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Show 254 Hood would follow in Oakley's. The branch president had telephoned and a bed was waiting for Dorothy. She was to spend the night there for observation. After checking her in, Oakley was to determine if Heinmiller should drive home by himself. If it seemed a poor risk, Oakley would drive him back home, where the branch president would be waiting to drive Oakley back to the hospital to pick up his own car, which Elder Hood was to leave in the parking lot upon being driven home by Elder Sorenson, who was to follow him to the hospital. If, on the other hand, Heinmiller appeared to have himself sufficiently in command, he would drive home alone and Oakley would phone ahead to alert the branch president and would then go home himself, and Elder Hood could then go home with Elder Sorenson, who would have followed behind in any case. This of course left Elders Burton and Zaret with nothing further to do, but Lorin was grateful for that because he was not sure he could keep it all in his head anyway. He suspected exhaustion had made his mind go silly. As he climbed into Oakley's car and fumbled for the ignition he kept thinking of pea pods hanging from wires. He had, later on, only confused recollection of the events that followed, because his mind was on other things. The six men, including Heinmiller, entered the night from that blighted house, leaving the hranch president behind, and for a distance travelled the same icy roads past the same glittering highway markers and the same darkened shopping plazas, until the last car in the procession, Zaret's, a green Studebaker with a stepped-up idle, fell back and swung onto the viaduct at the edge of town. Lorin watched it vanish into the stream of headlights along the freeway. The patient was delivered; the rest was a haze of hospital rooms with potted trees, and nurses in crisp hats, a matron at the check-in counter, banked snow in a parking lot, an injured dog along a road that he was not |