Sing It to Her Bones

12

My Toyota had sat in the sun all day with the windows closed, allowing the heat inside to build up high enough to broil meat. While I waited for the steering wheel and plastic upholstery to cool down enough to touch, I imagined Dr. Chase’s eyes boring into my back, but when I turned around to check, whatever I had taken to be Dr. Franklin C. Chase, Jr., had disappeared from the window.

I tested the temperature of the upholstery with the palm of my hand, then threw my purse behind the driver’s seat and climbed in. I slotted the key into the ignition, turned it, and as the engine started, both the air conditioner and All Things Considered blasted into life, right in the middle of the news.

Keeping the air conditioner set to high, I headed for the farm. Just after I passed through the intersection at Church and High with the light in my favor, a black Lexus sped through on yellow, going in the opposite direction. I was wondering where I had seen the car before and then I remembered: Katie’s sister. Opposite St. Philip’s, I checked the rearview mirror and watched Liz’s Lexus squeal around the corner on Princess Anne. Where on earth was she going at such speed? Dr. Chase’s? My paranoid imagination had clearly shifted into overdrive. She doesn’t have to be going to see the doctor, I reasoned. There’s a lot of stuff down that road. Ten to twelve houses. A beauty parlor. Harrison’s Restaurant-I checked my watch-and it’s almost dinnertime. Maybe I was adding two and two and coming up with five. Then again, maybe not. I had always been good in math.

I turned into the parking lot at Harmony Baptist, reversed, and headed back to the doctor’s office. As I drove past, I saw that I hadn’t been paranoid after all. Liz’s Lexus was parked in the lot next to Dr. Chase’s Ford. I tried to recall an earlier conversation with the doctor. Hadn’t he told me he hardly knew Liz? It could be true, I supposed. Maybe she was sick. Or perhaps Dr. Chase had called her in because he had discovered something in Katie’s file that he wanted to share with the family.

I was reminded of the photocopy, which now rested safely in my purse along with the slip of paper on which I had jotted down Paul’s telephone number. I thought about Paul, trying in his sweetly clumsy way to make up to me after our stupid fight yesterday morning.

To reassure myself that the documents were safe, I slipped my hand into the side pouch of my purse. The photocopy felt warm to the touch, as if it had just rolled out of the machine, but I couldn’t find the scrap of paper anywhere. I scrabbled around in my purse and checked the pockets of my jacket with no luck. Shit! I must have left it on my desk. Dr. Chase had warned me about his cleaning lady: anything that wasn’t tied down would be out with the trash by morning. Now I’d have to go back for it.

Erring on the side of caution, I parked in front of an old Victorian house several doors down. From there it took only a minute to reach the office and climb the steps to the porch. I peered through the glass in the front door. Everything inside was dark. My key grated noisily in the lock and I held my breath as I twisted the doorknob and let myself into the deserted waiting room. I stood still and listened. Nothing. Maybe they were in the back.

I crept to the reception area and peered over the counter. The slip of paper on which I had written Paul’s phone number was right where I had left it, half under the telephone, printed in neat capital letters. 508 something. I thought that if I could just reach over the counter, I might avoid going through the double doors where there’d be a risk of running into Dr. Chase or his visitor. If Liz and Dr. Chase were in cahoots, being caught here after hours could prove injurious to my health.

I stood on tiptoe and leaned as far over the counter as I could, but the slip of paper remained just out of reach. In that awkward position, the edge of the Formica counter cut uncomfortably into my stomach and I thought it would be all I’d need to be caught here like this, balancing on my stomach, good arm outstretched, reaching over the counter like a common shoplifter. I squirmed backward until my feet touched the floor, then pushed cautiously through the swinging doors and turned right into the reception area. From there I could hear the low murmur of voices on the other side of the wall.

I snatched Paul’s number off the desk, then pressed my back against the cabinets that lined the wall, not even breathing, straining to catch something of what they were saying. Unexpectedly Dr. Chase’s voice reached me, distinctly louder. Someone must have opened his office door.

“How was I to know that she was one of Dad’s patients?”

“You should have checked it out, Frankie. You should have thought of it.”

Frankie? So much for his feeble story about hardly knowing the woman.

“You were a damn fool to leave it lying about.” Liz was shouting now.

“It wasn’t just lying about, Liz. I stuck it under my blotter, for Christ’s sake.”

“Are you sure she saw it?”

“Almost positive. I never would have misfiled a chart like that. The colored tabs stood out like a sore thumb when she stuffed it in the U’s.”

I shrank back into the shadows near the coatrack, sandwiched between a soft wool coat and a down jacket left over from winter, feeling like a complete idiot. It would have been so easy to file Katie’s chart back in the D’s, and he might never have noticed. Now that I was clearly persona non grata, in addition to being muy stupida, I prayed for an opportunity to escape. I hoped that with the lights turned off in the waiting room, they couldn’t see me, although I could see them plainly enough through the glass panels in the swinging door as they bickered in the brightly lit hallway.

Liz stood with her back against the door of Examining Room B, flipping briskly through the pages in Katie’s chart. She must have been a speed reader. “What is all this shit?”

“As I told you, even if she’d looked at it, I doubt that she’d have understood my father’s shorthand.”

“But what if she did, Frankie? What then?”

“She’ll know for sure that you sister was pregnant. That’s all. We should have reported that to the police in the first place, Liz. You know that.”

“Well, we didn’t. And I can’t afford to have the fact that we didn’t come out now.” She waved Katie’s chart under his nose. “Get rid of this, Frankie.”

Dr. Chase stood with both hands in the pockets of his slacks.

“Now, Frank!” She slapped his right arm with the back side of the chart. “Take charge of something for once in your life, for Christ’s sake! I’m damn tired of cleaning up after you.”

Dr. Chase snatched Katie’s chart from Liz’s hand and tucked it under his arm. For a second I thought Liz was heading for the front door. My stomach lurched, and I was suddenly reminded of the sandwich I had eaten for lunch. But Liz had merely turned my way to pick up her purse, an expensive leather Coach bag, from where it hung on the doorknob of Room B. She hitched the strap over her left shoulder, then headed toward the back door. I was beginning to relax a little against the overcoat when she turned. “And I’ll take care of the other thing, too.”

Dr. Chase shook his head silently at the back of Liz’s departing hot pink Evan-Picone suit. He waited until the door had latched behind her, then walked over to it and engaged the dead bolt. I saw him return to his office and shut the door.

I sat back on my heels, heart racing, to mull this over, waiting to leave until I heard the sound of Liz’s engine and the crunch of gravel under her tires. Surely Liz was overreacting? How could a deceased eighteen-year-old’s pregnancy make any difference now? This was the 1990s, for heaven’s sake; Queen Victoria had been dead for years.

Liz was going to extraordinary lengths to protect her dead sister’s reputation, I thought. Or perhaps it was her family’s reputation that concerned her now? Fat chance! I nearly laughed out loud. This was much more than the congenital fear of a lawyer finding herself implicated in a cover-up. I was convinced that Liz knew much more than she was saying about Katie’s death.

I was turning scenarios over in my mind as I quietly let myself out the front door into the waning sunshine of an otherwise perfect spring day, fresh with the smell of new-mown grass.

I drove back to the farm in a preoccupied haze. Fortunately I was familiar with every turn of the road by now. My car seemed to drive itself, hugging the curves and gliding gently up and down the hills. It’s probably just as well I didn’t own a car phone or I would have telephoned Dennis Rutherford and started babbling like a blithering fool. I didn’t know what significance to place on the fact that Katie had almost certainly been pregnant when she died, and I wondered if that could have been determined at the autopsy had the medical examiner been looking for it. Would there be any trace of such a tiny fetus? Or was Katie’s body too badly decomposed to tell?

Something distracted me from these morbid thoughts of death and decay. I noticed it first in my side view mirror, a dark shape loitering behind me, highlighting that nutty notice on the mirror about objects being closer than they appear. When I glanced to the rearview, the dark shape turned into a van that filled the mirror from rim to rim.

At this point the road became narrow and twisty, and I had this guy right on my tail. Or guys, rather. I could see ball caps and dark glasses on a pair of otherwise generic faces.

Stop tailgating, you jerks! I accelerated to 50 mph and careened around a curve, hoping to widen the gap between us, but the driver of the van stayed with me, so close I couldn’t even see his front bumper.

Okay. Pass me then, dammit! I slowed to thirty-five. We had come to a straight stretch in the road, and there were no cars approaching from the opposite direction, yet they stuck with me like lint on a cheap black suit. I honked my horn and slowed to twenty-five, but still the bozos refused to pass.

Who were these people and why were they following me? I remembered what Dennis had told me about local hooligans and prayed that I would make it to Connie’s before somebody got hurt. Like me. I checked the rearview again, and this time I caught the expression on the driver’s face, mouth set in a determined line, arms straight and elbows locked. Where his hands grasped the steering wheel, I imagined the knuckles were white. I remembered Liz’s parting words to Dr. Chase, that she’d take care of something. Could that something have been me?

But how did she have time to arrange this ambush? I’d left Liz only five minutes ago. Then I remembered Dr. Chase’s telephone, the extension lights flashing on and off like the control panel on the starship Enterprise. I had assumed he was calling patients, but he could have been talking with Liz. Oh, shit! Maybe they were both involved.

I eased around the next curve, still going twenty-five, keeping well to the right. On the next straightaway my head suddenly whiplashed against the headrest with considerable force, sending explosions of light swimming behind my eyelids. The SOB had rammed me from the rear! I shook my head to clear away the cob-webs and jammed my foot down, hard, on the accelerator. Speed limit or no speed limit, I had to get away from these thugs before they killed me! In seconds I was driving a good 10 mph over the 55 mph limit, yet not only did I fail to lose them, but they seemed to be overtaking me.

I was aware of the blast before I heard it. The back of my neck stung as if it had been hit by a thousand tiny pins, followed by a whoosh! as my rear window exploded into the backseat. The right wheels of my Toyota hit the soft shoulder, and the steering wheel spun wildly, catching my right thumb and jerking it painfully as I tried to regain control of the vehicle. Somehow I wrestled the car back onto the road, but something wasn’t right, and it took all my strength to keep from plunging into the ditch. The way the car pulled toward the shoulder, I suspected my right front tire was flat.

Even in that crippled condition, I was still going fifty-five when I reached the pond and I realized with absolute certainty that barring a miracle, I wouldn’t make it around the curve. I pressed both feet on the brake pedal, sending the car fishtailing across the centerline. As I pulled back into my lane, I was vaguely aware that the dark van was still with me, but I was too busy to think about much more than slowing the car down. Hold on, Hannah! Here we go!

My car sailed over the ditch, shot through a hedge, ripped through a barbed-wire fence, and plunged, nose first, into the murky water of the Baxters’ pond. The last thought I had before everything went dark was not of Paul or Emily or the fear of dying but: Oh, damn, I’m going to ruin Connie’s scarf.