“But in purity and in holiness I will guard my life and my art.”

It had seemed so obvious and easy then. Now she guarded her life and her art with a custom security system and a Glock 9 mm. stashed in the nightstand.

“I will not use the knife on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein.”

She’d never had a problem with that part of the oath. She was loathe to use the knife. She’d gone into psychiatry because she couldn’t handle the messy parts of medicine. Her father, a surgeon himself, had been only mildly disappointed. At least she was a doctor, of sorts. She’d done her internship and residency in a rehab center where movie stars and rock idols learned to be responsible by making their own beds, while Val distributed Valium like a flight attendant passing out peanuts. One wing of the Sunrise Center was druggies, the other eating disorders. She preferred the eating disorders. “You haven’t lived until you’ve force-fed minestrone to a supermodel through a tube,” she told her father.

“Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will do so to help the sick, keeping myself free from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from fornication with woman or man, bond or free.”

Well, abstinence from fornication hadn’t been a problem, had it? She hadn’t had sex since Richard left five years ago. Richard had given her the bust of Hippocrates as a joke, he said, but she’d put it on her desk just the same. She’d given him a statue of Blind Justice wearing a garter belt and fishnets the year before to display at his law office. He’d brought her here to this little village, passing up offers from corporate law firms to follow his dream of being a country lawyer whose daily docket would include disagreements over pig paternity or the odd pension dispute. He wanted to be Atticus Finch, Pudd’nhead Wilson, a Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda character who was paid in fresh-baked bread and baskets of avocados. Well, he’d gotten that part; Val’s practice had supported them for most of their marriage. She’d be paying him alimony now if they’d actually divorced.

Country lawyer indeed. He left her to go to Sacramento to lobby the California Coastal Commission for a consortium of golf course developers. His job was to convince the commission that sea otters and elephant seals would enjoy nothing better than to watch Japanese businessmen slice Titleists into the Pacific and that what nature needed was one long fairway from Santa Barbara to San Francisco (maybe sand traps at the Pismo and Carmel dunes). He carried a pocket watch, for Christ’s sake, a gold chain with a jade fob carved into the shape of an endangered brown pelican. He played his front-porch, rocking-chair-wise, country lawyer against their Botany 500 sophistication and pulled down over two hundred grand a year in the bargain. He lived with one of his clerks, an earnest doe-eyed Stanfordite with surfer girl hair and a figure that mocked gravity. Richard had introduced Val to the girl (Ashley, or Brie, or Jordan) and it had been oh-so-adult and oh-so-gracious and later, when Val called Richard to clear up a tax matter, she asked, “So how’d you screen the candidates, Richard? First one to suck-start your Lexus?”

“Maybe we should start thinking about making our separation official,” Richard had said.

Val had hung up on him. If she couldn’t have a happy marriage, she’d have everything else. Everything. And so had begun her revolving door policy of hustling appointments, prescribing the appropriate meds, and shopping for clothes and antiques.

Hippocrates glowered at her from the desk.

“I didn’t intentionally do harm,” Val said. “Not intentionally, you old buggerer. Fifteen percent of all depressives commit suicide, treated or not.”

“Whatsoever in the course of practice I see or hear (or even outside my practice in social intercourse) that ought never to be published abroad, I will not divulge, but consider such things to be holy secrets.”

“Holy secrets or do no harm?” Val asked, envisioning the hanging body of Bess Leander with a shudder. “Which is it?” Hippocrates sat on his Post-its, saying nothing. Was Bess Leander’s death her fault? If she had talked to Bess instead of put her on antidepressants, would that have saved her? It was possible, and it was also possible that if she kept to her policy of a “pill for every problem,” someone else was going to die. She couldn’t risk it. If using talk therapy instead of drugs could save one life, it was worth a try.

Val grabbed the phone and hit the speed dial button that connected her to the town’s only pharmacy, Pine Cove Drug and Gift.

One of the clerks answered. Val asked to speak to Winston Krauss, the pharmacist. Winston was one of her patients. He was fifty-three, unmarried, and eighty pounds overweight. His holy secret, which he shared with Val during a session, was that he had an unnatural sexual fascination with marine mammals, dolphins in particular. He’d confessed that he’d never been able to watch “Flipper” without getting an erection and that he’d watched so many Jacques Cousteau specials that a French accent made him break into a sweat. He kept an anatomically correct inflatable porpoise, which he violated nightly in his bathtub. Val had cured him of wearing a scuba mask and snorkel around the house, so gradually the red gasket ring around his face had cleared up, but he still did the dolphin nightly and confessed it to her once a month.

“Winston, Val Riordan here. I need a favor.”

“Sure, Dr. Val, you need me to deliver something to Molly? I heard she went off in the Slug this morning.” Gossip surpassed the speed of light in Pine Cove.

“No, Winston, you know that company that carries all the look-alike placebos? We used them in college. I need you to order look-alikes for all the antidepressants I prescribe: Prozac, Zoloft, Serzone, Effexor, the whole bunch, all the dosages. Order in quantity.”

“I don’t get it, Val, what for?”

Val cleared her throat. “I want you to fill all of my prescriptions with the placebos.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding, Winston. As of today, I don’t want a single one of my patients getting the real thing. Not one.”

“Are you doing some sort of experiment? Control group or something?”

“Something like that.”

“And you want me to charge them the normal price?”

“Of course. Our usual arrangement.” Val got a twenty percent kickback from the pharmacy. She was going to be working a lot harder, she deserved to get paid.

Winston paused. She could hear him going through the glass door into the back of the pharmacy. Finally he said, “I can’t do that, Val. That’s unethical. I could lose my license, go to jail.”

Val had really hoped it wouldn’t come to this. “Winston, you’ll do it. You’ll do it or the Pine Cove Gazette will run a front-page story about you being a fish-fucker.”

“That’s illegal. You can’t divulge something I told you in therapy.”

“Quit telling me what’s illegal, Winston. I’m married to a lawyer.”

“I’d really rather not do this, Val. Can’t you send them down to the Thrifty Mart in San Junipero? I could say that I can’t get the pills anymore.”

“That wouldn’t work, would it, Winston? The people at the Thrifty Mart don’t have your little problem.”

“You’re going to have some withdrawal reactions. How are you going to explain that?”

“Let me worry about that. I’m quadrupling my sessions. I want to see these people get better, not mask their problems.”

“This is about Bess Leander’s suicide, isn’t it?”

“I’m not going to lose another one, Winston.”

“Antidepressants don’t increase the incidence of suicide or violence. Eli Lilly proved that in court.”

“Yes and O.J. walked. Court is one thing, Winston, the reality of losing a patient is another. I’m taking charge of my practice. Now order the pills. I’m sure the profit margin is going to be quite a bit higher on sugar pills than it is on Prozac.”