[Georgia 03] Fallen

hospital BlackBerry and looked up Dale’s email address, then started to enter it into her iPhone. She would ask him to meet her in the cafeteria so they could talk this through. Or maybe she should suggest the parking lot. She didn’t want to cause more gossip than was already circulating.
    Up ahead, the elevator bell dinged and she caught sight of Dale. He was laughing with one of the nurses. Junior must’ve told him she was down here. Sara chickened out. She opened the first door she came to, which happened to be the records department. Two older women with matching, tightly groomed perms sat behind desks piled with charts. They were typing furiously on their computer keyboards and barely looked up at Sara.
    One of them asked, “Help you?” turning the page on the chart opened beside her.
    Sara stood there, momentarily unsure of herself. She realized that somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been thinking about the records office since she got on the elevator. She dropped her iPhone back into her coat pocket.
    “What is it, darlin’?” the woman asked. They were both staring at Sara now.
    She held up her hospital ID. “I need an old chart from nineteen …” She did the math quickly in her head. “Seventy-six, maybe?”
    The woman handed her a pad and paper. “Give me the name. That’ll make it easier.”
    Sara knew even as she wrote down Will’s name that what she was doing was wrong, and not just because she was breaking federal privacy laws and risking immediate termination. Will had been at the Atlanta Children’s Home from infancy. There wouldn’t have been a family physician managing his care. All of his medical needs would have been handled through Grady. His entire childhood was stored here, and Sara was using her hospital ID to gain access to it.
    “No middle name?” the woman asked.
    Sara shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
    “Gimme a minute. These won’t be in the computer yet or you’d be able to pull them up on your tablet. We’ve barely dipped our toe into 1970.” She was out of her chair and through the door marked “File Room” before Sara could tell her to stop.
    The other woman went back to her typing, her long red fingernails making a sound like a cat running across a tile floor. Sara looked down at her shoes, which were stained with God knows what from this morning’s cases. In her mind, she went over the possible culprits, but as hard as she tried, she could not shake the feeling that what she was doing was absolutely and without a doubt the most unethical thing she had ever done in her life. What’s more, it was a complete betrayal of Will’s trust.
    And she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it.
    This wasn’t the way Sara operated. She was normally a forthright person. If she wanted to know about Will’s suicide attempt, or any details about his childhood, then she should ask him, not sneak around his back and look at his medical chart.
    The woman was back. “No William, but I found a Wilbur.” She had a file tucked under her arm. “Nineteen seventy-five.”
    Sara had used paper charts the majority of her career. Most healthy kids had a chart with twenty or so pages by the time they reached eighteen years of age. An unhealthy kid’s file could run around fifty. Will’s chart was over an inch thick. A decaying rubber band held together faded sheets of yellow and white paper.
    “No middle name,” the woman said. “I’m sure he had one at some point, but a lot of these kids fell through the cracks back then.”
    Her partner supplied, “Ellis Island and Tuskegee rolled up into one.”
    Sara reached for the file, then stopped herself. Her hand hovered in the air.
    “You all right, darlin’?” The woman glanced back at her office mate, then to Sara. “You need to sit down?”
    Sara dropped her hand. “I don’t think I need that after all. I’m sorry to waste your time.”
    “Are you sure?”
    Sara nodded. She could not remember the last time she had felt this awful. Even her run-in with Angie Trent hadn’t produced this amount of guilt. “I’m so sorry.”
    “No need to apologize. Felt good to get up.” She started to tuck the file under her arm but the rubber band broke, sending papers flying onto the floor.
    Automatically, Sara bent down to help. She gathered the pages together, willing herself not to read the words. There were lab reports printed in dot matrix, reams of chart notations, and what looked like an ancient