“I can’t just go showin’ you records,” Rotika told me patiently. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”

Geoff, my brain chugged along the same track, faster and faster. Geoff, Geoff, Geoff!

“Murder isn’t ethical either,” I argued, headed for the nurses’ station. I’d watched ER. I knew sign-in sheets were kept on clipboards, and the clipboards were either on or behind the desk.

“You stop,” Rotika said, with firm hopelessness.

I found the clipboard, scanned the entries.

Geoff hadn’t signed his real name, of course, or even the alias, Steve Roberts. I wouldn’t have recognized his handwriting, after all those years, but the line might as well have been written in blood, the way it stood out from the other entries. He’d scrawled, U.R. Dead, on the signature line, and drawn a tiny smiley face after it.

I clutched the clipboard to my chest.

Rotika tried to wrest it away.

The EMTs rolled Lillian’s body out of her room, zipped up in that black vinyl bag I’d seen earlier.

Everything stopped again, with a lurch, as surely as if the hand of God had reached out and grabbed the planet in a death grip.

I collapsed.

The clipboard clattered to the floor.

The EMTs left Lillian and rushed to me, kneeling on either side, the way Rodriguez and his partner had done the night before, after Heather stabbed me with the manicure scissors.

“Shock,” one of them said.

“Call—the—police—” I pleaded.

I heard the front doors whoosh open, and for a crazy, disconnected moment, I thought the gurney had rolled outside on its own.

Then I saw Jolie’s face peering down at me, over the shoulders of the crouching paramedics, shining with tears.

“Lillian?” she said.

I nodded, tried to sit up. Failed.

“Take it easy,” one of the EMTs said, taking my pulse, while his partner pressed a stethoscope to my chest.

“It was murder, Jolie,” I said. “They’re going to say it was natural causes, but it was murder—”

A blood pressure cuff squeezed my upper arm.

“Through the roof,” one EMT told the other.

“Let me up!” I protested.

“Take her to the emergency room,” Jolie said.

“No!” I choked out.

“I’m her sister,” Jolie insisted, “and I want her checked over.”

Everyone looked up at her in disbelief. My mind took a bumpy little side road, bouncing over the ruts. I wondered where Greer was.

“You’re black,” Rotika told Jolie.

“Yes,” Jolie said tartly. “I know.” She swept everybody up in a fierce glance, including me. “My sister needs medical attention.”

That was how Lillian and I ended up sharing an ambulance ride.

I learned later that Jolie and Greer followed, with Russell in the back of Jolie’s rig.