Third Strike

by Zoe Sharp

  “Somebody was,” he said, with no more than a trace of irony, “and now they seem determined to cover up that act of mercy.”

  “But surely the hospital’s to blame,” she said, anger leveling the wobbles out of her voice. “A mistake—”

  “Miranda,” my father said gently. “There are no circumstances under which one would give a patient such an amount of morphine.”

  Not if you wanted them to live.

  She took in a sharp breath, as if he’d spoken the words out loud, a soft gasp.

  “He was in tremendous pain. I thought, maybe … but you’re right, of course.”

  “The thing is, darling,” my mother said carefully, “that someone’s trying to make it look as though Richard’s lying about this whole thing. The hospital are denying poor Jeremy was given the morphine at all and the drug company, Storax, seem to be doing everything they can to … silence us.” She ducked her head, waited until Miranda met her gaze. Something the other woman seemed suddenly reluctant to do. “So you see, if there’s anything you aren’t telling us—anything at all—we do rather need to know.”

  Miranda didn’t answer right away, mutely pouring the tea as though grateful for something to do with her hands. She filled and passed cups to my parents, her brows knitted.

  “Your husband is dead,” Sean said quietly. It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d entered the house, and Miranda’s head turned almost blindly towards him. “There’s nothing you can do for him now except tell the truth.”

  She sat for a moment longer, a small huddled figure, then got restlessly to her feet. With an impatient frown my father opened his mouth to speak but my mother shook her head and, to my surprise, he buttoned his lip.

  Miranda went to the bookcase near the fireplace and picked up a framed photograph that had been lying facedown. She stared at it a moment and ran a hand lovingly across the glass, then caught herself in the self-indulgent gesture and hurried over to thrust the frame into Sean’s hands.

  “That was taken four years ago,” she said, not breaking stride, crossing to a bureau against the far wall and digging through one of the drawers, throwing sentences back over her shoulder. “Virgin Islands. Our wedding anniversary. Three weeks. It was glorious.”

  I edged over to Sean and glanced at the framed photo. In the foreground was a tanned man wearing close-fit swimming trunks, leaning out from the rail of a small yacht. From the angle of the horizon, the yacht was heeled over close into the wind, sails snapped bar-taut.

  The man was standing on the side rail, supported by a safety wire, with his feet spread wide to highlight well-defined calves and muscular thighs. His back was braced, giving the impression of strength and agility. Wrapped in his left hand, like the reins of a Roman chariot, were the cleated-off lines for one of the sails, a brightly colored spinnaker.

  Behind him, at the tiller, you could just see a woman. She was wearing sunglasses and a shade over her forehead, and she was slimmer and undoubtedly happier, but the brilliant smile could only have been Miranda’s. Both of them were waving to whoever held the camera, their movements synchronized.

  I looked up. Miranda was back in front of us, waiting. She pushed a second picture into my hands. An unframed snapshot, curling at the edges, one corner bent over as though it had been shoved away out of sight rather than proudly displayed.

  The second photo had been taken in this very room, I realized, the décor turned stark and gaudy by the harshness of the flash that had been used to illuminate the shot.

  It was of an old man, sitting slumped awkwardly in the chair my father currently occupied. He was smiling determinedly for the camera, an orange party hat slanted on his head. But his face was gaunt, the graying skin tight across his protruding bones. Like it hurt him almost beyond endurance to produce such a show of happiness, but he would have died rather than admit it.

  Pain was written loud and clear in every line of his body, from his twisted spine to his clawlike hands, the unnatural tilt of his neck. His feet were encased in ill-fitting Velcro booties and part of a Zimmer walking frame was just visible at one side of the shot.

  There was something about the line of his mouth, the shape of his teeth, his ears, that was familiar, but it took a moment to put it together.

  “This is Jeremy?” I said, not quite positive enough for it to be a statement.

  “They both are,” she said sadly. “That was taken in April this year—on his forty-third birthday.”

  I flipped back and forth between the pictures. His Korean heritage showed, I noted, in the fold of his eyelids, the shape of his nose. Even through the wastage, he retained a residual attractiveness.

  Sean silently handed me the framed photo and I gave them both back to her. She put them down on the table, near the tea tray, careful to leave the one taken on the yacht uppermost.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said. Not just his death, but the manner of it.

  She glanced at me, dully, and gave a mechanical nod. A standard meaningless acknowledgment of a standard meaningless line of condolence. But what else did we have to offer?

  “When did he start to get sick?” Sean asked into the uncomfortable silence.

  Miranda cleared her throat. “A year ago, in the spring,” she said, her voice very calm. “He always went mountain biking in the White Mountains with some of his buddies from the hospital every year, soon as the snow cleared. They’d been gone a couple of days when I got a phone call. He had a fall, they told me. A bad one. I expected …” Her voice trailed off into a helpless shrug. “I don’t know what I expected, but when I got to the hospital, the doctors there said it looked like he’d been dropped off a building. His spine had practically exploded. It didn’t make sense.”

  She broke off, gulped in air to steady herself before she could go on. “We went from specialist to specialist but nobody seemed to have a clue. Over the months that followed the accident, the breaks wouldn’t heal. Jeremy lost more than three inches in height and his back began to curve from the constant fracturing of his ribs and vertebrae.” Her eyes traveled almost resentfully over the width of Sean’s shoulders, his obvious strength, and swapped to me. “My wonderful, athletic husband was crumbling to dust right in front of me.” She drew in a shaky breath. “Eventually, they diagnosed spinal osteoporosis, but by then it was almost too late to do anything about it.” She flicked a quick glance across at my father. “That’s when I called you.”

  My father put down his teacup. “Almost,” he said, “but not quite.”

  “What do you mean?” Miranda tried to hedge, but the flush that stole up her neck told another story.

  “When I first suggested trying Jeremy on the new Storax treatment, you were opposed to the idea, at a time when one would have assumed that you’d pursue any avenue open to you. I had to convince you to give your permission as his next of kin. At the time, I thought it was because the treatment was still in the experimental stage, but you knew it was pointless, didn’t you, Miranda?” he said slowly. “You knew he’d already tried it and that it hadn’t worked.”

  “I—yes,” she muttered. “He knew the pharmaceutical company were screening their test patients very carefully and he was afraid he wouldn’t be selected, so … no, he didn’t tell them he had tried it already.” She met his level gaze and flushed again, but then her chin came up in a kind of defiant appeal that he understand the motives for her duplicity. “He was desperate.”

  “It would seem there was a very good reason Jeremy wouldn’t have been selected,” my father said, ignoring her mute plea. “I believe Storax knew that with certain patients there would be catastrophic side effects, a rapid acceleration of the progress of the disease. And I believe they’re doing everything in their power to cover that up.”

  “But that’s terrible,” Miranda said, frowning, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “After Jeremy died,” my mother put in, her voice calm and a little remote, “Storax sent some people ove
r to England to … threaten me, if Richard didn’t admit to things—awful things—designed to ruin his reputation.”

  Miranda groped for the back of the nearest chair, stumbled round and sank into it as her knees buckled.

  “But they’ve been so kind,” she said, face blank. “I’ve had e-mails from someone in their legal department, offering me advice. They’ve been so helpful, I—”

  “Who from in their legal department?” Sean demanded. “And what kind of advice?”

  Miranda’s head turned blindly in his direction, but I knew she didn’t see him. “From someone named Terry O’Loughlin,” she said. “We’ve never spoken—just e-mails—advising me to sue.”

  I glanced at Sean. “Why would Storax advise Miranda to file a claim if they knew about the side effects?” I said. “I can’t believe this is an isolated case, so surely they’re setting themselves up to lose millions in similar suits?”

  “Not if the case against them collapses because Miranda’s expert witness has suddenly lost all his credibility,” Sean said pointedly. “Because he’s a drunken lecher, for example.”

  My father folded a little in his chair, unconsciously reminding me of the picture of a sunken Jeremy Lee at his last birthday party.

  “The people Storax sent must have known that as soon as it was confirmed Jeremy had already taken the drug, I’d start asking questions,” he murmured, running a hand across his forehead. “He was dying anyway, but they couldn’t afford to wait … and so they finished him.”

  “And then sent Blaylock and Kaminski over to the UK to baby-sit Elizabeth,” Sean agreed. “They moved fast to cover this up.”

  My father allowed himself a brief dismissive glare. “Jeremy’s records should speak for themselves,” he said stiffly. “I need to see them.”

  Sean shook his head at this display of naïveté. “Don’t you think that the first thing Storax would have done after getting you thrown out of the hospital and tying you in knots with that reporter, was to walk off with his records, or alter what they didn’t want known? Without them, you can’t prove a thing.”

  “Jeremy kept his own records,” Miranda said suddenly. She looked up and her eyes had cleared, focused. “A journal of his illness. How it progressed, symptoms, treatments. Everything he tried and the effect it had. It’s in the den. Would that help?”

  “A journal?” my father said, sounding vaguely offended that secrets had been kept from him. As if the keeping of private notes alongside his own somehow signified a lack of trust. “Yes, yes it would. If you’re sure you don’t mind our reading it now?”

  “Of course not. There’s nothing really private in there.” Miranda jumped up and hurried towards the door. “I’ll get it.”

  “If we have Jeremy’s own account, that might save us a lot of time and trouble,” my father said when she’d gone, giving us a tight, tired smile. “I wonder why he felt the need to keep it?”

  “If he knew he was either taking or being given something that wasn’t aboveboard, he might have wanted his own record. Just as long as it can be relied upon.”

  “Jeremy was not only a doctor of some repute,” my mother said, as though that fact alone put him beyond question, “but he was also meticulous as a person.”

  Sean’s eyebrow lifted. “Even when he was in constant pain and pumped full of morphine?”

  “It’s very reliable.” Miranda’s voice from the doorway was distinctly chilly. “Considering I was the one filling it in for him during his last weeks. Everything they gave him, every time he cried out with the pain, I wrote it down in that damned book.”

  “Sorry,” Sean said, not looking particularly contrite even so. “It’s part of my job to play devil’s advocate.”

  She nodded. “He stopped taking the Storax treatment as soon as he realized it wasn’t helping, but he never thought for a moment it might actually have been making him worse. He made me swear not to tell you, Richard,” she added, throwing my father another anxious look. “He knew he was dying and he was afraid if it came out that he’d dosed himself, our medical insurance might be void. He was trying to protect me … .”

  It was only then that we noticed her hands were empty.

  “Miranda,” my father said, rising, “I can assure you that I will not allow confidential medical information about Jeremy fall into anyone’s hands but my own. You needn’t worry about—”

  “It’s not that,” she said, looking baffled and not a little afraid. “After his death I put the journal away—I could hardly bear to look at it. It was just a reminder—” She broke off, shook her head as if to clear it. “I put the journal in the top right-hand drawer of his desk, same place as always. But when I went to get it just now, well, it was gone … .”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Collingwood’s pissed,” Parker said.

  “Tell him to take more water with it,” I said recklessly. Even at the other end of a bad mobile phone line, in a moving vehicle, I heard his sigh. Parker was a pretty cosmopolitan guy and he got British humor better than most, but there were days when he simply didn’t find it funny. Plainly, today was one of them.

  “Okay—Collingwood’s pissed off,” he amended heavily. “That any clearer?”

  “Crystal,” I said, letting my voice drawl. “What’s he got to be so pissed off about?”

  “By the sounds of it, he expected you to keep your father closer to New York, so he’d be available to answer questions about Storax.”

  “Well, he’s the one who left us dangling for days,” I said, allowing my irritation to flare. “And he’s the one who told us to get out of town for a while.”

  “Yeah,” Parker said dryly, “but I think he hoped you’d go to Long Island, someplace like that. Not Boston.”

  “And I hoped that when he said he’d keep that blond bitch on a tight leash, he meant it,” I said, as quietly as I could. Even so, I caught an offended clearing of throats from the rear seat. Across to my left, Sean took his eyes off the road for long enough to flash me an amused smile. It was the most animation he’d shown all day.

  “Hey—you can’t always control your people as much as you’d like,” Parker said pointedly. “Don’t push it, Charlie. He’s doing you a favor.”

  “It was supposed to be a two-way street,” I said. “But so far, the traffic’s been traveling only in one direction. What’s he been doing all this time?”

  Another sigh, longer this time. “Government departments move slowly—you should know that.”

  “Yeah, well, this guy makes a glacier look positively speedy.”

  We were on I-95 again, heading north. It was a little after 1:30 in the afternoon. We’d spent the last couple of hours searching Miranda Lee’s house for the missing journal of her husband’s last days—without success. Suspicious that this wasn’t merely a case of absentmindedness, Sean and I went over the place thoroughly and it was Sean, naturally, who found the slight scratches around the face of the lock on the back door, showing that it had been recently finessed.

  Miranda had been coping fine until the realization really sank in that someone had invaded her home and had picked through her most private belongings. At that point, she spent some time in the downstairs loo, clutching the toilet bowl with both hands while she heaved. My mother stayed with her, gently pulling Miranda’s hair back out of the way and wringing out damp cloths to wipe the clammy sweat from her face.

  Meanwhile, my father collared Sean and me in the living room. “She needs protection,” he said, his face almost as pale as Miranda’s. Across the other side of the hallway we heard the muffled sound of renewed retching. “What would have happened if she’d been here when they broke in? It isn’t safe for her to be left alone.”

  “She should go and stay with friends or a relative,” Sean said. “There’s only two of us, covering the two of you, twenty-four /seven. We can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “So, call in more people,” my father said, his arrogance surfacing again.

  S
ean just stared. “And who’s going to pay for that?” he demanded in that quiet deadly tone of his. “Charlie and I have stuck with you like bloody glue since this happened, which is costing Parker thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Not to mention the damage your exploits have already done to the business.”

  “I might have known it would be the money you cared about,” my father sneered.

  “I don’t care about it and wouldn’t have accepted anything, had you offered it,” Sean said coldly. “But that’s just the point. Not once—not once—have you offered to pay the going rate for our services.”

  “But … Charlotte’s family,” my father said, sounding scandalized.

  “Yeah,” Sean said, his face cold, “but—as you’ve always made so abundantly clear, Richard—I’m not.”

  The end result of Sean’s parting shot was that my father grudgingly announced he would personally pay Parker’s fees for someone to come and stay with Miranda. It was the lady herself who turned him down flat.

  “I have a friend over in Vermont I haven’t seen since college,” she said. “She just had a baby and I’ve been promising I’ll go visit with her for a few days—a week maybe. Help her out with the older boys, let her get some rest.” She gave a watery smile. “Give me something else to think about, too.”

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” my father said gravely, in the same tone of voice I imagined him assuring a patient they’d diagnose some mystery illness. “I promise.”

  Miranda had no idea who’d taken her late husband’s journal, but, whoever they were, they’d been pretty subtle about it. Despite my father’s concerns over her safety, so far there had been no overt threats made towards her. And she had no idea when the robbery might have taken place. She hadn’t noticed anything amiss and claimed it had been weeks since she’d last looked in the desk drawer where it had been kept. She’d looked sad when she’d said it. Too many painful memories there, I guessed.

  We’d left her organizing her trip and were headed back up towards Boston when Parker called to inform us of Collingwood’s displeasure.