Part 9 (2/2)
”Okay, now, can we go?” Jill had indulged this long enough, and Abby was getting riled up, with all the encouragement.
”Wait, one last thing.” Abby went to the bathroom and opened the mirrored medicine chest. ”Here's Dad's Crestor. This is where he keeps his meds, not on the nighttable. Also, this prescription was filled at our CVS. Dad chats up the pharmacists, and they all love him. Proves my point.” Abby turned at the faint sound of a hip-hop ringtone. ”Wait, that's my phone, downstairs. I should get that.” She headed out the bathroom door, then the bedroom. ”I'll be right back.”
”I'll come with you.”
”No, wait, stay.” Abby rushed out of the room, leaving Jill lingering unhappily by William's bed. She and William used to have a bra.s.s bed, and she flashed on a Sunday afternoon long ago, when they were driving in the car, dropping off the last daughter at her friend's. It was early on in their marriage, still happy times, and as soon as the car door closed, they both looked at each other across the console and realized, in the same moment, that they would have the house to themselves, like a sort of suburban miracle.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? William had asked her, with a grin.
Totally. Food-shopping can wait.
William had hit the gas, and they raced home, flew from the car, then ran inside, not stopping to let Beef out, and William chased her upstairs to their bra.s.s bed, shouting, Let's make some noise!
”Oh, well.” Abby was entering the bedroom, teary again, and the expression on her face brought Jill back to earth. She went over and gave Abby a warm hug.
”What's the matter, honey?”
”That was Victoria on the phone. I can't go to your house, tonight.” Abby sniffled in Jill's arms. ”She says I'm taking sides, or switching to the wrong side, or whatever.”
”Aw, there's no sides, there never was, not to me.” Jill let her go, and Abby wiped her eye.
”I know, but still, I don't want to upset her anymore. It's a hard time for her, too, and she's right, I'm not being very considerate.”
”I understand.” Jill used to mitigate Victoria's tendency to boss her little sister, but those days were gone. ”Don't worry about it, honey. Whatever you're comfortable with, I'll do.”
”I'll stay here tonight, but please, take the laptop and the other stuff. I do want to try and live here, make a go of it, no matter what Victoria says.”
”Okay.” Jill hated leaving Abby alone, but there was no choice. ”What's in your refrigerator, sweetie?”
”Bottled water.” Abby managed a smile. ”And half and half, for Pickles.”
”How about I go to the store for you, pick up some groceries, and drop them off? Then you can at least make yourself a bowl of cereal in the morning. You still like Special K? With strawberries?”
”You remembered.” Abby smiled, more broadly. ”You're such a mom.”
An hour later, Jill was back in the car in the rain, having dropped off groceries for Abby and picked some up for herself. The traffic on the expressway heading out of the city was congested, and she inched along, using the time to return phone calls and emails from her patients. Padma hadn't called her about Rahul, and Jill hoped he was improving, but the bloodwork would be definitive.
She stewed behind the wheel, her thoughts all over the map. So much had happened, she couldn't absorb it quickly enough.
What woman would forget Dad?
Jill couldn't shake the question, and it wasn't the kind of thing that would get the attention of the police, even if they had followed up. You had to know William to know it was fishy. She fed the car some gas, then braked again in traffic, and the reflective letters of a sign on the overpa.s.s caught her headlights. BROAD STREET, MILE.
She remembered that William had filled his scripts for the drugs at a pharmacy on Broad Street, and she wondered if she should stop in and ask. She was curious about the scripts, and Broad Street was on the way home.
You're a doctor, and Sherlock Holmes was a doctor.
She thought of the lesson she'd taught Abby, that all deductive reasoning was the same, a process designed to find the truth. When Jill ran a differential for a patient, she would systematically cross off diagnoses that weren't supported by the data and keep those that were, testing as she went along, until she understood what was really going on. That was the reason she'd ordered the blood test for Rahul; if his results came back normal, as she expected, she'd have ruled out the more serious diagnoses.
Jill thought about it in traffic. If she could go to the pharmacy and rule out anything being wrong with the scripts, she could put to bed Abby's murder theory. So she reached for her purse and felt around for the yellow Post-it.
Chapter Thirteen.
Jill cruised down Broad Street, going north in the driving rain. The boulevard bisected the city, and this stretch was lined with check-cas.h.i.+ng agencies, empty storefronts, and used-car lots. Streetlights were broken, leaving entire blocks in darkness, and Jill tried to understand why William would have come here to fill the scripts. She saw the BROAD STREET PHARMACY sign ahead and scanned in the darkness for a parking s.p.a.ce. One opened up suddenly, and she braked to pull into it, but when she checked her rearview mirror, something strange caught her eye.
Mom, look in your mirror. There's a padiddle behind us, one car back.
She blinked. There was a padiddle, two cars behind her. To double-check, she squinted at her outside mirror, and she could see the padiddle clearly, though raindrops dotted the mirror. It was two cars back, and it was also a black SUV, with the left light out and the same boxy grille, which was quite coincidental.
Jill's mouth went dry. She hit the gas, drove past the drugstore, and turned right off Broad Street. The sidestreet was skinny and even darker, lined with rundown brick rowhomes and plenty of parking s.p.a.ces. She pulled over, shut off the engine, and slid down in the driver's seat to see if the SUV would follow her.
Her heart started to pound, and she felt scared and silly, both at once. Her eyes were glued to the outside mirror. A few minutes later, the padiddle appeared, driving fast. She ducked deep into her seat, let it pa.s.s, and popped up again. She couldn't see the driver, but she caught the beginning of its license plate, and the first letter was a T.
Jill told herself to calm down, trying not to jump to conclusions. There would be no reason for anybody to be following her, and it would be dumb to follow anybody in a padiddle. Then she thought again. The driver might not know he had a headlight out, and maybe he'd started following Abby, then more recently started following her.
Jill started up the car, drove out of the s.p.a.ce, took the next right, and backtracked three blocks, heading for the drugstore. She parked, chirped the car locked, grabbed her purse, and checked around her before she got out, but the SUV wasn't anywhere in sight. She climbed out and hurried through the rain into the drugstore, more than a little spooked.
She hustled inside the bright-lit store, which was cold, empty, and dingy, with a tile floor that felt gritty under her pumps. She spotted herself on a security monitor, then hustled to the back where the pharmacy would be and got in line at the counter behind a young blonde mother, with a crying baby wrapped in a thin receiving blanket. There wasn't a pharmacist on duty, just a young male clerk with gelled hair, whose pallor wasn't helped by the fluorescent lights overhead.
”Is this a drop off?” the clerk asked the young mother, who was jiggling the baby while he cried.
”Can I see the pharmacist?”
”No, she's gone for the night.”
”Then can you help me?” The woman held the baby close, but the crying didn't stop. ”My little boy's teething, and my aunt said to rub brandy on his gums, but it doesn't help.”
”You gotta go to the doctor. I'm not a doctor.”
”I don't have one. I went to the ER, but it was too crowded. Can you just answer a question for me?”
”No, I just work here, sorry.”
Jill felt torn, knowing she wasn't supposed to step in. The baby wasn't her patient, and the Good Samaritan didn't apply. But she wasn't about to let a mother and child suffer, even if the system would. ”Miss, maybe I can help you. I'm a pediatrician.”
”You, a doctor?” The young woman's eyes lit up, an exhausted blue, and she had a neck tattoo with her name written in curlicued script. ”He kept me up all night with his crying, and I can't calm him down, no matter what.”
”Let me see his hand a second.” Jill checked his tiny hand, and he had a telltale rash. She didn't even have to take the baby, because when he cried, he opened his mouth wide enough for her to see a blister on his tongue. ”How did he sleep and eat, today?”
”Not much.”
”And he has a fever, I bet.”
”Last night it was 101, and he's still warm, for sure.”
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