Unnatural Causes

by Dawn Eastman

  She was startled out of her thoughts by the sound of footsteps approaching. She turned toward the sound, but no one was there. Several birds rose through the trees, squawking and chirping. She heard rustling in the bushes as a small creature ran past, and then all was silent.

  It must have been an animal she heard.

  Katie glanced at her watch and stood. She needed to get back for her clinic, or she’d run late all day and Angie would sigh heavily and glance at the clock after every patient. She pulled out her phone to check her messages and walked toward the pathway. As she turned to step onto the path, she was surprised to see Matt Gregor, who was also focused on his phone.

  They jumped away from each other, both of them starting apologies, and Katie’s phone slipped out of her hand. They both bent to pick it up and grabbed it at the same moment. His hand was warm, and Katie jerked away quickly at the sudden contact.

  “You’ve stolen my secret hideaway, I see,” Matt said. He handed her the phone.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see your name on it. Did I miss the sign?” She took the phone and slipped it into her bag.

  “It’s more of an unwritten thing . . .”

  “So you’re the only one who knows it’s yours?”

  “Well, yeah.” He smiled. “And you. You know it’s mine.”

  Katie crossed her arms in mock annoyance. “Maybe I was looking for you.” She mentally smacked her forehead. No matter that the jittery bubbly feeling was back, she was too busy for a relationship. And if she was honest with herself, she was afraid of her reaction to Matt Gregor. She felt more comfortable with subdued pleasure at seeing someone than this weird teenager-y thing that was happening.

  Matt’s smile was brilliant and warm. “You were?”

  Katie looked at the ground, thinking fast. She remembered what Gabrielle had said about Matt swearing off of anyone in medicine. She wasn’t going to try to convince him to date another doctor. But he seemed . . . interested. Didn’t he?

  “Yes, I wanted to ask you about Ellen Riley.” As soon as she said it, she knew she’d blown it.

  “Oh, sure.” His smile faded to a polite interest. “What did you want to know?”

  What did she want to know? Besides who killed Ellen and who could be threatening her, Katie, now?

  “I just wondered . . . if she said anything when she arrived at the ER the other night.”

  Matt shook his head. “She never regained consciousness. I thought you knew that.” He tilted his head and met her eyes. “She never had a chance. I’m not sure how we even managed to get a heartbeat.”

  “Right.” Leave it to her to turn a perfectly fun interaction into a depressing medical discussion. Maybe he was right about not dating a medical person. She should adopt the same rule—then they could just be friends with no weird subtext. “I’d better head off to clinic—my nurse hates it when I run late.”

  Matt chuckled. “Don’t they all. They’re very schedule-conscious, those nurses.”

  Katie turned and walked slowly down the pathway, mentally berating herself for getting flustered by some guy.

  “Dr. LeClair?”

  Katie turned. Matt walked slowly toward her down the treelined path. A breeze loosed a handful of colorful leaves from their branches, and they fluttered gently down between them. She felt the good kind of butterflies in her stomach.

  “Please, call me Katie,” she said when he stopped a couple of feet from where she stood.

  He held her gaze for a long moment. “Can I . . . I’d like to . . .” He looked away.

  Katie curled her fingers into her hand to keep them steady. Maybe Gabrielle was way off base. He was going to ask her out—what should she do?

  “I heard you’re looking into Ellen’s death. I’d like to help, if I can.”

  It took Katie a moment to shift gears from imagining a date to feeling paranoid that people knew what she was up to.

  “You . . . heard?” Katie’s mind raced, trying to figure out who knew and who could be talking about it. Other than Patsy Travers, Beth, and Caleb, there was no one. “How did you hear?”

  Matt’s cheeks turned deep red, and he ran his hand through his hair. “Let’s say I overheard that you’re looking into her death.”

  “You were spying on me?” Katie took a step back from him.

  “No.” Matt held his hands out, palms up. “It was an accident. I came to the benches during a break, and I saw you there talking to someone. I was about to say hello, but something about the way you two were sitting made me think it was a serious conversation and I should leave you alone.”

  “Okaaaaay,” Katie said. She waited for him to go on.

  “So I was about to head back down the path, but I heard you say that you weren’t going to let this person get away with murder. At that point, I did leave and waited until the other person left. I saw that it was Beth Wixom.” Matt looked at his shoes. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but I really liked Ellen, and if she was murdered, I’ll help in any way I can.”

  Katie considered for a moment. She didn’t see a downside. Matt wasn’t on her list of suspects. He wasn’t even from Baxter. But he had been with Ellen in her last moments and had done all he could to save her. Katie understood the desire for closure.

  “Okay, yes.” Katie’s voice cracked. “I’d really like that.”

  “Good.” He held out his hand. “Let me give you my number, and you can text me when you think I can help.”

  Katie clicked open her phone and handed it to him.

  He punched in some numbers and handed the phone back. His warm fingers brushed against hers as he took it. Their eyes met, and Katie let her hand linger a second longer.

  Matt smiled. “See you soon.”

  Katie nodded and hurried down the path toward her office.

  21

  Katie entered the back door of the clinic still feeling unsteady from her rapid seesaw of emotions. He hadn’t asked her out, and that was good. She definitely didn’t want to go out with him. But she felt like something had shifted between them. Maybe they were becoming friends. Her mood plummeted when Angie and Debra, who were clearly in a state of high alert, immediately approached her.

  “Dr. Nick can’t make his afternoon clinic. He needs you to take over for him,” Debra said.

  “But I have my own clinic . . .”

  Angie nodded. “We’ve shifted most of them to Emmett’s clinic, so you should be fine.”

  “Why don’t we just split Nick’s patients like we’ve done in the past?” Katie didn’t wait for an answer as she walked to her office to put her bag away and put on her white coat. She was sensing that she would need roller skates as well if the worry she was picking up from her staff was any indication of the way the clinic would go. Debra and Angie followed on her heels.

  “Dr. Nick specifically asked that you do his clinic. He said you’d done a rotation at the pain center in Ann Arbor, and he knew you could handle it,” Angie said.

  Katie was surprised by this. She’d worked with Emmett during several rotations in residency, and she knew he trusted her clinical instincts, but she had never gotten that impression from Nick. In fact, she had often felt that he resented her addition to the clinic. “It’s his pain clinic patients this afternoon?”

  Angie nodded. “Don’t worry; most of them are return visits, and you just need to evaluate and decide if the plan is working. We shifted all the procedures to tomorrow. Nick didn’t want those patients to wait until next week to see him.”

  “How are we going to run three clinics tomorrow?” Katie asked. The small building only had enough rooms to run two clinics at a time, and on staff they had only Angie and Debra to help keep things running smoothly.

  “Emmett said you can take the afternoon off, and he’ll take the morning,” Angie answered. “We’re shifting everyone around now.”

  “Okay,” Katie said. Although it didn’t sound like anyone was waiting for her approval. “What’s wrong with Nick?”

 
; Angie and Debra exchanged a look.

  “He’s having one of his bad days,” Angie finally replied. “No one wants him here when he’s like that.”

  “We’d better get moving—the first four patients have already checked in.” Debra hurried back to the front desk.

  Katie turned to ask Angie what she meant about Nick, but she was already down the hall with a chart in her hand to bring the first patient back.

  Katie grabbed her stethoscope from her desk and followed.

  The first patient had spinal stenosis and ongoing chronic back pain. He had been a forklift operator until an accident had left him in too much pain to work the machinery. Katie saw that he was on disability and needed to come in monthly to have paperwork filled out and get a refill on his narcotic pain medication.

  The next patient was trickier. He’d been in a car accident six months earlier, and Katie saw that all his testing had come back normal. As far as she could tell, he should be better by now. She knew that it was often difficult to wean off of pain meds—for a certain type of patient, almost impossible.

  “Hello, Mr. Taylor.” Katie entered the room and put out her hand.

  Mr. Taylor took it in a weak grip and looked past her to the door.

  “Hello. Are you working with Dr. Hawkins today?”

  “I’m covering for him, yes. He had an emergency and won’t be able to see you, but I can take care of your prescriptions.”

  Mr. Taylor moved uncomfortably in his seat. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’d really hoped to see Dr. Hawkins. No offense, but I’ve been seeing him for a while now, and he knows exactly what I need.”

  Mr. Taylor stood up to leave.

  “Mr. Taylor, I’d be happy to help if you’ll let me.” Katie had occasionally run into this problem as a student. Patients didn’t want to deal with a student or even a resident sometimes, and that was always their right. But she felt offended that this man wouldn’t even let her write him a prescription.

  He sat back down. “I need a refill on my regular prescription, and Dr. Hawkins sometimes gives me a prescription for the stronger stuff.”

  “Stronger stuff?” Katie sat on the wheeled stool and flipped through the chart. She saw the prescription for tramadol but no mention of any other meds.

  Mr. Taylor seemed to get more nervous the longer she looked through the chart and finally said, “I think I’ll just reschedule. Thank you, ma’am.”

  She watched him walk out the door and then snapped his chart shut. Alarm bells were going off in her brain, but she had no time to focus on them. As she left the room, Angie handed her two more charts, and she continued down the hall to the next room.

  Katie saw twenty patients in three hours and felt like she’d run a marathon. She usually saw half that many. Plus, Nick knew all these patients and didn’t need to get up to speed on any of them. But still, she wondered how he had such a loyal following when he only allotted about three minutes per patient encounter. She didn’t have anyone else walk out on her, but she did have several patients ask if Nick had left her a “note” about their treatment.

  Katie marked each of those charts and Mr. Taylor’s and put them in a separate pile. After she finished all the notes, she looked at her watch and saw that it was nearly seven o’clock. She was too tired and hungry to go through the charts she’d set aside. She piled them near her bag and took the rest to the chart room. Since her car was still at the repair shop, she called Caleb and asked him to pick her up in ten minutes.

  She would examine the charts tonight after she had eaten something. Marilyn was in the records room vacuuming when Katie walked in, and she spun around in surprise when Katie set the charts down.

  “Dr. LeClair, I didn’t realize you were here. You gave me a fright.”

  “Sorry, Marilyn. Just a crazy day today, and I wanted to finish up all the paperwork. I’m heading out now, so I’ll see you later.”

  “I didn’t see your car in the lot. Is everything okay?”

  “It just needed a minor repair. My brother is picking me up.”

  “Sorry to hear that. It seems like when one thing goes wrong, five other things go wrong.”

  Katie grimaced. Of course Marilyn would get chatty on the one night Katie couldn’t wait to get out of the office. “I hope not. See you later, Marilyn.”

  “Bye, Dr. LeClair.”

  Katie stood by the back door waiting for Caleb’s car. She watched as the sky began to purple and the shadows deepened in the woods at the back of the parking lot.

  As she watched, one of the shadows pulled away from a tree and seemed to move farther into the woods. Katie blinked and looked again. She had to be imagining things. She was tired and stressed. There was no one in the woods.

  She squinted and watched for movement. A flash of light showed off to her right, and Caleb’s car pulled into the lot. As she looked back at the trees, she saw a blink of white and then nothing.

  Caleb pulled up close to the door and leaned out the window.

  “Katie? Are you okay?”

  “Yup. Just thought I saw something in the woods, but it’s gone now, whatever it was.”

  Caleb put the car in park and climbed out. “Where?”

  “It’s nothing, Caleb. I’m just tired. Let’s go home.”

  “Okay. Have you eaten anything?”

  “I had a sandwich for lunch.”

  “Well, that’s better than residency. Let’s get home and have some dinner.”

  Katie climbed into Caleb’s Jeep and rested her head against the seat back. She closed her eyes and tried to stop thinking for a few minutes. But the day kept replaying in her mind. The patients who only wanted to see Nick, the ones who asked if he had left anything for them. And then the fact that Emmett seemed to be checking up on his son. She was starting to get a bad feeling about his pain clinic.

  She jolted awake when Caleb stopped in their driveway.

  “You really are tired,” Caleb said.

  Katie yawned and grabbed her bag and pile of charts.

  “What’s all that? Do you still need to work tonight?”

  Katie shook her head. “I don’t need to, but there’s something weird going on, and I just wanted to go through a few of these charts.”

  “Weird how?”

  “I can’t really say, and I shouldn’t even talk about it, but I’m getting worried that Nick Hawkins might be involved in something illegal.”

  “This move to the country is getting more and more interesting.”

  They stomped up the front steps and opened the door.

  “Oh, no,” Katie said when she saw the condition of the house.

  Papers littered the floor, the couch cushions sat askew, and Caleb’s computer wasn’t in its usual spot on the table.

  “Caleb, did someone break in? Your stuff is everywhere. And where are the computers?” Had someone stolen Ellen’s computer? What would she tell Beth? Her brain was already on the fast track to panic.

  Caleb put his hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eye.

  “Don’t worry. I just got a little frustrated trying to code this app.” Caleb stepped into the room and put the cushions back. He tidied the papers and then held his arms out in a “See, it’s all fine” gesture.

  “Where’s your computer?”

  “In my room, in my secret hiding place.”

  “You have a secret hiding place?”

  “I have a false bottom in one of my drawers. You can’t be a hacker without a healthy dose of paranoia.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Katie dumped her bag and the pile of charts on the uncharacteristically empty table. She went to the kitchen and found some leftover chili to reheat. She stuck it in the microwave and hit the button.

  Caleb came in with his computer and Ellen’s computer under his arm. “Do you want to talk about this now or after you eat?” He gestured at Ellen’s laptop.

  “Tell me while I’m eating.” She took the bowl out and looked over her shoulder a
t him while she rummaged in the drawer for a spoon. “Did you find anything?”

  “Not a lot so far.” He set both computers on the countertop and opened Ellen’s. “I was able to reconstruct her browsing history and found the color-blindness stuff that Beth mentioned. Also, she was researching some old newspapers from Ann Arbor. She was looking at some stuff from about fifteen years ago.”

  “What was she looking at?” Katie blew on the chili and took a bite. She leaned against the counter and cradled the bowl in her hand.

  “Some guy disappeared, and there was a bit of a search for him before they decided he had just up and left his family. At least, that was the most interesting thing about the dates she searched,” Caleb said. “I suppose she could have been interested in the craft show and the Fourth of July parade.”

  Caleb clicked away on the keyboard and turned the screen so Katie could see. She kept eating and leaned over the counter to take a look.

  “She was also searching some names. Jack Riley is the only one that came up with any hits. Is that her husband’s father?”

  Katie looked at the photo Caleb had found. It was a black-and-white snapshot with the grainy resolution of newsprint.

  Katie nodded. “I think so. He’s the one that started the restaurant and almost went out of business until Christopher took over and expanded the franchise.”

  “Let’s see, she looked up Lily and Eugene Talbot as well as Sylvia Riley.”

  “Hmm. Todd’s last name is Talbot. He’s Beth’s fiancé.” Katie set down the bowl and scrolled down the browser history. “According to the dates, they would probably be his grandparents. Maybe she was just looking into Todd’s family?”

  Caleb shrugged and turned the computer back in his direction. “Hopefully the other files will be more helpful. I should be able to access them soon. I have a buddy who could probably get in faster than I can, but I assume you don’t want anyone else involved?”

  “Let’s keep it between us for now,” Katie said. “If you don’t think you can get in, we’ll consider asking someone else for help.”