Secret Santa (6 page)

“Sexing?” Neil’s eyebrows shot up, and Charli burst out laughing.

“He means he’s trying to detect the gender of the chicks. He’s not doing anything to them.”

“Oh. Okay. I’ll go get those pictures.” Neil left them, albeit looking a little confused.

Now Floyd asked, “What’s on your mind, Charli? I guess I didn’t think you’d have anything private to say, or I would have told you Neil was coming.”

“I can come back—”

“Nope. Me and the missus are heading down to Savannah for some Christmas shopping, and we’ll probably crash at Lila’s to see the grandkids. I won’t be back for a week. Got a buddy of mine to check on the chickens for me. So? What’s on your mind? Make it quick, because Neil will be back any second.”

“Um, did you know if my dad had a lot of cash?” The tentative way she asked certainly didn’t fit in with his suggestion to “make it quick.”

“No. He didn’t. I told him years ago not to take cash. Makes the IRS look at you harder when you run a cash business. Sure, people will write bad checks, but it’s a lot less of a headache than going through an audit. Why?”

She craned her neck to see where Neil was. Through the garage door, she could see him in the backyard, clicking away with the camera at the chicken coop. “Well, what if he did? I mean, do you know how he might have accumulated a chunk of—”

“Whoa!” Floyd dropped the chick he was holding back into the brooder and stopped her with one gloved hand. “I don’t need to hear this. But hypothetically, if someone found some cash, if they declare it now, it would mean amended tax returns for all the years the cash could have been accumulated. And it doesn’t stop there. The IRS would probably assume there was more cash, so you’d have penalties. Lots of penalties. And anybody—say, like a
wife
—who signed a joint return... Well, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

“So what do I do?”

“You?” Floyd raised his eyebrows suggestively. “Why, Charli, you know you didn’t find any cash. Chuck didn’t have any.” This was delivered with pointed suggestion of the answer she should be giving if someone quizzed her on the subject. “I was his accountant. I should know. By the time he bailed your mama out of debt from all her shopping sprees, he’d just about got to the point where he was turning couch cushions over, looking for spare change. But hypothetically?” Again with the suggestive lift of his eyebrows. “If you ever did find some money, I’d leave it lay. Spend it in small amounts.”

Charli saw Neil turn and head back toward them. “But if you say he couldn’t have gotten it legally, what if I can’t bear to keep it?” She saw him fix her with one stern eye at her question. “Hypothetically, I mean.”

Floyd eyed her. “It can’t be much. So don’t screw up everybody’s life to make nice with the IRS.”

She swallowed. Neil was almost back within hearing distance. To cover up the conversation, she said, “I’m glad you’re being so safe with your chickens, Floyd. Be sure to tell Neil all about it so that people will understand the risk.”

Floyd had once again assumed that “aw shucks” air he’d had before he’d sent Neil to photograph the chickens. “You bet, Doc! Good to see you. Tell your mama I said hey.”

With a wave to Neil, who looked rather suspicious at her departure, she headed for the car and the patients waiting at her dad’s office—no,
her
office.

CHAPTER SIX

T
HE
DOOR
TO
HER
father’s private office squeaked as it opened, giving Charli a moment’s notice to jam the pocket-size notebook into her pocket. Marvela’s head popped around the door.

“Hey, there you are! I know you’re dead on your feet,” Marvela began, then broke off. “You looking for something?”

“No, I...wanted to sit here. It’s like being with him,” Charli told her. It was true enough. After her last patient of the day, she’d come in here for that very reason. Then it had occurred to her to do some digging, to find out anything that could explain where all that money had come from. Her father had not been a rich man, wouldn’t have been even without her mother’s shopping compulsion.

Charli had found more than she’d bargained for. A stack of notebooks in her father’s bottom drawer.

They were journals of sorts—a combination of medical notes about patients and personal reflections. She’d pulled a notebook off the bottom of the stack, seeing a set of dates from the early 1980s in her father’s favored blue fountain pen ink.

Now, with Marvela’s eyes alight with curiosity on her, Charli toed her father’s drawer closed. “Did you need something?” Charli asked her office manager.

“Louredes Garcia over at the community clinic is on line one. In a jam. Your dad...he’d help them out sometimes.”

“Okay. Give me a minute.”

Marvela hesitated. “You okay? You look a little peaked.”

“Sure. Fine.” Charli flashed her a smile that she hoped would reassure her.

Marvela pulled the door closed. Charli knew she should pick up the phone, but she couldn’t resist the words she’d just read in the notebook.

Hernandez, Miguel: TB seems progressed, and patient’s lungs show textbook lesions. Not responding to antibiotics.

A few pages over, he’d noted in clinical, detached language that one Miguel Hernandez had died of complications from the TB, and that other family members showed similar symptoms.

No. What she was reading couldn’t be right. Her father hadn’t let a man die of TB. There hadn’t been a reported case of TB in Broad County in decades, much less a fatality—

Unless...maybe he hadn’t reported it. But why not? It was state law to report all cases of tuberculosis. Her father had been a meticulous man...in his notes, in his charting, in his dictation.

With a shaking hand, she set the notebook aside to read it more carefully later. There had to be an explanation.

The red light on the phone blinked insistently. Charli marshaled her strength and punched the button.

“Yes?” she asked, her eyes straying to the notebook.

“Dr. Prescott, I am so sorry to bother you, this is Louredes Garcia, over at the community clinic.” The woman rushed the intro as though she was afraid Charli would hang up. “Your receptionist said you were about to leave for the day, and I really hate—”

“What’s the problem?”

“Our nurse practitioner is out with the flu, and our backup doctor is out on medical leave. We have a waiting room stacked. Is there...? There’s no way—I’m sorry. I mean, your father has just passed away and all. I shouldn’t have asked you....”

Charli recalled the Hispanic names in the notebook. Could the money in the safe deposit box have something to do with the clinic? “Didn’t my father help you?”

“Yes, yes, he did. He was very generous with his time. And we couldn’t have had this clinic without him.”

“Then I can help for a while this evening. It’s the least I can do.”

“
¡Es increíble!
Thank you, thank you! You are a miracle!”

* * *

I
NSIDE
THE
CLINIC
, the slightly dingy waiting room was packed. A roomful of people turned their faces to take her in like sunflowers in a field. A cluster of dark-haired tots played under the clinic’s white plastic Christmas tree, shaking what Charli hoped were fake presents.
¡Feliz Navidad!
banners and Santa cutouts were liberally sprinkled around the walls, and despite the Spanish lyrics, Charli could recognize the tune of “Jingle Bells” over the speakers.

A murmur swept through the room and she could see elbows jabbing into neighbors’ ribs. Clearly, they were excited to see her.

Not as excited as Louredes Garcia. “
¡No me lo puedo creer!
You really came! I can’t believe it! Thank you!” The short, plump woman’s dark eyes snapped with joy.

Charli’s conscience nagged at her. If she hadn’t hoped to find some clue about the money and her father’s notes, would she have said yes so quickly? “It’s my pleasure,” she said simply. “Show me where I’m supposed to be.”

Four hours later, well past eight, Charli was numb with exhaustion. She’d treated six ear infections, two cases of the flu, four sprains, two pulled backs and a host of stomach ailments, and now, her last patient had sky-high glucose readings.

Louredes hovered near her shoulder, waiting for her recommendation so she could translate.

Charli reviewed the thick file. The man’s A1C readings had stayed high, his kidney functions had been abominable the last time he’d had them checked and now he had the beginnings of an ulcer on his foot.

He sat on the exam table, his hands folded, his mouth a straight line.

“Louredes, he needs to be in the hospital. We’ve got to get these readings stabilized, and that foot is only going to get worse. Plus, I’m afraid he’s heading for renal failure. Can you tell him all this?”

But Louredes didn’t immediately start translating. She shook her head. “Dr. Prescott, he’s got no insurance, and his permit is a work permit, so if he goes in the hospital, he’ll lose his job, and then he’ll be illegal.”

Charli sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “How’d he get in this situation? Has he been educated on diet? And is he compliant? Does he check his blood sugar at all?”

Louredes burst into the Spanish Charli wished she’d become fluent in. Spanish 101 and 102 seemed a distant memory and a completely foreign language to what she’d been hearing that afternoon.

The man rumbled back a response that was accompanied by an accusing look of scorn in Charli’s direction. He folded his arms across his chest and lifted his chin.

“He does check his blood sugar, but he can’t afford any more test strips. He ran out of the ones we gave him. And it doesn’t do any good, he says, because he can’t afford the insulin, either.”

Shame coursed through Charli. Of course the man couldn’t afford test strips. Most likely, just like all the other patients she’d seen that evening, he worked for less than minimum wage and had a houseful of children to feed.

“Does the clinic have any more test strips and insulin? He’s got to have a shot now. But he’ll need some to take home—after the hospital.”

“You’re still going to send him to the hospital?” Louredes made it sound as though Charli was getting ready to deport him.

“One night. He can leave in the morning. Tell him to go to the emergency room, that they can’t turn him down there. No, wait. Let me call.”

She used her cell phone to call the hospital administrator, Walter Campbell, and explained the situation. “He needs help. One night won’t break us, and we’ll discharge him back to the clinic, and they can―”

Louredes’s alarmed face stopped her from making too many promises, but Walter grabbed hold of the implied assurance. “One night. And don’t make this a habit!” he told her.

“I’ll donate my care, so the hospital won’t have to bill the E.R. docs. And I’m faxing over a copy of the labs so the hospital won’t have to duplicate. Deal?”

“Deal. What are you doing there, anyway?”

She was taken aback by the question. “They were in a jam.”

“Ha! They’re always in a jam. If you want to donate your time, you can start right here. We’re open to any volunteer hours you can give. You know how Lige is always going on about how tight our budget is.”

It was delivered in a “just joking” way, but Charli heard the bite in his words.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she told him.

“Oh, and, Dr. Prescott? I wouldn’t advertise the fact you’re donating care to the community clinic. Your paying patients wouldn’t cotton to subsidizing other people’s medical care. Folks are real sensitive about that around here these days,” he told her.

“My goodness. Thanks for the warning.” She hung up before the odious little man could give her any more words of wisdom—or her sarcasm could get her in hotter water.

Once Louredes had translated the deal Charli had worked out, and that she was personally treating him at no charge while he was in the hospital, the man’s face lit up.

“¡Madre mia!”
he burst out, and he followed it with several sentences of Spanish she couldn’t understand, along with much gripping of hands and many, many repetitions of
“¡Gracias!”

The day done and the patient packed off to the hospital, Charli sagged in her squeaky chair. Louredes beamed at her, as though Charli had sprouted a halo or an
S
on her chest.

“You are incredible!” the woman said. “I can’t believe you stayed so long! And you’re such a good doctor!”

“You buttering me up for another run?” Charli’s stomach rumbled. It surprised her, because, really, she wasn’t in the mood to eat. Maybe she should stop for a pizza on the way home.

Louredes dipped her head a little. “No. I hate to say it, but this is really like rearranging deck chairs on the
Titanic.
A big donation fell through. Unless we get a miracle, we’ll have to close the doors on January 1.”

“What?” Charli thought about the huge number of people she’d seen that evening, patients who’d had no money, no insurance and nowhere else to go for care. “Closed? What happened to your grant?”

“It wasn’t a grant, exactly.... The donor who’d said he’d help... He can’t now.” Louredes busied herself with cleaning up the exam room.

“Who was the donor? Maybe I can talk to him. Or maybe there’s someone else?”

Louredes closed the cabinet door and stared at the painted wood as if trying to decide what to say. “I don’t think so. I mean, who’s got a cool hundred thousand dollars lying around at this time of the year? We tried to apply for some grants, but most of the application windows are closed and all the funds are exhausted.”

A tingle went up Charli’s spine. Was it pure coincidence that the clinic needed the amount of money in that safe deposit box? And that suddenly the clinic’s main patron was no longer available?

“Who was the donor?” she asked again.

Louredes turned to sag against the counter, then shook her head and shoved her hands in the too-tight pockets of her scrubs. “It doesn’t matter. He can’t help now. A lot of the community will be happy to see us go. Neil Bailey says he could paper his bathroom with all the letters to the editor complaining about what a source of trouble we are to this town. I’m glad he doesn’t publish them all. He publishes enough, that’s for sure. It’s not your problem—and could you please not advertise that we’re closing?”

Charli nodded. “I won’t breathe a word. If I can help you, I will. You’ve made me a true believer—
today
has made me a true believer.”

“You sound like your father. Dr. Prescott was a good man.” Louredes’s voice was husky.

This new revelation surprised Charli yet again. Who was this man? When she was younger, all she’d ever heard from her dad about migrant workers were complaints.

“He volunteered here?” she asked.

Louredes’s gaze slid sideways and her knuckles whitened as she gripped her hands together so tightly the joints made that awful cracking sound that never failed to unnerve Charli. “Some. He was our medical director. And...he saw a lot of the local Hispanic community at his office. After hours.”

Charli recalled the notebooks with their inked patient notes. Before she’d left the office, she’d flipped through some of the other notebooks and bundled them up to take with her.

The later notebooks had been filled with entries detailing simple illnesses, cold and flu patients, not TB deaths. What she’d seen today had mirrored her father’s notes. She needed to read them. Tonight.

Charli was even more convinced that she didn’t know her father at all. Which was sad. Because if this had been the man he was, well, she really would have liked to have been his partner.

And the hundred thousand dollars? Maybe he’d intended for it to go to save this clinic.