studied two shelves stacked with brown bottles. An array of silver rings spilling down his left ear flashed in the sunlight whenever he leaned forward to study a label.
“Even in disguise,” Macguire whispered, “I don’t think Korman could look like that.”
“You’re right,” I whispered back. At their table Patricia and Amy were in intimate communication. Patricia’s voice cracked with pain; Amy’s voice exuded its liquid warmth. After nodding briefly to acknowledge our arrival, Amy directed Patricia to hold a bottle to her heart with her left-hand. With her right hand Patricia was told to press her forefinger and thumb together in an okay sign. Then Amy asked a question and gently pried apart the fingers of Patricia’s right hand. “Six a day?” Amy murmured, and pulled. The okay sign opened. “Eight a day?” It opened again. At twelve a day Patricia’s fingers wouldn’t budge. Amy wrote on a yellow pad while Patricia wrote a check. A novel approach to prescription, this.
Patricia gave me an apologetic glance as she exited. “Do you still hurt from Saturday?”
“I’m fine,” I told her, not quite truthfully. “But listen. John Richard’s out on bail. I don’t think he’d come after you, but when he loses his temper with women… Well. Be careful.”
Patricia’s face tightened and she swore under her breath. Then she shook her head and moved away from me without asking another question.
Amy was already eyeing Macguire by the time the cowbell rang behind Patricia. After an appraising squint, she moved to Macguire’s side. The thin teenager towered over her.
“‘You’re not well,” she murmured.
“Yeah, lady. Really.”
“I’ll be with you in a sec.” Macguire nodded without interest. He stopped in front of a rack of magazines. Amy slipped over to the shelves, where she seemed to know exactly what the Earring King wanted. I watched her hand him a large cellophane bag filled with lots of small cellophane bags, each of which was crammed with multicolored capsules. I could imagine Frances Markasian’s loud headline: COP’S WIFE ARRESTED IN HEALTH STORE DRUG BUST.
The Earring King glared at me. “What’re you staring at, woman?” he demanded.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. My mouth had gone dry.
“Edgar, you need to transform that anger,” Amy gently reprimanded the man. “It’s blocking you.”
Emanating hostility that showed no sign of being transformed, Edgar slapped down some dollar bills for his cellophane bags, mumbled that he didn’t want the change, and clanged through the door. A moment later a motorcycle engine split the silence. Amy shook her head of red hair.
“Cancer,” she said sadly. I didn’t know if she meant the disease or the astrological sign, and wasn’t about to ask. She looked at me and said, “How’s that shoulder?”
“Fair.”
“Let me treat your friend and then you. How’s that?”
“Well…” How was I supposed to say this? My ex-husband called from jail. He suspects you of killing his girlfriend. Or he wants to pin the murder on you. Now he’s on the loose and may come looking for you, Amy. Better pack up your alfalfa sprouts and hit the trail. “I need to talk to you without interruption,” I said somewhat lamely.
“No problem,” Amy replied brightly, and blithely turned the door’s paper clock to CLOSED.
Amy beckoned to Macguire. He shuffled behind us as she led the way to the back of the shop, where small tables were sandwiched between two refrigerated cases that held plastic bottles of chlorophyll and other substances I wouldn’t want to ingest. Next to the bottles were plastic bags of adzuki, black, and pinto beans, a few tired-looking carrots, and a small selection of packaged grains. Macguire flopped into a chair and I sat next to him. Amy clasped one of Macguire’s hands in hers; he immediately withdrew it. I had the same discomfiting sense I’d had in the McCrackens’ bathroom ? that Amy was way ahead of me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to catch up.
“Perhaps you should just treat me,” I told her. “I don’t really have any authority to ? “
But Amy was absorbed with Macguire’s eyes. He turned his face away from her and rubbed his temples. She said, “What do the M.D.s say?”
“The… Oh,” I faltered, “well, Macguire has mononucleosis, and he … what worries me is that he doesn’t have any appetite. The doctor has said he should be getting better, but… Anyway, he’s staying with me until his father gets home later in the month, and I’m not sure his father would approve of ? ” I was yakking away. Why did this woman always make me yak?
“Macguire?” Amy asked in her kind, melted-milk-chocolate voice. “Do you want to be healed?”
Macguire tilted his head skeptically, glanced swiftly at Amy, then stared at the floor. “I guess.”
“Okay. Just relax.” She had him remove his watch. Then he touched his head with first one hand, then the other.
“What are you doing?” I blurted out.
She replied without looking at me. “I’m reading his aura.”
Oh, that! I reflected. Of course. Marla and I would have to offer it in Med Wives 101.
Amy took a small flashlight from her pocket, then opened and smoothed out what looked like a paper diagram or chart of some kind. “Look at me.” This Macguire did, and for the next five minutes Amy shone the flashlight in his eyes and consulted her chart. When she’d made a few notes, she rose arid briskly began to gather supplies. A bottle of chlorophyll. Five brown bottles of pills. Cellophane bags similar to the ones the Earring King had purchased. Then she commenced the same drill she had with Patricia: Macguire held the medicines to his heart, and Amy asked questions and tested the response by pulling apart his fingers pressed in the okay sign. I kept an eye on the door, in the remote case the Jerk showed up.
Finally Amy seemed happy with a combination of three bottles of pills, two cellophane bags, and the chlorophyll. She asked Macguire if he wanted her to run through putting together his twice-a-day regimen. As usual, he replied dully in the affirmative.
“You’d better watch this, too,” she told me, and then showed us the sheet. He was to take ten capsules twice a day, plus a teaspoon of chlorophyll dissolved in a cup of cold water. Yum-my!
I pointed at the capsules. “What’s in these?”
“Shark cartilage,” she replied, “pau d’arco bark, essiac tea, rosehips ? “
A vision of Macbeth’s witches rose before me. “Okey-doke,” I interrupted her, before we could get to eye of newt.
“Are you ready for me to take a look at you?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said enthusiastically. What did I have to lose?
While Macguire dutifully swallowed his capsules with a glass of springwater spiked with chlorophyll, I got the same flashlight-in-the-eye treatment he’d received. Again Amy consulted her chart.
“Hmm,” she said. Then the beautiful brown eyes and faded-freckled face regarded me sadly. She bit the inside of her lip and then made her pronouncement: “You’re depressed.”
Great, I thought, got herbs for it? Prozac bark..? Instead I said, “Since it’s truth-telling time, Amy, there’s something I really need to talk to you about. “
“Your ex-husband. Dr. Korman.”
“How did you know?”
She smiled. “I may run a health-food store, but I don’t live in the next galaxy. Suz Craig and I didn’t get along, as you said you knew, when I helped you out at the McCrackens’ house. What, you think Dr. Korman is going to come gunning for me? I was a victim of Suz’s nastiness, so now I’m a suspect in her murder? Is Dr. Korman trying to say I killed her?”
Without warning, I felt infinitely dejected. Maybe it was Amy’s suggestion that I was depressed; maybe it was my acknowledgment of the truth. A woman was dead. If my ex-husband had killed her, he would pay. But so would my teenage son, who: would pay a long-lasting price in emotional pain. If John Richard had not killed Suz, then finding out who did would be left to the D.A.‘s investigator, I. Donny Saunders. Saunders, who, last time we’d met, had informed me radicchio was the name of a mobster. No wonder my spirits were low.
“Let’s get you some herbs for that depression,” Amy said decisively. She moved to the same area of the same shelf where she’d pulled down the bottle for Patricia McCracken. Hmm.
And then I, too, went through the drill of holding the herbs to my heart and having my fingers pried open. Within five minutes I, too, was swallowing mammoth capsules whose ingredient list included only three things I recognized: bamboo sap, ginger rhizome, and licorice root. It didn’t sound like a mixture I’d use in a cookie.
