Vultures at Twilight

by Charles Atkins

  ‘I’ll put on water.’

  ‘Lovely. And, Lil . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Brace yourself.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I stared at the torn and dirt-spattered page. It felt as if someone had punched me; the room swam and my heart pounded. I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Lil, I’m sorry.’ Ada’s voice sounded disconnected. She stood behind me and tried to give some perspective. ‘We shouldn’t take it literally. The girl wasn’t in her right mind. It was some fantasy or wish she had.’

  Her words made sense, but they were no antidote for the venom that had leapt off the page. How could someone say these things? They couldn’t be true. I forced myself to focus on the crumpled paper. The notebook it had come from was mangled and dirt smeared. It stood out from the rest that were all carefully arranged and stacked.

  ‘It was on the top,’ she had said.

  Like the mushrooms in Alice In Wonderland it had demanded attention – read me read me. And, like the mushrooms, it changed everything.

  The page was dated May 14, 2000. Very close to her death. The writing was wild and angular, much different from the careful printing in the book I’d looked at earlier. I forced myself to reread the hateful prose.

  Take me to my lover, mother

  Drive me in your car.

  Curl my hair, shine my shoes

  Twinkle twinkle little star.

  He’ll touch and probe

  Explore my wonders

  As above the heaven thunders.

  No, you mustn’t

  Don’t touch me there

  Your nurse will wonder

  Is she your wife?

  She’ll see my blush

  My virgin’s blood.

  She’ll know you’ve touched

  I’ve come undone.

  Take me to my lover, mother

  In the Main Street manse just down the road.

  A pretty girl in a big white house.

  My bicycle won’t carry

  I shouldn’t go that far.

  He’ll touch me in my privates

  His tongue will search me out

  He’ll poke and prod

  My wonders, lady

  Then hide away the dribble bits

  With cotton from his cubby

  He’ll sponge me gently.

  Then send me to my Mummy.

  When he’s done.

  He’s had enough.

  He’s taken all.

  I’ve come undone.

  There had been more to her verse, but the page was torn, as though she had reread her poem and found it too offensive . . . or someone else had.

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I felt Ada beside me. I knew what she must be thinking; how could she not?

  ‘It wasn’t Bradley,’ I said. ‘It’s completely ridiculous.’ She was insane after all; this was some sort of delusion. Didn’t her mother go into the examination room with him? I tried to remember; it was typical for parents to go in with their children. But wasn’t Wendy Conroy older when she came to visit? When the problems had started, she had been a teenager. With teens, he usually left the parents outside in the waiting room. Outside with me, his nurse . . . or is she his wife?

  What was it Bradley had said? I pictured his face, his pale blue eyes that crinkled with his smile. ‘When they get to a certain age, they won’t tell me what the problem is if their mother’s in the room. Usually around eleven or twelve, I ask Mom to stay outside. You’d be amazed at what some of the kids ask me, but it’s perfectly normal. They all want to know about sex.’

  We had laughed about that, how fifty percent of what he did was closer to being a psychiatrist than a general practitioner. People were forever stopping him in the street, asking for advice. It didn’t seem to matter if it was related to their belly pain or their in-law problems. It had always filled me with a quiet pride that my husband, my Bradley, was someone that people came to with their problems.

  And now this, from the mind of a tortured young woman came obscene accusations. I wanted to burn it.

  ‘Could she have been talking about someone else?’ Ada asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Bradley was her doctor for years. He was everyone’s doctor. No one has ever said something like this, or hinted. This is outrageous. And he can’t defend himself.’

  ‘Lil.’ She sat beside me. ‘We can’t jump to conclusions. Wendy Conroy was psychotic. There’s no way of knowing the truth. They’re poems; maybe it’s a metaphor? She saw a lot of doctors; maybe it had nothing to do with Bradley. She could have been talking about one of her psychiatrists, or some other kind of doctor.’

  I tried to listen, my mind raced; she was talking about Bradley. The white house, me filling out appointment slips in the waiting room, ‘cotton from the cubby’. I pictured his tidy office, with the glass-fronted cabinets stocked with everything needed, whether to handle an emergency delivery or to set a fracture. Maybe he had given her a gynecologic exam and it had become twisted into one of her delusions. That could happen, couldn’t it? A young girl on the brink of madness, what would she think of the stirrups and the speculum? Although, he always had me or Gladys, his nurse, assist him with gynecologic exams. He never did them without a chaperone in the room . . . but is that true?

  I couldn’t even entertain that what she alleged had actually occurred. Bradley was not a pedophile.

  ‘It was right on top,’ Ada had said. ‘It may have been her last journal, I’ve been flipping through the others, and they’re all older. Some from when she was a teenager.’

  ‘Why would she write that?’ I put the book down, resisting an impulse to tear it up, to burn it.

  ‘Tolliver said she was very sick. It’s probably a delusion. I’m sure it has nothing to do with Bradley.’

  I felt numb. ‘He was the only doctor in town, certainly the only one on Main Street. He was the only one she ever saw. At least until her problems started. Then there were a lot of doctors. A lot of psychiatrists, neurologists . . .’

  ‘Maybe it was one of them?’ she offered.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ I said. ‘I know we promised Tolliver, but it’s too much.’ My stomach churned; how could she say things like this? And there was no way to answer back. She and Bradley were dead; what possible use could this serve? And what other accusations lurked inside those college-ruled pads? ‘Ada, I need to take a walk.’

  ‘I’ll go with you.’

  ‘No, I need to think . . . I have to think.’

  ‘Lil, are you sure?’

  I headed for the door, and looked back at her. My thoughts were swimming, everything turned upside down, including my feelings for Ada. ‘I need to think,’ I stammered, barely able to find words, and before she could object I walked out.

  A crisp leaf-whipped October wind buffeted my cheek as I headed down my walk toward the road.

  It was too much. Two years after burying my husband, this girl, although she was a woman when she wrote that entry, accused him of molesting her over a decade before. It was obscene. It was not my Bradley . . . It couldn’t be.

  Without thought to direction, I headed toward the walking path that circled the ten-acre lake in the center of Pilgrim’s Progress. Geese squawked as I passed, and a pair of swans headed toward me, anticipating I’d come to throw breadcrumbs. I stared at the crushed gravel and thought about Bradley and the year of our courtship. He was older than I was, twelve years, but I was no child. I was twenty-one. And didn’t pedophiles like them young; wouldn’t that argue against his guilt? Our sex life had been good. Although, I didn’t have much to compare against. I’d been a virgin on our wedding night. Ours had been a quiet sort of lovemaking. Not the romance novel, bodice-ripping kind of thing. For lack of a better word, it was normal and gentle; and, over time, less frequent. But he’d hold me at night, before we went to sleep. We kissed every night and every morning. I could still feel his Saturday morning stubble against my cheek.

  I remembered the late-
night emergency calls, his black bag always ready by the front door. Sometimes our bell would ring at two or three in the morning and I’d get up with him, throw on my robe and slippers and go down to meet whatever emergency had come knocking. How many children with croup or broken bones had there been? How many drunken men who had fallen, and rather than stumble home bruised to their wives, had come to Bradley to get patched up and to practice their excuses. He was the keeper of secrets and I was his partner. He took to the grave the knowledge of which men had cheated on their wives and visa versa. There were things he would never write in his patients’ charts. ‘We’ll just keep this between the two of us,’ he’d say, after administering a shot of penicillin to a local alderman who had contracted gonorrhea in New York City. He knew all the little-town lies and truths that if they ever leaked could destroy families and careers. He knew of the abortions and even mercy killings; he never judged. ‘It’s hard enough,’ he’d say about a family struggling with a terminally ill parent. ‘You have to give them choices, help them through.’ On more than one occasion, I know he hastened death with the gentle kiss of morphine. He was there at the birth of his patients and we always attended the funerals. Not once was he sued. And while our move to Pilgrim’s Progress was supposed to presage his retirement, he practiced medicine until the day he died.

  He’d loved Grenville, even though he’d been born outside of Boston. We would joke about how you couldn’t really be accepted in Grenville until you’d lived here at least three generations. But he had been accepted, and respected, and loved.

  I veered from the footpath edged with clumps of purple and rust mums, and headed toward the road. Everything here in Pilgrim’s Progress was too tidy. I needed to see something older, something real. I thought about going back for the car but I needed to walk. I moved quickly toward the gated entrance to the community and turned right on to Cedar Swamp Road.

  As I passed Miller’s farm and the riding stables, I thought of Wendy’s poem. There were a couple other doctors in town, none of them in white houses, none of them GPs. And most of them weren’t even around when Bradley was in practice. For years he was the only physician in Grenville. More importantly, he had been her physician.

  I cleared the end of the road and turned left on to Main Street. I took in the shops and houses that had watched Town Plot for the past two centuries. The few Victorian mansions, with their multi-hued paint and busy gingerbread trim, were the most recent additions to the stoic colonial and federal homes. Even the office buildings dated back to the 1840s. Familiar, like the back of my hand, yet it all looked different, as though someone had taken Grenville and turned it into a movie set. I had always taken pride in how well we cared for the town; the yearly tree plantings, the near-fascistic historical society which mandated the size and style of every sign, door knocker or mullion placed on the antique homes. I loved the symmetry of Town Plot with its absence of graffiti, litter or other urban blight. As I walked past the one-room schoolhouse, now the headquarters for the historical society, I overheard a pair of tourists.

  ‘It’s so perfect,’ said a woman in Hawaiian print culottes and a blue cardigan as she read the bronze plaque.

  ‘Too quaint,’ her friend agreed as she focused her camera on the bell-topped school.

  I didn’t slow. Quaint? A lovely town where people are murdered and young girls go mad and kill themselves. Yes, I know people are flawed, my life as the GP’s wife took care of any illusions. I’d sit in church with people I knew were cheating on their wives, or were addicted to pain pills. I knew who was alcoholic, who suffered with depression, and who – despite being wealthy – never paid their bills. ‘It’s just human nature,’ Bradley would say as he’d write off thousands of dollars in unpaid fees.

  What would he say to this? Could he write off the murders and the accusations? Sure it’s human nature, but that doesn’t make it OK.

  I now stood in front of our house. It was still white, and the climbing pink roses and pale-blue hydrangea I had planted over thirty years ago were at their exuberant best; the last gasp of color before the first frost. The current residents had done little to change the exterior, and, secretly, I was grateful. The only notable differences were a new screened-in porch off the back and the gravel driveway was now asphalt.

  I didn’t really know the new family – the Jensens – a young doctor and his wife. I had met them at the closing and once or twice after that. I occasionally saw her in the grocery store and we would exchange hellos. I didn’t like to think of them in our house. But there again, Bradley had been pragmatic. ‘They’re almost rented, these old homes. Think of all the families that have come before us and those still to come.’ We had collected the records, our home’s genealogy back to before the Revolution. I gave it to the Jensens at the closing.

  And then I passed the eyebrow colonial where I had been born. For the past twenty years it had been an antique store. Occasionally, I would go in to pick up the scents of my childhood. Unfortunately, the current owners were prone to potpourri and I would find myself fleeing the noxious fumes. Now, in the front window – what used to be the living room – was a display of wrought-iron fireplace tools and rustic salt-glazed stoneware filled with dried leaves and flowers. I stared up at the tiny half window of my childhood bedroom. So small, like a doll’s house carefully polished and preserved.

  It’s all a facade, I thought as I turned and counted the antique shops, one after another. These had been homes. I could still remember the names of the families; many were still in town, just not in their original houses.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye I caught someone crossing the street. I turned and saw Mattie Perez, coming toward me. I tried to work the corners of my face into a smile; it didn’t work.

  ‘Lil, are you OK?’ she asked as she hurried toward me. Her expression showed more concern than was warranted by my mid-afternoon walk.

  ‘I’m fine, why?’

  She looked at me, trying to decide whether or not to say what was on her mind.

  ‘Just go ahead,’ I said. ‘I’m a big girl.’

  ‘Well, for starters,’ she said, looking down at my feet, ‘there’s that.’

  I followed her gaze and realized I had just walked three and a half miles in my pink bedroom slippers.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Bacon sizzled in the Brown Bear Diner, filling the air with a smoky tang as late-afternoon diners, most of them older, sat around bottomless cups of coffee and talked about the weather, the news, and of course the murders.

  I looked up as the pretty young waitress, possibly a high-school student, filled our mugs.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Mrs Campbell,’ she said as she turned over the cups.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, searching for a name. ‘Joanie, isn’t it?’

  ‘You remembered.’

  ‘Yes, but it gets harder and harder.’

  She laughed politely and headed back to the kitchen of the Brown Bear.

  ‘It must be nice,’ Mattie said, ‘living where you know pretty much everyone.’

  ‘You’d think so,’ I offered as I watched the waitress.

  ‘What is it, Lil?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I tried to focus on Mattie, but my thoughts ran in a dozen directions. For instance, the waitress was about the same age as Wendy, at least the age I remembered. She had the same blonde-haired blue-eyed features.

  ‘Lil,’ Mattie interrupted. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘You asked me that before.’

  ‘Yes, and you didn’t answer.’

  ‘I got some news today . . . I’m just distracted.’ Noticing a local reporter at the table across from the pass-through kitchen interviewing an antique dealer over coffee and pecan pie. And two tables down from them were three men and a beautiful dark-skinned woman who I recognized from the Channel Eight news.

  ‘About Ada?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could you tell me what it is? I might be able to help.’

  �
��Thanks . . . but I don’t think so.’ I stared at my knife and fork, trying to focus on the paper placemat with its advertisements for local merchants: the well digger, two realtors with old Grenville names, the travel agent, the health food store, the blacksmith; and how many towns still have one of those?

  ‘Is it something physical?’ she persisted.

  ‘No, and please . . . no twenty questions.’ My voice sounded harsher than I had intended. ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just . . . someone I care about has had very disturbing accusations made about him.’

  ‘Accusations?’

  You idiot, Lil! What a stupid thing to say to a detective. Oh well, in for a penny . . . ‘Child abuse.’

  ‘That is serious. What sort of abuse?’

  ‘Sexual.’

  ‘And he’s denying it?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to. I know he’s innocent.’

  ‘That can happen,’ she offered, her words carefully chosen. ‘And when it does, the damage from the accusation can be as bad as if it were true.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I agreed. ‘Once the thought is planted in people’s minds, that so-and-so is a pedophile, it doesn’t matter if it’s true. Your reputation is ruined.’