Episode 10: First Do No Harm
The Ruins
“All right, then, tell me what’s going on.”
This is how Henry Johnson—Dr. Johnson, or Doc Johnson, or sometimes just Doc—begins every visit, with every patient.
Even if he knows the situation already.
Which he usually does.
Last year, while standing in line at the Apple Cart, Genevieve mentioned to Ronwen that Mrs. Prewitt’s palsy seemed to be getting worse. By the time Mrs. Prewitt came in for the battery of tests that seems to be de rigueur after a certain age, he’d already researched the latest studies and had samples of the two newest medications for age-related Essential Tremor.
And a few months ago, when he was at the post office waiting in line to retrieve a package, he heard Amelia saying to Gloria that the mail delivery to The Coffee Hut was late, which was odd because Sam was usually so punctual. (Only businesses in the village and homes on the wild western side of the island get mail delivery. Those who live elsewhere have to schlep themselves to the post office to pick up their mail, unless of course they’ve ordered something that will be delivered by Missy through one of the other shipping companies. No one really knows how the decision was made as to who got postal service and who did not, but everyone understands complaining about it will get you nowhere. Besides, hanging out and catching up at the post office is practically a social event, so most of the time it’s okay.)
Gloria said the mail was probably late because Sam twisted his ankle when he was jogging past The Dog House Café. She said she saw him fall, ran out to help, and ended up binding his ankle with a linen napkin from the restaurant.
Caroline, who was also in line, said that must be why he’d only delivered letters and junk mail to The Breckenridge Inn. “So I had to come in to pick up the new sheets we ordered,” she said. “We have to replace the set in Room 4,” she explained, “and you do not want to know what a guest did to the old sheets.”
“Yep, that’s need-to-know information,” Gloria laughed. “And we definitely don’t need to know.”
And then all three women turned to Larry, who was standing in front of Dr. Johnson and behind the women, and asked whether Sam shouldn’t have some kind of medical leave or workers’ comp or something, but he just shrugged. “I do wills and trusts,” he said, sounding almost sullen. “I don’t do employment law.” Everyone in line remembered his brief foray into employment law with Katie and the Apple Cart, and they nodded in tandem, like a row of bobble head dolls.
The next day, when Sam delivered the mail to Dr. Johnson’s office, Dr. Johnson told him he should come in that afternoon for an x-ray, just to be on the safe side. And Sam started to say how did you know but then he smiled, because that’s just the way it is on a small island.
Another time, the doctor passed Retha and Jill as he was walking around the village commons with his Airedale, Rosie (also known as Rosie the Impossible, Rosie the Incorrigible, and Oh-No-Rosie). They were sitting on a bench, talking companionably in the way that is unique to women who have been friends for a long time, and he heard Retha tell Jill she was going to stop by the clinic, even though she “hates effing doctors,” because, she said, “my wrist seizes up when I’m pouring a drink and I’m thinking it might be whaddayacallit, carpool tunnel.”
“Carpal tunnel syndrome,” he suggested, as Rosie dragged him away, and then he yelled over his shoulder, “I’ve got an opening tomorrow. Come and see me.”
But even when he already knows the reason for the visit, still he asks: “All right, then, tell me what’s going on.”
“I start to feel better the minute I hear you say that,” Caroline told him, when she came in to talk about a persistent fatigue and her fears that, you know, that’s what Kasumi kept saying, before she found out she had cancer.
“Kasumi has a couple of decades on you,” Dr. Johnson said. “As do I,” he added, even though that was irrelevant. He’d been feeling his age more and more lately, and when he looked at Caroline’s warm eyes and attractive face he suddenly felt ancient. “With all you have going on, tired is practically an item on your daily To Do list. Honestly, Caroline, the wonder of it is that you’re not more tired. Six kids . . . and how many dogs do you have now?”
“Four,” Caroline admitted, hanging her head as if was shameful to have so many dogs. “And two cats.”
“Right,” he said. “And you have goats to milk and you have cheese to make from the milk, and when summer comes you have to set up your stall at the farmer’s market to sell the cheese.”
Caroline laughed. “And I have an inn to run, and a veterinary practice. Okay, I get it, I come by my tiredness honestly. So,” she paused. “You don’t think it’s cancer?”
He sighed. Why did everyone expect him to make a diagnosis within the first sixty seconds of the visit?
“We’ll run some tests, Caroline, and then we’ll see where we are.”
“That’s the other thing you do that always makes me feel better,” Caroline said, looking pleased. “You poke a needle in my arm and you listen to my heart and make me pee in a cup, and by the time we’re done, all my symptoms are gone. It’s a miracle.”
“That’s me,” he said, “Doctor Miracle Maker.”
So usually he knows at least a little about the situation before a patient shows up in his exam room.
But this time, he’s had no forewarning, no overheard comment at the store or the post office to prepare him, and the response to his kindly All right, then . . . has, so far, only deepened the mystery.
It’s Friday, December 6, and Genevieve has squeezed in an appointment for Missy, just before Dr. Johnson would normally take his lunch. “She seemed pretty adamant that she needed to be seen today,” Genevieve tells him. “It sounded like it was an emergency.”
Missy’s sitting on the examination table when he comes in. She’s kicking one heel against the metal frame like a fractious child, and she startles when he enters. She doesn’t look like she’s in pain or suffering from some desperate illness that would require the island’s equivalent of urgent care. “All right then,” he says, but Missy cuts him off.
“So Jenny and me, we were at the old ruins last night, you know?” she says.
He nods, thinking December is an odd time to head for the woods, but then, Missy and Jenny pretty much define odd.
“At midnight,” she says.
Dr. Johnson’s nod becomes a little fainter.
“It was a full moon,” she says, as if that clarifies the situation.
Dr. Johnson shakes his head. “Missy, a boatload of money washed up on shore, a man turned up dead in the apartments, and we don’t really know how he died or why, or whether the two events are connected. It seems like a bad idea to be wandering around in the woods at midnight.”
“Well, when you put it that way, I see your point,” Missy says. “But that’s why we were there. Jenny wanted to kind of scope out the lay of the land, so we could, y’know, sage the island. And she wants to do the saging on winter solstice, which is coming up soon. December twenty-first. She wants to clear away all the bad JuJu or something, and she said the ruins are sacred, so she said we should do it there.”
“Okay, let’s start over,” Dr. Johnson says. “Why don’t you tell me your symptoms, and we’ll take it from there?”
“That’s the problem!” Missy says. “I don’t have any symptoms. I just think I’m going crazy!”
Reminders
Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.
© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved
In the exact center of the island, in a close and stifling wood, there are the crumbling ruins of . . . something. Five stone pillars, five stone chairs, and one massive stone table carved with strange runes and symbols and cracked down the middle, as if someone used the table to act out the Aslan story in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Trailing vines hang from every surface, cobwebs festoon every corner. Dust motes, quivering in the few pale shafts of sunlight that filter through the dense forest overstory, seem suspended in time.
Elsewhere on the island, the wind whistles through the topmost branches of the tall douglas firs and the shorter but still majestic madrones and the dry-moss festooned Garry oaks, or whispers through the ferns (licorice ferns and lady ferns and sword ferns), or dances playfully among the pale pink nootka roses and the yellow profusion of tumble mustard, or roars powerfully over the white-capped waters of the Salish Sea—the wind is a Presence in the San Juan islands.
Here, the wind is not just quiet, it is absent.
Elsewhere on the island, dogs bark and yip and whine and snuffle and howl. On the village commons, rabbits thump out the beginnings of a warning, then give up because, with few natural predators, they are out of the habit of giving or heeding warnings, and scarcely seem to notice if a hawk snatches a fellow leporid from the meadow. (“Hmm, there goes Fred. I liked Fred. Ah well, clover’s especially tasty this morning, don’t you think, Marv?”)
Near the marina on Gull Bay, there is always at least one blue heron who, when disturbed (usually by a human coming to his or her or their boat), whumps the air with its impossibly large wings, and complains about the disturbance, sounding like a cross between a pterodactyl and a cranky old man.
Bald eagles twitter, purple martins chirp, great horned owls rend the air with a most undignified screech.
But here among the ruins, there is absolute silence.
It is unsettling.
Some claim the ruins are Masonic. Others believe a witch’s coven met here and danced in the moonlight. Still others suggest it was a First Nation ceremonial site.
The islanders have resisted all suggestions to call in anthropologists who might examine the ruins and provide a definitive answer. Historian accounts that attempt to solve the mystery gather dust in the Looser Island Library.
No one really wants to know the truth, when the unsolved mystery is so delicious.
A couple of years ago, Dr. Johnson had been standing in line at the Gas-n-Go Mini Mart when he’d overheard Jenny’s theories on the old ruins.
“I think it was the Wiccans and the Samish that made them,” Jenny said, sounding authoritative.
She was so taken up in her musings she forgot what she was doing, and Charlie, the clerk, stood with his hand outstretched to receive the kombucha she was buying.
“M-m-my uncle says that’s white man revisionist-history b-bullshit,” Charlie said, his hand dropping to the counter. “He’s got some Indian in him.”
Jenny corrected him—It’s First Nation—and he looked worried about the idea that he might have been using the wrong words all along.
“Not the . . . F-F-F-First Nation around here in the islands,” he said. “Choctaw is what he is, he says, and he told me stories that would p-put hair on your chest, if you were a man, maybe even if you’re a girl, about how white people tried to connect Indian magic with witchcraft. Right before they burned the Indian guy or l-lady at the stake. He said Indians and witches, they each of ‘em have enough troubles on their own w-w-without lumping ‘em together.”
Dr. Johnson had never heard Charlie speak more than a few words at a time, and he wondered at the young man’s unexpected chattiness. Charlie was shy and be-pimpled and he stuttered, and his conversations with customers were mostly limited to Hey and How’s it going and No M-n-Ms today, huh? His increasing success with learning to play the trumpet from Mrs. Prewitt had already demonstrated a depth of character no one would have suspected, and now this.
But it shouldn’t have been a surprise; the ruins brought out the strange and unusual in everyone.
Now, feeling increasingly befuddled, Dr. Johnson suggests, “Perhaps you should start by telling me where it hurts.”
“It doesn’t hurt anywhere,” Missy says, patiently, as if talking to a slightly obtuse old man.
Maybe that’s exactly what he is, he thinks. Less than all there, an old man with a big chunk of himself missing, a hole in his heart and in his head. A Mary-sized hole.
Even after eleven years, the loss of his wife feels fresh and new and raw.
“I just think I’m losing my mind, and I think you should send me to a shrink,” Missy says. “Because Jenny and me, we saw a ghost at the ruins.”
Meet me here next week to meet Mary and her fairy tile . . .
The “ruins” were inspired by the wonderfully spooky McMillin family mausoleum which, as some readers know, is on San Juan Island. The mausoleum is replete with masonic symbols, and some of the chairs house actual cremated remains. Read more here.
This episode again features cameos by characters from Book 1 and Book 2. If you’d like to read (or re-read) their stories, you can find them in the links below.
Missy and Jenny: here and here and here (spoiler alert in the third link for Book 2: What the Dogs Know)
Caroline and The Breckenridge Inn: here and here
Gloria and The Dog House Cafe: here and here
Larry’s foray into employment law: here and here
Amelia and The Coffee Hut: here and here
I'm so glad! I've been looking forward to the Rosie episodes...
One of my favorite episodes so far!
She’s a great dog!