She stood up on knees that trembled. “I think you’d better get someone else to see to your farm workers, Lige.”
He came around the desk, blocking her way to the door. “Charli, here’s what I think. I think you’ve got the wrong idea. And I would hate for you to go off half-cocked, spouting stuff to people. I mean, I don’t know that your dad actually reported all that income. I’d hate to see your mama have to deal with the IRS. Besides...it would be awfully hard to pay for it now that she’s donated it to the community clinic.”
“She didn’t—” Charli clamped down on her words, but the damage was done.
“Doesn’t matter who did, Charli. I can’t help it if your dad didn’t report income I paid him. I thought it was a little strange he wanted to be paid in cash all these years....”
“You liar.” She spat the words. “You paid him in cash—just like you were hinting at paying me. Why did he do it? What did you have over him?”
“Who said I had anything over him? Maybe he was more pragmatic than you, Charli. Maybe he understood that money was money, especially when he had a wife who spent it like water.”
He folded his arms across his chest. He was so close now that Charli’s nose twitched from the overpowering stench of the cheap cigarette he’d been smoking. She lifted her chin.
“The doctor I knew—the man I knew—wouldn’t have done this for money. And I won’t, either.”
His mouth twisted, and he shook his head in disgust. “You young kids. You don’t know how to work with people. You think you got all life’s answers handed to you with that medical degree. Well, think again. You don’t work with me, I won’t work with you. And your mama will be mighty disappointed when that hospital isn’t named for your dad.”
He thinks that will get me to do his dirty work? “Dad wasn’t much for ceremony. Thank you, but the hospital doesn’t have to go to that length. Plant a tree instead,” Charli told him in a terse voice, and pushed past him.
“I’d give my offer some more thought, if I were you.”
The words were addressed to her back. She heard the flick of a cigarette lighter before she had taken another step.
Charli glanced back over her shoulder to toss another, “Thanks but no thanks,” but what she saw in his face stopped her.
His eyes―cold, sharp, unrelenting in their intensity―didn’t leave her face. His next words were as gruff as before. “You need to think about people beyond yourself, Charli. You need to think about all the folks who depend on you. Your mama. Marvela. Your nurse—what’s her name? People who cross me—doctors who cross me—find themselves without a job and without references. And their staff? Their families? They’re the ones who suffer for somebody else’s pigheaded self-righteousness. Now that you got none of Daddy’s slush fund left to pay off your student loans and help folks out, you might want to remember that.”
With that, Lige rounded the desk, lowered himself into his chair and turned his attention to the paperwork on his desk. Charli couldn’t get away from him fast enough.
* * *
IT TOOK NEIL a solid half hour to persuade Darius to go bug someone else, and that was only after, in a rash moment of weakness, promising the man to do a half-page article on all of the lures Darius had invented. Ever.
In the meantime, Ida had already called twice for the papers. “I need ’em now! Or you can save ’em for catfish wrappers. What sort of business sense do you have, boy?” she snapped the last time she’d called.
So Neil flipped the closed sign on the door, ushered Darius out ahead of him and twisted the key in the lock.
In the car, bracing the steering wheel with his cast, Neil dialed his contact with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Brian Mulford answered on the first ring. “No.”
“What?” Neil tried to push a note of aggrieved injury into his question. “I call you to—”
“You call, nothing. You call to get the dirt on somebody or something or wheedle me into running a tag or do a criminal background check. Buddy, you owe me about five pizzas for all the free work I’ve been doing for you. How many Georgia Press awards have I won for you?”
“Three. Give up the badge and the gun, and you can be a reporter, too,” Neil told him.
“Then what would I use to shoot aggravating newspaper guys like you?”
“And if you shoot me, who would make you look good on the front page? How many promotions and pay raises have I earned you?”
Brian bellowed with laughter. “All right. Five. You win on that score. I guess we’re even. You do have a way of paying me back dividends. So what’s up?”
Neil made the turn onto the main drag and drove out to near the county line. There, in the middle of nowhere, sat Ida’s Gas-n-Go, a mecca for gossips and junk-food lovers alike. The parking lot was overflowing with pickups and SUVs, all featuring gun racks and hunting logos. Neil had made the mistake of going hunting just once—and embarrassed himself by pleading for the life of the deer he was supposed to shoot.
“The video from the community clinic,” Neil started as he pulled into a parking space. “You heard anything back on that?”
“Weird case, huh? Somebody wants to donate a hundred big ones, they can come find me and give me some charity.” Brian started listing all the ways a hundred thousand dollars would come in handy, from bass boats to a year’s supply of pork rinds.
Neil cut him short. “Well, anything pop on the video? Or something else? You know, fingerprints on the money?”
Brian scoffed. “Are you serious? Man, don’t believe what you see on TV, okay? Yeah, we got prints on the money. Partial prints. Smudged prints. Thousands of ’em. Anything usable? What do you think, genius?”
“I take that as a no.”
“And you would be a winner.”
“So nothing, huh?” Neil saw Ida, standing at the door of her establishment, hands on her generous hips, hair sticking out like Medusa’s snakes. He levered himself out of the car, only banging his hurt arm once.
“Well...” Brian’s voice took on that note of self-importance he always used when he was in the possession of anything resembling a clue.
“Give.” Despite Ida’s frantic waving, Neil stopped halfway to the convenience store’s entrance. Trying to hear anything in Ida’s establishment was a fool’s errand.
“Not for publication, right?”
“You’ve got a witness?”
“A witness? Is this even a crime? Giving away a hundred grand is not exactly a crime, least not according to the Georgia code. So feel free to—”
“Brian, Ida Cunningham is about to clock me if I don’t get her extra papers into the Gas-N-Go in, like, thirty seconds, so feel free to dispense with the drama.”
“Oh, man, I’d give anything to have some of her chicken tenders right about now. Or one of those onion things she makes.”
“Brian, you don’t spill what you’ve got now, I’m going to tell Ida it was you who delayed me, and you’ll never get her chicken tenders again.”
The threat worked. “Go after a guy’s weak spot, won’t you,” Brian grumbled. “Okay, our tech guys have managed to do a little magic on the tape. And we may have something.”
Ida had a spoon in her hand now, and she was miming some fierce motions about what she would do to Neil with that spoon if he didn’t hurry up. Neil gave up on the drama-free version of Brian’s story and headed to deliver Ida’s papers. Maybe if he were still on the phone, Ida wouldn’t abuse him so badly.
“What?” Neil stopped again as he got to the door. Ida took him by the jacket lapels and dragged him across the threshold.
“Boy!” she blasted. “I get to keep all the money from my papers this week, because you are an aggravating—”
Neil stuck his finger in his ear, his cast straight out, and pressed
the phone closer to the other ear. “What did you say?” he asked Brian again.
“I said the person on the video is either a really small guy or a woman.”
“How do you know?”
“’Cause videotape—even scuzzy black-and-white overused tape—doesn’t lie. Our tech guys have done the measurements.”
Someone came in the door behind him and collided with his cast, sending a radiating pain up into his shoulder. But it had nothing on the stomach-churning feeling that shot through him. He couldn’t explain it, that feeling.
“Brian. I need to see that video.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“PATRONS, THANK YOU for shopping at your local IGA, but our store will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
As Charli heard this, she yanked a grocery cart from the corral and swore under her breath. Even the blueberry yogurt was beyond its sell-by date, and she had to eat something besides hospital food, Twix and granola bars.
After the horrid meeting with Lige Whitaker, she’d dived into seeing patients just to distract herself from the doubts he’d given her about her dad. Lunch had been a hastily inhaled Twix with an orange juice—the orange juice was good for you, right? She’d fitted that two-course meal in between a screaming toddler with an almost-perforated eardrum and Mr. Hank Tolleson’s hemorrhoids.
Who said primary care physicians didn’t lead a glamorous life?
And she’d intended to get out of the office early for a change, so she could figure out what all Lige’s garbage had really meant, and if there was a way to get beyond it. Marvela, however, had slapped down a whole host of insurance paperwork for her to review, and Shelly, her nurse, had dumped about ten thousand orders for home health and medical equipment and—the saddest part of her job—hospice orders.
Plus today was payroll day, so she had to sign off on the staff hours so Marvela could write out checks.
How had her father done this for over four decades without going crazy? Maybe that was the explanation for why he’d taken Lige’s money. Why he’d hidden an outbreak.
Charli would have raced right through the produce section if she hadn’t been spotted by Julianne Brantley, who was thumping a head of cabbage.
Julianne, whose lipids panel was scarier than the first installment of Nightmare on Elm Street, held up the cabbage. “Hey, Doc? See? I’m following your orders! Gonna start eating those vegetables you’re so keen on. What are you getting?”
Honestly? Charli had been planning on picking up a few frozen dinner entrees. Faced with having to live out her own sermons, she brought the cart to a shuddering, squeaking halt.
Charli surveyed the small selection of basics the little store carried. This store was the only grocer in town, and an independent to boot, so prices were much higher than in the megamarts a half hour away—and the selection much more limited. Bagged lettuce. Tomatoes that looked pink rather than red. Bell peppers so expensive she’d have to take out a loan. Broccoli. Potatoes. A fairly good selection of fruit, thanks to it being the Christmas season.
Christmas made her think of Neil, which made her think of how unsubtle she must have looked in the newspaper office.
So does he think I’m just after the story or after him?
“Doc?” Julianne waved her hand in front of Charli’s face. “You in there?”
“Oh!” Charli snapped her attention back from the tiny newspaper’s office in her memory to the quandary at hand. “I was thinking about how expensive all this produce is. If health insurance companies wanted to get us healthier and spend less money, they’d do better to pay for part of the expense of eating right.”
“You got that in one, Dr. Prescott. This cabbage is about the cheapest thing going. I was wondering if you could write me a prescription for it and I could file it on my insurance.”
“I wish I could. It would save everybody money in the long run.”
Charli grabbed a couple of bags of prewashed lettuce, some of those expensive bell peppers and a pallid tomato, along with a bag of carrots. To the cart she added some bagged mandarin oranges and a head of broccoli. Yes, all of it was more expensive than junk food, but in the long run, it was cheaper than poor health. Tonight it would be quick and fast and that was what she was after.
“Whew, Doc, you’re eating high on the hog now!” Julianne told her as Charli wheeled toward the bread aisle. “That broccoli costs almost as much as steak, at least per pound. I could eat a lot cheaper if I just bought me some of those boxed dinners.”
“I’ll either pay it now or pay it later,” she called over her shoulder to Julianne. “Like I told you this morning in my office.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll wait, just get this cabbage now. My sister-in-law was telling me about some Mexicans who’ve got a vegetable stand. They have a greenhouse and everything, and they got some pretty tomatoes. Buy local, isn’t that what everybody’s saying now?”
“A vegetable stand?” Charli stopped her cart, despite another ominous warning the store would be closing in ten minutes. Surely they wouldn’t lock her in here without taking her money first.
“Yeah, out on the main highway, south of town. It’s run by some folks Lige Whitaker keeps around all year.”
Charli’s stomach twisted at the mention of Lige’s name. She’d tried to put their meeting out of her mind and, thanks to her schedule, she had—mostly.
“I’ll have to check it out,” she told Julianne. She hurried away—ostensibly because of the lights flickering on and off in warning, but mostly because she didn’t even want to think about Lige Whitaker.
As Charli rounded an endcap, she saw a big display of powdered cocoa, complete with marshmallows. Again, she had an image of Neil, with his dimples and his warm brown eyes and his apparent belief that hot cocoa could fix anything. Charli took a peek left, and then right, didn’t see Julianne or any of her patients behind her, and quickly dropped the box into her cart. It wouldn’t be as good as the real thing, but it would be a tolerable substitute.
Two loaves of whole-wheat bread, a sack of frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts, a jug of one percent and four fresh cartons of blueberry yogurt later, Charli arrived at the checkout. The high school girl who was ringing up her order glowered at her. “You didn’t hear the announcement about the store closing?” the girl asked.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would take me long to grab these few things.”
“Well, I wish people realized that when they stay longer, we gotta stay longer, and I’ve got a chemistry final to study for.”
Charli winced. I so remember those days. “I am sorry. I hope it goes well. Do you like chemistry?”
“It’s okay.” The girl darted her eyes around, probably to ensure the bag boy had not yet returned from carrying out the last customer’s groceries. “It’s kind of neat, actually, but boys around here don’t want to take you out if they think you’re some kind of genius nerd.”
Charli remembered this phenomenon, too. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. High school’s not forever.” The girl’s tag had a smiley-face sticker plastered beside the name Jen. “Jen, while they’re still scratching their backsides in a hunting stand and living with their mom, you could be enjoying driving around in a cute little BMW sports car that you earned with a megabucks job at a pharmaceutical company.” But don’t go into family practice medicine. You’ll never pay off the med school bills.
Jen froze for a moment, the head of broccoli halfway to the scales. A bemused smile hit her expression like a ray of sun on a cloudy day. “You think I could do that? Like, work for a pharmaceutical company? Maybe find a cure for cancer?”
“If you’re good in chemistry. And biology.”
“I never thought about that. My mama wants me to go to cosmetology school. She says everybody needs a haircut. She tells me I don’t need to be worrying about
getting straight A’s and I should work as many hours here as I can. B’s are good enough, she says, for cosmetology school. My friends call me lucky.” The girl rolled her eyes, weighed the broccoli and keyed in something on the cash register. The rest of the groceries beeped quickly by the scan bar.
Charli shook her head in commiseration. “Mine thought I needed to be in beauty pageants so I could learn charm. That’s kind of like putting someone in the Daytona 500 so they could learn how to drive.”
The subject of mothers reminded Charli of her worries about her mother. Her mom had been eerily silent all day—no phone calls, no messages, not even a surprise visit to the office. Charli had tried to get her on the phone after the meeting with Lige. But the phone had rung straight to voice mail.
Had Lige called her mother? Peddled some of his garbage to her? She didn’t want her mother worrying—and truth be told, Charli didn’t want to have to explain how she gave away a hundred grand of money that didn’t belong to her. Because in years past, her mother’s favorite self-medication for stress was a buying binge.
A buying binge.
Macon. I told her to go to Macon with her friends! Did I send her into temptation?
Charli blinked at the largish total that appeared on the cash register’s computer screen. She slid her debit card through the checkout’s card reader and prayed she had enough money in her account. When she saw Approved flash up on the screen, she nearly did a happy dance.
Despite med school and an M.D. after her name, Charli was a long way from that BMW convertible she’d dangled in front of the cashier. I’m encouraging her, that’s all. We need more girls in math and science.
Jen bundled up her bags and handed her the receipt. Her face was glowing with hope and dreams. “Thank you! Thank you!” she said effusively. “You’re that new doctor, aren’t you? Well, if you can do it, go to medical school, I mean, so can I. I mean, not taking care of sick people. I am so not a nurse. But that chemistry thing, working for a pharmaceutical company, I could do that. I can see that.”
Secret Santa Page 13
