“Right over here, Dr. Rainer. Dr. Chattin, our chief of staff, would like to see you after you’ve examined her. She’ll be prepped for surgery shortly, and it has been suggested that you’d be willing to operate. You’ll need to scrub in about forty-five minutes if Chattin okays it.”
“Of course,” Rainer answered.
To me he said, “I’m so grateful to you, Dr. McCarron. You may have saved her life. And you can have no idea what your presence here has meant to Isadora. But why did you come? Why did you extend yourself to a woman you believe to be a murderer?”
“She was frightened, Dr. Rainer, and despite what the paramedics said I wasn’t sure she’d live. There was so much blood. It was awful. Do you have any idea why she’d kill these people? It’s so strange….”
“Isadora is incapable of harming anyone except herself,” he said dispassionately, removing the bandage at her wrist. “I’d like to speak with you for a few minutes after I’ve completed my examination of the wound. Would you wait for me in the driveway outside the emergency room doors? What I have to say is confidential.”
“Of course,” I answered in the same tones he’d used with the nurse, and went outside.
The blood on my skirt had dried to a blackish brown crust, so I turned it backward and sat on the grass to wait. I didn’t have to worry about grass stains, I thought. As soon as I could get my other clothes from the truck, the skirt would be thrown in a trash can. I never wanted to see it again. Or Isadora Grecchi, for that matter. Or the bones inside her left arm.
“There you are,” Rainer said minutes later. “I may be able to save the mobility in her hand, but it’s going to be difficult. Let me just thank you for your help and then tell you what you will find out in any event. After that I must speak with Dr. Chattin and prepare for the surgery. I’m sure it will be allowed. I’ve known Chattin for twenty years.”
He was standing over me, apparently not in the mood to sit in the grass and chat, so I stood as well.
“Let’s go over here in the shade,” he suggested, moving some distance from the e.r. door to stand near an oleander at the edge of the hospital property. “You see, Isadora is more to me than just a colleague,” he began. “I’ve known her since she was very young, a child. It was in Denver. I was doing my residency at a hospital there, and she was brought in. The injuries were, well, very serious. Isadora was only ten years old. She’d been raped, Dr. McCarron, and not for the first time. The rapist was her stepfather, a drunken bastard—and I make no apology for my language—who should have been put to death for what he did to her. I assisted with the surgery. We were able to repair the damage to her spleen and the large bowel, but not the uterus, which had to be removed. Isadora cannot bear children.
“He’d infected her with syphilis as well, and it was already at the latent stage, which meant she was infected at least a year prior to that hospitalization. The large doses of penicillin necessary to kill the syphilis spirochetes at that stage of infection can make an adult very sick. You can imagine what it did to a ten-year-old child already traumatized by near-fatal internal injuries.”
I was feeling nauseous again. “Where was her mother?” “Isadora’s mother suffered very severe depressive episodes, often requiring hospitalization. There were no other family members to care for Isadora, so during her mother’s hospitalizations she was left in the care of her brutish stepfather. After the rape in which he came very close to killing her, her mother committed suicide.”
“God,” I whispered. “The police did turn up the fact that she was made a ward of the court in Denver, but no other information because juvenile records are sealed. Rathbone said they’d subpoenaed the records, but it would take weeks.”
“As I said, you were going to learn her history anyway,” he went on. “Now that the FBI is involved, those records can be accessed immediately. The next part of what I have to tell you is quite painful to me, but I want you to know. It’s necessary.
“Marlis and I had been married for four years at that time and had been unable to conceive a child. We were tested; there was nothing wrong, but it just didn’t happen. Marlis wanted a child so badly. When I came home and told her about Isadora, she said she wanted to visit the child, cheer her up during her stay in the hospital. In those days doctors’ wives often volunteered at the hospitals where we were on staff, so it was perfectly normal for Marlis to do that. Then when the time came for Isadora to be discharged there was some problem with the social services agency. No foster home was available in the area, and she was to be sent to another town. Mar asked me if we could take the girl in, become foster parents for her until a local placement could be arranged. Mar wanted to stay in contact with her, you see.”
“So you’re Grecchi’s foster father?”
He stared at the oleander, then said, “No. We did take Isadora to live with us for a time, even considered adopting her, at first. She was a lively little thing, but so damaged by the abuse she’d endured. Temper tantrums, soiling the bed, lashing out at us physically, deliberately breaking things. And then Mar became pregnant.”
“With Megan?” I asked, already knowing what had happened next.
“Yes. We were overjoyed, but fearful, too. Mar had a difficult pregnancy in the beginning. There was some bleeding. She was terribly ill and we were afraid she might lose the baby. After a month it became clear that she couldn’t handle Isadora alone while pregnant, and I was always at work, of course. We were very young and there wasn’t much information at that time about the difficulties presented by an abused child. We didn’t know what we’d gotten into, only that we couldn’t go on with it. We had to take Isadora back to the social services agency, allow her to be placed in a foster home out of town.”
He took a deep breath, tugged a pink oleander blossom from the bush, and regarded it bleakly.
“I did it, I took her away,” he went on. “Marlis was too upset to go along. I took Isadora to the agency offices with her clothes and all her little things, little toys and a brown corduroy teddy bear Marlis had made for her out of a jacket I wore in college. Mar used the cuff buttons for its eyes. Isadora loved that bear, wouldn’t be parted from it. Until Mar’s death two years ago, that was the worst day of my life.”
I watched as he dropped the pink blossom to the grass at our feet, and didn’t mention the brown corduroy bear on the mantel in Isadora Grecchi’s living room.
“I don’t know what to say, Dr. Rainer,” I replied in a voice I’d heard Roxie use when talking to her patients on the phone. Quiet and calm. “It was obvious from Isadora’s reaction to my bodyguard that she mistrusts men. I suspected that she might have been raped, but of course I didn’t imagine anything of this magnitude. It’s beyond imagining.”
“Yes,” he said, “but let me tell you the rest, and then I must go. Isadora needs me. Do you know, Dr. McCarron, that an obligation to a broken child, once undertaken, cannot end? Isadora is fifty-one years old now, and I am sixty-seven. Forty years have gone by, Marlis is dead, and Megan has established a life with her own husband and children, and Isadora still needs my care. Perhaps it would have been different if she hadn’t inherited a genetic proclivity to depression from her mother, but she did. And given the intolerable stress in her young life, there was no way that proclivity could have remained inactive.”
“What happened after she went into foster care in another town?” I pushed.
“It was in Colorado Springs, a well-meaning family but unfortunately of that ‘Christian’ fundamentalist type who manage to think the Bible is both historical fact and absolute law despite all reason. Stupid, pathetic people lost in punitive beliefs they then inflicted on the children in their care. Mar and I tried to visit Isadora every month or so, less often after Megan was born, of course, but we kept up the contact. We knew things weren’t going well for Isadora there, but there was nothing we could do. Then one weekend I was in Colorado Springs for a medical conference and happened to have a few free hours in the afternoon. I
went to this foster home unannounced to visit Isadora, who was then almost twelve, and walked in on a scene that shocked me.”
“What? What happened?”
“The poor girl,” he went on, clenching and unclenching his fists, “was being punished for something. Isadora was always doing something, was always in trouble both at home and in school. I don’t mean to suggest that she wasn’t a difficult child. But these people, these foster parents, had made her strip to her panties and stand in the middle of the living room while the father read aloud from the Bible.”
Of course. The Sword of Heaven.
“That’s what I walked in on—Isadora standing there, not crying but miserable, trying to cover her little breasts with her arms. There were other children in the home, Dr. McCarron, including three boys, one of them half grown and already shaving. They were allowed to watch Isadora’s humiliation. Apparently the others were so accustomed to the spectacle they were bored with it by then, because one of them had made a bowl of popcorn and that seemed of more interest to them than Isadora. I threw my jacket over her and took her out of there that minute. The father recited something about the ‘Whore of Babylon’ as we left, but didn’t attempt to stop me.
“I took her back to Denver and insisted that the agency find a better home for her. By then I was on staff at the hospital and had the community standing granted to doctors. I could throw some weight around, and I did. Isadora went to another placement, this time in Denver. Later there were two more foster homes, and then when the depressive symptoms began to manifest when she was about fourteen, she was sent to a facility for emotionally disturbed children. A sort of combination hospital and orphanage, where she could be monitored. There were a number of suicide attempts during those years, Dr. McCarron, one of them almost fatal.”
I thought about the bones I’d seen, and a child of fourteen, and tasted bile in the back of my throat. I could not have survived one week of Isadora Grecchi’s life, and I knew it.
“That facility was the best place for her,” Rainer continued hurriedly. “The staff were trained and for the most part kind. There was an arts and crafts program taught by someone from a local community college. Isadora was encouraged to paint and found in that a way to release some of her rage and pain. Marlis and I continued to visit with her, occasionally brought her to the house for a weekend, although these events were exhausting.”
“How did she get from there to becoming a doctor?” I asked. “It seems unlikely, given what you’ve told me.”
Rainer glanced at his watch. “I only have a few more minutes,” he said. “Isadora tried a number of things after she turned eighteen and was no longer under the jurisdiction of the court, some of them criminal but nothing serious. Drugs, petty thefts. I was always able to prevent her spending time in jail. Eventually she asked if I’d pay her tuition for college, and I agreed. There were starts and stops, but she’s quite intelligent and found a way to build self-esteem by getting good grades. She was given a partial scholarship to medical school, and I funded the rest. Her choice to become a doctor was merely an attempt to please me, I’m afraid. Isadora merely regards it as a job. She has little or no real feeling for people, but neither is she hateful, which is my point in giving you her history. You must understand. I know Isadora.”
“Yes, you do,” I agreed as we walked back toward the emergency room doors. “Dr. Rainer, that blue willow plate on the wall of your surgical waiting room. Is that plate Isadora’s?”
“Dr. Bouchie told me this murderer has some connection to those plates,” he said, frowning. “No, Dr. McCarron, that plate belonged to my wife. Marlis decorated the waiting room. I had a professional do the rest of the office, but the waiting room was Mar’s project. Years ago, after Megan went off to college, Mar developed an interest in antique china, joined a collector’s club. The blue willow was the best piece in her collection and she felt it should be displayed. She created that wall of plates to complement the blue willow. Isadora had nothing to do with it and in fact probably couldn’t name the pattern if asked.”
“Why did Isadora choose to go into anesthesiology? If she were basing her career choices on yours, wouldn’t she have chosen cosmetic surgery?”
Rainer sighed and then nodded. I had the feeling he’d thought about the answers to these questions for years.
“Marlis and I had hoped Isadora would marry, maybe adopt children, have a life like ours,” he said, shaking his head. “We still didn’t understand how impossible that was. At one point we suspected the existence of a lesbian relationship with one of her professors in med school. I know I appear an old fuddyduddy to you young people, Dr. McCarron,” he said, smiling for the first time, “but let me tell you that was fine with us. We just wanted Isadora to have a deep connection, a love to make her life as complete as we knew it could be. But I’m afraid we were only imagining loves for Isadora. In truth, there were none, have never been.
“Anesthesiology is lucrative but requires very long hours,” he explained. “Few women specialize in it for that reason. It’s incompatible with family life. Isadora wanted a great deal of financial security, wanted to repay me for the costs of her education, and did. She knew she would never have a family. Anesthesiology seemed the right choice.”
His hand was on the e.r. door now, and I could see Roxie, Rathbone, and a man with a cord running from his shirt collar to his right ear hurrying from the parking lot across the street.
“But here is what you must know in order to understand both Isadora’s innocence of these crimes and the reason for what must seem an incriminating attempt to end her own life. Last night she came to me, came to my apartment, with an investment idea. I don’t have time to explain it in detail, but it involved our jointly underwriting a breast-surgery clinic she would direct. She wanted me to be on staff for occasional reconstructive surgeries. We talked until very late, and then she stayed and slept on the couch. I know she didn’t leave because the door can only be unlocked from either side with a key. It was locked, and I had the key. She could not have sent those messages last night, Dr. McCarron.
“Isadora is a difficult, troubled woman and always will be,” he concluded. “She must live with a serious psychiatric disorder and the baggage from a brutal childhood, but she isn’t a murderer. These facts do not make her a murderer. I hope you and the others”—he nodded toward the three approaching figures—“are able to draw that distinction.”
“But did you agree to this investment idea, this clinic?” I yelled as he went inside.
“No,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve decided to move up north to be near Chris and Megan and my grandchildren.”
A few things were beginning to make sense, I thought as the door closed behind him. Grecchi had needed to hold on to Rainer, her lifelong source of stability. With the closing of the Rainer Clinic she’d come up with a plan, a new clinic they’d fund jointly. She’d be the director and he’d be around to do surgeries when his skills were needed. Mostly, he’d be around. But he’d said no, plummeting her into panic and suicidal despair. I guessed it made sense.
Except why would she undermine her own security, represented by Rainer, by killing patients at his clinic? To get even with him for abandoning her to a Denver social services agency over forty years ago? The child Isadora, I imagined, would have been jealous of Megan Rainer, who had supplanted her in the Rainers’ home. Had the adult Isadora transgressed an unthinkable ethical boundary and killed patients as a way of hurting Megan? But Megan wasn’t going to take over the clinic, anyway. Its closing now only benefitted her, allowed her the fulfillment of her dream two years before she’d expected.
And the enigmatic blue willow plates. I remembered feeling that a child had been outside my place that night, that I’d been playing hide and seek with a child who’d left me a strange gift in the dark. Did that child live inside the mind of a fifty-one-year-old woman whose blood now dried on the hem of my skirt?
The train of thought was like a maz
e. It led nowhere, didn’t work, made no sense. But then real people have never made much sense to me, only numbers. Charts and graphs and statistical estimations make sense. So does my notion of the universe, the grid, although the sense is beyond comprehension. Hard data and a slapstick universal irony are my realms. Forget everything in between.
“Girl,” Roxie said with concern as she and Rathbone and the FBI field agent reached my side, “you’re a mess.”
“So it’s Grecchi,” Rathbone noted, unfazed by my bloody skirt and fingernails. “You and Berryman nailed it during the interviews. Has she confessed?”
“She hasn’t said anything, Wes,” I explained. “And she’s sedated now. Rainer’s going to try to repair her arm. The doctors were saying stuff about ligaments and nerve damage. She won’t be able to work if she’s lost the use of her hand.”
The FBI agent looked a little like a balding Lyle Lovett, but his eyes lacked that lost-boy confusion. He seemed deeply focused.
“She’s not going to be working anytime soon,” he announced authoritatively. “Not where she’s going.”
“How bad was the cut?” Roxie asked.
“To the bones.”
“Might be able to restore some mobility if they get to it soon,” she said. “And it’s not her working arm, anyway, is it? People usually cut both wrists. I imagine she instinctively saved the hand she uses professionally. What a sad story.”
For a second I remembered Grecchi as she looked when BB and I had left her house, painting in the sunlit studio off her kitchen. Painting with her left hand, I remembered, as with her right she flipped us the bird.
“Rox, she’s left-handed!” I whispered, not wanting Rathbone and the agent to hear, although I didn’t know why.
“One for the books,” the agent said, his voice resonating with victory. “One of the first female serials. Fits the ‘organized’ profile in every way except sex. White, a loner, professional job, every which way except she’s not a he. Gonna rewrite the profile with this one. Crazy, too. I always thought the bureau ought to keep records on crazies, everybody the shrinks keep under control with medications. Be easy enough to do through the pharmacies. Make our job a lot easier.”
The Last Blue Plate Special Page 25
