Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves Page B

exchange for help with the hands-on part of the program.
    So I was redundant and on the point of taking off when a snatch of conversation caught my attention.
    “. . . gruesome,” a young woman was saying to four others. All five wore nursing uniforms and name tags identifying them as Calais Hospital staff. The four listeners’ expressions were alike, too: barely repressed impatience.
    “. . . stiff as a board, half tied in a knot, and that awful grin,” the first one said with what seemed to me very un-nurse-like relish. “Like Dr. Sardonicus.”
    The others—not horror-film fans, apparently—glanced at one another. In their eyes I caught pity mingled with contempt, and the way they turned their backs on her was unmistakable, too: not our crowd.
    “Hey,” I said to the old-movie buff as she stared after them. Her badge said her name was Therese Chamberlain and from what she’d said I guessed she’d been on duty when Gosling’s body reached the hospital. The ER in Calais would have been Hector’s first stop on the way to the morgue in Augusta.
    “You need a partner?” I asked.
    She did, latching onto me gratefully as Victor started the class. He began with a ten-minute lecture on the rigors of resuscitating people whose hearts had stopped when they were—inconveniently and he seemed to feel also deliberately and spitefully—not in a hospital.
    He also treated us to cautionary tales on why CPR was worse than useless when it was bungled: torn livers, broken ribs, and stomachs blown up like balloons were among the potentially fatal results of inept cardiac massage and rescue breathing.
    Which didn’t exactly make me want to learn these techniques officially. A sloppy paint job is about as far as I care to go in the bad repairs department, especially if I happen to be holding a current Red Cross certificate making me responsible.
    But my new partner, a very skinny, dark-haired young woman with chapped lips and chewed fingernails, already knew real CPR and—this was the crucial part for me—could do it on the doll.
    “Don’t worry,” Therese pronounced as we knelt on opposite sides of the floor mat. Called Resusci-Annie, the rubber model was anatomically designed so you could practice all the maneuvers of bringing a nearly dead person back to life without risking the opposite by practicing on a live one.
    “I’ll walk you through it,” Therese told me. “It’s easy after you get the hang of it.”
    Right, and tightrope walking was probably easy too when you’d been at it for a while. But if you put a foot wrong you’d only be killing yourself.
    “You’ll probably never have to do it in real life anyway,” Therese added.
    Famous last words. But it was after all only a rubber doll. “If you can do it, why are you here?” I asked her.
    Therese shrugged, wincing at the hard concrete floor under her bony knees. If there was an extra half-ounce of flesh on this girl anywhere, I couldn’t see it.
    “Renew my certification,” she replied, pushing on the doll’s forehead and pulling on its chin. Its neck arced sharply up into what seemed an uncomfortable and possibly even crippling angle. I mentioned this hesitantly.
    “Pine box is uncomfortable too, and it’s where the victim’s going, you don’t get that airway open,” she replied.
    Tough little nut. She pinched the doll’s nose and blew into its mouth. The rubber chest rose with a whooshing sound.
    She swabbed the doll’s mouth with an alcohol pad. “Now you.”
    She had sad pink-rimmed eyes and bad skin. “Mostly everyone here,” she informed me, amplifying her answer to my earlier question, “is a cop, EMT, or a nurse. Couple college students,” she added, gesturing at Sam and his partner. “You have to keep taking these courses to stay certified if you are on a health-care job.”
    “Oh.” I assessed the doll. At least I wouldn’t be in danger of lacerating its liver.
    “What’d the cops say when they brought Gosling in?” I