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was in great condition. I know I couldn't keep up with her on the jogging track," Bradley replied. Then he looked down at his wife. "Unless there's something I don't know about," he added. Geena shook her head.
    "She wasn't dieting," she said.
    "You say you had lunch with her two days ago, Geena?" Hyman asked softly.
    Geena Thorndyke looked up.
    "Yes, but nothing made me sick," she added quickly.
    "No, that's not what we're looking for. Do you recall what you ate?"
    "We had a salad… chicken salad."
    "Paige was in the habit of taking a daily vitamin anyway," Bradley said sharply. "I know that for a fact because she was always criticizing me for not."
    "Uh huh. What did you drink with your salad, Geena?"
    "We had… cranberry juice," she said and shook her head so vigorously, Terri thought she was going into a convulsion.
    "Well, that's a source of vitamin C," Henry muttered. "And if she was in the habit of taking vitamins daily, she would get the minimum requirements of vitamin C and none of these symptoms would have been precipitated."
    "So she couldn't die of scurvy. Right?" Bradley Thorndyke cried with frustration. He turned from Hyman to Terri. They simply stared at each other.
    "I'm sorry but we can't explain this, Bradley," Hyman said. "The autopsy report doesn't show a reading of ascorbic acid at all." He sighed. "Dr. Barnard can describe her symptoms when she was first brought into the emergency room. She never had an opportunity to begin any therapy. You will see a copy of the autopsy report, of course, and you will see that all the findings point to scurvy."
    "But what was she doing in that cheap motel?" Geena Thorndyke asked, staring down at the floor. She was really asking herself.
    No one spoke; only Geena's sobbing broke the heavy silence. She realized it and stopped crying to look up at Terri. Bradley Thorndyke turned to her too, as if he expected she had the answer to Geena's question as well as all the others.
    Terri felt like she was shrinking under their demanding gazes, and for the first time in her long journey to become a physician, she wanted to run away from the profession.
     
     
    Nearly eight hours later, Terri emerged from the first examination room where she had seen her final patient for the day and handed Elaine the patients file. She had had little time during the remainder of the workday to dwell on Paige Thorndyke. Before visiting hours had ended, she had seen twenty-five patients. The rapid change in weather characteristic of the Catskill mountain climate engendered the usual minor epidemic of coughs and colds. Many residents stubbornly clung to the remnants of summer, dressing lightly for the daytime and forgetting that the temperatures plummeted in the late afternoon and evening as the sun settled below the peaks and treetops. Shadows grew longer, deeper, darker.
    But Terri loved the Catskill fall mornings. They had that wonderfully invigorating crispness to them. Immediately after stepping out, she enjoyed inhaling deeply and feeling the rush of air fill her lungs and wash away the cobwebs woven during another restless night. Her spiders were hatched out of every diagnosis and prognosis. She had an understandable anxiety, a fear of missing something significant, making the wrong diagnosis and therefore causing the unnecessary death of a patient.
    "A good doctor is never completely free of that anxiety," Hyman told her when she confessed it to him during one of their frequent tête-à-têtes. "The trick is to recognize the gray areas and be modest enough to ask for a second opinion. Unfortunately, there are some pretty arrogant bastards in our profession. Even when they make a mistake, they refuse to recognize it's their mistake. They blame it on the symptoms being too ambiguous or something. Many even blame the patients, claiming they didn't tell them everything. They see and hear what they want. I suppose there's nothing as dangerous as an arrogant doctor.
    "But mind you," he added