Mortal Remains

by Peter Clement

  Mark shook his head. “Nothing, other than my father saw fit to keep them.”

  Earl laid them aside. “That’s it?”

  Mark didn’t answer immediately. He still seemed subdued by their little dustup.

  Get over it, Earl thought, watching him take another sip of tea.

  “Not quite,” he said, putting down his cup. “I want to know if Kelly ever talked to you about her relationship with her mother.”

  “No. She was estranged from her parents, but never seemed to want to talk about it. Why?”

  “Twice now Charles Braden has given the impression that he thinks Samantha had a pretty sick relationship with Kelly. At first I thought he was just being manipulative, subtly blowing smoke, trying to take the heat off his son by making us go after her, but seeing the woman’s behavior this afternoon, maybe she does bear looking at.”

  An image of scars the size of ropes popped back into Earl’s mind. “After Kelly’s disappearance, what did your father say?”

  “As I told you after the memorial service, only that she’d gone away.”

  “Did you ever overhear him suggest Samantha might have harmed her?”

  “No.”

  “What about later, when there was no word from her? Any show of worry from him that maybe something had happened to her, and she didn’t run off after all? In other words, was he less blind than the rest of us?”

  “There was no later, not for him. As I said before, after Kelly’s service, he died that September.”

  Earl immediately regretted being so curt with the Q &A. “I’m so sorry, Mark.”

  The younger man’s muscular physique seemed to shrink in on itself. “Yeah. I missed him a lot.”

  Earl instinctively sensed it was his turn to encourage talk. But not by asking questions. Simply by listening.

  Mark took another sip of tea. “My mother died two years earlier, meningitis – an accidental stick with a needle from an infected patient – so after his death, my aunt Margaret moved in to raise me.” He paused and smiled. “Crotchety, rough as sandpaper on the outside, but someone real special where it counted. I sure knew I was loved…”

  As Mark talked about his childhood, he noticeably skirted how his father had died, and Earl didn’t ask. Losing both parents so close together had to have scarred the boy. Yet here he was, apparently tough-minded, certainly personable, and, Earl suspected, a dedicated doctor. He’d have to be, choosing to work solo in such an isolated place that held so many devastating memories for him. Or maybe keeping to himself was the legacy of what he’d been through.

  “… I didn’t take over my father’s practice so much as resurrect it. Aunt Margaret, like my mother, had also been a nurse, so when he died, she advertised for a new doctor to come in and replace him. It never happened. His patients ended up going all the way into Saratoga Springs. But as my residency neared the finish, just about everybody in the community besieged me to pick up where he left off.” Mark leaned back in his chair and studied the bottom of his cup, momentarily lost in his own thoughts.

  “And why did you?” Years of eliciting painful histories from reluctant patients also taught when a nonthreatening prompt or two would keep a person talking.

  “Drawn to it, or maybe lured is the word. The shrinks would say I was probably looking for the dad I lost by trying to be like him. And for happiness. I had it there, until everything changed.”

  “Did Aunt Margaret have anything to do with it?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. That she encouraged me to follow in Dad’s footsteps. In fact, she did just the opposite. To her dying breath she made me promise to get out of Hampton Junction. ‘Anybody living in hills by choice wants to keep the world out,’ she used to say. ‘Go and doctor people where they want to let the world in, and you’ll be happier.’ ”

  “Was she right?”

  He shrugged, still cradling the empty cup. “Depends on what day you ask me. I get to do more in the boonies than I ever would in Manhattan. That makes me strong clinically, and I love that. But I do crave my trips out. It’s conferences, ski trips, diving, and theater, whenever I can swing it.”

  Earl smiled. Mark’s openness, even about what must be painful for him, suggested someone rock solid despite his childhood trauma. It also probably meant he didn’t get much of a chance to talk about himself. He’d have to be lonely up there, intellectually as well as emotionally, with no colleagues to rub elbows with day to day. “I bet you’d put a lot of us city docs to shame,” he said.

  “I hold my own. And I do get to teach. Residents often come to me from NYCH for their rural rotation. In fact, one’s due in another week or so. That part I love. But sometimes, lately, while I can look straight up at the stars to the end of the universe, the trees and hills close in from the sides so heavily it’s like nothing else exists.”

  Earl never wanted to feel that trapped.

  Later that same Sunday,

  11:55 A.M.

  Amtrak’s Empire for Albany rolled out of Penn Station and up the shores of the Hudson, first stop Yonkers. Mark managed to find a window seat on the side overlooking the river. As the train wound along its edge, he watched the mighty waterway rush in the opposite direction toward the ocean. He always found release in the transition from the press of New York and trackside buildings to the gentle sweep of bulrushes, distant trees, and faraway hills. He felt it even when the season drew the landscape in bleak, prewinter blacks and browns, and the low sky, laden with snow, ran north like an empty gray highway. The ability to see farther here coupled with the sense of relief of no longer having so many people crowded around inevitably allowed him to breathe easier and think more privately, maybe even more clearly.

  The sway of the car rocked him to the edge of sleep, and his mind’s eye wandered along images of Samantha and Chaz at odds over Kelly, Melanie Collins eulogizing Kelly, Earl crying over Kelly’s letter. How differently he’d begun to see Kelly these last few weeks. A woman who had ducked confrontation with her estranged parents and never resolved the problems that alienated her from them. A woman who ran rather than worked things out – even running from Earl. Someone who sought her sense of self and security through others – the Bradens, Earl, his own father. Even, in a way, through medicine. She must have been driven, succeeding at med school the way she did. No, Kelly was neither the flawless saint who had been put on a pedestal at the service nor the victim who had so enthralled Earl. Instead, he began to construct the picture of a very troubled woman who escaped from one problem directly into another.

  The car lurched, startling him from his twilight reverie.

  He focused instead on what he and Earl had decided. It was to be a simple division of labor. Earl would do the legwork in New York, despite the risk of singling himself out as a suspect. What a hardnose he’d been about that. Little wonder the guy had such a record for finding trouble. And did he treat everyone as if they were his intern and he’d be in charge? Shit, that had grated. Even so, he liked the man.

  For Mark’s part, he would use his position as coroner to request the hospital to identify the two patients whose mortality and morbidity reports they’d examined. He’d first try persuasion, falling back on his old ties with NYCH. He’d made a lot of friends there during med school and his residency, some as influential as the Bradens. If that failed, he’d resort to official channels and exert his power of subpoena. Problem was, the process would begin in county court, wind its way through judges in Albany, and probably get him a response from Manhattan by next Easter. Better he get results with honey than have to try vinegar.

  He also intended to chip away at Chaz Braden’s alibis in Hampton Junction during the week of Kelly’s disappearance. The town had its share of people like Nell, with sharp eyes and long memories. One of them might have noticed Chaz when he was supposed to have been in New York.

  Earl had suggested it might be useful to stir up local memories, very circumspectly of course, regarding Samantha McShane around that
time. Circumspectly indeed… with all the nosing around he was going to do under the watchful eyes of Nell and her network.

  Not that he’d have trouble getting people to tell him things. One of the burdens of a small-town practice was knowing the secrets of an entire community: the lies, the concealed failures, the hidden disappointments, the masked betrayals, the deeply buried hatreds – all eventually told to him, as surely as the threads of a web led to its center. These days people seemed to feel more comfortable confessing to a physician than to a minister, priest, or rabbi. He figured it had to do with a doctor’s obligation to be nonjudgmental.

  The train slowed, and the stop for Poughkeepsie, a gray brick station blackened with grime, eventually slid into view. As he watched the people get off, his cellular rang.

  “Hey, where are you?” he heard Dan say as soon as he pressed the TALK button. “I expected you back last night.”

  “You sound like a wife.”

  “No, just a mother hen.”

  “Something came up in New York. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. Should be there by three-thirty.”

  “Would her name be Mandy, by any chance?”

  “No, Mother! And if you’ve nothing better to do than carry on like Nell-”

  “Hey, I’ve been busy. After you showed me all the press clippings your daddy kept on the maternity center and the home for unwed mothers, I got to thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wondered if he’d had a similar interest as coroner, so I spent this morning going through all the crates of records we got stored in the White House beneath the jail. Sure enough, he saved a couple of boxes of stuff in there about those two places. Considered it important enough to mark Do Not Discard on the side, and nobody did. Looks like death certificates and birth records.”

  Mark felt his heart quicken. Death certificates from the home for unwed mothers would have come to him routinely because the place fell under his jurisdiction. But the birth records, and anything at all from the maternity center, he would have had to send for specifically.

  “Now I can’t make head nor tail of them,” Dan continued, “but I figure you might be able to tell what he was after.”

  “I’ll swing by the White House and pick them up on my way home.”

  “There’s more. I spent all yesterday looking through the copy of the NYPD file you left me. Their investigation back in ‘seventy-four was pretty complete. They even pulled Kelly’s phone records from her Manhattan apartment. That’s where I found something else interesting.”

  Dan had to get a life, he thought. This twenty-four/seven stuff might be good for law and order in Hampton Junction, but not for his mental health.

  “She made three long-distance calls the morning of her disappearance. The first was to the Braden estate. One of the maids told the police she remembered Kelly asking for Dr. Braden. The maid told her he wasn’t in and that Chaz had already left for New York.

  “Kelly placed her next call to the home for unwed mothers. No one there remembered it. Maybe she didn’t identify herself, the police figured, and was still trying to reach Chaz. He occasionally dropped in at either place on his way to the train and did consults on newborns with heart murmurs. Except that morning he went directly to the station, by his own account. The police checked. The time lapse between the time he and the house staff said he left and how long he had to catch the morning express to Manhattan allowed no detours. So if she did call looking for him, she would have been told he wasn’t there either. At least that’s what the police report figured.”

  “Okay.”

  “Kelly made a third call, this one to the maternity center, presumably still looking for Chaz. Again, no one remembered her phoning, but the police once more didn’t make anything of that.”

  “Where’s this going, Dan?”

  “That last call cost her four-fifty. The two previous ones less than a dollar. I didn’t think anything of the difference at first. Hell, a long-distance minute on hold would have eaten up a buck easy those days, before the breakup of AT &T. But I took a closer look at the record, and found she spent ten minutes on the line. She might have reached him there.”

  “You mean Chaz Braden lied about going straight to the station?”

  “Not only that. If he stopped by the clinic, he would have had to have left the house earlier than he said to make the train at all.”

  “And the household staff and people at the clinic went along with the lie?”

  “Probably because they’d no choice but to protect their boss’s son or lose their jobs.”

  It didn’t make any sense. “Why would Chaz risk so many people being able to expose him?”

  “The key lie would be his insistence that he hadn’t spoken with her since she left the estate bound for New York the day before.”

  “Any theory about why he wouldn’t want the police to know something so mundane?”

  “You tell me. But if she talked to him, at last we’d have a chink in that prick’s story.”

  2:30 P.M.

  LaGuardia Airport,

  New York City

  “Hope you don’t have stinky feet,” Earl said to Janet, watching the security officers make a lineup of passengers take off their shoes. The roar of a departing plane blistered the air, making him raise his voice.

  “Smart-ass!” She stepped in close to him, took his face between her hands, and gave him a long soft kiss on the lips. “You be careful,” she whispered in his ear.

  “I love you, and give Brendan a hug for me.”

  “You bet. And you call to give me an update every night.”

  He grinned at her. “Sure.”

  “It’s not funny, Earl. You make your poking around too obvious, and I’ll end up reading your name in the Herald. Mystery Lover Found.”

  “Come on.”

  “Come on, yourself. Chaz Braden looked like a big vulture, hanging around at the memorial, eavesdropping on everyone. He’d love to find out whom she met in that taxi and shift suspicion from himself. And from the angry expression on his face whenever he glanced in your direction, I’d be afraid he already suspects that you were having an affair with his wife.”

  “If you asked me, he looked pissed off at all Kelly’s old friends. He probably thinks it could be any of them. Otherwise, he would have served me up to the cops by now.”

  “My, aren’t you reassuring?”

  He grinned down at her, tightening his embrace. “You look beautiful.”

  “What I am is frustrated. There are leads Mark Roper should be following that have nothing to do with her old friends and needn’t put you in danger.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve been thinking about Kelly, and there’s a piece missing. The first thing a woman in her predicament would do is arrange a divorce. Back then, God knows where she’d have had to go. Reno, maybe? Mexico? The Dominican Republic? Did you try that angle when you looked for her?”

  “No, I never thought of it.”

  “A man wouldn’t. You tell that Mark Roper he should see if she got that far. It might help him piece together her movements before she died. He has to do that, at least, if he hopes to find new evidence to prove hubby or mommy or whoever killed her.”

  “I’ll tell Mark.”

  The boarding call for her plane came over the PA.

  “Good-bye, love,” she said, giving him a second kiss even softer than the first. “And don’t forget. Call me every night, be careful of Chaz Braden, and talk to Mark about what I said.”

  He pressed her to him, savoring how slight and yielding she felt beneath her coat. “Yes! Now go.”

  She stepped into the inspection area, slipped off her shoes, and stood with her arms wide, ready to be electronically frisked. On the outside she looked remarkably calm. But he knew otherwise. Whenever she felt really scared, she started giving him instructions.

  4:00 P.M.

  Hampton Junction

  Mark knew someone had been in his hous
e the minute he stepped in the door.

  Little things were out of place.

  The separation between coats and jackets in the front hall closet had changed. A week ago he’d moved the summer ones to the back and the winter gear to the front, so the positions of those items remained fresh in his mind.

  Someone also appeared to have gone though the pockets, the material of a few being pulled almost inside out.

  In the former living room, where he’d set up his waiting area, the phone and clock on an end table weren’t in their usual positions. He kept the face of the latter at an angle so everyone could see the time from any chair in the room, the phone placed off to one side so as not to obstruct the view. Instead they were placed one in front of the other.

  Growing increasingly alarmed, he rushed into his office, which had once been the dining room.

  All his computer equipment remained in place. The usual stack of unopened mail alongside a pile of unsent billings and recent test results that needed to be put in their proper files – he was weeks behind in his paperwork – were where he’d left them. Turning to the steel cabinets in which he kept patient records, he found them locked. No marks on the metal casings suggested an attempt to force them open.

  Thank God, he thought, looking around the room, unable to see anything missing. The adjacent examining room also seemed undisturbed. The drug cabinet, he thought, and ran to the back room, where he’d installed a medium-sized safe to store a supply of narcotics – codeine, percodan, and morphine – along with other controlled medications such as tranquilizers.

  He found it intact.

  Nor had there been any obvious attempt to tamper with it.

  So what could an intruder have been after if it wasn’t computer equipment or drugs?

  A third possibility crept to mind as insidiously as a chill. What if anything of interest was still here because the thief hadn’t finished robbing him?

  He went very still.

  The house itself didn’t creak tonight since the wind was light. He heard nothing else.