Yet Curt supposed, or rather hoped, he was like his father in many ways. After all, his father was a self-made man. Curt looked more like him than any of his siblings. His younger brother Neil, who worked with Uncle Frank on Wall Street, looked more like their mother, and his younger sister Michele, who was married to a dentist in Boston, was so much a cross between their mother and father that she had a totally different look.
He had his father's six feet two inch height and the same broad shoulders, but he had his mother's smaller facial features, her slightly turned up nose and soft mouth. His father didn't have the narrow waist he once had. However, he still had a rough and ruddy complexion, a farmer boy's forearms and hands. "Just shake hands with Bill Levitt and you know you've been shook," people would say. His father and he had glimmering rust brown eyes and reddish brown hair. Both had a splatter of freckles along their foreheads, too.
His habitual gestures, holding his chin between his thumb and forefinger whenever he paused to think, or nodding softly when he was in deep thought were gestures borrowed from his father. They had the same deeply resonant voice, good for trial work, and like his father, he was impatient with small talk and bureaucracy.
Right now, he tightened his robe around his waist and stared incredulously at Terri.
"Jesus, you know what time it is?"
"I'm sorry. I just got off my turn at the hospital."
"I'm glad I don't have to keep doctor's hours." He wiped his eyes and looked at her more closely.
"What... what's wrong?" he asked.
"Oh Curt, just hold me. Please," Terri said, a little surprised herself at how vulnerable and feminine she sounded. Curt pulled her to him and pressed her against him.
"What?" He closed the door behind her quickly.
"A terrible night in the emergency room," she said. "Two deaths, one right before my eyes."
"Really? What happened?" He wiped the sleep from his eyes when she stepped back.
"One was a car fatality, but the other, the first one... Paige Thorndyke. You remember the Thorndykes. Her father is an airline pilot."
"Sure. Paige's brother Phil Thorndyke was on the varsity basketball team with me. What about Paige?"
"She's dead."
"Oh no. Also a car?"
"No." Terri shivered. He put his arm around her again.
"Easy. Want some coffee?"
"No. Let's just crawl back into your bed," she said. He looked surprised.
"Sure, but... so what killed her?"
"I'm not certain," she said as they walked toward his bedroom together. "It seems ridiculous in fact. I'll have to wait on the lab tests and speak with Hyman."
"Well, what were her symptoms?"
"Curt," she said stopping and turning so abruptly to him in the doorway, his eyebrows lifted. "If I believed her symptoms, she died of scurvy."
"Scurvy? You mean... like sailors used to get because they didn't have enough vitamin C?"
Terri nodded.
"Only, taken to a bizarre extreme." She shook her head again, this time to shake the images out of her mind.
"What the hell... can't be, can't it?"
"I don't see how," she said and began to take off her clothes. "I don't want to think about it right now. I don't want to think at all. I just want to feel." He nodded. He understood and he was glad she had come to him. He would make love to her as gently and as lovingly as he could. In bed together there were no careers to consider, no egos to stroke. There was just honest and sincere passion.
Terri was eager to lose herself in it. She drew Curt to her as she would draw a warm blanket over her body, and as she had hoped, she forgot the dead.
TWO
Dr. Hyman Templeman pressed his lips together and squinted at Terri as if the sunlight coming through the opened pale blue Venetian blinds in his private office reflected too brightly off her face. Templeman's medical practice was located in his large home on Main Street, Centerville. It was a Queen Anne --
style Victorian house with a steeply pitched irregularly shaped roof, a dominant front-facing gable, and one side-facing gable. It had patterned white shingles and cutaway bay windows with Wedgwood blue shutters. The asymmetrical facade had a full-width, one-story-high porch that extended along both side walls. In its day it was one of the most expensive homes in the area. Now it was a remarkably well-kept historic whose spindle work detailing drew appreciative eyes.
"They just don't make houses like this anymore," people would say. And patients would add, "Nor do they make doctors like Hyman Templeman." The two-story building contained fourteen rooms. Hyman and his wife Estelle utilized the rear and the upstairs for living quarters, which was far more space than the two of them now needed. Their three children were all married and gone, two living in California and one in Westchester. The front five rooms, including a relatively recently built waiting room, were dedicated to Hyman's medical practice. He had an X-ray room, three examination rooms, and a small lab.
The structure didn't have much land around it, but it did have a long front lawn that unfolded smoothly toward the street. There was never enough parking space around or near his offices, but the village police had an unwritten understanding that they wouldn't ticket the cars of patients parked at expired meters. Parking was enforced only during the summer months anyway, and just as in most small resort communities, the recognizable cars belonging to residents enjoyed a special dispensation.
"I haven't seen a case of Frank scurvy since I served in the army medical corps," Hyman remarked. "And that was in the South Pacific. Never seen one around here. Why even the occasional stump jumpers and rednecks who come down from the hills don't have symptoms that bad. Frank scurvy is rare in the modern world, but the occurrence of petechiae, spongy gums, and tendency to bleed, usually with other evidences of nutritional deficiencies, suggests the possibility of scorbutic purpura."
"I know how unusual all this is, Hyman, but if you saw her..."
"Of course, I've heard of women who have gone on one or another of these fad diets denying themselves necessary nutrition. And you are aware, of course, that patients with gastrointestinal disease, especially those on an ulcer diet consisting chiefly of milk, cream, cereals, and eggs, develop secondary deficiencies. Infections increase the physiologic requirements for vitamin C and people with poor dietary habits are likely to precipitate the appearance of symptoms."
"I don't know whether or not she was on some fad diet, of course," Terri said,
"or if she was suffering from an ulcer..."
"Well, the Thorndykes have been my patients for years. I never treated Paige for anything like that." He shook his head. "We'll have to wait for the autopsy report to confirm it all," Hyman said sitting back in his high back, dark brown, wide-lapped leather chair. The mahogany arms were worn where he would run his palms up and down while he thought deeply or spoke intensely. It was a nervous habit Terri had noticed. What she didn't know was that it, along with some other chronic gestures, was growing more and more pronounced as Hyman approached his mid-seventies.