by G. H. Ephron
Jess was frozen, her mouth open, the backpack clutched to her chest.
“Why were you in Dr. Temple’s study the night of her party?”
“It’s not what you think,” she said.
“What do I think?”
“I was trying to put it back.”
“Trying to put what back?”
Just then, Joe came ambling up the hall carrying a can of Diet Dr Pepper. A thick man with a soft, kind face, he checked into the quiet room. Then he lowered himself into the chair outside the door and opened up his newspaper.
From inside the room came Olivia’s weak voice, “Dr. Zak?”
“I can explain everything,” Jess said, her voice urgent. “Just give me a chance to explain.”
“Dr. Zak?” Olivia called out again. “Is that you?
I put my head into the room. “Olivia, I’m here. Be there in a sec.”
I turned back to Jess. Her eyes were bright, the way they’d been when she emerged from Channing’s study. Had she been putting something back or taking something?
“It’s not what you think,” Jess repeated, her voice pleading.
“I have to go in and see Olivia,” I said. “After that you and I need to talk.”
“I’ll be in the dining room working. Come get me when you’re finished,” she said. Then she hurried off.
I told Joe he could take another five-minute break while I borrowed his chair. I dragged it into the quiet room and sat alongside Olivia.
She was lying on her back, her eyes barely open, the lids drifting shut and then jerking open. Spittle was dried at the corner of her mouth.
“Olivia,” I said, pulling my chair close, “why don’t you let yourself relax. Sleep.”
“Can’t shleep,” Olivia said, her tongue thick with sedative. “Mustn’t sleep.”
“Shh,” I said. “We can talk later, you know. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Talk … now.” She rolled over on her side and held a finger to her mouth. I leaned close. “She promised she wouldn’t tell.”
“Who promised? To tell what?”
“About the Ritalin.”
“Dr. Smythe-Gooding?”
“Mommy didn’t want me to take it.”
“Dr. Smythe-Gooding gave you the drugs?”
Olivia nodded. “She said Mommy wouldn’t understand.”
“Was she lying about you stealing Ritalin?”
Olivia closed her eyes.
I pressed, “She wasn’t lying about that, was she?”
“I needed more. She wouldn’t give me more. She promised she wouldn’t tell.”
A bell went off in my head. “Were you in Dr. Smythe-Gooding’s office stealing drugs when your mother died?”
A tear squeezed out of Olivia’s eye and made a damp spot on the mattress.
“Mommy,” she whispered.
“You heard the gunshot, didn’t you?”
“I promised I wouldn’t tell.”
“Who did you promise you wouldn’t tell?”
“Lying bitch,” Olivia said, her eyes closing.
“You promised Daphne you wouldn’t tell?”
Olivia’s eyes drifted shut.
“Dr. Dyer was a friend of your mom’s, too, wasn’t she?”
“Special friend,” Olivia said, slurring over the words.
“Like Daphne was a special friend?”
“Lying bitch,” Olivia said again. This time the words made a gentle sound.
I sat there for a few minutes, listening as her breathing deepened. Her clenched hand fell open. I smoothed the hair away from her face. She looked very young and vulnerable.
Special friend? Was that all it was, friendship? Or did Jess and Channing’s relationship go beyond?
I found a blanket, and as I was putting it over Olivia, I noticed her necklace. It was an old-fashioned, engraved gold locket. Where had I seen it before? The locket was open a crack. I reached over, meaning to snap it shut, but instead I found myself opening it. A black-and-white photograph of a little girl, maybe ten years old, stared back at me. She resembled Olivia, her hair still blond and soft around her face. I’d seen that little girl before. It was Channing, the way she looked in the pictures in her family photo album.
Now I pressed the locket shut and rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. This was the locket Jess had around her neck just a week earlier. Was this what Jess was trying to return?
When Joe came back, I told him I was going to write an order restricting Olivia’s visitors. “So, please, don’t let anyone in except me, Nurse Alspag, and Dr. Liu. Okay?”
Joe nodded. “Just you three.”
“Right.”
“What if … ?” he started.
“If anyone else wants to see Ms. Temple, and I mean anyone at all, I want you to beep me to get permission first.”
I checked in with Gloria and Kwan, told them I was restricting Olivia’s visitors to the three of us. Good thing that neither of them questioned it, because I’m not sure I could explain, even to myself, what—or whom—I was protecting Olivia from.
Jess was working in the dining room. I caught her attention through the glass and pointed up, to indicate I was heading up to my office. She nodded, held her hand up and spread her fingers. Five minutes.
I took the elevator and let myself into my office. I leaned back in my chair, took off my glasses, and stared up at the ceiling. So Olivia had been right there, a few feet away, when Channing was killed. She’d heard the gunshot. What had Daphne made her promise not to tell? Had she seen anyone? Someone Daphne didn’t want named?
Which brought me back to wondering what Jess was doing in Channing’s study the night of the party. If she was returning something, then why lie and say she’d been in the bathroom? Unless she was returning something she’d stolen. Something like a locket. Or maybe she was taking a gun.
Channing had written D in her datebook on the morning she was killed. Dyer? J would have been a more likely shorthand for a woman Olivia termed her mother’s special friend.
The phone rang. I checked my watch. It had been more than five minutes since I’d left Jess on the unit. Maybe she was calling to say she’d been delayed. I picked up.
“Hey, Peter!”
It was Annie. I felt a rush of pleasure. “Hey, yourself,” I said.
“I heard things didn’t go so well this morning. How’s Olivia?” Her voice sounded echoey, as if she was calling from her cell phone.
“Sedated. Sleeping.” As an afterthought, I added, “Feeling betrayed.”
“Friday she goes to the Bechtel.”
“Two more days.”
Annie didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Well, I guess there’s nothing for it but to keep going,” she said. “I went to those AA meetings and schmoozed with anyone who looked over forty. Told them I’d been thinking of signing up for one of those drug trials at the Pearce and wondered if anyone else had gone that route. People can be so helpful. I’ve got a couple of names.”
“Amazing,” I said. I pulled out the envelope I’d scrounged from Destler’s trash. There was the list of overage subjects. “Shoot.”
Annie gave me three names and ages. One of them was a match.
“I can’t believe it. Shit. Looks like Channing really did recruit participants who didn’t meet the Kutril trial criteria.”
“Whoa. Slow down. Did I say they participated in the Kutril trial? These folks were in the DX-200 trial.”
“Jensen’s …” I murmured as I traced and retraced a circle around the name. “So how did a subject from the DX-200 trial find his way into the Kutril research?”
“Good question,” Annie said.
I considered the alternatives. Desperate to increase the number of participants in her trial, Channing “borrowed” a record from Jensen’s work without realizing the person was too old for her study. I doodled on the envelope’s return address, turning an A into a pyramid and drawing a little flag on top. No, she was too ethical. And eve
n if she were tempted, with her head for detail, I couldn’t imagine Channing overlooking something as obvious as a patient’s age. Maybe someone had inserted the patient record in among hers, a cuckoo’s egg that could be used to discredit her work. Would Jensen stoop to that? Wouldn’t anyone be willing to slip a few pieces of paper into a file if the alternative was watching a patent worth millions of dollars turn to dust? After all, what doctor would prescribe DX-200 when an effective treatment at a fraction of the cost was available with Kutril? But if it had been Jensen, was he in this alone?
I stopped doodling, my attention snagged by the text printed on the envelope: Notice: Stockholders’ Meeting. The envelope was addressed to a Francine Bentsen in Weston. Destler’s wife’s name was Fran, and he lived in Weston.
My scalp prickled as I realized the implications. Of course. Destler wouldn’t have dared purchase Acu-Med stock in his own name, or have stockholder material addressed to the Pearce.
“You still there?” Annie said.
“You know that piece of paper I scrounged out of Destler’s trash? It’s a notice of an Acu-Med stockholders’ meeting.”
“And?”
“I think it’s addressed to Destler’s wife. He must have brought his mail in from home and then discarded the envelope, never dreaming I’d be rummaging around in his trash.”
“So? Am I missing something?”
“The ethics of medical research are pretty clear. If what you do as part of your job could affect the value of a stock, then you can’t own it. A promising new drug, especially with no competition, could make a company’s stock price go through the roof. It’s almost certainly not okay for Destler, as a senior administrator, to own Acu-Med stock. Just for example, he might be tempted to sabotage competing research.”
“Or at the very least,” Annie said, “turn a blind eye.”
“At the very least.”
“Well, that certainly is food for thought,” Annie. “Speaking of which, about tonight. Weren’t we going to have dinner together?”
“Why, you trying to wriggle out of it?”
“Hardly. But here’s the thing. I’ll be in your neighborhood in about an hour anyway. And I didn’t have any lunch. Can I talk you into early?”
“You can probably talk me into just about anything. But early sounds great.”
After I hung up, I tried to start on the mountain of paperwork that was threatening to take over my desk, but I couldn’t focus. I needed to think. At least those competing images of Channing Temple were starting to converge. Someone was trying to discredit her, to paint her capable of all kinds of professional and personal improprieties. And suddenly I was a few steps closer to figuring out who.
I checked my watch. It was thirty minutes since Jess had said she’d be up in five. I called down to the nurses’ station and asked Gloria where Jess was.
“I’d like to know that myself,” Gloria said. “She’s scheduled to be at neuro rounds starting five minutes ago. And she’s not there.”
“She was in the dining room …” I started.
“With a patient. I know. Then she makes a call and takes off. I just beeped her.”
“Have you checked on Olivia lately?” I asked.
“Joe is outside the quiet room sitting there cool as a cucumber, if that’s any indication.”
“I’m coming down,” I said.
I left my office and hurried to the elevator, punched the button, waited a couple of seconds, and heard it creak into action. It felt as if someone was poking me in the back with a stick—probably Channing. I took the stairs. The metal bars enclosing the inside of the staircase clanged as I ran down.
I was past Joe and in the quiet room when Joe looked up from his paper and issued an automatic “No visitors” command. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, and went back to reading.
Olivia was sleeping soundly. She stirred when I touched her forehead and then sank back into a deep sleep.
I found Gloria. “Did Jess return the page?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Any idea who she was talking to on the phone?”
Gloria looked insulted. “Now how would I know that?”
“Beats me. But you do seem to know most everything that goes on around here.”
Now Gloria smiled. “Usually, I guess I do.”
“She didn’t say anything when she left?”
“I didn’t even realize she’d gone,” Gloria said. I glanced past Gloria into the dining room. Jess’s things were still on the table. The kitchen staff had set the table around them. Gloria followed my look. “Like I said, she thought she’d be right back.”
I went in to gather up Jess’s things and set them aside for her. I opened the backpack to shove her books and papers inside. Vibrating in the bag was her beeper. What the hell good was a beeper if you were going to leave it behind? Jess needed more than a little centering. She needed a healthy dose of common sense.
Something else caught my eye. One of the books was a fabric-covered journal, the kind that contains blank or lined pages. Of course. Countertransference analysis. Jess probably was following in the footsteps of her mentor, keeping a journal of her thoughts and feelings. I’d have to warn her against the dangers of carrying it around with her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted someone else to read and misinterpret.
As I shoved the journal into the backpack, I took in the words written neatly on the cover: Feelings and Fantasies—Volume 11. Eleven? Jess had hardly been at this long enough to fill that many notebooks. My stomach turned over. The handwriting was Channing’s.
Was that what Jess was doing in Channing’s study during the party? Taking, or maybe as she said, trying to put back Channing’s journal? Was she the one who’d shown it to Destler, giving him more ammunition? Rumors of inappropriate behavior, questionable research methods—all of that could have been orchestrated to make suicide believable.
I opened the journal. The first pages were dated June, the last ones December. I couldn’t remember the dates on the pages Destler had, but she’d written something about the Indian summer. I flipped to September and turned the pages, scanning. Near the end of the month, there was the entry: Indian summer today. Hot and close … . I didn’t need to read it again. I remembered it well enough.
I took the backpack to the nurses’ station and left it on a shelf under the counter. I kept the journal. It felt hot in my hand as I waited for the elevator up to my office. I didn’t like having it. It had never been meant for anyone’s eyes but Channing’s own. But she was dead. Meanwhile, her murderer was getting off while her reputation was getting destroyed. I realized I probably should be giving the journal to MacRae to examine. But I couldn’t do it. That would have compounded the insult, violated her privacy even further.
I let myself into my office and started to leaf through the notebook. Channing’s real and fantasy life seemed to mingle on the pages. Daphne’s husband’s obituary was tucked into an early page. Robert Smythe-Gooding’s illness dominated July. It seemed as if Channing had been a constant visitor. She’d been very fond of him, and she’d agonized over him, watching him fade from his own body.
After Robert’s death, Channing seemed to turn inward.
I can intellectualize-I know she felt it was the only choice. Still, “suicide,” re-writes the past. Afterwards, it’s as if that’s all there was. No laughter. No day-to-day. No life.
Was she meditating on her mother’s suicide? I wasn’t so sure. Her point was certainly valid. Suicide. Murder. The effect was the same. Now it was happening to Channing herself. The way she died was swamping all other memories of how she lived.
I flipped through October. The entries turned to feelings about her patients, her work. It was as if Channing took her own darkness—her lust, envy, greed—siphoned it away like some bitter poison and spread it across the pages of her journal.
Then, in November, an entry caught my eye.
subtle changes
-more rigid and inflexi
ble
-forgetful
-insecure
-more distant
-blows hot and cold
Overwhelmed?
Benzos?
Guilt?
Olivia ok?
I puzzled over the list. Were these observations about Olivia? About Channing herself? I paged ahead. There was another list, six weeks later. Before I had a chance to read it, the phone rang.
It was Gloria. “Jess just called in.”
“Where the hell is she?”
“She’s over at Drug and Alcohol. Said she’ll be back in an hour.”
“Did she say what the hell she’s doing over there?”
“She said Dr. Smythe-Gooding asked her to help go through what’s left in Dr. Temple’s office, to be sure they don’t throw out anything important. Administration wants that office cleaned out by morning.”
25
I WAS determined that, in an hour, I’d be somewhere quiet, having a glass of wine, and ordering a meal with Annie. But Olivia’s arrest loomed. I couldn’t wait a day to find out how pages from Channing’s notebook had found their way to Destler. I had to talk to Jess.
I called Channing’s office. The phone went immediately to voice mail. It was unnerving to hear Channing’s voice, telling me to leave a message and she’d get right back to me. It was pointless to beep Jess. I called Daphne’s office, but no answer there either. I’d have to go over myself if I wanted an answer.
I checked my watch. “I’ve got Annie meeting me here at five,” I told Gloria. I started to leave. “If she gets here before I’m back, tell her I’m sorry and make her wait.”
Gloria grinned. “Make her wait?”
“You may need to let the air out of her tires.”
“By the way, Admitting called,” Gloria said. “They’ve been contacted by the police to arrange for Olivia’s transfer to the Bechtel. Day after tomorrow.”
I didn’t need to be reminded.
Halfway to the Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Unit, I ran into Destler returning to his office. He was red-faced from the uphill walk. I seized the moment.
