Free Healer by Carol Cassella Page A

of his diagnoses based on physical exams—the stuff she’d been taught in basic science and introductory medical school classes and then quickly put secondary to CT scans and MRIs and cardiac catheterizations. You got a better grade when you could stuff the workupand formal presentation of a patient with solid numbers, something more quantifiable than the subjective description of what you’d heard through your stethoscope. Every medical intern learned that lesson the first time they were raked over the coals for not knowing the blood calcium level to a decimal point.
    She hikes her purse over her shoulder and is almost out the door when she notices a plaque nailed onto the wall: URGENT CARE ROOM FUNDED WITH A GENEROUS DONATION FROM RONALD S. WALKER . She sets her briefcase down and looks more closely at the brass square, runs her finger over the name. In one of those moments where the world seems to shrink she remembers a charity fund-raiser she had attended only three or four years ago at the Fairmont in Seattle, hosted by Ron Walker. She knows him. Well, she doesn’t really know him. But she’s met him. Come to think of it, it was for some medical charity fund—maybe this clinic.
    They had gone with Rick Alperts and his wife, Lilly, only a few months after Addison had hired Rick. They had seemed so young to Claire. They weren’t, really—only younger by eight or so years—but they were young to the glitzy biotech world that Addison and Claire were already becoming a little jaded toward. Addison had bought a table for the lab, treating all his bright young recruits to a glimpse of the gold that beckoned alongside the reward of saved lives. Rick had met another avid biker that night, and bid six thousand dollars on a custom-built bicycle and a group trip along the Tour de France route. Claire had sat next to Lilly. She clearly remembers telling Lilly about the sale of Eugena, how Addison had brought the signed paperwork back to the hotel that night with a bottle of French champagne, tied about the neck with a ribbon knotted through a two-carat diamond solitaire—her belated engagement ring. He had dumped a box of lavender bath foam into the tub and climbed in with her, made Claire open the envelope right there dressed in nothing but a froth of scented bubbles, made her read the astonishing numbers out loud.
    It almost turns her stomach to think of it now, the way Lilly kept looking at Addison. How she had asked Claire to tell the story over again, the glitz and gold eclipsing everything else Addison was working for.
    After the study fell apart and Addison told Claire about the disputed lab results—data Rick still insisted were anomalous—she had asked Addison if giving Rick a share in the company might have been the root of it. Would things have been different without the promise of such a payoff? But Addison had heatedly countered that no drug is perfectly clean. Every drug study contains gray zones, where judgment and experience ultimately have to define what is fact and what is irrelevant variance at the diminishing ends of a bell curve. He had talked as if the margins of scientific theory could build a new house around their family. As always, when he defended Rick, it had deteriorated into a tearful impasse they both had to walk away from. Now she often wondered if Addison was subconsciously atoning for his own delay in reporting the missing data to the review board; his refusal to blame Rick seemed nearly irrational.
    She and Addison had bought a week in the Galapagos at Walker’s auction that night. She already knew that Ron Walker had investments out here in Hallum—Walker Orchards, the landmark hillside of apple and cherry trees south of town, thousands of them standing in meticulously groomed parallel rows, their pink and white blossoms so lush in spring that weekend traffic slowed with rubbernecking tourists. Its sprawling stone house was practically a symbol of Hallum’s agricultural history.