Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne

by Hoch Edward D.

  “Yes,” Ben Snow agreed with conviction. “That’s the way it must have been.”

  “You’re right,” Mary agreed. “I’d forgotten those notches.”

  “She wanted it to be fast, to happen while you and Landsman were still on the scene.”

  Ben smiled for the first time. “You’ve made an old man happy. My wife will be pleased when I get back.”

  “Why don’t you stay for dinner?” Mary suggested. “We could eat at my place before you head back. I’m sure you have lots of stories about the Old West.”

  Ben smiled at them both. “And I’ll bet you have New England stories that can top every one.”

  “Maybe,” Dr. Sam answered with a grin. “We’ll see.”

  THE PROBLEM OF THE BLUE BICYCLE

  It was the late summer of ’36 [Dr. Sam Hawthorne recalled] and the ­presidential-election campaign was heating up. Roosevelt and Landon had been nominated at the conventions back in June, but I hadn’t paid much attention at the time because I’d been busy moving into a small house I’d bought for myself just off Main Street. Fourteen years of renting an apartment was enough for me. Even though I wasn’t yet married, I wanted a place of my own, and this house was just the size I needed. My nurse, Mary Best, helped me get settled once I was in there, but it took me most of the summer before I began to feel at home.

  Often in the evenings and on weekends when I was working around the place, I noticed a girl who lived across the street. There’d been a graduation party the week after I moved in, so I knew she was just out of high school. Her name was Angela Rinaldi and she was tall, dark-haired, and, at least when seen from across the street, attractive. Her friends were a few girls her own age plus a variety of neighborhood children, some a few years younger. I’d see her sometimes in the early evening, when there was still plenty of light, leading them off on their bicycles. She rode a blue bike herself, and usually wore dark-blue slacks that buttoned down each hip.

  Angela’s mother’s name was Cora Rinaldi and when we chatted in the yard one Saturday morning I remember she said, “It’s good having a doctor right across the street. We know where to come if we get sick now.” She was a woman in her early forties who’d moved to Northmont from New York City because of her husband’s job. “He works for the telephone company,” she explained. “They’re installing a lot of new wiring up this way.”

  “Rural folks need telephones,” I agreed. “I often see your daughter riding her bicycle.”

  “All the time these days,” she agreed with a sigh. “Angela’s going off to college in another month. I suppose it’s like the end of childhood for her.”

  These days a high-school graduate would be more interested in boys than bicycles, but back then it was different, especially for a girl like Angela who hadn’t been in town that long. She seemed to have plenty of friends, but few of them were boys her own age. I took to watching her on the porch with her girl friends flying down the cement driveway on her bike, leading a charge of other children toward some glorious adventure.

  I knew she was leaving for college the Wednesday after Labor Day, and the evening before her departure I was on my porch, relaxing after a difficult day, when I saw her slip astride her blue bicycle. There were a half dozen others ready to follow—a couple of girls her own age and the usual hangers-on among the younger children. One of them was Angela’s younger sister. As if this was to be the ride of her life, Angela glided down the driveway in the lead. It had rained earlier in the day, and while the other six stayed on the concrete Angela cut the corner, riding through a large puddle at the edge of the road, her legs straight out to avoid being muddied.

  Then they were gone—a girl on the brink of being a woman, leading a ragtag collection of neighborhood children on a final bike ride. I watched them until they disappeared down the road toward the outskirts of town. It would be dark in an hour, but they’d be back by then. I could almost map out their route in my mind: straight out past the Milkin farm, then right along the road to Shinn Corners, then another right back home. It was a triangular route that would take less than an hour.

  The phone rang a little later. It was Mary Best with a question about a bill for one of our patients. “Are you working late again?” I asked her.

  “Well, Sam, it’s past the first of the month and there are August bills you haven’t sent out yet. Where’s my salary going to come from if you don’t take in any money?”

  By the time I got off the phone, it was dark outside and I switched on the lights. I was listening to one of my favorite Tuesday-night radio shows when I heard a car pull up outside. I thought I’d recognized the sound of Sheriff Lens’ motor and went out on the porch.

  “What’s up, Sheriff?”

  He’d started across the street toward the Rinaldi home, but when he heard me he came back to the foot of my porch steps. “Hello, Doc. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Are you here on business?”

  He nodded. “Maybe you’d better come with me. Something’s happened to the Rinaldi girl.”

  “Angela? What is it?”

  “We don’t rightly know. She’s disappeared.”

  Lights were burning in all the downstairs rooms of the Rinaldi house. Henry Rinaldi, a good-looking man in his forties with dark hair just beginning to turn grey, answered the doorbell. “Any news?” he asked the sheriff.

  “Nothing yet. We have our people and the State Police searching the area. If she doesn’t turn up by morning, we’ll have fifty people out there searching the fields.”

  Cora Rinaldi sat on the sofa with a girl I took to be her younger daughter, and I could see her eyes were red from crying. Two older girls, Angela’s biking companions, were there. They seemed to relax a bit with Sheriff Lens’ statement. Perhaps they’d feared even worse news when he’d arrived at the door.

  He turned to the older girls. “I need to know what happened out there. Can you give me your names, first of all? I know you, Laura, but I don’t know your friend.”

  Laura was Laura Fine, whose father was vice president of the bank. I knew the family slightly, but I hadn’t recognized her until that moment. The other girl said she was Judy Irving. Both had graduated from high school with Angela, and had often been with her during the summer, biking or riding around in somebody’s car.

  “Give me the names of everyone who was with you,” Sheriff Lens said, opening his notebook.

  Both girls started to speak at once, but then Laura Fine yielded to Judy Irving. “There were seven of us. Angela wanted to go for one last bike ride—out past the Milkin farm—before she went off to college tomorrow.”

  Sheriff Lens interrupted with a question. “Mrs. Rinaldi, how old is Angela?”

  “Seventeen. She’ll be eighteen later this month. I can give you a graduation picture of her if it’ll help.”

  “Thank you, it will. Go on, Judy. Who else was in the group?”

  “Laura and I, and Angela’s sister Ruthie.” She motioned toward the younger girl on the sofa. Ruthie was perhaps thirteen and her features were similar, though she lacked the assurance I’d observed in Angela. “And the Homer brothers, who always tag along. And Ruthie’s girl friend, Terry Brooks.”

  “The seven of you often go biking?”

  “Sometimes just the three of us older girls go, but the rest of them like to follow us. Angela is sort of a leader, you see.”

  “What happened tonight?”

  “We were all pretty much together at first, though Angela was leading the way as she always does. Gradually she pulled farther ahead, until—”

  “How far ahead?”

  Judy frowned, pondering it, until Laura said, “About the length of a ­football field. I was a cheerleader in school, and it was about the same length—a hundred yards.”

  “Did you reach the Milkin farm?” Sheriff Lens prompted.

  Judy took up the story again. Her pretty blonde hair caught the light from the floor lamp and I wondered if she’d been a cheerleader, too. “Wel
l, you know how the road curves to the right at the beginning of the Milkin ­property? There’s a corn field there and we lost sight of Angela when she rounded the curve.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few seconds.”

  “Maybe half a minute,” Laura Fine confirmed. “No more than that, and probably less.”

  “Then what?”

  Judy’s bottom lip began to tremble as she tried to continue. “When we rounded the curve, she was gone! The—her bicycle was lying in the road about a hundred yards ahead, but there was no sign of her! We thought she was hiding in a ditch or something, but she wasn’t. We looked all over.”

  I cleared my throat and asked, “How dark was it?”

  “Still daylight,” Laura answered, trying to keep from crying, too. “Where the bicycle was, there were mowed fields of hay on both sides of the road. It was cut to within an inch or two of the ground. No one could have hidden there, Doctor.”

  “The ditches?”

  “There weren’t any.”

  “Did any cars or trucks pass?”

  Judy blew her nose. “No. Not a car or truck or anything. The road was straight after we rounded the curve, and we could see all the way to the Milkin farmhouse about a mile away. There wasn’t even a tractor out. And there were no people at all, not Angela or anyone else.”

  “It was as if,” Laura said earnestly, “she rounded that curve and something reached out of the sky to take her away forever.”

  I woke early on Wednesday morning with Angela Rinaldi’s fate very much on my mind. The first thing I did was phone Mary and tell her about it. “How many appointments do I have this morning?” I asked her.

  “Just one.”

  “See if you can postpone it. I want to drive out to the Milkin farm and find out how the search is going. If there’s an emergency, try to reach me at the Milkin place or through the sheriff’s office.”

  I went outside and saw Henry Rinaldi across the street, standing by the garage door and staring up at the sky. “Hello,” I said, walking across the street to join him. “Any news?”

  He looked at me and I couldn’t be certain if he remembered that I’d been in his house the previous night. “No, nothing,” he replied.

  The morning sun was making me squint and, as I turned away back toward my car, I remembered the last time I’d seen Angela on the previous evening, leading her pack down the driveway and into the street. The puddle was gone and I could see the diamond-shaped tread of her tires across the mud. It was all that remained of her, and a chill went through me when I considered the possibility that she might never be found.

  I drove out the way I’d seen them go the previous evening, heading toward the Milkin farm. After a short time, I saw the field of tall corn stalks by the curve in the road, obscuring what was ahead. There’d been more than one accident at that curve. When I rounded the bend, I saw several sheriffs’ and state-police cars parked off the road. Men were in the fields, moving toward the distant woods. I spotted Sheriff Lens by his car and pulled up in front of it.

  “Mornin’, Doc. How you been?”

  “Like you, thinking about the missing girl. Any clues yet?”

  “Not a one. Her friends were right, you know. Nobody could hide in these fields without bein’ seen. We were lookin’ for some sort of trench or furrow that could be invisible from the road, but there isn’t any.”

  “And she wouldn’t have had time to make it all the way to the trees.”

  “Heck, no. It’s a ten-minute walk.”

  “Someone picked her up. It’s the only possibility.”

  “Who, though? And how come the kids didn’t see a car or truck? You got pretty good visibility along this road.”

  I stared down the road, knowing he was right. “You talked with Fred Milkin yet? Maybe he saw something.”

  “Briefly, last night. The girls went there to use the phone when they couldn’t find Angela. He says he didn’t see a thing.”

  “Let’s go talk to him again.” I glanced around and asked, “What happened to the bicycle?”

  “I sent it back to her family. We got a couple of prints off the metal, but without hers to compare with they’re not much good.”

  We started walking up the road toward the grey farmhouse. “Do you think it’s a sex crime, Sheriff?”

  “I try not to think about it, Doc. If someone grabbed her, they had to have a reason, though, didn’t they?”

  “But if they grabbed her, where did they take her in those few seconds before the rest of the kids rounded the curve?”

  Sheriff Lens shrugged. “Then there’s the other possibility. I like that one even less.”

  “What other possibility?”

  “Maybe something happened to her—a terrible accident of some sort. The kids were so panicked by it they hid the body and made up the whole story of her disappearance.”

  “Six children, Sheriff? One of them her own sister? No, that’s even more impossible. The story they told us has to be true—so far as they know the truth.”

  We’d reached the farmhouse and Fred Milkin came out the door to meet us. He’d obviously been watching events through the window. Milkin was a slim, middle-aged man who’d never married. He’d stayed on at the farm alone after his parents died, hiring help for the planting and harvesting as needed. “Hello, Fred!” I called to him. He’d been a patient of mine a few years back when I’d treated him for a skin condition.

  “Hi, Doc. Hello, Sheriff. You got a lot of men out there.”

  “We want to find her, Fred. I only hope she’s alive.”

  “Like I told you last night, I never saw a sign of her. I didn’t know a thing until that bunch of kids came poundin’ on the door to use the phone.”

  “Who did they call?” I asked.

  “Her folks, and then I guess her dad notified you, Sheriff.”

  Sheriff Lens nodded. “Did you have anyone working around here yesterday, Fred?”

  “Nobody. The hay’s all cut.”

  “See any strangers? Hoboes, maybe?”

  “Not lately.”

  We left Milkin standing in his yard, watching the progress of the search. I drove back to town and went to the office, but seeing patients was the last thing on my mind that day. I left by mid-afternoon and drove over to Laura Fine’s house. Her family had a nice home, one of the newer ones in town, and everyone knew where it was. She was one of the few girls her age with a driver’s license.

  I pulled up just as she was getting into the family car. “Hello, Laura,” I said.

  “Dr. Hawthorne! Has there been news about Angela?”

  “I’m afraid not. The police are still searching.”

  “I can’t believe what happened. My folks can’t believe it, either. Dad says people don’t just disappear like that.”

  “Do you or Judy have any new ideas about what might have happened?”

  “I certainly don’t.”

  I caught the inflection in her voice. “What about Judy?”

  “She’s off playing detective somewhere. I’ve been trying to reach her all day.”

  I came to the point of my visit. “Laura, I want to ask you about Angela’s boy friends.”

  “She didn’t really have any. Nobody special, anyway.”

  “Did she go to the senior prom?”

  “Yes—with Phil Gilbert. But that was nothing serious. He asked her and she wanted to go, so she said yes. She told me later he gave her a goodnight kiss and that was all.”

  “Where does Phil live?” I asked her. “I might drive over and speak with him.”

  “He’s right on the next street, Dr. Hawthorne, but he’s not home. I tried calling him last night about Angela and his mother said he was up at the family’s cottage at Silver Lake. He’s closing it up for the season.”

  “When’s he due back?”

  “Sometime tomorrow.”

  “Was there anyone else she went out with recently? Or anyone who asked her for a date and got turned
down?”

  “Not that I know of. But sometimes she was vague about boys.”

  I thanked her and went back and sat in my car, wondering if I was going about this in the wrong way. In the past when I helped Sheriff Lens with a case, I tried to figure out what had happened, and how. With Angela Rinaldi I had jumped ahead to the question of who. A stranger? A friend?

  I looked at the dashboard clock and decided it was only a thirty-minute drive to Silver Lake.

  The clerk at the crossroads store directed me to the Gilbert cottage on the lake. It was down a steep dirt road near the water’s edge, and as I approached I could see a muscular young man putting up wooden shutters over the side windows. I parked my car next to his green Packard and got out.

  “Hello, there!” I called. “Are you Phil Gilbert?”

  He finished securing the shutter with a tack hammer and then turned with a grin. “That’s me. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Dr. Sam Hawthorne. I drove over from Northmont. We’re looking for Angela Rinaldi.”

  “Angela? What happened to her?”

  “She’s disappeared.”

  His grin changed to a frown and he walked closer to me, wiping his hands. “When did this happen?”

  “Last evening, right after dinner. On the road out near the Milkin farm. The police and troopers are searching for her.”

  “My God—do they think she’s been—?”

  “No one knows what to think. I came here because I understand you took her to the senior prom this spring.”

  “Yeah. It was the only date I had with her. We didn’t hit it off too well.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  He brushed the sandy hair from his forehead. He’d acquired a tan over the summer and his arms were almost brown. “We didn’t seem to have the same interests. She was excited about going off to college and I was thinking about where I could find a job.”