Reflections from the Snow Ch. 02

"OK, that's alright, that's OK. Now is there anything else? Anything else you can think of?"

Mel pondered for a moment more.

"No, I don't think so. She wrote her note, handed it to me, took her bag and left. That's the last I ever saw of her."

I made Mel draw a picture of the shield on a napkin. It was pretty crude and I wasn't sure how much it would tell me, but it was something.

I shook Mel's hand vigorously and thanked him profusely before heading home with my new prize.

It was already past midnight when I got home, but I poured myself a beer and pulled out the Yellow Pages. I searched for every business I could think of that might have a shield as a logo. I immediately tried Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance. I found an ad for them that had their logo and it was a blue shield. But there was also a cross (duh!) and there were no letters in the logo.

Then I tried looking for BMW. There wasn't a listing for the car manufacturer itself, but I found a dealership ad that had the logo. The letters were there at the top with a nice big "B", but the logo itself was round, not at all like what Mel described or sketched on the napkin.

I looked for other companies with the name "shield" in them, but didn't come up with much. I wasn't even halfway through my first beer and I was already stuck! I drained it and went to bed, hoping for fresh ideas in the morning.

But fresh ideas never came. I kept my eyes open for business logos, scanned for ads in the newspaper and local magazines like never before, even pestered my friends and co-workers for ideas, but nothing matched. I was at another dead end.

It was about three weeks later. I had taken advantage of the three-day Labor Day weekend to head up to New Hampshire and get away from the big city for a while. I got a later start back on Monday than I had intended and got stuck in traffic on I-93 in the afternoon. It was a giant parking lot.

There I was, fruitlessly searching for something interesting on the radio, sitting in traffic, and tapping my fingers restlessly on the steering wheel. My eyes wandered to anything of interest: clever custom license plates, unusual makes of cars, striking occupants of nearby vehicles, even billboards. That's when I saw it. "Trust your loved ones to the Brigham and Women's Hospital family of doctors." A picture of a dad holding his toddler high against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. And the Brigham and Women's logo: a blue shield with the letters BWH across the top and three brushed, thick, white lines forming a rough triangle in the lower part of the shield. Exactly what Mel described! I stared at that logo fixedly, as if there might be some other clue hidden in the image, until repeated honking behind me broke my attention and made me realize the traffic in front of me had moved up a good 100 yards.

The rest of the journey was agony. I wanted to get home and plan what I would do next. But the traffic was implacable and just barely crept along. I tried to occupy myself by bringing to mind what I could of the hospital. It was a huge complex, as I recalled. I had driven past it a few times, purely by chance. I'd never had occasion to actually go there. But I knew they had a million different specialties, areas of treatment, and so on. It wouldn't be easy to locate someone who . . . Someone who what? Did she work there? Was she a patient there? How would I inquire? This might not be so easy.

I pictured the place in my mind as I crawled south. I imagined patients shuffling around in hospital gowns, doctors walking briskly down hallways with stethoscopes draped around their necks, and nurses in blue scrubs and cushioned shoes rushing from room to room.

Shoes! That's when the last clue fell into place. My mind returned once again to that fateful night outside Corcoran's. I step outside. My hat blows off and I stumble after it, almost knocking over a passing woman. I don't look up, but I do see her shoes. Flat, thick-soled, tan, boring shoes. Shoes like a nurse would wear. Beth was a nurse. It had to be!

I pounded the steering wheel with the palm of my hand. Would this damned traffic jam never end?