Finding Sheila

by Anne Hagan

  His hand covered the mouthpiece. “I’m speaking with Dr. Goddard. If you’ll give me just a minute…”

  “I just want to know, am I wasting my time here? I’ve got a case to solve. If you people won’t help me, I need to go out and find someone who can.”

  He spoke into the mouthpiece again, “One moment sir. I’ll be right back with you…Yes sir. Yes, she’s right here, right now.” He grew quiet, listening, but his eyes flicked over her. He tried to wave her back toward her seat, but she crossed her arms and didn’t budge.

  Finally, he hung up the phone. “Dr. Goddard,” he began, “is our Chief Medical Officer. It’s his permission you need to see patient records.”

  “Did he give it?”

  “No. Not so much.”

  Dana bristled.

  “Look, honey, It’s Sunday. There’s a major holiday in four days. I’m lucky I got him on the phone at all. He’s off with his latest floozy, cavorting on goodness knows what tropical island, as far away from the prying eyes of the hospital board as he can be.”

  “Do you understand the urgency of this situation, Zach?”

  “Zachery.”

  She ignored the correction and pressed on. “A major felon vanished into thin air. Poof!” She threw an arm up and snapped her fingers, playing her role to the hilt. “It’s my job to find her and see justice served. I have reason to believe she was pulling a scam, possibly on this hospital. I want a look at one record, just one. Hers. Do you think you can do that for me?”

  The records clerk wasn’t at all happy to see Dana back in her domain and she made sure she knew it. After ranting at her for a few minutes about going over her head to get what she wanted, she made Dana leave her cell phone and her other belongings on her front counter. She looked over the letterhead stationary piece Zachary had given to Dana again and tapped it with a bony finger. “You’ve only been given permission to look at the files, not to record anything within them. No notes. None! Understood?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The half stooped over old woman opened the gate and let Dana behind the counter. “This way to the file room you’ll be wanting. We keep the records of prisoners separate from the other patients. Makes it easier when they’re back and forth to court and the damn lawyers are in and out and in and out of here.”

  Dana was glad she wasn’t a lawyer. They walked past a couple of desks that were obviously occupied normally, but devoid of occupants on a Sunday. Slow day, Dana thought.

  The clerk unlocked a door, flipped a light switch and then stood back to let the younger woman through into a room no bigger than a closet.

  This makes Doc Rutledge’s office look huge. There was a single work table in front of her, free of any items and, behind it, five filing cabinets.

  “They’re alphabetical. The files you’ll be wanting are in the bottom drawer of the first one.” A phone rang in the outer office. The woman waved a finger at her. “I’m giving you ten minutes; then I go on my lunch break.” She shuffled out to answer the phone but left the door open.

  Dana spent Saturday night talking to Mel, going over the files that had been transferred to her from the Women’s prison. Between them, and what little she’d been able to learn from Caroline Rutledge, she thought Sheila Ford’s doctors at Saint Vincent might have suspected she had MS. There wasn’t enough in them She was hoping the internal hospital records would confirm or refute that, conclusively.

  She found the file she wanted quickly and laid it on the table. On an initial flip through, she noted how thin it was. The first visit had been five months prior. There were a number of tests; most of their facts and figures so much medical mumbo jumbo to her. Nothing jumped out. There were no conclusions that had been made or to be made.

  At the back of the file, she found copies of requests from Sheila’s previous family doctor and primary care physicians for records. It didn’t appear anything had been provided that led the staff doctors at Saint Thomas to believe she had been previously diagnosed with anything or suffered from or complained about anything, prior to her incarceration. Dana wracked her own brain. She hadn’t known the woman well or long, but she’d always seemed healthy to her.

  She leafed through the pages one more time, this time catching the referral form from Caroline Rutledge. She scanned it quickly, stopping at the words suspected neuromuscular dysfunction. She perused the lists of symptoms Rutledge claimed Ford had presented with. She suspected MS or something like it too. Why didn’t she tell me this?

  Dana replaced the file in the drawer, then pulled open a couple of the others and skimmed over the names. The name ‘Cherryman’ caught her eye. She tiptoed around the table and peeked out at the file clerk. When she saw the other woman was still busy on the phone, she sneaked back over to the cabinet and pulled the file out.

  Raeanne Cherryman. The name was unique enough. It has to be the woman Rutledge was treating yesterday. Her curiosity got the better of her.

  She stood at the open drawer, paging through the file. Cherryman had an odd vehicle injury, a cracked sternum, that the hospital treated her for on a date before she apparently became a prisoner. Dana searched but found nothing in the record that indicated the woman had been a prisoner at the time of her injury, like the referral from Rutledge she’d found in Sheila Ford’s file. If she was a prisoner, why was she out in a vehicle? How the hell do you crack your sternum?” There was no evidence of an x-ray or an MRI to prove the diagnosis, lending further proof in her mind that the injury happened prior to the woman’s incarceration, yet here was the file with the prisoner records.

  Dana bumped forward into the drawer as if she were bumping the steering wheel or the dash, then shook her head. How hard do you have to hit something to crack your sternum? She made a mental note to look up the injury, any record of an accident involving Cherryman, and records of her conviction.

  Knowing at least five minutes had passed, she glanced down at her watch to check the time…her smart watch. She gave herself a mental head slap then, moving fast, she snapped several pictures of the diagnosis documents in Raeanne Cherryman’s file with the watch camera. She returned the file to its drawer and dug out Sheila Ford’s again. She snapped pictures of several test result pages and the referral from Rutledge, then snapped her watch back around her wrist and closed the file just as the old matron of records reappeared in the doorway.

  “Time’s up deputy. Put it away and let’s go.”

  ###

  Dana traced the screen of her laptop with a finger. Raeanne Cherryman had been convicted of felony counts of passing bad checks and grand theft auto for a Chevy truck valued at over $35,000. She had a long rap sheet as a small time criminal in Tennessee until the Class C Felony charges that had landed her in the women’s penitentiary with a five-year sentence. The conviction - she plead guilty - was less than a month after a serious accident where she rolled a vehicle, for the theft which had occurred only a couple of days after the rolling incident.

  Dana read several articles about the symptoms and treatment for a cracked sternum. She sat back and contemplated what she’d read. If Cherryman was injured in an accident the way her medical records indicate, she would have been in intense pain for a month or more afterward. Maybe for several months afterward. She probably wouldn’t have been up and on the move quite so quickly. Odd that she was out writing a rubber check to steal a pickup truck a couple of days later.

  Focus! This isn’t about Cherryman. Looking back at the screen, she skimmed through the photos of Sheila’s lab tests. She looked everything up, still nothing struck her as anything but routine test results. Some enzymes were elevated slightly. Most were in normal ranges.

  She rubbed her eyes. Can you fake MS convincingly? Is there something that definitively shows you have it? She thought of Caroline Rutledge then and realized that, after her conversation with Mel, she hadn’t gone back as she had intended to look the doctor up. Back to the Internet she went, this time looking for medical board licensing i
nformation in Tennessee.

  She sat back hard in her chair, in shock, when a page of Rutledge’s credentials showed her to be board certified in neurology and in neuromuscular medicine.

  “It just doesn’t ring true, Mel. Why would someone who’s a board-certified neurologist be passing meds in a prison? And, better yet, why isn’t she sure Sheila has MS? As a neurologist, she would know all of the possible signs and symptoms and be able to make a diagnosis with a proper exam and patient history.”

  “Maybe that’s just it. Maybe she has done those things and she’s convinced Sheila does not have MS. Maybe she referred her out to cover her own ass.”

  “Or, maybe she’s in on some larger scheme like the plot to get Sheila sprung from the prison so she could disappear,” Dana said.

  Mel rubbed her face on her end of the line. “Do you really think that? A neurologist? Why would she jeopardize her license like that?”

  “Beats me,” Dana said. “She’s young Mel…33-34, but she looks younger than she is. After all those years of school, residency, time spent to get board certified; maybe she has loans she’s still paying on. Maybe she flopped as a neurologist…maybe she couldn’t get a position, ended up at the jail to have a guaranteed paycheck.”

  “You can’t prove a single word of that, can you?”

  “Nope. Not one.”

  Chapter 11 - Family Fun Day

  Sunday, November 22nd

  Crane Family Farm

  Morelville, Ohio

  Mel blew out a heavy breath as she worked her way up the long driveway to the farm house. She hadn’t intended to show up for the pre-Thanksgiving cleaning fest the day promised to be, but she was getting nowhere at the office. After Dana’s call, she tried calling Jennifer Coventry’s cell phone again. As before, her call went right to voice mail. Hope the FBI is having better luck tracking the family down.

  When she exited her truck, she could smell the lemon zest of furniture polish and mop bucket water. Inside the farm house, it was bedlam. She never understood why cleaning had to involve moving every last thing from its original resting place, somewhere else, only to be returned immediately afterward.

  “You did come after all,” Faye Crane called out when she spied her daughter. She was on all fours, part way up the oaken stairs to the second floor. “Grab a rag off the pile on the kitchen table and help me get this banister oil soaped, would you?”

  Mel did as she was told. It didn’t pay to argue with Faye; not when she was in cleaning mode.

  “Thought you were at work?” Mel’s twin sister Kris asked.

  “I was. Wasn’t getting anywhere. I didn’t have a lot of leads to work with.”

  “Still trying to find Sheila?”

  “Me, not so much. There’s only so much I can do from. I was trying to give an assist to the FBI…”

  Faye called out, “You two can talk and work. We don’t have all day.”

  Kris laughed. “Actually, we do.”

  Mel stage whispered to her sister, “She’s just mad because she can’t hear what all we’re saying.”

  “I heard that,” Faye said.

  Mel and Chris reentered the dining room area. Faye directed her minutes older twin to the outside of the balustrade. “The step ladder is right around the corner in the den. Work your way up as high as you can with that.”

  She started on the lower part and was able to get half way before she even needed the ladder. By the time she was using it, she’d caught up with her mother who was carefully wiping down each spindle.

  Faye took the opportunity to quiz her. “I take it Dana is still in Tennessee and you have no idea what’s going on?”

  “Oh, I know what’s going on; there’s just not a lot I can do to help. It seems Sheila’s daughter has disappeared right along with her. No one can even put a finger on where she might have gone or when.”

  “Somebody around here has to know something about something.”

  “Doubtful. Jennifer hasn’t lived here in years. She was all but married off herself when Sheila and Terry got married.”

  “There’s somebody around here that knows something about everything, Melissa.”

  “Are you hinting that you might know something? Are you holding out on me?”

  Faye waved her cleaning rag at her. You know that’s not what I meant. I mean that if you’re looking for people who know things about Sheila that might help you find her, you really don’t have to look very far. If we all put our heads together, we can come up with something or somebody.”

  “Something or somebody about what?” Jesse Crane asked as he strode into the room carrying a basket full of laundry. “Here’s your towels,” he said to his wife.

  “You didn’t fold them,” Faye shot back. “You could have folded them and put them in the linen cupboard.”

  “I’ll do it, Grandma,” Beth, Kris's teenage daughter volunteered.

  Faye waved her to it and then picked up where she left off. “We’re talking about Sheila Ford, Jesse.”

  Beth took the basket from her grandfather and moved to stand beside an armchair where she could stack the folded towels without missing a beat of the adult conversations swirling around her.

  Jesse gave the teenager a knowing look, but his own curiosity got the better of him. He turned to his daughter. “Find her yet?”

  “No. I probably won’t. There’s a manhunt through three states for her. Someone will track her down…probably the FBI.”

  “Not if you get a lead first,” Faye said.

  Weird that she’s all of a sudden supportive of my work. “It doesn’t quite work that way. First, it’s not really my case. It belongs to the FBI.”

  “So then why is Dana still in Tennessee? Why isn’t she home?”

  “She’s just helping out, following the paper trail. I’m supposed to be trying to run down her daughter Jennifer, whom the FBI can’t even find.”

  “Sounds like a big ‘ol conspiracy to me,” Jesse said.

  Mel refrained from rolling her eyes at her father. “I have a hard time thinking that, not yet. She’s a different sort. She strikes me as the kind of person who has little patience for things like the life Sheila had here. She’d prefer to chair the hospital volunteers’ group or some such thing.”

  “Well,” Kris joined in, “There haven’t been any sightings of Sheila in the village or anywhere around. That word would have spread quicker than word of her disappearance did. I’d have heard something at the station by now.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Mel said. “I’ve been by the house a few times too. Walked around; checked it out. No sign of anyone having been there in the dead of night or otherwise.”

  Kris gave Mel a quizzical look. “What do you really know about her beyond what we’ve always known about her? I mean, does she have other kids here in Ohio besides Jennifer? Any other family?”

  “No. No other kids,” Faye answered. “She just had the one daughter…that Jennifer you’re talking about. And, you’re right; she never came around here much. She was older…out of the house anyway, by the time Sheila and Terry got together.”

  “How long were Sheila and Terry married, mom?” Kris asked.

  Faye stopped working her polish rag and sat back on her heels only a few steps down from the top of the staircase as her twins looked up at her expectantly. “I dunno. I’d say twenty some years now, maybe.” She got a faraway look in her eyes. “Twenty-one or twenty-two.”

  Jesse scoffed. “She’s been around here longer than that.”

  She shook a finger at him. “You know better. She didn’t even move here until they were married. Think about it; you and your buddies took Terry fishing on his wedding day…brought him back smelling like he fell in the lake. Their house wasn’t ready. He was living in that shack of a cabin out on Chuck’s property. You had to bring him out here to clean him up.”

  “We was just trying to get him out of the way of all you women and your plans and your primping is all. We had him all
spiffied up in plenty of time.”

  Beth giggled but stopped when Jesse shot her a warning look.

  “Her maiden name was Perrott,” Mel said as she looked across at her mother and then down to her sister, from her perch on the ladder. “Ring any bells?”

  “I knew that,” Faye said, “but it’s not a common name around here.”

  Kris shook her head in agreement. “I don’t know of any other around people by that name.”

  “She wasn’t from Ohio at all though, was she?” Jesse asked.

  Mel said, “Terry was from Tennessee. Maybe they met there.”

  “Could be,” Faye answered, but if I recall correctly, Sheila was from Virginia. Not sure how the two of them ended up in Ohio, or her daughter either, for that matter. You might be better off to be looking for her family ties in Virginia.”

  Kris snapped her fingers. “There was a kid we used to go tubing with in the summers. He would come here and stay with them for a couple of weeks every year. He said he was a second cousin to Sheila or something.”

  Recollection dawned in Mel’s eyes. “Robby. He was a couple of years younger than us…from around the Akron area too, like Jennifer, as I recall, not Virginia.” Mel tapped her fingers against her forehead, thinking but she drew a blank. “What was his last name?”

  “I don’t think it was Perrott,” Kris said.

  Faye stood up. “It wasn’t. I think it was Bragg. I honestly don’t think he was from Akron, though.”

  Chapter 12 - Cousins

  Monday, November 23rd

  Finding a Robert Bragg of about the right age for her memory of him was a task that proved impossible. Finding motor vehicle records for his father Tyrell Bragg was not. The elder Bragg still lived in Bolivar, just south of Canton, where Robby had grown up.