I was holding a box of heavy-duty band-aids at 5:24 on a rainy Friday afternoon when Eileen Voss walked through the front door of Harlan Pharmacy without her sunglasses. That was the exact second my knees went soft behind the counter, because for four straight months she had not let a soul in this town see her face uncovered. Her left eye was completely normal, clear and blue, but her right eye was swollen nearly shut with a deep, purplish-yellow bruise that ran all the way down into her cheekbone.
She did not say hello, and she did not look toward the front window where the rain was starting to hit the glass in heavy streaks. She just walked straight up to my register, reached into her coat pocket, and set an empty white plastic bottle right on top of the glass display case.
Most people in town called her Mrs. Voss because her husband, Carl, corrected them if they used her first name. Carl was fifty-eight and ran a concrete finishing crew out near the county line, and he was the kind of man who talked over everybody in the room just to prove his voice was louder. He corrected the mailman about where to drop the circulars, he corrected the boy who bagged groceries at the Piggly Wiggly, and he once spent ten minutes at our counter arguing with Dr. Patel about how many pills belonged in a thirty-day supply of blood pressure medicine.
He talked like he had gone to medical school in between pouring driveway slabs and shouting at his hired help. If Eileen was with him, she stood three feet behind his right shoulder with her hands folded over her purse, looking at the floor until he told her it was time to turn around and walk out.
I am sixty-seven years old, and I have worked behind the counter at Harlan Pharmacy since back when we still had a soda fountain that nobody used. When you stand in the same spot for forty-odd years, you learn how to read people by the way they step up to the register. You learn who is sick, who is just lonely and looking to talk for five minutes, and who is buying rubbing alcohol and cotton balls because they are trying to fix something at home without going to the clinic. You also learn how to recognize sunglasses that are not being worn for the sun.
Eileen started wearing hers back in the middle of June. They were big, thick brown plastic frames that covered almost the top half of her face, the kind elderly ladies buy after they have their cataracts done. The first time she came in wearing them, she handed me a prescription for iron supplements and told me the glare off the pavement was giving her bad sick headaches. Two weeks later, it was bright lights inside the grocery store. By August, she was keeping those glasses on even when she stood under the flickering fluorescent tube right by our vitamin rack, keeping her chin tucked down so low her neck looked cramped.
The pharmacy always smells like rubbing alcohol, brown paper bags, and the peppermint drops that old Mr. Harlan keeps in a glass jar right beside the main register. It is a quiet building with thick brick walls, and sound carries real easy from the front counter all the way back to the prescription counter where Mr. Harlan fills the bottles.
Every single Tuesday morning like clockwork, Carl’s silver Dodge pickup would pull away from the curb outside at 10:12 AM so he could drive over to the farm supply yard across the tracks. And every single Tuesday morning, at 10:19 AM sharp, Eileen would walk through our front door by herself to buy tiny things she could carry in her coat pocket.
She never bought big items that would show up on a long receipt. It was always a small box of Bayer aspirin, a roll of paper tape, or a package of cherry-flavored cough drops. Small things that cost less than four dollars, paid for with exact change in dollar bills that had been folded over twice. I watched her for three weeks in July before I realized she was running those errands on a strict timer. She had seven minutes between the time Carl’s truck turned the corner and the time she had to be standing back on the sidewalk waiting for him to pick her up on his way out of town.
That was when I started my list. I did not put it in the pharmacy computer system because Mr. Harlan let Carl run a monthly store account, and Carl checked every single line item on the statement at the end of the month. Instead, I took a tiny spiral notebook out of my purse, the kind that costs fifty cents at the dollar store, and I tucked it inside an empty paper box that used to hold diabetic test strips. I kept that box under the main counter right behind the stack of paper bags, where nobody had a reason to reach except me.
Every Tuesday, as soon as Eileen walked out the front door, I opened that little notebook and wrote down the details. Date, time, sunglasses on indoors, left sleeve pulled down to her knuckles in ninety-degree heat, voice shaking when she asked for the receipt, no purse on her shoulder, paid in cash. By the second week of October, there were eleven tiny black ink dots lined up in the margin of that notebook. Eleven Tuesdays in a row where she walked into our store looking like she was trying to shrink down small enough to fit inside her own coat.
I know there are people in this county who would say I should have picked up the telephone and called the sheriff’s department back in July. Maybe they are right, and maybe I was being too cautious for my own good. But I have lived in Taney County my entire life, and I have seen women in this town get punished real hard because somebody else tried to save them too loudly. If you call the authorities on a man like Carl Voss without a solid floor under your feet, the officers drive out to the house, ask three questions on the front porch, and then drive away, leaving the woman inside alone with the door locked behind her.
The turning point came on a Tuesday near the end of September when the rain was coming down so hard the gutters outside were overflowing onto the sidewalk. Eileen came in at 10:18 AM wearing her brown sunglasses, her blue raincoat buttoned up to her chin despite how warm it was inside the shop. She handed me an old glass prescription bottle for her blood pressure pills, and taped to the side of the label was a small yellow sticky note. Her hand was shaking so hard when she set it on the glass counter that the paper made a dry, rattling sound against the countertop.
I picked up the bottle and looked at the note. Written in blue ballpoint pen, in very faint, wobbly handwriting, were four words: “No childproof cap please.”
I looked up from the bottle and looked right at her. She was staring straight down at a display cardboard rack of cherry cough drops, two packages for three dollars and twenty-nine cents. She was holding the edge of the glass counter so tight her fingernails were turning dead white against the wood trim. Mr. Harlan was back in the pharmacy office with the radio playing quiet gospel music, so there was nobody standing near us except the clock on the wall ticking away the seconds.
I leaned across the glass, kept my hands down low, and said, “Eileen, are you safe at home?”
She did not move her head, and she did not pull off those dark glasses. For five long seconds, the only sound in the whole pharmacy was the rain hitting the roof and the soft hum of the soda fountain refrigerator that Mr. Harlan never had the heart to unplug.
Then she opened her mouth, her bottom lip trembling so bad she had to bite down on it before she could get the words out. “He counts my pills,” she whispered, her voice so thin I had to strain to hear it over the gospel music. “He counts my pills and he counts my minutes.”
My knees felt hollow right then, like the joints were made of paper, but I kept my face completely flat because I knew Carl’s silver truck sometimes idled across the street near the feed store while he waited for his orders to be loaded. I did not gasp, and I did not make a big scene. I just reached under the counter, pulled out a fresh paper receipt roll, and tore off a four-inch strip of white paper.
I took my black pen and wrote my personal home phone number on the back of that paper strip in big, block numbers so she could read it without her glasses if she had to. Right under the phone number, I wrote six words that I had thought about for three weeks while staring at my little notebook: “Ask for calcium if you need help.”
I slid the paper strip across the glass right beside her blood pressure bottle and covered it with my palm until she looked up. “You put that in your shoe right now,” I told her, keeping my voice as steady as if I was giving her instructions on how to take an antibiotic. “Not your coat pocket, and not your purse. You put it down inside your left shoe before you step back out onto that sidewalk.”
She looked at me through those dark lenses for one brief second, her jaw working like she was trying not to cry, then she reached out, grabbed the slip of paper, and shoved it deep into her coat pocket. She turned around and walked out the door at 10:24 AM, two minutes before Carl pulled up to the curb to hit his horn.
I thought that would be the end of the waiting, but things got worse the very next morning. It was a Wednesday, a day Eileen never came into town, when the front bell rang at 9:15 AM and Carl Voss stepped into the store by himself. He was wearing his heavy yellow work boots and a grease-stained canvas jacket, and he walked straight toward my counter with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. My heart gave a hard, ugly thud against my ribs, but I stood my ground behind the cash register and picked up a rag to wipe down the glass.
“Morning, Vera,” he said, stopping right on the opposite side of the display case. He did not smile with his eyes, but his mouth twisted up into that aggressive, fake polite shape he used when he was about to complain to a crew member about a sloppy job. “Eileen came in here yesterday morning to pick up her pressure medicine, didn’t she?”
“She sure did, Carl,” I said, keeping my hands moving with the rag over the glass surface. “Paid her copay and took her bottle right on home.”
He leaned his weight onto his forearms, pushing his face about a foot closer to mine over the register. His breath smelled like stale coffee and cheap tobacco. “She’s been getting real forgetful lately,” he said, his voice dropping down real low and casual, like he was just sharing a piece of sad family news with an old friend. “Leaving things around the house. Forgetting where she put her house keys. Leaving little scraps of paper around the kitchen that don’t make a bit of sense.”
My left hand went cold, but I kept my face completely blank while I wiped the counter corner. “Well, Carl, we all get a little scattered when the weather turns damp. I lose my glasses three times a morning if I don’t leave them on the string around my neck.”
He didn’t laugh, and he didn’t lean back. His eyes moved very slowly across my counter, looking at the cash register, the tape dispenser, the small trash box by my feet, and the stack of paper bags sitting by the scales. He was checking to see if I looked nervous, testing the air to see if I was holding something behind my back.
“She told me she had a headache yesterday,” Carl said, his knuckles turning white where he was gripping the edge of the oak counter trim. “Said she talked to you for a couple of minutes while Mr. Harlan was in the back. I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t bothering folks with confused talk.”
“She didn’t say two words past asking for her bottle,” I lied, looking him dead in the eye without blinking. “She was in a hurry to get back out to your truck so you wouldn’t be stuck idling in the rain. You know how Eileen is. Quiet as a field mouse.”
Carl stared at me for three seconds that felt like three hours. Then he gave a short, hard nod, snapped his collar up around his neck, and turned around toward the door. “If she comes in here talking crazy, Vera, you give me a phone call at the shop. She’s got family that knows how to take care of her.”
He walked out and slammed the glass door so hard the brass bell on the top frame rattled for ten seconds after he hit the pavement.
As soon as his truck turned onto the main road, I went straight to the back of the store where Mr. Harlan was sitting at his high desk counting out cholesterol pills into a plastic tray. I did not ask for his permission, and I did not ask him what he thought about Carl Voss. I pulled the diabetic test strip box out from under the register, took out the little spiral notebook with the eleven dots, and laid it right on top of his pill tray.
“Mr. Harlan,” I said, my voice shaking for the first time all morning. “I need you to look at these dates. Carl Voss is hurting that woman, and he searched her coat last night.”
Mr. Harlan stopped his pill counter mid-stroke. He was seventy-four years old, a quiet deacon at the Baptist church who hated confrontation more than anything in this world, but he was not a stupid man. He picked up my little notebook, flipped through the six pages of neat pencil notes I had kept since June, and read every single entry without saying a word.
When he reached the last page, he set the book down, pulled off his wire-rimmed reading glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Vera,” he said quietly, “Carl’s brother is on the county board of commissioners. If we make an accusation without solid backing, the sheriff isn’t going to do a thing except pick up the telephone and call Carl to ask him what’s going on at home.”
“I know that,” I told him, leaning over his desk so the back counter wouldn’t echo my words. “That’s why I’m not calling the sheriff’s office. I’m calling Deputy Dave Miller on his personal cell phone tonight after five o’clock. Dave’s sister runs the women’s crisis shelter over in Springfield, and he knows how to handle a situation without broadcasting it over the county radio scanner.”
Mr. Harlan looked at the little spiral notebook for another long minute, then he reached out, closed the cover, and pushed it back into my hands. “You make sure she asks for it herself, Vera,” he said softly, his voice heavy with the kind of sadness old men get when they realize how much bad stuff happens behind closed doors in their own neighborhood. “If she doesn’t make the call herself, he’ll have her locked up in a state home before the week is out.”
That Thursday was the longest twenty-four hours of my life. I carried my cell phone in my apron pocket all day long, checking the screen every twenty minutes to see if there was a call from a number I didn’t recognize. Nothing came through. By Friday afternoon at four o’clock, the sky had turned a dark, bruised gray, and a cold rain started blowing against the front windows of the pharmacy.
At 5:20 PM, Mr. Harlan went into the back room to lock the narcotics safe and tally up the day’s prescriptions. I was out front by myself, sweeping the linoleum floor near the front door and getting ready to turn the door sign from OPEN to CLOSED at 5:30.
Then, at 5:24 PM, the brass bell above the door chimed, and Eileen Voss walked in.
She wasn’t wearing her coat, and she wasn’t wearing her brown sunglasses. She was wearing a thin blue cotton house dress that had two missing buttons near the collar, and her hair was wet from the rain. Her right eye was completely swollen shut, the skin around it a dark, nasty shade of purple that spilled down across her nose. Her mouth was set in a tight, straight line, and her face was completely white, like all the blood had been drained out of her body before she stepped over our threshold.
She walked straight to the register, reached into her apron pocket, and set an empty white plastic calcium bottle on the glass counter.
“I need the large size,” she said. Her voice was not shaking anymore. It was flat, hard, and quiet, like a stone that had been dropped down a deep well. “I need the large size right now, Vera.”
My heart hammered against my ribs so hard I could barely draw a breath, but I didn’t waste a single second asking her questions. I reached under the counter, grabbed the desk telephone, and dialed Dave Miller’s personal cell phone number from the sticky note I had taped right beside the register drawer.
Dave picked up on the second ring. “Miller.”
“Dave, it’s Vera at Harlan Pharmacy,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on Eileen’s face while she stood on the other side of the glass. “I have a customer here who needs the large bottle of calcium. She needs it picked up at the alley door right away.”
“I’m two blocks away at the courthouse,” Dave said, his tone turning sharp and completely businesslike in half a second. “Hold her in the building. Do not let her go back out onto the street. I’m coming around the back lane with the unmarked car.”
I slammed the receiver back onto the hook just as the headlights of a silver truck cut through the rainy dark outside the front display window.
“He followed me,” Eileen whispered, her one good blue eye wide with a sudden, wild kind of terror that made her take two fast steps backward toward the vitamin rack. “He saw me run out the back porch while he was in the barn. He’s coming, Vera.”
Outside on the curb, the heavy engine of Carl’s Dodge truck cut out with a loud backfire. The driver’s side door slammed shut so hard the sound echoed off the brick storefronts across the street. Through the rain-streaked window glass, I saw Carl striding across the sidewalk, his canvas jacket flying open, his face twisted up in a red, furious scowl that I had never seen on him before.
“Get behind the prescription counter,” I told Eileen, grabbing her by the elbow and shoving her toward the narrow swing-gate that led to the back storage room. “Go back by the alley door and stay down low until Dave hits the lock.”
“Vera, no,” she gasped, trying to hold onto the counter edge. “He’ll break the glass. He’ll smash the door down if he sees it locked.”
“Go!” I yelled, pushing her through the gate just as Carl reached the front entrance and grabbed the exterior door handle.
I turned around, stepped fast across the linoleum floor, and reached the front door just as Carl tried to shove it open. I grabbed the heavy brass deadbolt knob with both hands and threw the bolt shut into the steel frame with a loud, metallic clack.
Carl hit the glass door with his shoulder half a second later. The heavy plate glass shuddered in its rubber frame, and the brass bell on top rang violently.
“Open the damn door, Vera!” he shouted, his face pressed flat against the glass, his eyes wide and bloodshot as he pounded on the door frame with his thick fist. “Open this door right now! My wife is inside there, and she’s not well!”
I stood three feet back from the door on the dry linoleum, my hands clasped together in front of my store apron, keeping my feet planted right where they were. “We are closed for the evening, Carl,” I said, speaking loud enough for my voice to carry right through the heavy glass pane. “Store hours are eight to five-thirty. You come back on Monday morning.”
“She’s in there!” he roared, slamming his open palm against the glass so hard the whole front window rattled. “I know she’s in there! You let her out here right now, or I’m kicking this frame out!”
Behind me, I heard the heavy wooden alley door at the back of the prescription room unlatch with a dull thud, followed by the quick sound of boots on the back concrete steps and a car door opening and closing in the alley rain.
Carl heard it too. He stepped back onto the wet sidewalk, looked down the narrow side lane between the pharmacy and the dry goods store, and saw the red taillights of Deputy Dave Miller’s unmarked sedan backing out into the street.
“You old bitch!” Carl screamed, turning back to the glass door and raising his heavy boot to kick out the bottom wooden panel of the door frame.
Before his foot could hit the wood, the siren of a second sheriff’s cruiser wailed around the corner from Main Street. A blue and red strobe light hit the wet pavement, reflecting off the shop windows in bright, flashing streaks as two uniformed deputies pulled their car right behind Carl’s silver Dodge, blocking him completely against the curb.
The main driver’s door of the cruiser opened, and Senior Deputy Ray Gibson stepped out into the rain with his hand resting flat on his belt holster. “Step away from the door, Carl!” he shouted over the noise of the rain and the idling engine. “Step back onto the curb and put your hands where I can see them!”
Carl froze with his boot raised, his jaw working like he was going to argue, but when he saw the second officer stepping around the passenger side of the cruiser, his shoulders dropped about two inches. He slowly pulled his foot back down to the pavement, turned around with his face still red as a beet, and put his hands up on the roof of his silver truck while the officers moved in around him.
Inside the quiet pharmacy, the sudden silence felt heavier than all the shouting had been.
Mr. Harlan stepped out from the back office room, holding his small black radio in one hand and a fresh box of peppermint drops in the other. His face was real pale, and his hands were trembling, but he walked slowly up to the front door, unlocked the bolt with his master key, and pushed the door open just enough to smell the damp asphalt and wet autumn leaves coming off the street.
“Is she gone?” Mr. Harlan asked, looking out at the flashing blue lights on the pavement where the officers were putting Carl into the back of the patrol car.
“She’s gone,” I said, reaching down into my apron pocket and pulling out the empty diabetic test strip box. I opened the lid, took out my tiny spiral notebook with the eleven black ink dots, and laid it right on the top of the glass counter beside the register. “She’s on her way to Springfield with Dave right now, and this notebook is going straight into the state evidence file before nine o’clock tonight.”
Mr. Harlan looked down at the tiny notebook for a long second, then he reached over, picked up the empty white calcium bottle Eileen had left behind, and set it carefully on the top shelf behind the counter right beside the old soda fountain glasses.
I didn’t turn the front sign back to OPEN, and I didn’t start sweeping the floor again. I just walked around behind the counter, sat down on the high wooden stool where I had been sitting for forty-four years, and looked out the front glass window at the rain falling steady on the empty street.
