“Mary Thomson and her sister Betty. Mary’s got terminal breast CA, but refuses hospitalization.” He grabbed his black bag from the backseat and trudged through an unbroken half foot of snow toward the front entrance. “With Betty’s help, I’m keeping Mary at home as long as I can.” He rapped sharply on a new-looking white door with a large windowpane covered by a curtain on the inside. “Betty, it’s Dr. Roper.”
Introductions having been made, he and Lucy entered the bedroom. He removed the dressings from under Mary Thomson’s right arm and exposed a glistening black cavity the diameter of a walnut where the tumor had eaten through the skin of her axilla. Thousands of tiny, scarlet metastases extended to the middle of her chest, rendering it red as a boiled lobster, and from biceps to wrist her arm was swollen the size of a thigh. Where her breast had been, the tissue lay stretched and scarred, some of it cratered like a lunar surface. Everywhere he touched felt hard as wood, and a cloying aroma of decay hovered over it all.
“Now you don’t be shy, dear,” Mary said to Lucy, flashing an overly white smile of false teeth that seemed too big for her gray, gaunt face. “Take a good look, and ask me anything you like.” Lying flat for the examination, she had been sitting propped up against a bank of pillows to greet them when they arrived. Just the simple act of getting upright, he knew, exhausted her, but it remained her way of welcoming visitors to her home, and she always made the effort. “Arm swelled up like that after radiation to the nodes under my arm,” she continued. “Blocked the lymph ducts. At least that’s how Dr. Mark here explained it to me.”
Lucy smiled down at her and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. “How’s your pain?” she said, with the same softness Mark had heard in the car. She gently slid her hand over Mary’s inflamed skin, carefully palpating every inch of the way.
Cuts right to the heart of the matter, Mark thought. With cancer, pain management mattered most, and too many doctors sucked at it.
Mary looked over to him. “Can I tell her, Doc?”
He adjusted an IV line attached to Mary’s left arm. At the other end of it stood a small, square machine winking fluorescent green numbers at them. An electrical wire connected it to a button by her hand, completing the circle. “Go ahead,” he said. “We can trust her.”
“Dr. Mark and I are breaking the law,” she whispered, giving a conspiratorial grin. “Every time I push this,” she added, pointing to the button.
“Mary’s the best teacher you’ll find when it comes to home care and using morphine on demand,” he said. “It’s not so much illegal as controversial outside a hospital, and the law’s a little gray on the matter. Of course, we keep mum about it, so as not to become a test case.”
“But I’m no junkie. Don’t use much more now than I did when Dr. Mark first got this contraption for me.”
“What you are, Mary, is a very brave woman,” Lucy said.
Mary gave a faint laugh. “My sister Betty out there, she’s the brave one, putting up with me like this. Not many let their kin pass on at home these days.”
“Mary, I noticed there were no tracks in the snow today,” Mark said. “Didn’t one of the social workers pass by? I specifically told them to see if you and Betty needed anything every morning.”
“Oh, I said not to bother, since you’d be here. They got far more needy folks than us to worry about.”
After they’d had Betty’s tea and were back outside, climbing into her car, Lucy asked, “How long?”
“A month, maybe more. I doubt she’ll last till the end of your rotation.”
As they picked up speed on the highway, Lucy’s cellular started to ring in her purse, which she’d propped on the console between their seats. One hand on the wheel, she fumbled for it, managing to spill the contents at his feet.
“Merde!” he heard her mutter as he retrieved the phone from amongst the debris. Dan’s number flashed beside the caller identification icon.
“I found your cellular,” the sheriff announced as soon as Mark answered. “One of my men stepped on it under the snow.”
“Terrific. You got any more useful information?”
“The shot came from behind on the passenger side, then out your front window, just as you thought. We’ll never find the bullet.”
“Shit!”
“It gets worse. After I left your place last night I swung around to the office to pick up my camera and flash. Went out to the wreck to try and get shots of boot impressions in the snow, but the wind had already blown them in.”
“Hey, I told you you shouldn’t-”
“I made some phone calls, and here’s the interesting part. The staff at the Braden estate insist Chaz is in New York.”
“But that’s the sort of crap they would say.”
“I also called his office in New York, and was told he’s home with the flu.”
“Again, figures.”
“I then call him at home and am told Dr. Chaz Braden is so sick he’s in bed.”
“Wall-to-wall alibis.”
“But she’ll see if he’ll take the phone.”
“Oh?”
“On the line he comes, and, sounding gravelly voiced, tells me the same story. I said I was sorry to bother him. He said it was no trouble. I told him we’d had a problem yesterday evening with drunken hunters taking potshots at passing vehicles and described what happened to you. He replied, ‘That’s terrible,’ then asked why I was calling him. ‘Just wanted to check if you were having similar problems near your place,’ I answered. He explained that since he had been ill and left for New York sometime after three in the afternoon, he couldn’t say what happened around his place last night. I thanked him, and we hung up.”
“So what’s so interesting? It’s exactly what I’d expect from the son of a bitch.”
“Oh yeah? That mean-mouthed bastard hasn’t been so cordial to me since the first day he came round after I took office. Even then he made it clear that he saw me as small-time, that he was big-city, and that meant I should stay out of his way. Yet here I am calling his big-city self to check on his whereabouts, and he’s polite as can be. What’s a country boy to think?”
Mark perked up. “He’s worried.”
“Yeah. And coming from a guy who normally scoffs in my face, that’s almost as good as an admission he pulled the trigger.”
“So you’ve tossed out the drunken hunter idea.”
“Let’s say I moved it to the back burner. But I can’t arrest Chaz for suddenly being courteous to me. We still don’t have any evidence he took a shot at you.”
Discouraged, Mark hung up at the end of the call and started to salvage the contents of Lucy’s purse from the car floor. The slush from his boots had left everything soggy. A packet of photos had spilled out, and fanned at his feet like a deck of cards.
“I’m afraid these may be ruined,” he said, picking them up and separating them out in the hope they’d dry. He couldn’t help seeing they were all of her in a group hug with four young men. Everyone had broad smiles, and seemed to be from the four corners of the earth. One had Asian features, another Polynesian, the third appeared to be North American Indian, and the fourth, brown-skinned, could have been from anywhere on the planet. Behind them stood a white wall with a red tile roof.
Could one of them be her fiancé? “I’ll spread these out on the backseat. You might be able to save them.”
“Thanks. We rarely see each other these days. I don’t know when there’ll be another chance for all of us to be in a picture together.”
He twisted around and began to place the shots side by side. When he’d finished and she still hadn’t elaborated on who they were, he arranged the pictures a second time.
“So how do you like our little United Nations?”
“Are they your colleagues from Médecins du Globe?” Mark asked.