a tight schedule, and if we’re going to put on a rebuttal we’ll need Abby’s hospital records here by Tuesday morning at the latest.”

“What about the adoption records?” Dooney asked. “They’ll be sealed.”