Free Bad Medicine by Eileen Dreyer

newer clothes or with older eyes. It seemed that Mrs. Ryan had gotten bad news before.
    "Not my Peg," Mrs. Ryan begged, as if Molly could take the news away. Change her mind. "Please, not my Peg."
    "Do you want to wait for someone else to get here before we go on?" Molly asked again.
    Mrs. Ryan straightened, lifted a square, plump hand to push back the salt-and-pepper hair that sagged across her forehead. "No." Her voice was too quiet now, and Molly wanted to be gone. "She's had her problems. Haven't we all? But she wouldn't do this. She wouldn't do this to me."
    Molly wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something heavy, just to hear it break. It had seemed such a good idea when she'd taken this job. She was good at it. She liked the people. She needed the hours and the money.
    Sitting on this well-worn couch with this well-worn woman, Molly gave serious thought to standing in line behind that maintenance guy from the motel for a job at Burger King.
    * * *
    In the end, Peg Ryan's sister showed up. In the end, she admitted that yes, Peg had been on Prozac, that she was under a lot of stress with the new law firm. She'd been trying a huge case. She still lived with her parents here in Shrewsbury. Didn't have much of a social life to speak of because she wanted a career in law so badly. She'd suffered bouts of depression in high school and then in college, but it was something she'd gotten over.
    Not Peg, her sister Maureen said, just as her mother had. Holding her mother's shaking hands. Round, freckled face drawn and disbelieving. Not Peg.
    But Molly heard in their voices the same pause. As if the words Not Peg had been a prayer instead of a protest. In the end, she'd asked for the name of Peg's law firm, since Peg had spent the majority of her time there. And then, she got out of that stifling little house, because what she really wanted more than anything, as she stared at those two women holding each other against the truth, was a drink.
    * * *
    Molly didn't get her drink. She didn't get a nap, or time off for good behavior. Instead, figuring the day couldn't get much worse, she decided to breach the law offices of Marsdale, Beacon, Fletcher, and Richards. There were still a couple of questions on Mary Margaret Ryan's psychosocial history that had been left blank. Or at least incomplete. Since Molly was going to have to spend the evening at the ER again, and the next morning watching autopsies, she needed to get her paperwork cleared up.
    At least, that was what she told herself.
    She also believed in getting unpleasant things out of the way, like the dentist or divorce. The dentist she saw every year, the divorce court, twice, both preventative measures that prevented decay and disease.
    Marsdale, et al, held sway on the twenty-first floor of One Metropolitan Plaza downtown. A handy little building for an impressive law firm. New, trendy, with its postmodern copper roof and marble facade for the paying customers, and the bankruptcy court taking up the seventh floor for the nonpaying ones. It boasted a two-story lobby with Thomas Hart Benton-like murals of the city of St. Louis, one of the premier restaurants in town, Kemoll's, in the lobby for the occasional business dinner, and enough red marble to jump-start a cathedral.
    Molly wasn't impressed. She was surly. But that was about how she faced a visit to any law firm. Especially since she figured that the ones she'd had dealings with had been able to import their own share of marble to impress the clientele on the money she'd invested in them.
    Then she got to the information board and realized it was computer generated. Punch the right buttons, get the right answer. Molly hated those almost as much as lawyers.
    No. She hated buttons. She felt humiliated by lawyers. Every time she thought about facing one, she remembered sitting in that witness chair fighting for the words that would fairly represent that night Mrs. Wiedeman had died. She remembered that no matter what