Unbreathed Memories

chapter 18

When Mark Voorhis came up squeaky clean with Maryland Q and A, I wasn’t surprised. With Voorhis’s spotless reputation and charming bedside manner, which I had experienced firsthand, I hadn’t really expected Paul to uncover any dirt about the pediatrician. But Diane was another matter. I was sure that her controversial techniques must have disagreed with somebody, so it was a surprise when she, too, came up with a clean bill of health. Paul didn’t find her listed with Maryland Q and A, of course, since she wasn’t an M.D., but he’d thought to check the state licensing boards. None was aware of any complaints against the woman.

I thought about what Stephanie had told me about her final session with Diane. I wondered what Stephanie had said that upset the therapist enough to cut the session short. Stephanie had been talking about her fear of memories coming back full-blown. What had Diane remembered? Something terrible in her own past? I was convinced that the answer lay in Waterville, Illinois.

Paul needed only minimal arm-twisting before agreeing to go to the Library of Congress to look through the microfilm of the Waterville Gazette. “Who am I this time?” he teased. “Marta or Lewis?”

“I’m rather partial to Lewis,” I said.

Paul tipped my chin up and kissed me. “You know who gets my vote?”

“Who?”

“Jimmy Stewart.”

“Why Jimmy Stewart?”

“Because in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, old Jimmy had Grace Kelly do his legwork.”

“Get out of here!” I bopped him over the head with my pillow.

The rest of the day crawled by. At one o’clock I made the first of my twice-daily calls to Mother in the hospital and we compared health notes. Lately she had been making an effort to sound chipper when we talked, but I could tell it was all an act. Even though I kept our conversations short, toward the end her voice would fade and she’d hand the phone off to Dad, who rarely left her side. I’d ask the inevitable-how’s she doing-and we’d have strained, one-sided conversations where he’d try to answer my questions without upsetting Mother, who, knowing her, would be pretending not to listen.

“She’s not much better, is she?” I’d ask.

“You could say that.”

“But not worse?”

“That’s right.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Good to hear you’re on the mend.” A glib non sequitur signaled that I’d better ask for details another time.

“Thanks, Daddy. I’m still sore and positively itching to get out of the house, but I see the doctor on Friday. If it’s OK with her, Paul says he’ll drive me up to visit Mother this weekend.”

“So soon?” His voice brightened. “She’ll be really glad to see you.” He took a deep breath. “And me, too, of course.”

I could hear muffled conversation in the background. “What’s that?”

“Your mom says don’t rush it.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not.”

Paul returned home around six-thirty, bearing a bag of Chinese carryout. All day I’d been on my own in the food department, which meant whatever I could scrounge from the refrigerator. Lunch had been leftover spaghetti zapped in the microwave and a sorry-looking bowl of Caesar salad. Paul barely had time to lay the cartons out on the kitchen table before I tore the lid off the hot-and-sour soup container and began slurping down steaming mouthfuls between demands for a full report on his research.

“Tell me what you found out.” I opened a waxed-paper envelope and munched on one of those crunchy noodles designed to throw on top of the soup.

Paul speared a dumpling with his chopsticks. He waved it at me and I watched it wobble, fall, and splash into the dipping sauce, decorating the tablecloth with mahogany speckles. He picked it up with his fingers. “Eat your tofu,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you.”

“Sadist.” I popped open a carton of steamed rice and inverted it over my plate. When I lifted the carton away, it left a rectangular block, which I draped with spicy green beans.

“Nope. Masochist. That drive to D.C. is hell. Can’t understand how you put up with it for so many years.” The last dumpling disappeared down his throat.

“I imagine we needed the money,” I teased. “Remember Emily? And all those paychecks I signed over to Bryn Mawr?”

“There was that,” he admitted.

I laid down my chopsticks, sat up straight in my chair, folded my hands primly in my lap, and said, “OK. Out with it.”

“I guess I’ve tortured you long enough.” He leaned forward with his arms resting on the edge of the table. “OK, here’s the scoop. The Waterville Gazette comes out every Thursday. It’s a provincial rag reporting on local politics, school and church events, much like our Chesapeake Times down in Pearson’s Corner.”

I remembered the Chesapeake Times. Once upon a time I’d made headlines there, when I discovered the body of a murdered teenager floating in an old cistern. I picked a green bean up with my fingers and nibbled it slowly while Paul continued.

“Because Dr. Voorhis left Waterville sometime in 1979, I began looking in the December issues and worked backward. In November, there was an announcement that two doctors, a married couple, had bought the Morgan Clinic. And that led me backward to an even more interesting article.”

While I held my breath, Paul shoved his chair back and reached for the battered briefcase he’d propped against a table leg. He extracted a sheaf of papers from the side pocket and held them out to me. “Here are photocopies of everything I found.”

I snatched them from his outstretched hand. “You sweetheart!”

“They’re roughly in order.”

My heart began to pound as I shoved my plate away, flicked some grains of rice onto the floor, and arranged the photocopies on the table in front of me. The one on top showed a simple invitation-style announcement bordered with a Greek key design. It introduced Drs. Warner and Millicent Rickert to the Waterville community and invited patients to look to the clinic for all their medical needs. The next photocopy was from the society page. It described a farewell party held for Diane Voorhis at the Waterville Country Club, sponsored by someone in the Junior League, the mother of one of Diane’s little friends. The article was dry and about as interesting as reading the stock market quotes-I mean, who cares what kind of flowers decorated the tables-until the final paragraph:

Diane, 13, will be relocating to Baltimore, Maryland, where her father, Dr. Mark Voorhis, is going into private practice. Fiona Voorhis, his wife of fifteen years, a popular member of the Junior League and an active member of St. Anthony’s church, died in August.

I sensed Paul staring at me. I whistled and looked up.

“What did she die of?”

“Read on, McDuff,” he said with a twinkle.

Since everything seemed to be arranged in reverse chronological order, I dived straight to the bottom of the stack. Under a picture of an attractive woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Diane Sturges was the headline: LOCAL WOMAN FOUND DEAD OF CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING. I checked the date. On a Tuesday night in August of 1979, Fiona Voorhis had been discovered dead in her car, a Volvo station wagon, when her husband returned home following his rounds. He told police he had heard the engine running, but by the time he opened the garage and pulled his wife from the car, it was too late.

“Where was Diane?” I asked Paul.

He laid a finger on a photocopy featuring several pictures of a barn fire. It was from the following week’s paper, and it carried more details. The night her mother died, thirteen-year-old Diane had been attending a church camp in nearby Durham. Poor thing, I thought. No wonder she was so screwed up, losing her mother like that. And so young. The police had found a suicide note, but its contents had not been revealed. Family friends had reported that Fiona had been recently despondent. Again, no cause for that depression was given. The final article dealt with the inquest. Fiona Voorhis’s death was ruled a suicide. I counted on my fingers. Five months later, Dr. Voorhis had sold his practice and he and his daughter were on their way to Baltimore. I wondered why.

I turned the photocopy over, as if expecting something to be printed on the back of it. “That’s it?”

Paul nodded. “Isn’t that enough?”

I paged through the articles again. “I would give my eyeteeth to know what was in that suicide note.”

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.”

I had to agree with him. “It’s an odd thing, though.”

“What’s odd?”

I shuffled through the photocopies. “Did you notice that the Gazette reports on everything under the sun-birthday parties for two-year-olds, high school dances, junior varsity basketball scores, the weekly menus at the school cafeteria…”

“And your point is?”

“There was a farewell party for Diane, but none for the good doctor.”

“Maybe he didn’t want a party. He was the grieving widower, don’t forget.”

I ignored him. “Makes me wonder all the more about that suicide note,” I said. “The earlier articles hint at something more-that she was found dead under suspicious circumstances-but the reporter writing about the inquest doesn’t even hint at anything suspicious or unusual.”

“Let’s ask Dennis.”

Paul’s suggestion surprised me. I’d thought about Dennis, too, but was glad that Paul had been the one to bring it up, not me. Perhaps his sister’s boyfriend, being a policeman, could find out something about the case, maybe even learn the contents of the suicide note. “You call him,” I prompted.

“Why me?”

“I’m always asking him for stuff. He already thinks I have a screw loose. The request might sound more reasonable coming from you.”

“I doubt it.” Paul stood, came around behind my chair, and rested both hands on my shoulders. “He’ll just think I’ve joined the Hannah Club.” He kissed the top of my head. “But since you’re an invalid and completely at my mercy, I’ll give it a shot.”

Surprisingly, Paul reached Dennis at home. Widowed a little over a year, Dennis Rutherford divided his time between the Chesapeake County Eastern District police station where he worked and Connie’s farm. From my one-sided vantage point, pinned by pain to my chair and listening to Paul as he wandered around the kitchen with the portable phone pressed to his ear, I gathered that Dennis had reluctantly agreed to make some discreet inquiries, but that he wouldn’t guarantee to share the results with me. Paul promised to meet him for a beer and a long-overdue chin wag, or whatever male-bonding activities men get up to over beer when their womenfolk aren’t around. “There!” He laid the phone on the table and turned to me. “Satisfied?”

I aimed my sweetest smile in his direction. “Very.”

Paul covered his eyes with both hands. “Aieeee! It’s the saccharine death ray!”

“And only one of my extraordinary talents not presently under reconstruction.”

Paul circled the table, leaned down, and brushed his lips against the back of my neck. “Dennis also thought you’d like to know that the Baltimore police still don’t have enough evidence to charge your father with anything.”

I relaxed against him. “That’s good news.” I reached back and caressed his cheek, enjoying the prickly feel of it against my skin.

“It’s after eight. Can I help you upstairs?”

I took the hand he offered and pulled myself up unsteadily. “Thanks.” I had expected to hobble upstairs on my own-I was doing much better at stairs these days-but Paul surprised me by scooping me up as if I were a blushing bride. I wrapped my arms around his neck. He was panting slightly but trying not to show it when he arranged me gently on the bed in our room.

I laid the back of my hand dramatically against my forehead. “I feel like a heroine in a romance novel, a fragile lily doomed to expire from consumption.” I faked a dainty, ladylike cough.

He tucked the comforter around my legs and began to chuckle.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m just remembering something. When I was a kid, my dad loved opera. Long before there was a Kennedy Center, we’d take the train up to New York to hear the Metropolitan Opera. Saw Leontyne Price in Aida once.”

“You never told me that!”

“Never came up before.”

I wondered what there was about Aida to make somebody laugh. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Aida a tragedy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then what’s so funny about going to the Met?”

Paul parked himself on the edge of the bed. “Well, I’d been to a lot of operas-Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, La Bohème-but in all that time, I’d never seen a thin soprano. The first time I saw La Bohème-I must have been about ten-I goggled at the bloated diva who was practically bursting out of the seams of her Mimi costume and couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about.”

I must have looked puzzled.

Paul crawled onto the bed next to me, fully clothed. He plumped up a pillow and sandwiched it between his head and the wooden headboard. “If you recall, Mimi’s dying of consumption. I figured if she wanted to eat herself to death, that was her problem!”

I bent double with laughter, pressing the comforter against my abdomen. “Oh, help! You are a bad, bad boy!”

His arm encircled my shoulders and I leaned my head against his chest. “I certainly hope so,” he whispered into my hair.