“No,” Betsy said. “It’s more than that. He . . . Okay, let me tell you about something that happened a couple of months ago.”
Betsy told how she’d been sitting at her desk, typing out invoices of unpaid bills, when Dr. Reede came out of the exam room. She had long ago learned to keep her mouth shut around him, since she never knew if he was in one of his “moods,” as she and Alice called them. He varied from a grunt in answer to a greeting to a “Is there no work to do in here?”
But that day he’d stood there in silence until Betsy looked up from the computer. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“When does Mr. Carlisle come in again?”
She brought up the schedule on the screen. “Tomorrow.” Since Mr. Carlisle was a hypochondriac who wanted attention more than medicine, she asked if she should reschedule him.
Dr. Reede hesitated. “When are Mrs. Springer and Mrs. Jeffrey coming in?”
Mrs. Springer was a very nice middle-aged woman who usually brought the staff cookies, while Mrs. Jeffrey had a six-year-old daughter and was pregnant with twins. “Wednesday,” Betsy said. “Mrs. Springer at nine a.m. and Mrs. Jeffrey at three.”
“Change them,” Dr. Reede said. “Everybody on Friday. Carlisle at ten, Springer ten-fifteen, and Jeffrey at ten-thirty.”
“But—” Betsy began. There was no way that Mr. Carlisle would get in and out in a mere fifteen minutes. And Mrs. Springer was to have her annual physical. This was going to cause a traffic jam—and it would be Alice and Betsy who would have to do the apologizing.
&nbs
p; “Just do it,” Dr. Reede snapped and went back into the exam room.
“So what happened?” Heather asked.
“Everyone was on time and everyone was predictable,” Alice said, her eyes twinkling.
“What does that mean?” Heather asked.
“Mr. Carlisle took forty-five minutes in the exam room and during that time . . .” Alice
began.
“They helped each other,” Betsy said. The two women had worked together for so long they often finished each other’s sentences. “Mrs. Springer put down her knitting and played with Mrs. Jeffrey’s daughter.”
“And when the young mother fell asleep in her chair, Mrs. Springer asked us for a pillow for her,” Alice said.
“And when it came time for Mrs. Springer’s exam, she said she’d reschedule and she took care of the little girl while Mrs. Jeffrey went in.”
“They’ve been friends ever since,” Alice finished. “Mrs. Springer is an honorary grandmother to the kids.”
Heather leaned back in her chair. “You think Dr. Reede did it on purpose?”
“If it were an isolated incident, I’d say no,” Betsy said, “but there have been other things too.”
“Such as?” Heather asked.
“One morning when I came in to work Dr. Reede was just getting off my computer. I was curious about what he was doing so I—”
“She snooped,” Alice interrupted.
“I did indeed. He was on Amazon and he was still logged on, so I looked at what he’d ordered. It was a novel by Barbara Pym.”
“Never heard of her,” Heather said.
“They’re sweet little English novels,” Alice said.
“I’d think he’d read horror stories, the more gruesome the better,” Heather said.
“I know he reads the New England Journal of Medicine from cover to cover,” Betsy said in the doctor’s defense. “Anyway, I thought I’d found out some secret about him.”