The Doctor's Little Girl (13 page)

Further questioning told him that Marcel had showed up to drop off some packets about the HPV vaccine, which Andrew agreed with the nurse were worth letting students have access to. She had no idea that he had also left the Mialis ones, too. She looked while Andrew was on the phone with her and saw that there were plenty left, as well as some for an acne medication that Marcel’s company sold.

Andrew thanked the nurse for her time and then got off the phone, feeling frustrated. Maybe it wasn’t his place to be so involved in this, but the fact that Marcel had obviously been snooping around in Andrew’s life somehow, since he had his home address, made him feel personally invested. While he was deciding if he should call the main office of Questru to file a complaint or if he should just call Marcel personally and deal with this man to man, his phone rang. It was his cell phone, not his desk phone. A quick peek at it proved that it was Dave, his best friend. A smile crossed his face. Did he ever have news for Dave.

“Hey, man,” he said as he answered the call.

“Andrew!” said the voice on the other end. “What’s up?”

“I’m sitting at my desk dealing with an insane pharm rep situation,” Andrew told him.

“What’s going on? I’ve never had an insane pharm rep situation before,” Dave joked.

Andrew sat back in his chair, content to chat for a moment. “So, you know the drug Mialis?” Andrew asked. “Remember the presentation about it at the conference?”

“The heart attack drug?” Dave asked.

“No, it’s for promoting wakefulness in…” Dave cut Andrew off.

“That was a joke, Andrew,” Dave said, his voice flat. “It was funny because Mialis is meant to be a wake-up drug but has the pesky side effect of giving people heart attacks and making them die.”

Andrew chuckled. “You’re ridiculous,” he told his best friend. “Anyway, there’s been a new rep coming in from Questru, who sells Mialis. He’s a weasel of a man. He came here and met with me and I basically told him that I know about the problems with the drug and I’m not interested in prescribing it, but he left a ton of lit on it in the waiting room anyway without even telling my secretary that he was doing it. Then he sent me a thank-you note for our meeting at my home address, which I never gave him.”

Dave grunted. “That’s downright unsettling.”

“Tell me about it. Anyway, the other day one of my teenage patients came in to ask me about losing weight and she had one of his damn leaflets with her! When I asked her where it came from, she told me that she got it at her school nurse’s office.”

Even Dave was stunned into silence for a moment by that. “So, this guy is going around to trying to sneak pamphlets for an off-label weight-loss medication that has a history of killing people into high schools so that he can sell more drugs?” he asked. “This sounds not very far removed from something that could get him seriously arrested.” Andrew rolled his eyes.

“As opposed to non-seriously arrested?” he asked.

“You know what I mean,” Dave said.

“I just got off the phone with the nurse from my patient’s school and she had no idea that the booklets were there. He asked to leave vaccine materials and snuck those in.”

“What a fucker,” Dave said. “Look, why don’t we talk about this more face to face in a couple days?”

“Huh?” Andrew asked with surprise. “Are you gonna be in town?”

“Yeah, I’m landing on Monday night,” Dave let him know. “I’m hoping you can pick me up from the airport and that I can crash at your place. I mean, I’m assuming that’s okay. You don’t have anything else going on, do you?”

Andrew grinned. “I have a couple of things to fill you in on that aren’t related to medicine,” Andrew told him.

“Oh, really?” Dave asked. “I’m all ears.”

Andrew hadn’t been so sure how much he was going to tell Dave about his relationship with Molly. He decided to start at the beginning and explained how they had met at the airport and how he had given her his card.

“That’s actually kind of weird, in case you were wondering,” Dave said.

Andrew spun in his chair a little. “I couldn’t help myself. It was like Lisa was right there in the airport, needing me to save her again.”

Dave didn’t sound thrilled by this. “Andrew, man, you couldn’t save Lisa the first time.”

“This is different,” Andrew defended. “Well, it turned out to be different.”

“So, she’s not a med school dropout, crushed by her parents’ constant disappointment in everything she does?” Dave prodded.

“You’re being a dick, Dave,” Andrew told him. “Lisa was your friend, too.”

“Alright, I’m sorry,” Dave said, backing off. “I’m assuming that you ended up bringing her out to be with you, right?”

“Yep,” Andrew told him. “She’s been staying with me. Things have moved pretty fast, I’ll admit, but I’m in love with her.”

Dave sounded a little incredulous. “Real love?”

“Real love. Like nothing else matters,” Andrew confided. He thought about whether he wanted to say the next thing he was going to or not, and then decided to hell with it. He didn’t like feeling like there was something he was keeping to himself, especially since Dave would soon be meeting Molly. “Our relationship is a little bit unusual,” he started.

“How so?” Dave wanted to know.

Andrew took a deep breath, and then he told his best friend everything. He told him about how he had spanked her, about how he had examined her at work, about how she called him ‘daddy.’ He didn’t hold anything back.

There was a long silence after Andrew finished. He waited anxiously to hear what his friend’s response would be.

When it finally came, it was, “That’s probably one of the hottest things I’ve ever heard.”

* * *

Andrew had been in his office for a while, and Molly was sitting alone at the front desk since Samantha had the day off every Friday. There was a time when Molly would have been envious of her perpetual three-day weekend, but now she felt totally happy at her job. Besides, Andrew would still have to work and Molly couldn’t imagine that bumming around an empty house would be much fun. She would rather be close to him, even if they weren’t really interacting most of the day.

He finally came out, and Rebecca came into the hallway to talk to him about what supplies needed reordering. He then came over to see Molly.

“Holding down the fort alright by yourself?” he asked.

Molly had trouble acting nonchalant in front of the nurse, but resisted the urge to call him ‘daddy.’

“Yes, Dr. Harrington,” she said with a coy grin. Andrew seemed stressed and like his mind was elsewhere, which was a big change from the happy, loving daddy who had served her a special breakfast this morning. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

Andrew rubbed his temples with both hands and then explained the whole story with the Mialis situation to both Molly and Rebecca.

Rebecca looked concerned. “So, he’s making money by playing off these teenage girls’ fears about their bodies, while putting them at risk for heart problems?” she said. “That’s rotten, Dr. Harrington.”

Andrew agreed.

“I don’t know what you can do about it, though,” Rebecca added.

Molly didn’t have such a calm reaction to the story. She perked up with righteous indignation, much like she had when Theresa had picked on that older woman at the airport, which seemed like a lifetime ago. “You can’t let him get away with this, doctor,” she said, her voice a little raised. “He’s hurting people and that’s not right.”

“Darling,” Rebecca said to her soothingly, “sometimes people do things that aren’t right and it isn’t your place to do anything about it. You have to just live and let live.”

Molly shook her head no. She would not accept that.

“I think you should call the cops,” she suggested. It was the only thing that made sense to her. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, about the whole thing was illegal, but she was sure that something was.

“I’m not going to call the cops,” Andrew said, his voice final.

“But he got our home address, da—Dr. Harrington!” she insisted, catching herself calling him by the wrong title before it was too late. “If none of us gave it to him, then he got it by snooping around here. Who knows what else he looked at.” Molly stretched her mind to think of things she had heard Andrew talking about in the past. “He could have violated your doctor–patient confidentiality by looking at things that he wasn’t supposed to.”

Andrew smiled at her. “I don’t think that’s likely, Molly, and although he has violated my privacy however he obtained my address, he hasn’t broken the law in doing so.”

Molly fumed. “If you’re not going to call the cops, you should at least call his company and tell them what he’s doing,” she told him. “Tell them every single thing that he did wrong and get him fired. If a person ever deserved to be fired for something, it’s trying to sell drugs to kids, not being late all the time.” Molly let resentment at her own previous employment situation leak into the conversation. This lightened the mood a little bit and made Andrew laugh.

“Both you and Dave have turned this into ‘selling drugs to kids,’ for some reason,” Andrew said. “It’s not like he’s actually pushing drugs into their hands. They still have to go to their doctors, who, if the others in this town are anything like me, aren’t going to prescribe stimulant weight-loss drugs off label to teenagers.”

“Unless he has a bag full of those free samples of it,” Molly muttered.

Andrew stared at her blankly. “I have a horrible feeling about what you just said,” Andrew told her. “Reps aren’t allowed to give samples directly to patients or consumers, they have to go through doctors, but I have a bad feeling that if Marcel is as brazen as he is, he could be willing to take the next step, if he hasn’t already. Mialis does give good, quick results in weight loss, and if he did give out samples, it would be a surefire way to get customers, because if it works after taking it for the sample month, you can bet everyone would ask for a prescription. I’m going to go make some more calls,” Andrew said, returning to his office.

Molly smiled proudly. She knew that she could make Andrew see what was right.

“Wow,” Rebecca said, “I didn’t think of it that way. I guess I was wrong, sugar,” she told Molly. “I feel bad for not wanting to act on this, now that you put it that way. I’m sorry I doubted your judgment.”

For a second, Molly wanted to gloat about how right she had been, but she quickly realized that Andrew would not approve of that behavior. Instead, she just grinned at Rebecca and asked:

“I can think of a way you can make it up to me. Still willing to teach me how to iron?”

* * *

Andrew had to stay at work late that evening, since he had ended up calling several other schools in the area to ask them if they had been visited by Marcel and if they had any Mialis booklets floating around in their offices. He had been shocked to find out that every high school in the area had been visited, and that most of them had received the advertising literature without knowing it.

He had then called the parents of his teenage patients, all of them, to let them know about the situation and to make sure that, to their knowledge, none of their children had received any samples of the drugs. He wanted to have as much firm evidence as he could before he filed his complaint at Questru, so he had decided to wait and investigate the situation a little more first. The voice in his head that told him it wasn’t his problem was outweighed by the voice that stamped her foot and insisted that it was their responsibility to help people: the voice of his sweet little girl.

Rebecca had left to go get take-out for everyone to have for dinner and had come back with some other stuff, too, which Andrew hadn’t really paid much attention to. She had stuck around, entertaining Molly while he worked. When eight o’clock rolled around, though, she had stuck her head into the office.

“I have to get home now, Dr. Harrington. Good luck with everything.”

Andrew waved at her. “Thanks for the pizza,” he said, “and for looking after Molly.”

“She wants to know if she’s allowed to play video games now that work is over,” Rebecca added with a wry smile.

Andrew laughed. “Yes, of course, she can do whatever she wants… within reason, that is.”

Rebecca said goodnight and left, presumably telling Molly that she had his permission to play. Andrew made one more phone call after he heard Rebecca leave, then cleaned up his office for the next day and came out into the reception area, where Molly was happily matching colored diamonds in a computer game while sparkling animals danced in the background. She was looking much tidier than Andrew had ever seen her. Her chocolate hair was in a French braid, and her clothes were neatly pressed. He did a double take.

“Hi, Dr. Harrington!” Molly bubbled. “Rebecca taught me how to iron while you were working. And she did my hair! And she showed me how to sew on buttons. That’s important, because one of my shirts needs the buttons fixed on it,” she rambled, blushing slightly as she was obviously remembering the way that Andrew had ripped her clothes off her the night before.

“You look great,” he told her, his voice genuine. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say you were all grown up.”

Molly giggled.

“It’s almost a shame that I’m going to undress you now,” he added. “Almost.”

Molly looked up at him. “What are you going to do?”

Andrew adjusted his white coat. “I’ve never given you a proper medical examination,” he explained. “Since you’re a doctor’s little girl, you should be getting the best of medical care.”

“You examined me the other day…” Molly started.

“No,” Andrew corrected her, smiling. “I took your temperature the other day when you were being naughty. This exam is going to be much more thorough than that. Go into exam room two, undress all the way, and wait for me, young lady,” he instructed.

Andrew didn’t foresee a lot of chances to be alone in the office with Molly, and he intended to make the best use possible of all of them.

Molly quietly got up from the desk, pausing her game. She stopped and looked at him inquisitively.