Mortal Remains (9 page)

No, better she not invite the witches to her bedside. Leave everything until morning rather than risk trouble now. Not that she’d tolerate any rudeness from one of those shrews. She felt uncharacteristically aggressive tonight.

Curling into a ball, she drew the covers over her head, trying to conserve body heat.

It didn’t help.

He skin continued to feel slimy. The pain behind her eyes grew worse.

She emerged and reached to where the call button was pinned to her bedding. Her hand shook as she gathered it into her palm and pressed.

“They better not mess with me tonight,” she muttered, staring through the gloom at her closed door, waiting for one of them to arrive.

No response.

Bloody cows!

She pressed again.

The silence of her room became a rushing noise in her ears. The moon outside her window shone unusually bright. It hurt her eyes to look at it, yet the darkness closed in on her, immune to illumination.

She pushed the call button over and over.

It mustn’t be working,
she thought, tugging on the end that looped past the head of her bed to where it attached to the wall.

It came freely as she pulled, until the plug itself lay in her hand. Staring at it, she had to make a massive mental effort to realize it wasn’t hooked up anymore. Her thoughts all at once shattered into fragments, and she couldn’t thread them together.

“Help!” she screamed. “Help me!”

No response.

“Come and help me.”

Still nothing.

That’s right, she remembered, her mind working again. People shrieked and yelled all night on this ward, yet no one paid them any heed.

With great effort she kicked off her covers.

The shivering increased, and she could feel her limbs twitch in the cold. Somehow she managed to get them over the edge of the bed.

Now to sit up.

Her vision dimmed, and she became locked in the black confines of her own skull. Then tiny explosions of light, like stars scintillating in space, invaded the darkness. These stars grew taller and wider, becoming squares of white, each encroaching on the night and peeling it away in strips. The experience seemed vaguely familiar, but her mind couldn’t piece her symptoms into a diagnosis. Neither could she see where to plug in the disconnected wire.

She pushed herself erect until she perched on the side of the mattress, her bare feet brushing against the floor, her thinking reduced to shreds of instinct until she felt only the impulse to launch herself forward and walk.

She levered herself off onto the cold tiles and took a step, flailing ahead with her arms like a blind person.

She took another step, and flailed some more, seeking something to lean on.

But she found nothing.

She tottered forward.

And slapped her palms against a wall.

Her thinking cleared enough to remember where the door should be and, feeling her way along, she lurched toward it. When her fingers found the handle she steadied herself, took a deep breath, and pulled it open. “Help me!” she cried, barely able to keep herself upright. “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

Her voice blended in with the howls and shrieks of the senile old crones on the ward, the ones whom a phenothiazine cocktail never seemed to knock out and whose pleas to go home reverberated ceaselessly up and down the halls.

She felt certain that their calls sounded louder tonight. How could she have ignored such cries before, the way the nurses did?

She tried again to make herself heard, yelling as she sank to the floor, half-in, half-out of her room. Her mind vacillated between lucid seconds of frantically attempting to figure out what could be happening to her and timelessly floating through a searing light that she still found familiar – something some patients had once described to her, yet she couldn’t quite remember their disease.

The plaintive wailing grew in volume, closed in and swallowed her.

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

Hampton
Junction

“D
r. Roper, you said my arthritic knees would be better by now. Look at them. They’re the size of cauliflowers.”

“What I said, Nell, was that the pills would make the pain better, not that they’d take away your arthritis.”

“But the pain came back.”

“Are you still taking those pills the way I told you?”

“The prescription ran out. I figured you only wanted me to take ‘em for a month. That’s all the time your father ever needed to get me better.”

She’d also been a quarter century younger back then. Mark turned to wash his hands at the sink in his examining room, not wanting the feisty octogenarian to see his grin. Nell had been coming to him about her knees for seven years, ever since he’d reopened his father’s practice, and she’d argued her way through each visit. The idea that a prescription must be refilled and the medication taken longer than a month had never taken root beneath her frizzy white hair. It had nothing to do with poor memory or a lack of confidence in him. She resisted growing old and the idea she could no longer shake off what ailed her. She still lived independently, her mountain cabin twenty miles north of town on an isolated road overlooking the Hudson River Valley. The only reason she’d recently agreed to let a local handyman cut the twelve cords of firewood she used every winter was that he had four kids to feed and obviously needed the money. But Nell herself wasn’t isolated. Known for her prize-winning recipes at the fall fair – her peach cobbler had taken home the blue ribbon seven years running – her kitchen was a much-visited mecca for anyone caring to pick up her pearls of culinary wisdom. She also reigned as the unofficial queen of the town’s gossip network, a function she dutifully filled by welcoming all visitors and spending hours on the phone. The acquired information made her one of the most sought-after guests for Sunday suppers, afternoon bridge parties, and socials at each of the town’s two churches, neither clergyman willing to yield her soul to the other side, or go without her contribution of cobbler.

Slowly wiping his hands with a paper towel, Mark laboriously explained yet again that she must ask Timmy Madden, the pharmacist, to refill her prescription when she ran out.

Nell sighed, having endured his lecture while tugging her well-stretched pair of elastic stockings over varicose veins as thick as quarter-inch ropes. “And how are you doing, Doctor?” she said. “It must have been a shock, pulling the bones of Kelly McShane out of the mud. Who do you think killed her?”

Now he understood the real reason she’d bothered to come and see him. “I don’t think anything, yet, Nell, and I couldn’t tell you if I did.”

“Oh, come on. Was it that rotten husband of hers?”

“Is that what everyone around here has decided? That Chaz Braden murdered her?”

“You betcha’!”

“Anybody got any proof?”

“He’s mean and was known to get drunk on more than one Saturday night. It’s a bad mix.”

Street justice in rural America could be just as arbitrary as its urban counterpart. In the countryside, though, it tended to be unanimous. “And that’s enough to make you sure it’s him?”

“Yeah. Now tell me what you think.”

Mark chuckled. “My lips are officially sealed, Nell. Besides, you and your friends have probably already snooped out everything there is to know.”

She gave him a no-harm-in-trying shrug, then cocked her head and slipped him a sly jack-o’-lantern smile, missing tooth and all.

A reminder of another argument he’d lost – getting her to wear the partial plate a Sarasota dentist made her.

“You still seeing that pretty veterinarian from New York?” she asked.

Reason number two for the visit.

Nell had always been uncommonly interested in the women who’d occasionally visited him. From the very first day of his return she seemed to have elected herself the local record keeper of his private life. “We keep in touch, Nell,” he said, helping her off the table.

Little wonder she chose now to get an update, especially if she and her friends really had exhausted all they could say about a twenty-seven-year-old murder. While Halloween and Thanksgiving provided lots of gossip – who was shooing away the kids, who intended to run the Christmas pageant, what couples were taking separate holidays – the weeks in between yielded few topics for discussion.

“Not much to interest a young woman around here these days, I guess. Only us old folks left,” she continued, sitting down to put on her shoes – Nike air pumps that she’d sworn more than once did more for her arthritis than anything he’d ever given her.

“Nell, you’re the youngest ‘old folk’ I know.”

“Did you ever ask any of them pretty girls to marry you?”

“Nell!”

“I like your hair cut short like that. It’s black as your mother’s but gives your face the same lean good looks your father had. What with that hunky physique you’ve built up hiking and running all over the mountains, the girls should be falling down over you. The only problem is you’re getting that same sadness in your eyes that he had.”

“Jesus, Nell!”

“Oh, go on. Who’s more fitting to talk frankly with you than me? I watched your mother change your diapers, bless her dear departed soul. And I used to baby-sit your father when I was a teenager.”

“I know, Nell.” As they chatted he helped her down a short hallway and into the center of what used to be his parents’ living room but now served as his waiting area. It was packed as always, and she routinely saved a zinger or two for this audience, all of them nearly as old as she was, most of them women.

“Guess what’s the trouble with your generation?” she asked.

“I got a feeling you’re going to tell me,” he said, resigned to his usual role as her straight man.

“None of you want to buy a cow because you get your milk for free.”

He started to laugh, along with everyone else. “Nell, you’re wicked.”

“Maybe you should take me out.”

“I couldn’t handle you.”

“Tell me, did that veterinarian woman cook?”

He felt his face grow warm. Banter with Nell in private was one thing. In public it could get embarrassing. “We ate out a lot when she was here,” he said quickly, trying to end the conversation.

She flashed him that jack-o’-lantern smile again. “Well, you know what I always say?”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m afraid to ask.”

“If she’s no good in the kitchen, she won’t be worth much in the bedroom.”

The oldsters found this one even more uproarious.

“Oh Nell, how naughty,” yelled one of his blue-haired regulars.

“But ain’t it the truth?” she fired back.

The woman giggled. “I’ll say.”

A large lady gestured with her thumb to a distinguished, white-haired gentleman at her side.

“Fred here adores my pot roast.”

He turned beet red and fiddled with his hearing aid.

Nell proceeded to lead the rest of the room in a free-for-all of off-color innuendos about food and sex. It grew so loud that Mark barely heard the phone ring. He didn’t have a secretary. Hiring anybody locally had proved impossible. Whomever he picked, someone inevitably commented, “I don’t want that person seeing what’s in my file.” Since he knew his patients the way only a country doctor could and the practice pretty well ran itself anyway, he’d kept it a one-man operation – except when it came to all the forms for Medicare and Medicaid. They drove him crazy. His aunt Margaret used to process them for him. Now a company from Saratoga did it. They charged him a hefty commission, but he figured it well worth the price, since he could use the extra hours to run or hike.

“Dr. Roper,” he answered, blocking his other ear in order to hear over the brouhaha.

“Mark, it’s Dan. Hey, sounds like you’re in a tavern. The whole gang there, huh?”

“Yep. Everyone over seventy-five is here to party. That’s my waiting room!”

He chuckled. “Well, I hate to be the pooper, but I’ve got Chaz Braden and his father, plus Kelly McShane’s parents in my office, all of them squabbling over her remains.”

“What?”

“It started last night with phone calls from their lawyers, just as soon as Everett made it official that everything is now in our hands.”

Son of a bitch. “I’ll be right over.”

Dan’s office was in a large, colonial building that dominated Main Street. Shabby wood siding toward the back made it look as if the contractor had run out of money. Once nicknamed the White House, the building hadn’t been painted in years and was now a sooty gray. Inside, county officialdom was cut down to size. The courthouse, the jail, a records room, the fire hall, the police station – all were crammed into three floors and a basement. There was even a small coroner’s office that Mark used only during inquests or for campaign headquarters on those occasions when someone challenged his reelection.

Floorboards creaking under his feet, he walked up to a door with a clear window that had SHERIFF written across it and peeked in at the people he’d be dealing with.

Dan slouched in his chair massaging his temples. An immaculately groomed, sophisticated-looking older woman sat across from him. She wore a well-tailored black suit and hat. Lord, Mark only saw hats like that in old movies these days. She held black leather gloves in her left hand and kept tight hold with her right on the gold clasp of a black snakeskin handbag in her lap. Behind her stood a compact man, also elderly, but his tanned complexion, though creased, had a youthful tautness that was at odds with his shock of white hair. Arms folded across his chest, his mouth grim, he seemed to be studying his shoes.

Kelly’s parents, Mark assumed. He hadn’t seen them since he was a small boy. They’d moved away shortly after their daughter’s disappearance.

Charles Braden III was the only one who seemed to be at ease. Mark remembered him vividly from his days as a resident at NYCH when the man served as outgoing chairman of the Obstetrics Department prior to retirement. Still sleek, sporting the same wiry, brushed steel haircut, and dressed in a two-thousand-dollar suit, he leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets.

By contrast, his son Chaz looked anxious, though no less sartorially splendid. His wiry body was taut; dark circles underscored his eyes.

Mark took a breath, squared his shoulders, and walked in, adopting the swift stride he used to impose his authority while making rounds at Saratoga General, another arena where money tried to outrank him. “Good afternoon, everyone.”

They all looked up at him.

Before Mark had enough time to clear his throat, Mrs. McShane was on her feet, her handbag placed precisely on her chair, and standing before him. “Dr. Roper, I am Kelly’s mother-”

“Samantha, my dear-” Her husband followed on her heels, reaching out, placing his hands supportively on her shoulders.

She wrenched away from his touch. “Please, Walter, let me have my say.” She turned a beseeching face to Mark. “Do forgive me, but I simply must demand a little respect here as Kelly’s mother.” She had a tremor in her voice that reminded him of Katharine Hepburn’s performances in her later movies like
On Golden Pond
or
A Lion in Winter
. “My darling girl meant everything to me and to learn that I was right all along, that she didn’t run away from us, that someone viciously murdered her – well, I’m sure you understand how devastating, how traumatic this has been for me.”

From behind, Mark heard one of the Bradens mutter, “Garbage!”

Samantha obviously had also heard. She drew herself up to her full height, but didn’t turn around. “As I was saying, Doctor, it should be a parent’s right to bury her only child, her beloved chi-”

“For heaven’s sake, Samantha,” Chaz said, stepping forward. “You and Kelly hadn’t exchanged a single civil word in years before she-”

“That’s quite enough!” Walter said. His arm shot protectively around his wife’s shoulders. “And after all you put Kelly through during those years, how dare you say anything about us. The least you can do now is agree to let Samantha give her a proper, loving funeral.”

“I have every right to bury my wife,” Chaz shot back. “Every right. It was you two and Kelly who were estranged, but we, Kelly and I, were not. Let me repeat that. We weren’t the ones estranged, and I insist-”

“You insist?” An incredulous look rearranged Samantha’s beautifully made-up face. “All her friends said she wanted to leave you, and you know it. If Kelly estranged herself from anyone, it was you.”

“I don’t know any such thing!” Chaz said, alarmingly red in the face.

“And you drove her away from me,” Samantha continued. “Every chance you had. You’re the last one who’s going to take her from me now by trying to turn the tables on me like this.” Walter still steadied her as if she were a fragile piece of Baccarat.

This was fast growing out of control, Mark thought. He glanced at Dan, who shrugged, rolled his eyes, and raised his hands as if to say, “See what I’ve been trying to deal with?”

Then Charles Braden III moved into the middle of the fray. “Chaz, please, we know you adored Kelly and are distraught, but, as I’ve said before, have a care for a mother’s feelings as well. Do sit down, Chaz.” He squeezed his son’s shoulder. “And let’s all try to remember that Kelly would have been dreadfully upset by this wrangling.”

Although Charles sounded reasonable, Mark thought, the guy was so smooth he reeked of hypocrisy. Time to take charge himself, and impose his own agenda. “Listen up, people,” he said, moving to position himself behind Dan. “I’m afraid neither side will get any satisfaction today. Her remains are evidence still, and I’m not releasing them to either party.” He knew that he couldn’t get anything more out of the bones from a forensic point of view, yet instinctively balked at letting them go.

Everyone looked surprised.

“I thought you’d have done everything necessary by now,” Chaz said, walking quickly around the end of Dan’s desk to where he could stand toe-to-toe with Mark. He exuded anger, but also seemed edgy, his fingers continually opening and closing as if he were practicing his grip. “What are you playing at?”