A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  It’s gonna be okay, he told himself. They’d start a new life out in California. And someday, when he had the nerve and he thought she was ready for it, he’d tell her the truth. But for now, as long as Steph was at his side, he could handle anything. Everything was going to be all right.

  Patrolman Grimes looked better now. He was back from the couple’s apartment and stood in the hospital corridor with an open notebook, ready to recite.

  All right,” Burke said. “What’ve we got?”

  “We’ve got a twenty-three year old named Jerome Pritchard. Came out here from West Virginia nine months ago.”

  “I mean drugs—crack, Angel Dust, needles, fixings.”

  “No, sir. The apartment was clean. The neighbors are in absolute shock. Everybody loved the Pritchards and they all seem to think he was a pretty straight guy. A real churchgoer—carried his own Bible and never missed a Sunday, they said. Had an assembly line job and talked about starting night courses at UCLA as soon as he made the residency requirement. He and his wife appeared to be real excited about the baby, going to Lamaze classes and all that sort of stuff.”

  “Crack, I tell you!” Burke said. “Got to be!”

  “As far as we can trace his movements, sir, it seems that after the baby was delivered at 10:06 this morning, he ran out of here like a bat out of hell, came back about an hour later carrying his Bible and a big oblong package, waited until the baby was brought to the mother for feeding, then . . . well, you know.”

  “Yeah. I know.” The new father had pulled a 10 gauge shotgun from that package and blown the mother and kid away, then put the barrel against his own throat and completed the job. “But why, dammit!”

  “Well . . . the baby did have a birth defect.”

  “I know. I saw. But there are a helluva lot of birth defects a damn sight worse. Hell, I mean, her legs were only withered a little!

  DOC JOHNSON

  “I think you’d better take the call on oh-one,” Jessie said, poking her head into the consultation room.

  I glanced up from the latest issue of Cardiology and looked at my wife. It was Monday morning and I had a grand total of three patients scheduled.

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  That’s what I get for hiring my wife as my nurse-receptionist, but I had to keep overhead down until I built up a decent practice and could afford a stranger . . . someone I could reprimand without paying for it later at home. I had to admit, though, Jessie was doing a damn fine job so far. She wasn’t letting the pregnancy slow her down a bit.

  “Who is it?”

  She shrugged. “Not sure. Says she’s never been here before but says her husband needs a doctor real bad.”

  “Got it.”

  Never turn down a patient in need. Especially one who might be able to pay. I picked up the phone.

  “Hello. Doctor Reid.”

  “Oh, Doctor,” said a woman’s voice. “My husband’s awful sick. Can you come see him?”

  “A house call?” After all, I was a board-eligible internist. House calls were for GPs and family practitioners, not specialists. “What’s wrong with your husband, Mrs . . .?”

  “Mosely—Martha Mosely. My husband, Joseph, he’s . . . he’s just not right. Sometimes he says he wants a doctor and sometimes he says he doesn’t. He says he wants one now.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  If this Mosely fellow was going to end up in the hospital, I’d rather have him transported there first and then see him.

  “I wish I could, Doctor, but I can’t.”

  “Who’s his regular doctor?”

  “Doc Johnson.”

  Ah-ha!

  “And why aren’t you calling him?”

  “Joe won’t let me. He says he doesn’t ever want to see Doc Johnson again. He only wants you.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to get into the house-call habit, but as the new kid in town, I couldn’t afford to pass up a chance to score some points.

  “All right. Give me the address and I’ll be out after dinner.”

  He doesn’t ever want to see Doc Johnson again.

  I thought about that as I drove out to the Mosely house. An odd thing to say. Most people in Ludlum Bay swore by Johnson. You’d think he walked on water the way some of them talked. Which wasn’t making it any easier for me to get started in the Bay. I’d been living—quite literally—off the crumbs he left behind. Joseph Mosely appeared to be a crumb, so I was on my way to gather him up.

  I turned south off Port Boulevard onto New Hope Road, watching the homes change from post-World War II tract homes to smaller, older houses on bigger lots. The January wind slapped at my car.

  This was my first winter in Ludlum Bay and it was cold. I grew up in Florida, went to med school and did my internal medicine residency at Emory in Atlanta. My idea of cold and these New Jerseyans’ idea of cold differed by a good twenty degrees.

  The Bay natives like to say the nearness of the Atlantic tends to moderate the severity of the weather. Maybe that’s true. According to the thermometer, it doesn’t seem to get quite as cold here as it does inland, but I think the extra moisture sends the chill straight through to the bone.

  But now the cold was locked outside the car and I was warm within. I had a bellyful of Jessie’s tuna casserole, the Civic’s heater-defrost system was blowing hard and warm. Snow blanketed the lawns and was banked on the curbs, but the asphalt was clean and dry. A beautiful, crystalline winter night for a drive. Too bad Jessie wasn’t along. Too bad this wasn’t a pleasure drive. People attach such rosy nostalgia to the house call, but here in the twenty-first century the house is a lousy place to practice medicine.

  I slowed as the numbers on the mailboxes told me I was nearing the Mosely place. There: 620 New Hope Road. As I pulled into the driveway my headlamps lit up the house and grounds. I stopped the car halfway through the turn and groaned.

  The Mosely house was a mess.

  Every neighborhood has one. You know the type of house I mean. You drive along a street lined with immaculately kept homes, all with freshly painted siding and manicured lawns, all picture-perfect . . . except for one. There’s always one house with a front yard where even the weeds won’t grow; the Christmas lights are still attached to the eaves even though it might be June; if the neighborhood is lucky, only one rusting auto will grace the front yard, and the house’s previous coat of paint will have merely peeled away, exposing much of the original color of the siding. If the neighborhood is especially cursed, the front yard will sport two or more automobile hulks in various stages of refurbishment, and the occupant will have started to paint the derelict home a hot pink or a particularly noxious shade of green and then quit halfway through.

  The Mosely house was New Hope Road’s derelict.

  I turned off my engine and, black bag in hand, stepped out into the cold. No path had been dug through the snow anywhere I could see, but I found a narrow path where it had been packed down by other feet before me. It led across the front lawn. At least I think it was a lawn. The glow from a nearby streetlight limned odd bumps and rises all over the front yard. I could only guess at what lay beneath. A blanket of snow hides a multitude of sins.

  I got a closer look at the house as I carefully picked my way toward it. The front porch was an open affair with its overhang tilted at a crazy angle. The paint was particularly worn and dirty up to a level of about two feet. Looked like a dog had spent a lot of time there but I saw no paw prints and heard no barking. The light from within barely filtered through the window shades.

  The front door opened before I could knock. A thin, fiftyish woman wearing an old blue house dress and a stretched-out brown cardigan stood there with her hand on the knob.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Doctor,” she said in a mousy voice, “but Joe’s decided he don’t want to see a doctor tonight.”

  “What?” My voice went hoarse with shock. “You mean to tell me I came—”

>   “Oh, let him in, Martha!” said a rough voice from somewhere behind her. “Long as he’s here, might as well get a look at him.”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  She stepped aside and I stepped in.

  The air within was hot, dry, and sour. I wondered how many years since they’d had the windows open. A wood stove sat in a corner to my left. The only light in the room came from candles and kerosene lamps.

  Joseph Mosely, the same age as his wife but thinner, sat in a rocker facing me. His skin was stretched tight across his high forehead and cheekbones. He had a full head lank hair and a three-day stubble.

  Something familiar about him. As I watched, he sipped from a four-ounce tumbler clutched in his right hand; a half-empty bottle of no-name gin sat on a small table next to him. He stared at me. I’ve seen prosthetic eyes of porcelain and glass show more warmth and human feeling than Joe Mosely’s.

  “If that was your idea of a joke, Mr. Mosely—”

  “Don’t bother trying to intimidate me, Doctor Charles Reid. It’s a waste of breath. Take the man’s coat, Martha.”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  Sighing resignedly, I shrugged out of my jacket and turned to hand it to her. I stopped and stared at her face. A large black-and-purple hematoma, a good inch and a half across, bloomed on her right cheek. I hadn’t noticed it when she opened the door. But now . . . I knew from the look of it that it couldn’t be more than a couple of hours old.

  “Better get the ice back on that bruise,” he said to her from his rocker. “And careful you don’t slip on the kitchen floor and hurt yourself again.”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  Clenching my teeth against the challenge that leaped into my throat, I handed her my coat and turned to her husband.

  “What seems to be the problem, Mr. Mosely?”

  He put the glass down and rolled up his right sleeve to show me a healing laceration on the underside of his forearm.

  “This.”

  It ran up from the wrist for about five inches or so and looked to be about ten days to two weeks old. Three silk sutures were still in place.

  My anger flared. “You brought me all the way out here for a suture removal?”

  “I didn’t bring you anywhere. You brought yourself. And besides—” He kicked up his left foot; it looked deformed within a dirty sock. “I’m disabled.”

  “All right,” I said, cooling with effort. “How’d you cut yourself?”

  “Whittling.”

  I felt like asking him if he’d been using a machete, but restrained myself.

  “They sew it up at County General?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then who?”

  He paused and I saw that his eyes were even colder and flatter than before.

  “Doc Johnson.”

  “Why’d he leave these three sutures in?”

  “Didn’t. Took them out myself. He won’t ever get near me again—ever!” He half rose from the rocker. “I wouldn’t take my dog to him if she was still alive!”

  “Hey! Take it easy.”

  He calmed himself with another sip of gin.

  “So why did you leave the last three in?”

  He looked at the wound, then away.

  “ ‘Cause there’s something wrong with it.”

  I inspected it more closely. It looked fine. The wound edges had knitted nicely. Doc Johnson had done a good closure. I found no redness or swelling to indicate infection.

  “Looks okay to me.”

  I opened my bag, got out an alcohol swab, and dabbed the wound. Then I took out scissors and forceps and removed those last three sutures.

  “There. Good as new.”

  “There’s still something wrong with it.” He pulled his arm away to reach for the gin glass; he drained it.

  then slammed it down. “There’s something in there.”

  I almost laughed. “Pardon me?”

  “Something’s in there! I can feel it move every now and then. The first time was when I started taking the sutures out. There! Look!” He stiffened and pointed to the scar. “It’s moving now!”

  I looked and saw nothing the least bit out of the ordinary. But I thought I knew what was bothering him.

  “Here.” I took his left hand and laid the fingers over the underside of his forearm. “Press them here. Now, open and close your hand, making a fist. There . . . feel the tendons moving under the skin? You’ve probably got a little scar tissue building up in the deeper layers next to a tendon sheath and it’s—”

  “Something’s in there, damn it! Doc Johnson put it there when he sewed me up!”

  I stood. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s true! I wouldn’t make up something like that!”

  “Did you watch him sew you up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see him put anything in the wound?”

  “No. But he’s sneaky. I know he put something in there!”

  “You’d better lay off the gin.” I closed my bag. “You’re having delusions.”

  “Shoulda known,” he said bitterly, reaching for his bottle. “You doctors think you’ve got all the answers.”

  I took my coat off a hook by the door and pulled it on.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? And haven’t you had enough of that for one night?”

  “Damn you!” Eyes ablaze with fury, he hurled the glass across the room and leaped out of the rocker. “Who the hell do you think you are to tell me when I’ve had enough!”

  He limped toward me and then I remembered why he looked familiar. The limp triggered it: I had seen him dozens of times in the Port Boulevard shopping area, usually entering or leaving Elmo’s liquors. He’d lied to me—he wasn’t disabled enough to warrant a house call.

  “You’re drunk.” I reached for the doorknob. “Sleep it off.”

  Suddenly he stopped his advance and grinned maliciously.

  “Oh, I’ll sleep, all right. But will you? Better pray nothing goes bad with this arm here, or you’ll have another malpractice case on your hands. Like the one in Atlanta.”

  My stomach wrenched into a tight ball. “How do you know about that?”

  I hoped I didn’t look as sick as I felt.

  “Checked into you. When I heard we had this brand-new doctor in town, fresh from a big medical center in Atlanta, I asked myself why a young, hot-shot specialist would want to practice in the Bay? So I did some digging. I’m real good at digging. ’Specially on doctors. They got these high an’ mighty ways with how they dole out pills and advice like they’re better’n the rest of us. Doctor Tanner was like that. That office you’re in used to be his. I dug up some good dirt on Tanner but he disappeared before I could rub his face in it.”

  “Good night.”

  I stepped out on the porch and pulled the door closed behind me.

  I had nothing else to say. I thought I’d left that malpractice nightmare behind me in Atlanta. The realization that it had followed me here threatened all the hopes I’d nursed of finding peace in Ludlum Bay. And to hear it from the grinning lips of someone like Joe Mosely made me almost physically ill.

  I barely remembered the trip home. I seemed to be driving through the past, through interrogatories and depositions and sweating testimonies. I didn’t really come back to the present until I parked the car and walked toward the duplex we were renting.

  Jessie was standing on the front steps, wrapped in her parka, arms folded across her chest as she looked up at the stars under a full moon. Suddenly I felt calm. This was the way I had found her when we first met—standing on a rooftop gazing up at the night sky, looking for Jupiter. She owned two telescopes she used regularly, but she’s told me countless times that a true amateur astronomer never tires of naked-eye stargazing.

  She smiled as she saw me walk up. “How was the house call?”

  I put on an annoyed expression. “Unnecessary.” I wouldn’t tell her about tonight. At least one of us should rest easy. I patted her growing belly.
“How we doing in there?”

  “You mean the Tap Dance Kid? Active as ever.”

  She turned back to the stars and frowned. I followed her upward gaze.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. Something weird about the stars out here.”

  They looked all right to me, except that I could see a hell of a lot more of them than I’d ever seen in Atlanta.

  Jessie slipped an arm around my back and seemed to read my expression without looking at me.

  “Yeah. I said weird. They don’t look right. I could get out a star map and I know everything would look fine. But something’s just not right up there. The perspective’s different somehow. Only another stargazer would notice. Something’s wrong.”

  I had heard that expression too many times tonight.

  “The baby wants to go in,” I said. “He’s cold.”

  “She’s cold.”

  “Anything you say.”

  I had trouble sleeping that night. I kept reliving the malpractice case and how I wound up scapegoat for a couple of department heads at the medical center. After all, I was only a resident and they had national reputations. I was sure they were sleeping well tonight while I lay here awake.

  I kept seeing the plaintiff attorney’s hungry face, hearing his voice as he tore me apart. I’m a good doctor, a caring one who knows internal medicine inside and out, but you wouldn’t have thought so after that lawyer was through with me. He got a third of the settlement and I got the word that I shouldn’t apply for a position on the staff when my residency was up. I supposed the big shots didn’t want me around as a reminder.

  Jessie wanted me to fight them for an appointment but I knew better. Every hospital staff application has a question that reads: “Have you ever been denied staff privileges at any other hospital?” If you answer Yes, they want to know all the particulars. If you say No, and later they find out otherwise, your ass is grass.

  Discretion is the better part of valor, I always say. I knew they’d turn me down, and I didn’t want to answer yes to that question for the rest of my life. So I packed up and left when my residency was over. The medical center reciprocated by giving me good recommendations.