“Anna. Anna. Hey. Open your eyes. Anna, it’s John. I . . . Please wake up. Please open your eyes. Anna.”

In a few moments Merrill rushed back in with medical personnel and a doctor.

“She’s lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said.

“We have the same blood type,” I said. “Give her mine.”

“Are you absolutely positive?”

“Yes,” I said, “and it’s disease free. I was just tested.”

I climbed on the table beside her, her blood soaking into my clothes, and the doctor quickly found a vein, transferring my blood into her body as he worked on her wounds and called for an ambulance. Her blood had helped save me. Now my blood—my clean, virus-free, life-giving blood—would do the same for her. I was sure of it.

41

A few days later, I was seated on the edge of Anna’s hospital bed, the afternoon sun streaming in through the open blinds striping the bed and warming the room.

The door was closed. We were alone.

Anna was wearing an oversized cotton nightshirt with bouquets of violets against a soft yellow background. Her hair hung straight down to the smattering of dark freckles just above her breasts and had the fluffy look of having just been blown dry.

The bandage on her neck was smaller than the one the day before, and when we had hugged, I had smelled the slightest hint of her perfume.

“Your blood’s in my veins,” she said.

I nodded. “I keep thinking about that.”

“Me too.”

We fell silent a moment.

“You never told me what brought you to the infirmary,” she said.

I told her.

“Did you suspect Strickland before you saw the tape?”

I nodded. “She was the first to appear at the scene that Tuesday morning in the sally port when Johnson was killed. She was there before Medical was called. I think she wanted to make sure Johnson actually got killed. If he’d just been injured, she could finish the job. And that’s exactly what she did. She smashed his windpipe. She was the only one who could have. She climbed onto the back of that truck not as a healer, but a killer.”

“How’d she do it? Get him in the bag in the back of the truck in the first place.”

“She had Hardy take Jacobson to Confinement so she could drug and dispose of Johnson. She put him in the caustic storage room, then locked it so Jones couldn’t get in. Then she spilled a urine sample in the exam room and had Anderson supervise Jones cleaning it up. When Shutt pulled up and knocked on the door, she didn’t answer it. When he walked over to Laundry, she carried the bags out and put them in his truck.”

She nodded, squinting slightly. I could tell that she was picturing everything I was saying.