Denny went.
Lauren Dalby was on the bathroom floor, sitting with her back against the tub and one arm across the closed lid of the toilet, her forehead resting on her arm. She was a thin woman in jeans and a gray Kellam Falls Elementary PTO sweatshirt, barefoot, with her brown hair pulled back in an elastic that had mostly given up. Her phone was in the sink. A spiral notebook lay open on the bath mat with a pen in its spine, and on the open page, in the same small square handwriting Denny had seen on the note, was a list of times and numbers in two neat columns. The sweet nail-polish smell was stronger in here. Now he named it. Joyce's sister, at Thanksgiving in 2011, before the ambulance came.
"Mrs. Dalby," he said, and crouched down on the bath mat beside her. His knees cracked like kindling. "Lauren. My name's Dennis Albrecht. I'm the police chief. Your daughter's fine. She's with your boy. He's all right, she put his hose back on. I've got your insulin. Can you hear me okay?"
She lifted her head. Her face was gray-white and damp, and her eyes, when they found him, were her daughter's eyes, and fully, sharply there. That was the first thing he looked for. That was the thing that mattered.
"You," she said. Her voice was a croak. "You're the WHO DR."
"That's me."
"You send," she said, "a terrible question mark."
He laughed. He did not expect to. It came out of him in a rough bark that echoed off the bathroom tile, and Lauren Dalby closed her eyes and almost smiled, and then her face changed and she turned and was sick again, briefly, mostly water, while Denny put one big hand flat between her shoulder blades and held it there and looked at the wall. When she was done he got a washcloth off the towel bar and wet it at the tap and handed it to her.
"I put him down too fast," she said into the washcloth. "I felt it coming and I put him down and I must've pulled the circuit with my elbow and then I knocked the lamp. Is he really—"
"He's ninety-five on the monitor. Ruthie said so. I saw it."
She sagged against the tub. "Okay," she said. "Okay."