Square in the Face (Claire Montrose Series) (23 page)

Claire started as an engine rumbled into the parking lot, and then the night was quiet again except for the sound of a car door closing. Squinting at Dr. Bradford, Claire tried to make out if the sound was a surprise. But he didn’t take his eyes from her.

The clinic door opened. Even with her smeared vision, Claire recognized Dr. Gregory, only without his trademark smile.

His words were sadly chiding. “Oh, Claire, why did you have to come here?”

Something inside Claire crumbled. Dr. Gregory must have weighed whatever he felt for her against whatever he would get for helping Dr. Bradford. And it was clear which side had come up short.

“Take care of her!” Dr. Bradford commanded, and then pressed the gun into Dr. Gregory’s hand.

“What?” He bobbled it, then recovered. “But I don’t” -

Dr. Bradford cut off his protest. “You’re the one who sent me that stupid girl. I want you neck deep in this, like I am.”

It was then that Claire made her move. She leaned forward so that that the drape of the sweatshirt hid her hands.
 
There was no time to fumble or make a mistake. She grabbed the knife, pinched it open, rolled to the side, and lunged at Dr. Gregory with her arm stiff before her.

And as she did, she saw what she held. Not the knife, but the corkscrew. It plunged into his right shoulder. What happened next was a blur - Pansy leaping, Claire diving, the gun going off so loud that she felt as if her eardrums had exploded. Blood spattered her face. Where had she been hit? she wondered, even as she scrambled to her feet and ran for the door. Only when Claire heard the odd high-pitched howl of the dog did she realize that Dr. Gregory’s wild shot had hit Pansy, not her.

Claire wrenched open the door of the clinic. Darting past the little red Miata, she made a split-second decision to stay on the road. It was faster and at this point all she could hope for was to put as much distance between her and the two doctors as possible. As she was thinking this, a bullet whined into the ground in front of her. Bits of gravel pricked her face.

The sound of her own ragged breathing filled her ears. She was a distance runner, not a master of the anaerobic 100-yard-dash. Suddenly, the Miata drove up beside her. The passenger door was open, and Dr. Gregory was leaning out the driver’s side window yelling, “Get in! Get in!”

Claire stared at him. For a second, he lifted hands from the wheel to show her he no longer had the gun. There was no time to weigh what he was - an opportunist or a killer or an admirer - or some mixture of all three. Claire ran behind the car and herself into the seat. Dr. Gregory shoved the accelerator to the floor and they began to fly over the last hundred yards toward the highway, so fast that her door closed on its own.

We’re getting away,
Claire had just enough time to think. Then a bullet shattered the back window, plowed through Dr. Gregory’s back and burst from his chest, burying itself in the dash. His mouth opened in a terrible silent scream. His hands tightened on the wheel as he fought to drive the last hundred yards. But his body was already betraying him, and the wheel slipped from his grasp. Instead of flying to freedom they crashed into the trunk of a great cedar.

Before Claire could even form an impression of the impact, the airbag already lay like a deflated white beach ball in her lap. Her face burned and her mouth filled with blood from where she had bit her tongue. She turned to Dr. Gregory. He listed sideways against the door, his eyes half open. Claire put her hand out to him. Her ring finger crooked off from the rest of her hand. She gently touched his bloodied lips, and started when he whispered something. She leaned forward to hear him over the cars that sped past them, out of sight behind a scrim of trees.

“Man’s laughter and manslaughter,” was what she thought he said, but she didn’t know what it meant. She leaned toward him, but his eyes rolled back in his head. His head fell forward and she knew he was dead. Another shot sang past the car. Claire knew if she didn’t move fast she would be as dead as Dr. Gregory.

She opened the car door and rolled out into the dirt. Crawling was noisy and inefficient and her broken finger felt like someone was sawing it off with a knife, but she was afraid to stand up and make too much of a target. When she reached the shelter of the woods, she stood up and began to dart from tree to tree as she ran in the direction of the highway.

The problem was that she would soon run out of trees. She heard Dr. Bradford crashing along behind her, and ahead of her the noise of trucks and cars going past at sixty miles an hour. She sent up a swift prayer that someone might notice her once she scrambled up from the ditch, that a nice truck driver might fishtail to a stop before Dr. Bradford put a bullet through her head. The chances of her not being hit by one or the other seemed slim, but what other chance did she have?

Then Claire saw the lights. Revolving, red and blue, cutting into the darkness around her as they sped past, then the sound of brakes squealing as one, two, three police cars turned into Dr. Bradford’s private drive.

2DRESQ

Chapter Twenty-five

With his tongue protruding between his teeth, Max was trying to solve a sixty-four piece jigsaw puzzle of jungle animals that Charlie had bought for him. Although the piece he held was half blue sky and half tree, he was stubbornly trying to fit it in underneath the lion that was missing a paw.

It had been two days since Doug had called the police when he heard the sound of gunfire. And yesterday the test results had come back on Emily Price. As Lori had already known, the child’s blood shared so few markers with Zach’s blood that the doctors had decided there was no way she could be Zach’s sister.

Sitting by Max’s side at the dining room table, Claire attempted to take the piece from his hand, but he resisted. Then she tried to show him how to approach the problem. “See how the piece you have has some sky on it? And where is the sky - down low or up at the top?” He was silent as he continued to try to force the piece into a space where it almost fit, even though it didn’t match.

“You can’t fit just anything into the holes, Max. Sometimes things will look like they fit, but they don’t, not quite. You have to look for patterns and match them up.” She tapped the top part of the puzzle again, and finally Max snapped the piece in where it really belonged. Claire answered his proud smile absently. Her own words echoed in her head. Something at the edge of consciousness nagged at her. What had she ignored because she thought she already knew the answers?

Today’s
Oregonian
lay folded up neatly next to Claire’s bandaged arm and splinted finger. The story of Dr. Bradford’s arrest for one count of first-degree murder, one of manslaughter and one count of attempted murder was splashed all over the front page. The doctor himself was sitting in jail, too canny to admit anything. When they first hauled Dr. Bradford in, he had made his one phone call, not to a lawyer, but to his second wife. While the cops swarmed over the crime scene and the burial site, she slipped into the clinic. The clinic’s records went into one of the big stainless steel sinks and were doused with lighter fluid. By the time someone managed to put the fire out, all that remained was a heap of white-hot ashes. Paper burns down to nothing.

But people remember. Then Claire realized what had been nagging at her. Something Doug had told her.
“After Vi got her daughter, I told her what happened to me. She understood, you know.”
Why had Vi understood? And why had Doug chosen to use the word “got” instead of “had”? A tiny flame of hope flickered within her. Had she fit together the pieces of the puzzle of Lori’s missing daughter incorrectly?

There were only a dozen Trumbos in the phone book, and Claire picked up the phone, ready to call them all. But before the first one slammed down the phone on his questions, he had spit out Vi’s husband’s name. John, John Trumbo. The phone book gave his address in SE Portland.

Claire figured it was better to go without calling first. “I need to go talk to that nurse, Vi,” she told Charlie. “Something Doug said made me think she might know more about what happened to child the Lieblings had. The one who was Lori’s daughter.”

“You mean the one who is dead,” Charlie said. It wasn’t a question. Her faded blue eyes were filled with sadness when she looked at Claire.

###

The Trumbos lived on SE Henry. It took a bit of back and forthing before Claire figured out which house it was, a tan ranch house unremarkable in every way, except for the wooden wheelchair ramp out front. When she got to the door, there was a hand-made sign posted on the front, reminding her of the sign Lori had posted when Zach got sick
. “We will not talk to reporters.”
Claire wasn’t one, so she knocked.

She had just decided the door would never open when it did. Claire had to adjust her gaze, dropping it to the man in the wheelchair. “I need to talk to your wife,” she said. From inside came the harsh, wet sound of someone breathing.

John Trumbo looked at her appraisingly. His hair had once been black but was now nearly silver. If he had been on his feet he would have been tall, and even sitting he still seemed powerful, his arms ropy with muscle.

John and Claire looked at each for a long time, but finally Vi called out, “Let her in.” John rolled backward without speaking. He didn’t take his eyes off Claire.

Walking through the doorway, Claire could see most of the house, even back to the kitchen and the refrigerator decorated with elaborate drawings of horses. The living-dining room area had gold carpeting and worn furniture. Something seemed subtly off, and Claire realized what it was - all the furniture was spaced far enough apart that a man in a wheelchair could pass between. From a short hall, she could hear the sound of a TV, turned up loud enough that Claire could make out every word of a Simpsons’ episode.

Vi was seated in a recliner, her back held straight by pillows. Claire almost didn’t recognize her. Wrapped in a quilted pink robe, her frame looked as small as a child’s. Her head was bald, but on a Styrofoam stand on the dining room table, Claire saw the reddish wig she had worn when Claire visited the clinic. Oxygen ran from a tank on the floor through two clear tubes that hooked over Vi’s ears and ran into her nose. In some ways, Vi reminded Claire of Zach, of the way that oncoming death began to pare down a person.

“You’ve come about Ginny? I’m sorry I didn’t do more to help her.” Between the two sentences, Vi had to pause to take a breath.

“That’s not why I’m here. I’m here to ask you if you know what happened to Lori Hesslewhite’s daughter.”

Vi closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them again and regarded Claire calmly. “So it was never about Ginny?” When Claire shook her head, Vi gave her a smile that was half rueful, half some other emotion Claire couldn’t name.

Claire said, “I started thinking about how you threatened to sue Lori when she called the clinic and asked about her daughter. Women must call the clinic from time to time. But what you did seemed like an overreaction. And then I started thinking about what Doug told me. He said you ‘got’ your daughter, that you understood what it was like for him to be given back to the clinic. And I decided I had to come here. You see, a child’s life is at stake.” Except for the hiss of the oxygen, there was complete silence as Claire explained the situation to them.

John turned to his wife. She had closed her eyes as Claire was speaking, and for a long time after Claire finished they remained closed. Finally she said, in a voice so soft it was as if she were talking to herself. “For the longest time, I thought we were the only ones who wanted her. I still remember the day that woman called and was screaming, ‘I didn’t pay $100,000 for this!’ Saying she wouldn’t keep her.” Her voice took on another woman’s harshness.

“This was Monica Liebling?” Claire asked.

Vi opened her eyes and nodded. “They were both investment brokers, both used to getting what they wanted. Expensive cars. A house full of gadgets. Vacations in the Caribbean. Even when their first child died of SIDS, they immediately made plans to move on. Have another child. Only Monica Liebling couldn’t seem to get pregnant. So they came to us.”

“And adopted Lori’s daughter,” Claire said.

Vi adjusted the clear plastic tubing that ran over her ears. Her hands had shrunk down to skinny bundles of tendons, bones and blue veins. “Yes.” The word was so faint that Claire barely heard it over the sound of the oxygen. “But everything changed when Diana was ten months old. Monica Liebling called me right after she left the pediatrician’s office. She said Diana was defective and that she wanted a replacement. I reminded her we weren’t talking about a broken toaster. That we were talking about a child.” Vi paused and pushed herself up higher on the couch. “She said we were talking about a
deal
. And that if I didn’t see it that way, she would go to her lawyer.” Vi smiled at the ghost of a memory. “And if there’s one word Dr. Bradford never wanted to hear, it was the word lawyer.

And so, Vi explained, they had made a new deal. The Lieblings would be matched with one of the next pregnant girls that signed up, and eight months later, they would bring home a baby. In the meantime, the Lieblings would explain to their friends and neighbors that another tragedy had struck them, terrible in its random cruelty - their second child had died from SIDS, just as their first child had. They would claim to be too distraught to hold even a memorial service. And Dr. Bradford would supply them with a death certificate, in case the need ever arose.

That left only one loose end. A ten-month-old baby girl with a shock of black hair and fierce dark eyes. Vi’s soft smile at the memory hardened as she talked about how the Lieblings left Diana at the clinic, still fastened in her car seat, along with a half-empty bag of disposable diapers, her Paddington Bear rattle and all her clothes. This time, they had said, they wanted a boy.

“See, we couldn’t have any children of our own. Some kid fiddling with a tapedeck when he should have been driving took care of that right after we got married.” She exchanged a look with John that was so private in its pain and longing that Claire had to look away. When Vi looked back at Claire, her gaze was unblinking. “Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed put at the Bradford Clinic once I figured out exactly how he ran things. But it was all those babies that kept me there. I loved holding them right after they were first born. I’d always figured we would have a big family.”

“So you took in Diana,” Claire finished for her. The other woman nodded. “And she has” - Claire hazarded the likeliest guess - “Down’s Syndrome?”
“What?” The word came from both John and Vi’s mouths. Then Vi looked at John and said, “Can you go get her?” A pause for breath, a pause where he didn’t move. “Please?” she added.

He looked at his wife for a long time, then he brought his arms back and put them on the wheels of his chair and pushed himself down the hall. After he opened the door, John flicked the light on and off several times, surprising Claire. Why was he resorting to such a drastic way to get his daughter’s attention when he could just talk to her?

When he returned, it was with a slender girl. Her black eyes were wary. There were two slight bumps under her navy-blue T-shirt. And nearly hidden by the wings of her dark hair, the flesh-colored bud of a hearing aid nestled in each ear.

John signed and spoke at the same time. “This woman knows your other mother, the one who gave birth to you.”

“Ask her,” Claire said, “ask Diana if I can call her biological mom and tell her I’ve found her.”

John did as she asked, and they all waited a long moment, eyes on Diana.

Who gave a nearly imperceptible nod.

An hour later, when Lori walked in the door, she was transfixed by the sight of her daughter. Diana stared at her for a long moment, then suddenly flew at her and began flailing her with her fists. Her eyes were fierce and black and just like Havi’s. Strange, wordless nasal screams flew out of her mouth, past sharp teeth. Lori offered no defense, did nothing to shield herself, even as the blows rained down on the face that had never watched her daughter grow, the arms that had never carried her. A stray punch to the abdomen left Lori doubled over and breathless, but as soon as she could she straightened up again to face the girl’s pain. Diana’s fists gradually slowed until her blows were like soft, cupping slaps as they continued to stare in each other’s eyes.

Finally, Diana began to cry, tears leaking down her face. When Lori held out her arms, the child hurtled into them.