Redemption

by Nancy Geary

  “And he convinced you of that?” The words came out before Frances could stop herself.

  “I know,” she sputtered. “I know what you’re thinking. That I’m a horrible woman, a worse mother. Don’t think a day hasn’t passed without my sharing your views. I think a part of me was so horrified, I denied it had happened. I couldn’t accept the truth. I wanted the whole experience to be some awful nightmare, some concoction in my head, because I looked at Bill and he was the man I loved. And I couldn’t get myself to stop loving him, so it was easier to make myself disbelieve.”

  Frances knew she should say something comforting but couldn’t bring herself to do it. “Did Hope ever tell you how she felt?”

  “Not at the time. She refused to testify at the hearing, which took place before the Board of Registration in Medicine. The whole focus was whether Dr. Frank had violated her confidences. Bill didn’t say anything, either, on the advice of his lawyer. But he had to tell his partners, and they asked him to leave the law firm immediately,” she said, almost as an afterthought.

  How had Adelaide and Bill managed to keep his abuse secret? How come there hadn’t been some kind of public outcry? A respected lawyer raped his minor daughter, and nobody knew?

  As if reading her mind, Adelaide continued, “The hearing was closed and the records sealed because Hope was a minor. Bill’s exit agreement included confidentiality provisions on both sides. He was lucky the firm agreed to that, but I think his partners were as anxious as he was to keep all of this out of the press. There were a few months when people talked, or at least I thought they did. I’d get an occasional odd look, or we wouldn’t get an invitation that I’d expected. But basically it passed. Bill’s been a member of this community for a long time. His friends weren’t looking to find the worst.”

  She paused and stared directly at Frances. “I know what you must think of him. But he was destroyed. He begged me not to leave him. He said he would make it up to me, to her. He promised to redeem himself. And he did. He was a wonderful father to her after that. He was loving, careful. I know he never did anything inappropriate again. And it’s why he went to extraordinary lengths to see this marriage happen. He knew it would be best for her, and he wanted her to be happy, to be safe.”

  Frances cringed. And what about you? she wanted to ask. How could Adelaide have called Bill her husband? How could they have lived day in and day out with the consequences of their conduct? How could she think that redemption was even possible?

  “I love Bill. I know that must seem incredible to you after all I’ve said, but I do. Perhaps none of us can ever understand each other’s relationships, what makes two people attracted to each other, care about each other, and want to build lives together. But he took me in when I was alone. He helped me to come to terms with Morgan’s death. He gave me a life here in Manchester, and I was scared to be alone again. He’s not evil. He’s a good person. Ever since Hope’s emergency, he’s tried to make up for what happened, and now it’s too late. He’ll never know if Hope forgave him.”

  “So you and Hope never discussed it?”

  She paused. “Yes. Once. About a month ago, she actually climbed onto the window ledge above the patio and started screaming. ‘How could you allow it? How could you not protect me? How can you live with yourself?’ Kathleen went running upstairs to Bill’s office to try to get her back inside. I just stood there frozen, listening, begging. ‘I can’t trust my own mother,’ she hollered. ‘I hate you. I hope you rot in hell.’ That’s what she said. And then all of a sudden, she stopped. When I went inside she was curled up in a ball in Kathleen’s arms, in tears. We never said another word about it.”

  Adelaide looked exhausted, as if her confession had taken every ounce of energy she had. As she stood, she stumbled and had to catch her balance by holding on to the arm of the sofa. “I don’t know what to say,” she said, although her comment wasn’t directed at Frances. “You must think me a monster. Who doesn’t protect their own child from the worst possible assaults? There isn’t a day that I don’t ask myself that question. But I didn’t know what to do, and I convinced myself that we could remedy the situation. Here I threw myself into this wedding so that she would feel celebrated, special, and beautiful. She was supposed to finally recognize how much her parents loved her. And how sorry we were. We are.”

  Adelaide’s knees buckled, and she struggled to remain upright. Frances didn’t move. She knew she should assist her, comfort her, but she couldn’t. The image of Hope hanging in her closet filled her vision, the torture and pain she’d endured in life finally over. For a moment, the thought that her killer had actually been compassionate flashed through her mind, a mercy killing of a girl whose life had been filled with demons. She leaned back in her chair and felt the spindles against her spine.

  “Please don’t tell a soul,” Adelaide murmured. “All of this can’t possibly have anything to do with her death.”

  29

  The Avery Bowes Institute was an impressive white stone building with a slate roof and two pairs of thick columns marking the entrance. To the left, a brick path led away from the structure and into an expansive lawn dotted with wrought-iron benches, a marble fountain with a sculpture of Neptune from whose mouth the water percolated, and a cedar-mulched loop of track for jogging. To the right, an asphalt parking lot was filled with large practical cars and SUVs. Frances pulled into one of the marked spots.

  But for a pair of white-coated doctors crossing the parking lot, the grounds were deserted. There was no trace of patients, health care providers, nurses, or anyone else enjoying the beautiful afternoon outside. Her footsteps as she walked up the wide wooden stairs echoed in the exceptional quiet. She opened the large black door and stepped into a dramatic circular entrance. In the center was an oversize burl wood desk with no one in attendance. A small white sign on the front of the desk instructed her, “Please ring bell for service,” which she did.

  “May I help you?” came a woman’s voice over an intercom.

  Frances looked around, startled by the sound, and saw the black speaker propped next to a large ledger. “I’m here to see Dr. Frank. Peter Frank.”

  “First door on the right,” the voice replied. For a moment, Frances felt as if she were Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, about to discover the pudgy fellow behind the curtain pretending to be a wizard. Why have a reception desk if no one was there to man it? Nonetheless, she heeded the instructions.

  The door opened into a sunny but otherwise generic waiting room filled with simple oak furniture and two potted palms. One woman wearing a cropped tank top, hip-hugging jeans, and a nostril ring sat reading a well-worn copy of Redbook. She looked up briefly with big blue eyes and cast a vacant stare before flipping the page and returning her attention to the magazine.

  Frances approached an interior window and stared through at a cramped secretarial station, where a heavyset woman sat, eating a meatball sandwich. The buttons on her white uniform were stretched to popping across her stomach. “Just take a seat. The doctor will be with you shortly.”

  Frances settled herself into a chair opposite the Red-book reader and stared at a poster outlining the Patients Bill of Rights. Confidentiality. There it was, listed in bold print.

  The door into the waiting room opened and a tall, thin man stepped through. He wore a wrinkled dress shirt and a pair of black pleated pants. He extended his hand and introduced himself. “Peter Frank.”

  “Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

  He glanced at the young woman, then down at his watch. “You’re early again,” he said. “I’ll see you at quarter of.”

  She didn’t respond.

  He shrugged. “Why don’t we step outside,” he said. “I could use a little fresh air.”

  Together they retraced Frances’s steps back out through the entrance. Dr. Frank led the way across the lawn to the track loop. “Is it all right to walk while we talk?”

  Frances nodded. “How long have you been at Avery
Bowes?”

  “Too long, most would say. There’s so much work to be done here, people in a great deal of need, that the days have turned into months, which have turned into years. I think I’m working on my second decade.” He chuckled to himself. “Emotional illness is an amorphous beast. There’s so much we don’t know. And the funding is either nonexistent or mediocre at best, so progress is slow. But for the research departments at several major pharmaceutical companies—everyone’s looking for another Prozac—we’d be quite stymied.”

  Frances knew little about the politics of mental health care, so she thought it best just to listen.

  “The other major hurdle facing those of us who try to deal with the realm of emotional disease is societal ignorance. People don’t understand it. It’s less tangible; you can’t see bipolar disorder on an X-ray or schizophrenia on an EKG. I can’t tell you how many parents of severely disturbed adolescents or spouses of very sick adults have said to me, ‘If she would just get out of bed and get some exercise,’ or, ‘That isn’t any reason not to help with the children,’ or, ‘Our life is so perfect, I just don’t see what there is to be upset about.’ It astounds me. I wish I could point to a broken bone or a tumor, but I can’t. The eyes of loved ones glaze over when I raise an issue of chemical imbalance or serotonin levels. But this is real. As real as anything else we have to battle.” He turned to her. “It’s a thankless job, a thankless profession. I’ve started to ask myself why I ever got involved.”

  Dr. Frank reached out and grabbed her elbow, pulling her toward him just as a man in gray sweats jogged by. “People around here won’t necessarily avoid you,” he said, releasing her arm and stepping farther away as if embarrassed. They walked for several yards in silence. “I’m very sorry to hear about Hope’s death, but I don’t know how I can help you. Although it’s sometimes hard for me to imagine after everything the Lawrences have put me through that I still have any obligations to them, Hope was my patient.”

  “I respect that. But you testified about sexual abuse that Hope had disclosed to you. Abuse she’d suffered. Adelaide told me what Bill did, and she can probably get copies of those transcripts since Hope was, at least arguably, a party to the hearing. I was just wondering if you could talk to me to save me some time.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the connection to her death.”

  “And I’m not sure I can explain it,” she said. That Hope was vulnerable, that she put herself in the way of danger, that she’d been abused before—all were characteristics that made her a prime victim. The question was, who had exploited that now?

  “Well, I suppose that’s why you’re doing the investigating and I’m not.” He made a clicking sound with his jaw as he thought for a moment. “It was actually more complicated than what you’ve described. I’ll give you the procedural history for starters; it doesn’t involve any patient-therapist disclosures.”

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “I filed what’s called a 51A report. It’s actually chapter 119 of the Massachusetts General Laws. Section 51A mandates that a health care worker or various other professional people notify the Department of Child Welfare if he or she has reasonable cause to believe that a person under eighteen is being abused or is at substantial risk of harm. Based on my therapy with Hope, I felt obligated to report.”

  Frances stopped in her tracks. “Did you have reason to think the abuse was continuing? You started seeing Hope almost a year after her hospital emergency.”

  Dr. Frank ran his fingers through his hair and looked down at the ground. He kicked a few of the pine needles back and forth between his scuffed loafers. “That’s true. But my understanding of the requirements of 51A covered this circumstance. Bill Lawrence and his attorney disagreed. They filed a complaint before the Board of Registration in Medicine, accusing me of violating my statutory duties to protect patient confidences. That’s what the hearing was about. In order to assess whether I’d done something wrong, the board had to examine my underlying concerns for Hope.”

  “I see. So there was no hearing on your 51A report?”

  “That’s right. It’s my understanding that DCW in vestigated and found no problem. I seriously doubt whether Hope would ever have said anything.”

  “But her pregnancy—”

  “By the time the agency got involved, enough time had passed. Nothing in the hospital record identified Bill as responsible for her unwanted pregnancy. DCW’s concern is immediate harm. They’ve got too many kids sitting in their own feces waiting for food that isn’t coming to worry about what happened years before. So I became the defendant, not him, a brilliant piece of legal strategy. The issue was my conduct, my disclosures, not the fact that he’d had sex with his fourteen-year-old daughter. Frankly, it was obscene.”

  “What happened at the Board of Registration?”

  “It eventually found in my favor in a split decision. The one member who disagreed wrote a lengthy and scathing decision. I emerged with my license intact, but barely; it was an expensive and emotional battle that took nearly a year of my life. My marriage suffered. I hardly saw my kids. I was fortunate to have the support of several close colleagues here, but it was a difficult time professionally, too.”

  “Do you have copies of the transcripts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you give them to me?”

  He thought for a moment. “There’s nothing that precludes me from sharing them with you, if that’s your question. And you know what? Part of me doesn’t care anymore. I knew the world of mental health care was screwed up, but that hearing was a mockery.”

  They walked a few paces in silence. His set jaw made his face look hard, unforgiving. She understood his bitterness. Bill, whose outrageous conduct was the issue to begin with, had tried to take his medical license. How could he not be angry with the Lawrence family? He’d tried to help, and it had nearly cost him his career.

  “But Hope continued to see you?”

  “It wasn’t continual. When Bill brought the Board of Registration action, I stopped seeing her. She and I both knew our conversations couldn’t be confidential and that there was too much discord between her family and me for me to be an effective therapist. I hadn’t heard from her for years. After she got engaged, she contacted me. Perhaps she realized that I’d done nothing improper, that my only concern was to help her. Perhaps she came back because there was nowhere else to turn. Her therapy had been beneficial, and I believe she trusted me. Oftentimes major events like a pending marriage can trigger old emotions. It’s not uncommon for people to return to therapy when their lives are on the brink of change.”

  “And you agreed to start seeing her again?”

  “I wasn’t going to penalize her for her father’s conduct, but I had nothing further to do with her family.”

  “Could I ask you one more thing?”

  He turned to face her.

  “What sort of consulting did you do for Fiona Cabot?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “She paid you five thousand dollars for a series of consultations. Did those have anything to do with Hope or the Lawrences?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Did you tell her Hope couldn’t have children?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Isn’t it considered improper to see related patients without their consent?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. “I’ve already made one mistake.”

  “Might I suggest more than one?” Frances stared into his eyes, wondering what secrets he knew and wouldn’t share. She wanted the transcripts; she wanted an explanation of Fiona’s visits. It seemed an odd coincidence that Hope and her future mother-in-law would share the same therapist, and she didn’t believe in coincidences. Furthermore, judging from the invoice she’d seen, Fiona had paid Dr. Frank $1,250 an hour, more than six times what most well-qualified therapists made.

  “Why?” Dr. Frank asked, interrupting h
er stream of consciousness.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you doing this, undertaking this investigation?”

  It was a question she’d asked herself more than once, and the answer still eluded her. She wondered whether she’d ever have the kind of understanding of herself and her motivations that she wished she had. She’d never seen a therapist before; in fact, she’d considered the idea of paying someone to listen to problems a narcissistic self-indulgence. But at various times in her life, she’d had moments of reconsidering, only to dismiss the thoughts as quickly as they had come. Maybe she’d been too hasty. Self-awareness, or at least the ability to answer simple questions about why she agonized over the investigation into Hope’s death when the district attorney’s office was competent to handle it, seemed worth the premium. But judging from Hope’s experience with Dr. Frank, psychiatry only made matters more complicated.

  “I could probably make something up to sound good, but in all honesty, I don’t know,” she replied. “It just seems like something I have to do… for my family.”

  “Then I hope for your sake you find your answers.”

  “Me too.”

  The Church of the Holy Spirit was empty. The sun had faded, and the gray light of dusk partially obscured the designs in the stained glass. Frances sat in the last pew and stared at the altar, the large Bible propped on a stand, the gold cross, and the series of candles in brass holders. The simplicity was beautiful.

  She’d returned to the house at Smith’s Point only to receive a note from Adelaide asking her to come here. But there was no sign of anyone, and she wasn’t sure how long she could sit still in the growing darkness. She’d swallowed two cups of 7-Eleven coffee on the drive back from the Avery Bowes Institute. Although the coffee had tasted weak, the caffeine had gone straight to her nerves. She felt wired.

  She removed the stack of papers from the crinkled brown bag that she held on her lap. It was only a small portion of the transcript of Board of Registration in Medicine v. Peter Frank, M.D., but it was all she had until she received the rest of the materials that Dr. Frank had promised could be copied. She flipped past the cover page and began to read what appeared to be a prepared statement by Dr. Frank.