Chapter 2

Maggie pinwheeled her arms to avoid a full-body fall onto the man whose prone form occupied the better part of the aisle. She widened her stance to regain her balance then dropped to her knees beside the motionless figure.

She recognized the man immediately. Colton Ellis, a longtime customer known for his sharp sense of humor, love of Lucille Ball, and extensive collection of t-shirts won for eating hamburgers that approximated the size and shape of his head.

Maggie put her fingers to Colton’s neck and felt for a pulse. His skin was red and warm, but still, no drumbeat of life beating beneath the surface. She moved her fingers and tried again, tucking her hand in the hollow where the carotid pumped, below the angle of his jaw, beside his Adam’s apple, anywhere she might find the Morse code from his heart.

Nothing.

She began CPR and shouted to Francine to call 911.

“Change your mind about that little thief?” Francine called from her register.

“I don’t need the cops. I need an ambulance.”

  

The plaintive wail of sirens pierced the silence of the group gathered around Colton Ellis as if he were lying in wait. And Maggie supposed he was. Despite her repeated chest compressions, Colton remained immobile.

Too many minutes later, the paramedics ran up the aisle, boots clacking, equipment clanking. A uniformed woman with white-blonde hair and gray eyes put a hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “Can you continue while we get set up?” she asked.

Maggie nodded and kept pumping Colton’s chest to an internal soundtrack of “Staying Alive.” Moments later, with their equipment in place, the paramedics assessed Colton.

“No pulse,” the woman said.

Her partner, a man with a fireplug body and a face to match, produced a defibrillator. He pressed its paddles onto Colton’s chest, which was rose white and hairless like a mountain range above the foothills of his wrinkled jeans.

“Clear!”

There was a whine as the defibrillator charged, then a concussive zap as 1,700 volts charged into Colton’s heart.

Maggie expected Colton’s body to rise from the floor then crash back into place, as she’d seen in countless movies and television shows. Instead he barely flinched, starting as if in response to a bad dream.

The paramedics checked the heart monitor. The woman frowned then nodded at her partner. He pumped epinephrine into Colton’s veins. Waited. Reemployed the defibrillator.

Another look at the heart monitor. Another frown.

The female paramedic resumed chest compressions while her partner bagged Colton with a manual resuscitator, a phrase that made Maggie think of Francine at the check-out counter. Then they hoisted Colton onto a gurney, grunting with the effort, and rolled him away like luggage bound for a long trip. 

“Is he going to be…?” Thom called out as the paramedics reached the end of the aisle. His hand gripped the wooden handle of his mop, seeming to draw comfort from its solidness. Thom was in his twenties, quiet, sensitive, the kind of man who seemed to take on others’ pain as his own. His empathy was working overtime. “Is he going to be okay?”

“We’ll do our best,” the woman called over her shoulder.

Maggie had a feeling that “best” wouldn’t be good enough.

Colton hadn’t responded to the jumpstart to his heart. His lungs hadn’t re-inflated. His heart hadn’t regained its muscle memory, nor did he rise up, Lazarus-like, to proclaim the gospel or ask for a side of fries.

She was certain they were carting off an empty shell.

She watched the paramedics take the same path as Zingers Girl: past the shingles vaccine poster, through the front door, across the parking lot, a feeling of helplessness rising like floodwaters. This time, Maggie couldn’t swoop in with her receipt and her jerky and her white-lie deception. She couldn’t save the day—or even the hour.

Maggie dug her fingernail into her thumb. Damn it. 

She liked Colton. He wasn’t a frequent flier like some of Petrosian’s regulars, but he’d come in often enough to be memorable, an easy joke on his lips, a new t-shirt serving as a badge of beef-eating honor around his bulging belly.

That very morning he had tromped up to the counter, his ursine form swaying between a rack of corn pads and a tower of Toblerone, and grinned mischievously. “Today’s your lucky day, new girl. You can stop a man from starving to death.” He had rubbed his belly like a restaurant Buddha. “Just make up the antibiotic elixir to cure my strep throat—makes it hard to swallow bacon cheeseburgers—and I’ll be on my merry, gluttonous way.”

And so she had. And so he was.

Until his heart stopped cooperating and he stumbled and fell, struggling to live as shoppers checked off lists and juggled coupons.

Maggie wondered what Colton’s last memory was. The face of a beloved family member? The way she had laughed at his terrible knock-knock joke? The half-full shelf of digestive aids perched above his head as the blood stopped pumping through his veins?

Outside the siren complained once more, perhaps chafing under its new payload, and the crowd began to slink away from the invisible outline of the body that seemed to stain the pharmacy’s well-worn floors.

Maggie turned to go, unsure of her destination other than “away.”

The front door burst open. Levon Petrosian strode in.

For a small man, Petrosian seemed to fill the doorway. He had a slight frame, thinning hair and black eyes perched above a sharp nose. His thin face was banked by jowls that pulled his cheeks chin-ward.

He looked around the room then he began pulling off thin leather gloves, one finger at a time. Never mind the unseasonably warm spring day. Never mind the 80 percent humidity. Petrosian wore the gloves every time he drove, as if he were Cary Grant about to race the cliffside roads of Monaco. He’d told her they were a gift from his wife. That fact alone trumped the trivialities of temperature and barometric pressure.

Petrosian folded the gloves in his hand. “What happened?”

The question was loud enough to be intended for anyone, but his eyes were on Maggie. She swallowed. “Colton Ellis.” She stopped, weighed her words. “Looks like a heart attack.”

Petrosian nodded. With Colton’s beet-red face, apple-shaped body and assortment of health problems, a heart attack was hardly a surprise. “Where? When?”

“Next to the Tums. I’m not sure when it happened. I hadn’t been down that way since we opened. I don’t know if anyone had.”

She glanced at Francine then at Thom and Nan, a young cashier who had just returned from break. They shook their heads. It seemed that part of the store wasn’t frequently trafficked.

Petrosian examined his gloves. “He’ll recover?”

“Doesn’t look good,” Francine chimed in. She gave Maggie a look then popped a hip. “He was probably dead before Red tried to play hero and resuscitate him.”

Petrosian turned back to Maggie. “You administered CPR?” She nodded. He quartered the gloves, knuckles whitening. “I had an AED on order,” he said, referring to the portable device that would allow nearly anyone to deliver a potentially life-saving electrical shock to the heart. Under Thom’s fluorescent lights, Petrosian’s skin turned seasick-green. He rotated his head to take in the pharmacy’s now empty aisles, the detritus left by the paramedics, the drawn faces of those around him. “I had waited for a sale. It seems my thriftiness cost Mr. Ellis.”