The Plague Doctor (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-five

Mother was just about to put the torch to the bananas and rum in her silver chafing dish when the phone rang. It was Barry.

“I can't believe it, honeychile, but I got robbed! Somebody broke in the greenhouse and made off with your little bottle!”

“Gosh, Barry, are you all right?” I asked, although I couldn't imagine anyone trying to overpower that mountain in blue denim.

“Oh, my heart! I knew you cared!” he laughed. “No, I'm fine, darlin.' I was back in the office.” He paused for a minute, “I have to 'fess up 'cause I'm so smitten by you. It was my fault. I'm afraid I left the door unlocked.”

I could almost hear him blushing.

“That's all right, Barry. I shouldn't have burdened you with something that could have possibly been evidence in a police investigation.”

“Really? That important, huh?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Then I guess the analysis I did on the contents would be pretty important, too?”

“Oh, Barry, I do love you! What is it?”

“I was right the first time. It is Goldenrod, and it does contain fungal spores of the rust we've seen for the last year. Funny thing, though—it's twice the strength of the usual first treatment allergen. Somebody could be in big time trouble for making that little cocktail.”

“Barry, you don't know how much I appreciate this. But I have to warn you—you could be in danger for just knowing that. I'd feel so much better if you'd stay with a friend tonight.”

“You, maybe?” he breathed deeply and dramatically into the phone. “All night long?”

“Not me,” I laughed. “Somebody with a gun. And don't ride anywhere on that bicycle of yours. Get your friend to come and pick you up in a car. Or better still, a truck.” I remembered his size and added, “A big truck.”

Cassie was waiting like a vulture for the fancy banana dessert. I bequeathed her my share and begged to be excused. I had some more telephone time to put in. When I explained that I needed to call my agent, Mother willingly agreed. She loved Pamela Winslow. She was everything I was not, including a lesbian. But that was one little fact Mother willingly overlooked in her admiration of Pam's style, panache, and wardrobe.

We had been college roommates for four years. It was Pam who had suggested I become a writer after Rafe disappeared and I needed to get a job to care for my little daughter. With her helpful introductions, I was able to launch a career as a successful writer of children's books which lasted for nearly a decade. And when the kiddies tired of me, she had been the one to suggest that I write mysteries under the
nom de plume
of Leonard Paisley. I still wasn't exactly one hundred percent happy about that. There had been several times during the last year when I had wanted to murder Leonard so I could take all the credit for his popular novels—the ones I worked so hard to write.

Pamela answered on the first ring, but she obviously wasn't expecting a call from me.

“Oh, drat!”

“Well, hello to you too, Pam.”

“I'm sorry darling, but it's this damn water heater. This was such an adorable penthouse. I just couldn't pass it up, but it does have its own personality. And tonight of all nights it's being extremely anal retentive about the hot water. I was hoping you were the plumber.”

She sounded so pitiful. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn't help it.

“Go ahead, sweetie! Have your fun at my expense. I'm sure you've had your hot shower today.”

“As a matter of fact, I can't remember, Pam. This has been one hell of a day and the night is still young.”

Her voice got very quiet. “Oh, do tell, darling, a new man, have we? Does my sweet Cassandra like him? Tall, dark, and handsome, humm?”

“I hate to disappoint you, but no, there's no new…well, yes there is!”

Just for fun, I decided to give her a bit of misinformation.

“He is tall. About six four I would guess, and he weighs about two fifty. He has a grey beard and vibrant green eyes. He asked me out to dinner.”

I knew this bit of news would travel from one side of Manhattan to the other in the space of twenty-four hours.

“How delicious, pet,” she breathed. “I've been hoping you could have some really good sex!”

I chuckled, “Not sure about the sex yet, but the menu sounds interesting.”

I could hear her rustling about on her desk.

“Not to change the subject, love, but Leonard owes me some chapters. You promised them almost a month ago. What's going on? How many do you have ready?”

She was all business now. I struggled to keep up with her. I should have thought to turn on Ethan's computer so I could read the floppy disc Andy had returned to me. I could not remember for the life of me how many chapters of our latest tome I had completed before my laptop was stolen.

“Just give me a sec while the computer warms up.”

I twisted around and grabbed the disc from the coffee table where Cassie had left it.

“Ah, let's see. Okay. I have a synopsis and thirteen, no fourteen chapters done.”

“And that's translates into how many words?”

Pamela was very interested in the word count. I always teased her about that. I cared what the words were, she cared how many. I went to the document info tab and let it do the counting for me.

“Twenty-five thousand, one hundred and fourteen words to be exact. That's odd.”

“What dear? Sounds perfectly fine to me. Get those off to me tomorrow at the latest, please. I have a luncheon Monday with a new editor. He's hungry, and you know I'm always looking out for Leonard's interests.”

“Not to mention your fifteen percent!”

“Don't be crass, darling. Kisses to the munchkin and that divine mother of yours.”

“By the way, Pam, just out of curiosity, what's so special about tonight?”

“You're too young to know, babe, too young to know!”

I hung up the phone and stared at the computer screen. I was puzzled over the numbers the computer had brought up on Leonard's latest. I was very consistent about my writing. I never used an outline. The number of pages and chapters formed the backbone of my books. Each page held about two hundred and twenty words, and each chapter had approximately eight pages. Fourteen chapters should have added up to a little over twenty-four thousand, six hundred words, not over twenty-five thousand. I must have been seriously verbose in the last one or two chapters.

I scrolled down the pages. Everything was fine until I got to chapter twelve. Sure enough I had written eleven pages instead of the usual eight in that chapter. I paged back to the beginning and quickly scanned thorough it. It had been a while and I couldn't quite remember exactly what I had written.

Cassie came loping in with Aggie dancing around her heels.

“Brought you the last banana, Mom. They're scrumptious.”

“No thanks. ‘A full mongoose is a slow mongoose.'”

“What?”

She plopped down on the red chintz sofa. Aggie pounced up on her stomach and started licking her chin.

“Don't let the puppy lick your…!”

“No, the thing about the mongoose. What's that all about?”

“Rikki Tikki Tavi. Don't you remember your Kipling?”

“No, but I remember Garcia Lorca, and Isabel Allende, and…”

“Cassie!”

She jumped up from the sofa causing Aggie to scramble around trying to keep her footing on something or somebody. The dog failed to gain purchase and fell to the floor with an angry growl and a disgusted look on her furry face.

“What's the matter?” asked Cassie, her eyes wide with fear.

“Baxter! He left a suicide note hidden in Leonard's twelfth chapter!”

“Oh, my God!”

She tripped over the angry snarling puppy in her attempt to reach my side.

“Pull up that chair,” I pointed to my grandmother Howard's dainty little rocker. “Here, I'll turn the screen around so we can both read it.”

“Shouldn't we call Gran and Horatio?”

“Do you want to wait?”

“No!” she responded impatiently.

“Well, neither do I. Besides, let's find out what he said first. Gran might insist that we call in Andy Joiner. If she does that, our plans for tonight will be shot to hell.”

“Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Thanks, Mom, for putting Ethan first.”

“Just remember that on visiting day when you have other things to do.”

I scrolled quickly through the pages to see how much Edgar Baxter had written within Leonard's text. There seemed to be two and a half pages of odd, sometimes rambling sentences, all without standard punctuation or any capital letters.

“Seems very strange. Do you think he was drunk or on some medication?” asked Cassie.

“Could have been. Or maybe nothing mattered any more, least of all the rules of grammar. And remember, he had no computer in his office. He probably couldn't type.”

We read quickly thorough the old man's hasty notes. It was difficult to get the meaning without periods or commas, but essentially he was making a strained confession without any apologies for his actions:

“my darling lovee juliia died an lef me al alone she who wold hav b en the most lov inm other had nown to lovf andnoento leave behinfor med to lov ei am alone I hav a missionnow to mak sertann only those who shold an deserve to bar the infAnts old a ndpoor and foolish with foul genes and c roooked souls and eevil heartts canno long caRry seed”

“Spooky!” breathed Cassie.

“Shhhh, I'm trying to read.”

“none lissened to me I spok to them and inthhhhheir prided they laufed at my gpod c onsul theyh angered med an d so they lost the right to c hoolsz researxc h fvoujnd the goldednrod and and”

“I'm getting a headache. Mom, you read and tell me what the crazy old fart said.”

“Umm, he does sound a bit off. I wonder why no one ever noticed?”

“I always thought he was a bit medieval, but that's a long way from being crazy enough to start your own plague.”

“You want me to try and decipher some more of this?”

“Please! You're the detective—detect!”

“He seems to have discovered the same information Ethan did about Goldenrod.”

I went on reading so I could explain it to Cassie. It seemed that when Baxter decided that he was going to play God, he approached an allergist—my allergist—in Morgantown, and had him make up several batches of allergen. When he kept asking for stronger extracts, the allergist became suspicious and started asking questions. Baxter then had to bypass him and find another source so he could continue to give the extract to his patients. He used a series of three injections which he would prescribe for the women under the guise of folic acid and prenatal vitamins.

The first shot was twice the strength of the regular Goldenrod allergen and would put unusual stress on the fetal heart. The second, even stronger one, brought on bleeding from the placenta. The most concentrated extract, the third and last, would cause deep contractions of the uterus and expulsion of the fetus.

He only used his “special therapy” a few times that first year, but then he began seeing more and more families who didn't, to his mind, deserve a baby. His Goldenrod treatments increased. So did his need for the allergen.

Something went terribly wrong during the last fourteen months. Even those fortunate mothers he had deemed worthy of bearing children began to miscarry. When it happened time and time again, he panicked and closed his practice to obstetrical patients. The abortions continued. Baxter felt that he had brought about a plague. He had no choice. He sentenced himself to die.

The night Cassie and I had gone to Wallace's office, Edgar Baxter had gone also. He went to find the records of his maternity patients who had gone to Wallace when he closed his own practice. He wanted to find any evidence against himself and destroy it as he had, or thought he had, destroyed his own records in the fire.

He heard our voices just in time and hid in the examining room where Winston had surprised me and Cassie. He found Wallace's shotgun, which I had left on the examining table, and decided to take it with him. He had never owned a gun. Wallace's fancy weapon seemed the perfect instrument for his own demise. When we stayed at Winston's until dawn, and his last attempt to tie up loose ends failed, he decided to go ahead and use it. He hoped the gods would judge him for his intentions rather than the results. Again, these were his own words.

“That's it? No, ‘I'm sorry.' No, ‘Gee, I guess I played God and went a little too far?'” asked Cassie.

“Doesn't look like it.”

“What a creep!”

“I think he was insane,” I responded sorrowfully.

My daughter was still too young to understand that minds are fragile things. She had no patience for a very good and decent old man who had cracked after years of seeing too much suffering and death. I wished we could have helped him before it was too late. We might have stopped him before he went into his mental cave and unleashed the monster. He was gone now, but the monster was still with us—maybe forever.

Cassie went back to the sofa and rescued her banana. Aggie was trying her best to lick it out of the bowl.

“Crazy as a bed bug, that's for sure!” she said shaking her head as she shared her dessert with the puppy.

“No, I think he was one of the walking wounded,” I continued. “Completely insane but able to function in the normal everyday world without calling too much attention to himself. Maybe it happened slowly after Julie died. Or maybe it even happened after his surgery.”

“Nuts! He was nuts—plain and simple.”

“No, Cassie, there was nothing plain and simple about the insanity of Edgar Baxter. He thought he was God. His divine mind mulled over the ability of each and every woman to care for her child. His decision was absolute, his actions terminal. He was the one who gave life and took it away.”