Dead Certain

of?
    I looked down at Bill Delius’s sallow face, the oxygen cannula taped to his nose, but as hard as I looked, I saw no answers there.
     
    I found Kyle Massius in his corner office in the hospital’s administrative wing. He did not look at all happy to see me.
    “I really should call security and have you thrown out,” said the man I’d dunked in the pool every summer when we were still kids.
    “I’d love to see you try,” I countered easily, settling into a chair. After all, it’s hard to be intimidated by somebody once you’ve seen them with French fries stuck up their nose. In an earlier generation Kyle would have been considered the classic second son. Clever and ambitious, he’d been raised to privilege and then pushed out to make a living when his father left his mother and squandered all his money on a twenty-two-year-old soap opera star. With an interest in science but a talent for business, he’d gotten his degree in hospital administration and used his family connections to land his job at Prescott Memorial.
    “Do you have any idea how much trouble your mother is going to end up causing for herself with this crusade of hers?” he demanded, running his hand through what was left of his hair and giving me what I’m sure he thought of as a very pointed look over the top of his glasses.
    “Trouble for herself or for you?” I countered. “What did you really think would happen when you decided to sell out this hospital? You know my mother. Did you really think that the family would just genteelly step aside while you dismantled everything that they’ve spent four generations working to build?”
    “That’s got to be the first time the Prescott family has found its name associated with that ugly four-letter word work,” Massius observed dryly.
    “I don’t know of many people who are putting in their forty hours a week who have enough left over to endow a place like this,” I pointed out.
    “For your information, nobody has what it takes to endow a place like this anymore. When Everett Prescott decided to dazzle his friends by founding a hospital, all he needed to do was put up a big building and fill it with beds. Now we have MRIs and joint-replacement surgery, operating rooms that are filled with enough specialized equipment to launch a space shuttle. Nobody can write a check for all of that.”
    “Maybe no one person can,” I countered, “but many people pooling their resources can.”
    “But for how much longer? Do you have any idea how deeply in debt we are already? Do you know how hard it is for this hospital to keep constantly raising money? It’s not just the Founders Ball, you know, it’s the constant begging for people to remember us in their wills, the perpetual scraping to corporations, the competition with more trendy charities—AIDS, breast cancer, the homeless—everyone clawing for the same charitable dollar.”
    “You make it all sound so noble,” I observed dryly.
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kate. Will you get off your high horse? I’ve spent the last three years fighting a losing battle. Do you know how many patients we turn away for every one that we admit? Every year it just gets harder.”
    “And you honestly think that it will get easier once HCC takes over?”
    “The community will be better served,” declared Massius sanctimoniously. “Differently perhaps, but better.“
    “So who put you in charge of deciding what’s in the best interest of the community?”
    “Your mother, the woman who’s so terribly in touch with the people. She did when she put me in charge of this hospital. Don’t get me wrong, Kate. I understand that your family feels a certain proprietary interest, but a hospital is an institution that has to change and grow with the times. Just because you paid for it doesn’t mean you can control it.”
    “We’ll have to see about that,” I said.
    “Is that what you came here to tell me?”
    “No. I came to get copies of all the correspondence between HCC and the hospital, as well as copies of the budgets for the last five years, and a copy of the charter.“
    “You don’t want much, do you? What makes you think that you can just waltz in here and ask for all of that?”
    “The fact that you’re going to have to turn it over to me anyway during discovery, so you might as well get it over with,” I replied, pulling a copy of the lawsuit we’d just filed out of my briefcase and sliding it across his desk. “Consider