Sleepless Nights (33 page)

When Emmie answered the door, and explained that Elizabeth Summers had gone, we both collapsed wearily onto the steps of the deck at the front of her house, shivering and roundly defeated. Emmie stared at us. “Do you mind telling me what in the world is going on?” she asked, arms crossed over her loose black T-shirt.

I explained that we had hoped to find a bottle of aspirin drops in her medicine cupboard—a bottle that Dr. Reid prescribed for Baby Angela. “I remember you saying that that’s what Reid told you to give her for her cold,” I added. “Maybe you just bought a generic, but we were wondering if he actually wrote out a prescription…”

“For Angela’s aspirin? Yes he did,” she said. “He did, because then I wouldn’t have to pay for it. Prescriptions were covered by my insurance. In those days I had a pretty good policy, through Dad’s work. Not like now, these days I got a high deductible, you wouldn’t believe…”

“Emmie, did Elizabeth Summers take the aspirin drops away this evening?” Tom cut in abruptly. “When she came to clear out your cabinet, I mean?”

Emmie regarded him. “’Course not,” she said.

“But you said she was taking old medicines, she claimed she needed them for some program to aid developing countries…”

“Yeah, she did.” A strange, half-angry expression passed over Emmie’s face.
“Jeez,
you may be a mother, but anyone can tell you haven’t lost a child. Wait in there.”

She pushed us into the sitting room, then reappeared a few moments later with a large cardboard box, which she gently laid on the sofa. We craned over her shoulder to look at it.

The box was painted pink, and small magazine pictures of animals—teddy bears, rabbits, kittens—were lovingly glued to the sides. The word
ANGELA
was carefully picked out in red and glitter on the top, and a long, broad strip of pink ribbon was wrapped around the whole box. Emmie clipped back her hair, then sat down on the creaky bed, unfastened the ribbon, and opened the box.

Inside nestled five tiny, slightly stained white onesies (“Sometimes I think they still smell of her.”). Beside them was a small brown teddy bear, a few pairs of pink newborn socks, and a strange assortment of baby equipment—a blue rubbery aspirator and a swaddling cloth, a half-used tube of diaper cream and three diapers (“That was what was left of the packet when she passed away.”). And then there was a plastic crib mobile and a pink hat, a hand-knit wool blanket edged in white, a birth certificate, a sheaf of Xeroxed notes from the hospital on “Newborn Care,” and a Polaroid in a silver frame of a tiny, red, scrunched-up baby with her eyes tight-closed. And finally, in the midst of it all, a brown bottle. “Angela Vaughan, April 23, 2001. Reid, M.D. Aspirin. One dropper (.8 ml) to be taken twice a day.”

“Is that what you’re looking for?”

We looked down at it, and at each other, and then back at her, momentarily lost for words.

“What, you think I just kept Angela’s stuff in some old cabinet, jumbled anyhow?” she chided.
“My baby’s things?”
she went on, stroking the photographed face gently with her finger. “I don’t have my little girl anymore, I don’t have her to hold in my arms, but everything she had, everything she used, everything with her name on it is—precious. I packed it all up, and sometimes, when I feel she’s gone so far away from me, I take it all out, and look at it, and I see her name on this bottle, ‘Angela Vaughan,’ and it makes her seem real to me again, you know? I like to imagine, for just an hour, that she’s still alive. I think about what she’d look like now, how she’d come into this room, calling
‘Mommy!’
—hair all over the place, dirty knees
and a torn dress, teddy in her hands, those big eyes smiling up at me. She’d be a pretty girl, don’t you think?” She smiled down at the tiny, scrunched-up face. The face that would never become the girl her mother longed so desperately to know.

“Well, anyway,” Emmie went on, after a moment’s pause, “I guess what you’re telling me is you need to take this bottle. Tell me
why,
please.”

I took the bottle and slipped it into my pocket. “Reid should never have given this to Angela,” I explained. “It’s not safe. This bottle is crucial evidence. Apart from anything, it proves he came more than once to see you, because the date on the bottle is April 23; the medical examiner’s report Driscoll filed claimed Reid came just once, on April 19. We’re going to need to file a medical malpractice claim against your doctor. And if we can prove that he sent Elizabeth Summers today to fetch this bottle, well…”

Emmie looked bewildered. “Reid always prescribes aspirin, he says modern medicine has a—a prejudice against it, he says it’s good for the blood…you’re telling me that—
that
made her sick?”

Tom explained what Ian had told him—that aspirin doesn’t
cause
Reye’s, but that medical research has found a correlation between children treated with aspirin for respiratory illnesses and the development of Reye’s. That aspirin use has been limited in children and teenagers for the past decade now, for precisely this reason. “I had no idea,” she said, when he was done, wiping her cheeks. “I just did what he told me.”

The small brown bottle would go a long way toward validating Emmie’s claim that Reid visited her multiple times in the weeks before Angela’s death
and
that he either lied to Driscoll or persuaded him to omit this fact from the form he submitted to the medical examiner’s office.

Emmie listened to us describe the seriousness of falsifying a death report. “You say Driscoll was supposed to fill that form in after talking to me?” she asked suddenly. “Ha! He didn’t ask me a
damn thing. Reid gave me something when he came that day, something to make me sleep, he said it would dull the pain. When I woke up, Driscoll was gone. I didn’t think anything of it—wasn’t thinking about anything except Angela—but I guess he and Reid cooked that thing up together while I was out cold. Gramps’ll tell you the same thing, for what it’s worth.

“But one last thing,” she went on anxiously. “How is this going to help us with Ryan? How’s it going to stop him from taking Paulie away?”

“This goes a long way toward reestablishing your credibility as a good mother,” I explained.

“It’ll help us prove you didn’t miss the signs that Angela was seriously ill,” Tom added. “Practically speaking, we’ll probably ask the judge to hold up the decision about custody while we pursue the medical malpractice claim—a successful verdict in
that
suit will help exonerate you in the custody fight.”

“Ryan’ll have a job taking Paulie away from you once we’ve proved medical malpractice against the doctor and, with any luck, secured damages,” I added.

I watched her in the side mirror as we pulled out of the driveway, waving slowly to us in the moonlight.

When we got home, Jeanie was so agitated to learn what happened she hardly let us get in through the door. “What happened? Did she have it? Can I see it? Will you get him? How
incredibly
thrilling this is…” So great was the general excitement that she and Tom actually exchanged energetic claps on the back—and even, after a moment or two, an awkward, hasty kiss.

59

Jeanie

M
y last day at Quiet Lanes was Sue-Ellen’s as well. She went downhill fast those last two weeks, the cancer taking vicious hold. She should probably have moved to the hospice before, but there was no space, so Mrs. Forrest struggled to provide for her at Quiet Lanes, in spite of the lack of appropriate facilities. The other residents did what they could to help.

I came to clear out her room. I put her few valuables into a small leather monogrammed case—the locket and her wedding ring, which had started to slip too easily off her bony finger—and gave it into the hands of the nurse who had come to take her along the coast to the Old Saybrook hospice. As she was wheeled toward the waiting van, she looked up at me and grinned slyly. “Someone’s coming tonight,” she said suddenly, raking my face with her sharp blue eyes, and I laughed in sheer disbelief. (Not for the first time I wondered if there was something to her “Romany” training after all…)

“Now how can you possibly know that?” I asked, shaking my head at her. “You’ve been prying somehow, you naughty old woman!” She laughed back, delightedly.

“Honey, I see it in your face,” she drawled softly. “He’s coming to Connecticut, and no matter what you say, you’re just
crazy
to get your hands on him.”

“He’s coming, you’re quite right, but it’s nothing to me,” I cor
rected her gravely, as her wheelchair was hauled carefully up into the van. I walked around so that I could still see her through the sliding door. “He’s not the right man. There’s someone else in his life, and that’s the end of it.”

“Honey, it’s never the end,” she said, smiling tremulously at me. “It’s never the end. Until it’s
really
the end, that is.” I nodded, and didn’t speak; I wouldn’t for worlds. Instead I waved at her as the door slammed closed, and I kept waving at that neat, erect head, with its perfect wave of golden hair, long after the van had pulled out of the drive.

Paul was, indeed, coming in the evening, although how Sue-Ellen guessed I can’t imagine. We’d had a phone call from him late one night, about a week previously, saying he needed to come up again to “winterize” his boats—in other words, put on their little socks and coats to keep them warm.

He arrived just in time for dinner. I was in the middle of finishing the salad dressing when there was an almighty knocking on the front door. (Presumably, just in case I happened to be swanning around buck-naked again. You should be so bloody lucky, I thought to myself sourly.) When the four of us sat down, the atmosphere was chilly. Would you pass me the salt, he asked, and I crashed it in front of him with an expression designed to convey the words “you are an evil bastard and in an ideal world I’d pour this straight down your throat.” This continued for half an hour. Then Tom, in what was clearly a desperate effort to get the conversation moving in a more positive direction, asked about life at Paul’s company, and he began to talk.

Of course I switched off and examined my manicure—but then some stray word, or perhaps it was the tone of his voice, unexpectedly caught my attention.

“You know, this is really why I joined Prince in the first place,” he was explaining, leaning forward, the light of the low silver chandelier reflected in his eyes. “My work with New York nonprofits has been incredibly rewarding these past few years. I’m certain that
PHMP Pro, in particular, would have collapsed if we hadn’t been able to help them. But we managed to restructure the company, purchase supporting industries to help them finance themselves, and this year they’ve been able to get AIDS medications to people in some of the poorest countries in Africa. Then last month, I thought I’d made a total mess of the Marathon case, but it worked out okay, the tax exemption will stick, they’ll be able to stay in business after all. Which is good, because their outreach program to inner-city kids is making a real difference.”

Tom began to ask about how he was negotiating the bureaucracy of the New York State Charities Bureau, but I cut in. “I don’t understand,” I said abruptly.
“What
have you been doing?”

Paul looked at me. “I was just talking about my work at Prince,” he replied. “Defending the indefensible, as you would put it. Or, as I like to say, specializing in supporting nonprofit organizations and charities of all sizes.”

I stared at him. “Really?”

Paul put his fingertips together. “The reason I went to Prince and Cohen in the first place, Jeanie, was that they offered me the opportunity to head their nonprofit services. It’s become particularly important now given the state of the economy. We can’t let these vital enterprises fail.” His body was rigid, but I saw his foot twitching under the table like the tip of a black cat’s tail. “I once offered to describe my work to you, as I recall, but you didn’t wait to let me.”

Just as I was beginning to feel a creeping embarrassment, the other, more serious charge I’d directed against him rose into my mind. “Fine, so I got that wrong, I suppose,” I said bitterly. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? What you do in your professional life, I mean. You’re not exactly a paragon of virtue in your
personal
life.”

Paul looked over at me. “Jeanie,” he said, abruptly standing up, dropping his napkin on the table, then leaning forward on his hands to face me, “I want to tell you, here and now, in front of Tom and Q, that I am
not
having an affair with Lily Olawe.”

I gasped; Q gasped; Tom snorted with laughter. “With Lily? Good God, I should think not! Why would anyone think you were?” he said, gazing disbelievingly from me to Paul, and back again.

“I saw him with her,” I said firmly. “I saw him touching her, holding her. I saw her stroking his chest,” I went on explanatorily. Q furrowed her brow.

“Would you be kind enough, Tom, to tell your sister-in-law what all good lawyers know about the veracity of eyewitness statements?” Paul said suddenly.

Tom raised his eyebrows. “About—? Uh, okay. There’s no proven correlation between the
confidence
of a witness in what he or she saw, and the
accuracy
of the statement.”

“Precisely.” Paul nodded. “In other words, people don’t always see what they think they’ve seen. And they’re notoriously bad at judging whether they’re interpreting events correctly. This makes eyewitnesses tough to handle in court. People will swear blind they saw a black man coming out of a window, but what they actually saw was a man in the shade. They’re not lying, they truly believe they know what they saw. As a lawyer, you have to trust the jury to see that just because the witness is confident, it doesn’t mean they’re correct. Or you have to find a way to prove outright that they’re wrong.”

I stared. “Okay, well, thank you for this little lecture, mister law professor, but what has it got to do with you and Lily, please?”