Setting down my mocha coffee to cool, I eased into my desk chair and swiveled to face the TV displaying security feeds. All was peaceful on the mental health ward, no tempests brewing. So I scanned the lengthy sign-off sheet our newest nurse was required to complete before he could come off orientation. Refreshing my memory, it appeared the sheet hadn’t changed in the past year. The new nurse was a ledgerkin, which was different for us. All the rest of us, patients included, were elves related to the legendary royals, the Klauses.
“Ok–how do you say your name?” I asked shifting in my chair, keenly aware that my cheeks were turning red. The getting-to-know-you form he’d filled out was handwritten and didn’t look right. I figured it was less awkward to ask now than halfway through the day, but it was still uncomfortable.
“Beetle,” he answered without cracking a smile. He was a tough guy to read, but I thought Beetle was serious. It’s just that he didn’t look anything like a bug with his orange skin and cow-licked blonde hair, not to mention the soft paunch. He was diminutive in stature, like the crusty minibeast, and he was giving me the creeps. But the resemblance to an insect stopped there.
“Just like it’s spelled. Does it mean…?” I was hoping to discover that ledgerkin spoke a language I was unaware of, and that the syllables represented a different idea to him.
“It’s just Beetle.” Monotone delivery, unimpressed.
“OK. Well, I’m Eggnog,” I pointed to the nametag pinned on my frumpy scrubs, which completely hid my modest bosom. Snowballs! I was making this even more awkward! Beetle didn’t react, not even by moving his eyeballs. Introductions were behind us, and it was time to move on. “Beetle, tell me what you know about the admission process already.” As a rule, we try to breeze through checklists by avoiding unnecessary explanations, and Beetle had done his homework.
“The ward’s force field nullifies elvish magic,” Beetle began. I found it funny that he started there, but he was a ledgerkin, so maybe he didn’t know yet. Our best researchers were investigating why the elvish magic was fading. It seemed that elves at NP–the North Pole–were generally complaining of brain fog and the loss of magical abilities. The ward’s force field was less and less essential all the time.
Beetle was still talking, though. “Then, we remove all personal belongings and change patients into our ward-issued pajamas. Staff conduct an inventory of the belongings and place items into a locked safe, a bin that can be checked out by the patient, or a bin containing items only to be used under staff supervision, as appropriate to each item. Meanwhile, another staff member fills out admission paperwork with the patient, gives them a tour of the unit, and explains the rules of the ward.” Beetle was kind of a know-it-all, it seemed.
I didn’t catch myself giving him an annoyed look, but Beetle did. “I like rules,” he explained, smiling for the first time since he’d shown up. It was the creepy smile of a possessed doll, but I was going to have to take it.
I put my initials on that blank and searched for another that I figured would be a breeze for Beetle. “Great. One other storage spot for patient belongings is their locker, which is in the locked laundry room. The extra storage is for when they level up and get to wear their own clothes with some limitations, and they can go off the unit to exercise. Why don’t we allow friends and family to bring patients food from outside?”
“Outside food is an opportunity to smuggle in weapons and other contraband such as drugs. It is never permitted,” Beetle rattled off.
I hesitated. “You’ll find that most of our rules have proven flexible at some point. You just need to talk to management about the situation. For example, once, there was someone too paranoid to eat our food. If we hadn’t allowed food from her sister, she would have ended up in crisis: dehydrated with imbalanced electrolytes and underweight. It was a pain, but we did make that exception once in my time here.” And I had only been on this ward for a year.
Beetle narrowed his eyes. This was not the job he had signed up for. He would figure it out eventually, I thought. When you come face-to-face with a person in need, you find ways to help, especially if you’re a nurse. Beetle was just a new grad, trying to find his way. Beetle looked excessively mad about it though.
He turned and followed my gaze when I took a moment to scan the security feed. There was plenty of staff at the front desk with direct eyes on everyone, but I still did my due diligence. I wouldn’t want to leave them short-handed because I had failed to notice something from the snug back office. For some reason, the patient named Graham had caught my attention. He was hunched over A Christmas Tragedy, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and two translations of The Little Match Girl spread out on the table in front of him, and he seemed to be doing some kind of comparison between texts. Any connection between those titles was so loose to me, I couldn’t remember the list later. Graham, on the other hand, was so focused on his discoveries, the patient appeared to be trembling.
From my perspective, he was safe. I wasn’t going to disturb that. So far, we’d only been running tests and giving him Ativan to calm him until we understood the problem. But I did hope we would find the right medication to help him live in the same world as the rest of us.
Graham was a face I knew from a distance as one of the security guards around NP. Back when I worked in the factory, I’d see him check in with my foreman to ensure there were no concerns or issues. He was handsome, and I’d had a crush. Back then, I wished I could just walk up and introduce myself. Now, here he was. Still handsome though definitely battle weary. And his smile was not at all creepy like Beetle’s.
The insect spoke up as if on cue. “Should I take those books away from him?”
“Why would we do that?” I asked academically. This was a teaching moment.
“Because he might work himself up with his paranoia and require sedation,” Beetle answered.
“If we notice a triggering pattern, then we will take action like that. In general, it’s better to let the patient declare themselves. Taking his things away without an established pattern is not fair, and it would be triggering in itself,” I explained. “But good intuition. I’ve got my eye on that patient in particular, too.”
Most patients on our floor had Adjustment Disorder and blamed being overworked by the Toy Factory for their suicidal ideations. Take them away from their stressors, and they felt better immediately–well enough to learn new coping skills at group sessions, for example. Some elves had anxiety or depression, and a few would leave with new prescriptions. True psychosis, however, was a rarer thing. Graham had my eye for more than just the outdated crush. Actually, Graham had famously been spear-heading the security side of the investigation into the cause of our flagging magic. He was here for paranoia, and he maintained that he had been poisoned.
Well, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you haven’t been poisoned, I thought. We had no better theories about his condition. The only question would have been the identity of the poison. We hadn’t exactly run toxicology yet, but I would eventually insist on it. Nurses advocate for their patients, after all, and this was Graham’s theory. So far, all his labs had revealed were elevated liver enzymes, which could be caused by a lot of things. Not a huge help.
Just then the lunch cart rolled up to the door of the ward, plain to view on the CCTV. The staff at the front desk talked to the galley worker through our intercom. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Pris (short for Pristine, but she hates her real name) check the trays for sharps before bringing them onto the ward. All was quiet while the patients ate, and most of them mingled. Graham sat by himself, struggling to make enough space and eventually settling with one book open on his tray. Meanwhile, Beetle and I continued to blaze through his orientation checklist.
“Do you know where the crash cart is?” I asked Beetle.
As he explained things to me, I realized that it wasn’t his knowledge that annoyed me. It was his tone of voice, which suggested that I was silly for asking him such a thing. Actually, most people came to the floor not knowing the basic safety things. I was glad to have an observant teammate, but my voice sharpened when I asked, “How do you know which key that is already?”
Beetle was gleeful. “I was allowed a few hours of shadowing before I accepted a position on this floor. I paid close attention,” he explained. I kicked myself for revealing how impressed (and frustrated) I was.
A sudden movement on the monitor snagged my eye. Graham had slumped out of his chair and was seizing on the floor. After that, it sounded like a bar fight with someone using a baseball bat. I was on my feet without making a decision to move. Staff at the front desk jumped up as well. I met Pris at Graham’s head and dove to put my hands under him as a cushion. The baseball bat sound? That had been his skull hitting the floor, we realized. Pris directed staff to slide the heavy, sand-filled furniture out of the way, and she announced to the patients that they needed to go to their rooms. Calmly, everyone complied.
I still don’t know who got a pillow for Graham’s head, but I remember that when my knuckles had a break from the beating they’d endured, I rated my pain seven out of ten. Someone was already calling a Rapid Response Team to get more resources on our unit, including the doctors. Beetle, bless his obnoxious little head, must have climbed the desk to reach the keys where they hung at twice his height, in order to access the medication room and get the crash cart we had just been talking about. He was already rolling out Big Red (our nickname for the cart) with vital medications, the defibrillator, suction, and a bag-valve-mask on board. Everything we really needed in a crisis.
Most seizures end well within two minutes, and our biggest fear is an injury like head trauma. Most of the time, we don’t worry about the fact that the patient isn’t breathing during a seizure. But Graham’s seizure wasn’t stopping at the two minute mark, when doctors started arriving.
I reported the facts to the doctors, while Pris handed me a mask to blow oxygen by Graham’s nose. He wouldn’t really breathe while he was seizing, but maybe some of it would reach his lungs anyway. His blood sugar was normal. We struggled to monitor vital signs because of the convulsions. Pris started an IV and gave several classes of medications as the doctor called out verbal orders, but the seizure continued unabated.
It took coordinated effort to check inside Graham’s mouth for a possible choking hazard. His tongue was oddly red but not swollen to obstruct the airway. I motioned one of the doctors over to look at it, searching his overeducated brain for information. The young resident spread the word to his colleagues, all of them shaking their heads. They were coming up empty.
The attending physician, Doctor Narwhal, shined her flashlight in Graham’s mouth, checking that the tongue wasn’t closing the airway. It was time to induce a coma, a last-resort effort to stop the seizure. I prayed for a Christmas miracle. Graham’s miracle did not arrive.
As Pris administered the medications to induce a coma, Graham stopped convulsing. He also stopped breathing, and his heart stopped beating. This began a new flurry of activity. Someone passed me the bag-valve-mask to breathe for Graham, while Pris began chest compressions, and the defibrillator warmed up. It takes a long time to work through coding a patient, so I’ll just sum it up by saying: we lost him.
We triple-checked his medical file for clues, There were no allergies reported. He was not on any medications associated with seizures. In fact, if anything, the scheduled Ativan would have helped to avoid or ameliorate this seizure. Graham was so young, and he had no history of epilepsy. This wasn’t anything I’d ever seen before. I felt utterly helpless.
Even in the fog of crisis, my nursing intuition nudged me, reminding me of something I’d seen on a popular NP crime show. His red tongue was especially odd, because there was nothing red on the lunch trays. I got a mental flash of the cursed candy canes from the crime show and the victim’s tongue, swollen red by magic. I knew I was being fanciful, but that episode introduced me to ledgerkin and was still the only other time I’d ever seen one of their kind.
I looked up at Beetle next to the disemboweled crash cart. In a way, he looked like any new grad waiting to be told what to do. But shouldn’t a new grad look anxious? Beetle’s face was impassive. Doctor Narwhal had pronounced the patient dead and given verbal directions on next steps. While she was speaking, Beetle made eye contact with me and smiled. I imagined that Beetle meant to encourage me, but instead he appeared sinister. Then again, maybe he just looked like a ledgerkin. I didn’t have a lot of experience to go by.
When Graham’s body was taken from the floor and the Nursing Supervisor had all of her questions answered, I was wrung out like over-stretched taffy. I sent Beetle away to go eat his lunch somewhere else. He hadn’t packed one, so he was taking a hike to buy one–through the tunnels to Ulu Chophouse in another building–thank goodness. Crystal, from our front desk, handed me her pencilled record of the timing of events. I thanked her. Then, I started filling out the requisite reports and processing what had happened. And then the tears came.
It wasn’t Beetle’s fault. Beetle had never touched the food. It was prepared in the Galley after Beetle arrived on the unit, and Beetle was never near the food cart. Just because Graham started eating right before the seizure didn’t mean anything either. We had no idea what caused this. And that’s exactly what one of the resident physicians explained to the rest of the patients during a debrief. They had all witnessed the seizure before we sent them to their rooms, and they had all seen Graham’s body zipped in a body bag from the windows on their doors. Dr. Custard invited patients to talk about their feelings or anything at all. The patients opted for silence until the doctor released them from the debrief. Once they were eating lunch again, they talked among themselves in hushed tones.
The attending provider, Dr. Narwhal, was calling Graham’s family to tell them he had a fatal seizure. She would double-check that we hadn’t missed a history of seizures, a medication that we should have reconciled on admission, an allergy, or any clue at all. Maybe they had an answer. Maybe something had been deleted from Graham’s file by mistake. Blaming Beetle wasn’t the answer, though.
Half an hour later, Doctor Narwhal popped her head into my back office, where I was nibbling at lunch over my tearful charting. Joint Commission would have a fit over the presence of even a water bottle, much less food at the nurses’ station, but Doctor Narwhal was cool. Plump and serene, Doctor Narwhal wasn’t one to sweat the small things. She was a restful person to be around. “Family confirmed no prior medical history, no medications, no allergies, nothing. We didn’t miss anything. It’s just very odd.” After a pause she asked me, “How are you doing?”
I would have answered her, but Beetle stepped around Doctor Narwhal in the doorway and resumed his desk chair beside me. How incredibly annoying that Beetle maintained exactly a half hour lunch break on this day of all days. That guy really liked rules.
“Are we sure that’s what it was?” I asked. Since this was so unusual, I assumed Doctor Narwhal had asked the family’s permission to do an autopsy.
“What else could it have been?” Doctor Narwhal asked. Her body language remained open, giving me the floor.
“Graham was investigating something when he became so paranoid that he ended up here. Even on the ward, it looked like he was trying to crack some code.” I struggled to remember the books he’d had in front of him. Standing to retrieve the books from the table where Graham had been reading them earlier, I thought aloud, “Maybe we can all look at his books and the investigation with new eyes,” I said. Yes, I realized as I said it that I was asking for something wildly outside our scope.
“I’m afraid I already returned the patient’s books to the NP library,” Beetle interjected.
“What? When did you have time to do that?” I asked, definitely letting my annoyance raise the volume of my voice a few notches.
“Over my lunch break. The library will be closed after our shift is over, and I didn’t want the books to get accidentally shelved with the ones that belong to the ward,” Beetle defended primly.
What really shut me up was Doctor Narwhal’s professionally soothing voice, which I’d heard her use countless times on agitated patients. “If there had been anything to his theories, his own security team would not have recommended a mental evaluation. It’s more likely that his long-term high stress level triggered his seizure and contributed to his death.” She said it delicately and then stopped.
That was the thing with Doctor Narwhal. She knew when to stop talking and let her points land. She was such a reasonable and convincing person, I think she could have been successful at a lot of things. Being a defense attorney, for example. She could get you acquitted for murder, she sounded so sensible and balanced, like there was nothing else for you to think of that she hadn’t already combed through meticulously.
I sat back down, feeling heavy, and thanked Doctor Narwhal. I reassured her that, yes, I was fine. But I wasn’t. Something about this didn’t sit right with me. Doctor Narwhal couldn’t really explain why Graham would seize for the first time ever at age thirty-two, or why we couldn’t make it stop. His long-term stress level, my eye. She didn’t even try to explain the red tongue. And then there was Beetle, whisking the books away so I couldn’t think about what Graham had been investigating. A tear or two escaped my eyes at the overwhelming injustice and suddenness of Graham’s loss. There are no adequate restraints when misty eyes throw a tantrum. Sometimes, unlike my patients, tears break loose.
Pris brought me the Rounds board. It was my hour to patrol the unit, checking for safety and keeping eyes on the patients. I pulled up the Standard Operating Procedures on my computer for Beetle to enjoy, and that bought me some breathing room. I really didn’t want him following me for the next hour.
There was a break between the patients’ lunch and the next Group, so some patients were resting in bed. Others were working on a puzzle in the milieu. I put eyes on all of them, while I checked that the required doors were locked, nothing dangerous was accessible, and no obvious maintenance issues stood out. At the pneumatic tube station, where we send small parcels to other wards and offices around the building, I was surprised that the door swung open freely.
Pris saw me from the nurses’ station, playfully smacked the tall, bulky elf next to her and said, “You forgot Patient Graham’s labs!”
Avalanche apologized, red all the way to the top-tips of his pointy ears. “I was about to send those, when the doctors called it.” The labs had been collected during the code, between medications. When the doctors declared Graham dead, different priorities took precedence and these had been forgotten. It wasn’t a big deal that Avalanche had misplaced the labs, and the tube sat on the chute without being sent. The only unsettling thing was that he’d left this door unsecured, so patients could get into something potentially dangerous. Don’t ask me Dangerous how? No patient has had the opportunity to dream up a way yet, and I didn’t want to know.
“No biggie. Just remember to close the doors. They lock automatically, but you have to shut them, ok?” And as Avalanche agreed, a new thought occurred to me. I held the tube containing Graham’s blood vials. There were no doctor’s orders open for this patient, because he was deceased, no longer a patient. The lab would throw these away. But … I had an idea. I set the tube on the firing piece and pressed the button for Lab. It fired off.
“What are they going to do with those?” Pris asked.
“Oh, shoot, I should have just thrown those away. I’m really not myself right now,” I fibbed. “I’ll just text my friend in the lab.” And I pulled out my phone to text Peppermint. Sending you labs on deceased pt. Need u to run tox. Off the books. Sometimes, sneaking was the only way forward.
I got a thumbs-up emoji in response. Peppermint was so chill, she wouldn’t even be demanding about information after running the labs. “Illegal schmeegal,” she would say. She’d figure I had a good reason, and she’d keep it quiet. I figured she was a rebel because she resented being stuck in the lab at all, and that was a mystery for me. Peppermint seemed too smart, too talented to be working a routine job like that. I figured it was better not to ask. In this moment, I was grateful for whatever the circumstance, and relief settled into my shoulders and my gut. My friend was brilliant and a huge asset. I had found a way to do something for Graham.
Somehow, I kept things professional and polite enough between Beetle and me. I checked off a good amount of his orientation packet, which pleased him, and then I told him to go home early, when all the night shift nurses had arrived. I could handle the unit turnover report on my own, and it was such a relief–like watching a dark cloud blowing out of sight–when he hustled his little legs off the unit.
Peppermint texted that she had to mail out for some of the toxicology screening, so it would take five days before I got all the results from her. Without the toxicology report to work with, I would have a few shifts to either wait or investigate by some other means. My first line of investigation was obviously the content of those library books. What had been going on in Graham’s mind?
That’s why, the day after Graham died, I told Pris that I needed a walk. That stroll incidentally took me to the library. Pris would text if I needed to run back to the unit, and exercise did some good for my restlessness.
“I just want to make sure you got all of the books back,” I told the librarian behind her checkout counter. Fortunately, her brother also worked security, so she already knew Graham died. I didn’t have to explain things that would violate patient confidentiality. Elder nodded her silver bob cut, which had probably always been silver and sparkly. Her skin was unwrinkled, so she could have been any age less than a few millennia.
She tap-tapped the keyboard and then happily reported, “Yes, his account is all clear.”
I sensed that it could get tricky from here. “Can you tell me what books he had checked out? The ones that my coworker, a ledgerkin named Beetle, returned together yesterday?” I asked.
“May I ask why you are interested? We don’t normally divulge the reading habits of other patrons,” she responded not unkindly.
Thinking on my feet now, I made up the excuse nearest at hand. “I was his nurse, and his death hit me hard. I guess he’s just on my mind, and I wanted… Well, I wanted to check those books out myself and just… hold onto them for a week or two. I thought it might help me.” I shrugged, feeling as lost as I sounded in this lie.
Elder nodded sympathetically, “I understand,” but from the tone of her voice, I could already tell she was saying no. She explained complicated legalities about privacy, except in exigent circumstances, blah blah. It was a reading list, not a health record! Sheesh. I thought on my feet again.
“I see, of course,” but I was struggling. “Look, maybe this is just grief talking, but there’s something suspicious about Graham’s death. He thought someone was after him, and I wonder whether he was right. I just want to look for clues in those books he was studying.”
Elder’s mouth tightened thoughtfully. “Why don’t you wait here, while I fetch a book about the grieving process for you?” Elder was already walking away to do just that. She left me a little stunned. I was a mental health nurse. Didn’t she think I knew the grieving process? And then I realized she hadn’t typed or clicked anything, which meant her computer still displayed Graham’s account. All I did was leap onto the desk, protecting my abdomen with one arm as I lay across it. Then I craned my head and peered around. There they were! I eased my phone from my scrubs shirt pocket with one arm while maintaining my balance with the other arm. Camera mode. Click, and I dropped my feet back to the floor just seconds before Elder returned with the offered book. She had a smile on her face that suggested she knew just when to return.
“Actually, could I add four more books?” I asked sweetly, and Elder fetched them for me as if it were any random list of books.
But the stories, if they had anything to do with what was going on, remained mysterious to me. A Christmas Tragedy, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and two translations of The Little Match Girl, one of them claiming to be a literal translation and the other a poetic translation that purported to convey more of the original feeling. I poured over all four books every free chance I had at home, not daring to bring them to work. Being civil to Beetle was my limit on a good day, but I knew I wouldn’t withstand any comments about these books.
What was it about this ledgerkin that was so irritating? When I grew bored with the books, I searched the internet to learn about ledgerkin, and I couldn’t tell you now whether my goal was to get along with Beetle more smoothly or to find some dirt on him. I read about Ledgerland, glanced over their geography, natural resources–including one mineral unique to Ledgerland–and exports, the political landscape, a civil war, and finally, the emigration of the defeated survivors.
The following week, Peppermint texted that the lab results had come back negative for all known toxins. Maybe it was the way she’d worded the text, all known toxins that pinged my brain. In my mind’s eye, I saw the candy cane murder story again. It wasn’t in the books Graham checked out, and it wasn’t in the TV episode. The answer was hidden somewhere in my brain from nursing school – maybe in a footnote of a chapter – that some metals build up in soft tissues, including the brain, and can cause death. They would also build up in the liver and elevate those enzymes, as we’d seen. Toxicology wouldn’t normally check for a mineral found only in Ledgerland, I realized, as I struggled to remember the name of the metal.
What if it’s an unknown toxin? I texted back. Is there any blood left?
Peppermint typed back, What do you have in mind?
Ledgium. And I quickly slipped my phone into my pocket, because Beetle returned from the errand I’d sent him on. I had asked him to check that nothing in the supply closet was expired. Even gauze packets have expiration dates on them, so it should have taken longer.
“The lancets for checking blood sugar expired four months ago,” he shook his head gravely.
“It’s a good thing you’re here to catch that,” I said, mirroring his head shake. “Nothing much happened while you were away, but I appreciate you allowing me to stay available to the patients in case they do need me. Thank you for doing that.” I hoped I was convincing. The truth was, the lancets were probably fine, even though they were technically expired, and I would be replacing them for what I considered to be a shaky reason.
“I had Pris order a new box,” he concluded and resumed his seat. Well, great, I thought. Even easier. He had already run so many dumb errands for me, I couldn’t think of anything else. And the truth was, I needed to save excuses, so I could lose him on other days when I needed a break from him. It was a matter of mental wellbeing.
“Good catch,” I told him, and I hoped I sounded sincere.
Pris popped her head around the door frame. “Eggnog? Patient Cocoa is asking to use her cell phone to pay some bills.”
Cocoa had asked to use her phone once before, and even though the boundary was crystal clear, she had used it for purposes other than what she’d asked for. She had wanted to look up phone numbers on her contact list, she’d said, but she persisted in responding to text messages. I knew this because the staff member tasked with chaperoning her cell phone use ended up having to snatch the phone away from the patient, and I had thought Cocoa might end up in restraints due to her passionate–read: violent–response to that.
“She misused the cell phone before,” Beetle said, galloping away on that high horse of his. “The rule is that she may not access it again.”
“Correct. However, paying bills is a big deal,” I said. “Tell Cocoa that I’ll work on getting a doctor’s order just for paying her bills. Try to get her to list which bills, so we can be as clear as possible about exactly what she is allowed and expected to do.” Pris understood and left to do just that.
My hand was on the receiver, but Beetle was incapable of reigning it in and letting me call the doctor. “Cocoa risked restraints the last time she had her phone,” he argued.
“She needs to pay her bills. We’ll set her up to have a better outcome this time,” I told Beetle, wishing on a star that he would get some common sense and stop going on power trips. This would be a good experience for him. I would personally chaperone the patient’s use this time, and Beetle would learn something. Hopefully. I sighed involuntarily just as Dr. Narwhal picked up my call.
“Eggnog?” she asked.
“My apologies ma’am–”
“Whatever it is can’t be that bad,” she answered. And I had another idea.
“Would it be alright if Beetle sat in on your meetings with patients tomorrow?”
“Of course,” she answered. “Is there anything else?”
Either Dr. Narwhal would understand why I was getting frazzled after she spent a day with Beetle–and maybe she would help me get rid of him–or, I would get a day to myself. In either case, this was a winning idea. “Yes, Patient Cocoa needs to pay some bills on her phone…” and the rest of the day was a breeze, because my spirits had taken a soaring lift. Cocoa, as it turned out, had already learned her lesson and didn’t test the limit this time.
That evening after I gave turnover report, I snuck down to the lab to see Peppermint.
“You were right,” she said grimly, and it’s tough to look grim when your natural hair color is striped red and white. Then, you’d also have to take her clothing into account. Today’s ensemble was typical for Peppermint: A knee-length pleated, glittery green skirt and a gold stretchy long-sleeved top. “I had to do some digging to figure out what ledgium was–at first I thought that was a typo, but I should have known with you–, then, how to test for it.” The point of her velvet foot tapped the floor mutely yet indignantly. “The test doesn’t give exact levels, but from what I can tell, the blood level was high. Ledgium is a metal that builds up in soft tissue organs like the liver, heart, and brain, so I wish I had those handy. Ledgium is known to cause tongue redness and swelling in the moderate stages, and, at the highest end of toxicity, seizure and death. It skips some of the lesser symptoms you’d see with a metal like lithium, so it’s harder to catch in the early stages.”
“How did Graham get it in his system?” I wondered aloud, pulling out the hair tie that kept my bun tightly bound, releasing myself from my usual headache.
“I’m not sure, but according to the literature, Ledgerland is the only known source of the metal. So there’s only one way it got to the NP, and that’s on purpose,” Peppermint said meaningfully. She leaned in and raised her eyebrows. “I think your patient was poisoned.”
“I need to tell Dr. Narwhal about this,” I said. Better to confess I ran an unauthorized test now rather than later. Clearly, this needed to be handed over to security.
“But then I’ll get in trouble,” Peppermint said, and it was true. I’d placed her in a bad position. What had I been thinking?
As if reading my mind, Peppermint offered a solution. “Let’s just keep it to ourselves until we have the source identified. Maybe we’ll have a better way to explain ourselves then, or maybe they won’t punish us, because we’ll be heroes who solved a case. Can we just wait?”
I thought it was pretty unlikely that digging our hole deeper would help us stay out of trouble, and I told her so. She didn’t even bother arguing with me. Peppermint only pleaded with a sing-songy, drawn-out, “Pleeeeaaaaaase.” She had her hands clasped in front of her, as if to ask for a saint’s intercession.
“OK, we can investigate on our own for a little longer, but I still think this is only going to place us in more trouble.” I figured that’s what I deserved after what I’d done to Peppermint, but I wished I could help her make a better choice. This seemed silly to me.
Peppermint ignored that. “So, any thoughts on where the ledgium might have come from?”
I felt my eyes pop wider on their own volition. “There is a ledgerkin working on our ward now! But he didn’t touch the food cart. Are there any ledgerkin in the galley?” I asked, thinking it was a long-shot for Peppermint to have an answer.
“I used to date a guy on security,” she said. Of course she had! Peppermint had dated more people than Santa Claus visited houses on Christmas Eve. It was epic.
“Oh, please, please, please, can I please have his number?” I asked, clasping my own hands to plead with Peppermint as she had so successfully pleaded to me.
Peppermint rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “If you go investigating ledgerkin in other units, I’m your wingwoman,” she announced, texting me the contact info.
And it turned out that she wasn’t mistaken. There were ledgerkin lurking everywhere, once you knew who to ask about them. Her elf-man in security made IDs for everyone and knew exactly who worked where. First, let me simply note that Peppermint’s discarded date, Orion, was jaw-droppingly, mouth-wateringly hot like one of those spiced candy canes. It wasn’t the gun and the armor and the boots. He would look hot while brushing his teeth. Or while sleeping. And it was time to reel in my thoughts.
Orion handed me the print-out with ledgerkin names and units. “None of them have records, or we wouldn’t have allowed them entry,” he offered.
“Four of them work in the galley,” I noticed immediately.
“Snow conversion is another unit that took a handful of them in,” Orion added, and he was right. Snow conversion refers to our water supply.
“The candy factory, toy factory,” and my eyes glazed over. I had some leg work to do.
“Thanks, Orion.”
“Sure,” he said, dismissing me. I wasn’t the kind of flashy girl that guys like Orion dated. I backed out of his office with all the security feeds and radios, and let the door latch, while mentally putting away the well-worn feeling of rejection as well. Aware that he could still see me on his screen, I moved along and tried to look natural, but I was plotting my next move. There was a lot of ground to cover, and I felt an almost panicky sense of urgency to solve the riddle of Graham’s death, potentially averting more disasters.
I prepared myself to beg Peppermint to come with me the following day, because we both happened to be off. I had my reasons: I would feel less likely to miss something, and cops worked in pairs anyway. It only made sense. Besides, Peppermint could make it look like we were just flirting, where I would only look like someone who wanted to lay down the law.
“Sure!” she burst out with no prodding from me. “Do you want to do a makeover first?” She was excited.
I thought about it. “Do you think it will help?”
“Absolutely!” she said, but it turned out that what she really wanted was to cut my hair, which I had simply grown out and always wore in a severe bun. I let her cut it her way – for Graham.
By the time Peppermint was done with me, my hair had … whimsy. She called it a ‘tousled pixie’ cut. “I didn’t know you could style hair,” I commented.
“Oh, yeah, I thought I wanted to be a hair dresser at one point, but then I realized I had to deal with people. I’m more of a lab girl,” she explained.
I thought she was a people person. I was counting on her to be flirty.
Still running her fingers through my hair–tousling it, I supposed–she mused, “I got a little bossy with people who wanted bad hair cuts, and then I was just done.”
That explained it. And she generally attracted guys who liked how bossy she was. They encouraged and indulged it… for a while. Then she kicked them to the curb.
“Well, this is as good as I’m going to get. Shall we?” I asked. But Peppermint needed time to dress both of us in complementary but different outfits. It was a while before we set out.
***
We made our stop at the galley when it was lunch time. I carefully scooped my ice blue velvet skirt so it laid flat under me, but it never really felt comfortable. I couldn’t wait to put on some practical pants when this day was over. Peppermint tested the strap of her large purse to see whether it would stay put across the back of her chair. She had tight-fitting sleeves on her dress, perhaps so that she could handle her giant purse without wardrobe issues. The thing looked like it had grown as the day went on. I was grateful she had outfitted me with cream-colored crepe butterfly sleeves so that my look was less revealing. We both had on tights that looked great on Peppermint but made me feel very exposed.
“So,” I said, slipping my feet out of my too-high heeled, cream-colored velvet boots to stretch my toes, “what we have discovered so far is that all ledgerkin are cranky, no single one more suspicious than the others.”
“That, and there’s a guy in the candy factory who won’t pass a background check for long. He’s compromised by his gambling debts.” Peppermint was examining herself on a reflective tin Christmas tree decoration, pursing her candy-apple red lips as she said this.
“True story,” I agreed. “I hope he goes to the loan department and gets that straightened out like I advised him.” Most of my best advice goes unheeded on the mental health floor, so I already figured he would wait until his situation was worse and he realized had no other option. Briefly, it reminded me of the way Peppermint and I were digging our holes deeper. I nodded to myself and then tucked into my pot roast. We gave up talking for a few minutes. Peppermint delicately forked at her chicken dumplings, savoring a few bites and then calling it quits early.
“Time to compliment the chefs,” she said with a twinkle in her eye that suggested she’d like to date a chef and take a break from cooking for herself.
So we dumped our trays and sashayed through the doors that clearly said “AUTHORIZED EMPLOYEES ONLY.” We’d been bouncing past signs like this all morning, and I was beyond my initial shame for ignoring the rules. A matronly elf-woman was stirring the nearest pot as we entered, but an elf-man appeared to be running things, so I figured we were saved when we caught his eye. Obvious hopes played across his features as he closed the distance to speak with us privately.
“What a treat we had for lunch,” Peppermint said. “We just had to compliment the chef!”
“That would be me, Rudolph,” the elf-man introduced, crossing his beefy arms so that the sleeves of his tight white t-shirt bulged dangerously. His waxed, pointy mustache, curled like the toes of elfin shoes, twitched when he smiled, and he added, “I am so pleased you enjoyed it.” His gaze seemed to take in both of us, much to my surprise. I could have been wrong, but I thought Peppermint angled her body deliberately to upstage me. She crossed her arms with the effect of plumping up her cleavage, and Rudolph appreciated that, or so I judged by the widening of his eyes.
Just then, a ledgerkin zipped through with a towering pile of dirty dishes swaying in a stack that reached over his head, and then he was gone through another floppy door. I grabbed for the conversational reins, because Peppermint was turned the wrong way to see the little orange guy pass through. I cut off whatever Peppermint was about to say with, “I didn’t realize we had so many ledgerkin at the North Pole, but we’ve been seeing them everywhere today, haven’t we?”
Rudolph glanced over his shoulder at the door that had just flapped shut. Then he leaned towards us as if to tell a secret. “They had a civil war at Ledgerland about how to enforce their rules. Some of them wanted a strict letter-of-the-law approach. The ones who held Ledgerland chose a more flexible application of the rules. So we got the really hardcore ledgerkin as refugees.”
“Oh,” I said breathily, taking the opportunity to lean in, too. “Why did they pick NP? Isn’t this really different from Ledgerland?” NP was magical and charming and revolved around selfless giving that culminated in Christmas. My home was different from everywhere.
Rudolph smiled appreciatively, reminding me of an ice fisherman who finally got a bite. “Well, they appreciated the work ethic and the global application of our Naughty and Nice lists. They get to take turns, just like us, doing the fly-bys that place people on the lists. Rumor has it that Father Christmas orders repeat fly-bys on most of the homes the ledgerkin cover, and kids are usually moved back to the Nice List then,” he said significantly. I mouthed an “O” of understanding. He remembered Peppermint, when her head bobbed as well, but his smile returned to me.
I wiggled in my discomfort, wondering how Peppermint felt about me stealing her show, afraid this might damage our friendship. I really cared about Peppermint. Just then, I perceived Rudolph’s struggle to keep his eyes pointing north, where my eyes were located. My fidgeting legs and hands froze like a baby reindeer too afraid to fly off its first roof. The chef’s struggle lessened, it seemed, so I sighed out a breath I hadn’t been aware of holding. This was such an odd day for me.
Rudolph’s mouth was working, but no sound was coming out. I realized just in time that Rudolph had lost his train of thought. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Peppermint do an eyeroll. She definitely tapped her foot.
“So these ledgerkin are really hardliners about the rules,” I prompted him to continue. Maybe I thought that ignoring Rudolph’s lopsided attention would make the competition (real or imagined) between me and Peppermint go away.
“Right? So the ledgerkin still aren’t happy, but we’re stuck with them.” Rudolph said all of this with a tone that suggested we would be impressed by his worldly knowledge.
Accordingly, Peppermint and I both widened our eyes, nodded, and cooed little sounds of amazement. It seemed like Peppermint’s hefted her huge bag from one shoulder to the other in confirmation of its weight. I only noticed that peripherally at the time, mostly relieved that Peppermint was still participating in this conversation. I wasn’t used to factoring in the possibility of jealousy in my friendships!
Properly encouraged, Rudolph leaned almost imperceptibly closer to add, “I hear that it isn’t enough for them. The ledgerkin want more control. They think the whole world has gone mad, and they want to make everyone behave. Even us!”
All three of us laughed like we were gossiping, which I suppose we were. “How could anyone control the world’s behavior?” I laughed. I sometimes wished I could do just that–force a gambler to straighten out his debts, for example.
“I don’t know!” Rudolph said, shaking his head. I wondered why the white chef’s hat didn’t move. Starch? “It sounds mighty tempting though, doesn’t it?” And we laughed some more.
“You must trust those ledgerkin, though,” Peppermint commented, once we’d all sobered up. I risked a good look at her to read her body language and face. As a mental health nurse, I assessed that Peppermint didn’t look as cheerful as before, and she’d taken a step back.
Rudolph shrugged noncommittally.
“They’re in the kitchen, even if you only put them on dish duty,” she pressed. “They basically have direct access to the food we all eat.”
“There are ledgerkin in snow conversion, chocolate making, toy production, everywhere. What difference does it make to add them here?” Peppermint and I had already visited those sites this morning, so this wasn’t news to us. It seemed the foremen hadn’t had Rudolph’s knowledge or interest. They probably only cared that the ledgerkin were hard workers, always busy and moving.
“Do they touch the food?” I pressed.
Rudolph shrugged again but seemed to consider the thought. “No, but they are right here,” he said, giving me a nod for pointing it out first.
“What actually concerns me,” Rudolph checked over his shoulder, and the matron stirring a pot quickly turned away and pretended not to be listening to us, “is that they mainly put people on the Naughty List when it’s their rotation to do the fly-bys. If everyone is Naughty, then what are we even doing here? I mean, we’re elves. We want to tinker and make toys. I heard Father Christmas was going to take them off the fly-bys, before he got sick. Did you know he’s been sick for a few weeks?”
We both shook our heads.
“We’ve been delivering meals straight to the residence: Chicken soup, cheese and crackers at first, now just broth and ginger ale. Add that to the fact that the old magic is failing and the weather appears to be changing. It all seems so wrong,” Rudolph said.
Rudolph had made a complicated, double observation, that I didn’t know how to respond to. Scientists once thought that our magic masked the temperate beauty of the North Pole, giving humans the illusion that we lived in a tundra, so they would keep away. More modern scientists believed the old magic was actually protecting us from the tundra, giving us the experience of a cold but livable climate with four seasons, one far away from humans for our protection. Either way, elves were starting to feel really cold, and we were simultaneously concerned about global warming. Thus, Rudolph’s double-observation about old magic failing and weather changing. It confused all of us at NP, so don’t feel bad if I just lost you, too.
There was one thing Rudolph had correct for certain: It all added up to something very wrong in NP.
TO BE CONTINUED
Check back in March for Part 2, the conclusion of North Pole Conspiracy. Until then, happy reading!
