Unbreathed Memories

chapter 2

Other than to make an appointment with Dr. Bergstrom, for the next few days I didn’t worry much about my reconstructive surgery. Or about Georgina and her imaginary problems. Instead, I spent my mornings engrossed in a project an old friend at St. John’s College had steered my way. I had been temping at a local law firm, filling in for a secretary on maternity leave. I confessed to my friend over lunch at El Toro Bravo that I was glad the woman was coming back. I was pretty damned tired of doing nothing more constructive than answering the telephone and filing updates as thin as Bible pages into fat black legal loose-leaf binders.

“Have you heard of L. K. Bromley?” my friend asked.

Of course. Everybody had heard of L. K. Bromley, the famous mystery writer, who in her time was crowned “America’s Agatha Christie,” writing more than seventy mystery novels in a career that spanned fifty years. But few people knew that L. K. Bromley was also Nadine Smith Gray, that tweedy, straight-backed, white-haired Annapolitan who lived in a wee brick house on the corner of College and North Streets and walked her dachshunds every day on the back campus. She looked more like a Navy widow or someone’s sweet old grandmother. So when she moved to the Ginger Cove retirement community at the ripe old age of eighty-two and left her entire library-or, rather, L. K. Bromley’s library-to the college, along with the money to process and maintain it, everyone was surprised. No one at the college could figure out why Ms. Bromley had singled out St. John’s for that honor. Maybe it was in gratitude for all the lectures she attended there, someone speculated, or the classic film series, or the privilege of letting her dogs poop on the well-manicured lawn. Ms. Bromley, as mysterious and tight-lipped as her protagonists, wasn’t saying.

A delighted St. John’s needed someone with experience to organize and catalog the collection. I had just spent an enjoyable and productive two days perched on a low stool in a bright workroom on the southeast side of the recently renovated college library. There I sorted through Ms. Bromley’s novels, putting plastic covers on to preserve the dust jackets and deciding what to do with the large number of books that she used as references. There were guidebooks, maps, train schedules, trial transcripts, and books on forensic evidence, just the thing if you live a quiet suburban life and need to know what a bullet can do to a person’s head at close range. I pored over Coroner’s Quarterly with the same morbid fascination that I used to give to my grandfather’s medical texts, delighted in the old maps of Savannah, Georgia, and Reno, Nevada, and marveled that in the 1950s you could catch a train from Annapolis to Baltimore every hour. In recent years the tracks had been torn up, and you were lucky if you could find a bus going there once or twice a day.

The librarian had suggested that I complete the Bromley collection by rounding up copies of the author’s short stories. They had been serialized in publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, so I was expecting to spend a great deal of time with Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, visiting other libraries that kept complete runs of popular magazines, and shelling out dimes by the ton for photocopying. I was fascinated by the work, and after only a day had decided that even if the creeps who had laid me off last year from Whitworth & Sullivan wanted me back, even if they crawled down Route 50 after me, begging on their hands and knees, I’d never agree to work in Washington, D.C., again.

The part-time job also gave me the flexibility I needed to help my parents with their recent move to Annapolis from Washington State. Dad had graduated from the academy in 1950 and had been stationed there again when Ruth and I were in high school. He liked the town so much he always swore he’d retire there, so after leaving the Navy in 1980 and spending nineteen years as a consultant to the aerospace industry, he and Mother made plans to move east. Mom seemed relieved. My recent illness had affected her more than she let on, and we both had the telephone bills to prove it.

Now the calls were local, but I preferred the face-to-face contact I had missed when we were separated by a continent. Recent afternoons found me heading for my parents’ new home in the Providence community, out Greenbury Point Road, just past the Naval Station. It was a comfortable, ranch-style house on a quiet street, one block from the water. As a housewarming gift Paul’s sister, Connie, had painted a mailbox featuring entwined anchors, a mermaid, and other nautical flora and fauna. I noticed it had been installed at the head of the drive. “Capt. George D. Alexander, USN, Ret.” gleamed from both sides in bold, gold letters.

Mother was removing glasses from a packing barrel and layering them into the dishwasher when I arrived shortly after lunch. She swiped with the back of her hand at a damp tendril of graying hair that hung down onto her forehead, then nodded in the direction of the laundry room. “Hang your coat up in there, darling, then come give me a hand.”

I smiled at my mom, a petite woman not more than five feet tall, wearing black jeans, a faded red cardigan, and a favorite pair of fleece-lined slippers from L.L. Bean. Rolls of shelf liner, a ruler, and a pair of scissors lay out on the kitchen table. “Be a dear and finish up with that cabinet over there, so that it’ll be ready when these glasses come out.”

I dutifully measured the shelves, then used the scissors to cut the paper to fit, following the preprinted grid on the back of the sticky paper while Mom continued unpacking. At one point she held up a Peter Rabbit bowl that had been mine as a child. There was a chip in the rim where I had once banged it too hard with my spoon. “Remember this, Hannah?”

“I sure do.” I remembered my favorite bowl well, but had no clear recollection of the temper tantrum that had resulted in the damage. Mom must have told me about it. I had been two and a half; no one could remember back that far. Now Georgina was trying to dredge up memories from when she was that age. I didn’t believe it was possible.

I was trying to think of a way to bring up the subject of Georgina’s therapy with my mother, but wasn’t sure how much she knew. “Mom, have you talked to Georgina lately?”

She looked at me sideways over her shoulder. “Not for several days. Why?”

“She’s been calling and asking idiotic questions about her childhood. I told her what I knew about it, but can’t understand why she doesn’t ask you.”

“She’s probably afraid her father will give her an earful after the phone call he had with her last week. I overheard him saying that if she didn’t get herself to a real doctor, he didn’t want to talk about it any more.”

So they knew about the therapy sessions. I put down the scissors. “I thought she was seeing a doctor.”

“Dr. Sturges is a therapist, but she’s not an M.D.”

“I thought therapists were M.D.s.”

“Not always. Some are psychologists or social workers.”

“But surely she’s competent.”

“Your father doesn’t think so.”

“That woman is a quack.” My father entered the kitchen from the dining room carrying a wrought-iron pot rack and a hammer. He brushed my cheek with his lips, handed me the hammer, then climbed onto a stool and positioned the rack on the wall over the stove. He turned, towering over me, a handsome, broad-shouldered man, his close-cropped sandy hair only slightly gray at the temples. “She’s filled your sister full of the damnedest nonsense I’ve ever heard.” He extended his hand, and I put the hammer in it. He used it to bang away at a nail, swore when the nail bent double, and wrenched it out of the wall with the claw end of the hammer, sending it ricocheting off the wall and skittering across the tiles. He inserted another nail in the hole he had started and began pounding again. “God!-damned!-quack!”

I looked at my mother, her brown eyes serious and unblinking. “Why don’t you use a drill and some proper screws, George?” When my father didn’t answer, she shrugged. “I’d invite you to stay for tea,” she said to me, “but we haven’t found the teapot yet.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of still more boxes piled up in the corner of the kitchen, spilling out into the adjoining family room. “There’s coffee.”

“No thanks, Mom.” I gave her a hug. “I’ve got to get going anyway. I promised Paul I’d make chicken curry tonight, now that I’m a woman of leisure. More or less.”

I squeezed my father’s leg where he stood on the stool. “Bye, Dad.”

He patted my head. “See you later, pumpkin.” As I shrugged back into my coat I heard him say, “Lois, I’ll take some of that coffee, if you don’t mind. On second thought, make that a martini.”

In the fifteen minutes it took to cross the Severn River, drive home, and find a parking spot in front of our house on Prince George Street, I worried about Georgina. What on earth was going on in that screwball head of hers? At the turn onto the Severn River bridge, I was cut off by a silver Toyota speeding down the hill through a red light. I honked at the driver, a young man with a cell phone grafted to his ear. I had owned a Toyota once, until I drove it into a pond at my sister-in-law’s. I’d recently replaced it with a 1996 Chrysler Le Baron convertible in a pale purple color the used car salesman had described, with an expansive sweep of his hand, as wild orchid. Paul called it the Grannymobile, my midlife-crisis car. Could well be. In any case, I figured it was a heck of a lot cheaper than Georgina’s shrink.

At home, I retrieved the mail from the floor where it had fallen through the mail slot. Nothing but bills, and the U.S. Postal Service had torn the cover of my New Yorker magazine again. I tossed the lot onto the hall table, hung up my coat, draped the strap of my purse over a doorknob, and headed for the kitchen. I pulled some chicken breasts out of the freezer and put them in the microwave to defrost, and had just settled down with a steaming cup of Earl Grey when the telephone rang. I wiped my hands on a towel, sighed, and resigned myself to giving the brush-off to another telephone salesman. Nobody else ever called me at three o’clock in the afternoon.

“Hello.”

I heard a strange, disembodied whispering, like summer wind through the trees.

“Hello?” I said again.

The same plaintive sound sighed down the line, but this time it separated into two recognizable syllables. “Han-nah!”

“What? Who is this?” My heart began to pound.

“Hannah, it’s me, Georgina.” Her voice was so husky I hardly recognized it.

“Georgina! You sound terrible. What on earth’s the matter?”

“Hannah, you’ve got to come and get me!”

“My God, what’s happened?”

“I’ll explain later,” she whispered. “Just come!”

“OK, but I can’t do anything until you calm down and tell me where you are.”

“At my therapist’s.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes.” Georgina drew a ragged breath. “No! Oh, please hurry!”

“I’m thirty miles from Baltimore. Even if I drive like a bat out of hell it’ll take me forty-five minutes to get there. Will you be OK until then?”

Whatever Georgina meant to say was lost in a noisy snuffle. She began to wail.

“Breathe, Georgina! Breathe.” I could hear her gasping, so I tried to distract her. “Where’s your car?”

“Scott… dropped… me… off.”

“Look, he can get there faster than I can. I’m going to call him right now.”

“No, Hannah, don’t! He’s home with the kids. He’d have to bring them along. They can’t…” Georgina paused as if listening for something, then said, “I think somebody’s coming. Please hurry!”

I knew that Diane Sturges lived on Lake Roland, a city park since 1861, yet one of Baltimore’s best-kept secrets. Georgina had pointed out the back of the elegant, ultramodern Sturges home last fall when we had been hiking with the children along the footpath that ran through the woods and along the lakeshore. We had parked down by the bridge like everyone else and had walked up the dirt and gravel path, holding hands and singing. I wasn’t sure I knew how to get to the house directly.

Georgina’s breathing had steadied, but she began moaning. I found myself shouting, hoping to get her attention. “How do I get there, Georgina? Roland to Lake and turn right on Coldbrook?”

“Pleeeease!”

I could see that I was on my own. I checked my watch. Three-fifteen. If I was lucky, I could beat rush-hour traffic and make it to Baltimore well before dark. After dark, I doubted I’d be able to find a white elephant in the deeply wooded, exclusive neighborhood, even if it were wearing a neon tutu. I threw the packet of chicken into the fridge, scribbled a note to Paul suggesting he nuke a Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese, and headed for my car.

As I sped up Interstate 97, I wondered what on earth had happened. Did Georgina have a difficult therapy session? If so, what? What could be so awful that she couldn’t share it with her husband? Was their marriage on the rocks? Or maybe she had worked herself up into such a state that she didn’t want her children to see her that way. I had pressed Georgina pretty hard for answers, but she only cried harder and pleaded with me to hurry.

I took the ramp to the beltway at thirty miles over the posted limit, exited at the BW Parkway, and broke all speed records getting to the stadium, where I peeled off on Martin Luther King and headed straight through the city to the JFX. At the Northern Parkway exit I darted across three lanes of traffic to make a left turn on Falls Road, then headed east on Lake Avenue. I had reached the Boys Latin School when I realized I must have overshot the turning to Coldbrook Lane, so I U-turned in the school’s drive and headed back down the hill. Coldbrook appeared almost immediately on my right. I turned and drove slowly along the narrow, forested lane, hoping I would recognize the Sturges house from the front, but none of these expensive homes had been built anywhere near the street.

At the end of the lane, I came to a dead end at a wooden gate. I steered to one side, parked my car on the soft earth near a pile of leaves, and climbed out. The Sturges house had to be near here somewhere. I remembered seeing this gate during our hike.

To my left, a driveway angled up steeply and disappeared around a corner. A box containing salted sand and a small shovel stood near the mailbox, but there was no name painted on the mailbox, just a number. Still, it seemed a likely candidate. I looked around, feeling guilty, then opened the mailbox and thrust my hand in. I pulled out a packet of magazines and long envelopes held together by a rubber band. The letter on top was addressed to Diane V. Sturges, Ph.D., and another envelope announced that she was a member of the Mystery Guild book club. Her husband, Bradley, had investments with Salomon, Smith, Barney and read Sports Illustrated and Forbes. I stuffed the mail back in the box, then, leaving my car parked on the street where it wouldn’t get blocked in, I hurried up the drive.

At the top of the hill, the driveway widened enough to accommodate two cars and circled around under an elaborate, pillared portico attached to a substantial, modern, yellow brick dwelling. A spur led to a three-car garage, also made of brick. One garage door stood open. No cars were in sight.

I stepped up to the front door and stood there for a few minutes, my finger hesitating over the bell. What if I rang it and somebody answered? What would I say? Excuse me, but may I use your phone, I seem to be lost? I could always claim to be collecting money for charity. Or be a Jehovah’s Witness. I mashed the doorbell button with my thumb. Silly. I would simply ask for my sister.

When no one came to the door after several minutes, I peered through a window. Everything inside was dark. Where was Georgina?

To the right of the entranceway a flagstone path led around the house, passing through a well-tended garden that, in summer, would be brilliant with color but now contained mostly boxwood, rhododendron, and ivy. I picked my way carefully along the path, hugging the foundation of the house, then stopped. A sign, “Office,” hung on a white-painted door. The door stood ajar.

I pushed it open with my palm. “Georgina?” There was no answer. I stepped into a small, prettily wallpapered entrance hall simply furnished with a small table, an umbrella stand, and a brass coatrack with Georgina’s green winter coat and paisley scarf hanging on it. Ahead of me a short flight of stairs, lushly carpeted, led up to a landing. I took three steps. “Georgina?”

I gasped when Georgina appeared unexpectedly at the head of the stairs, looking like a madwoman. Her hair tumbled loose about her shoulders, and her mascara had melted into black streaks that ran down her cheeks. “Thank God you’re here!” She stumbled toward me and hugged me so fiercely that I thought my ribs would break and we’d go tumbling backward down the stairs together.

I took hold of my sister’s arms and eased her into a sitting position on the landing, keeping one arm around her shoulder. “Now. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Georgina pulled herself into a ball, knees to her chest, and rocked back and forth, sobbing. “Diane’s dead.”

“Your therapist? My God! Are you sure?”

Georgina nodded her head, her lips a thin, tight line. “Look.”

Georgina pointed. I stood and passed through a pair of French doors into a simply but elegantly furnished office, dominated by a large walnut desk. Someone, probably a decorator, had arranged small Oriental rugs casually about on the oatmeal-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, A perfectly normal-looking black leather sofa stood against the left wall, a matching overstuffed armchair angled next to it. I strolled around the desk. A green blotter. A pen. An appointment book. A framed photograph of a handsome man in his mid-sixties. Dr. Sturges’s husband? Her father? Who could say. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.

“What are you talking about, Georgina?” I yelled. “There’s nobody here!” I was afraid my sister had really lost her marbles.

“The balcony.”

Beyond the desk, a set of sliding glass doors led out to the balcony that I had admired last summer. Through the glass I could see an iron bench, a small glass-topped table, and, next to it, a large urn containing an evergreen of some sort. Traces of snow remained piled here and there in the corners where the rays of the winter sun couldn’t reach. Again, nothing appeared out of order. Yet something must be wrong to have frightened Georgina and upset her so badly. I slid open the door and stepped out onto the deck.

A cold wind blew in off the lake, roaring across my ears and whipping my scarf back over my shoulder. I stood shivering at the end of the balcony, surrounded by tall trees. Through their bare, dancing branches I could see the waters of the lake just below. Off to the left, a lone bicyclist stood on his pedals, then shifted to a lower gear as he huffed and puffed his way up the bike trail. The trail curved toward me, then away again toward the lake, over a small bridge.

Ivy snaked along a brick wall that separated the Sturges property from the park. Inside its boundaries lay piles of dried leaves, patches of snow, a small cedar tree, rocks, a blue shoe. Another blue shoe, attached to the leg of a woman wearing a blue suit. A woman whose body now lay broken over the face of a boulder, one leg bent cruelly under the other, her left arm flung out over her head, her eyes blank and wide. From the size of the dark stain that had spread over the surface of the boulder, and from the unnatural angle of the woman’s head in relation to her shoulders, I knew she was very, very dead.

I grasped the railing and swallowed hard, fighting the urge to throw up. Without touching the doors, I hurried back to Georgina. “What happened? Did you see her fall?”

“She was like that when I got here.” Georgina gasped, one hand to her mouth. “I came for my appointment like always and I looked all around… Oh, God.” She sniffed noisily and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Diane wasn’t in her office, and then I felt a draft and noticed that the doors were open. Oh, God! Oh, God!” She rocked faster and faster. “I wish I’d never gone out there!”

I took Georgina by the arms and shook her. “Why didn’t you call the police?”

“I was too scared. I called you.”

“We have to call the police!”

“But my fingerprints are all over the place! Oh, Hannah, just get me out of here! I’m her last patient on Fridays. Nobody needs to know I was here. We can call the police from the pay phone down by the pizza place.”

She started to cry again, great racking sobs just like when we were kids and I was stuck baby-sitting her. I was a sucker for it then and even worse at resisting it now. “Georgina, we have to call nine-one-one. If there’s even the slightest chance she could be alive…” I stepped back in the direction of the office. I hadn’t seen a phone on the desk, but there had to be one in there somewhere.

“No!” Georgina’s scream caught me off guard. When I turned around a split second later, she had bolted down the stairs, grabbed her coat and scarf, and disappeared.

I raced after her-out the door, up the path, down the driveway, and into the street, where I caught up with her at my car, pounding on the locked door with her fist. “Stop it, Georgina!” As serious as the situation was, the first thought that came to mind was that she would ruin my paint. I unlocked the driver’s-side door and popped the locks. “Get in.”

Georgina silently obeyed, settling into the passenger seat, hugging her bunched-up coat like a security blanket. I knew I should go back to the house and call the police, but I was afraid to leave my sister alone. No telling what she’d do in her present condition. I considered the forest, deep and thick, surrounding us on three sides and, only yards away, the lake, dark and cold, its shoreline rimmed with ice. Against my better judgment I gave her a disapproving, big-sister glare and said, “OK, we’ll call from the pizza place. I don’t suppose it matters where we call the police from, as long as we call them.”

Five minutes later, I was standing in a phone booth at the Lakefalls Pizzeria dialing nine-one-one. “There’s been an accident. A bad fall,” I told the operator. “Two twenty-one Coldbrook.” When she asked for my name, I panicked and hung up. Why did I do that? I leaned against the wall and counted slowly to ten. In the light from the restaurant, I could see Georgina, where she sat huddled in the front seat of my car. I went inside the pizzeria and bought her a Coke.

“Here, drink this.”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“You should drink something. Here.” I grabbed her left arm and pulled it toward me. Her hand came out of her pocket, clutching several sheets of paper. “What the hell’s that?”

Georgina thrust the paper back into the pocket of her sweater, like a child. “Nothing.”

“Yes it is. Let me see.” I set the Coke down on the floor of the car and held out my hand, palm up.

“No.”

“Georgina!”

Slowly Georgina pulled the crumpled wad from her pocket and held it out to me, eyes downcast. “It’s pages from her appointment book. I took it because my name’s in it.”

“For the love of God, Georgina! You’re her patient! Your name’s supposed to be in there!” I snatched the pages from her fingers. “First you make me guilty of leaving the scene of an accident-maybe even a crime!-and now you’re tampering with the evidence!” Sirens began wailing, approaching in our direction down Falls Road. I stuffed the pages from Dr. Sturges’s appointment book into the depths of my bag. “And it’s too late to put them back now, the police are already on their way.” I threw my head back against my headrest and closed my eyes. “Oh, God, what a mess! I’ll deliver these to the police myself, but in the meantime, I’m taking you home. You’re going to have a nice, hot bath and tell Scott all about it. You’re going to pull yourself together. Then, first thing in the morning, you’re going to talk to the police.”

But it didn’t quite work out that way. I should have known better after watching Homicide all those years on NBC. The Baltimore police would turn up on Georgina’s doorstep the following morning, even before Sean and Dylan made it out of bed to turn on the television.