Suddenly (2 page)

She suddenly pictured her not-big place puddled with not-big gifts from the not-big kitten to which she hadn’t shown the litter box. Fearing the worst, she returned to the bedroom and hurried into black overalls and a white T-shirt. After running a brush through hair that fell in waves just shy of her shoulders, she took the kitten to the kitchen and set it down where she should have set it the night before. “Okay. Do your thing.” She noticed a bulge in the litter. “Ahhh, you’ve already done it. Good kitty.” She also noticed that much of the food was gone, so she added more, refilled the water dish, then quickly drank a glass of orange juice and set the glass in the sink.

“I’m off to work,” she told the kitten, who was studying her with tiny round eyes. “Don’t look at me that way. I always go to work. That’s why I can’t have a pet.” She knelt and gave the kitty a pat. “And if Mara won’t take you, someone else will. I’ll find you a home where they’ll love you to bits.”

She straightened and looked down at the kitten. It seemed so small and alone that she felt a tugging inside. “Which is precisely why I don’t want a pet,” she muttered, and forced herself on out the door.

The office was packed. She moved from one examining room to the next with neither a break nor a thought to Mara until the bulk of the patients had been seen. When she finally returned to her office, she found herself face to face with the chief of police.

Something was wrong. She knew it instantly. Norman Fitch was a large, normally ruddy-faced man, but he looked as if he’d been kicked in the gut.

“She ran out of gas, but not before it did her in,” he mumbled. “Garage door was shut tight.”

Paige drew a blank. “What?”

“Dr. O’Neill. She’s dead.”

That word echoed first in the room, then in Paige’s head. She didn’t like it. She had
never
liked it, which was largely why, after she had fallen hopelessly in love with the idea of being a doctor, she had gone into pediatrics. Of all the disciplines, it used that word the least.

“Mara, dead?” It wasn’t possible.

“We’ve taken her to the morgue,” Norman said. “You’ll have to identify the body.”

The body
. Paige pressed a hand to her mouth. Mara wasn’t a
body
. She was a doer, a fighter, a whirlwind. The idea of
the body
inert in a morgue was incongruous with the woman herself.

“Mara? Dead?”

“Coroner will do an autopsy,” Norman said, “but there’s no sign of violence.”

It was a minute before Paige followed, and another before her horror allowed her to speak. “Then…then you think she committed
suicide?
”

“Looks that way.”

Paige shook her head. “She wouldn’t. Not suicide. It must have been something else.”
Mara dead?
It
couldn’t
be. Paige glanced at the door, half expecting the woman in question to barge through wanting to know why Norman was there.

But she didn’t barge through. The door remained shut, and Norman was insisting, “It’s the classic technique. Easy as pie and painless.”

“Mara wouldn’t commit suicide,” Paige insisted. “Not with her practice thriving. Not with a baby on the way.”

“She was pregnant?” Norman asked, seeming appalled by this in ways that talk of
the body
hadn’t horrified him, which angered Paige into a sharper tone.

“She was adopting. From India. It’s taken forever, but everything is fine. Mara told me so just the other day. She said that the authorities in India had approved her, and that the baby would arrive in a month or so. She has a room all ready, with clothes and furniture, baby equipment, and toys. She was so excited.”

“Why a month?”

“Red tape.”

“Did that depress her?”

“It frustrated her.”

“Was she depressed about the John girl?”

“Not
that
depressed. I would have known if she was. We were best friends.”

Norman nodded. He shifted his weight. “Maybe you’d rather someone else identify the body?”

The body
. There it was again, a sudden stark image devoid of mind and spirit, the antithesis of Mara O’Neill. Paige couldn’t picture it. It was wrong, obscene, perverse. She felt another spark of anger, then one of dismay.

“Dr. Pfeiffer?”

“It’s all right,” she managed. “I’ll do it.” She struggled to think. “But I’ll need someone here.” She phoned Angie, mentioning nothing of Norman’s claim. To say the words would make them real. Likewise, she insisted on following Norman in her own car. The more casually she behaved, she reasoned, the less of a fool she would feel when this turned out to be a joke.

But she was playing games with herself. She knew it the instant she entered the morgue. The whole town knew Mara, including Norman Fitch, his deputy, and the coroner. Paige’s identifying the body was a formality.

Death was quiet and still. It was a faint blue tinge to skin that had always been rosy. It was an immediate, stabbing sense of fear and loss and sadness. It was also strangely and unexpectedly peaceful.

Paige recalled the Mara who had been her college roommate, the one who had skied the Canadian Rockies with her, who had baked birthday cakes, knitted sweaters, and practiced medicine beside her in Tucker, Vermont. She recalled the Mara who had prodded her into campaigning for more than one worthy cause over the years.

“Oh, Mara,” she whispered, tearing up, “what
happened?
”

“You saw nothing?” the coroner asked from the side. “No sudden mood swings?”

Paige took a minute to compose herself. “Nothing to suggest she would harm herself. She was tired. She was upset about Tanya John. When I talked with her last—”

“When was that?” Norman asked.

“Yesterday morning in the office. She was on a tear because the lab messed up some tests, but that was typical Mara.” The tests had involved blood drawn from Todd Fiske, one of Mara’s favorite four-year-olds. Paige would have been angry, too. She hated drawing blood from a child. Now it would have to be drawn again.

She couldn’t imagine telling Todd and his family that Mara was gone. She couldn’t imagine telling
anyone
.

“Oh, Mara,” she whispered again. She needed to be away from this horrible place but couldn’t seem to leave. It wasn’t right that Mara was staying, not when she had so much yet to do.

Mara’s family back in Eugene, Oregon, greeted Paige’s news with a silence that told none of their thoughts. Mara had been estranged from them for years. Paige was saddened, though not surprised, when they asked that she be buried in Tucker.

“She chose to live there,” Thomas O’Neill said tersely. “She lived there longer than anywhere else.”

“What kind of arrangements should I make?” Paige asked. She knew that the O’Neills were devoutly religious, and though Mara hadn’t been, Paige would have respected any request they made, especially one that showed caring.

There was no request, just a short, “Use your judgment. You knew her better than we did.” Which saddened Paige all the more.

“Will you come?” she asked, and held her breath.

There was a pause, during which she felt an incredible pain on Mara’s behalf, then slowly, finally, a reluctant, “We’ll come.”

Angie looked dumbfounded. “What?”

Paige repeated herself, all the while reliving her own disbelief. Mara O’Neill was full of life and energy. The concept of death didn’t fit her.

Angie’s eyes begged her to take back the words, and Paige wished she could. But denial was absurd, given what she had seen in the morgue.

“My God,” Angie murmured after an agonizingly long and helpless minute. “Dead?”

Paige took a shuddering breath. She had been the one to introduce Angie to Mara. They had become friends to the extent that rarely a weekend passed without Mara stopping at Angie’s, if not for Sunday brunch then for an afternoon to argue politics with Ben or sneak hot-fudge sundaes to Dougie.

Dougie. Paige’s heart went out to him. Angie shielded him from life’s dark side, but there would be no shielding now. Death was absolute. There were no halfway measures, no reprieves.

Angie was on the same wavelength as Paige. “Dougie will be crushed. He adored Mara. Just last Sunday they went hiking on the mountain.” She looked uncharacteristically rattled, but only for a minute, which was how long it took her to order her thoughts. Then she questioned Paige on the hows and wheres of Mara’s death. Paige related what she knew, which was far too little for Angie’s peace of mind.

“What about the whys?” she wanted to know. “Suicide is the first thing that comes to mind when a person is found dead in her car in a closed garage with the engine running, but suicide doesn’t fit Mara any more than death does. It might have been an accident. Mara’s been looking tired. She might have fallen asleep without realizing the engine was on. But suicide? Without a cry for help? Without letting any of us know that she was even
near
the breaking point?”

The absurdity of it frustrated Paige, too. She prided herself on being observant, but she hadn’t seen a thing to suggest Mara was on the edge.

Angie barreled on. “What about her patients? They’ll have to be told. Most will hear about it through the grapevine and call us for confirmation. Should we let Ginny handle it from the front desk?”

Ginny was an able receptionist, but juggling the appointment book was a far cry from grief counseling. Fortunately Paige didn’t have to point that out. Angie was already shaking her head.

“We’ll have to talk with them ourselves. Mara was their champion. They’ll need help dealing with her death…. Her death. My
God
, that’s awful.”

Leaning against the edge of Angie’s desk, sharing the pain with someone competent enough to help with the decisions, Paige could be weak as she hadn’t been since she had found Norman in her office earlier that morning. She touched her throat. The vividness of Mara’s death was choking her.

Annie gave her a hug. “I’m sorry, Paige,” she said softly. “You were closer to her than I was.” She drew back. “Have you told Peter?”

Paige shook her head. She forced the words out. “He’s next on my list. He’ll be as stunned as we are. He thought Mara was tough as nails.” She made a self-deprecating sound. “So did I. Never in a million years did I imagine she would…she would…” She couldn’t say it.

Angie hugged her again. “Maybe she didn’t.”

“Without violence, what else could it be?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.”

“Wait and see” implied the future. Catching a glimpse of it, Paige felt a deep inner pang. “The practice won’t be the same without Mara. It’s been an incredible foursome. Each of us different, but meshing into a great team. The group worked.”

Paige was its common denominator. She had known Mara from college, Angie from a year-long overlap as pediatric residents in Chicago. Angie had taken time off to have Dougie, was living in New York and ready to return to work, when Paige connected with Peter, a native of Tucker with the kind of leisurely small-town practice that appealed to the others. Given the promise of the small community hospital nearby and the fact that none of the four pediatricians was out for big bucks, they pooled their time, effort, and expertise in a way that enabled them to offer high-quality medical care while working reasonable hours. Angie’s pragmatism was a foil for Mara’s dynamism; Paige’s business sense countered Peter’s provinciality. They complemented each other and were friends.

“Mara was a good doctor,” Angie said in tribute. “She loved kids, and they loved her because they knew she was on their side. Her shoes will be hard to fill.”

Paige could only nod in agreement. The sense of loss she felt was devastating.

“Will you be making the funeral plans?” Angie asked.

She nodded again. “Not looking forward to it.”

“Can I help?”

She shook her head. “I have to.” She owed it to Mara.

“We’ll close on that day,” Angie said. “Ginny can reschedule appointments once the plans are firmed up. In the meanwhile, I’ll see as many of Mara’s patients as I can. Peter will see the rest. Want me to call him?”

“No, no. I’ll do it.” Paige was, after all, the hub of the wheel. Hard to believe a spoke had been taken out for good.

She woke Peter from a deep sleep. He sounded none too pleased. “This had better be good, Paige. I’m not due at work until one.”

“It’s not good,” she said, too mentally taut to cushion the blow. “Mara is dead.”

“Dammit to hell, so was I. I didn’t get to bed until two—”

“
Dead.
I just came back from the morgue.”

There was a pause, then a more cautious, “What are you talking about?”

“They found her in her car in the garage,” Paige said. With each repetition, the story grew increasingly surreal. “They’re guessing carbon monoxide poisoning.”

There was another pause, a longer one, then a puzzled, “She killed herself?”

Paige heard a mumbling in the background. She waited until Peter impatiently hushed it before saying, “They don’t know what happened. The autopsy might tell us something, but in the meantime we need you here. I have to make plans for the funeral, and Angie is already—”

“Was there a note?” he asked sharply.

“No, no note. Angie is already seeing patients. We have to contact Mara’s patients and let them know—”

“No note
at all?
”

“Norman didn’t mention one, and I’m sure they looked.”

Peter’s voice rose a notch. “The
police
are involved?”

Paige was the puzzled one now. “They were the ones who found her. Is that bad?”

“No,” he said more quietly. “Not really. It just makes the whole thing seem sinister.”

“In that it was untimely, it is sinister, and if it’s upsetting for us, just think of what Mara’s patients will feel. She was so involved with them.”

“Too involved,” he declared. “I’ve been telling her so for years.”

Paige knew that all too well. Peter and Mara had spiced up more than one group meeting with their banter. But Mara was no longer there to argue her side, so Paige did it for her. “Mara’s involvement was of the good-hearted sort. She felt a strong moral commitment to her patients. And they loved her.”