FORGET ME NOT (Mark Kane Mysteries Book One)

by John Hemmings

  MARK KANE MYSTERIES

  BOOK ONE

  FORGET ME NOT

  JOHN HEMMINGS

  About the Author

  John Hemmings is a practicing attorney and author with over thirty years’ experience as a trial lawyer. Each of his books features Boston private investigator Mark Kane and his long-time companion Lucy. The first four books in the series are already available and further titles will be published soon. If you would like an update on available titles please write to the author at johnhemmings.author@gmail.com. Many of the stories are inspired by actual events and people the author has met and worked with during his career, but names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent – and sometimes the guilty.

  Copyright © 2015 by John Hemmings

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ‘I only learn things when I ask questions’ – Lou Holtz

  For Johnny & Mark

  MARK KANE MYSTERIES

  BOOK ONE

  FORGET ME NOT

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One: Gloria

  Chapter Two: Greg

  Chapter Three: Doubts and Suspicions

  Chapter Four: Gloria’s Hair

  Chapter Five: Spot On

  Chapter Six: Susan

  Chapter Seven: The Plane Crash

  Chapter Eight: Orchids

  Chapter Nine: If You Knew Suzie

  Chapter Ten: The Witnesses

  Chapter Eleven: A Nightmare

  Chapter Twelve: The Suspects

  Chapter Thirteen: To Tell or Not to Tell

  Chapter Fourteen: A Wiz with Computers

  Chapter Fifteen: A Technological Midget

  Chapter Sixteen: Simon

  Chapter Seventeen: The Long and the Short of it

  Chapter Eighteen: The Emails

  Chapter Nineteen: Gwen

  Chapter Twenty: DNA

  Chapter Twenty One: The Lovers

  Chapter Twenty Two: Paul

  Chapter Twenty Three: Calypso

  Chapter Twenty Four: Gearhardy

  Chapter Twenty Five: Mowbray

  Chapter Twenty Six: Blood

  Chapter Twenty Seven: Josette

  Chapter Twenty Eight: Complicity

  Chapter Twenty Nine: The Printout

  Chapter Thirty: The Affidavit

  Chapter Thirty One: Grey Areas

  Chapter Thirty Two: Fair’s Fair

  A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  MARK KANE MYSTERIES SERIES

  Chapter One

  Gloria

  “There was a band playing outside my window last night; I hardly got any sleep.”

  “I’ll make sure they don’t do that again, Gloria, it’s most inconsiderate I know.”

  “And when will that dreadful man, Colonel Brown leave me alone? I don’t have time for his romantic nonsense.”

  “Sally’s coming this afternoon; she’s bringing the boys.”

  “Who?”

  “Sally, your… I’ll leave you to get some rest. Are you sure you don’t want anything for lunch?”

  “My husband will see to that, thank you.”

  A black-capped chickadee appeared magically on the sill outside the bedroom window and Gregory looked at it wistfully. The diminutive bird cocked its tiny head on one side and looked back at him quizzically. Gloria had known the names of all the birds that shared their beautiful grounds, but now she didn’t even know her own. He sat for a while longer, looking at his wife’s face, still beautiful to him now though slightly lined and framed with graying hair. Her face was not in repose; her eyes were open, her lips moving occasionally, perhaps framing silent words about her strange inner world. He was holding her hand and as he rose she let it slip away. He stood at the doorway, his face set as if it were a grim mask. Gloria sat semi-upright in the bed with her head propped up on the pillows and stared straight ahead. Whatever awareness she had of his presence in the room that too had slipped away as soon as their hands parted. He knew she was no longer Gloria, no longer the vibrant, witty and vivacious girl he had married, nor the wise and loving housewife and mother she became as their family grew. She was simply a vessel now. A living vessel of flesh and bones, tissue and organs; but the thing that had made her Gloria had been cruelly taken away.

  She was just sixty four years old and her physical health had been good; more than good, she had been robust, with tremendous energy, enthusiasm and joie de vivre until this awful disease had gradually started to erode her spirit, her personality, her very self. It had started so unexpectedly, almost innocuously. Gregory remembered the day it began and how he laughed because he had assumed she was making a joke. Gloria had fallen at home and broken her thighbone. It was a nasty injury and one that needed surgery so she had checked into the local hospital for an operation to insert a steel rod into the leg. The surgery had gone without a hitch and she was up and walking with a frame the following day. The surgeon had recommended that she remain in the hospital for a few days so that they could arrange physiotherapy for her. Gregory had remained with her throughout the day in the private room that their insurance had provided. This was no magnanimous gesture on his part; the truth was that he didn’t know how to cope without her. Their longtime neighbors, the Sandersons, had called in to see her the day following the operation and they were all gathered around the bed having a perfectly normal conversation when Gloria had suddenly turned to Jeff Sanderson and said, “Do you live in this neighborhood too?” They had all laughed, and then became embarrassed when they realized that it was not a joke at all. Gloria had no idea who Jeff and his wife were.

  Gregory put this lapse down to the effects of the general anesthetic that had been administered to Gloria the previous day and thought no more about it; but after Gloria returned home he noticed that she was becoming increasingly forgetful – not only about names of people, but names of things too. They made an appointment for her to see a neurologist who conducted a number of tests. It was the onset of dementia, of Alzheimer’s disease, he said. Neither Greg nor Gloria could believe it. How could she have dementia? She was fit, healthy and relatively young. In fact neither he nor Gloria accepted the diagnosis, quietly hoping that it was a mistake and that she would get better.

  In those relatively early days the progression of her illness was slow and sporadic. Some days she would seem to be her old self and they would both be reassured. But gradually the deterioration of her mind started to accelerate, until there were no more good days. In a way this was the worst part of the illness because Gloria knew what was happening to her, and she was informed and intelligent enough to know that she was only going to get worse. In the fall, the following year, they had taken their last vacation together, driving through Maine and Vermont, revisiting places that had been special to them during their courtship and marriage. They had no planned route or timetable. He remembered how they had walked hand in hand through the fall landscape and Gloria had told him that she felt like the trees themselves. As they shed their leaves so she was gradually losing her mental faculties, and like them she would face a bleak winter, but for her there would be no spring, no regeneration. She said this without self-pity, but with the same matter-of-factness that had been the hallmark of her approach to life. They were passing through a patch of densely
shaded hemlock forest, hoping to catch a glimpse of squirrels, deer or maybe even a red fox, when she had suddenly grasped his hand tightly and said, “Greg, I’m frightened.” He wanted so desperately to reply, but the word’s wouldn’t come so instead he squeezed her hand to reassure her as they made their way through the trees and back into the sunlight.

  As fall became winter, and winter became spring, she slipped away from him, and everything that she had known and loved, into an abyss of nothingness. Dementia is a cruel disease, he thought, it robs you of your mind but leaves the body intact. Gloria’s condition was not the culmination of old age. With the right care she should live for years yet. She no longer recognized Gregory or the children. She barely recognized herself anymore. She could not carry out the simplest everyday tasks. Gregory had discussed it with the children and they had all agreed that they would not put her into a private care home. Instead Gregory arranged for home nursing staff, day and night. Fortunately they could afford it, with the help of a comprehensive medical insurance they had wisely taken out some years before, and Gregory paid for whatever was not covered by the insurance. He was comfortable financially and Gloria had a good deal of her own money, indeed the family home was hers, passed down by her own parents who had both lived into their eighties, but had moved many years before to a condominium in Florida.

  The visits of the children to the family home had become no less frequent in recent weeks, but the duration of each stay had dwindled. There was nothing anyone could do; no meaningful conversation, let alone reminiscences. And as the weeks went by Gloria’s disease took her in its grasp more fervently and made any kind of communication pointless. In a curious way Gloria was not suffering anymore, but the inevitable disruption in the children’s lives and the lives of Gregory’s grandchildren had become problematical. If it had been a terminal disease like cancer, he thought, then the family would have some kind of timeline to work to, however callous that might seem. But the family couldn’t be expected to put their lives on hold for years to come. He spoke about this to their children, now grown up. He told them that he accepted the responsibility as his own and was determined that she should be afforded every assistance that money could buy to preserve what little was left of her dignity and he would dedicate what was left of his own life to care for her as he knew she would have cared for him. He was a religious man who remembered his vows and took them seriously. ‘For better or worse’ was a recurring mantra in his mind as he went about his increasingly lonely daily life. His children were wonderfully supportive and refused to abandon him or her and for this he counted his blessings, but it sorely tested his faith. He would become, by turns, angry or incredulous at the apparent unfairness of it all. He knew that God couldn’t be expected to prevent wars, violence, greed or dishonesty because God had given Man free will. But God had allowed Gloria’s free will to be taken away from her, and this apparent incongruity troubled him deeply.

  So much had been left unsaid between them and that is what upset him the most. They had just blindly held onto the belief, the hope that she would improve, or at least that her condition would reach some kind of manageable equilibrium. The doctors had told them that the onset of seriously debilitating dementia could take years to manifest itself. No-one had expected the disease to accelerate so quickly. Gregory looked again at Gloria, who hadn’t moved. They had always been so close, so intimate, but the only intimacy left to him now was when he brushed her hair gently each morning and evening. He wiped away the tears that had welled up in his eyes and then turned and left the room, quietly closing the bedroom door behind him.

  Chapter Two

  Greg

  “You see,” said Lucy, “I told you you’d enjoy yourself.”

  I guess she was right, in a limited sort of way. Outwardly I just grunted. We were seated next to each other on matching recliners beside the main pool of the Boylston Recreation Club as guests of Bradley Swayne, a towering obelisk of a man who was married to a woman the size of a tadpole. He was a satisfied client, and the day out was my reward. I had been treated to lunch and drinks with an assortment of Boylston’s best and brightest, but whilst I was presently enjoying my proximity to the decoratively semi-clad young ladies hovering around the poolside, my main reason for accepting Swayne’s invitation was the hope that I might meet other potential clients. It had been a moderately successful ploy which was destined to bear fruit a little later, but Brad was presently swinging his golf clubs somewhere out yonder and it was only mid-afternoon. I deserved a day off but, in spite of the opportunity to drum up more business, I could think of better places to spend it and better things to do.

  “The trouble with you,” Lucy said, rather unkindly I thought, “is that you can’t relax properly unless you’ve got a drink in your hand.”

  Brad’s assignment had involved me being away from my home turf for almost two weeks. I’d been to L.A. and then Phoenix, via Reno, driving all the way. Brad had offered to pay for air tickets, but I felt lost without the old Chevy, and anyway I enjoyed the ride. It was a well-paid job with generous expenses, but it was too long to be away. A couple of promising cases went by the bye. I’d been hired by Brad to find his seventeen-year-old daughter and bring her home. I’d found her on the West Coast and promptly lost her again. I followed a trail of credit card receipts and found her again. This time she agreed to come home, but only because she’d exhausted her credit and decided that working for a living wasn’t as much fun as she’d thought it was going to be; plus the friends she’d met along the way had disappeared when they couldn’t freeload any more. I was fairly certain she would be gone again soon, probably by the fall, paraphrasing the old adage: ‘you can bring a spoiled brat home with you but you can’t make her stay’. Brad, being Brad, had dealt with the problem by purchasing a brand new Porsche for her, either as a reward for coming home or an inducement to stay. I’d looked for her new toy in the club car park, but if it was there it was lost among others of its kind. There was no sign of her at the club.

  “I thought toots might’ve shown up to give me a spin in her new car,” I said. “After all she wouldn’t have it if it wasn’t for me.”

  “I imagine she prefers to hang out with people her own age,” Lucy said pointedly, without deigning to look in my direction.

  The Boylston Recreation Club was as swish as it sounded and the members as uninteresting as I’d expected, which was why I’d got Lucy invited as well. Lucy’s my secretary and girl Friday, although I have to share her semi-professional services with an assortment of other self-employed hacks so that we can all afford a swanky office address downtown. She was enjoying her day out better than I was. Earlier she’d called me a grouch.

  Women of a certain age were spread over sun loungers which were scattered around the edge of the pool, apparently comatose, but the younger women were scantily clad and checking each other out. Their costumes left little to the imagination, and I was using my imagination on what was left. I had decided to cover my own legs with linen pants rather than attract the pity or derision of others. I was the only one within a hundred feet of the pool who was not at least the color of café con leche.

  To my left was a forty something woman whose skin was the color of mahogany, and well-seasoned mahogany at that. She wore pink shades to match her pink lip salve, and a large straw sun hat which kept her face in the shade. The sun lotion that she had applied to her face and body made the skin of her neck and shoulders glisten in the sun, and I watched in fascination as rivulets of perspiration flowed like tributaries from her face and neck forming pools in the hollows above her collarbones. I was one of the few males in the vicinity of the pool, and the only one not wearing shorts. Elsewhere the men were doing more manly things, like golfing or bragging about their respective houses, fortunes or gifted children.

  To be fair Brad had asked me to join him for golf. I didn’t tell him that I had never played the game in my life, or even wanted to, because that was something he simply wouldn’t
have understood. Instead I told him that since Lucy didn’t know anyone at the club I felt that I should keep her company. She was there when I said it and knew it was simply an excuse, grimacing at me from behind Bradley’s back. Brad and I had arranged to meet at the nineteenth tee at four o’clock. Lucy wasn’t invited. Lucy was on the sun lounger to my right pretending to read a magazine whilst surreptitiously eyeing the athletic-looking young men at the poolside. She thought her dark glasses were masking this activity and I didn’t spoil her afternoon by telling her they weren’t. An almost deafening roar from the bar signaled Brad’s triumphant return from the eighteenth green.

  The noise from the bar contrasted starkly with the quietness of the pool area. No jumping or diving was permitted, and no ball games either. They weren’t going to let anybody have fun at the Boylston Club. There was an overflow grill around the pool to eliminate waves, so the only sound was a rhythmical and soporific ‘lup…lup…lup’.

  “Bradley said there’s someone that he’d like to introduce to me over a drink,” I said. “It could be business.”

  “Step on it,” Lucy said. “You have no greater fan then Bradley right now.”

  “Except you,” I said.

  “Yes, except me,” she replied unconvincingly, momentarily raising her shades and rolling her eyes.

  I heaved myself off of the recliner and stretched.

  “Would you like a drink sent out to you? He’s bound to ask.”

  “A Pina Colada,” she said, with her best but barely convincing approximation of a coquettish smile, “with a tiny umbrella please.”

  As I walked over to the clubhouse I noticed a sign forbidding dogs and small children near the pool. I wasn’t sure whether that was because of the peeing or the noise; perhaps it was both. If I hadn’t already known where the bar was I could simply have followed Brad’s booming voice. I squeezed myself through the almost tangible bonhomie and congratulated him on his winning round which was being broadcast to everyone within shouting distance. He introduced me to an assortment of his friends whose names I instantly forgot. I was introduced by both name and description. The description was ‘my secret weapon’ which caused great merriment and some raucous laughter. I stood there sheepishly and took it on the chin. Fortunately no-one asked me what my handicap was, although right then it was a dry mouth.