Read Online Murder, She Wrote: Murder on Parade: Murder on Parade by Donald Bain, Jessica Fletcher - Free Book Online

trusty bicycle to Seth’s office at his house, a short trip but long enough to generate plenty of perspiration that pasted my shirt to my body and ran down into my eyes, stinging them.
     
     
    “You look as though you just stepped out of a sauna,” Seth’s nurse, Harriet, said as I came through the door.
     
     
    “It’s hotter out there than a sauna,” I replied. “Ah, the air in here feels wonderful.” I plucked the front of my blouse.
     
     
    “What did we ever do without AC?”
     
     
    “I remember when there was no air-conditioning,” I said, going to a mirror and trying to rearrange my limp hair into something vaguely resembling respectable style. “I used to go to the movies as a child when the theaters bragged about their ‘air-cooled’ system, nothing more than a fan blowing over blocks of ice. But it did feel good.”
     
     
    Harriet laughed and said, “Imagine what places like Miami and Houston would be like without air-conditioning. They certainly wouldn’t be the thriving cities they are today, that’s for sure.”
     
     
    “Is he running late?” I asked. Seth always tries not to keep patients waiting, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.
     
     
    “No, he should be free in a few minutes.” She lowered her voice. “You know Doc as well as anyone, Mrs. Fletcher—better than most.”
     
     
    “We do go back a ways.”
     
     
    “Have you noticed anything strange about him lately?”
     
     
    “Strange? How so?”
     
     
    “Oh, I don’t know, he seems—he seems sad these days, withdrawn.”
     
     
    I nodded. “Yes, I have observed that, Harriet. It’s probably nothing. Maybe the heat. It makes everyone cranky.”
     
     
    Her expression said she didn’t buy what I’d said, and knew furthermore that I didn’t mean it. I smiled. “He isn’t his old self,” I agreed.
     
     
    “I worry about him,” she said.
     
     
    Harriet had been Seth’s nurse for at least thirty years. She ran the office with all the precision of a Prussian officer, sometimes to Seth’s chagrin when she chastised him for his lack of external organization. Though he wasn’t the most orderly of men, he possessed an internal sense of order that served him well enough. He needed someone like Harriet, and her impending retirement might well be contributing to his recent bouts of melancholy. She’d been encouraging him to start the process of hiring her replacement, but he’d dragged his feet, probably because he didn’t want to face the reality of her leaving. Call it denial.
     
     
    “We all worry about Seth,” I said, taking a chair next to her desk.
     
     
    She spoke even more softly now. “Dr. Jenny says she thinks he’s concerned about losing some of his patients. And I think she’s worried about that herself.”
     
     
    My eyebrows went up. “Has that been happening very much?” I asked.
     
     
    She nodded, her expression serious. “Too much,” she said for emphasis. “It’s like people who’ve been patients for years have suddenly decided he’s too—how shall I say it, Jessica?—that he’s too old-fashioned, out of touch with what’s new in medicine.”
     
     
    I came forward in my chair. “That’s simply not true,” I said. “Seth keeps up with medical advances as well as any other physician.”
     
     
    “You and I know that, Mrs. Fletcher, but try telling it to someone who’s made up his or her mind. Patients can be so stubborn.”
     
     
    Doctors, too , I thought, including Seth Hazlitt . His stubbornness came to the fore more in his personal life than in his medical practice. But he could be hardheaded, too, at times, when challenged by a patient who was more interested in talking than listening.
     
     
    “Like Mrs. Kalisch,” Harriet continued, obviously eager to vent her feelings to someone with whom she felt comfortable. “She’s been a patient of Dr. Hazlitt’s for years. He’s treated her entire family. She arrived for an appointment the other day and