Wednesday, November 7, 2:30 P.M.

Hampton Junction

“Dr. Roper, you said my arthritic knees would be better by now. Look at them. They’re the size of cauliflowers.”

“What I said, Nell, was that the pills would make the pain better, not that they’d take away your arthritis.”

“But the pain came back.”

“Are you still taking those pills the way I told you?”

“The prescription ran out. I figured you only wanted me to take ‘em for a month. That’s all the time your father ever needed to get me better.”

She’d also been a quarter century younger back then. Mark turned to wash his hands at the sink in his examining room, not wanting the feisty octogenarian to see his grin. Nell had been coming to him about her knees for seven years, ever since he’d reopened his father’s practice, and she’d argued her way through each visit. The idea that a prescription must be refilled and the medication taken longer than a month had never taken root beneath her frizzy white hair. It had nothing to do with poor memory or a lack of confidence in him. She resisted growing old and the idea she could no longer shake off what ailed her. She still lived independently, her mountain cabin twenty miles north of town on an isolated road overlooking the Hudson River Valley. The only reason she’d recently agreed to let a local handyman cut the twelve cords of firewood she used every winter was that he had four kids to feed and obviously needed the money. But Nell herself wasn’t isolated. Known for her prize-winning recipes at the fall fair – her peach cobbler had taken home the blue ribbon seven years running – her kitchen was a much-visited mecca for anyone caring to pick up her pearls of culinary wisdom. She also reigned as the unofficial queen of the town’s gossip network, a function she dutifully filled by welcoming all visitors and spending hours on the phone. The acquired information made her one of the most sought-after guests for Sunday suppers, afternoon bridge parties, and socials at each of the town’s two churches, neither clergyman willing to yield her soul to the other side, or go without her contribution of cobbler.

Slowly wiping his hands with a paper towel, Mark laboriously explained yet again that she must ask Timmy Madden, the pharmacist, to refill her prescription when she ran out.

Nell sighed, having endured his lecture while tugging her well-stretched pair of elastic stockings over varicose veins as thick as quarter-inch ropes. “And how are you doing, Doctor?” she said. “It must have been a shock, pulling the bones of Kelly McShane out of the mud. Who do you think killed her?”

Now he understood the real reason she’d bothered to come and see him. “I don’t think anything, yet, Nell, and I couldn’t tell you if I did.”

“Oh, come on. Was it that rotten husband of hers?”

“Is that what everyone around here has decided? That Chaz Braden murdered her?”

“You betcha’!”

“Anybody got any proof?”

“He’s mean and was known to get drunk on more than one Saturday night. It’s a bad mix.”

Street justice in rural America could be just as arbitrary as its urban counterpart. In the countryside, though, it tended to be unanimous. “And that’s enough to make you sure it’s him?”

“Yeah. Now tell me what you think.”

Mark chuckled. “My lips are officially sealed, Nell. Besides, you and your friends have probably already snooped out everything there is to know.”

She gave him a no-harm-in-trying shrug, then cocked her head and slipped him a sly jack-o’-lantern smile, missing tooth and all.

A reminder of another argument he’d lost – getting her to wear the partial plate a Sarasota dentist made her.

“You still seeing that pretty veterinarian from New York?” she asked.

Reason number two for the visit.

Nell had always been uncommonly interested in the women who’d occasionally visited him. From the very first day of his return she seemed to have elected herself the local record keeper of his private life. “We keep in touch, Nell,” he said, helping her off the table.

Little wonder she chose now to get an update, especially if she and her friends really had exhausted all they could say about a twenty-seven-year-old murder. While Halloween and Thanksgiving provided lots of gossip – who was shooing away the kids, who intended to run the Christmas pageant, what couples were taking separate holidays – the weeks in between yielded few topics for discussion.

“Not much to interest a young woman around here these days, I guess. Only us old folks left,” she continued, sitting down to put on her shoes – Nike air pumps that she’d sworn more than once did more for her arthritis than anything he’d ever given her.

“Nell, you’re the youngest ‘old folk’ I know.”

“Did you ever ask any of them pretty girls to marry you?”

“Nell!”

“I like your hair cut short like that. It’s black as your mother’s but gives your face the same lean good looks your father had. What with that hunky physique you’ve built up hiking and running all over the mountains, the girls should be falling down over you. The only problem is you’re getting that same sadness in your eyes that he had.”

“Jesus, Nell!”

“Oh, go on. Who’s more fitting to talk frankly with you than me? I watched your mother change your diapers, bless her dear departed soul. And I used to baby-sit your father when I was a teenager.”

“I know, Nell.” As they chatted he helped her down a short hallway and into the center of what used to be his parents’ living room but now served as his waiting area. It was packed as always, and she routinely saved a zinger or two for this audience, all of them nearly as old as she was, most of them women.

“Guess what’s the trouble with your generation?” she asked.

“I got a feeling you’re going to tell me,” he said, resigned to his usual role as her straight man.

“None of you want to buy a cow because you get your milk for free.”

He started to laugh, along with everyone else. “Nell, you’re wicked.”

“Maybe you should take me out.”

“I couldn’t handle you.”

“Tell me, did that veterinarian woman cook?”

He felt his face grow warm. Banter with Nell in private was one thing. In public it could get embarrassing. “We ate out a lot when she was here,” he said quickly, trying to end the conversation.

She flashed him that jack-o’-lantern smile again. “Well, you know what I always say?”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m afraid to ask.”

“If she’s no good in the kitchen, she won’t be worth much in the bedroom.”

The oldsters found this one even more uproarious.

“Oh Nell, how naughty,” yelled one of his blue-haired regulars.

“But ain’t it the truth?” she fired back.

The woman giggled. “I’ll say.”

A large lady gestured with her thumb to a distinguished, white-haired gentleman at her side.

“Fred here adores my pot roast.”

He turned beet red and fiddled with his hearing aid.

Nell proceeded to lead the rest of the room in a free-for-all of off-color innuendos about food and sex. It grew so loud that Mark barely heard the phone ring. He didn’t have a secretary. Hiring anybody locally had proved impossible. Whomever he picked, someone inevitably commented, “I don’t want that person seeing what’s in my file.” Since he knew his patients the way only a country doctor could and the practice pretty well ran itself anyway, he’d kept it a one-man operation – except when it came to all the forms for Medicare and Medicaid. They drove him crazy. His aunt Margaret used to process them for him. Now a company from Saratoga did it. They charged him a hefty commission, but he figured it well worth the price, since he could use the extra hours to run or hike.

“Dr. Roper,” he answered, blocking his other ear in order to hear over the brouhaha.