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around, and walked to the bedside. “Where do you want it?”
    “Actually, in the mornings I’ve started giving them to myself.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yep. In case they want to keep me on the stuff when I go to my son’s. I don’t want to be totally dependent. Just leave the syringe on my nightstand.”
    Tanya frowned. “You’re sure?”
    “Yep.”
    Tanya hesitated, the capped syringe in her hand, then shrugged. “Okay. You’re the doctor,” she said with a grin, and placed it on Bessie’s side table along with an alcohol swab. “But I can’t stay to talk. We’re short-staffed again.”
    Time to sleep, Bessie decided.
    She rolled over and reached for the syringe and swab. “Might as well be at the good old belly button,” she muttered, whipping up her nightdress and exposing what looked like a horseshoe of pinpricks around her umbilicus. She wiped the skin with an alcohol swab, then managed to bunch up a roll of flesh using the limited movements of her right forearm. With a quick thrust, she sank the needle in to its hilt, and slowly pushed in the plunger.

Chapter 4
    That same evening, Tuesday, November 6, 9:30 P.M.
    Hampton Junction
     
    M ark brushed aside a cobweb and sent a nest of spiders scurrying for cover. From a wall of cardboard cartons, he pulled out the third box he’d been through that evening. He was in the basement of his house, the home where he grew up and now lived and worked, rummaging in the inactive files that his father, Dr. Cam Roper, had stored here for as long as he could recall. The voice of his mother complaining about it ran as clear as a recording through his head.
    “Honestly, dear, you’ve got lots of space in that office of yours in the village. Why clutter us up with this junk? We could make a workshop down here.”
    “That’s why I’m filling it up with this stuff,” his dad had whispered to him, then winked. “To make sure I don’t have to spend our Saturdays down here building stupid shelves.”
    Our Saturdays.
Mark smiled at the resonance those words could still evoke.
    That was before he’d lost them both.
    First his mother. Pricked her finger on a needle, he’d been told. Then she fell sick and died in a matter of days. To a five-year-old boy it sounded like something out of a fairy tale, an evil spell cast by a wicked dwarf involving a spinning wheel. But no magic kiss brought her back. Later he’d learned the needle had been a syringe, and the evil had been meningococcus bacteria from a patient with meningitis. She’d infected herself while helping out at his father’s office drawing blood samples.
    Two years later his father died, killed in a freak explosion.
    Aunt Margaret, his mother’s older sister, already widowed at fifty-five and childless, had insisted on moving in and taking care of him. “For a while,” the crusty old woman told him at first.
    She’d stayed for good.
    Even when he’d come back from medical school, she continued to live here. At the time he sensed she wasn’t finished watching over him. Since they were each other’s only family, he didn’t mind.
    Initially he’d set up his own office in town, finding one with a spacious apartment above it. But when Margaret died, he moved in here, practice and all. Just until he had time to dispose of the estate, he told himself. That was two years ago.
    Outside the wind had come up, moaning and whistling against the wooden slat door that led to the yard. The beams above his head creaked and groaned as if the whole structure threatened to lift off the stone foundation, but it never had and, Mark guessed, never would. He easily ignored the sounds, having snuggled under blankets and fallen asleep to them throughout his life. Instead he concentrated on going through the
Mc
s.
    “You have a dad who’s a great doctor, you know,” Kelly had said to him on many occasions, puffing him up with pride. “He saw me first when I was a little girl and was very sick. Now I’m healthy, but he’s still