It had to be You

implicated.”
    Jack was naturally disappointed with such meager information. But he’d keep his ear to the ground anyway. This might turn into a good story for his newspaper eventually.

    Wednesday morning, Lily did, in fact, hear some gossip. And without even meaning to. At first.
    Betty had already cleaned the floor and counter of the pharmacy part of the big room. She was free of Mr. Connor at last and could get back to her usual work. But Robert, who could flirt the spots off pigs, had persuaded her to accompany him downstairs with the laundry to visit with Doreen and her little boy, Buddy.
    “You can tidy up the storeroom if you’re looking for something to do,“ Betty tossed over her shoulder to Lily as she followed Robert with a small basket of linens.
    The storeroom door was off to the right of the locked shelves of medications. It really had become untidy. There were mops and brooms and what Lily thought of as “scooper-uppers,“ though Mimi would surely know the right name for these objects. Then she remembered hearing Mimi call them dustpans.
    There was a wastebasket full of newspapers, old tattered magazines, and a wealth of little scraps of yarn. She’d have to ask later what to do with that. Looking up at the shelves, she realized they weren’t as well organized as they might be. The floor polish sat next to a bottle of peroxide. The dust rags were as far as they could be from the lemon oil.
    As she was plotting out how to rearrange things, she heard voices. Miss Twibell was talking quietly to Chief Walker.
    “Why didn’t you want to talk to me about Mark Farleigh?“ he asked.
    “I don’t like revealing any of my patients’ ailments,“ she said. “If they want to talk about them to their friends, or you, or me, that’s all right. But I don’t pass it on to anyone but those authorized to know. The visiting nurse and Dr. Polhemus.“
    “And the law,“ Howard said softly. “That, too, is ‘authority’ in spite of your scruples, which I do understand. I need to know about everyone. And won’t ever reveal anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to this case.”
    Miss Twibell was silent for a moment. “I think I must trust you to keep that promise.”

Chapter 8

    There was another long silence while Miss Twibell apparently decided how much to tell Walker. Lily froze in place.
    “Mark Farleigh,“ Walker reminded her. “I’ve never even seen him except outside. Is he a patient or an employee?“
    “He’s both,“ Miss Twibell said. “He was a young man studying to be a botanist before the Great War. Frankly, I think he signed up to serve just so that he’d have a chance of seeing plants in France that might not grow here. But that’s just a guess.“
    “Shell shock?“ Walker asked.
    Miss Twibell said, “Yes, the worst kind. The silent kind. He wouldn’t even talk to his parents when he came home from the war—thin and looking ten years older than he was a year and half earlier. They were frankly embarrassed by having a grown son at home who apparently couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. They were in the habit of having parties back in those days before the Crash in ‘29, and their guests were always asking where their heroic son was.“
    “How did you become involved?“
    “They didn’t want to take him to Dr. Polhemus. He’s a gossip.“
    “Don’t we all know that? I can’t tell you how many people he’s told about the newspaper editor’s warts.“
    “He doesn’t gossip about my patients though,“ she said. “I made him swear on his mother’s grave that he’d never speak to anyone else about them. And, surprisingly, he seems to have kept his promise. Anyway, that’s why Mark’s parents brought him to me. They wanted to tell their friends that Mark had taken a job in a distant city. When, in fact, they live barely ten miles away.”
    Lily was supposed to be tidying the storeroom, but now she had to do so in complete silence as she continued to listen.
    “They offered to pay you to keep him here?“ Walker asked her.
    “They offered. But it was a stingy offer. And in all fairness, they might not have been able to afford much more. And there were no more payments after the Crash. They must have lost their money like most people did. But I took a liking to Mark the first time I saw him, and it didn’t matter by then.
    “When they brought him here, there was a flower arrangement on the table right in front of us, and he stared at it with a faint smile