Hiss of Death: A Mrs. Murphy Mystery Read online

  A note of irritation crept into Annalise’s voice. “I suppose, but think how small a virus is. And the wrong kind of virus, one that can spread and replicate rapidly, can destroy millions of lives.”

  “Of course,” he said and sighed.

  Annalise added with feeling, “Her organs were like those of a twenty-five-year-old woman.” She took a breath. “Most people find autopsies gruesome, but if I could show films to high school kids of, say, Paula’s arteries, liver, lungs, heart, et cetera, with another woman, say, ten years younger, who drank, smoked, drugged, it just might drive the point home for those teenagers to practice good health habits.”

  “Once they finished puking,” Cory sarcastically replied.

  She responded, “I know, but I find it fascinating. Beautiful, even. The human body is put together like a great machine. Some are Chevys, some are trucks, some are Ferraris. Paula was a Ferrari.”

  “Thanks, sugar. As always, you done good.” He used the colloquial expression. “Paula was a good hand in the operating room.”

  “No more,” Annalise flatly said.

  “Gotta go. Brody has a soccer game.” He named his oldest child, eleven.

  “I’ll see you Monday,” she replied.

  “Right. Be good to see you, as always.” He pushed the off button on his cellphone.

  • • •

  Dr. Jerome Neff, a thoughtful man, called Harry that night. They knew each other, a nodding acquaintance, but as she had found Paula, he wanted to let her know.

  “Thank you, Dr. Neff.” Harry hung up the phone and told Fair.

  • • •

  Later that evening, the long twilight casting a silver-blue light bright enough to see everything, Harry and Fair, hand in hand, walked along the rows of corn, little tips just breaking through the soil. The sunflowers had also just broken ground; the broccoli in the garden was already four inches out of the ground. The petite manseng vines flashed early green leaves.

  The two cats and the dog trailed them.

  “Gotcha.” Mrs. Murphy leapt straight up to catch a moth, but it eluded her with a flutter.

  “They aren’t fast. They just go higher,” Pewter noted.

  Harry and Fair stopped to lean against the back pasture fence.

  “Never get tired of looking at the mountains.” Harry smiled.

  “Me neither, but I’m creaky tonight.”

  “After delivering four foals, I expect your back aches. Take a hot shower when we get back, and I’ll massage your back and shoulders.”

  “I need it. Hey, how about Coop coming in twenty-first?”

  “I know. It really was a perfect day for a race. They were hot when they finished, but the temperature hung in the mid-sixties all day.”

  “It was a perfect day.” He put his arm around her waist. “So, next week, are you and the girls going to your mammogram party?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I guess.”

  He squeezed her slightly. “I know you don’t like the boob squisher.”

  “Well, honey, imagine if you flopped your part on a tray and a big flattish camera pressed down on it for a second or two.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Harry, Susan, BoomBoom, Alicia, and Coop laughed as they ran across the parking lot at the hospital auxiliary on Pantops Mountain through a sudden hard spring rain, drenching them.

  “Thank God for remote keys.” Susan pushed the unlock icon on her overlarge fob.

  Harry, already at the passenger side of Susan’s Audi station wagon, jumped in the second she heard the lock release. Dripping, Harry leaned over the passenger seat to grab the towel Susan kept in the back to wipe up after her own corgi, Owen.

  BoomBoom scrambled to get into Alicia’s Mustang, and Coop got in her own car.

  Susan slid behind the wheel. “Where did that rain come from? Wasn’t on the weather report.”

  Harry shrugged as she wiped herself down. “Being a weatherman is the only job where you can be wrong half of the time and still pull a paycheck.”

  “Got that right.” Susan glanced in the rearview mirror. “There goes the hair.”

  After handing Susan the towel, Harry ran her fingers through her hair. “Just fixed mine.”

  “You know, I’d whack this all off, but Ned loves my long hair. He even likes to brush it. I think when he was little he became mesmerized by his mother sitting at her makeup table.” She started her fancy station wagon, a gift from Ned, who wanted his wife to ride in style.

  Susan couldn’t imagine living without her Audi, which she’d driven for two years.

  “Funny, I haven’t thought of a dressing table in years,” said Harry. “My mom had one, too. You saw it. Had fabric around the two sides, hung to the ground. As I recall, it was a big rose print. She’d sit right up in the open middle, face to the mirror, lights blazing.”

  “Your mother, like you, was so organized,” said Susan. “All her lipsticks stuck out from this little wooden box she’d made. Full of holes. Every lipstick had a place, and they’d never fall over or roll on the ground. Given her cats, I suppose that was an invention born of necessity.”

  “I disappointed Mom. She wanted a girly girl and got me.”

  “Oh, Harry, she loved you, and every Saturday the farm was full of cars, overflowing with boys. You were the most popular girl at school.”

  “Because I could throw a football farther than they could.” Harry laughed. “BoomBoom was the most popular.”

  “Maybe.” Susan turned toward Route 64, following Alicia and BoomBoom, as well as Coop. “Isn’t it great that Alicia bought a Mustang convertible? She could have bought a Ferrari or a Porsche—”

  Harry interrupted Susan, something she rarely did even to her dearest friend, since she considered it impossibly rude. “Can’t believe you just named a Ferrari. I’m the gearhead, not you.”

  “But I listen.” Susan flattered her, but it was true. “I just love that she bought an American car. Of course, she has her Range Rover for serious farm chores, but for her thrill car, she bought American. Said it makes her feel like she did in the sixties. Young.”

  “Hmm. I never think about Alicia being in her fifties, because she’s so glamorous. Well, so is BoomBoom, but her face wasn’t plastered all over America like Alicia’s.” Harry considered that. “It’s a curse, fame. The people who seek it deserve it.”

  Susan laughed. “My, aren’t we profound.”

  Harry replied, “I’d punch you, but you’re driving. Anyway, Alicia never sought it. She more or less stumbled into film, and the camera did the rest. Camera loves her.”

  “Yes, it does. And she had the sense to get out with bundles of money when she reached middle age. Course, inheriting Mary Pat Reines’s estate hardly hurt.”

  “Ever notice how some people are just lucky? Lucky in love. Lucky in their careers. Some are lucky with money. I don’t know if you can have it all, but, boy, some people come close.” Harry studied the car in front of them. “Love that she bought the five-point-zero-L engine and tricked the Mustang out in red candy metallic.”

  “Pretty cool. You never owned a convertible. Given how much you love cars—both you and BoomBoom—I’m surprised.” Susan got in the right lane so a Honda could pass her. “How come you never bought a convertible?”

  “Couldn’t afford luxuries. All I could swing was the F-One-fifty, which I bought used. That 1978 isn’t the smoothest ride, but I think it looks terrific, especially since my wonderful husband had it painted and the upholstery tweaked for our anniversary.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  Harry blinked. “Sorry. I’m a little concerned that you all had to wait for me while they called me back for second pictures.”

  “That happened to me once. Sometimes the first set of mammograms isn’t clear. In my case, a bit of scar tissue showed up.”

  “How’d you get that scar tissue in your breast?”

  “I’ll answer that when you answer my question.
”

  “I can afford a convertible now, but I really am a purist. I love the line of a roof if a car is well designed, and the Mustang really is. So’s the Charger. Like the Camaro, that’s the Mustang’s competitor, in case you don’t know.”

  “Didn’t.”

  “Anyway, they’re all retro but forward, great designs and truly American. But to be safe, a convertible has to weigh more, sometimes as much as four hundred pounds more, and I abhor that. Hence, no convertible.”

  “So it’s not a safety thing?”

  “No. Most cars have roll bars that pop up. If they don’t, they’re usually built in so that if you flip, for instance, you won’t land flat up, which means you’ll be dead. There might be a kind of lip, which keeps you intact. I’m not being precise. Okay, I answered your question. Answer mine.”

  “When we played lacrosse in high school, that complete shithead from Saint Anne’s whacked me right across the boob when no one was looking.”

  “Thadia Martin. She was a bitch. There’s a great lesson in karma.”

  “That she is. And it wasn’t a league game, either. We weren’t on Saint Anne’s schedule, since we’re a public school and they’re private. They’ve always been the big dog in lacrosse, and we were good. They thought they’d teach us a lesson.” Susan smiled broadly. “Wiped the field up with them.”

  “Yeah, we really did. She’s out of prison now, and I heard she’s a rehab counselor. I think Paula mentioned her once with distaste.”

  “Actually, she runs the entire drug counseling program, and Harry, I think they were smart to hire her. Who else knows how drugs can blow up your life but someone who’s served time for selling, for armed robbery?” Susan shook her head. “Crazy.”

  “This country is crazy.” Harry looked ahead. “Turnoff. Route Three-forty.”

  “I know.”

  “I know you know. I just wanted to sound smart.”

  The friends ate at South River Grille in Waynesboro. Coop, on her day off, enjoyed them all enormously and was very entertaining with her stories of the dumb stuff a sheriff’s officer sees, like picking up a fellow walking into the Mud House, a coffee shop, in red lace panties, brassiere to match.

  • • •

  That afternoon, when Susan dropped off Harry, the rain continued, though lessening in intensity.

  Opening the kitchen door, Harry beheld kitty wrath.

  “Wasn’t me.” Tucker glanced up, her big brown eyes radiating honesty.

  “Brownnoser,” Pewter spat.

  “Who did this?” Harry surveyed the broken vase knocked off the kitchen table, her lovely pink and white tulips still fresh.

  Harry picked them up, snipped off the ends, put them in another vase, and filled it, adding a little sugar to the water. Slipping her fingers into heavy work gloves, she picked up the big pieces of glass. She’d learned the hard way never to pick up glass with bare hands. The fragments were dropped in a small cardboard carton, and she swept up anything she might have missed. Next came the mop. Finally done, she sat down to stare at Pewter, who pointedly sat next to the refreshed tulips with her back turned. Mrs. Murphy, head leaning on the table, sat opposite on a chair.

  “Pewter, you could at least turn around and look at her.”

  “She smells funny,” Pewter said, justifying her pointed inattention.

  “Maybe it’s her new perfume. I’ve noticed it, too.”

  Tucker, the olfactory expert, pronounced judgment. “Not the perfume. It’s a little different odor, not bad, just something different.”

  “Pewter, I’m not fooled. You did the damage.”

  “Mrs. Murphy chased me. I couldn’t help it.”

  “What a fib.” Mrs. Murphy climbed up on the table now and boxed Pewter’s ears.

  Harry grabbed the vase. “This is how it happened in the first place. You two.”

  “It’s a rainy day.” Pewter knocked Mrs. Murphy upside the head, but she didn’t unleash her claws.

  “You jumped on the table, and I followed. How was I to know you’d slipped sideways to take out the vase? You’re like a Porsche, Pewter, sixty percent of your weight is in your rear.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I listen to everything Mom says about cars.”

  “I’m not fat. I’m not built like a car. I have big bones.”

  “Oh la.” Tucker rolled her eyes.

  “I can jump down there and bloody your nose, Bubble butt.” Pewter leaned over the table, looking convincingly menacing.

  “Calm down,” said Harry. “I’d like to sit here in peace.”

  “You should have taken us with you,” Pewter sagely advised.

  “That’s the truth.” Mrs. Murphy agreed with Pewter, which meant now they were best friends.

  The phone rang. Harry checked the old railroad clock. Three-thirty. Could be the feed store. She’d ordered sweet feed. Usually they deliver. If they called, it meant they had run out.

  “Hello. Crozet zoo,” Harry answered.

  “The question is, is it a petting zoo?” Dr. Regina MacCormack, Harry’s general practitioner, laughed on the other end of the line. “Now, there’s a thought.”

  “Harry, come into the office tomorrow. I want to go over your mammogram with you.”

  Harry hesitated. “That means it isn’t good.”

  “No point in keeping you worried. There is a peculiar small mass in the back of your right breast. Let’s look at it together, and I’ll tell you what I think and what comes next. Can you make it at ten?”

  “I can. Thanks for not being evasive.”

  “I know you too well. And no one wants a call like this. Is it cancerous? I don’t know. Come in tomorrow. Let’s talk. There is a test that I’ll recommend. You’ll have to think about it.”

  “See you at ten.” Harry hung up the phone and looked at her three friends. “Dammit to hell.”

  Dr. MacCormack’s office, along with many other physicians’, was located along the outer road belt of the new enormous Central Virginia Hospital.

  The old hospital, the main brick building constructed in 1930, could no longer meet the demands of a wealthy county. Like the other doctors who had worked at the old hospital, Dr. MacCormack rejoiced in the new one.

  Two years ago, Central Virginia Medical Complex, west of Charlottesville, opened to great fanfare. The cost of the hospital, outbuildings, and equipment staggered the imagination and probably exceeded the gross national product of Namibia.

  Flanked by Regina and Jerome Neff, as well as the hospital administrator and the county commissioners, Dr. Isadore Wineberg, sixty-one, had cut the ribbon.

  The old-timers wondered what those who practiced at the old hospital and who had since passed away would make of the building, with its gleaming wings radiating off the main hub. In particular, Izzy and Regina thought of Larry Johnson, a general practitioner who often took vegetables and even chickens in payment for his services. It was a sure bet the doctors at Central Virginia Hospital would take no chickens. They were a different breed from Larry Johnson, a different breed from Izzy and Regina, too.

  The new generation, in thrall to technology, forgot to study the patient as an entire organism. The focus was on scans, blood tests, numbers, numbers, numbers. The flaw in this overreliance on technology was an underreliance on common sense. This misstep was most apparent in the dispensing of drugs, the ordering of batteries of unnecessary tests. The unnecessary tests covered the physician’s ass from lawsuits, mostly. Meanwhile, the bills spiraled ever upward, and if the patient wasn’t horribly sick before treatment, the depletion of funds contributed to malaise afterward.

  Rehabilitation also underlined the difference between older and younger doctors. How did the patient live? Was he or she a horseman? Not an idle question in central Virginia, for horsemen are stoics. They might hurt like hell, but they won’t tell you. And if you don’t pay attention to them, they will launch into rehabilitation in ways the young doctor never imagined. Horsemen with kid
ney transplants would climb up on a horse’s back three weeks after surgery. A person leading a sedentary life in front of a computer would be walking and little more at three weeks.

  This blindness to the total person drove Izzy, Regina, and the younger Jerome nuts. The older doctors took those with brilliance and common sense, like Jennifer Potter, a young surgeon, under their wings. Cory Schaeffer they left alone. To his credit, he was usually surrounded by athletes in his off-hours, kept himself in shape, and seemed to recognize another athlete when he saw one, even if it was on the operating table. But his arrogance ensured that the old guard would never invite him to learn the nuances—not just of medicine but of Virginia. They’d sit back and watch him make those mistakes that can be costly—if not in medical terms, then in social.

  After the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Izzy and Regina repaired for a drink.

  “I’m glad I’ll be retiring soon,” Izzy said as he reached for his second Scotch and soda.

  “If only we could just practice medicine,” Regina wistfully said.

  “Those days are gone, Regina, gone forever.”

  “Well, I’ll do the best I can.”

  And she did.

  Central Virginia Hospital sat in the middle of a large, round beltway. Spokes were the various departments, the core of the new building being a large six-story square. The architects felt they had created a state-of-the-art medical center, but like so many new things, it was confusing as hell. Did one go to the core building to check in, or did one go to the wing that housed one’s specialist?

  One thing they did right was the emergency room, which was easy to find. It was the first spoke off the main building once one turned off the state highway onto the beltway. The overhang where ambulances pulled in had a series of lights. You couldn’t miss it.

  Another thing the designers accomplished was exciting landscaping and plantings. One saw lots of green spaces, too. Dr. MacCormack’s office sat on one of the roads off the beltway, away from the hospital. Like the hospital, those buildings were sparkling new. Many doctors could perform minor procedures in their offices, a great convenience to patients. Harry drove along to Willow Lane, turned right, and within less than a minute arrived at the modern glass-and-steel three-story building. An expensive carved and painted sign with Apollo’s caduceus identified this as Willow Lane Medical Associates. Once at the front door, another painted sign, again expensively done with incised letters in black with gilt edges, cited all the doctors within.