Chapter 8 - The Hyperbaric Chamber
The basement of St. Jude’s was three degrees warmer than the ward upstairs, smelling of hydraulic oil, copper pipes, and the heavy rubber gaskets of the diving tubes.
They had moved Piper at four in the morning when the old farmer died in Chamber One.
She lay behind five inches of curved acrylic, her small face pale and gray under the green fluorescent tube mounted inside the steel cylinder. She looked like a museum specimen preserved in a bottle of clear river water. Through the intercom system on the control console, her breathing came through with a hollow, metallic echo, every inhalation sounding like someone dragging an iron chain across a concrete dock.
Dr. Chen was sitting on an upturned milk crate by the pressure gauges, his eyes red-rimmed, drinking black coffee from a styrofoam cup that had three holes poked in the rim where he had chewed it.
"Two point five atmospheres," Chen said, tapping the brass dial with his thumb. "Pure O2. It forces the gas off the hemoglobin by sheer mechanical pressure. It’s like scraping burnt toast with a butter knife."
"Will she have the tremors?" I asked.
I was sitting on the concrete floor with my back against the steel flank of the compressor, the red breadbox between my ankles.
"Maybe," Chen said. "Her memory might be spotty for a week or two. She might forget the names of her teachers or how to do long division. But the brain stem is clean. The EEG we ran before we loaded her had good, sharp alpha waves. She’s tough, Clare. Most kids with that kind of saturation have seizures before they hit the ambulance."
"She’s used to hard air," I said. "We lived in the valley behind the cement plant for three years after her father went. You learn to breathe through your teeth when the kiln is burning."
The intercom clicked.
"Mom," Piper’s voice said. It didn't sound like her voice; it sounded like a recording of a voice played through an old telephone in a railway station.
I stood up, walked to the acrylic window, and pressed my cheek against the cold curve of the plastic.
"I’m here, Piper."
"Is... is Barnaby in the oats?"
My throat closed up, tight as a knot in a green halter. "Barnaby is in Trooper Gidley’s front seat, baby. He ate half an egg salad sandwich from Gidley’s lunchbox and he bit the radio cord."
A tiny, faint smile moved the corner of her lips behind the transparent shield. "He doesn't like... he doesn't like troopers. He thinks they're the men from the gas company."
"He's right," I said. "They are."
"Did you... did you get the box?"
"I have it right here," I said, holding the red tin up so she could see the flaked enamel through the port. "Every paper. The whole sixty acres. The springs. The barn. Even the timber on the ridge."
Piper’s eyes moved slowly toward the top of the cylinder where the pressure gauge was ticking down toward one atmosphere—the decompression phase.
"Aunt Brooke said... she said if I told you about the lime, she’d tell the school that I stole the silver spoons from the drawer," Piper whispered. "She said nobody believes a girl who sleeps on the floor."
"The school isn't going to hear from Aunt Brooke, Piper," I said.
The heavy steel door at the top of the stairs banged open.
Thorne came down the concrete steps, his gray hair sticking to his temples with sweat, his neck wrapped in an old wool muffler that had several moth holes near the fringe. He had his medical bag in his right hand, the black leather scuffed white at the corners from forty years of being thrown into the back of station wagons.
"She’s confessed," Thorne said, stopping at the foot of the stairs and looking at the acrylic cylinder.
I didn't turn around. "Brooke?"
"Brooke," the doctor said. He set his bag down on the concrete with a dull clunk. "Vance had her in the small interview room with the recorder running. She lasted forty minutes before she started screaming about the taxes. She said the estate owed eighty thousand dollars in back levies to the district and she didn't have the cash because Richard’s brother lost the milk route."
He walked over to the console, looked at Chen’s charts, and nodded once.
"She told Vance that if the house was condemned for a fatal carbon monoxide accident, the commercial insurance had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar rider that paid out directly to the surviving tenant of record," Thorne said, his voice dropping into that cold, dead register that had made him the most hated man in the county Republican committee. "She had the policy taken out in September. She forged your name on the waiver of secondary beneficiary."
I looked at Piper through the glass. Her eyes had closed again, her small, dark lashes resting against the violet shadows that still ringed her sockets.
May you like
"She was going to kill twelve people for eighty thousand dollars," I said.
"No," Thorne corrected, looking down at his own liver-spotted hands. "She was going to kill twelve people so she wouldn't have to sell her mother’s silver tea set to the antique dealer in Newburgh. Brooke doesn't care about eighty thousand dollars, Clare. She cares about people seeing her carry the tea set into the church basement."
