Mortal Remains (8 page)

He pictured them at the Plaza. Had she been as rapturous and exuberant as she sounded in her writing? Was his father happy for her? Did they order champagne? The image of them toasting her well-deserved joy, oblivious to death being so near, filled Mark with sadness. Dreams could be so puny, struggle, hope, and daring so futile. She was on the verge of achieving everything – being a doctor, finding a man who loved her, making a clean break with her past. It made her moment of celebration seem all the more cruel.

Then a chill that had nothing to do with the cold shimmied through him.

That meeting, if it took place, also marked what would be the final two months of his father’s life.

10:00 P.M.

Buffalo, New York

“Can we do a cuddle sandwich now, Daddy?”

Earl looked up from his computer screen to see Brendan, dazed and tousled, totter through the study door. “What are you doing awake?”

“Isn’t Mummy home yet?”

“I’m afraid not.” He stood and picked the boy up. “But it’s back to sleep for you.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s very late.”

“I mean why isn’t she home?”

The vagaries of labor had sabotaged yet another evening of all three of them being together, but try and explain that to a four-year-old. “I told you, sometimes babies don’t want to come out on time,” he said, placing him in bed and tucking in his covers.

“Can’t she make them?”

“Sometimes, but not tonight.”

“She could holler real loud at them, like she does for us when we’re playing outside, and it’s time to eat.”

He grinned down at the budding obstetrical genius. “Mummy won’t be home until long after you’re asleep.”

“I can stay awake.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Look. My eyes are open wide.” He scissored his lids apart with his fingers and grinned like some goofy space creature.

Earl slowly reached toward him with twitching fingers. “Not for long.”

Brendan started to giggle. “Yes, for long.”

“But Mr. Tickle’s here.”

His small hands flew out to grab Earl’s. “No, not Mr. Tickle,” he squealed, wriggling with delight in his bed. “Cuddle sandwich! Cuddle sandwich!”

“Time to sleep, little man.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“Hey, you’re as relentless as your mother.”

“What’s ‘rentless’?”

“Relentless. It means you never give up.”

“Do I get a cuddle sandwich?”

“Okay. Tomorrow morning, you can crawl into bed between Mummy and me, but not until the sun comes up.”

“Promise?”

“You bet. Now good night, and let’s see who can give the strongest hug.”

Brendan’s arms flew around Earl’s neck and squeezed for all their worth. The embrace had the restorative power of a resuscitation. “Night, Daddy,” he said.

Earl gently held him a second longer, pronounced him the winner, and turned out the light.

A quarter of an hour later, alone in his own bed, except for Muffy sprawled on her back, he once again wrestled with what to tell Janet. There’d been small follow-up stories on the evening newscasts, and other New York papers posted updates on their web sites. The only new development was that the NYPD had turned the investigation over to the local authorities in the Adirondacks who had found the remains. Anyone with pertinent information on the case should contact Sheriff Dan Evans or Dr. Mark Roper, coroner. Earl recognized a slough when he saw it, having had his own share of unwanted work dumped on him.

At first he’d felt relief. Recalling the sleepy countryside surrounding Chaz Braden’s estate, he couldn’t imagine there being much of a police force there. Any attention to her murder would probably focus on local acquaintances of hers. It might even be directed at Chaz again, and this time subject his alibi for the day she disappeared to the rigors of small-town scrutiny. After all, weren’t rural murders more apt to get solved than urban ones, what with everybody being into everybody else’s business? It was their equivalent to live theater. Rather than draw the curtains and remain uninvolved, people noticed things, stored them up, and kept them at the ready for later tellings. As long as the case was out of the NYPD’s hands, no one would be stirring up old memories in his former classmates, and he might be home free. So why say anything to Janet and worry her for nothing?

Because he felt as if he was betraying her by staying silent.

He rolled over and picked up the original, well-creased
New York Herald
article from his nightstand and studied it again. The name of the local coroner, Dr. Mark Roper, seemed vaguely familiar. Now why, he wondered, did it resonate?

Then he remembered.

Kelly had sometimes talked about a Dr. Roper. He was the man who encouraged her to go to medical school and whom she often visited, confiding her problems to him whenever she went up to Hampton Junction. He even counseled her to escape her marriage to Chaz.

Could this Mark Roper be the same man? Hell, if he was, he must be in his early seventies. And that would mean trouble if Kelly had told him everything. The guy could be making a beeline to find him right now, which would take about a day. Shit, he might already have contacted the Buffalo authorities and a cruiser could be on the way to pick him up.

Earl lay still. Feeling his heart start to race, he fought the compulsion to get up and peek through the bedroom window to make sure that a squad car wasn’t pulling up to the front door.

But had she referred to that doctor as Mark? It didn’t sound right. Yet a second physician called Roper in so small a place was unlikely.

He got out of bed and went to his study to check the directory of licensed physicians for New York State. He skimmed through all the Ropers, finding only one whose office address was Hampton Junction. Except it couldn’t be Kelly’s Dr. Roper. This man’s license number indicated he’d been in practice only seven years.

The original Dr. Roper’s son? he wondered. That could also be problematic if the father were alive and capable of discussing what he remembered about Kelly. The name Earl Garnet might still come up.

He undressed and returned to bed, hoping he could escape into sleep, but thoughts of Kelly persisted. He found himself drifting back to 1974.

It had been the time of Watergate, Nixon’s ignominious slide toward the disgrace of his resignation, when the anatomy of the president’s self-destruction, like the Vietnam War, was documented in wall-to-wall television coverage. His downfall seemed suited to the little screen, running daily as it did with the incremental revelations of a soap opera, something Earl and his classmates could tune in to after skipping weeks of episodes without feeling behind in the story. As medical students in their most clinical year yet, they had little time to pay it more attention. But they never missed
M*A*S*H
.

At the movies, portraits of evil topped the big box office hits. Robert De Niro emblazoned himself on everyone’s memory in
Godfather, Part II
; but for making them cringe, nobody topped Roman Polanski when he sliced open Jack Nicholson’s nose in
Chinatown
.

As for music, they couldn’t get through a day on the wards without hearing the radio blast Paul Anka’s “Having my Baby” or Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.” In the OR surgeons cut and sewed to newcomer Elton John’s big hit, “Bennie and the Jets.”

But to Earl’s gang, only one troubadour counted.

Thousands of tiny flames, each a point of light held aloft, filled the darkness.

Bob Dylan stepped forward on the stage.

Robbie Robertson stood to the right of him, lean as a silhouette hunched over a guitar, The Band at his back.

You say you love me,

And you’re thinkin’ of me,

But you know you could be wrong.

He snarled the last word, loud and long.

The crowd roared the words with him.

“You sing that like you mean it,” Jack MacGregor called to Kelly. Shadows played over his thin face, resculpting its hollows.

“You better believe I do,” she yelled back. Her eyes danced in the flicker of the tiny fires.

Earl had rarely seen her look so radiant.

… you go your way

and I go mine.

It was at that moment she slipped her hand into his and simply held it, the darkness preventing anyone from seeing.

Melanie Collins leaned toward him from his other side. “Some study group,” she said, then laughed.

“And we’ll be payin’ dearly for it, children,” Tommy Leannis added from his end of the row, the musical lilt of his Irish sounding false. His constant fear of failure emanated off him like a bad smell and made him a fifth wheel. Yet he insisted on tagging along whenever they knocked off the books for a night, as if he was just as afraid to be alone with all the material they still had to learn.

“It’s all right, Tommy,” Kelly hollered back at him, never letting go of Earl’s hand. “If an old woman like me can get through, what have you got to worry about? Top five, all of us,” she predicted, sounding confident in the din.

… Then time will tell just who fell,

And who’s been left behind…

Earl’s senses had contracted solely to the feel of her fingers entwined in his. He kept his eyes on the stage, uncertain how to respond. He already knew he loved her, and before that night had wondered if she felt just as strongly about him. But he’d never dared to speak his feelings, frightened that the crystal clarity of such words would shred the fragile, amorphous limbo in which they remained close friends, able to speak intimately of everything else, without ever trespassing on her marriage. Yet this sudden overture – her fingers played over his like flames – invited him to risk that step, and the possibility exhilarated him. Feeling her start to withdraw, he immediately tightened his grip, and she gently squeezed back. He stole a look sideways and saw her staring straight ahead, apparently enraptured by the music. Then she smiled, slowly, as though savoring something delicious, and her hand clung hard to his.

After the concert all of them trooped toward the subway, arms linked and voices raised in loud renditions of what they’d just heard.

Jack, Melanie, and Tommy scooted across the intersection at Forty-second Street ahead of them. “I don’t want to go home,” Kelly whispered, as she and Earl waited at the red light.

“Where then?” said Earl, trembling inside, all the time wondering,
What about your husband?
But he was too intoxicated by her to put the brakes on.

“Offer to stay behind until I get a taxi,” she whispered before they rushed to join their friends.

He nodded.

“Guys, I’m going to take a taxi tonight,” she announced when they reached them. “It’s too late for a woman alone.”

“You three go ahead. I’ll make sure she gets one,” Earl said, certain they’d see through him. “No cabbie in his right mind would stop for a gang of rowdies like you.”

“Well, I’m insulted,” Jack quipped.

“Come, children. ‘Tis back downtown where we belong,” said Tommy, linking arms again with Melanie. Then all three of them disappeared down the entrance to the Forty-second Street station, their voices echoing back above ground until the noise of traffic swallowed up their off-key singing.

Earl felt acutely self-conscious.
What now?
he wondered, turning to look at Kelly.

She studied him a few seconds, then moved closer and took his hand. The wind played with her long hair, and strands of it brushed against his face.

“Earl, whatever happens between us, just remember that my marriage to Chaz is finished.” Her voice sounded as steady and matter-of-fact as if she were giving a case history on one of their patients. “He’s a brute, and I intend to leave him. That mess has nothing to do with you.”

Her face upturned to his, the glitter of the streetlights captured in her eyes, the scent of her – all drew him in. He lowered his head and gently kissed her.

He awoke to find Janet leaning over him, her lips caressing his. “Hi, love,” she said, glancing down to where the covers slipped below his waist. “You seem happy to see me.”

Wednesday, November 7, 2:30 A.M.

Geriatric Wing,

New York City Hospital

Bessie woke up shivering.

God, had they turned the heat off?

She huddled deeper under her blankets, and realized her nightgown was soaked, her skin clammy.

What was going on? She’d never had night sweats before.

And they weren’t welcome, usually being the portent of a serious problem. An infection, some inflammatory condition, even an occult carcinoma – her mind automatically scrolled through the list, until she put a stop to it. No point in getting ahead of herself. The proper thing to do would be to see if they kept recurring, then tell her doctors. A solitary sweat didn’t necessarily mean much. But she should take her temperature. Whether she had a fever, and if so, how high, would be important to know. A big spike would shift the diagnosis toward an infectious cause; low grade, it could signify anything.

But she didn’t feel feverish.

If anything, she was really freezing, as in cool to the touch, not hot the way someone feels when they have a fever with the flu or pneumonia.

And she was hungry. Her stomach seemed clamped in on itself because it was so empty. That was new. Since entering the hospital she’d practically no appetite at all.

She reached for her call button to summon her nurse and ask for a thermometer.

Then hesitated.

The night shift here were often a bitchy bunch. Most were floats, especially on geriatric floors where the mission was custodial, not nursing in the curative sense. Always understaffed, they rarely missed an opportunity to express what a burden the elderly were. Most requests for the simplest of items, like a bedpan or medication for pain, they met with rolled eyes and exaggerated sighs. They saved outright contempt for those who committed the ultimate crime of placing extra demands on them by being sick as well as old.