This one is just for fun. Hope you enjoy and, as always, would appreciate any comments.
The Strange Case of Miss Leslie Groves
Unlike the other phlebotomists at St. Bernadette Mercy Hospital, Joseph Hackmann did not mind going up to the Psychiatric Ward. He found the patients there to be generally harmless, occasionally eccentric, and frequently entertaining. One patient, in particular, a young woman named Leslie Groves, made an impression on Joseph because of the strange circumstances surrounding her case. He told her story many times. I first heard it from him fifteen years after the fact, and I’ll repeat it here for you.
Joseph worked the second shift, beginning at two o’clock in the afternoon. He spent the first three or four hours drawing blood for Complete Blood Counts, Rapid Plasma Reagin, and Blood Chemistry Panels on newly admitted patients. For the remainder of the shift, he stood by for urgent calls to the Emergency Room or Intensive Care Unit. Joseph would start his rounds with the surgical and internal medicine wards, since they were the easiest and quickest to complete. Then he would go on to Pediatrics. He saved the Psychiatric Ward for last because he never knew what to expect up there on the eighth floor.
At about five o’clock in the afternoon on August 5, 1995, a Saturday, Joseph entered the room of his last routine psychiatric admissions of the day – and one who proved to be one of his more entertaining patients. His name was Mr. Raymond Wells. He was sitting sedately in an armchair next to his bed facing the door when Joseph walked in with his tray of test tubes and syringes. “Good afternoon, Mr. Wells,” said Joseph in greeting. “I’m from the laboratory, and I need to take a blood sample from you.”
Mr. Wells, who appeared to be in his mid-thirties, looked at Joseph with a blank expression and said nothing. While he was not privy to the patients’ diagnoses, Joseph assumed Mr. Wells suffered from some sort of depression. That was a common condition on the eighth floor, and Mr. Wells’ general behavior – a dull despondency – was in accord with the many other cases of depression that Joseph had observed in his eighteen months on the job.
Joseph checked the number on Mr. Wells’ hospital identity bracelet against the number on his requisition and prepared his “Vacutainer” needle. One lavender top tube, two red top tubes, a slip knot tied with a rubber tourniquet, a dab of iodine and a wipe of alcohol, and Joseph was prepared to “stick” him. Since Mr. Wells paid absolutely no heed to what Joseph was doing, Joseph held his arm rather tightly in the event Mr. Wells should try to jerk it away when he felt the needle enter. But that precaution proved unnecessary – Mr. Wells remained oblivious to the proceedings even as his blood flowed into the test tubes.
While the tubes filled, Joseph noticed Mr. Wells make a series of grins and grimaces toward the partially open door. Joseph looked, but saw nobody there. Perhaps this guy has hallucinations, Joseph thought. With the tubes filled, Joseph began peeling and attaching the labels. As he did so, he observed Mr. Wells make a motion with his hand as if he were calling someone to enter the room. Joseph looked again, and while he saw no one at the door, he noticed Mr. Wells’ full reflection in the mirror on the near side of the door. Ah-ha! Joseph thought. As Joseph placed the label on the third tube, Mr. Wells tugged at the sleeve of Joseph’s lab coat. “Would you please ask that fellow to come over here?” asked Mr. Wells in a supplicating tone.
“Well, I don’t know,” replied Joseph with a roguish smile. “I think he wants you to go over there!”
But this is all just introductory to the main story having to do with Miss Leslie Groves.
While he was labeling the tubes, Joseph noticed a heavy storm brewing outside. It appeared to be one of those unexpected afternoon flash summer thunderstorms that occur occasionally in the desert Southwest. Joseph watched the dark clouds rolling in, swirling, churning, and completely obliterating the sky within minutes. He could hear the wind gusting, blustering, and blowing with terrific force against the large window behind the bed. Although tornadoes in this part of the country are rare, Joseph pulled the heavy curtains across the window and pushed Mr. Wells – still in his armchair of course – to the interior side of the room – near to the door where, in fact, he could be closer to his companion. By the time Joseph had pushed Mr. Wells to this safer location, the bellowing wind went silent and the room perceptively brightened through the curtains. Joseph drew back the drapes in time to see the last wisps of black clouds disappear and the summertime sky return to its familiar azure hue. That was very strange, Joseph thought. He noted the time on the labels for his blood samples – 5:15 p.m.
This also is introductory to the main story, but it is pertinent, as you will see.
The following day, Joseph was back at work. He had completed a two-year degree in Biology. His work at the hospital had convinced him to go back to college to finish his Bachelor’s degree, and he was considering whether he should major in Medical Technology or Biochemistry. He eventually chose Biochemistry and ended up working at a pharmaceutical company, but that was much later. To get back to the story, the following day, Joseph was back at work. Sunday was another light day, and by four o’clock he had completed all the wards except for the Psychiatric Ward. He had only one requisition for the eighth floor – a toxicology and full drug screen on a patient who had been admitted late the night before in Room 806, Leslie Groves, female, age sixteen.
Joseph smiled as he walked past Room 803, where Mr. Wells sat in his armchair in much the same manner as Joseph had left him the previous day. He entered Miss Grove’s room, the next room across the hallway, and quickly ascertained the state of affairs. Clothed in the usual loose, thin hospital gown, Miss Groves was struggling to be free of big, brown leather restraints that were fastened tightly around her wrists and ankles. Joseph also noticed that Miss Groves was quite petite, even for sixteen, with disheveled dishwater blonde hair, a tawny complexion, and blue eyes that were opened wide with a wild, confused, frightened expression. Joseph set his jaw in reluctant anticipation. This one could be trouble, he thought.
“Who are you, then?” cried the girl with anxious alacrity.
“I’m from the laboratory, Miss Groves, and I need to take a blood sample from you,” replied Joseph in his most soothing voice.
“A blood sample!” she repeated apprehensively. “Oh, God! What next?”
Joseph set his tray of test tubes on the table next to the bed and took her plastic hospital bracelet in his hand to check the name and hospital number. When he did so, she clasped his wrist tightly. “Miss Groves,” said Joseph retaining his calm demeanor, “I have to take a blood sample from you. It will be easier if you relax.”
But she gripped his arm all the tighter and pulled his attention toward her. “Will you listen to me?” she asked in a high-pitched, desperate voice. “No one else will listen to me. Will you listen to me?”
“Sure, I’ll listen to you,” Joseph shrugged. He had managed to loosen her grasp on his arm with his other hand, but she held on to that hand tightly. Joseph allowed her to squeeze his hand. She was obviously distraught, and he knew he would not be able to obtain his blood sample until she calmed down.
“Listen!” she cried. “I don’t belong here! I mean… I really, really don’t belong here!” She was fighting back tears and still struggling with the leather restraints.
“Well,” said Joseph. “We’ll all see if we can get you out of here and back home as soon as possible.”
“No, no! You don’t understand! I don’t belong here!” A frenzied look in her eyes alarmed even Joseph. Then she asked insistently, “Where am I?”
Joseph replied, “At St. Bernadette’s hospital.”
The girl responded, “No, No! I mean… What town is this? What state?”
“We’re in Tucson. East Tucson, in Arizona,” replied Joseph, quickly and quietly suppressing a smile.
“Arizona!” cried Leslie Groves. “That’s what they said, the nurses. That’s what I mean. I don’t belong here. I’m from New Mexico. Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the country, I mean, a cattle ranch fifty miles southwest of Albuquerque.”
Joseph inclined his head. Her distress was unaffected. He felt sorry for her.
“I mean,” she continued, taking in gasps of air as she spoke, “What I mean to say is that I was at home, outside, on our ranch near Duncan yesterday afternoon. And then, and then… I was here. I mean, not here but outside… Somewhere I don’t know where. There was this big wind and a strange little boy laughing at me, and then I was alone in the desert. I was next to a river, and there was a road. I followed it for hours up between two mountains. I kept walking and it got dark. I was scared to death. Finally, I don’t know, it must have been midnight, and I made it to a town. I kept asking people where I was. Then someone called the police, and… and they brought me here. Nobody will listen to me. They think I’m crazy – or taking drugs! Oh, I don’t belong here!”
Her voice trembled with so much agitation and real torment that Joseph felt compassionate toward her and gently squeezed the hand that still grasped his frantically. “It’s ok,” he said. “The nurses will take care of you. They’ll take care of you and make arrangements to get you home. It’s not so far from here to Albuquerque. You can drive it in six or seven hours. But I do have to get a blood sample. They won’t be able to do anything until they get the lab tests results.”
“No, you still don’t understand,” she said. Then she repeated with great vehemence, “I – don’t – belong – here!”
At this she released his hand and sobbed. A long, pitiful, plaintive moan emerged from her lips, and tears of anguish streamed from her eyes. Joseph had seen his share of disturbing sights in his many months at the hospital, particularly in the Emergency Room during full moon nights, but few spectacles affected him more than the distress he saw in the face of Leslie Groves. However, he still had to get his blood sample, no matter what delusions she might be suffering from. He took advantage of her momentary doleful reverie to tie the rubber tourniquet and prepare his utensils. “You might feel a little ‘stick’ now,” he said and inserted the needle into her vein.
Leslie did not react to the “stick.” Joseph was pretty good at being able to draw a painless blood sample. Leslie had become relatively calmer and more coherent now. She told him, “I feel so disoriented. I didn’t know how I got here. Last night, I was so afraid. Everything is so strange to me here. When they brought me in, they didn’t give me a chance to explain. The police were no help at all. The nurses downstairs were no better. Nobody will listen to me. They don’t treat me like a human being at all.”
Joseph returned her imploring look with one of as much gentle sympathy as he could muster, but he could think of nothing to say in response.
“Is this really how people are treated here at this time? With no rights at all?” She continued asking Joseph questions to which he had no reply. “One of the nurses was nice to me,” she went on. “We have a phone at our house. We just put it in. I gave the nurse the phone number, but she came back and said the number didn’t exist.” Then she burst into a new round of sobs and tears, “Oh, how will I ever get home?”
Joseph felt real compassion for the girl, but could think of nothing to say to console her. He politely took his leave. Walking down the long corridor towards the elevators, he was joined by Gail Young, a very pretty Registered Practical Nurse who made no secret of her affection for Joseph. Joseph liked her, and they occasionally took their dinner together in the hospital cafeteria, but nothing ever came of the relationship. She eventually married an X-ray technician – but that is another story altogether. On this occasion, she inquired of Joseph in a heightened state of excitement, “What do you think of our new arrival in 806?”
“Oh, she’s no more crazy than the rest of them,” Joseph answered with a smile.
“Joseph, please. You know we’re not supposed to use that word. No, really, now. Did she talk with you? What do you think?”
“Well, she said she was from Albuquerque and couldn’t remember how she got here,” Joseph replied still walking toward the elevators.
“Is that all?” asked Gail with some exasperation. “She didn’t tell you what year she was from?”
This stopped Joseph in his tracks. “What year she was from! What do you mean by that?”
Gail laughed her small, merry laugh that sounded like brass bells around a goat’s neck on a Greek island. “Why, what I mean is this,” she said. “She told me she was from the past. She said the year was 1945.”
“Wow!” smiled Joseph. “That’s cool. She did say a couple of things that struck me as odd, but she never told me she was from 1945.”
“She was probably afraid you would think she was crazy! Oh, now you’ve got me saying that word! Oh well, anyway, she’s convinced that she has traveled in time to the future. She wanted to know if the Japanese had surrendered. Isn’t that a riot?” she laughed. Then seeing Joseph’s puzzled expression, she laughed all the more. “Don’t you get it? 1945? World War II? Ha, ha, ha!”
Joseph thought little more about Leslie Groves that evening or the next day for that matter. He didn’t work on Mondays. By the time he returned to work on Tuesday afternoon, he had forgotten all about her.
That Tuesday, August 8, was unexceptional in every respect. That is, until about eight o’clock in the evening. Joseph was sitting at the phone desk at the front of the lab reading languidly from an 800-page text on molecular biology when he heard the wind pick up outside. The phone desk was located just next to a large bay window. He looked out to see billowing dark, purple-gray clouds moving violently in the early evening sky. He walked out toward the door of the Emergency Room to get a better look. Several nurses and Emergency Medical Technicians were standing at the door when he arrived. “Weird, isn’t it?” one of them said to him. “Just like the other day. Blows like hell for two or three minutes, then just blows away.”
Joseph returned to the lab. About fifteen minutes later, an announcement came over the loudspeaker calling for security to come to the eighth floor. Joseph decided to go up there, too. He was big and strong. If any trouble was brewing, he might be able to help.
When he got up to the ward, he saw a flurry of activity at the nurses’ station, a lot of chatter going on, and the head nurse on the phone talking in an animated manner. Security guards were coming in and going out of room 809. He entered the room, too, and saw… nothing. The bed was empty. No patient was anywhere in sight. Gail Young was in there, along with a couple of orderlies and a nurse talking with a security guard. “What happened?” he asked Gail as they stepped off into a corner of the room.
“She disappeared!” cried Gail trying to control the excitement in her voice. “Leslie Groves. We moved her into this room today. I was in here, making my rounds. She was asleep on the bed. Then that terrible wind blew up outside. I went to the window and drew the curtains. When I turned around, she was gone – disappeared!”
“Nobody saw here go out of the room?” Joseph asked.
“Nobody!” cried Gail. “We’ve looked everywhere – all the other rooms – we called all the other floors. Nobody saw or heard a thing. It’s like she vanished into thin air!”
The police were called. A comprehensive search was made. One of the nurses reported that she saw an unknown fat man walking past at about the time of the disappearance, but as it was during normal visiting hours, this was nothing really out of the ordinary. To make a long story short, Leslie Groves was never found. The forms were filled out officially listing her disappearance as a voluntary discharge against the advice of the healthcare provider. To the very end, according to Gail and the other eighth floor nurses, Leslie insisted that she was from Albuquerque, New Mexico – and from the year 1945. Gail half-believed it to be true. She said Leslie had told her things, described details that made her wonder.
Well, that was the end of the story. At least, that was the end of the story for several years. Joseph had never forgotten the incident and one day decided to look up Leslie Groves on Google. He found more than three million hits, but nearly all of them referred to a different Leslie Groves – a Lieutenant General Leslie Groves Jr. of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, who had directed the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs in the 1940s. Joseph then refined his search to find a Leslie Groves who was born in 1929, reasoning that if his Leslie Groves was sixteen years old in 1945, then she would have been born in 1929. He found something interesting – a short entry that read like an obituary. “Leslie R. Wilson neé Groves, 1929-1991. Survived by husband Richard Wilson of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Social worker who campaigned for the rights of hospital patients and the mentally ill.”
After Joseph told the story to me, I did a little more research of my own. What I found astounded me. While I couldn’t find anything more on Mrs. Leslie Wilson neé Groves, I thought there might be more than just coincidence that she shared the same name with General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project. So I looked up and found that the first test detonation of an atomic bomb occurred July 16, 1945 near Socorro, New Mexico – only about 60 miles southeast from where Miss Groves said her family’s cattle ranch was located. I also learned that at the end of World War Two, an American plane dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, at exactly 8:15 in the morning of August 6, 1945. And another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945. I checked an old calendar. Given the time difference, the atomic explosions would have been exactly fifty years to the date, even to the hour and minute, of the two strange wind and cloud events that coincided with the appearance and disappearance of Leslie Groves at St. Bernadette Mercy Hospital. I also noted that the numbers of the two hospital rooms where she stayed, 806 and 809, correlated to the dates of the bombings, August 6 and August 9. Not only that, but I discovered that the area where Leslie Groves’ cattle ranch was located southwest of Albuquerque is at the exact same latitude as Hiroshima, and that the longitude differs by 120 degrees – exactly one third of the way around the earth in distance. Also, I found that a road from Tucson passing between Mica Mountain and Mount Lemon and leading to the San Pedro River about twenty miles from town would be about where Leslie Groves might have found herself the day she claimed to have been transported – and that location is at the same latitude of Nagasaki, and its longitude differs from Nagasaki by exactly 120 degrees. I also remembered Joseph say that Leslie Groves mentioned seeing a strange little boy laughing at her when she first found herself in the desert in Arizona and that the hospital report said something about an unknown fat man in the Psychiatric Ward at the time she disappeared – this is the strangest part of the whole thing – while I was researching the dates and times of the two atomic bombs, I learned that the military codenames for the two bombs were Little Boy and Fat Man. I was astonished at all these coincidences, but I never mentioned them to Joseph – I was afraid he would think I was crazy.
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Actually, the story is very well-written. It does remind me a bit of Twilight Zone except that those rarely ended well. We don't have to know how she got to the future-that should remain forever a mystery.
