Thirteen
Laurel spent an anxious hour pacing the waiting area of the doctor’s office, trying to comfort Pearl. Her coughing spasms were relieved only when she could draw enough breath to wail.
When they finally were called into the examination room, the elderly physician peered at them through his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and asked, “What seems to be the problem?”
Laurel wanted to smack him.
With a maddening lack of urgency, he went about examining the screaming baby while asking Laurel pertinent questions. In the hope of moving things along, she kept her answers brief and precise.
He listened to Pearl’s chest and, when he removed the earpieces of the stethoscope, asked if she’d been born early.
“By three weeks.”
He ruminated on that, then used a medicine dropper to dose Pearl with powdered aspirin dissolved in water. “This will bring down her fever. And this,” he said as he similarly administered a dose of sweet smelling syrup, ?
??will help with her cough.” He gave Laurel a small bottle of the cough remedy and a packet of the aspirin to take with her.
Irv had waited in the car. When he saw her coming from the building, he got out to help her and Pearl into the passenger seat. “Is it the Spanish flu?” he asked. “Pneumonia?”
“He didn’t say.”
He tilted his head and looked at Pearl, who was lying in Laurel’s arms. “She seems better already.”
“He gave her paregoric.”
He frowned. “That’s dope, ya know. You’d’ve been just as well off funneling some whiskey down her throat.”
Laurel agreed. Her mother had given her paregoric whenever she’d suffered a stomachache or diarrhea. However, rather than easing her symptoms, the opiate had always nauseated her, making her throw up.
She didn’t like the idea of the stuff, and would be very stingy with the doses she gave Pearl for her cough. Now, however, she was grateful that the baby was no longer struggling for every breath. Pearl’s eyes were blinking sleepily, and sleep would be as good a remedy as anything.
Laurel kissed her daughter’s forehead, then whispered to her, “Things are going to get better, Pearl. I’m going to make them better. I promise.” After Irv had started the car and gotten behind the wheel, she said, “I want to see that house for rent.”
* * *
As they drove through town, Irv reopened the subject of the scene in the sheriff’s office. “That fella Hutton. What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything.”
“I mean in connection with the doc’s wife gone missing.”
Rather than answer his question, she asked, “How was the mayor involved? Is he a close friend of the Driscolls?”
“Naw, he just sticks his big nose into everybody’s business.”
“Well, this is his business. He’s a public official, and a woman in his city went missing overnight.”
“You think that Hutton took her?”
“I don’t know, Irv.” Her tone reflected how tired she was of his seeming obsession with Mr. Hutton. Since he’d ventured into their yard yesterday, no matter what topic they were talking about, Irv always circled back to him. Every time she’d asked what had made him so suspicious of the man, his answer was usually the same. “Just don’t trust a tall, dark stranger who drops out of nowhere.”
As now, he muttered, “Don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”
He would trust Mr. Hutton even less if he knew that he’d placed his hands on Laurel’s arms and held her against him. She’d taken his hand!
By doing so, she’d given him an opportunity to force himself on her if he’d been of a mind to. No, they had to be wrong to suspect him of molesting Mrs. Driscoll in any way. He’d done nothing in the manner that Sheriff Amos’s question had suggested, nothing to make her fear that he meant her harm, or that his intentions were dishonorable.
The worst he’d done to her was to make it impossible for her not to think about those moments when they had touched. She feared that seeing him again, even in those circumstances, had prolonged the time it was going to take for her to forget them.