Healer Read Online Free

hope. Be sure to let the Hendlers know we’re in the house—they’ll call the police if they see smoke.”
    “Yeah. I’m getting great at building fires. Bring some space heaters out next weekend though, would you? And mousetraps.”
    “Sure. They’re on my list.” He sounds relieved to be given this purposeful assignment, so easily accomplished. She knows he will dictate a reminder note to himself as soon as they hang up—he has always loved making lists of tasks just so he can cross them off. She had caught him, on more than one occasion, writing down chores he had already finished. Once she had figured out her own birthday gift—her Audi—when she saw the checked-off reminder to call the insurance company.
    Claire gets up and walks to a dark corner of the kitchen while Jory crouches by the woodstove crumpling paper into balls and sorting through the woodbox for smaller pieces. The kitchen sink smells of mildew; she turns on the hot water faucet to flush the drain. “Addison? Do you think, I mean, did you get the feeling anybody at the meeting has heard about why the review board shut the study down? Is that why you’re not getting new investment money?”
    She hears him take a deep breath and almost wishes she could snatch the question back. “No. I don’t think so. That should be protected as proprietary information; nobody’s legally allowed to talk about it. Not even Rick Alperts.”
    Claire wraps her arms more tightly around herself, shivering inside her down coat. “You haven’t run into him at any of the conferences, have you? Would he take that chance?” It is a ridiculous question. Rick is fueled by risk. But somehow it’s easier when they turn together against him, make Rick their living and breathing common enemy.
    “I heard he’s back in California. People know we ran out of time—ran out of money—but nobody knows the details.”
    “So you’re pretty sure he hasn’t talked to Nature or the Wall Street Journal ?”
    He laughs, but she can hear the tension in it. Even so his laugh still relaxes her, as it always has, skips her past the last months to remind her that one stupid gamble should not be allowed to ruin love. “No. Not yet, anyway. Sleep tight tonight, okay? I’ll see you Saturday,” he says.
    On Wednesday morning she hangs her black suit at one end of the shower and turns the handle all the way to hot, hoping steam will erase the creases pressed into the material after being packed in a box for three weeks. She forgets about the blouse, though, and once she finds it, crammed into another box with silk scarves and lingerie, she has to button the suit jacket up to the top to hide the wrinkles. Dress shoes are in some other huge container, somewhere, labeled on one side or another with thick black marker MOM’S CLOSET . Around two in the morning on the last day before they had to be out of the house she had given up on neatness and begun pitching her wardrobe into any half-filled moving crate, most of them not yet delivered. She dives headfirst into the most likely container, its sides bulging with the weight of personal adornments, and comes up with a single black leather high heel. The other one turns up two boxes later beneath a clock radio, a Ziploc bag of perfumes and three Tumi handbags.
    “Now your hair’s a wreck.” Jory stands in the doorway, swallowed inside Addison’s thick bathrobe, black circles of mascara bleeding under her eyes.
    “Well. Matches my clothes, then. Dad forgot his bathrobe, huh?”
    Jory shrugs and picks up a brush from the table, stands in front of her mother and lightly sweeps the tangles off her forehead, traininglocks of hair around the curve of her fingers. “Stand up. Turn around. You look okay. Not like a doctor. But okay.”
    “Yeah, well, who needs nice clothes when you wear a white coat all day, anyway. You all right here alone for a few hours? There’s oatmeal. And a pizza in the freezer. I’ll go to the store