Dollie the Doctor's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Dollie ended the call with the council member and set the phone face down on the desk. She looked at the twenty-third name on the list. Twenty-three was not the whole neighborhood. The old lines ran under houses Harold's memory could not reach. She needed a wider net before Friday, and she needed it without breaking the order. She walked out to the waiting room. Harold was still there, hands in his cardigan pockets, watching the last patient sign out. She asked him to stay. "The list is short," she said. "How many houses on those lines aren't on it?" He took his hands out of his pockets and thought. "Six, maybe eight. Renters. New owners. People who fill their prescriptions in the next town. I don't know their charts." "Then they aren't my patients," Dollie said. "I can't call them." "No," Harold said. "But I can." She stopped. He met her eyes. "I'm retired," he said. "I don't have a license to lose. I can knock on a door and tell a neighbor I heard from a friend that the tap tastes off and they should switch to bottled until Friday. That isn't your voice. That's a nosy old man on a walk." Dollie sat down on the arm of the waiting room chair. The order pinned her mouth shut inside these walls. It said nothing about what a retired pharmacist chose to say on a sidewalk. "If they ask why," she said, "you don't know why." "I don't," Harold said. "I heard it from a friend." She pulled the old pipe map from the file cabinet and spread it on the reception counter. Harold leaned in. He tapped houses one by one and named who lived there, or admitted when he didn't. They marked eight addresses that were not on his original twenty-three. He wrote them on the back of an envelope and folded it into his cardigan. "Tonight," he said. "Before bed. Bottled water by morning." "Harold." She caught his sleeve at the door. "If a council member asks, you never spoke to me about water." "I came in for a wellness check," he said. "You told me my numbers. I went home." He left. She watched him cross the parking lot under the clinic's porch light, envelope in his pocket, walking like a man with errands. Dollie went back to the exam room and clipped a fresh blood result sheet to the next chart. The twenty-three were still hers to see across Wednesday and Thursday. The extra eight now belonged to Harold. The net was as wide as she could make it without losing her license. Her phone buzzed on the desk. A text from a number she did not recognize. Three words. We need to talk.