We drifted away. Marson’s patrician hackles were up. He said, “That woman has always irked me. Can’t imagine why Mary keeps her around—such impertinence.”
I noted, “They’ve been together forever. The status quo can be comfortable—better the devil known.”
Dr. Francis Frumpkin himself emerged from the crowd to greet us. “Brody! My genius young architect!” He clapped an arm over my shoulder and left it there, telling my husband, “Don’t let go of this one, Marson.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
Easing out of Frumpkin’s clasp, I reminded him that he had other fish to fry: “We enjoyed meeting Dahr yesterday—seems like a great guy.” Dahr was moving in and out of the reception area, checking on things, carrying an iPad. On Friday, I had judged him a handsome man, but now he looked especially dashing in black dress slacks, a tailored white lab jacket that was cut like a blazer, and the obligatory stethoscope draped from behind his neck.
Frumpkin gave him a wistful look.
Marson asked, “He does have ‘feelings’ for you, correct?”
“Oh, yes,” said Frumpkin. “But I can’t seem to convince him there’s a future for us—a life together. And it’s not what you think. It’s not the age difference, at least not per se. You see, Dahr wants a family. But me? I’ve done that. I’m content to enjoy being a grandfather.”
As far as I knew, he had but one grandchild, and I found it difficult to imagine her as a source of either joy or contentment. Thank goodness, the dreadful Olivia didn’t seem to be around that day.
“Speaking of grandfathers,” said Frumpkin, pointing behind us, “did you notice?”
We turned. Hanging on the opposite wall of the lobby was the enlarged photo of Archibald Frumpkin with the parachute, framed and spotlighted.
Our host explained, “The first of many, let’s hope. We’ll display that tribute in the lobby of your fabulous building, Brody—and in every FlabberGas clinic built from that day forward.” He glowed.
Stepping over to an open doorway, he pointed down a hallway to a sign affixed to a door, reading “FlabberGas Station #1.” He told us, “The sign, that’s just a mockup for today, but we will in fact call the treatment rooms ‘FlabberGas Stations.’ The prototype clinic will have three, but once we get rolling, the franchises could have as many as six.”
Somehow, this aspect of his marketing plan struck me as … off. Suppressing a laugh, I told Marson, “Good thing Glee didn’t get ahold of that detail.”
Marson laughed.
But Frumpkin didn’t. “That hack. That bitch. I have half a mind to sue the Register for slandering my practice.” Calming himself, he said, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” and retreated down the hall.
A mellow, familiar baritone voice asked, “What was that all about?”
Turning back to the waiting room, we found Sheriff Thomas Simms looking past us, watching as Frumpkin slammed the door to FlabberGas Station #1.
Marson greeted him with a smile and a handshake. “Hi there, Thomas.”
I did the same, explaining, “Frumpkin doesn’t buy the adage that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity.’ He saw this morning’s Register.”
Simms chuckled. “I was wondering how he’d react.”
Marson asked him, “Is Gloria here?”
“Nah, wasn’t interested. Dropped her off at home after church. Tommy, too. But me? It’s a seven-day job.”
I said, “Speaking of your job, we met your opponent—briefly.”
“Yeah,” said Simms, “he’s something else.”
Deputy Alex Kastle was indeed something else. It seemed impossible to imagine him stepping into the role of our good friend, whose mild manner and well-weighed words and sense of justice were such a credit to the entire community. Plus, there was a superficial but obvious distinction—Thomas Simms happened to be black, while Alex Kastle looked like a poster boy for a figmental Aryan master race.
Simms checked his watch. “About time to get this going, isn’t it? Looks like everyone’s here.”
We glanced about the room, populated by most of the same people from Friday at Mary’s. Walter Zakarian, the Karastan King, was working the edge of the crowd, pecking about with his walking stick, this one fashioned from gleaming ebony.
“Hold on,” said Marson, joking. “Doc Phelps isn’t here.” He was referring to the veterinarian who’d walked out of the Friday presentation—in a bit of a huff.
With playful understatement, I suggested, “He may have lost interest in the ‘investment opportunity.’”
Dahr bustled past, heading for the front door. He approached Deputy Kastle and apparently needed to check the list of attendees on the clipboard. Kastle gave him a hard time, and when he finally handed over the list—all but tossing it—he looked away with an expression of utter contempt.
Astonished, Marson said, “What an ass.”
With a weary nod, Simms told us, “I guess he’s no more fond of Muslims than he is of blacks.”
Dahr returned in our direction and stopped near the door to the hallway, announcing, “Everyone? Your attention, please? Dr. Frumpkin is ready to begin the demonstration. Follow me, please.”
Standing where we were, Marson, the sheriff, and I became first in line as everyone moved out of the waiting room and filed down the hall to FlabberGas Station #1. Stepping inside, we ended up in the prime position to witness what would follow. The room had not been built to accommodate an audience, so it quickly got crowded, with some of the guests remaining in the hall, watching through the doorway. Deputy Kastle brought up the rear and reported, “Everyone accounted for.” Oh, brother.
Ready and waiting inside the room were Dr. Frumpkin; his daughter, Sarah; and her husband, Dr. Jason Ward, who wore green scrubs and black surgical Crocs. They were joined in front by Dahr Ahmadi, scanning through something on his tablet.
Also ready and waiting was the hyperbaric chamber itself. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected—given its frivolous purpose in Frumpkin’s crazy-sounding miracle fat-busting scheme—but the startling reality of seeing it there, of standing right next to it, was downright fearsome.
The entire contraption was at least eight feet long, about four feet wide, and five feet tall. A heavy metal frame, in a soothing shade of hospital blue, supported a huge, clear acrylic tube in which the patient would lie on a sliding gurney, which entered the end of the tube through a thick, round riveted door that resembled the hatch of a submarine. Along the side of the metal base, just below the tube, stretched a control panel containing switches, dials, gauges, readouts, and even a telephone handset. Atop the tube was a flat-screen TV aimed in toward the pillow for the patient’s amusement. A tangle of plumbing, hoses, and gas lines dropped to the floor and disappeared through the back wall of the room.
Okay, I’m a sissy, but you couldn’t have paid me to get inside that thing. And yet, Mary Questman had already done so—more than once.
“Welcome, my friends,” said Dr. Frumpkin. “Today you’ll witness a demonstration of the defining feature of our revolutionary FlabberGas process, which makes it unique among weight-loss programs. But first, I want to apologize for these cramped and sterile surroundings. We are standing, of course, in a section of a surgical suite. However, treatment rooms in the future FlabberGas clinics—which I do hope you’ll want to join me in building—those will be spacious and inviting, even luxurious. In terms of general aesthetics, think of a spa.”
And then, Glee Savage arrived. With a cheery yoo-hoo, she warbled from the lobby, “Where’s the paaar-ty?” The sharp clack of her heels approached from the waiting room and progressed down the hall, landing her among the stragglers outside the door to FlabberGas Station #1, nose-to-nose with Deputy Alex Kastle.
Frumpkin froze. He eyed her through the door with an unbelieving stare. After a long, tense moment, he blustered, “How dare you show your face here?”
Glee answered, “Just trying to help, Francis. How about a little follow-up?”
“Now, really, Francis—”
“Deputy? Miss Savage is not allowed here. Please escort her out.”
Kastle told Glee, “Okay, ma’am—let’s go.” His look was grim, but he must have enjoyed this development, earning his pay, flexing his stuff.
Glee warned him, “Don’t you lay a hand on me.”
“Then let’s get moving.” And he followed as she retreated. Seconds later, we could hear him noisily banging the metal-framed front door behind her.
Standing near me, Mary mumbled, “Oh, dear. Poor Glee.”
Berta offered, “Want me to check on her?”
Mary nodded. Berta wended her way out.
“There now,” said Frumpkin, pleasant as pie, “that’s better.”
Deputy Kastle returned—minus Berta and Glee.
We listened to too much technical gibberish from both Frumpkin and Sarah, who spoke at length about the traditional uses of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. A quarter hour later, she concluded, “Although the pressurized administration of oxygen is often associated with decompression sickness, serious infections, or the treatment of wounds that won’t heal, a widely recognized side effect is that it induces a general feeling of good health, a pleasant sense of well-being. You’ll remember Michael Jackson—or those oxygen bars that were trendy a few years ago.”
“Aha,” said someone. “No wonder Mary was so eager to be your guinea pig.” Soft laughter rippled through the room.
“Actually,” said Dr. Frumpkin, “we’ve had a slight change of plans.” Without elaboration, he simply explained, “We decided to let Jason do the honors as today’s guinea pig.”
Frumpkin’s son-in-law stepped forward and took a little bow. When I’d met him on Friday at Mary’s, I was struck by how closely he fit my notion of a typical doctor—clean-cut, down to business, just the facts. Now, however, bowing comically in his scrubs, he looked more like a child who was ready for bed. He stepped out of his clogs.
Frumpkin opened the hatch at the end of the pressure chamber, Dahr slid out the gurney, and Jason hopped onto it, telling the crowd, “Good-bye, cruel world.”
Sarah told us, “He’s beginning to take after my father—that acute sense of theater.”
Laughing, Frumpkin agreed, “I’ve trained him well.”
Dahr slid the gurney into the transparent tube. Frumpkin closed the hatch. Jason plumped the pillow beneath his head.
When Dahr seated himself on a low stool at the control panel, Jason rapped on the inside of the tube. Dahr switched on the intercom. Jason said over the squawk box, “Don’t tell me you’re driving today.” Even through the electronic crackle, there was something in his tone that conveyed dismay rather than humor.
Dahr picked up the handset and told him, “I know what I’m doing, Doctor.”
Frumpkin told us, “Of course he does.” He took the handset from Dahr, asking Jason, “Ready for blastoff?”
Jason gave a thumbs-up, and Dahr began tweaking the controls. A whirring of motors and pumps emerged from the hush of the room. Every now and then, the panel emitted a gentle sequence of beeps.
Sarah explained, “We’re replacing the air in the chamber with pure oxygen. Room air contains only about twenty-one percent oxygen. We’re also pressurizing the chamber, as they do in airplanes, which boosts the oxygen’s healing powers. The beeping you hear indicates we’ve attained various levels of pressure.”
Someone asked, “Doesn’t it hurt?”
Sarah took the handset and asked Jason, “How’s it going?”
“Just dandy.” He gave another thumbs-up.
He looked so odd in there, our guinea pig. I thought of a lab specimen laid out in a giant test tube. And an eerier image sprang to mind: the pressure chamber resembled a futuristic coffin in some sci-fi space thriller.
Frumpkin told us, “These treatments can last about an hour, and patients often fall blissfully asleep.” He asked into the handset, “Ready for a little shut-eye, Jason?”
Jason exaggerated a yawn and a stretch, then rolled onto his side, facing us with a smile, and closed his eyes.
Frumpkin continued, “We won’t go the full hour today—you’ll have the idea soon enough—but let’s take some time for a few questions.”
There were many. Frumpkin and Sarah took turns with their detailed answers. I tuned out. The churning of the oxygen chamber had a lulling effect. I lost track of the passing time. Twenty minutes? Thirty? The sight of Jason made me sleepy.
He seemed so peaceful …
“Dr. Frumpkin?” said Dahr with a note of alarm.
Frumpkin and Sarah immediately joined him at the control panel, peering in at Jason, who hadn’t moved.
Dahr said, “Something … something isn’t right.”
Frumpkin ordered, “Begin decompression.”
Looking horrified, Sarah moved back a few steps.
Instinctively, the crowd inched forward. Marson and I could see directly over Frumpkin’s shoulder.
Sheriff Simms was right behind me. There was no masking the urgency in his voice as he asked Frumpkin, “Can’t you just spring the hatch and get him out of there?”
Frumpkin tossed his arms. “That would kill him. Even emergency decompression takes about two minutes.”
It was the longest, most frantic two minutes I’d ever lived through. Everyone was mumbling and whining and milling as Frumpkin and Dahr took turns with the handset, shouting to Jason, who offered not the slightest response.
When at last the machine signaled the completion of its cycle, Frumpkin yanked the hatch open and Dahr slid the gurney out. They both went to work on Jason, trying to resuscitate him. Sarah, frozen where she stood, watched with disbelief. Others streamed forward, transfixed by the ghoulish curiosity of the moment.
An finally, Frumpkin made the pronouncement we all knew was coming: Dr. Jason Ward was dead.
Sheriff Simms suddenly had an investigation on his hands. “What happened?” he asked, stepping to the gurney.
Dr. Frumpkin’s cheeks were streaked with tears. “Asphyxiation? Cardiac arrest? Impossible to tell—without an autopsy.”
Dahr Ahmadi said, “I only noticed trouble because he looked unresponsive. All the settings were correct; readouts were normal. There’s nothing wrong with the machine.”
“We’ll need to check that, of course.” Simms started taking notes.
Mary Questman stepped over to comfort Sarah Frumpkin Ward, who had just lost her husband. She steadied the younger woman as they moved through the parting crowd and approached the gurney. Dr. Frumpkin hugged his daughter’s shoulders.
Sarah wept as she reached to stroke Jason’s hair. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Simms said, “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”
“But he was in perfect health. He’s undergone these hyperbaric treatments several times before—with no problems at all.”
Simms asked, “If you had to make a guess, what could have caused this?”
Sarah exchanged bewildered glances with her father and with Dahr. “Well,” she said, “if I had to guess, lacking any other explanation, I’d say he might have gotten something other than oxygen.”
Frumpkin explained, “We store a number of medical gases here. Different procedures have different needs.”
Simms asked, “Where are they stored?”
Sarah said, “There’s a utility room—the gas closet. The tanks are there, also connections to the plumbing lines for the surgical suites. The closet opens to the outside, for deliveries. The door is always locked.”
The sheriff asked, “Could the gas lines have been switched by mistake?”
Dahr said, “That’s virtually impossible. The connections are all different—it’s an important safeguard. Care to take a look?”
“You bet.”
So Sarah stayed with her husband’s body while Dahr went to find the key. Dr. Frumpkin le
d Simms out through the front of the building, with Marson and me at the sheriff’s heels; everyone else fell in behind us as we passed.
Out in the parking lot, Frumpkin turned at the corner of the building. “It’s right back here.” He led us along a short service drive that ended at a gray metal utility door in the brick wall of the clinic.
And not twenty feet away, at the edge of the woods, Glee and Berta sat on a log, laughing their asses off, sharing a smoke—which smelled a lot like pot. When they saw the crowd approach, Berta dropped the joint and Glee stubbed it out with her shoe.
Frumpkin wondered aloud, “Where’s Dahr with that key?”
Simms walked over to the door, took care not to disturb fingerprints by using both hands to turn the backside of the knob, and easily opened the door—without a key. Then he strolled back, writing notes on his pad.
I leaned to ask him, “What do you think?”
“I think it wasn’t an accident,” said the sheriff. “And if it wasn’t an accident, it was a crime—a crime called murder.”
P A R T T W O
Suspension of Disbelief
Mary Questman awoke from a fitful sleep on a chilly Monday morning, the day after Jason Ward’s death. She checked the bedside clock—not quite seven. Though the October sun had yet to rise, the glow of twilight peeped around the edges of the closed curtains. She sat up, taking care not to disturb Mister Puss, who had nested on her pillow. He stirred, cracked an eye open. She leaned to touch noses with him.
Where’s the fire?
“No rush,” she told him, tracing a finger along his spine from neck to tail. “Go back to sleep.”
He purred, stretched all fours, then buried his head in the pillow, falling silent. His belly rose and fell in contented slumber.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Mary switched on a light above the sink. She drew a pot of water for the coffeemaker and started it brewing. Then she stepped outside the back door to retrieve the morning paper.
Standing on the porch for a moment, she was struck by how different things were from the day when Mister Puss had landed on her doorstep, as if he’d dropped there out of nowhere. Back in May, birds were singing in the fragile spring foliage as the day began to warm to a nurturing sun. Today, though, the birds were quiet—had they flown south already? The leaves had turned. The gray sky was as cold as the house.
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