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to deny that she said it. Instead—and she always denied this in her turn—his recollection was that she made a very damaging admission.
    “That makes me a prime suspect,” he swore that she said.
    Priscilla half ran to her car in the parking lot behind the Medical Office Building. She found and opened her briefcase, dug in it briefly till she came upon Annie’s number. Then she hurried back to Carte and handed him the number she had written down.
    “Thank you,” he said. Then he turned and without another word walked away from her. She stood, rigid and alone, and watched until he turned the corner and was gone. Later, returning home—and as though in preparation for coping with what was to come—she began a journal.
     

16
     
    The Emergency Room had emptied out by five-thirty that afternoon. There were no more pediatric patients to be seen in the outpatient clinic. Evelyn could go home.
     She had never spent a harder day. She hadn’t had that kind of pressure since joining Kaiser. Most of her work here—for all the pediatricians—was outpatient clinic work, just like a private pediatrician’s practice. The only difference was that with Kaiser she had the advantage of constant consultation, any time she wanted it. It made the job less lonely, the atmosphere more relaxed, and the pressures easier to bear.
    The drawback, Evelyn reflected, was that when something as nerve-wracking as this situation hit you, you weren't prepared. You weren’t used to living on the emotional edge. And you weren’t twenty-five years old, either. You were Chief of Pediatrics, dealing with parents who had hair-trigger emotions, and a very sick little girl with terrible veins and a bad case of dehydration. You were dealing with a potentially serious crisis.
    Estol Carte had just left her office. He had spent a worse day than she had, but he had stayed on top of it in a way that would never cease to impress Evelyn.
    He had sat by her desk and told her that the control sample on Mindy’s new formula contained precisely the right amount of sodium. So it appeared that the source of the sodium overload in Mindy’s original formula was not contaminated factory stock. And then he had described his most recent meeting with Priscilla Phillips. Apparently Mrs. Phillips had denied all knowledge of laxatives or cathartic salts.
    “I told her I’d have to call the Child Protective Services, and she said I should call the head of it. She went down to her car and brought me back the number!” he’d told Evelyn, shaking his head.
    “What did you do?”
    “I called her. Also the San Rafael police. They’re meeting me here later.”
    “God, it never occurred to me to do that, Estol. We re going to have to write up a child abuse report.”
    “I know.”
    “I’ll do it. I’ll work on it tonight. Have you been up to see Mindy?” said Evelyn.
    “Yes, she’s doing fine. I ordered oral Cho-free for her. She hasn’t had either the IV or NG in all afternoon.”
    “What about serum electrolytes?”
    “I’ll leave an order for them to be drawn in the morning. That’ll give her body a chance to equilibrate whatever’s still in there. But I’m sure the sodium will be down.”
    “Well, I’ll check first thing when I come on the ward in the morning,” said Evelyn. “I can’t believe we’ve got another whole day of this to go through.” She felt a sudden sense of comradeship—they could be two shipwrecked survivors on a lifeboat. She hoped they wouldn’t sink in the next storm.
    Estol left, and Evelyn went back upstairs to collect her things. She shrugged out of her stiffly starched white doctor’s coat and into her warm one. She gathered up a handful of copies of the child abuse forms that Kaiser supplied in quadruplicate and stuffed them into her bulging bag, then walked back through the hospital to the parking lot. The fog had returned, she thought briefly, or perhaps it had never lifted at all.

17
     
    Later Priscilla would not