Desperate Measures (32 page)

Wordlessly, Barbara handed her the enlargement of the table, and watched her study the prescription container just as Barbara had done, turning the photograph to see the printed label. She gasped.

“He never mentioned that he treated her,” she said.

“I know. Tomorrow when we go out there, I have to ask him about it. I don't want to bring it up in front of Alex, though. Could you ask Alex to go for a hike up the hill behind the house, keep him away for an hour or so?”

Shelley looked back at the photograph and nodded. “God, why didn't he mention it?”

The heat wave had continued. September had been exceptionally warm and sunny, and although the heat had lessened now in October, no rain was in the forecast. Forest fires raged out of control throughout the state, and more were expected if the hot, dry weather persisted much longer. The air smelled of woods on fire, the sunsets were murky, and the sky was hazed to a pale gray-blue. Campgrounds had been closed; no open fires were allowed anywhere; all forest activities had been curtailed. It was said that real Oregonians never tanned; they rusted. And they got grumpy when the heat continued into autumn.

Barbara was grumpy. She should have told Frank about the prescription, but there had been no opportunity; he had been out shopping for a skillet and she had worked until it became too late to call him. He had made it clear that his cell phone was for emergencies only, and she did not want to talk about it while driving.

Here in orchard country, the filberts had been harvested, and there was a FOR SALE sign on the Marchand property. The clover under the trees looked withered, and the lawn was unkempt. Daniel had kept the property up over the summer, but he was off at school now. The place looked very sad.

And the Minick woods would be tinder-dry, Barbara thought as she turned into his driveway. She hoped he had a good well; Opal Creek was little more than a trickle. She wondered if he had considered summer droughts when he bought a house in a forest. He came out to the porch to greet them. She had told him and Alex that her father was helping with the case now, and that he knew nothing of X or
Xander
. Today Dr. Minick greeted them all as old friends.

She introduced her father, and the two tall men shook hands cordially. ‘'I'm happy to meet you at last, Mr. Holloway,” Dr. Minick said.

“Call me Frank,” he said. “It's curiously upsetting when someone my own age calls me ‘mister.'” Then he grinned. “Shelley can't bring herself to say Frank. She doesn't call me anything to my face, and I suspect that when my back is turned she refers to me as ‘the old man.'”

Shelley blushed.

Dr. Minick laughed. “I thought she reserved that for me. I don't think Barbara can bring herself to call me Graham, either. Come in, come in. I have lemonade or iced tea. Or plenty of cold water.”

They entered the house, and at the same moment Alex came from his studio. He was wearing a beret, but not his sunglasses. Without hesitation he crossed the living room to meet Frank, who didn't pretend a thing. They shook hands, and Frank studied Alex's face, then nodded. “She said it was worse than the pictures. She was right. I'm glad to meet you. And you should know up front that I believe you are a very courageous young man. Now, there was a mention of water. That smoke in the air is enough to choke a horse.”

Barbara felt her knot of tension come undone, and Shelley visibly relaxed.

A few minutes later they all examined the kitchen stove as if it were an alien artifact. “I cooked up some pork chops last night, and made gravy,” Frank said. “And I have an old skillet out in the car.”

Dr. Minick laughed. “So did I. We probably should use your chops if they've been out in the heat very long. I was going to sacrifice a skillet. It's old, too.” He looked at the stove again. “Leona's stove was probably cleaner than mine.”

His was very clean. Barbara's grumpiness increased. Men who cooked
and
cleaned were impossible.

“Alex, do you really want to hang around and watch them turn meat to cinders, and smell it happening?” Shelley asked. “You showed Barbara the woods behind the house. Would you mind showing me, too?”

“Better than that,” Alex said. “I'll show you where I go to spot forest fires these days. It's a rough climb. Steep in places.”

“Deal,” she said. She pointed to her boots. “See, I came prepared. Let's go.”

They left, and Frank was bemused by the troubled expression that flickered across Graham Minick's face, erased almost instantly. “Want to get started?” Frank asked. He went out to get the bag with the chops and skillet.

“The guys who found the body said the door was closed,” Barbara said when Frank returned and was spooning gravy on two pork chops in the skillet. “Will that make any difference?”

“I don't think so,” Frank said. “We don't want to start a fire, just create a lot of smoke, and a skillet hot enough to brand a piece of wooden flooring. I didn't bring any wood,” he said.

“Firewood ought to do the trick,” Dr. Minick said; he went to the living room and returned with a relatively flat piece of wood. He took it outside and put it on the driveway well away from anything flammable. “All set.”

“We don't know how high the burner was turned on,” Barbara said. “The guy who removed the skillet couldn't remember.”

“If he was just heating the chops, it would have been pretty low,” Frank said.

“With an electric stove, you usually turn it on fairly high to heat the element, and then turn it down,” Dr. Minick said.

“Well, let's do it the way you'd do it,” Frank said. “The theory is that he turned on the stove, and someone entered the kitchen at pretty nearly the same time. He went over to the table, leaving the burner on, and got killed.”

Dr. Minick nodded and turned on the burner. “Not the highest setting,” he said. “We rarely use that unless we're boiling water.” He had turned it up a little past midway on the dial.

They stood watching then. Frank was remembering why he had had gas put in at his house; it took an electric element time to heat up, and then more time to cool to the right temperature, and there was too little control in between. The gravy began to simmer in a pattern of rings, and in a very short time began to smell burned. The surface was bubbling all over. Gravy had to be stirred, Frank thought, or it scorched fast.

“We don't know how much gravy Leona had,” Barbara commented, stepping back a few paces. It was starting to smell pretty burned, like so many of her own dinners did; she knew that odor very well.

They also didn't know how thick Leona's gravy had been, Frank reflected, moving back away from the stench.

Dr. Minick moved to stand by the door to the living room, closer to the smoke alarm on the wall, and Frank stepped closer to a fire extinguisher on the counter by the sink. The smoke alarm finally went off; Dr. Minick removed it from the bracket and took it out to the porch and left it there. Frank picked up the fire extinguisher, and they continued to wait. The gravy had dried out completely and there was a crackling sound as fat from the chops burned, then a yellow flame appeared, another, and both chops were on fire.

Barbara had thought that flames would shoot up, threaten the surrounding cabinets, but it was not happening yet. The fire was contained in the skillet, but halfway across the kitchen she could feel the heat. Although the smoke was making her throat hurt, burning her eyes, they waited; the chops had to burn to little more than cinders, the way they had been in the Marchand house.

Suddenly Frank said, “That's enough. It's going to destroy your stove, and catch that cabinet on fire.” He handed the fire extinguisher to Dr. Minick, then turned off the burner and lifted the skillet, using two oven mitts. Barbara hurried to open the door for him, and they all went out to the piece of wood on the driveway. It sizzled and more smoke arose when Frank put the skillet down.

“Altogether, twenty-two minutes,” Barbara said. “Fourteen minutes to when the smoke alarm went off.”

“It must tell us something,” Dr. Minick said, “but I don't have a clue about what.”

“For one thing,” Frank said grimly, “it tells us that if those two fellows hadn't appeared about when they did, there would have been a house fire.”

Dr. Minick reentered the house and set a large fan in the doorway to exhaust the smoke; then they all went to the front porch to wait for the house to become habitable again.

The two men sat on the top step with their backs against the newel posts on both sides, and Barbara sat cross-legged on the wooden porch floor, back two or three feet, midway between them, where she could see their faces.

“Dr. Minick,” she said, “there's something that we have to discuss. A new piece of information has surfaced that involves you, I'm afraid.” Of the two men watching her, she realized that Frank was the more guarded one. Dr. Minick simply looked puzzled. “Were you Leona Marchand's doctor?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Of course not. I'm not in practice here, except for Alex if he becomes ill.”

“On the table of the Marchand house there was a filled prescription for Ovulen, ordered by you as the attending physician, for Leona Marchand.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, as if the smoke had finally irritated them past endurance; he put the glasses on again before he spoke. “Ah, that. In June Leona paid a visit. Alex was hiking up the hill; I think she watched and waited until he was gone before she knocked. Anyway, however that was, she asked if I was free, if we could talk for a few minutes.” He turned his gaze from Barbara to the forest.

“She told me that after years of very little sexual activity, Gus suddenly had become demanding, and she was afraid that he wanted another child. Daniel would be leaving for college and had no interest in the orchard. Gus wanted another son who would stay and help with the orchard, and take it over when Gus got too old. Leona said she had had some terrible miscarriages and she feared a pregnancy at her age. She was forty. She asked me to write a prescription for birth-control pills for her. She said she couldn't go to their doctor, who was Gus's friend of many years and who more than likely would tell him. She especially could never let Gus know. He didn't believe in contraception of any sort. The fact that he believed sexual intercourse existed only for procreation made her believe that he was trying for another child.

“I advised her to see a gynecologist, of course, and she said she would, but she needed the pills now, for the next few weeks until she could get an appointment. She was truly desperate, she said, and I believed that. It was an extremely painful request for her to make. She was in tears before she finished.”

“Did you examine her?”

He shook his head. “No. I wrote the prescription but I made it nonrefillable. I told her she had to see a doctor who would examine her and then do follow-up care and monitoring. She said she would do that.”

He turned his gaze back to Barbara and said, “In some states what I did would be illegal. I don't know what the law is in Oregon. I would have written the prescription even if I had known it was illegal, however. I was fond of Leona, and I felt very sorry for her. When we first came here, fourteen and a half years ago, she was a beautiful young woman, with mirth bubbling up unexpectedly over trifles, happiness and joy in her every movement, her every expression. It was a pleasure just to see her, she was so alive, so happy with being alive. I watched her change over the years. She couldn't leave him; he held the ultimate weapon: her two children. I don't believe he was physically cruel to her, although he was a disciplinarian with the children, but there are tortures that don't require the laying on of hands. She changed into an old woman during the past fourteen years. He did that to her. And if he wanted her to be nothing more than a breeder of his livestock, I was ready to help her thwart him. If she had lived, I would have followed up with it, demanded to know that she had actually gone to her own doctor.”

Dr. Minick was making no effort to hide his hatred for Gus Marchand, but Barbara suspected that he could assume a mask the way her father had done during the past few minutes. Frank's face revealed nothing of what he was thinking. She said, “I doubt that this will come up at the trial; there's no reason to link those pills to Alex. And I don't want to bring it up, of course. But there's always the possibility that it will surface. I'll find out if it was an illegal move on your part.”

He nodded, then pushed himself up from the step. “I'll go see if my stove is ruined.”

“We'll help,” Frank said. “I'm curious about it, and the cabinet next to it. First that piece of wood, though.”

They went out to the driveway where Frank used a mitt to move the skillet; the wood was branded the way the porch wood had been at the Marchand house. The chops were not cinders, but close enough, Barbara thought. They had stopped their experiment only minutes earlier than Bakken and the orchard inspector had stopped a fire from spreading at Marchand's place.

Inside the house, the exhaust fan had cleared the smoke, but the odor lingered, although not a lot worse than the odor of forest fires outdoors. Frank and Dr. Minick inspected the cabinet and tried the burner; apparently no great harm had been done. The finish on the cabinet had softened and blistered, but Minick dismissed that as trivial.

They were sipping iced tea in the living room when Shelley and Alex returned, red-faced and sweating; Shelley looked very happy. “I'm parched and dying,” she said. “Water, for the love of God! Water!”

“Help yourself,” Dr. Minick said, smiling at her. “Think you can make it the next few feet to the oasis?”

“One can but try,” she said. “Come on, Alex; follow that camel.” They went to the kitchen together.

“We'll take off as soon as she cools down a degree or two,” Barbara said. “I have a mountain of work waiting for me. Thanks for letting us nearly burn down your house.”