Free Murder in Little Egypt by Darcy O'Brien Page B

country on a hill, about three miles from town. Marian was glad of that, after seeing McLeansboro. If she was going to make a life here for herself and Dale and their children, for they were ready to start a family, better to be able to do it on her own without worrying about the customs and opinions of neighbors. And out in the country she would not have to contend with Noma and other in-laws next door. Noma made herself felt as it was, dropping by unexpectedly at any hour for what seemed to Marian an inspection.
    One morning, before she had been able to settle in, Marian was in jeans on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor when Noma entered without a knock, accompanied by three other ladies from Eldorado wearing little mink stoles. They were on their way to a funeral. They stood in the kitchen doorway, peering down, Noma advising on the proper proportions of ammonia and vinegar and recommending her preferred brand of floor wax. Noma was playing so much the classic mother-in-law, Marian didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. She suggested that the ladies return at a more appropriate time, when she would be prepared and delighted to give them a decent welcome.
    “We didn’t mean to intrude,” Noma said. “I just wanted to see how you were getting on, dear.”
    With Noma, Marian adhered to a strict no-comment policy. Even when Noma criticized her clothes—“Do you really think Bermuda shorts and knee socks are appropriate for a doctor’s wife? Is that what young women are wearing in St. Louis these days? Married women?”—Marian kept her mouth shut. She would just smile. She enjoyed thumbing through copies of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar in front of Noma and feeling the disapproval drift across the room like a breeze off a snowdrift.
    Dale threw himself into his work at Hamilton Memorial Hospital, which had forty-eight beds but usually needed no more than twenty. His friend from St. Louis, Dr. Everson, quickly tired of McLeansboro and departed for a bigger town, so Dale had his hands full. His patients grew in number as his reputation spread. People were delighted to have a bright, energetic young doctor available. He kept office hours well into the evening, so that patients would not have to lose pay from work to visit him, and he made house calls when someone who could not get into town needed him. Marian sometimes went with him to keep him company.
    She got to know Little Egypt well, better than she would have preferred, driving around with Dale. The poverty depressed her, and she decided that she had never been cut out to be a nurse, because she permitted herself to become too much affected by disease and death. It was worse seeing people suffering in their own houses: A big, impersonal place like Barnes Hospital separated illness from daily life and made it easier to forget when you went home.
    One house call in particular got to her. They visited an old woman dying of cancer in the village of Macedonia. She had retreated to the basement of her decaying house, lying on a cot in the damp and the dark, her head swathed in dirty rags. The stench was terrible. When Dale urged her to let him remove the rags from around her head, she refused, throwing her hands up to protect herself, rocking back and forth and moaning, “No! No!” He took her pulse, listened to her heart, gave her some pills.
    Afterward Marian wanted to know why the woman had clung so adamantly to those old rags. Dale said that she had lost all her hair, not from radiation treatment, she was too far gone for that, but from the disease itself. The rags were her last vanity.
    “Can’t she be moved someplace? Doesn’t she have any relatives?”
    “I won’t charge her for the visit,” Dale said. “She couldn’t pay me anyway. She’s got nothing. Don’t worry, she won’t last long. I give her another week or two.”
    It took Marian days to get over that scene. She envied Dale his ability to move on to the next case, to put unpleasant