Chapter 7: What Elias Did

Elias Brubaker did not answer the old man in the back seat.

He tucked the blanket higher around Thaddeus's knees and closed the car door.

"Not today," he said through the window.

"You're a coward about this," Thaddeus said.

"Yes."

"She'll hate you for waiting."

"Probably."

Margot was standing on the club steps with the brown bottle in her hand, talking to the directors, her chin up.

Elias watched her and did not walk over.

He knew what she would ask him, and he knew the truth would cost him her next sentence.

He had been wrong about her once already.

He drove Thaddeus home to Lake Forest and put two of his people on the door, and then he went back into the city alone.

He did not tell her where he was going.

The pharmacy on Milwaukee Avenue was a narrow shop with a green cross in the window and a pharmacist who was turning the sign to Closed.

The man was fifty and soft around the middle, and he looked at Elias's coat before he looked at his face.

"We're shut."

"You filled a prescription for Thaddeus Ellery in July," Elias said. "And again in September, and again last week."

"I don't discuss patients."

"I'm not asking you to discuss him. I'm asking you to look at your own order slip."

He laid a photograph on the counter.

It was the pill bottle, front and back, the green handwriting clear in the light.

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