Wednesday's Child

by Gayle Wilson

  “Jeb—”

  The forward motion of the door halted. He bent as if to look into the car again. This time, however, his head lowered until his face was only inches from hers.

  He searched her eyes as, lips parted, she held her breath. Although she had anticipated his intent, that didn’t prevent a surge of excitement from coursing through her body as his mouth lowered to cover hers.

  The kiss was brief. Over before she had time to react.

  He straightened, stepping back and closing the door without meeting her eyes again.

  She watched him limp toward the front steps of Lorena’s house, still aware of the unexpected warmth and softness of his lips against hers.

  And aware, too, that another very good reason had just been added to the ones that would bring her back to Linton as quickly as she could possibly manage.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “SO WHAT THE M.E. told you and what he said in this autopsy report could both be right. Is that what you’re saying?”

  It wasn’t like Doc to equivocate, but Jeb had the feeling that’s exactly what was going on. And he didn’t like it.

  “I’m saying that sharing an opinion with a colleague and giving an official report that you might have to defend in court are two entirely different things. And not mutually exclusive.”

  “Could you arrange to get a look at the autopsy photographs and tell me what you think?”

  “In what capacity?” Callaway asked.

  “I don’t know, Doc,” Jeb said, letting his growing exasperation show. “How about as a concerned friend?”

  “Of the medical examiner? Or of Mrs. Chandler?”

  “Ms. Chandler,” Jeb corrected. “That’s her maiden name. After her husband disappeared, she went back to it.”

  “What kind of stake you got in all this, Jeb?”

  “The same one everyone else in this town should have. A little girl is missing, and she was last seen here.”

  “Seen? You didn’t tell me that. You mean somebody actually saw her after her father’s car went into the river?”

  “Before. They saw her with him here in Linton.”

  “Then the logical explanation is that she died with him. As hard as that is to swallow, it’s probably what happened.”

  “You sound like Adams. Except her body wasn’t in that car, Doc. How do you explain that?”

  “I don’t. I wouldn’t venture to try. Sometimes things don’t have neat explanations. Believe me, I’ve seen things in my years of practice—”

  “Like disappearing bodies. Come on, Doc. She wasn’t in the damn car when they dragged it out of the river. The doors and windows were all closed. The safety seat is there, but the baby isn’t. What does that sound like to you?”

  “What does it sound like to you?”

  “It sounds like whoever killed her father took her.”

  “Took her.”

  “Carried her off with him.”

  The old man laughed. And his next comment was in the same nearly patronizing vein. “Well, then I guess all you’re left with is the question of why someone would do that.”

  “Maybe because it’s harder to bludgeon a toddler to death than it is a grown man.”

  With his background, that part was easy for Jeb to believe. He’d killed his share of men, not all of them in combat, and he knew that he could never, under any circumstances, kill a baby.

  “Okay, so what happened to her then?”

  Doc sounded as if he were humoring him. Given everything that had happened the last few days, especially the attack on Susan, the old man’s attitude set Jeb’s teeth on edge. Otherwise, he might have been a little more diplomatic in presenting the second reason he’d come by the Callaway house on the way to his appointment in Pascagoula.

  “I thought you might know something about that.”

  “Me? Now, why in the world would you think I’d know something about that baby?”

  “Lorena says that you and your daddy had a lot to do with placing babies in good homes.”

  “Well, as far as I know, my daddy didn’t place any whose fathers had been murdered.”

  Jeb took note of the word, although he didn’t comment on it. Either what the M.E. had told Doc about Richard Kaiser’s death had been more definitive than the old man had just indicated, or Callaway had, to some extent at least, bought into the scenario Jeb had outlined for him.

  “But he did place babies in good homes?”

  “What my father did was a service to his patients. And only when they approached him. If you’re trying to imply—”

  “I’m not implying anything about your father, Doc. All I’m saying is that if someone in this town had a baby who needed a home, they might have come to you.”

  “Well, they didn’t,” the old man said. “Whatever happened to Ms. Chandler’s baby, I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “No one approached you seven years ago to—”

  “How many times I got to tell you, boy? I didn’t have anything to do with that baby.”

  “How about someone here in town? You know the women. Was there one of them, maybe someone who’d tried to conceive for a long time, who all of a sudden had a baby girl seven years ago?”

  “You know what?” Doc said, his normal good nature destroyed by Jeb’s persistence. “It ain’t none of your damn business if some poor woman in this town had a baby seven years ago. You gonna go around and take a survey of which of them had a hard time conceiving? I swear you’ve gone off the deep end with this, Jeb. I can understand Ms. Chandler’s obsession. It’s her baby. But you? What’s made you buy into this like you are?”

  It was a fair question, but one Jeb wasn’t prepared to answer. Not to someone else. Maybe not even to himself.

  “Because I think she’s right,” he said instead.

  “You think somebody in this town killed Mrs. Chandler’s husband and took her baby and has then been living right here under our noses with it all this time.”

  “Why not? Nobody knew about Kaiser or his daughter until now. Nobody had any reason to be suspicious.”

  As he said it, he realized how true it was. Until the SUV had been found, no one had had any reason to question the origins of any of the children in town.

  “You gonna take DNA samples of every little girl here?”

  He wanted to say yes. He wanted to ask why not. Something about the look in the old man’s eyes prevented him.

  “If her daughter’s alive, Susan Chandler has every right to try to find her.”

  “If she’s alive. That’s the crux of this, Jeb. You got no real reason to believe she is. Neither has anyone else. You just admitted that your witness saw that baby with her father. And you got no one who saw her after his death.”

  “Susan’s convinced she’s here.”

  “Yeah, I imagine she would be. She lost everything she ever had, boy. Her husband. Her faith in him. And her little girl. Wouldn’t you be trying to get some of that back? Hell, any of us would be. Only, that doesn’t mean that baby’s alive. And you, of all people, ought to know that.”

  Jeb didn’t attempt to argue with him. Not only was the reasoning flawless, the respect he’d always had for Doc made him listen—even when he didn’t want to hear what he was saying.

  “If you got feelings for the woman—and I suspect you have—then do her a kindness. Tell her she’s wasting her time. Don’t let her heart get broken all over again. ’Cause this time, she just might not get over it.”

  “I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT have read about the discovery of the body,” Jeb said.

  Duncan McKey, the renowned surgeon and founder of Southeastern Rehabilitation Services, had sent word for Jeb to come up to his office as soon as his session was over. This was where they usually discussed any changes in his program and evaluated his progress. Or more appropriately, Jeb thought with a trace of bitterness, his current lack of it.

  Since McKey had been well aware of the Army reevaluation, he would want to hear th
e results. And Jeb truly believed the surgeon would be almost as disappointed as he had been.

  McKey’s continued encouragement had given him reason to hope, but maybe that was a hope that had been misplaced. He knew that was something the doctor would address.

  He was sitting now across the big mahogany desk while McKey leafed through the reports from his last two therapy sessions. Talking about Richard’s death gave him something to take his mind off the upcoming assessment, which he feared would probably mirror the one he’d received from the medical board.

  “Between the professional reading I need to stay current and the staff reports,” McKey said without looking up, “I don’t read the papers like I should. If it wasn’t in the headlines or on the sports page, I probably missed it.”

  “The guy was an accountant with some firm in Atlanta. One weekend he took his baby and withdrew all the money he and his wife had saved and disappeared. No debts. No criminal involvement anyone can discover. Seven years later, they find his car—with his body inside—in the Escatawpa. He’s got a fractured skull, and there’s no money and no baby.”

  The skilled fingers stilled over the pages of the report. McKey’s eyes, widened slightly, lifted to his.

  “Obviously somebody found out he was carryin’ that cash. So what was he doing in Linton?”

  “Maybe if we knew that…” Jeb shrugged.

  “We? You working with the locals on this? Knowing that crew in Johnson County, mind you, I’m not sayin’ that’s a bad thing.”

  “Not really working with them. I got interested because Kaiser’s ex-wife is staying at my great-aunt’s. The place used to be a bed-and-breakfast, and someone recommended it to her. Lorena’s never said no to anybody in need in her life.”

  “The wife come down to identify the body?”

  “Mostly to find out what happened, especially to the baby.”

  “So if this guy’s walkin’ out on his marriage, why bring the kid with him?” McKey’s question expressed the central question that puzzled everyone who heard the story.

  “Nobody knows. Fourteen-month-old toddler. A little girl. And she definitely wasn’t in the car when it was pulled from the river. The windows were up, the doors closed, and the infant seat was still inside.”

  McKey’s lips pursed before he shook his head. “Probably left her with somebody. Planned to come back to get her, and then, before he could…”

  “Except that’s not what happened. The mother and the FBI have been looking for her for seven years.”

  “Then, as much as I hate to say it, Jeb, I doubt anybody’s gonna find her now.”

  “Somebody reported seeing the baby in Linton. And since the husband never left…”

  “They’re thinking the baby didn’t either. And I take it they’re also thinking she’s still alive.”

  “Actually, no one seems to be thinking that but the mother. And me, I guess. At least…I’m thinking it’s possible.”

  “Seems like somebody over there would have to know about her then. Town like that, you can’t take a piss without half the population hearing it.”

  “Maybe if we knew what Kaiser was doing in Linton in the first place. He leaves home without so much as a note left behind, taking all the money in his bank accounts and his kid, and he ends up in the Escatawpa.”

  “Sounds like something Grisham would write.”

  The comment was so close to what Jeb had been thinking that he couldn’t believe it. If ever there had been an opening…

  “I’ve been trying to come up with some scenario that might have put an accountant on the run.”

  “You’re suggesting that his being an accountant had something to do with what happened.” McKey had seen where he was going immediately, but then a man didn’t get where this one was without being bright.

  “I’m wondering if he could have found something about one of his clients they didn’t want revealed.”

  “Like that they were doctoring the books, maybe?”

  “There seems to have been a lot of that going around back then. Most of it didn’t come to light until after Kaiser’s death, but…maybe he was unlucky enough to be one of the first to discover what was happening in corporate America.”

  “When that stuff all came to light,” McKey said, “the most common defense seemed to be ‘everybody’s doing it.’”

  “That’s what I’m wondering. If they were. I figure you’d be more in tune with the corporate climate at that time than I am. As I remember it, I was far more concerned about what was going on in Bosnia right about then.”

  “Hell, I might as well have been in Bosnia. Corporate climate doesn’t mean much to me, Jeb. Back then Court handled that kind of stuff, and I left it to him. I still don’t get involved in that side of the business. I leave that to the financial types.”

  “Even so—”

  “I hire extremely good men and let them do their jobs. They tell me when and where to build the clinics. I staff them with the best people I can find, and I run them. And I tell the financial folks to stay the hell out of my side of things. If I wanted some bean counter telling me how to practice medicine, I’d have stuck with the HMOs.”

  “And they let you get away with that?” Jeb asked, amused at the picture McKey had painted.

  “Ray DeCourtney and I had an agreement when we started all this. I made them stick with it after his death. You know, even after all these years, I miss that wonderful, crazy bastard every day of my life.”

  DeCourtney had been killed in a private-plane crash shortly before the company he and McKey had started turned golden. He hadn’t lived to see the fruits of his labor.

  “You want somebody to speculate on how many folks were doctoring their books back then,” McKey went on, “you’re gonna have to talk to somebody else.”

  “It was just a thought,” Jeb said.

  He watched as the surgeon closed the file in front of him. McKey’s lips pursed again as he looked up from it.

  Jeb’s former anxiety, which had dissipated somewhat with the distraction of talking about the case, immediately began to churn in the pit of his stomach. He could tell himself that the evaluation board didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, but McKey did. And he would shoot straight about his chances of appealing their decision when it came down.

  “So what did the Army guys tell you?”

  “Nothing official. Not yet, but…I don’t think they were impressed with what I’d accomplished since the last time.”

  “There are other things you can do, you know,” McKey said.

  Jeb couldn’t read his tone, but it hadn’t been particularly sympathetic, which gave him hope. “Other exercises?”

  “Other professions. Or other specialties, as far as that goes, if you want to get your twenty in.”

  “Riding a desk.”

  “There are worse things.”

  “Not to me. And if you’re going to tell me I should be grateful—”

  “You know me better than that. You came to us with an injury. We’re in the rehab business. I’m not gonna tell you to be grateful for anything. You can be as pissed off as you want at the slowness of your progress. I damn well would be.”

  “So you’re sayin’ I should just give up.”

  “I’m saying there are natural limits on the prospects for improvement with injuries like yours. It’s been what? Almost a year? I’m not sayin’ you aren’t going to get more flexibility back. I am sayin’ that the chances of anyone doing that decrease as the months pass.”

  Jeb could argue, as he had at the beginning, that he would be the exception to all those normal expectations. He’d learned a lot of lessons since those days, however, the most important of them that determination alone wasn’t always enough to accomplish a goal. Sometimes it took luck. Or divine intervention. He’d found out the hard way that he couldn’t depend on either.

  “You want to keep tryin’,” McKey went on, “you’ve got the money. And we’ve got plenty of ope
n appointments. But I can’t promise that either of us is going to get the results we want, no matter how much we invest. I’d be dishonest if I told you anything different.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Despite his words, Jeb felt numb with the severity of this second blow. McKey had always been his ally. The two of them against those bastards on the medical review board.

  Through the course of these long, difficult months, he had also come to view the doctor as a friend. He had wanted no less from McKey than the absolute truth. He had just been hoping that truth wouldn’t be quite so brutal.

  “You chose a dangerous profession,” the surgeon went on, “and the odds caught up with you. I’ve never known anybody who’s worked harder to come back than you. No matter what, you got nothing to regret about the effort you’ve devoted to this.”

  “So what you’re saying is that I should give up?”

  “What I’m sayin’ is that if the medical board comes back with a refusal to either extend your leave or let you rejoin your unit, you should probably consider accepting it.”

  “I won’t have much choice.” The bitterness and self-pity he’d fought for so long washed over him in a wave.

  “And if you did have a choice?”

  “I’d ask them to give me a few more months.”

  “Even knowing it might not make a difference?”

  “I’m not ready to quit. Not yet.”

  His eyes lifted to the poem he’d read a dozen times through the months while he’d waited for McKey to study his progress reports. The lines had always seemed to echo and fortify his own determination. “Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody, but un-bowed.”

  “Then I think I still have enough pull to accomplish that.”

  McKey’s words snapped his attention back to the man behind the desk. His lips weren’t smiling, but the brown eyes seemed to be.

  “To get me more time?”

  “I can’t guarantee it, but…I haven’t worked like a damn dog all these years without some rewards. One of them is a pretty good reputation in this field, if I do say so myself. If I tell them I believe you can make significant progress in say…the next six months, I think they’ll go along with it.”