by Janet Rebhan
“Please tell me this isn’t happening,” Nancy said to no one as she gripped the telephone receiver tightly.
The manager of the battered women’s shelter went silent on the other end of the line. Then she spoke softly. “She had been driving back from picking some things up at her apartment. She wasn’t used to the winding road, and it was dark . . .” She trailed off and paused for a moment, then resumed. “We read about the accident in the local paper, but there was no mention of the baby. I phoned the police department to ask, but they weren’t allowed to give me any information. They were already aware that her boyfriend had shot her, so I had to assume the police contacted Mary Anne’s extended family and gave the baby to them.”
“There is no extended family,” Nancy said. “At least none who can take care of a baby. Her mother lives in Detroit, and she’s a heroin addict. There’s only one sibling, a twelve-year-old sister, who lives with the mother.” Nancy sighed heavily.
“She told me her parents lived in Texas on a ranch.”
“She lied,” Nancy said flatly.
“So what are you saying? What should we do?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m going down to the police station.”
CHAPTER 7
Ragna Sweeney hated cleaning house. She loved cooking, gardening, decorating, and most other domestic duties—even laundry didn’t bother her. But cleaning was something she always had to force herself to do. Years ago, when her husband was at the height of his career, she’d had a full-time housekeeper to clean her five-bedroom ranch-style home in Woodland Hills. Angela was her name. She came every other week and even did the windows every couple of months. There was nothing Angela wouldn’t clean. She had been a hard worker. Ragna would pick her up at the bus stop in Warner Center every Tuesday morning at 8:30 a.m. and drop her off in time to catch the 3:38 p.m. Metro back to her neighborhood in North Hollywood. This got Angela back in time to cook dinner for her family.
Angela lived with her husband, two teenage daughters, her sister, and her sister’s husband. All of them had emigrated from El Salvador, where most of their extended family still lived. They managed to share a two-bedroom apartment. The daughters took the master bedroom, Angela and her husband had the other bedroom, and her sister and brother-in-law slept on the roll-out sofa in the living room every evening.
Even though Ragna paid Angela top dollar in cash and never forgot a birthday or Christmas bonus, Ragna always felt guilty about Angela cleaning her house over that ten-year period. Life just wasn’t fair. Ragna didn’t need to work. Her husband made a good salary as director of sales for a major pharmaceuticals company, and Ragna was afforded the opportunity to stay home to raise their daughter, Vivie. She worked part-time as a receptionist for a dentist when Vivie was in high school just to stay productive. She even went back to the local community college and completed her associate’s degree in criminal justice just for fun. But mostly she kept busy volunteering in her local Lutheran church, playing bridge with her girlfriends every Thursday, shopping, reading true crime books and detective novels, growing orchids in her windowsills, and doing just about anything that gave her a bit of a challenge or required attention to detail.
Ragna had lived what she considered the good life for many years. Right up until her husband, Harold, lost his job when his company downsized during the great recession that was in full swing by 2009. Harold was all set to retire a little early at the age of sixty-two. Instead, he found himself jobless with no severance and his 401(k) only worth about one-third what it should have been after the stock market plummeted. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Ragna had discovered a malignant lump in her breast. Having no medical insurance, they used up their retirement savings and put their house on the market. They sold it for not much more than they had initially paid for it, because the mortgage crisis had forced prices down to record lows. Once they paid the balance owed to the bank, they placed the remainder into a savings account and tried to live as frugally as possible.
Eighteen months passed before Harold was able to find employment again. He found a thirty-hour-per-week position in retail sales for the home audio division of a local electronics chain. It was enough for them to get by, and it gave them medical coverage again. There was no money now for extras, particularly not for a housekeeper. Ragna had resigned herself though. She reminded herself it could always be worse, and she often thought of Angela and wondered how she and her family were doing now. Were they even still here? Or had the economy forced them to go back to their home country?
Sometimes late at night, when her husband slept by her side, snoring softly, Ragna talked to God. She didn’t cry or complain. In fact, she always opened with a word or two of thanks like she had been taught to do in church when she was only a little girl. Then she moved on to asking for help, usually help for those she loved the most or those less fortunate than herself. Then she closed again with anything that came to her mind for which she could be grateful, even if it seemed silly. She could be grateful she was still alive, grateful that her cancer had not metastasized, grateful her hair had grown back even thicker after the chemo, although it seemed she had more gray now than before. Grateful she and Harold still had each other, grateful her daughter still had her job as a set production assistant at Warner Brothers, even though she was still praying she would find that special someone to marry and settle down with. She wasn’t too happy her daughter currently dated a divorced cinematographer almost twice her age, but she couldn’t do anything about that. Vivie was a grown woman now, and she’d made it very clear to Ragna on more than one occasion that her mother should keep her nose out of her private life. Ragna knew she had the tendency to be a little inquisitive, but that was only because she was a caring person.
Ragna opened the door to the tiny hallway closet and reached inside for the vacuum cleaner. She smiled to herself, thinking how lucky she was to have purchased it back when she still had the money. Her top-of-the-line Hoover WindTunnel Platinum Collection Bagless Upright was a lifetime investment that would probably outlive her.
She plugged the cord into the wall outlet next to the sofa and bent over to pick up a stack of newspapers next to her husband’s favorite vintage leather recliner. On the top of the stack lay a dated copy of the Daily News San Fernando Valley Edition. Ragna’s eyes landed on the headline at the bottom right corner of the first page: FATAL CRASH IN BOX CANYON. MOTORCYCLIST FLEES SCENE. She went on to read that Mary Anne Maynard, twenty-one, of Canoga Park, had been killed on impact. She saw no reference to any baby; only that a female motorist passing by shortly after the accident occurred had witnessed a man on a motorcycle fleeing the scene. Ragna’s heart began to thump wildly. How had she missed reading this? She wondered what had become of the baby and shivered at the thought of Vito Gamboa getting his hands on the infant. Could he have fled on a motorcycle with a baby? Surely not. Why had there been no mention of the child? She clearly remembered seeing the baby in the back of Mary Anne’s car that evening in the alleyway. Now Ragna’s intense curiosity and heartfelt concern got the better of her.
She walked straight into the kitchen and opened her junk drawer, where she kept an extra pair of reading glasses. Then she searched for the card the nice detective had given her the day he came out to interview her shortly after the shooting. He had been assigned to Mary Anne’s case and had taken over where the police left off. Assault with a deadly weapon, or ADW for short. If her instincts were correct, and they usually were, Ragna knew the case would be upgraded from ADW to a homicide investigation now that Mary Anne Maynard was dead.
She found the detective’s thick white calling card beneath a red boxed deck of Bicycle Rider Back playing cards, and this time she would fix it on her refrigerator door with one of her tiny magnets. There were six magnets in all. Each one featured a different version of Sherlock Holmes. Angela had given them to her on her sixtieth birthday.
Ragna placed the card for Detective Mitch Coffey between her grocery list and
the Arrowhead water delivery schedule. Then she reached for her phone and entered the numbers for his office line as she checked the Herschede triple-chime grandfather clock that dwarfed her doll-size living room. It was a quarter till two, and she hoped Detective Coffey would be back from lunch by now.
Fiona Carlisle felt a bit nauseated. Dr. Goodwin had just asked her for Caroline Martinez’s file because Caroline had called the office and was now holding on line three. While from the looks of it, Dr. Goodwin wasn’t at all ruffled, Fiona’s stomach betrayed her own rattled nerves. She worried again of the possibility she could lose her job over this. Worse yet, she, along with Dr. Goodwin, could be sued. She prayed silently to herself. Oh God, please help. It was an innocent mistake. Lots of women abort babies every day without a second thought. This was a horrible error. Please just make it all go away. She had never truly felt like the confident, intelligent forty-three-year-old woman she presented herself to be. She hoped she had made the right decision to shred the lab results for both Mrs. Martinez and Mrs. Martin. She took a deep breath and tried to compose herself.
“It’s back in the file cabinet behind reception,” Fiona said. “She’s not due back here for another month. Is something wrong?”
“Don’t know,” Dr. Goodwin said as he turned and walked out of her office.
“Here you go; I found it.” The receptionist smiled as she handed Dr. Goodwin the file. “Line three,” she reminded him. Dr. Goodwin took the file and returned to his office, closing the door behind him.
Fiona could feel beads of perspiration building underneath her breasts in the fold between her mammary glands and her front ribs. Then she felt with her hand between her breasts to find the slippery condensation there too. This she always found irritating. Her body didn’t perspire like most women’s. It never happened where she had already prepared for it with underarm deodorant. Instead, Fiona always noticed herself getting wet in the most uncomfortable areas: between and underneath her breasts, in her scalp, and down her spine, starting at the nape of her neck. This perspiration never caused an odor. She thought it may have something to do with being perimenopausal, but every time she had her hormones checked, the lab results always revealed she was still producing estrogen within the normal range. Even so, it felt a lot more like a hot flash to her when she experienced it. And she was on full furnace right now. She took her white lab coat off and hung it on the back of her office door. Then she reached for a Kleenex and dabbed lightly inside her blouse between her breasts. She was grateful not to be wearing nylons. These days she usually went bare legged when she wore a dress, especially in the summer. Did anyone wear nylons anymore? she wondered.
A knock on her door jolted her out of her thoughts. The receptionist poked her head in.
“Your two o’clock is here for her ultrasound: Mrs. Matthews. Her file’s in the exam room.”
“Okay, thanks,” Fiona said, still heating up. She wondered what she could say to make the receptionist tell her what was happening with Mrs. Martinez. Had she called in a panic? Was she crying over the telephone? “By the way,” Fiona said. “Did we give Mrs. Martinez a prescription for prenatal vitamins when she was last here? I mean, she was pregnant this time, wasn’t she?”
The receptionist looked a little perplexed when she answered. “I think so. I mean, I’m sure we would have. I would have to check the file. Dr. Goodwin has it right now.”
“Oh, okay, never mind. It’s not really that important. I’ll check the file later,” Fiona said.
The receptionist turned and started to close the door. Before it closed all the way, Fiona noticed Dr. Goodwin place a file down on top of a stack of other files and then go into one of the examining rooms. She got up, took her lab coat from the back of the door, and put it back on. Then she opened the door again, took Mrs. Matthews’s chart, and walked to the waiting room to call her next patient.
Later, after Mrs. Matthews had left and she had an hour before her next patient, Fiona pulled Mrs. Martinez’s file from the stack of folders waiting to be refiled. She read Dr. Goodwin’s handwritten notes. Notes that would later be transcribed neatly into clean, crisp printed words no one could mistake. Miscarried was the word she was looking for and the word, much to her relief, that she saw written on the three-by-five-inch white note paper with the doctor’s name, Dr. Samuel T. Goodwin, printed at the bottom.
The rest of the doctor’s scribbled handwriting was not important at this time. Based on Dr. Goodwin’s actions, Fiona surmised that Mrs. Martinez had started her period, thought she was having a miscarriage, and phoned to ask Dr. Goodwin what to do. Dr. Goodwin would have asked her if she was in any pain and just how much blood she had passed, and whether or not there were any clots. Absent any unusual amount of blood loss, at this early stage in the pregnancy, Dr. Goodwin would have told her she had probably miscarried and to schedule an appointment as soon as possible for another exam. At that time, of course, her diagnosis would be confirmed.
Fiona quietly returned to her office and reached for the telephone. She knew at this point everything was probably going to be okay. Neither the patients nor the hospital staff would ever notice there had been a human life hanging in the balance between two file folders, between two lab reports, between two women separated in name only by an e and a z.
But that’s not what bothered Fiona anymore. What she felt now, particularly after her silent supplication only a few moments earlier, was the need to set things straight, whether or not anyone would ever notice. She was having a good old-fashioned guilt attack—or what her grandmother would have called a “quickening of the Spirit.” Even though Fiona rarely prayed unless she was in trouble, somehow Spirit was always there, Johnny-on-the-spot, whenever she called it forth. And she got the answer she wanted all right. It looked as though no one would ever put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Yet as Fiona well knew from her Catholic upbringing, God always worked in mysterious ways. The mystery being that she got exactly what she had prayed for, and of course, it was exactly what she needed to make her come to her senses. The thought of Mrs. Martinez in mourning because she thought she had miscarried when in fact she had not made Fiona feel ashamed. This poor woman would probably never get pregnant again because she had never been pregnant to begin with. She had been trying for years to no avail in spite of fertility drugs.
Fiona picked up the receiver and pressed the numbers of her friend’s cell phone into the office telephone on her desk, hoping she would answer, hoping she wasn’t too busy to talk as she so often was. Being an emergency physician, her friend was usually not reachable during working hours, but Fiona wasn’t sure these days whether Nancy Kelley worked days or nights. It had been a month or two since they’d last spoken, and Fiona knew Nancy was trying to change her schedule back to the day shift again. She and Nancy had been friends since they met in college. They were both premed at the time, but Fiona had opted for nursing school at the last minute. Fiona wanted to talk to another medical professional. Nancy would understand. Nancy was a woman of integrity and had a good heart. Fiona knew her to be acutely sensitive to the needs of others, perhaps even to a fault. But then again, many people who were attracted to the medical profession had similar traits. Nancy would be able to help Fiona figure out the best way to go about making restitution in this kind of situation.
The hospital cafeteria was empty except for Nancy Kelley, who sat alone at a small table in the corner by a row of vending machines. She completed her call to the battered women’s shelter, and now she checked her wristwatch. Her lunch hour was almost over. She tried to recall which police station was handling Mary Anne Maynard’s case when suddenly she remembered the detective who had come to visit Mary Anne in the hospital: nice guy, tall and lean and quiet. Rather than overly obtrusive, he was laid back and analytical, which was in fact what being a detective was all about, she surmised. He had taken over Mary Anne’s case after the initial police report had been filed. Nancy thought he was kind of cute and not
iced he didn’t wear a wedding band. And he had an unusual name. But what was it?
Nancy’s eyes wandered to the one vending machine in the center of the row against the wall in front of her—the one between the candy bars and bags of chips on the right and hot soups on the left. The front of the machine displayed the large image of a white porcelain cup sitting on a saucer. The cup, filled with amber-colored liquid, pictured white steam rising in ghostly, cloudlike formations from the surface. And then it came to her. Of course, Detective Coffey! Now if she could just remember where she had placed the business card he gave her that day. She rummaged through her purse and took out her wallet, checking every sleeve until she pulled out a thick white matte card with the detective’s office line printed at the bottom.
She picked up her cell phone again and began to punch in the detective’s digits. Before she could press Send, she heard the familiar ring tone—the theme song for MASH—reserved only for fellow physicians, nurses, and paramedics. She checked the name on the LCD: FIONA CARLISLE.
“Hey, girl. Haven’t talked to you in a while,” Nancy said.
“I know. I’ve been meaning to call you. Do you have a minute to talk?”
Fiona’s voice was tight, and Nancy immediately had a sense this phone call was important. She glanced at her watch again. Detective Coffey could wait a little longer.
“Sure, what’s up?”
Fiona proceeded to tell her story to Nancy, who listened intently. When Fiona had finished talking, Nancy took a deep breath and silently asked for guidance, something she often did when someone came to her for advice. The last thing she ever wanted to do was mislead someone who was already troubled.
