The Law of Similars (30 page)

For me, it had tremendous worth. It hadn't been so long since I'd discovered just what those little sugar pills could do. At the time, I couldn't have begun to explain how they worked. Just sugar, I might have said if someone had asked me how I'd gotten better so fast, so it must have been a placebo effect. You know, my head did all the work.

But I didn't really believe that: I knew even then there was something magic in the remedy, something tangible that could at once break up the porridgelike slough of anxieties in which I'd been mired for more than two years, and cure the cold that for me was not merely common, it was continuous and everlasting.

Yet I was absolutely convinced the remedy was harmless.

As harmless as Halls.

And I was entirely comfortable with this paradox--preternatural efficacy, completely benign.

Nevertheless, once more I placed the vial back upon Carissa's desk blotter. Maybe after I'd kissed her I'd go back for it. See if the tube wanted to jump into my suit pocket and leave with me.

When I emerged into the snow outside the Octagon a few moments later, I was relieved to see my truck was coated with powder. It looked exactly like any one of the dozen pickups that dotted the main street of the village.

"Someone gave you Barbies for Christmas?" I asked Margaret, more than a little surprised. I tried to figure out whether Dr. Barbie was wearing panties, or whether the white under the doll's incredibly tight dress was merely a part of the plastic figure's torso. But it was clear I was going to fail unless I rolled up the skirt, and if I tried that, I knew, Margaret would nail me for lewd and lascivious with a doll.

"Just that one," she said.

"I wish my doctor wore dresses this slinky."

"You have a female doctor? I'd never have thought that of you, Leland. Bravo."

"Well, I don't. But I might if female doctors started dressing like this."

She reached across the desk and took the doll away from me. "Sometimes I want to wash my toys in bleach after you've handled them."

"I have very clean hands."

"But just a filthy, filthy mind!"

"I only say the things most guys think."

"Then you're a very sick gender. All of you."

"Only at moments. I assure you, my mind doesn't work like this when I'm playing Barbies with Abby. Santa brought her a pair of the dolls, and not a single lurid thought passed through my brain when I was picking them out at the store."

"You know Barbie's very bad for little girls, don't you? Just a terrible influence. Even with her new shape. She--"

"If you and Garrick have kids someday and figure out how to tell them Barbie's forbidden, I'll listen. I promise."

She adjusted the stethoscope around Dr. Barbie's neck and sat her down beside the other toys on the credenza. "Did you hear I arraigned Jesus on Christmas Eve?"

"No, I missed that."

"Yup. It just isn't Christmas Eve if we don't bust the Messiah."

"And at least one sex offender."

"Isn't it awful?"

"What did he do? Jesus?"

She glanced at a note on her desk. "Disorderly conduct. Unlawful mischief. Simple assault."

"Jesus did that?"

"Yeah, he did. But this one spells the Christ part with a Y."

"Where was this?"

"A bar on College Street."

"Did the fellow look like Jesus?"

"Not a bad likeness, I guess. At least at first. Long brown beard. Kind of thin. But when you got up close, you saw he had lizard tattoos on the backs of his hands, and it was pretty clear they went way up his arms."

"You didn't check to be sure?"

"No, I did not check."

"Was there room at the inn?" I asked, referring to the state psychiatric hospital.

"Yup. For the moment, anyway, he's in Waterbury. On a happier note, did you and Abby have a nice Christmas?"

"We did. We were at my sister's in Hanover."

"Santa was good to Abby?"

"Santa was excellent to Abby."

"I was actually a little worried about the two of you. I was kind of afraid something had happened. You spent all yesterday afternoon holed up in your office."

"I was busy."

"On?"

"A variety of things."

"And then you didn't come in this morning...."

"I feel much better. Really."

"What did you think of Jennifer Emmons?"

"You know Jennifer?" I asked, instantly fearful that I'd sounded more scared than surprised. This wasn't supposed to happen. I'd planned on telling Phil first about Jennifer, and explaining to my boss before anyone else that I happened to be a casual acquaintance of the homeopath who'd treated her husband. But Phil had been on the phone, and so I'd wandered into Margaret's office to see how she was doing while my boss finished his call.

"No. But she spoke to Garrick yesterday morning, after connecting with someone in the Attorney General's Office in Montpelier. The fact that the homeopath's a psychologist will probably be our saving grace."

"Jennifer Emmons is nothing if not resourceful."

Margaret raised her eyebrows. "Are you being sarcastic? Is she going to be an irritant or something?"

I shook my head. "No, not at all. She's a...she's probably a perfectly wonderful person. I didn't mean anything by that remark. I really didn't."

"It's just that it's all so murky. Is that it?"

"Yeah, that's it. It's..."

"Murky."

I smiled, hoping I looked sympathetic--agreeable--as I felt inside the front pocket of my suit jacket. There beside my keys was the vial of tiny pills I'd taken off Carissa's desk before I left. I'd need another one for sure before I saw Phil.

"I just don't understand why you saw her in the first place," Phil said after I told him. "Why didn't you come get me?"

For the first time in my life, I actually thought I saw lines in a person's brow. Furrows. Honest-to-God furrows. And while I hoped they were there simply because Phil was angry, I knew in reality they were there because he was disappointed. I had let him down, and now he was hurt. I could see it in his posture: He was actually slumped in the chair behind his desk.

"I know I should have," I answered. "But I didn't realize where the conversation was heading until we were pretty far down that path. And by that time, I thought it would have been just plain...just plain cruel to tell the poor woman that she had to stop talking, because she'd need a different attorney."

"Was she that upset?"

"Wouldn't you be?"

It seemed to be snowing harder than when I'd left Bartlett just before lunch. I couldn't even see the lake outside Phil's window, much less the mountains across the water in New York. My drive home that night would be a disaster if it kept up. An absolute disaster. Defroster on high, unable to use my high beams with the air filled with white. If I was lucky, I'd wind up behind the snowplow.

"This just isn't like you."

"I know."

"I just can't imagine what you were thinking."

"It's hard to imagine," I said. "I'm sorry."

He sighed and shook his head. "I guess it's not really the short-term I'm concerned about. I think I can probably handle this with--it's Jennifer, right?"

"Right."

"She might be pissed--God, she'd have every right to be. You understand that, don't you?"

"I do."

"But then again, she might not be. Who knows? Especially when I explain to her your reason for not mentioning you know this homeopath. And I think I'll tell her I'll handle the case myself."

"That's a good idea." In the back of my mouth, I felt the last of the arsenic dissolving. I wondered if the pill just got smaller and smaller, or whether snowflake-sized granules of powder broke off and existed in my mouth for brief seconds before disappearing.

"And I don't give a damn about the newspaper. They'll only care if Jennifer cares. And even then it might be one story and an editorial."

"And that's only if Jennifer's angry," I said. I wondered just how angry Carissa would be if she knew I'd taken a vial of arsenic, and a part of me thought she'd be furious. No one, after all, likes a filcher. And no healer wants a patient self-medicating.

But I also told myself there was a chance she'd see the whole thing as silly. You took a little vial of sugar pills? Leland, why didn't you just ask?

Either way, however, even if she smiled and called me silly, I was confident she would insist I return the tube. And that idea gnawed at me, because it seemed to suggest the remedy was more risky than I realized, and I shouldn't be quite so cavalier with my cure.

"Anything in the paper today?" Phil asked.

"A small story in the local section. It says we're investigating. No mention of the homeopath by name."

"Really?"

"Nope."

Perhaps she wouldn't even miss the arsenic, perhaps she wouldn't even notice the vial was gone. She had at least five or six more tubes in the cabinet, and she had other things on her mind than one little vial of sucrose. And the stuff couldn't have been expensive: Wasn't it mostly sugar? Wasn't it almost entirely sugar? It better be, I thought.

"Jennifer must have given them the woman's name," he said.

"She must have. But the reporter probably couldn't reach her"--though not, I knew, for lack of effort. The reporter had left three messages on her answering machine at the Octagon last night, and another two at her home.

"So how well do you know this woman? Honestly?"

I shrugged, using the pause to view once more the file card in my head with the outline of my story. A few bullets. Easy. "I've seen her twice in my life. We went on a date the week before Christmas, and then we ran into each other in the parking lot of my church Christmas Eve and sat together during the service."

"One date? Last week?"

"That's it."

"Are you still seeing her? Do you plan to see her again?"

"I doubt it. It didn't really work out."

"After one date..." Phil murmured slowly, and I realized I was hearing his incredulous courtroom voice--a tone I had seen him use to great effect with lying defendants and perjuring witnesses alike. But I was the one on the stand now, I was the one being cross-examined, and I wondered if I'd already fallen so far in Phil's esteem that he no longer trusted me.

"You've been married a long time," I reminded him. "You've forgotten: Sometimes it only takes a single date to see there's no chemistry."

"And there was none in your case?"

"Not really," I said. At some point, when this nightmare was behind us and Carissa and I had resumed seeing each other, Phil might remember I'd said that. But there wouldn't be a whole lot he could do.

"So you've only seen her twice in your entire life."