Unbreathed Memories

by Marcia Talley

  “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.

  chapter

  19

  Ever notice how you can go for days and days and nothing much happens? Get up, eat, sleepwalk through the day, eat, go to bed? Then all of a sudden—bah-bing—everything seems to happen all at once.

  It began on Lincoln’s Birthday, the day I saw my plastic surgeon. This miracle-working woman, whose office was decorated with her own paintings and sculptures, had created another masterpiece. My breast. A beautiful, healthy pink mound that stood tall and proud upon my chest. I was thrilled to be the owner of a boob that I didn’t have to take out of a drawer every morning.

  While the doctor warned me to examine myself often for telltale signs of rejection, I stood in front of the mirror, half listening, wearing not much more than a goofy grin and admiring my newly matched pair. I was enormously pleased; so pleased that after I left the office, I had to control an irrational desire to show off Dr. Bergstrom’s remarkable handiwork to everyone I met.

  I fantasized strolling up Maryland Avenue from shop to shop. “Look at this,” I’d say to Jehanne, the curly-headed barista at Seattle Coffee. And she’d go, “Why, Mrs. Ives, wherever did you get that?”

  I had permission to drive again, too. After we returned home from the doctor’s, I left Paul happily puttering in his basement workshop and celebrated my new freedom with a trip to the grocery store. I wandered up and down the aisles as if greeting old friends—the coffee bins, the dairy case, the gourmet food counter—then carried some English muffins, cheddar cheese, and a carton of half-and-half through the checkout, managing to keep my shirt on the whole time.

  My second solo outing caught me totally by surprise. I had spent the early part of Friday afternoon getting my prescribed exercise by strolling along the Naval Academy seawall, a bulkhead of heaped-up boulders and concrete that edged the academy shoreline from the Visitors’ Center all the way to Hospital Point. I began my walk at the end of the seawall nearest the Visitors’ Center, stopping to enjoy a panoramic view of Annapolis harbor. In Feburary only a few hearty cruisers and die-hard sailing live-aboards were anchored in the scenic harbor. In summer, though, it would be a different story; boats would be anchored wall-to-wall, and you could practically walk to Eastport without getting your feet wet. I smiled. Eastport. Home of Severn Sailing Association, the school where Paul had spent many dollars and hopeless hours trying to turn me into an accomplished sailor.

  I had stopped to rest at the submarine memorial near Trident Light and had just parked my buns on the topmost step, when the cell phone in my parka chirped. Ruth was calling from a pay phone in the Los Angeles airport to tell me she was on her way home. Worry and guilt had gradually eroded her ability to concentrate on her spiritual growth. She’d left Bali after discovering an escape clause in the travel agency’s contract that allowed partial refunds for bona fide medical emergencies.

  Seven hours later, I met Ruth at BWI, gave her a hug, told her she’d need to heft her own luggage into my trunk, and drove her straight to University Hospital in Baltimore.

  Mother was overjoyed.

  Ruth was in tears.

  I paced. I couldn’t keep my shirt on, quite literally. “You gotta see this, Mom.” I drew the privacy curtains across the glass partitions that separated Mother’s room from the adjoining ones. I unbuttoned my shirt and unfastened my bra. “Tah-dah!” I flashed my mom. “What do you think?”

  Mother beamed. “Beautiful, Hannah. A work of art.”


  From a bedside chair Ruth studied my chest with interest. “Weirdest show-and-tell I’ve ever seen.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been so proud of anything in my whole life,” I declared while reassembling my clothing. “It’s a shame I can’t show off Dr. Bergstrom’s work to everybody.”

  “Speaking of everybody, where’s Daddy?” Ruth wanted to know.

  Mother managed a grin. “He’ll be back in a bit. He went home to bathe and change his clothes after I complained that he’d been wearing the same olive-green trousers for the last three days and I was sick of looking at them.”

  Ruth brought Mother up to date on her abbreviated trip while I listened jealously. Morning walks to the rice paddies, meditation, herbal steam baths—it sounded positively divine. After an hour, Daddy joined us, smelling like Ivory soap and having changed into a pair of freshly pressed khaki pants and a red plaid shirt. His hair was still damp. I listened impatiently while Ruth repeated it all for him, but Mother didn’t seem to mind. She smiled and asked questions as if it were the very first time she’d heard about colonic hydrotherapy.

  Ruth’s Conduit Street cupboard had never been so thoroughly bare, so I made her come to our house for dinner. Carryout was on the menu again, a particular specialty of mine. Ruth happily joined Paul and me in the kitchen, where we heaped our plates high and dug in.

  That was where Connie and Dennis found us a few minutes later, our teeth sunk into slices of garlic bread and our forks fully draped with spaghetti puttanesca from Cantina d’Italia.

  I wiped tomato sauce off my chin. “Hi, you guys.”

  Dennis removed his leather jacket and draped it over the back of a vacant chair. “Got something you’ve been waiting for, Hannah.” He laid a photocopy of a fax on the table. “It’s from the Waterville police department. Came in today.”

  “You are amazing!” My dinner was forgotten. “But how are you able to show this to us?”

  Dennis pulled a chair out for Connie, waited until she was seated, then sat down himself. “It was all part of the official court proceedings. Although Mrs. Voorhis’s note was never made public, the gist of it certainly leaked out.”

  Connie wriggled out of her jacket, leaned forward to snitch a strand of spaghetti from my plate, and continued, “Small wonder, when you read what it says.”

  I picked up the photocopy with both hands and held it in front of me. Paul leaned sideways and craned his neck to get a better view.

  In a neat, looping hand, Fiona Voorhis had written:

  I can’t go on living. Truthfully, I have been dying for years, a little bit every day, sick with the knowledge of what Mark has done to our daughter; hating myself for the part I played in his abuse out of simple ignorance and denial. Will anyone listen to me now?

  Underneath, on the same piece of paper, was the photocopy of another note. Fiona had left a message for her daughter, too.

  My darling Diane. Someday you’ll understand. Forgive me. I love you. Mother.

  A dozen words that thirteen-year-old Diane Sturgis must have memorized and carried about with her in her heart.

  Finally, all these years later, Diane had understood.

  chapter

  20

  It had been two weeks since Dennis first showed us Fiona Voorhis’s last sad letters. Connie sat across from me at my kitchen table with a half-eaten piece of apple pie in front of her. “You did what?” Her voice cut through the air like a saw hitting a nail.

  “I sent him a note.”

  “What kind of note?”

  “I got to thinking about that dumb movie I Know What You Did Last Summer.”

  She closed her eyes. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

  “So I sent him a note saying, ‘I know what you did.’ And I stapled it to a clipping from the Sun about this guy who’s on trial for abusing his daughters.”

  “Hannah, are you nuts?”

  “It was anonymous. He won’t know who sent it.”

  Connie laid down her fork and relaxed into her chair. “So what’s the point?”

  Connie was going to hate what I was about to tell her. “Well, I suggested he meet me at All Hallows to talk about it. At seven tonight.”

  I was right. Connie half rose from her chair with a murderous gleam in her eyes, then sat down abruptly.

  “The way I figure it, Connie, if he’s guilty, he’ll turn up just to see what I know. If he’s not guilty, he’ll ignore it. Tear up the note and throw it away.”

  “What reason would he have to show up? You can’t prove he abused his daughter.”

  “I know that, but he doesn’t.” I avoided her eyes. “I lied. I told him I had evidence he might be interested in.”

  Connie’s silver earrings bounced against her neck. “Oh, Lord! And I suppose you’ll want me to go along with you on this?”

  “Well, yes. Why else would I tell you?”

  She frowned. “Dennis isn’t going to like this.”

  “I don’t suppose he will, but I’m counting on you to get him to come along.”

  “What!” Connie spluttered, her face an alarming shade of pink.

  “Don’t blow a gasket, Connie.”

  “Easy for you to say. I’m panicking. You are dangerous to know.”

  “I’ve got it all figured out. Georgina told me about the sound system they use at All Hallows to record the sermons. It’s installed in the fellowship hall somewhere, underneath the sanctuary.” I had been trying to remember if I had seen an AV closet the night I crashed the therapy session. It might have been behind any one of several closed doors.

  Connie avoided me by closing her eyes and resting her forehead on the palm of her hand.

  “If Voorhis shows up in the sanctuary, I’ll get him to confess and we’ll have it all on tape,” I argued.

  “Hannah, I told you. Dennis will have no part of this.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s got to be illegal, for one thing.”

  “That’s just on TV.” I leaned over and tried to look up into her eyes. “Look, I swear to you. Dr. Voorhis came to my hospital room. I was not imagining it. And don’t forget what Dennis found out about Fiona Voorhis.”

  “Hannah, have you ever stopped to consider that Fiona Voorhis might have been deranged?” Connie skewered me with her eyes. “Just like a certain sister-in-law I could mention.”

  “I agree. Any one of these facts taken separately mightn’t amount to much, but put it together with what Stephanie Golden told me about her last session with Diane Sturgis and it all adds up.”

  “To what?”

  I felt for the plastic syringe cap, still in my pocket. Whenever I began to doubt myself, I’d wrap my fingers around that solid object and know I was completely sane. “It adds up to the fact that Voorhis killed Diane when she confronted him about his abuse. What’s more, he knows I know it.”

  Connie studied me seriously. “Consider this. If Voorhis really visited your hospital room, then the man is dangerous.”

  “Exactly! That’s why I need Dennis. If things get dicey, Dennis will leap out of the woodwork and make an arrest.”

  “Dennis can’t do that! It’s not his jurisdiction. You’ll have to pull your own chestnuts out of the fire this time, Hannah.”

  Connie was remembering how Dennis had raced to the rescue the last time I had a showdown with someone intent on murder. Now I’d stuck my neck out again. “Well, it’s too late now. Voorhis must have my envelope. If he comes, he comes.”

  “Why don’t we just stake out the church, hide in the bushes or something, and see if he shows up?” Connie didn’t give in easily, but I was heartened to hear the “we.”

  “That won’t do any good. We’ll know, but where’s the proof?” I shook my head. “Nope. We’ve got to get him to admit to everything on tape.”

  Connie was close to tears. “What a mess.”

  I smiled crookedly at her. “But, as you say, he won’t show up and we can all go out afterward for
pizza and talk about how crazy Hannah is.”

  Connie cocked her head to one side. “How are you going to get into the church? It’s Friday, for Pete’s sake.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the second object that I kept there. “I’ve got a key.”

  “How on earth …?”

  “I slipped it off Georgina’s key chain the day I was watching the kids. I had it duplicated.”

  “Is there anything you haven’t thought of?” Connie sounded disgusted.

  “Well, I’m not exactly sure how I’ll set up the recording equipment because I’ve never seen it, but I’m counting on the church warden being there. He usually is. And he’s such an old maid, he’d never refuse a policeman’s direct request.” I paused to see if she took my point. When she didn’t say anything, I drove it home. “That’s why I need Dennis.”

  “Dream on, Hannah. Dennis could never afford to be involved in an unauthorized taping outside his jurisdiction.” She raised an eyebrow. “What do you need the church warden for?”

  “Lionel Streeting? He’s got the key to the AV room.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t had that copied, too,” Connie muttered.

  I made up my mind. “Look, we can do this without Dennis. I’ll talk to Streeting myself. He’s seen me, but he doesn’t have a clue who I really am. I’ll just tell him I’m from the police.”

  “And when he asks to see your badge?”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  In the end, we didn’t need the key. When we got to All Hallows, the door to the parish hall was unlocked. Since Dennis wouldn’t be involved, I hadn’t dared tell Paul what I was up to, and in the absence of Dennis, Connie had finally agreed to come along, reluctant to leave me on my own. Following the same route as on my previous visit to the therapy group, Connie and I made our way along the darkened corridors.

  “Do you suppose Lionel is here tonight?”

  “If the door’s unlocked, he must be. We can always check his office.”

  When we found it, the door to the Senior Warden’s office was closed, but a light had been left on inside that spilled out over the transom.