“Stay right where you are, Evie,” Neil called, and this time I heard him twice, once through the phone and once through the floorboards over my head. “I have been waiting a long time for you to find that tin.” The ceiling creaked. A little rain of dust sifted down onto the soot black lid in my lap. Paige, beside me on the cellar floor, had both hands over her mouth. I had been married to this man for three years. I had listened to him hum in the shower. Yet the voice that came through the old planks was calm, patient, and utterly without warmth, like a clerk reading a label. “I am coming down,” he said. “Please do not be afraid.”
Paige moved faster than I did. My granddaughter is nineteen years old, with a pharmacist head and a ballplayer arm, and she snatched the two sealed pills out of the cigar tin and shoved them in her sock. “Grandma,” she whispered, “the stairs.” We listened to him descend, slowly, a heavy step on each board. At the foot of the stairs he stopped and put the flashlight of his phone on the two of us, huddled by the chimney, and for a moment he looked almost relieved, a tired man at the end of a long shift. “Evelyn,” he said. “How long have you taken the blue pills?”
I did not answer. I could not. My blood pressure pills sat at the bottom of my purse, forty feet over my head, in an orange bottle that Neil filled every month at the counter with a little flourish. He had kissed me on the forehead each time. “I would never,” Neil said, reading my face. “Never mind. We will settle it in the car.” He reached for my elbow. And in that instant Paige stood up in the beam of the light, small and steady, with her telephone raised, and said, in a clear, young, professional voice, “Mr. Sutter, I am recording this. And the State Board of Pharmacy is upstairs.”
A leather wallet kept a pharmacist last prescription: the truth, filled twice and never swapped.
Neil laughed. It was a short, uncertain sound. “Honey, no one is upstairs.” But from the floor above, almost on cue, came three firm knocks on the front door, and a crisp woman voice calling the name of Neil through the glass. It was a state inspector named Ms. Okoye, whom Paige had phoned from the parking lot twenty minutes earlier, after reading the lab slip aloud to her pharmacology professor. The professor had known the form at a glance. It was a toxicology request that no ordinary druggist ever files. Neil turned his head toward the sound, and the light shook in his hand.
He bolted for the coal chute. I will remember it all my life, a fifty eight year old man in a white pharmacy jacket scrambling up an iron ramp toward a slot of daylight, and just as he reached it, the hatch swung open from the outside, and a deputy sheriff reached down and took him by the collar. “Neil Sutter,” the deputy said, almost gently, “come on up out of there.” The inspector walked down the cellar stairs with a leather folder under her arm and sat beside me on an upturned crate. She took my hand without speaking, as a nurse does.
It came out in pieces over the following weeks. For eleven years, Neil had been selling stolen pain medication out the back door of the drugstore, a few hundred pills a month, in plain brown envelopes to a man in Jackson. Howard counted everything twice. In March, five years ago, he had caught the shortage. He confronted Neil in the stockroom. He said he would call the Board on Monday. Neil begged him to wait. Then, that week, Neil swapped the heart pills in the bottle of Howard for a drug that slowed the pulse to a crawl, and let the highway do the rest.
He had meant to do the same to me. I found that hard to hear. The old building on the square, my half of the original partnership, held the dusty paper records that would reveal the shortage, and Neil could not buy it, and could not burn it, because I would not sign. So, three years ago, he married me. The pills in my orange bottle were a lower dose of the same drug, and I had grown tired, and dizzy, and forgetful, and had told my doctor that it was only age. Paige found the proof in the school laboratory in forty minutes.
Neil pleaded guilty to murder, to distribution of controlled substances, and to attempted murder, and was sentenced to forty years. The marriage was annulled, and I felt nothing at all. The pharmacy by the bypass was closed by the Board and sold at auction. The old brick building on the square came back to me, and I reopened it the following spring, with fresh paint, a pressed tin ceiling, and a new sign in hand lettered gold. Howard Marsh and Company, Family Pharmacy. Paige cut the ribbon with a pair of kitchen scissors, and half of Paris, Tennessee, came to watch.
She works the counter on weekends now, in a white jacket that is slightly too big for her, and she counts every prescription twice. A man came in last month who had known Howard, a retired farmer of eighty, with his hat in his hands. He looked at her for a long time. Then he said, quietly, “Young lady, you have his way of looking at a bottle.” Paige did not answer. She only slid the pills across the counter, and wrote the date on the label in the handwriting of her grandfather.
I still carry the wallet. Paige restitched the lining herself, with a red thread that does not match, so I would always know it was her. Some evenings, when the shop has closed and the square is quiet, I sit at the old marble soda fountain with a glass of lemonade, and I take the note of Howard out of the leather and read the first line, the one he wrote with the careful hand of a pharmacist. Evie, if you are reading this. And I answer him out loud, in the empty room: I am here, Howard. I am reading.