Fred approached them. “Pardon me, sir, pardon me, madam—”
The couple looked up. They were both elderly, obviously in their seventies.
“Perhaps you can help me,” said Fred. “I’m looking for Dr. Frank Johnston, but it seems there’s no one at home next door.”
“This time of day they’re both at the Shuffleboard Club,” said the woman. “You’ll find them there.”
“I’m just passing through town,” Fred said, “on my way down the coast to Naples. Thing is, I was at med school with a Frank Johnston twenty-five years ago now, and I heard he’d moved to Florida, so I just thought I’d drop by and see if this Frank Johnston is my old Mend. It’s a fairly common name, might not be him.”
“I don’t think Doc went to medical school,” said the man. “He’s a registered pharmacist, not an M.D. Everyone calls him Doc.”
“My Mend Frank Johnston didn’t finish med school,” said Fred. “It might be him. Fellow about five eight, nine, slight build, he’d be about fifty years of age now.”
“Well, this Dr. Frank isn’t him,” the woman said. “Doc’s sixty if he’s a day, heavyset, hair almost white.”
“Oh — then I’m on a wild-goose chase,” Fred said.
“No trouble,” the man and woman said simultaneously.
“Has he been here long?” Fred asked. “I mean your neighbor. Reason I ask, it’s unusual to have a business like a pharmacy in a residential neighborhood. Wouldn’t be allowed in Naples. We have zoning laws.”
He had touched on a grievance. Both the elderly man and the woman sat up straight and became interested. It seemed Doc had moved in next door only a couple of years ago when he married Marie. It was Marie’s house; she had been their neighbor for ten years or so. She was a widow, very well fixed — her first husband had made a fortune in the liquor business, imported Mexican tequila. Dr. Frank had been her pharmacist. Marie had very poor health. Doc had prescribed miracle drugs for her, made her exercise, keep fit. Everyone was surprised when she married Doc, she had to be a good fifteen years older. Anyway, she had set him up in his geriatric pharmaceutical practice in her guesthouse. They got away with it because it was open only sixteen hours a week. The neighbors didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
Fred went back to his hotel and asked at the desk for directions to the nearest bookstore. He walked there and bought the latest copy of the magazine Small-scale Railroader, which contained Olive’s advertisement. Then he walked around awhile, sightseeing, and ate dinner at the best restaurant in town, putting the tab on his expense account.
Shortly before two o’clock next afternoon, Fred again parked his rental car on Gulf Boulevard and walked down the driveway of 5020. There were two cars in front of Dr. Frank’s Pharmacy, one of which was just backing out; its driver was a white-haired man. Fred went up the steps to the pharmacy door, opened it, and walked in.
There was a counter that held two large pharmacist’s jars of colored water in front of an alcove lined with shelves holding bottles and boxes of all sorts. A man in a white jacket was talking to an elderly woman seated in a kind of waiting area near the door. On the wall behind her hung a framed diploma. Frank Johnston was a registered pharmacist in the state of Florida.
“Be with you in a minute, sir,” the pharmacist said. He went behind the counter and began measuring out a prescription. Bent over a tray of small yellow tablets, he counted some of them carefully into a depression that ran along the side of the tray. As he did so, he began a tuneless humming in accompaniment to his work. When he had finished counting, he moved the tablets in the depression to a small prescription bottle and put the cap on. The humming stopped. He came forward from behind the counter and gave the prescription to the old lady. “Now, Mrs. Meade,” he said, “be sure to follow the instructions exactly. No more than one tablet every twenty-four hours, on rising.”
The old lady got up, took the prescription, and handed over a fifty-dollar bill. The pharmacist went back, put the bill in a drawer under the counter and handed over a five-dollar bill in change. “Thank you so much, Doc Frank,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, these sure do hit the spot, make me feel so much better.”
“Glad to help, Mrs. Meade. Say hello to your good man for me.”
“Oh, I will,” Mrs. Meade said, turning to leave. “He’s feeling like a new man with his new prescription. Goodbye now.”
Fred Eagle had been studying the man in the white coat. He was overweight for his medium height, with a double chin and the beginnings of a pot belly. His face had a fringe of white whisker that matched what was obviously a hairpiece; no hairline was visible and the parting looked as if it had stitching.
“Dr. Johnston?” asked Fred cordially. “My name is Sam Caldwell. I’m the promotion and advertising editor of Small-scale Railroader.” He laid the magazine on the counter between them. “You answered an ad in the current issue and we noticed you wrote from Bradenton. I’ve come to ask for your advice and help. We’ve never sponsored a convention of model railroaders in this part of the country and I wanted to talk to you about the possibility of doing so. Are there enough model buffs around here to hold a convention? If so, is there a suitable auditorium? What about the best time of the year — hotel accommodations, climate, entertainment after closing hours?”
Doc waved both hands in the air, palms out in a negative gesture, while shaking his head. “It’s not me wants the train,” he said. “I don’t know anything about them. It’s for my wife, she’s the one needs a hobby, and she thought the railroad would be good, it would fit into this place after I retire and close the pharmacy. It was her suggestion, looking in Small-scale Railroader magazine, so I bought one at the store in town. We don’t subscribe.”
“Why would you subscribe?” Fred asked.
“No reason, no reason,” Doc said hastily. “We subscribe to the magazines my wife is interested in, like Vogue and W — things like that.”
“Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you,” Fred Eagle said, picking up his copy of Small-scale Railroader. “Thank you for your time.” He extended his right hand across the counter and Dr. Johnston covered it with his own in a reciprocal gesture. The nails were bitten down to the quick.
It was a few minutes before two o’clock on a Thursday three weeks after Doc’s visit from the editor of Small-scale Railroader. Doc had locked the pharmacy for the weekend and had walked over to the big house when he saw a car turn off the main driveway towards the pharmacy. He was of two minds whether to go back and open up for the latecomer, so he waited to see who his tardy customer was. The time was now exactly two o’clock. The car was an old Chevrolet with an out-of-state license plate. The driver parked it in front of the pharmacy and both front doors were opened simultaneously. Doc watched in growing horror as the unmistakable figure of Mrs. Edna Treadle emerged from behind the wheel, followed after an interval by the enormous bulk of Ham Stone’s wife Olive getting out of the passenger side. The two women went up the steps of the pharmacy and tried the door.
Doc had not thought of Olive or her mother for eight years. So thoroughly had Hamilton Stone become Frank Johnston that they were two separate persons. Now Ham Stone’s past had intruded into Doc Johnston’s present. Doc recognized Olive and Mrs. Treadle from that other life when he was Ham Stone and he was momentarily petrified from shock. What are they doing here? he thought.