Chapter 30

Chapter 30 of 48 · 9-minute read

Transiting Saturn Trine Lauren’s Natal Pluto

I have the tools. I have the tools. I have the tools.

Christabel’s reading was right. I’m like the Magician on the Tarot card representing advice for me to take. I have the tools to resolve this situation.

I should have taken the time to make my weekly visit to the cemetery with yellow roses in hand, and maybe I’ll get to that later today. For now, I need to use some of my tools—both magickal and mundane—to figure out who the chaos witch is so that I can name her and dissolve the servitor she created.

But first, I have to do my younger kid a favor.

Finding Sonnet’s junker car in the parking lot isn’t hard. She always parks in the same space, directly in front of the ice cream shop, but the next row over. Same as all the other employees who’ve been told not to compete with patrons for spaces, even though the parking lot can accommodate thousands of shoppers and theatergoers.

For a weekday morning before most of the stores and cinema have opened, the old car looks lonely. Quent hasn’t come back for the car, possibly because it’s in my name and not Sonnet’s because she is not yet eighteen. Legally, it’s my property that has been abandoned here. Not that I intend to take it home either. Not yet. For now, I will let things stand as they are, at least until Sonnet needs her car again.

But she does need something she left inside.

I wheel into one of the spaces close to her car, then grab for the spare set of keys. I grimace as I open the driver’s door. Sonnet’s bedroom may be tidy and hospital-level sanitary at home, but her car is the opposite. Obviously, she’s not afraid of mice in her car like she is in her bedroom.

Drink cans, half-empty water bottles, paper bags from fast food restaurants that smell of stale French fries—especially after sitting in the sun in the parking lot for several days. Graded school papers, all of them B+ and above. Clean gym clothes. Dirty gym clothes.

Obviously not worried about vermin in her car. Probably never even thought of it.

Somewhere in this mess is a pair of emergency glasses that she wears only when she can’t wear her contact lenses. She saves room in her purse by leaving them in her car, just in case she should need them while she’s at work or at school. Too bad her answer to where her spare glasses might be was a shrug.

I reason that they aren’t in the back seat, mainly because it would be inconvenient. I open the glove compartment and rummage through half-opened packages of crackers and other snacks. I should be thankful: she’s a good kid, and I see no evidence at all of drugs or alcohol in this dumpster of a car.

Ugh! My fingers sink into something sticky. The compartment between the driver’s seat and passenger’s seat is worse than the glove compartment.

Next, I feel underneath the radio and ashtray in a space where I’ve seen her stash her phone before. Grasping the steering wheel with one hand, I lean as far as I can underneath the ashtray and feel around tentatively. My fingers find the thin legs of what feels like glasses and a set of curved lenses. Relieved, I retrieve the glasses with the tips of two fingers—and then I gasp.

Beautiful.

The morning sun catches two sets of tracks across the glass windshield, impossible to see under normal circumstances, but from this angle of looking up and that angle of sun shining down, the trails might as well be flashing neon.

The first set of tracks makes me smile. Tiny paw prints from the kitten that sometimes hangs around in our yard. I’m used to warning her to make sure the cat isn’t hiding in the wheel well or under her car before she cranks it. The trail it left is adorable.

The other trail is different. Not a cat. Not a rodent.

Hoof marks!

My breath catches in my throat. One hoof mark cuts across the trail of paw prints and obliterates it. It hasn’t rained here since the day before Sonnet’s last shift at the ice cream shop. The kitten prints came from home, but the hoof marks are more recent.

Tools.

I have the tools, and I cannot wait any longer to figure out who sent the servitor to stalk my daughter. Stalking me is one thing, but you don’t mess with my kids. My weekly visit to the cemetery can wait. The Dead will understand.

Fifteen minutes later, I press my key into the lock at the centermost structure in the Center of Light. The clinic door opens to a dark corridor. My heart hurts as I step inside. I can still feel Jesse’s energy here—excited, compassionate, intelligent, funny. Caring.

The air inside is stale. I’ve kept the air conditioner off to save money, but the utilities are still connected until the bank takes over. I flip the three switches on the inside wall and all the florescent lights in the entire clinic buzz to life.

It’s not that I haven’t been back inside the clinic in the last few months. Petra and the other staff, right before I laid them off on Jesse’s behalf in late March, boxed up everything. All the paper copies of patient records and X-rays. All the computers, keyboards, scanners, and printers except for one desk, in case we needed to cross-reference our accounting system with patient records and schedules. I’ve been back in several times a week up until last week to retrieve patient records for patients to pick them up.

Someone had suggested I simply destroy all the records because it would be easiest, but I refused, even when I had to deal with meeting with patients in person to hand them their records and then listen to either their anger or their pity. Not a single exchange has been unemotional, and I’d taken the brunt of it. They needed to direct their frustration somewhere, and Jesse had been the fun guy while I’d played the bitchy office manager. I’d made myself an easy target, especially since I don’t have the sizzling charisma of the man I married and lost. Nothing made sense, neither to me nor to Jesse’s patients, so I was either yelled at or hugged. And I loved Jesse too much to let his name be tarnished any more than it already has been. In my mind, there was some logical explanation for what had happened to him.

“Lauren, this isn’t your burden to bear,” Petra had told me while she packed her personal belongings. She’d delayed retirement to work as Jesse’s nurse for seven years, and nothing held her back now. “No matter how upset his patients are and how sad his staff members are, you’re hurting worse than anyone else. This has been more unfair to you than the rest of us combined.”

Of course, Petra meant not just the emotional havoc of Jesse’s mistakes but also the sudden financial woes that threatened my own livelihood and standing in town. I really wish I could talk to her now, but she’s spending the year hiking gentle trails across Europe with a contingent of older widows she met on social media.

I don’t begrudge her physical distance. She deserves a break after decades in the health field, but we agreed privately that the potential malpractice suits might put her in an awkward position as Jesse’s former nurse. So far, I’ve been immune to legal action because I was technically an employee of Jesse’s clinic with no medical role, and our personal and professional finances had been kept separate. My name wasn’t attached to the clinic’s assets or debts. Tom set that up years ago as a routine precaution that I hadn’t thought necessary at the time. Six months ago, none of Jesse’s patients would have contemplated legal action, but now, anything he’d done in those last few days in the clinic in March is being called into question.

Ghosts fill this place, and none more so than Jesse’s. I can almost see them, almost step back in time. The bustle of patients and staff, Sondra sharing space for her own practice on Wednesdays and Fridays until she abruptly severed that partnership in February. The electricity of people coming and going, and Jesse’s lively chatter with any and all of them in the corridors and exam rooms.

I stop suddenly in the corridor. The white-tiled floor stretches ahead of me, both now and in my memory. The present moment overlays the past, like black and white over a memory of bright color. The now is still and eerie. In memory, this corridor is vibrant.

The bubble of memory, the seventh vision, walks the corridor with me. Boxes of pepperoni pizza in my arms. The heat on my palms after the chill in the outside air. The sting of antiseptic in my nostrils. The sound of Jesse’s voice as he stands at his exam room door, backs away, the scarlet-nailed hand clasping his forearm and squeezing gently. Delicate bracelets dangling, swaying with the pulse of her grip on his sleeve.

Then, back in the present, the corridor of white and gray, silence broken only by the buzz of fluorescent lights.

I shake it off and walk past the exam room. The door gapes open, but it’s dark inside. I can almost imagine the woman standing inside the exam room, behind the wall, out of my sight. But not quite. I can see her arm, the red blouse, then nothing but the empty room in the present. No matter how hard I try, I cannot conjure up her face.

But I do have the tools here to find out who she is. I remember which day I brought pizza for lunch, separately from all the other times I’ve brought lunch to Jesse and his staff. I recall the day I first bled after menopause. I recall the day I fled to Sondra for tests. I recall the day she told me my Pap smear was abnormal. I recall the exact dates of my surgical procedures and the scattered dates of the lab results, especially the one that was miserably delayed. I recall the exact date and time Jesse backed away from his boundary-trampling patient.

Hunched over the last work desk, I hit the surge protector switch, and the sole remaining computer boots up under my fingertips. My own breaths sound jagged in my ears. As part-time office manager, I have access to everything, so I start with the scheduler. The software program opens to today’s date and shows me all the blank appointments for the week. I have to backspace months to find the last scheduled appointment, then even more to find the date I’m looking for.

Holding my breath, I scroll down the page of appointments, starting at eight o’clock in the morning. I arrived shortly before noon—the clinic lunch hour—so it’s safe to assume this was the last patient of the morning.

Strange.

In the eleven o’clock hour, the calendar shows four patients scheduled fifteen minutes apart and an abbreviated appointment crammed into the last five minutes. Jesse did take walk-ins, but usually not immediately before lunch. We often shared lunch in the gardens at the healing center, so he kept our “high noon lunches” sacred. That was quality time together, especially since he often took on extra shifts in the local emergency room to help pay off his clinic loan sooner, something he’d started doing regularly in the last months at the clinic. He’d been almost crazed over trying to earn as much as he could.

Unlike the emergency room with hours-long wait time or other family practices that kept crowded reception areas and long delays, we ran a prompt clinic with no prolonged waits, didn’t accept insurance, and demanded full payment before escorting a patient to the exam room. That meant Jesse could charge lower fees for office visits and pick and choose the kinds of patients he wanted. Some got through the net, but we quickly referred them out, especially if they refused to take his advice and make an effort to control what they could about their own health.

I click on each of the appointments in the eleven o’clock hour. The chaos witch has to be one of them. I suspect I know which but open the patient overview for each anyway. Three are men, one is a child, and the walk-in is a woman. With her account flagged.

Downs, Nancy.

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