Dan sipped at his coffee. “You’re sure nothing’s missing?”
“Nothing.” Mark downed his tea in a gulp and refilled the cup from a blue pot big enough for ten. Seated at the kitchen table, he grew impatient with Dan. “He checked to see what information I had on her.”
“But I can’t just accuse Chaz Braden of looking at your files because you think one piece of paper was out of order.”
“I know it was out of order, Dan. I’m meticulous about not mixing up the pages of a medical file. Of course Chaz did it. Who else would care?”
“I don’t know. But if someone busted in here, he did the neatest job of breaking and entering I’ve ever seen.”
“He came in here. That coat on the basement floor didn’t move itself.”
“But the locks haven’t a mark on them. No forced windows. Not so much as a missing pane of glass. If you weren’t obsessive about your papers, we’d have never suspected anyone was here. I doubt Chaz Braden has those kinds of skills.”
Mark’s stomach muscles tightened. “Maybe he hired somebody. Besides, anyone could have picked that basement lock.”
“It would take a real expert not to leave at least a scratch or two. And how would Chaz even know you had Kelly’s old medical file?”
“He must have overheard me telling Earl Garnet.”
Dan sighed and took another sip from the mug with the caption SLOWLY APPROACHING FORTY written on the side. Mark always reserved it for his visits. “If you made better coffee,” he said, pulling a sour face and pushing out of his chair, “I’d stick around. As it stands, I figure the ghost who broke in here is long gone. But I do suggest you get a better lock on the basement door.”
He thanked Dan for coming and saw him to the door. As for his assertion the intruder was long gone, that could be, but Mark dug out his old baseball bat from the basement and put it in the front closet, just in case.
He laid out the contents of Kelly’s file on his kitchen table sheet by sheet, like a deck of cards in a game of solitaire. Then he went over and over them. He still couldn’t see any patterns or sequences by which he could connect one to the other.
Only guesses.
Such as the reason his father saw Kelly for therapy. The logical assumption – she’d been working through her problems with Chaz, or maybe even her unresolved issues with her parents. But why five years? Most support therapy interventions went on for twelve months, sometimes twenty-four, unlike psychoanalysis, in which the progress got measured in decades.
Or how the other two matters she’d mentioned in her letter – I can’t leave and let them go unresolved – might tie in with the discrepancies in her phone bill. Suppose she actually reached Chaz at the maternity center and threatened to go public about the M and M cases if he didn’t let her go. That call could have been what got her killed. It would certainly be a conversation Chaz would not want revealed. If that were the case, however, wouldn’t it have been simpler for him just to admit she’d contacted him, then make up some benign story about what was said? He shouldn’t have had to risk an elaborate lie and claim he never even spoke with her. No, there had to be some other explanation.
But empty theorizing wouldn’t get him anywhere. He needed some way to check out his hunches.
He shifted his gaze to the morbidity-mortality reports that seemed to be so in order and looked at where Melanie Collins’s signature appeared.
Last night over the phone she’d gone on at length about Chaz. A lot of what she said was, “Kelly told me he berated her night and day… Kelly said his rages frightened her… Kelly felt repulsed when he wanted sex.” Maybe Kelly also confided how Chaz mismanaged his patients. Or perhaps Melanie had seen for herself.
But would Earl mind if he called her, after being so explicit about dealing with his former classmates himself? Surely not. That was for people like Tommy Leannis, who clammed up to outsiders.
He dialed her number and got a busy signal.
Try again later.
In the meantime he went back out to the Jeep and carted in the boxes that Dan had discovered in the White House. Now why the hell had his father collected all these? he wondered, first unpacking what amounted to stacks of birth records from the home and laying them out in piles on the floor. At least they were already in chronological order, spanning the years from 1955 to 1975. He made a quick estimate of the total by counting out one hundred of the documents, then using the height of them as a measure. Approximately thirty-two hundred women delivered their babies over the twenty-year period, a good two-thirds of them in the first decade of operation. Each record had a six-digit number, same as a hospital chart, but carried no identifying information about the mother other than her age and area code. The personal data, he figured, must have been kept separate for confidentiality reasons. Flipping through them, he saw that most of the women had been young, some lived in upstate New York, but the majority came from New York City. The specifics as to the infants – sex, physical status at birth, the presence of any congenital defects – was standard. The death certificates – he’d thumbed through only twenty-one of those for the home – were in keeping with the number of babies he would have expected to die, given the perinatal mortality rate of seven per thousand that prevailed at the time. The papers also indicated that a great majority of the infants became wards of the state in public orphanages, yet in a separate pile, the records showed that the home arranged private adoptions for 180 of the babies. The bottom line – everything seemed in impeccable order.
Next he laid out the birth records for the maternity center in Saratoga Springs. There’d be no site to visit there. Dan had stuck in a note saying the building had been torn down in the 1980s, replaced by a health spa.
The height of this pile reflected nearly double the number of births at the maternity center as compared to the home, six thousand by his estimate. But the place had approximately the same number of infant deaths, only twenty to be exact. Money and good prenatal care halved the going rate for mortalities.
He spent the next few hours meticulously studying the documents but still couldn’t find anything wrong. Another time, perhaps, when he wasn’t so tired, and he began to gather up the papers, wondering if for now he shouldn’t lock everything in the White House for safekeeping. But having had virtually no sleep for thirty-six hours, he settled on putting the records in his drug safe instead.
His gut started to burn like an overused muscle, the result of too much tea, no supper, and a whole lot of frustration. He made himself a sandwich and poured a glass of milk.
This time when he called Melanie, she answered on the first ring.
“Hello?”
She sounded tired.
“Hi.”
“Mark! Are you still in New York?”
“No, I’ve retreated back to the woods.”
“Ahhh – that’s a waste.”
“I know.” He laughed.
“I’d like to see you,” she replied.
“Next time I’m in town.”
“Mark, I could use some country air.” It sounded like an order.
Whoops! “Great. Let’s arrange it sometime. But after hunting season’s over. It’s like a remake of Deliverance around here right now.” What were white lies for but to let everyone back out of embarrassing corners with feelings intact?
She gave her throaty chuckle. “How about a couple of weeks from now?” she persisted.
Oh, brother. On second thought, why not just have her come? Like nuts to the squirrels, it would give Nell and company enough to chew on the whole damn winter. “Melanie, I have to ask you something. Do you mind if we talk business a sec?”
“Shoot!” Her voice had snapped to attention.
“I’ve been going over old records related to Kelly’s death, specifically my father’s old medical chart on her. In it I found photocopies of M and M reports on two cases of dig toxicity in 1974, the year of her disappearance. Her name was on the order sheets, as well as yours. And get this, the staff person initialing the orders was hubby Chaz.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what to make of them or why they’d be there. I wondered if maybe Kelly asked my father to review the cases because she thought there was wrongdoing somewhere.”
“On the part of whom?” She sounded astonished.
“Her husband. I thought perhaps she’d been looking for something to hold over his head in order to keep him at bay, as part of her plan to leave him.”
Silence reigned for a few seconds. “I see. I suppose that makes sense.”
“What I wanted to know, Melanie, was if you can recall anything suspect about Chaz Braden’s clinical work that year. In particular, do you remember any issues around his management of patients on digoxin?”
“Not generally. Do you know the patient names?”
“Not yet. I only have chart numbers.”
She chuckled yet again, the tone a pitch higher this time. “Sorry. You’ll pardon me if I don’t recall all the cases I wrote orders on. Will you be looking up the original charts?”
“No, Earl Garnet’s getting those-” He could have kicked himself. Blurting out to the likes of Melanie Collins that Earl was helping him – what an asshole move. More than anyone, with her intuition about Kelly being in love, she could nail Earl as the man. God, he sucked like an amateur at this sleuthing stuff. “I needed someone who’d been in her class to question her contemporaries,” he quickly added. “Had to twist his arm, yet he finally agreed.”
“But Mark, I could have helped you.”
Yikes. “Oh, I knew you would, Melanie. The thing is, since I’m basically questioning if Chaz’s competency was an issue back then, the inquiry could get nasty, and I thought it better to ask someone well beyond the long arm of the Bradens.” Amazing how quickly he could come up with a credible lie when he had to.
“Chaz isn’t the brilliant man his father is,” Melanie said, after a long silence. “But he makes up for it by being fastidious. Drives people nuts, the way he always double-checks and micromanages things, yet by putting in long hours does get things done. A real workaholic. So let’s just say he wouldn’t be chief without ‘Daddy’ pulling the strings. But out and out negligence? No way. Not even ‘Daddy’ could cover that up these days.”
“What about in ‘seventy-four?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Those days he was only a few years out of a cardiac residency and up-to-date in his training, so he appeared to do pretty well. As son of the big man, he certainly got the benefit of any doubts over his clinical abilities. I don’t think anyone in the hospital besides his father and friends of Kelly knew about his weekend drinking then. We only learned of it through her and what we saw for ourselves at parties up there. The truth is, most people at NYCH didn’t even realize what a bastard he was until much later.”
“So there could have been more chance of an error by him going undetected in ‘seventy-four?”
“It’s worth a thought, isn’t it? Certainly no one would have been keeping a suspicious eye on him. Listen, Mark, I have to go. Rounds start at seven, and Monday’s always a monster for consults in the ER. When you know the names of those patients, give me a call. And I’m penciling in a visit with you for two weeks from now.”
He thanked her and said good night. The first thing that came to mind after hanging up had nothing to do with the case.
If he kept picking the Melanies of the world, he told himself, he might turn into another Collins – a middle-aged physician coming on to horny, lonely thirtysomethings for sex and company. The thought gave him the creeps. Yet if someone as successful and good-looking as she could end up that way…
He eyed his desk. Paperwork and unopened mail, never something he attended to promptly in the best of times, had piled up more than usual since Kelly’s body had been found. And he had his own monster day tomorrow, the weeks before the snow flew always being a busy period, his elderly patients needing flu shots and final checkups before they tucked themselves in for the winter. Tucking in… exactly what he needed to do for himself. He was beat. He detoured by the closet, then took himself and his trusty bat to bed.
Monday, November 19, 8:30 A.M.
New York City
The rhythmic electricity in the streets of Manhattan never changed for Earl. Even in old thirties movies Fred Astaire could be dancing along Times Square, and in the background there would be the purring motors, strident horns, thousands of teeming footsteps and bobbing heads, all syncopated to the buzz of chattering voices and leaving little doubt where Busby Berkeley or Gershwin got their inspiration. These days, he figured, those same rhythms spawned the beat to hip-hop, but the sound remained the same, and it washed over him as he walked down Second Avenue toward New York City Hospital.
Standing in the building’s shadow, waiting for the red to change at the intersection of Thirty-third, he closed his eyes. The familiar cacophony carried him back in time, to the point he imagined he would open his eyes again to find Kelly, Melanie, Tommy, and Jack at his side, impatiently waiting at that same stoplight, fretting about morning rounds.
He blinked and was alone. The two who were dearest to him in those days were dead – Jack, his closest friend, who’d sacrificed his life for him, and Kelly. Tommy had parlayed his B-student vexations into the stuff of a grade-A whine-ass, and Melanie, always a coquette, had apparently become the female counterpart to a roué.
The light changed, and he started across, huddled in his raincoat as wind and drizzle gusted up Thirty-third from the East River.
The cement-and-glass structure where he’d been forged into a doctor loomed over him, its upper stories lost in fog. For an instant it reclaimed the hold it used to exert on his nerve, jacking up his heartbeat and giving the acid in his stomach a stir before it just as quickly became simply another hospital, no different from the hundreds he’d visited in various official capacities throughout his long career.
Still, when the sliding doors opened to receive him, and hospital smells assaulted his nose, he felt caught in the crosscurrents of then and now.
Security was as meticulous as in his own St. Paul’s, the officers checking photo ID, scanning him down for metal, even having him remove his shoes. “No stinky feet,” he murmured, smiling to himself and missing Janet after his night alone in the hotel.
His grin must have made him look suspicious because a frowning guard gave him another extra thorough once-over with his wand before sending him through. But they did have his visitor’s badge waiting. Mark had obviously been on the job as far as greasing the administrative wheels.
He set out for medical records, pushing through the rush of white-coated students, interns, and residents, all scurrying after the flapping white coats of their appointed staff person and engaged in the constant banter of questions and answers that had been the method of choice for teaching medicine since the days of Socrates.
“What’s the differential of a solitary swollen red joint?” demanded an elegant gray-haired woman leading her pack into the outpatient’s department.
“Traumatic, inflammatory, septic,” a blond young man with the shortest clinical jacket in the group snapped back at her.
“Very good. Now what’s the most likely diagnosis in the inflammatory category?”
“Which joint?” demanded a woman with red hair pulled back in a ponytail.
The staff woman’s eyes arched in a show of approval. “Good question. The case we’re about to see involves a knee.”
“Gout,” the redhead said without hesitation.
The group disappeared through a swinging door.
Earl passed a treatment room off ER where another youthful trainee, this one masked and gloved, frowned mightily as he wielded a suture and hemostat over a child’s lacerated cheek. Pulling the knotted thread tight, he reached for scissors on a sterile tray, fumbled them, and they fell to the floor. Glancing around, he quickly retrieved them and brought them back into his sterile field.
It’s not my turf, Earl tried to tell himself, then thought, What the bloody hell! “Excuse me,” he said, sticking his head in the door before contaminated steel touched flesh. “Get a new set and change your gloves!”
The young man went crimson behind the white mask, even his ears turning scarlet. “Yes, sir!” he said.
Earl watched him comply, then added, “You pull that again in this lifetime, I’ll personally bounce you from the program.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned back into the corridor, but not so quickly that he missed the who-was-that-mean-ass frown appear on the would-be doctor’s brow.
Memory led him the rest of the way through the labyrinth of elevators, stairwells, and hallways to the lower levels where, in the bottom layer, like a sediment of secrets, a low-ceilinged subbasement the size of a city block held a half century’s worth of clinical files.
“A tomb,” Kelly had once called it, striking a dramatic pose, “where the fates of a million souls are stored.”
The place gave him the creeps. There had been perks, however, to their working down here on chart audits, usually at night and often alone. Earl smiled, recalling how they had sometimes put the maze created by rows and rows of shelves loaded with charts to good use, quietly engaging in a few secrets of their own.
A plump, gray-haired receptionist greeted him at the front desk. “Ah yes, Dr. Garnet, Dr. Roper had us prepare what you have clearance to review.” Bifocals dangled from around her neck on a gold chain and a pin depicting Snoopy holding a paw to his mouth, the bubble caption reading SHHH!, decorated her collar. “Here is the woman’s chart; it’s still active. As you’ll see, she’s had a ton of visits over the years, and is now a patient in our geriatric wing. Been here three months. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to talk with her. She had another stroke thirteen days ago.”
“A stroke?”
“Bessie McDonald’s her name. Tragically she’s in a coma. We got permission from her family for you to look at her charts, provided you promise to inform them what it’s all about, especially if you find anything. I’ve attached her son’s phone number to the front cover. He lives in California.”
A coma. Terrific! “Certainly I’ll notify them-”
“When I called, both he and his wife were overcome with curiosity about why you’d be interested in her case.”
“Well, thank you for your trouble-”
“Oh, no trouble at all. When our CEO tells me to do what I can in helping out a coroner, I don’t spare any effort.” She popped her glasses onto the tip of her nose, looked at him over the top of the frames, and gave him a knowing wink. “Especially when it has to do with a twenty-seven-year-old murder case.”
Jesus, so much for keeping his purpose here confidential. “Look, I don’t know who you heard that from-”
“Oh, come now, Dr. Garnet, I can put two and two together. Dr. Roper’s the coroner investigating Kelly McShane’s death, and the attending physician for the specific admission you wanted to check was Dr. Chaz Braden. What else could it be about, though I can’t imagine what the link might be…” She trailed off, clearly hoping he’d fill her in on the details.
“You don’t tell that to anyone else, understand?” Earl said instead, astounded someone so chatty could be chief guardian in an area bound by law to be a hub of confidentiality.
Her eyes opened wide with astonishment. “That’s the last thing you need to worry about.” She spoke with the you-can-trust-me sincerity of someone who actually believed her own lies. “Now as for the deceased man, his chart is in the microfilm library. It’s at the far end of the main hall-”
“I know. I did my training here and can find it okay.”
She grinned at him. “Of course. But you don’t remember me, do you?” She held out her hand. “Lena Downie. I was a clerk back then. Now I run the joint.” She gestured behind her where the administrative offices were. One of the doors had her name on it “You were one of the bright lights around here. And you’ve done well. I’ve read in the papers about your exploits.”
Earl felt his cheeks grow warm as he took her plump fingers in his palm and gently gave them a shake. “Thank you. But I’m sorry I don’t recall-”
“Don’t think anything of it. I was a skinny young woman back then. I’m a grandma now. So what’s the connection between these cases and Kelly’s murder?”
“Dr. Roper asked me to help out on a matter, and I’m not at liberty to discuss it.” Polite words, but his tone said, “None of your business!”
“I remember Dr. Roper, too,” she said, her armor not even dented by his reproach, “though he was here much more recently. A fine young physician. I also met his father once. He was a real gentleman as well.”
“Really,” Earl said, wondering what it would take to shut her up. He picked up the chart, all four volumes of it, each three inches thick – War and Peace looked slim by comparison – and carried them to a nearby desk.
“Yes. It was around the time you were a student here. I remember because I’d only been on the job a few months and got in trouble because I gave him a couple of charts to look at. He’d showed me his identification, and I thought it sufficient, his being a doctor and a coroner, without realizing he wasn’t on staff here. I nearly got fired over it. He was super though. Took all the blame – said that he hadn’t thought to go through channels and should have known better. Saved my skin, I tell you.”
Earl came to a standstill. “You remember what year that was?”
“Of course. Summer of nineteen seventy-four, when I first started. That was also the time when Kelly Braden disappeared. Was Dr. Roper Senior investigating that case, too?”
“Too?”
“Boy, that was some story back then, with all the speculation going on about what had happened to her, pointing fingers at Dr. Chaz Braden. I began to think this hospital was like Peyton Place. Wouldn’t have worked anywhere else. So come on, tell me. What have these two charts to do with Kelly?”
God, there was no stopping her. He figured any chance of keeping a low profile among anyone else within earshot had just died as well. But there might be an upside to this woman’s appetite for other people’s business. “You’ve got quite a memory, Lena.”
“People think working in records must be the dullest thing. Hey!” She gestured to the rest of the building stacked above them and leaned toward him. “Everything of importance that happens in this Casablanca comes through my domain.” She’d finally lowered her voice.
He took a look around. As far as he could see they were alone. At least he’d caught a break in that regard. But the stacks ran deep, and any number of people could be back in there. “I bet you don’t miss much either,” he whispered, still not willing to risk being overheard and hoping she’d take the cue.
She gave him a wink. “You got that right.” She’d dropped to a register suitable for a conspiracy.
“Maybe you could help me.”
She grinned. “Maybe.”
“I know it was a lot of years ago, but do you remember when exactly Dr. Roper’s father came here looking for the charts he was after that summer?”
Her smile lit up the entire basement. Obviously she enjoyed the intrigue. “How could I forget when it almost cost me my job? Toward the end of August, about two weeks after Kelly disappeared.” A look of astonishment swept over her face. “My gosh, had he discovered something?”
Earl ignored the question. “Any way you could find out what charts you gave him?”
Her expression faded, and she sadly shook her head. “Sorry. I never really looked at them.”
That would have been a bit of a long shot, he admitted. Nevertheless, the rest of story intrigued him.
He began to repeat his insistence that she not mention what they’d talked about to anyone when she squinted into the air as if trying to make out something not readily visible. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I do recall an interesting detail about those files. Never would never have remembered it if you hadn’t got me thinking. He asked for the charts the same way young Dr. Roper did this morning. Didn’t have the names, only the numbers. And something else similar. I remember having to fish one of them out of the DECEASED section back then, exactly like now.” She tapped her temple and gave him a knowing wink. “One alive. One already dead. Makes you wonder if I haven’t just given you those same two files, doesn’t it?”
He found a table off in a corner, opened the first volume, and began to read. The jumble of pipes running overhead groaned and clanked, exactly the way they had a quarter century ago, and the air ducts filled his ears with a rushing noise, making them seem plugged with water. He shivered, feeling as cut off and claustrophobic as when he’d been a student.
A particularly forlorn moan raced through the plumbing and traveled the length of the room.
Like an angry spirit, Earl thought.
That same day, 3:50 P.M.
Twenty Miles North of
Hampton Junction
“A woman having to give up her baby, now that’s a misery of the worst kind,” Nell said, grimacing as if she’d just tasted something sour. The lines ringing her face deepened into a map of disgust. “All those girls up there, shamed into hiding, simply because they fell in love with the wrong man at the wrong time.”
“Did you know anybody who worked there?” Mark asked.
“Nobody who’s still alive. The heyday of the place was in the fifties, before the pill. You’d be surprised at the number of women who had to find so-called homes like that, or worse, deal with some butcher in a back room with a pair of knitting needles. Thank God the kids in the sixties freed sex from the prudes.”
He knew from experience that to get anything from Nell, he had to first let her ramble about whatever was on her mind – her way of downloading mentally to make room for whatever he had on his mind. As she talked, he idly gazed around the interior of her living room. The log walls were aged a deep brown, but she’d kept them polished to a rich luster with wood oils. Small windows, a necessity to keep out the cold in the era before thermal glass, prevented what little afternoon light remained from making its way inside. Yet the place wasn’t gloomy. A fire in the stone hearth at their feet provided its own special illumination, and oil lamps – tall, elegant, and bright enough to read by – filled the house with a golden glow. Not that the cabin didn’t have electricity. Her son put in recessed lighting along with baseboard heaters decades ago, yet she favored the softness of flame.
To his left a partially drawn curtain hung over the entrance to an adjacent room, where a brass bed covered with a handmade quilt – any antique dealer would kill for it – filled most of the space. Photos of her children and grandchildren adorned the walls. She’d positioned them so they kept watch on her while she slept. Off to one side a small extension housed a modest bathroom with an old-fashioned steel tub.
At his right a doorway opened into an equally tiny kitchen dominated by a magnificent woodstove. On it she’d prepared meals for her two children during the years she raised them alone, her husband having been killed in the Battle of the Bulge during the final months of World War II. Even now she preferred its steady heat for baking to the gas range that her daughter had had installed so she needn’t haul wood anymore.
That someone so old should live in such isolation appalled a lot of people in town, including the county social worker. Yet her son and daughter, each living on an opposite corner of the country, never pressured Nell to put herself in a home, and Mark supported the decision. He also certified her fit to drive the Subaru station wagon parked outside, provided she passed a road test in Saratoga each year. Geriatric wards, he thought. However much they dressed them up with balloons, sing-alongs, and bingo, they were death row, and definitely not for her. One day somebody would find her lying where she fell, and he’d make a final house call. Better that than sentencing her to die a day at time. It was the kind of judgment call that kept physicians second-guessing themselves, and every snowstorm he worried about her falling or lying helpless somewhere, unable to use the panic button she wore around her neck.
“… back then, if you loved the wrong man at the wrong time, you were treated worse than a murderer.” She ended with a cackle that might have split stone.
“When I phoned to invite myself for a chat today, Nell, you said you could tell me secrets about that home for unwed mothers.”
“Supposing I did. Maybe I just said that to lure you here because I like your visits. Have some more tea.” Before he could decline, she’d refilled his cup to the brim with tea she’d made from leaves, not a bag. “And a scone,” she added, waving a platter of them fresh out of the oven under his nose. “Remember what I said about being good in the kitchen?”
He grinned, and took one. “Umm… that’s scrumptious.” He was swallowing as he spoke. “You must have been something in the bedroom, Nell,” he added, figuring he could indulge her raunchy sense of humor for once.
She smiled, and for a second there flashed as youthful a sparkle as he’d ever seen in her eyes. “My husband and I were very much in love, Mark,” she said in all earnestness. “Like your mom and dad. They had that special thing, too.” She sat erect, proud, like a queen on a throne, secure where she’d reigned supreme as a mother and wife.
Any doubts Mark had about letting her stay here until the end of her days vanished in that instant, at least until the next big snowstorm.
An easy silence fell between them. He took it as permission to get on with his questions. “So tell me, Nell, did you ever hear anybody who worked in the home hint at shady stuff going on?”
“You mean illegal? No, not that I can think of.”
“Then what secrets did you mean?”
“The local love nests, who did it with whom, and which ones ended up with a love child. But I’m not telling you any names. Oh, I know some of the other dried-up old biddies around town might like talking about that stuff, having nothing better to do for sex. Not me. There’s no pleasure to be had in raking over that kind of heartache.”
“You knew local women who had babies there?”
She paused before answering. “I knew of a few.”
“Did you ever talk to any of them about it? How they were treated? What it was like?”
She grimaced. “Yeah, I talked to one. Talked to her a lot. She… she was a friend of mine.”
“And what did your friend say?”
“What do you think she said? It broke her heart. She felt sad and cried all the time. Was miserable.”
“Can you tell me any specifics? What she told you they put her through?”
Nell fixed her gaze on the fire and took a sip of tea.
Mark had learned long ago that unlike most small-town gossips who gave as good as they got when it came to passing on juicy tidbits, she preferred to hoard her information and force others to coax it out of her, thereby increasing the value of her revelations. But the look of distaste on her face told him her reluctance to talk now was sincere. For a moment he feared she might not tell him anything at all. “Look, I don’t need to know her name. Just what she said about how the place operated.”
Nell hadn’t appeared to hear him. Just when he’d resigned himself to not learning anything helpful, she said, “The worst moment was when they whipped the baby away without letting her see it. She didn’t even know if it was a boy or girl.”
Mark said nothing, hoping she’d continue.
“Afterward she spent most of her time in her room. They gave a woman a couple of weeks to recuperate back then. She could have gone outside to walk, but could hear the babies crying through the open windows in the nursery. They kept them on a separate floor, away from the mothers, of course, but they didn’t ship them off to the orphanage or hand them over to adoptive parents right away. ‘To let them stabilize,’ one of the nurses told her when she asked why. Knowing she might be listening to her own child proved too much. The crying noises began to sound like screams. Even in her own room the sound came through, but there she could at least bury her head in a pillow to keep from hearing it…”
Nell’s words reinvoked the slimy cold sensation he’d felt while standing in the desolate remains of that delivery room. It was all legal, though, charitable even, according to the times, and Nell probably wasn’t going to tell him anything that would explain his father’s interest in the home. Nevertheless, he settled back, sipped his tea, and continued to listen, just in case.
“… even little things she found to be a humiliation, such as how her file was red, and all the other women’s were green, to tag her as a local. Someone told her, ‘It’s for your own protection, so we can keep your records in a special lockup, away from the prying eyes of any staff who live nearby and might know you.’ I suppose the idea made sense, but it just added to her feeling she had something to be ashamed about.”
Mark shook his head at the sorrow of it all, then changed the topic to what he hoped would be more fertile ground, asking her questions about the week of Kelly’s disappearance, specifically if Nell had seen or heard anything of Chaz Braden being around when he normally should have been in New York. “Remember, it was the Monday we didn’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore,” he reminded her, knowing she was a staunch Democrat.
Nothing.
He inquired about Samantha McShane and if anyone had seen her in the vicinity around that time.
Nell gave an indignant snort. “The woman hardly ever came into Hampton Junction. Like she was too good for us. The few occasions she did, when Kelly was little, I mostly saw her in Tim Madden’s drugstore buying medicine while going on about how sick her child was. One day word got around that she tried that act with your father, and he set her straight. Kelly seemed to be more visible after that set-to, riding her bike into town and playing with local kids as she got older. But once Kelly grew up, left home, and married Chaz Braden, her parents weren’t down here much, and eventually they sold the place. Probably because the Bradens virtually blackballed them from the social circuit. I used to play cards with a number of housekeepers who worked for that set, and they told me anyone who wanted a Braden at their party didn’t dare invite Samantha or Walter McShane. From what I heard she became pretty much a recluse in her New York place as well. But why are you asking about her? You think she had something to do with the murder?”
“Now don’t you start that story, Nell.”
And so it went. Nothing she told him even hinted at a lead.
As it grew darker outside, snow flew horizontally against a double row of little squared panes that overlooked the Hudson Valley. He got up and peered outside. In the growing darkness snow clouds seemed to be building up over the mountains to the east, yet he could still see the river below, gray as a snake as it coiled through the hills. Despite the smallness and age of the cabin, it looked as solid as a well-made ship, and the wind driving the flakes couldn’t disturb the quiet coziness within. He returned to his chair, accepted another cup of tea, and their talk moved on to the coming of winter.
“There were some funny things, though, come to think of it,” she said after a pause in the conversation.
“Funny things?”
“About that home. You’d think with all the charitable spirit behind it, they’d have done more to make the place a little bit nicer.”
“How could they, with a forbidding building like that to start with?”
“They had enough land to make it like a park in there, or at least put in a garden. I remember Ginny Strang, God bless her dear departed soul, telling me she suggested as much when she worked in the place. The women would have liked tending it for something to do, she figured. As it was, they only had a half-finished lawn to walk on and pretty much nothing to occupy them. Well, the idea was turned down flat.”
All part of their punishment, he thought, more ghosts from the cryptlike rooms rising to stir his anger. “Obviously, you should have been running the place, Nell.”
“I would have been glad to. But that’s another thing. The way they hired people. Very few locals. And they never took anyone full-time.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t know why. Lots were willing to work from here, nurses trained in the war, but they only gave people two or three shifts a week, and mostly picked outsiders over us from Hampton Junction.” She sniffed as if freshly offended. “I guess once again we weren’t good enough.”
“Now, Nell, it could be just as they did with your friend – their wanting to ensure the privacy of the mothers,” he said, trying to mollify her. “With different staff all the time, and none of them likely to have any social contacts beyond the place of work, the patients would probably feel more anonymous.”
She puckered her face at what he said and continued to look miffed.
“Come on, don’t get upset over nothing,” he pressed. Maybe he couldn’t “cure” her knee, but he at least should be able to get her out of a snit. “I know it backfired for her, but given the censorious climate of those days, it makes a sick kind of sense. It’s certainly the opposite of how we hire today, bending over backward to keep the same people around so the patients get to know who’s taking care of them.”
“Then how come it was identical to what happened at that fancy-schmancy maternity center the Bradens ran in Saratoga? No need for women to feel ashamed there.”
“How do you mean?”
“They hired a few former nurses from Hampton Junction to work there as well, but none of them could get a full-time job at that place either.” She finished with her scrawny head as erect as an eagle’s and a so-there glare.
Snow made the dusk luminous. Even with four-wheel drive, whenever he topped thirty miles an hour the Jeep started to fishtail toward the ditch, and he had to wrestle the wheel against the pull of the slush. The road out to Nell’s place was so infrequently traveled it was the last priority for the plows.
He rummaged through his CD holder and soon he crawled along to the breathy voice of Diana Krall singing “The Look of Love.” The car heater quickly warmed the interior of the Jeep to the point he could open his jacket, and the wipers beat a steady rhythm against the storm. With his headlights switched low to reduce their glare against the flakes, he easily distinguished the swell of the road from the steep drop of its shoulders on either side. Better straddle the middle, he decided, having the highway all to himself and not wanting to skid anywhere near the edge.
He continued to feel disappointed that, pleasant as his visit with Nell had been, she’d told him nothing new about Kelly’s murder or why his father might have been interested in either the maternity center or the home. Somehow, after his initial good luck with Kelly’s old file and spotting Earl Garnet’s role in her life, he’d assumed he was on a roll, that he’d continue to round up leads at the same speed.
Now he felt at a dead end, the next step as obscure and dark as the woods on either side of him.
He hoped Earl had fared better today. He patted his cellular phone in the breast pocket of his shirt, wishing he knew Earl’s number, which lay safely buried in the wallet he was sitting on and would be hell to get out. No matter. He’d be home soon. The traction felt more secure now that he hogged the center of the highway, and he gently eased his speed up to forty miles an hour.
Settling back, he watched the sweep of flakes across his windshield as Krall drifted into another song. She seemed to be whispering it into his ear.
“… I get along without you very well…”
A loud thwack sounded on his right, something stung the side of his face, and the glass immediately in front of him shattered into a silvery web of cracks around a small black hole.
“Jesus!” He jumped in fright against the restraints of his seat belt and inadvertently floored the accelerator. The Jeep lurched ahead, immediately swiveling to the left. He instinctively jammed on the brakes, and felt the staccato pump of the antilock system, but too late. In the snow-spotted blaze of his headlights, he glimpsed the edge of the road as it flew under him and the hood of his car nose-dived down a ten-foot embankment toward a ravine of open water lined with rocks. Amidst a deafening bam of impact and crunch of crumpling metal, he flew forward against the chest strap of his seat belt only to be pounded backward by the airbag exploding out of the steering wheel.
He felt he’d been hit by a giant boxing glove and struggled to breathe. After a few seconds that felt like minutes, he managed to suck in a breath.
He sat in total silence except for the howling of the wind and the occasional ping from the remains of his motor as it cooled down. Though the engine had cut out, the dash lights remained on. He brought his hand up to his stinging cheek and felt it covered with tiny sharp fragments. He looked over to the passenger door, and instantly a searing pain shot through the corner of his eye. “Shit!” he screamed, covering it with his palm, but not before he saw a pattern of splintered glass around a central hole identical to the one in front.
He’d been shot at! One of those fucking drunk hunters had taken a shot at him.
The burning in his eye grew worse, but fury overruled pain. He snapped open his safety belt, and after a couple heaves with his shoulder against the door, managed to push it open and crawl out. “You fucking asshole!” he hollered at the woods on the other side of the road where the shot had come from. “I could have been killed!”
A steady rush of wind through the trees, and the soft hiss of flakes striking the ground amplified the silence.
“You son of a bitch, come and help me. I’ve got glass in my eye.”
No answer.
Christ, would the shooter just run away? “Help me, dammit!”
Nothing.
Son of a bitch.
Still cupping his injured eye, he squinted with the left at the damaged Jeep.
The right high beam, still shining bright, faced straight down into a shallow stream of water that he only then realized he was standing in. The ambient light showed him the front wheel on his side of the vehicle had become part of the doorframe. And he could smell gasoline, a lot of it. Pushing off from where he’d been leaning on the hood, he turned and started to climb back up toward the highway. But his boot slipped on a rock, and he pitched forward into the water, landing on his hands and knees. “Goddamn it,” he yelled, the pain in his eye trebling to the point he hardly noticed the burning cold up to his wrists and thighs. He quickly got to his feet and jammed his fingers under his arms, where they continued to burn. Some water ran down his legs into his boots, soaking the lower half of his trousers, but the all-important feet and toes stayed mostly dry.
“You’ve got to help me!” he hollered one more time, knowing the gutless creep had probably run off, saving his own skin rather than facing up to his brainless act. He didn’t need his help anyway, he thought, reaching in his shirt pocket for his cell phone.
It was gone.
Oh God, he thought, looking down where he stood. By the reflected glow of the headlight, he saw the end of it sticking a half inch out of the water. It had fallen out when he fell.
He snatched it up and flipped it open.
Dead.
He heard a soft whump behind him, and a sudden orange glow came from beneath the Jeep.
Ignoring the pain in his eye, he started to run along the streambed. If it blew, he’d get a backful of steel.
He cut right, and started scrambling up rocks coated in snow. He reached the road and, crouched low, made a beeline for the far side, slipping as he ran.
The Jeep exploded just as he reached the far ditch. He threw himself facedown on the snow-covered dirt and heard bits of metal fly over his head. Peeking through his fingers with his good eye, he saw the entire forest light up in the glow, the trees and glittering ground between cast in flickering gold.
That’s when he saw him.
In a growth of young birch a man stood watching, as casually as if at a bonfire, his eyes fixed on the burning car, gun held at the ready across his chest. The peak of a camouflaged hunting cap hid his face.
Mark’s insides crawled toward his throat.
What kind of creep would deliberately shoot someone off the road, then hang around watching?
A very dangerous one.
The initial burst of light subsided, throwing the interior of the woods into darkness.
Mark riveted his gaze in the direction where he’d seen the man. Could the guy be waiting to take another shot, the initial one intended to hit him after all? He’d obviously ignored the shouts for help.
No, don’t go overboard here. The man’s hanging around didn’t necessarily mean he intended to fire again or meant to seriously injure him in the first place. The guy could be watching to make sure he got out okay. Probably he hadn’t even expected the car would blow up, and was now shitting bricks, not knowing whether his “prank” had ended up killing someone.
Not that he, Mark Roper, was about to put the asshole’s mind to rest by standing up to show he’d gotten safely away.
Metal groaned as it twisted in the heat, lightbulbs blew apart with loud popping noises, and a sickening perfume of burning paint, melting plastic, and rubber filled the air.
But try as he might, Mark couldn’t ignore the darker possibilities running through his head. Icy rivulets of melted snow dripped down his back, and his eye throbbed more fiercely. The man could be a certified crazy. Having taken a potshot and done this much damage, he might decide to finish off his prey.
Or an even worse scenario: This was no random act, and Mark had been deliberately ambushed.
After all, in Chaz Braden he had an enemy with reason to want him out of the way. But how could that asshole or anyone else have known to lie in wait for him on this road at this time? No one followed him on the way out to Nell’s. There hadn’t been another car on the road.
He continued to stare into the forest. Had the man with the gun seen him run to this hiding spot?
Maybe not. He’d bent low and dashed to the shadows of the ditch before the blast illuminated the place he’d crossed.
But the guy would only have to check around the remains of his Jeep to find boot prints in the snow. What if the idiot took a notion to follow him?
Time to get farther away.
He ran along the ditch. After a hundred yards, repeated spills into a creek that meandered under the snow had him soaking wet. As he put more distance between him and where the man had been in the woods, the wind cut through his clothing, making him shiver. He’d soon be in big trouble with hypothermia if he stayed out in this for very long.
Yet the nearest house was Nell’s, ten miles back, and the first houses at the outskirts of town lay ten miles ahead.
Normally an easy run, he might not make either because of the cold.
His own home was less than three miles away, on the other side of a range of hills to his right. The distance wasn’t any big deal – a forty-minute walk in the city, plus he was in good shape – and the forest would provide cover, both from a pursuer and the wind. But it was across rough country, a trek difficult enough during the day, let alone at night.
He peered up over the edge of the highway.
Not a headlight in either direction. He could easily freeze to death waiting for someone to come along.
He looked over toward the fiery wreckage again. The glowing orb of light encasing it created the impression of a macabre Christmas ornament suspended in the darkness. At the edge of the sphere he saw movement, and the silhouette of the hunter strode across the road.
The man stood a few moments facing the fire, his back to Mark. He was as tall as Chaz Braden, but bulkier. Yet winter clothing under the camouflage clothing could produce that effect. Still cradling the gun, he reached into his outfit, pulled out a hip flask, and took a long drink.
Enough trying to second-guess a creep, especially one who was all boozed up.
Mark turned and, staying low, ran to the woods. A few yards into the trees he found it considerably darker, but could still see the pale surface of the snow on the ground and the trunks of the trees ahead of him. Holding his hands out to ward off any low branches, he pushed deeper, balancing speed with stealth. His only hope would be to get as much of a lead as possible before his attacker found his trail.
Glancing back over his shoulder and through the trees, Mark saw the man’s silhouetted form circle the car, then kneel where tracks would have been. The figure reached into his pocket, and, seconds later, a tiny beam of light shot out from his hand toward the ground.
Mark pressed ahead all the faster.
The floor of the forest sloped steeply upward, and his breathing quickly became labored. The trees overhead were old, big enough to have blocked the sun for the last hundred years, so there was little new undergrowth to ensnare him. But the rocks and wet leaves beneath the snow made traction difficult, and with each step forward he seemed to slide halfway back. Every now and then a branch caught him across the face, and the pain in his injured eye seared as hot as if a live coal were stuck in it.
But up he went, able to use the left eye by squinting the injured one closed. Having adapted to the dark, he could see enough to grab low-hanging branches and pull himself along whenever his feet started to skid.
Taking another glance backward, he saw the man with the rifle following his thin cone of light across the highway toward Mark’s first hiding place.
He kept going up, figuring he was now a hundred and twenty yards from the road and had probably climbed a hundred feet of elevation.
Two ridges lay ahead, each about five hundred feet high with a shallow valley between them, some of it open ground. But if he could reach the first ridge well ahead of the hunter, he could widen his lead going down the far slope, possibly even get out of rifle range. That might discourage his pursuer from following him.
His right eye, tearing profusely, clamped itself so tightly shut in reflex to the pain that he could barely keep his left one open. He had to use the fingers of his left hand to pry the lids apart. Even then he couldn’t manage more than a squint and found his field of vision cut in half.
He tried again to glance behind him. The man, little more than a dark shape in the open snow at the highway’s edge, stood directly below him now and looked right up to where he climbed.
He can’t see me, Mark thought, keeping his panic in check.
His tracker shouldered the rifle and started after him, once more following the thin beam of light, presumably playing it over his footprints.
Mark estimated he had a hundred-and-fifty-yard lead. Not much of an advantage over a bullet. He redoubled his efforts. Everything depended on how far down the other side of the ridge he could get before the gunman reached the peak and drew a bead on him.
His breathing grew more ragged, and his boots kept slipping, sapping energy from his legs until his calves burned. But at least he wasn’t cold. The exertion made him warm, so much so that as sweat began to cling to his shirt, he hardly noticed his wet pants. Now and then he scooped a handful of slush into his mouth and gulped it down between gasps of breath. The coolness actually felt good. But as soon as he stopped to rest, his damp clothes would accelerate heat loss and quicken the onset of hypothermia.
But as much as the trees blocked the wind down here, high overhead it roared through the branches, obliterating any noises the man below made. That better work both ways, he thought. Whenever one of the low limbs he grabbed as a handhold snapped off with a crack, he imagined it could be heard for a mile. He tried not to think of the man stopping, unshouldering his rifle, and aiming at the sound. He took yet another furtive look. Mark could no longer see him, not even the thin beam of light. But he could see his own trail, leading to him like a tracer bullet.
Up he went, his legs and arms aching from the effort. He could only hope the man behind him had as much trouble.
As the slope became steeper, more slippery, he had to reach directly in front of him to grab rocks and roots buried in the ground so as to propel himself upward. He mustn’t slip now, or he’d slide a lot more than a few steps, possibly all the way to the feet of his pursuer. He tested each handhold before actually gripping it, his exposed fingers aching with wet and cold, and kicked at every toehold to secure an extra half inch of footing.
He must be near the top, he told himself. The wind sounded louder. And some of what he crawled over became bare rock. In spots it became even too steep to hold an accumulation of snow, and he crawled over bare rock, part of a granite spine that ran the length of the crest. That meant no tracks. Mark felt a sudden burst of elation. If the top was just as bare, he could not only get ahead of the son of a bitch, but run along the ridge before starting down, then lose him altogether.
He hoisted himself over a ledge and stood on a shelf of stone in a full blast of icy cold. He’d made it. He also instantly started to freeze. His damp clothes flattened against his skin, and the chill cut through him as if he had nothing on. The worst were his fingers, which immediately cramped and curled into claws. But the stony ground beneath his feet, though coated with ice, had been blown clean of snow just as he’d hoped.
He quickly looked around, making sure his would-be assassin hadn’t somehow beaten him by taking a different route. To the right and left he saw only naked rock disappearing into the gloom. On the horizon in front of him, the wind was rolling back the cloud, exposing a dazzling strip of stars and a full moon low in the sky. He must get to the safety of the woods before it got any higher. Once it lit up the snowscape below, he’d be like a mouse running from a hawk in the clearings.
Huddled low and keeping his feet wide apart so as not to slip, he thrust his hands under his arms and scurried along the top of the ridge. After about a hundred yards he jumped down onto a bushy shallow ledge on the far side. He saw a gradual, snow-covered slope fifteen feet beneath him. Once there he would be a dozen strides from the trees. He’d need to smooth over any prints he left, then count on the wind to do the rest. With a bit of luck, the man behind him might have already lost the trail and not be able to spot it again.
He moved to ease himself over the rocky edge and lower himself to the ground when a movement in the darkness below, another fifty yards farther to his left, caught his eye.
He stood absolutely still.
Staring down into the shadows, he saw nothing more and thought he must have imagined it.
Until a shape darker than the woods crept toward him and quickly became a human form.
But it couldn’t be.
He had such a head start on the man. How could he be here already?
Choices raced through his mind. Should he scramble back down the other side? Stay crouched on the ledge? Maybe he hadn’t been seen yet. Or any second there’d be a bullet. He drew his breath, determined not to scream and beg.
The figure crossed about ten yards below him. Mark could easily see the dark outline of a rifle barrel held upward toward the sky. But the man’s head seemed turned toward the forest, cocked to one side as if he listened for something down there. Not once did he glance up where Mark lay crouched.
Was it the same person who’d first shot at him? Had he found a less steep way up after all? Or was it someone else? His build looked slimmer, though in the dark Mark couldn’t be sure. An accomplice of the man who’d pursued him, perhaps, lying in wait, knowing his partner would chase the prey up to him?
Whoever it was remained focused on the forest below, looking down the hill, away from the ridge.
Some accomplice.
Mark breathed as softly as he could. The cold continued to rip through him, and he started to shiver. He clamped his jaws closed to keep his teeth from chattering.
The man beneath him continued to listen and stare into the woods, the white vapor of his breath whipping into the night.
If he turned, they’d be looking right at each other. Mark quietly curled into a ball and crept back against the bushes, burying his head in his arms to mask the white traces of his own breath in the frost. With his good eye he squinted along the ridge to see if the man he’d thought was on his heels had arrived.
No one.
Was the man not thirty feet from him the gunman?
No, Mark finally decided. From all the years he’d hiked and played around these hills he knew for certain there was no shortcut.
So who was this guy?
Just another hunter out poaching who had nothing to do with his pursuer?
Or is it me he’s listening for?
His shivering grew worse. His fingers ached. His eye throbbed.
He glanced once more along the ridge.
It was fully bathed in moonlight now.
There, against the sky, appeared the shape of a man climbing into view, a rifle on his back. An instant later he knelt and probed the ground around his feet with a penlight.