The Grilling Season (22 page)

“The … Oh,” I faltered, “well, Macguire has mononucleosis, and he … what worries me is that he doesn’t have any appetite. The doctor has said he should be getting better, but … Anyway, he’s staying with me until his father gets home later in the month, and I’m not sure his father would approve of—” I was yakking away. Why did this woman always make me yak?

“Macguire?” Amy asked in her kind, melted-milk-chocolate voice. “Do you want to be healed?”

Macguire tilted his head skeptically, glanced swiftly at Amy, then stared at the floor. “I guess.”

“Okay. Just relax.” She had him remove his watch. Then he touched his head with first one hand, then the other.

“What are you doing?” I blurted out.

She replied without looking at me. “I’m reading his aura.”

Oh,
that!
I reflected.
Of course.
Marla and I would have to offer it in Med Wives 101.

Amy took a small flashlight from her pocket, then opened and smoothed out what looked like a paper diagram or chart of some kind. “Look at me.” This Macguire did, and for the next five minutes Amy shone the flashlight in his eyes and consulted her chart. When she’d made a few notes, she rose and briskly began to gather supplies. A bottle of chlorophyll. Five brown bottles of pills. Cellophane bags similar to the ones the Earring King had purchased. Then she commenced the same drill she had with Patricia: Macguire held the medicines to his heart, and Amy asked questions and tested the response by pulling apart his fingers pressed in the okay sign. I kept an eye on the door, in the remote case the Jerk showed up.

Finally Amy seemed happy with a combination of three bottles of pills, two cellophane bags, and the chlorophyll. She asked Macguire if he wanted her to run through putting together his twice-a-day regimen. As usual, he replied dully in the affirmative.

“You’d better watch this, too,” she told me, and then showed us the sheet. He was to take ten capsules twice a day, plus a teaspoon of chlorophyll dissolved in a cup of cold water. Yum-my!

I pointed at the capsules. “What’s in these?”

“Shark cartilage,” she replied, “pau d’arco bark, essiac tea, rosehips—”

A vision of Macbeth’s witches rose before me. “Okey-doke,” I interrupted her, before we could get to eye of newt.

“Are you ready for me to take a look at you?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said enthusiastically. What did I have to lose?

While Macguire dutifully swallowed his capsules with a glass of springwater spiked with chlorophyll, I got the same flashlight-in-the-eye treatment he’d received. Again Amy consulted her chart.

“Hmm,” she said. Then the beautiful brown eyes and faded-freckled face regarded me sadly. She bit the inside of her lip and then made her pronouncement: “You’re depressed.”

Great
, I thought,
got herbs for it? Prozac bark?
Instead I said, “Since it’s truth-telling time, Amy, there’s something I really need to talk to you about.”

“Your ex-husband. Dr. Korman.” “How did you know?”

She smiled. “I may run a health-food store, but I don’t live in the next galaxy. Suz Craig and I didn’t get along, as you said you knew, when I helped you out at the McCrackens’ house. What, you think Dr. Korman is going to come gunning for me? I was a victim of Suz’s nastiness, so now I’m a suspect in her murder? Is Dr. Korman trying to say I killed her?”

Without warning, I felt infinitely dejected. Maybe it was Amy’s suggestion that I was depressed; maybe it was my acknowledgment of the truth. A woman was dead. If my ex-husband had killed her, he would pay. But so would my teenage son, who would pay a long-lasting price in emotional pain. If John Richard had not killed Suz, then finding out who did would be left to the D.A.’s investigator, Donny Saunders. Saunders, who, last time we’d met,
had informed me radicchio was the name of a mobster. No wonder my spirits were low.

“Let’s get you some herbs for that depression,” Amy said decisively. She moved to the same area of the same shelf where she’d pulled down the bottle for Patricia McCracken. Hmm.

And then I, too, went through the drill of holding the herbs to my heart and having my fingers pried open. Within five minutes I, too, was swallowing mammoth capsules whose ingredient list included only three things I recognized: bamboo sap, ginger rhizome, and licorice root. It didn’t sound like a mixture I’d use in a cookie.

“So is Patricia McCracken depressed, too?” I asked Amy. “About losing her baby?”

Amy lifted her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“Depressed enough to get really angry with Suz Craig?”

“Who knows? Suz distressed a lot of people.”

“Including you.” When she gave a single nod, I swallowed, then said, “Why’d she fire you?”

Amy smiled placidly. “Is that what Suz said, that she fired me? No. That’s what she always said when people couldn’t get along with her … that she fired them, as if they were the incompetent ones.” She shook her head gently. “I quit ACHMO. My payout from the pension plan helped buy this shop.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“Why’d you divorce Dr. Korman?”

“Because he abused me.”

“Aha! Same here. Only Suz Craig didn’t abuse people physically. She beat them up
mentally.
” Amy
said it as if it were a disease. “When I left, I thought, now why did that take me so long?”

“Meaning … ?”

She frowned and pondered my question. For a long minute she was silent. Then she answered, “AstuteCare has been in Colorado for eight years. I was with them from the beginning, moved up to Medical Management. There was a group of department heads, including Brandon Yuille and Chris Corey, who also lived in Aspen Meadow. We worked as a team. Suz joined ACHMO two years ago. It was the beginning of hell.”

Hell. Interesting. “Why? What did she do to change things?”

“We used to have a weekly meeting to discuss problems we were having. What we needed in the new Provider Relations Manual, that kind of thing. Suz would scream and yell. ‘What’s the matter with you people?’ was her favorite. And then she’d viciously attack every person in the room for being stupid, lazy, incompetent. Or, in the case of Chris, fat. ‘How’s a tub of lard supposed to set a model for health?’ Suz used to yell at him. You get the idea. Brandon Yuille’s father, who’d just lost his wife, was remodeling and reopening the pastry shop. Suz was on Brandon’s case constantly about being there on the weekends instead of working overtime for her. She claimed Brandon came in too tired to be of any use, because he was up all night baby-sitting his father, on and on. It was none of her business that Brandon’s father was a widower and alone and desperately needed his company. But she
made
it her business. She made his life miserable.”

Aha, more hell. “Wasn’t there anybody you could complain to?”

She shrugged. “It was coming to that. A group of them was trying to go over her head.”

“And did they? And to whom?”

“They talked about it. But I’d had enough. Her cruelty was unbearable. I couldn’t stand it anymore. The last—no, let’s see, the
next-to-last
—straw for me came about five months ago when I was negotiating to buy this store. I saw the store as a long-term project for my retirement. Originally I was planning just to have it open on the weekends, until I could build up the clientele over about a ten-or fifteen-year period, when I retired from ACHMO. But Suz never wanted you to be in charge of your own destiny.
She
wanted to be in charge of your destiny.”

“She knew you wanted to open this store?”

Amy smiled sadly. “Suz made it her business to know personal details about the people who worked for her.” She shook her head. “Anyway. One of the ACHMO doctors had a gambling problem. Suz asked me—privately, mind you—to follow the guy to the casinos in Central City, see what he was up to, and try to talk to him. See if he’d go into some kind of self-help group, therapy, whatever. If I did, she said, she promised to co-sign one of my loan applications. I didn’t feel good about it”—she shrugged—“but if one of our providers had an addiction that would negatively affect the care he gave, I believed I should help find that out. So, I agreed to follow him.”

“So you don’t gamble?”

She laughed softly. “No. I followed this provider
of ours to Central City and found him playing slots. I watched him for two hours, then confronted him. He convinced me to dance with the one-armed bandit for a while so I could see how much fun it was. I dropped eighteen dollars in quarters into two slot machines and never made more than a dollar. Then I convinced this guy—a pediatrician, if you can believe it—to have some coffee, to talk to me. Over coffee he said he wasn’t going to quit gambling. I was wasting my time. Suz got rid of that doctor and now he’s in Utah, leading rock-climbing expeditions. Different kind of gamble, I guess. Then Suz spread it around that I had the gambling problem. At that time people were bidding for this store space and I was working feverishly on loan applications. Because I hadn’t succeeded in rehabilitating the pediatrician, Suz refused to co-sign for me, and I didn’t get my loan. When I confronted her about trying to destroy all my plans for the future—to destroy
me
—she claimed I was paranoid.”

“And so you quit.”

Amy looked away for a moment. Then she said, “Well, not just then. You know how it is with institutions you’re involved with. Institution of marriage, institution of the job, institution of the church. At first you’re doing work you love and everybody’s nice. Then maybe the work gets boring but you like the people so much you don’t want to leave. Then some of the good people leave and you think, well, it’s not as good as it used to be but it’s better than going out there looking for something new.”

I looked over at Macguire, who was perusing a magazine on nudist colonies.

“Pretty soon,” Amy went on, “there are only a
handful of people you like, or a handful of
things
you like, about the institution. Then bad things begin to happen. In our case at ACHMO, we got Suz Craig, a female vice-president we didn’t like. She came in and made us all miserable. And although we got a great deal of camaraderie out of talking about her behind her back, it was scant comfort.”

“I still don’t understand why someone didn’t complain.”

She sighed. “There was talk of it, but you know, who was going to bell the cat? Human Resources? Brandon Yuille is so terrified of losing his job that he wouldn’t even join in on our gossip. Poor guy, he had enough to deal with with his mother dying.”

“Was she covered by ACHMO?”

“Don’t know,” Amy replied. “Brandon talks a blue streak about food and always brought us goodies, but about his personal life he was extremely closemouthed.”

“How about Chris Corey? Did he hate Suz Craig, too?”

“We all hated her, Goldy. She tormented Chris for being overweight and for being late on his deadlines. She used to say that this wasn’t a waiting room where he could be an hour late for all his appointments. And so on and so on. She was cruel and spiteful and manipulative. Plus she was ruining the HMO with the way she was handling cases like Patricia’s. She wanted us to find dirt on the people suing, without realizing how that kind of activity could backfire. An HMO can’t survive bad publicity. People just won’t sign on.”

“So if you didn’t leave when she refused to co-sign your loan, why did you finally leave?”

“You know, I never could figure out if Suz wanted me to leave or wanted me to stay. If she wanted me to leave, why didn’t she just let me buy my store? If she wanted me to stay, why did she threaten to use the gambling issue in a way that would hurt me? I’m telling you, the woman was just
mean.
” She sighed. “The
very
last straw for me was when we had a team meeting and in front of all my colleagues, Suz told me I was over the hill, didn’t know the first thing about healing people. She even said I didn’t dress like a professional.”

I couldn’t help it. I eyed Amy’s shapeless, spangled dress - that - could - double - as - a - nightgown. She laughed.

“Don’t worry, Goldy, I didn’t wear this kind of thing to work. But I wasn’t going to wear short wool suits that came up to my behind and didn’t even keep my legs warm in a Colorado winter.”

“So you … “

“I went home after the public dressing-down Suz gave me and I looked in the mirror, hard. I asked myself, ‘Are you happy?’ And the answer was such a resounding ‘No’ that I went in the next day and quit. Then she threw a fit about my quitting. She swore she’d tell anyplace I applied that I had gambling problems and couldn’t hold down a steady job. ‘Who am I going to hire in your place?’ she wanted to know, after screaming at us for weeks that we were expendable. I just listened and kept telling myself, ‘In eight hours, Amy, you will never have to listen to this tyrant again.’ Because that’s what Suz was—a tyrant.”

“And so you just walked out.”

“Yup. Gleaned out my desk, took my two weeks of vacation as my notice, and that was it. I never looked back. I had some savings to tide me over, used my pension payout to buy the store instead of getting a loan, and now I’m doing what I love.” She smiled. “By next year I may even be showing a profit. I’ll start some new pension savings.”

I looked at the brightly decorated store, the sparsely filled shelves of herb capsules and poorly stocked freezer, the “health” magazines that included the soft-porn rag Macguire was finding so entrancing. But the place, like Amy, had … well … the place had an aura. And the aura was one of happiness. Aura! Yikes! Listen to me!

“You know what I’m talking about,” she insisted. There was a slightly accusatory tone in her voice. “You opened your catering business after being married to Dr. Gorgeous. You must be ecstatic to be free of him.”

“It’s … well …” From the wall, the Maharishi beamed down at me. “It’s
nirvana
,” I admitted.

“Then you know what I’m talking about.”

“I do. But now Dr. Gorge—John Richard has been charged with Suz Craig’s murder and my son is suffering like you wouldn’t believe. For my son’s sake, I need to find out if his father really killed her.”