by Archer Mayor
“What was Ellis like as a kid?” she asked, hoping for both a place to start and a way to duck the spotlight.
Doris shook her head and for the first time looked a little thoughtful. “You’re probably asking the wrong person. I’m not going to pull your chain here . . . What did you say your name was?”
“Nancy.”
“You have kids?”
“Not yet. I’m hoping to someday.”
Doris waved her hand in the air dismissively. “Yeah, well . . . Somebody told me once that having a kid changes your life, moves your priorities around, makes you realize stuff you hadn’t thought about before. I think all that’s a bunch of bull. I had a kid because I had sex with somebody. I probably could have had an abortion, so I won’t deny I was curious about being a mother, but once he was out and I figured out the lay of the land, I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. I’ll always owe my sister for that. She took him off my hands almost from the start. She may not have been any big shakes as a mother, but Christ knows what I would’ve done to him.”
Nancy was disappointed, if not startled. She wished better for Ellis, and perhaps herself by proxy, but given her own knowledge of the world, she didn’t find Doris’s admission shocking. In fact, she appreciated her honesty. She’d known her share of parents who only paid lip service to what Doris had been smart enough to heed. Doris might have been careless getting pregnant and selfish afterward, but who was Nancy to say that she hadn’t best understood her own limitations and, in fact, acted in the child’s best interest? Despite her own yearning to become a mother eventually, Nancy was the first to admit that many humans had nothing on bugs when it came to child rearing.
For that matter, maybe Doris should be complimented.
She went at her next question obliquely. “Ellis has never mentioned your sister. Is that the aunt Rose who gave you the pendant?”
Doris’s expression was rueful. “Good sister, not so good at life. That’s what threw Ellis and me back together—they fell out once he got to be a teenager. No surprise there. She’s gone now, so I’m all he has left, and as adults we’re pretty good. But bad as I would’ve been, I wonder if I couldn’t’ve done better than Rosie, now that it’s all said and done.”
She glanced out the window and sighed. “God, what a life it’s been. I’m not really sure why I’m bothering to hang on. Scared, I guess.”
She looked back at Nancy. “Rosie drank herself to death. She took Ellis in, but she never treated him as her own, and he was real sensitive to that as he got older. He had to pretty much figure out growing up by himself, and he didn’t have very good examples to go by. I give him credit for still being alive.”
“He’s better than that,” Nancy said, finally seeing a place for her own insight. “He’s gentle and kind and thoughtful.”
Doris smiled at her. “That’s nice to hear. I think so, too. He learned it all the hard way, that’s for sure, and it cost him a lot, but he’s a good man. I realize now how smart I might have been not having that abortion.”
Nancy nodded, but the words kept rattling around inside her, taking on more complex and contradictory meaning with each lap. Maybe it was better enjoying how Ellis and his mother had finally ended up than analyzing how they’d gotten there.
In the hospital’s basement, Ellis and Ann Coleman walked down a sterile, windowless hallway clearly designed for employees only, with all the doors labeled with numbers and letters, until they came to one with nothing on it whatsoever.
Coleman slipped in her key and turned the door’s lock. “Discreet, huh? You’d never know what this one led to.”
She swung it back, and they entered a small corridor. There were three more doors leading off from it.
“That’s the dangerous one,” she said, pointing to the end. “Even I’ll admit that. The stuff they keep in there’ll kill you before you reach the lobby. They lock it in a huge lead safe called a pig.”
She stopped at the first door. “But that’s not for us, so we don’t need to worry. The iodine treatment trash is all in here.”
As she put the key in again, he stepped back a foot.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, laughing. “I wouldn’t do this if it was dangerous. Like I said, they’ve overreacted a little. Occasional exposures like this one amount to less than if you stepped out into the sunshine. Radiation is all around us, after all.”
She opened the door to reveal a small room filled with a towering pile of thrown-together semitransparent plastic garbage bags. It looked like the very clean interior of a rental moving truck.
“Jesus,” he said softly. “How’re we gonna find it in there?”
“Simple,” Coleman answered, stepping in amid the pile and looking around. “Each bag is labeled with a date and a room number. All we have to do is find your mom’s room number and the latest date, which”—she laughed as she reached out—“should be right on top.” She turned with the small bag in her hand. “Voilà.”
“Cool,” he complimented her.
She held the bag up to the light. “If it looks like what I think it does, and it’s loose, it should have settled to the bottom. There. What’s that? What do you think?”
Ellis squinted through the cloudy density of the plastic. He could dimly make out a hint of gold sliding around, a little bigger than a dime. “That looks about right.”
Coleman slipped on a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and opened the bag. She reached deep inside, fished around for a second, and came back out with the prize in hand, glittering from her fingers in the light.
Ellis impulsively kissed her on the cheek. “You are great. I really appreciate it.”
Ann Coleman patted him on the shoulder, resealed the bag, and threw it back onto the pile. “Happy to help. Any son of Doris’s is a friend of mine. Remember, though . . .”
He held up his hand as if swearing on the Bible. “I know. Not a word. Not even to Mom.”
Back upstairs, Ellis found Nancy and Doris laughing together and chatting as he walked into the room, dangling the pendant from his outthrust hand. His mother’s eyes widened with pleasure.
“You got it back. I don’t believe it.”
He walked over to the bed, hung it on the bedpost, and then, laughing, pushed the bed in her direction, thereby maintaining the six-foot proximity rule.
“How did you do it?” Doris asked, smiling and slipping the pendant over her head.
“I’d tell you,” he said, “but then I’d have to ki—” He stood before her, frozen, his expression stunned.
She laughed at him. “Kill me? Too little, too late, Ellis.” She looked meaningfully at Nancy and added, “And I thought we were getting along so good.”
Ellis stammered. “Jesus, Mom . . .”
She shook her head. “I’m kidding, sweetie. It was a good line. I guess you had some help out there.”
He sat down, his embarrassment still evident. “I sure did, but they swore me not to tell.”
She touched the pendant at her throat. “Well, I’m grateful. I always thought this pendant kind of holds us together, considering where it came from—puts a little Rosie in the room.”
Ellis ducked his head and stared at the floor for a few moments before saying, “Yeah.”
“She tried, Ellis,” his mother said. “In her own messed-up way, she made this possible, you and me, after all these years.”
He looked back up at her. “I’m happy for that.”
“And,” Doris continued, “maybe that made it possible for the two of you to meet up, huh?”
Ellis reached out to his side and took Nancy’s hand in his own, a gesture she wasn’t sure she could ever remember coming from anyone else.
“If it did, then I guess I can live with it,” he said.
Nancy looked at his profile, already weather-beaten in his late thirties, a mix of maturity and childishness. His was like the heart of a boy beating inside a tired bear of a man, and she felt, then and there, that maybe she could b
e the one to help influence which extreme won out.
Taking her along in the process.
Chapter 9
Several days following his visit to his mother, Ellis woke up and turned his head. Nancy was sleeping beside him, her breathing deep and regular. The blond hair across her forehead was still damp from the sweat of their lovemaking. Slowly, he propped himself up to look at her, flat on her back, naked. This was the fifth time they’d been able to do this, sneaking away and grabbing anything from a few minutes to just over an hour, and he still couldn’t decide if it was the best thing ever to happen to him, or the makings of the worst mistake of his life.
It wasn’t just fear of discovery that gnawed at him, or the inevitable pain, loss, and probable damage that would result. He’d suffered all three so often they’d acquired a natural taste. It was more the uncertainty of when they’d smack him in the head. Ellis didn’t consider himself a born loser, as Mel so often insisted, but more a man unusually prone to poor luck. It was the constant haplessness of his state that dogged him. He was forever feeling like a vole in the middle of a busy highway, unsure which way to turn and all but certain to end up under someone’s wheels.
He continued to admire Nancy’s sleeping form, recognizing also that perhaps his tendency to self-destruct wasn’t always quite as random as he liked to think. He’d made choices along the way, often loaded with risk, of which this was a perfect example.
This time, however, he felt pretty good about the result, and used that to all but disable his natural wariness.
He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Rise and shine, Nance.”
She stirred slightly, bending one tanned leg.
“Gotta get going.”
She rolled his way and snuggled up against him, murmuring something into his chest that he couldn’t hear. He stroked her back, running his hand down over her hip. She responded instinctively, reaching down between his legs.
He was sorely tempted, not to mention encouraged by his own quick response, but the lingerings of his uneasiness held sway. He followed her hand down and moved it away, kissing her at the same time. “Gotta go,” he repeated. “We don’t need him hunting you down. He thinks you’re out shopping, right?”
She sighed and rolled away to the edge of the bed, dropping her feet over and sitting up, her back to him. He watched her with regret as she rose and quickly replaced her clothes, her movements reflecting both her natural energy and a touch of anger.
She finally turned as he too began dressing. “Why’re we so worried about him all the time?”
Ellis pulled up his jeans and paused, saddened that the inevitable had finally been broached. It wasn’t that the subject had never occurred to him, or even that it seemed a problem without solution, which it did. It was more the familiarity of that dreaded, oft-encountered moment when a decision was called for and he felt himself quailing.
“Don’t you think we should be?” he asked, as if ducking a small thrown object. He reached for his T-shirt.
Curiously, this actually seemed to stump her for a moment. “Other people break up all the time,” she said quietly. “Mel and me don’t even have kids, and it’s not like we own much. He could keep the trailer.”
Ellis said nothing, sitting back down to put on his socks and boots.
“You’d like that to happen, wouldn’t you?” she asked, her voice almost timid. “For you and me to work out?”
He looked over his shoulder at her, one boot in hand. “Jeez, Nance. What d’ya think? Sure I would.”
But Mel might as well have been standing in the room for all the strength of their conviction. Such was his hold over them.
Nancy appeared to collapse in the face of an argument that hadn’t even begun. “It’s so unfair,” she said miserably.
He rose and circled the bed to put his arms around her, an awkward bear hugging a child. “It’ll work out.”
But he hadn’t the slightest idea how.
Far to the south, in Hartford, Connecticut, Joe Gunther was ushered into a basement office with a picture window overlooking not the outdoors but a vast, low-ceilinged room lined with metal filing cabinets. Sitting behind a desk decorated with an incongruously colorful vase of cut flowers and a carved wooden nameplate was a tall, middle-aged woman with suspiciously uniform black hair. The nameplate spelled out “Jennifer Joyce.”
“Special Agent Gunther?” she asked, extending her hand.
He shook hands but moved to the window rather than sit opposite her. “Holy smokes, this is impressive.”
Joyce laughed with embarrassment. “Looks are deceiving. It’s just a huge graveyard, really.”
He turned toward her. “But where exhumations are as steady as burials, I bet. What amazes me is that most people think facilities like this don’t exist anymore—that everything’s on computers.”
“Don’t I wish,” she said. “It would sure make my life easier.” Her face brightened. “The index is computerized, at least. That’s something. We used to have to walk up and down the rows, hunting for what we were after.”
Joe smiled back agreeably, although in truth he had a preference for just that kind of digging. It appealed to the hunter in him and satisfied his need to see things as they really were rather than as shimmering characters on a screen, as seemingly evanescent as the electricity giving them life.
But he didn’t need to fear any debate on the subject. His hostess had already returned to the task that had brought them together.
“Dr. Hillstrom’s fax seems perfectly in order, and the director just e-mailed me his approval allowing you access to the case, so I guess there’s no more to it than to give you a cubby and let you have at it.” Joyce finally rose from her desk and crossed to the door, revealing a combination of tight skirt, black fishnet stockings, and stiletto heels that Joe hadn’t seen in more decades than he cared to remember. Retro was alive, at least for one enthusiastic participant.
She led him down the hall to a metal door marked with a number and showed him a room reminiscent of a high-end bank vault. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “Be right back.”
The room was an exaggerated closet in size and decorated solely with a table and chair. The walls were bare and the ceiling lined with fluorescent strip lighting. He felt like a human subject about to undergo an uncomfortable experiment.
His connection to the outside world reappeared some ten minutes later, bearing an inch-thick folder.
“Here you go,” she said brightly. “Everything we’ve got about Judith Morgenthau. Any questions or problems, just push the button by the door.”
With that, she was gone, softly closing the door behind her—he hoped not hermetically.
He stared at the closed file for a moment. It was old, slightly yellowed, and soiled along the edges, indicating considerable use a long time ago.
Taking a small breath, he flipped back the cover.
Such dossiers have a system, usually a chronology and a department sectioning, combined. The police have their piece of it, the ME’s office theirs, then the hospital, and on down the line, depending on the case and how far it extends. This one, despite the cost it had exacted from Hillstrom, had still been pretty straightforward—a body found on the road, autopsied and identified, had been ascribed a cause of death in coordination with the police investigation that had eventually located the initial offending car.
That was merely the nutshell. The trick was going to be in finding and analyzing the nut.
He began, out of habit, with the photographs—first those of the scene, showing an initially unrecognizable lump, until details like a hand or foot eventually became discernible. Then the autopsy shots—here the body, or what was left of it, was washed and carefully laid out. The damage was horrendous. Body parts had been pulled apart and scattered over several hundred feet, and only placed in their proper position at the morgue. The prior mess at the scene now looked like a female body made up of bits and pieces. He certainly understood why
it had been difficult initially to tell the difference between this poor woman and a dead dog.
He skipped the rest of the ME’s findings for the moment, knowing that was where he would have to be most thorough, and opted instead for the police reports.
These, too, had a comforting feel to them, even though the paperwork was both ancient and different from what he knew in Vermont. He traced the investigation from the initial call to the summoning of an investigative team to the arrival and findings of the forensic techs. Reports and narratives followed, detailing how, once the deceased’s name was made clear, her lifestyle and habits were painstakingly reconstructed through a blossoming of interviews.
Here Joe paid close attention, cross-referencing with some of the ME’s reports, concentrating on statements made by those who might have known she was pregnant, watching for the classic what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it smoking gun of lore, hoping to pin Medwed to a precise spot on a timeline of knowledge. Hillstrom had said that she’d only been brought in after the actual autopsy, once the workload and media buzz had started building. Joe wasn’t expecting a signed memo from her boss asking her to take the blame for covering up the woman’s pregnancy, but some proof that Medwed had known of the condition before she did would have been nice. Nice but not likely, as it turned out, since all signs of his even being near the autopsy had been obliterated to protect him. Typically, Hillstrom’s loyalty had been matched by her thoroughness.
Progress was slow and frustrating. Joe located a copy of Morgenthau’s medical records from her doctor’s office, entered the day before the accident, detailing what looked at first to be a routine visit. He took several tries at deciphering a notation in nearly illegible script at the bottom of a page labeled “to be transcribed,” before figuring out that the doc had in fact ordered a pregnancy test. Intrigued and suddenly hopeful, Joe dug deeper, expecting to find the results, but concluded that they must have arrived after her death and thus were never added to the file. He cross-checked with the police narratives concerning the woman’s medical history. The test didn’t surface there, either, which all but eliminated the police from being inside the loop.