Dollie the Doctor's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Dollie set the fourth chart on top of the other three and pressed her palm flat against the stack. Four patients this month. Same cough that would not clear. Same slow tremor in the hands. Same low fever that spiked at night and vanished by morning. She had trained for eight years and could not name what she was looking at. Her clinic sat quiet in the late afternoon. Blue clapboard walls. A small waiting room with two empty chairs. She had opened the doors here two years ago because this was her hometown, and because the old doctor had retired without a replacement. Now people were getting sick, and she was the only one who might stop it. She spread the four files across her desk and wrote the addresses on a notepad. Elm Street. Water Lane. Old Mill Road. Chestnut Row. She stared at the list. Four streets she had walked her whole life. Nothing linked them that she could see. Different families. Different ages. Different jobs. She needed a map, and she needed someone who had watched this town longer than she had. The bell above the door rang. Harold Winters shuffled in, cardigan buttoned crooked, one hand braced on the frame. He had run the pharmacy for forty years before he closed it. He was also her first patient with the cough. He was the reason she had started keeping the list. "You said come by if anything changed," he said. His voice was thin. "My hands were shaking this morning. Couldn't hold the kettle." She pulled out a chair for him. "Sit. I want to show you something first." He lowered himself down and squinted at the addresses. "These your sick ones?" "Four so far. I can't find what they share. You've lived here longer than anyone I trust." Harold took the notepad. He read the streets slowly, mouthing each one. Then he set the pad down and looked at her over his glasses. "These are the old lines," he said. "Before the town put in the new water main in seventy-two. Every one of these houses is still on the original pipes. My street too." Dollie sat down hard in the other chair. "The water." "The pipes," Harold said. "Lead, most of them. Some worse. I used to fill prescriptions for half these families. Kidney complaints. Nerve troubles. I thought it was just old people getting old." She grabbed the notepad back and drew a rough circle around the four streets. Her hand was steady, but her chest was not. If Harold was right, the illness was not spreading. It had always been there. And every house on the old lines was already drinking it. "Harold," she said, "I need to test your tap water tonight. And theirs. All of them." He nodded once, then coughed into his sleeve. When he pulled his hand away, his fingers were trembling.