Page 5 of Chosen Path
“Well, for one thing, Doc Larson kept a boot scraper outside the door. But, also, he asked everyone to leave their shoes on the porch during mud season. You know, as a courtesy.”
Molly furrowed her brow. “Why aren’t people leaving their shoes outside now?”
Corrine’s facial expression was aggressively neutral as she shrugged and replied, “You haven’t asked, now have you? We didn’t want to assume you’d do things the same way.”
Molly forced a smile. Six months in, and she was still being treated like an outsider. Still paying for every minor change she made to the way Doctor Larson did things. She was half-convinced her patients would never forgive her for asking them to add their email addresses to their contact information.
“I suppose I haven’t. I’d appreciate if you could spread the word that I’d like to keep Doctor Larson’s shoe procedure in place.”
“Sure thing, hon. All you have to do is ask.” Corrine coughed into her fist. Her back shook as the coughing fit took hold.
“Mrs. Wolf, I’m concerned about that cough. Why don’t you let me get a throat swab and run a culture? If it’s bacterial, I can prescribe—”
Still hacking and red-faced, her patient shook her head and raised her free hand as if she were warding Molly off. “No,” she gasped.
“I really have to advise you—”
“—I’m not sick.” Corrine straightened up and took a breath. “You said so yourself. My blood pressure’s good. This cough is nothing. Stop making a fuss.”
Molly blinked at the fierceness in Corrine’s voice. She was genuinely angry.
What would Uncle Al do?
He’d lead with honesty.
Molly exhaled. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Wolf. I didn’t mean to upset you. To be frank with you, I’m concerned that there’s something going around the village—some infection that I’m missing—that might be the underlying cause of these recent deaths.”
Corrine Wolf’s eyes bugged out, and she jammed her feet into her muddy boots in a hurry. “You’re talking about Nikolas Lundgren, are you? Folks are saying he died in his sleep. Natural causes.”
She grabbed her purse from the hook on the wall and slung the strap over her shoulder and across her body.
Molly frowned. Where could she have heard that? Molly didn’t gossip, and the county police officer who’d come to the scene wasn’t local. She doubted he’d hung around town to talk.
“Well, that’s true. I haven’t been able to pinpoint a cause of death, but I’m not convinced I didn’t miss something. Mr. Lundgren’s the seventh person to die since I took over the practice in the fall. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“No. What’s odd about it? People are born, and people die. It’s the cycle of life. There’s nothing unusual about it.”
Molly was about to point out that while there had been seven deaths, there hadn’t been a single baby born in Scandia Bluff since her arrival in November.
But Corrine wasn’t finished. “You need to stop worrying about it. Doc Larson never did.”
Molly tilted her head and studied the woman. “Are you saying there are usually this many deaths each year? This isn’t an aberration?”
Corrine’s mouth tightened. “I said no such thing, and don’t you be telling folks I did.”
With that, she flung open the pocket doors, stormed out of the exam room, and left the house. She slammed the front door with such force that Molly’s framed diplomas shook and banged against the wall.
Molly scratched the back of her neck and tried to make sense of the encounter. She didn’t know Corrine Wolf well, but she’d never seen the woman so upset before. She hoped her patient’s blood pressure wasn’t skyrocketing as she stormed away.
Molly washed her hands at the exam room sink and made her way to the kitchen to reheat her lukewarm coffee. She couldn’t imagine what she’d done to set Corrine off. Maybe the woman was reacting to Nikolas Lundgren’s sudden death. Grief manifests in odd ways, she told herself.
She sipped the coffee and toyed with the notion of digging into Doctor Larson’s files. But she had no idea where she’d even start. She hadn’t yet found the time to organize Doctor Larson’s archived records, and the thought of tackling them made her shoulders sag. Rolf Larson had kept meticulous, detailed notes. Meticulous, detailedhandwrittennotes. Page after page of patient notes scribbled in his cramped cursive, replete with abbreviations from a personal shorthand that he’d devised.
She remembered her disbelief when the older doctor had proudly yanked open one of the overstuffed filing cabinets that lined the walls of the room behind his study. He was delighted to show off his system. Once she’d found her voice, she’d asked him if he’d ever considered computerizing his files. He’d laughed so loudly for so long that she’d been sure she’d just talked her way out of a job offer.
She wished she had the budget for even a part-time assistant to help her get the records in order, among other things. Like washing her floors, she thought as her eyes fell on the clods of mud that Corrine had tracked through the waiting room to the front hallway.
That settled it. She didn’t have time to clean the floor and root around in the records before her next appointment. She abandoned her mug and grabbed the mop and bucket from the utility closet. While she swabbed the mop across the old, scarred hardwood, her mind wandered to the expert Uncle Al had found.
