Chapter 31

Chapter 31 of 48 · 6-minute read

Transiting Juno Square Lauren’s Natal Moon

I frown at the name. I’ve heard it before. Someone has flagged her account, and that can mean only two things: a narcotics seeker or a patient who behaves inappropriately. Jesse always took care to “fire” patients who came to his back door begging for drugs at the same time they visited every other physician in town for the same drugs. He gave more leeway to patients who made excuses for their health and did nothing to improve it, but eventually he would change their minds or weed them out. He was known for prescribing “movement”—the patient’s choice of any kind of exercise—but sending them to another doc if the patient refused.

The other way to get “fired” was for a patient to mistreat one of Jesse’s staff or to act aggressively toward him. That included women who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves.

I’ve found her. The chaos witch. I’ve found her!

The basic patient record linked to the calendar is for a woman half my age and an address that I know immediately is phony—666 Circle Lake Circle. I jot down the corresponding file number so I can locate her paper records. Maybe there’s something more there.

As I pick through the boxes of files, I appreciate Petra even more. I’d been a bawling mess, but she took over and instructed our office assistants to label each box with the patient account numbers. Since then, it’s been relatively easy to locate patient records when they’ve come by to pick them up—rarely more than five minutes of a patient’s time in the clinic to accept and sign for their records and less if they had their account number handy. Handling these boxes of records has been my last big job for the clinic, and whatever remains when I turn over the keys will either go into storage or be destroyed.

Ms. Downs’s account number is one of the higher ones, meaning a more recent new patient. I follow the labels and open the third from the last box. All the other files in that range have been claimed by other patients, so the box is empty except for one file.

I check the label. N. Downs. The pink sticky note taped to the folder’s cover tells me everything. It’s our internal code. Neon green “stickies” are for suspected drug-seekers. Bright yellow—the most common—are for the patients who habitually refuse to take care of their own health, per Jesse’s advice. Hot pink is for patients who behave inappropriately toward staff or can’t keep their hands off my handsome Jesse. The unspoken rule is that they are never to be alone with him. His rule, not mine, though I was always in agreement.

Nancy Downs. Damn it. How do I know her?

Desperate for clues, I open the folder. Her first appointment was right after Winter Solstice. I skim Jesse’s notes. She’d come to him complaining of pain in her feet, which was oddly the same reason I myself had seen him years ago as a patient, before we fell in love. When people ask how we met, it’s the story we tell them—told them—and then everyone laughs about Jesse sitting at my feet, checking my Achilles tendons, and knowing I was his “One.” For the sake of appearances, we’d postponed dating until we could find me another doctor, though neither of us saw him as an authority figure with any power over me, given his age and disposition.

I thumb through the folder. The records show that this patient returned weekly after that first appointment. Her complaints started with her feet and slowly moved up her legs with each visit. I flip back to the folder cover and peel up the taped pink sticky note to find a yellow one underneath.

The day I brought in pizza, Jesse had flagged her account to be referred out. His notes were plainspoken. He had no intention of seeing her again. She had originally claimed intense pain in her feet and legs, now moving up to her inner thighs, but refused X-rays or physical therapy. She’d said she felt better after Jesse palpated the sore areas, and she joked that maybe it was demons moving up from her extremities to take over her body. Jesse’s notes were clear that he no longer believed the symptoms she presented were real or even imaginary.

Of course, Jesse never mentioned any of her symptoms, real or imagined, to me. He didn’t talk about his patients’ private concerns, even though I was cleared to handle reports and records for the office and had touched most of his patients’ files more than once. What he did talk about was if a patient violated his codes, so I knew which were addicted to painkillers and which wanted him sexually. That way, I was able to help safeguard the Center of Light, his clinic, and his reputation. Yet, he’d never mentioned Nancy Downs to me.

All men in relationships have certain patterns, and when they break those patterns, there’s always a reason. Something about their pattern of behaviors changes, and I can literally feel the shift in energy. If they’ve always texted you goodnight and now they don’t, they’re texting somebody goodnight. If they always tell you when another woman is sexually assertive with them and suddenly don’t, there’s a reason for that as well. So much about Jesse started to change around that time, and I’d been so caught up in my own fears that I’d missed his descent into hell.

“Oh, wait,” I murmur aloud. Freezing, I conjure up the hazy events after Solstice when I’d still been recuperating from complications from my first surgery after overdoing it at the Solstice ritual.

Maybe he had mentioned her to me, but the timing is wrong. He’d had an aggressive patient in late December and early January, but Jesse told me she’d stopped coming around. The one in the red scarf. She’d told him she was going to shut us down due to his inappropriateness toward her, but then she’d disappeared. I’d even put up security cameras outside the clinic and had seen her myself, usually with a scarf around her head outside in cold weather and sunglasses on. She’d tried to cheat her way out of paying for some of the center’s meditation classes and had caused some minor trouble there with our regular vendors, so the extra security had made sense. Then she vanished in early January, and I stopped worrying about what she might stir up. She never came to another Center of Light event, not even weekend psychic fairs. At least that I know of.

Was it the same woman—Nancy Downs? And if it is, why did Jesse lie about her continuing to come to the clinic? A lie by omission would be unacceptable, but he specifically told me she quit the clinic, and that’s a lie that takes effort.

If Jesse lied about that, what else did he lie about? And why? After a long marriage to Quent, I refused to build a second marriage on lies and had insisted on honesty. To my knowledge, Jesse honored that until he told me this woman was gone.

According to her file, after that day in the clinic when I’d seen her grip on Jesse’s arm, she’d returned weekly, always on the day I was never in the clinic, but his notes were sparse. He always liked to use checklists and write a few comments at the bottom for the official record, but after that day, he didn’t write any more notes and had talked about going strictly digital with a cloud backup rather than old school printouts.

I close the folder and place it carefully back into the storage box. A yellow sticky note falls from the inside corner of the box. The glue is mostly gone, but it matches the tacky substance at the top of the pink sticky.

She’d been yellow-flagged, then pink-flagged, and then someone had covered that pink flag up? Did that mean Jesse was alone with her during all those follow-up appointments?

Nancy Downs with a fake address, no insurance card, no other identifying information in her file.

How do I know that name?

Then it hits me. It’s not a real name or a real person. Jesse wouldn’t know that, nor would his staff. But I would.

Oh, shit.

It’s from one of my favorite movies, “The Craft.” Nancy Downs is the name of one of its most iconic witches. A fictional character.

The person making my life hell is laughing at her own joke, and we’re all the brunt of it.

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