“Yes.”
She turned to Cassie. “I told you. He was in here then just like he is now.”
“Look, I—”
She cut me off. “Mister, you sure turned this town upside down. Can I get a picture of you with Cassie?”
Before I agreed to the picture, and after I exchanged amazed eye contact with Allie, I questioned them to find out exactly what the hell they were talking about. It turns out that my original article on Jen had actually attracted tourists to the place, according to the clerk by the thousands.
She even showed me what was literally an entire wall of T-shirts and trinkets that she had on sale, with Jen’s picture on them and the words LAST SEEN IN ARDMORE? I had actually never thought about whether or not my article had penetrated this town, and I was very surprised to hear about the effect it had and the reaction it provoked.
Surprised and annoyed.
Jen was not a gimmick, a curiosity, or something to attract tourists and cash, but that was what had happened. And I had no one to blame but myself.
Allie stepped near me and said, “Are these people getting on your nerves as much as they’re getting on mine?” She said it just loud enough for them to hear her, and the surprise registered on their faces.
Allie and I left, and outside there were at least a dozen people standing there watching us. Somehow word had leaked out—maybe from one of the other customers—that we were inside, and curiosity-seekers had already started to come out.
We disregarded them and got in our car. “These people have got to be kidding,” Allie said, obviously annoyed. Then she called out to them, “Anybody here considering getting a life?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, and got into the car. I said, “I expected them to throw rocks at me, not treat me like a rock star.”
I decided to take Allie out to where Jen had disappeared before making any other stops, so we headed out toward Kendrick Falls, which we never reached last time. It was likely going to be the toughest part of the day for me emotionally, and I wanted to get it over with.
It was a beautiful day, nothing whatsoever like the last time, when the ominous clouds formed and essentially forced us off the road. It took us less than fifteen minutes to reach our destination.
“Here’s where the storm started to build,” I said, trying to maintain my composure. “And here’s where we rolled over into the ditch.”
I pulled over and stopped the car. I kept gripping the wheel tightly; it was my best shot at keeping my hands from shaking.
“Let’s get out,” Allie said, and she proceeded to do so before I could object. I got out as well.
“So where did the car wind up?” she asked.
“What’s the difference?” I responded, feeling very uncomfortable to be there at all. “Why is that important?”
“I don’t know. I just want to understand what happened, to see it for myself. Bear with me, Richard. Okay?”
“Okay.” I looked around, trying to get my bearings, and walked over to the tree that the car had lodged against. I knew I had the right one, and it was confirmed by the slight damage that had been done to the tree. I hadn’t crashed into the tree; the car’s momentum had already mostly stopped when it arrived there.
“We landed here,” I said. “Then I ran up to the road, stopped some cars, and we all looked alongside the road on both sides for Jen.”
“Come on,” Allie said, and started retracing the steps up to the road. I didn’t follow her, because I was looking at something else. I was looking at the area behind us.
When Allie realized I wasn’t with her, she turned and said, “Is something wrong?”
I didn’t answer; I just stood there, and then slowly walked in the direction I was staring.
“Richard, what is it?” she asked, and came back toward me to see for herself.
“Allie, we were probably going sixty miles an hour when the storm hit. It came up so fast that we didn’t have much time to slow down. So we would have been going at least forty, forty-five when we went off the road.”
“So?”
“So we would have been still moving forward after we left the road. We would have gone through all of this shrubbery before we wound up at that tree.”
Allie looked and realized what I was talking about. The shrubbery seemed undamaged, the small trees untouched. “So it didn’t happen that way at all,” she said. “At least some of those trees would have been knocked down if it had.”
“I was there, Allie. I experienced it.”
“Then maybe you have the spot wrong. Maybe it happened farther up the road.”
I shook my head. “No. It was here. It just didn’t happen the way I lived it. Nothing happened the way I lived it.”
I could see Janice Ryan looking out the window as we pulled up. I was reacting emotionally to everything I was reexperiencing in Ardmore, but I would have to really gird myself for this one. This house was where I stayed with Jen those last few days. It was where we made love, where I asked her to marry me.
Where she said yes.
Janice came out on to the porch, and I saw it as a positive that she wasn’t carrying a shotgun. The last time I saw her she had smacked me in the face; this time I expected worse. I had no idea if she would talk to us, but I took it as a bad sign that she wasn’t wearing one of the FIND JEN tourist T-shirts.
We got out of the car and I approached the porch, with Allie walking a few steps behind me. “Mrs. Ryan, I know that you were upset by what happened, and I—”
She didn’t let me finish. “Come in. Please.”
I introduced Allie, and they exchanged pleasantries. Janice had no particular reaction to Allie, certainly not the way she would have reacted if Allie looked exactly like her missing daughter. We went inside, and the interior of the house still bore little resemblance to how it looked when Jen and I stayed there, but that was what I expected.
Janice offered us coffee and we accepted, and we all sat down in the den to drink it and talk. “Thanks for inviting us in,” I said. “I’m sorry for the way I acted the last time I was here.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m the one who should apologize. There is no excuse for the way I behaved.”
“It was understandable,” I said.
“You mentioned my daughter, Jennifer. She was my baby. She died when she was two years old. Nothing was ever the same after that.”
I had known she had a daughter who died very young, but I did not know her name was Jennifer. I should have checked. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can understand why what I said upset you so much.”
“I read your magazine articles,” she said, then smiled. “Pretty much everybody around here has. I just want you to know that I was not here with you or Jennifer, and Ben, my husband, died twenty years ago. I know you think it all happened the way you wrote it, but it did not.”
“We’re trying to figure out what did happen,” Allie said.
Janice looked at her and nodded. “So am I.”
Her comment surprised me. “What do you mean?”
She stood up. “I’ll show you.”
We followed her to the bedroom where Jen and I had slept, which was furnished as a den. As in every other room in the house, the rooms were filled with things … trinkets, paintings, photographs … the tables and walls were pretty much loaded to capacity.
“I was on vacation.… I went to see my brother in South Carolina for a week … just before you were in Ardmore.”
She walked over to the wall and touched a few of the pictures, straightening them slightly. They were of a happier time in her life, and most included her with a particular man, who I assumed was her late husband. He was not the man I remembered, not the father who bragged about his daughter.
“When I came back, things were different. Small things, but enough for me to notice.”
“What kind of things?” I asked.
“Some of this was out of place. A few of the pictures were mixed up, things on the
tables were out of order.”
“Out of order?” Allie asked.
“Yes. When you don’t have people, family, around you anymore, you live with things. They represent my memories. I know exactly where they are; I could close my eyes and describe everything that was in every one of these rooms.”
“And it changed when you were away?”
She nodded. “I could give you at least five examples. I couldn’t understand it; I didn’t know what to make of it. The doors were still locked, and the alarm had not gone off. If it had, the police would have been called. And nothing was missing; there was no robbery. I thought I must have been wrong, but I knew I wasn’t.”
I believed her, and I could tell that Allie did as well. But like everything else, it made little sense. She’d been already back from vacation when I was there with Jen, and the house had looked nothing at all like this.
We talked for a while longer; Janice seemed eager for the company. But we made no progress in understanding what had happened in this house. I knew I was here, with Jen, for those four days, and she knew for certain that I was not.
The facts were on her side.
As we got ready to leave, Allie said to her, “We’re so sorry you had to go through all this,” and they hugged.
Janice teared up noticeably, and stepped back, as if to look at Allie. “My Jen would have been just about your age,” she said, and then hugged Allie again.
We finally left, and it was too late to track down anyone else. We weren’t terribly in the mood to do so anyway, both of us were feeling a little drained by what we had already been through.
“Doesn’t make much sense to drive back to the city tonight, only to come back up here tomorrow,” I said.
She nodded her agreement. “There was a motel near the exit where we got off the highway; it looked okay.”
I had seen it; it was a Hampton Inn and certainly seemed fine for the night. We went back there and checked in to two rooms, then went into the restaurant/bar off the lobby for dinner.
Neither of us wanted to talk much about our search; we had been blanketed by it for so long that we shared a desire to be rid of it, if only for a short time. So we talked about everything else, about how we grew up, about politics, about sports, about how we liked to spend time when we weren’t searching for missing loved ones.
I continued to be amazed at how at ease I felt with Allie, and I could tell she felt the same about being with me. Maybe it was our shared loss, or our shared goal, but we just clicked in a way I rarely have with anyone. Even the silences were fine, a sure indicator in my book that two people are in sync.
We didn’t just talk; we also drank. More than we should have, but we didn’t get blasted. Just drunk enough to feel good, a feeling that neither of us had experienced for a very long time.
We closed the place down, which was not exactly a sign of decadence in Ardmore, since closing time was eleven P.M. Our rooms were next to each other on the third floor, so we rode up on the elevator together and then walked together down the hall to the rooms.
What happened next I don’t think was because we were drunk, but I’m not really clear on any of it, and I’m not sure I ever will be. Allie opened the door to her room, and then turned back to me, maybe to say good night. I kissed her, or maybe she kissed me. She pulled me into her room, or maybe I pushed her.
Within moments we were on the bed making love, and I was not inclined to ponder who was the instigator or whether it was the right thing to do.
It sure as hell felt right in the moment.
I woke up at seven A.M. and discovered that Allie was already showered and dressed. I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with the awkwardness left over from what had happened between us, but Allie solved it for me.
“It happened, Richard. There’s no going back, and there’s no undoing it. But it’s yesterday, and we need to focus on today and tomorrow.”
“So no guilt?” I asked.
She smiled, reached out, and lightly touched my face. “We don’t have time. Maybe later.”
We had breakfast downstairs and checked out. I had a list of the four clients that Frank Donovan had serviced in Ardmore, and we set out to visit each of them.
The first was a residential house on the outskirts of town. It was small and fairly run-down, and the people who lived there had no apparent desire to be helpful. They did tell us that they’d bought the place just three weeks before, and that they thought the previous owners had moved to somewhere in the Midwest. It would have been those people who hired Frank, so if we were being told the truth, there was nothing to be learned there.
The second client was also residential. Rita and Donald Church lived only three blocks from the Ryan house. They reacted to us much like they might have if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had shown up; I was a full-fledged celebrity in their minds.
Rita invited us in for some coffee and apple pie, which was about all we got out of the visit. They remembered calling Frank for plumbing services because a pipe had broken under their shower and their basement was flooding.
Ralph replaced the pipe and charged them what they felt was an exorbitant amount. The Churches were in their late sixties and retired, and if there was anything about them that would connect to the murders, neither Allie nor I could find it.
Our third stop was Ardmore General Hospital, where Frank had made three visits in the past two months. According to Craig, his company was on a retainer with the hospital, being paid a flat fee for handling whatever plumbing work needed to be done.
It was a much larger facility than I would have expected, and far bigger than the tiny place where I had been taken after the accident on the day Jen disappeared. There were three quite large two-story buildings, and a smaller annex building in the back, spread out over a tranquil, campus-type environment. The receptionist at the desk told us it was the only decent-sized hospital in the area, and people who lived as far as twenty-five miles away considered it their home hospital.
She also told us that the director of the hospital was Dr. Harold Gates, and we asked to see him. I told her I was from Manhattan magazine, and she said, “I thought you looked familiar. You’re that guy, right?”
I nodded. “I’m that guy.”
Allie walked back toward the hospital entrance as the receptionist picked up the phone and dialed a number, then talked softly so that I couldn’t hear. I assumed she was telling Gates, or his assistant, that “that guy” was here, and wasn’t that a big deal. It must have been, because within three minutes Allie and I were granted an audience with him.
Dr. Gates was surprisingly young, no more than forty. He had a smooth way about him, polished, as if he would be better at selling medical supplies than using them. Perhaps political savvy was necessary to work one’s way up the Ardmore General Hospital totem pole, and it seemed likely that Gates had it in significant quantity.
“Nice of you to see us without an appointment,” I said.
He smiled. “You’re a celebrity around here. If I turned you away, my staff would have revolted. So what can I do for you?”
“You had a plumbing company working for you run by Frank Donovan.”
His expression revealed nothing, if there was anything to reveal. “Okay, if you say so.”
“Mr. Donovan and his wife were recently murdered.”
Again no change in expression. “I’m certainly sorry to hear that. What does it have to do with the hospital? Assuming, of course, that you’re right about him doing work here.”
“We have reason to believe that he saw something here in Ardmore, very possibly at this hospital, that made him a danger to someone … that resulted in his death.”
“I can assure you that I have no knowledge of this whatsoever.”
“Who would have been Mr. Donovan’s contact here?”
“Probably someone in our engineering department. Why are you asking me these questions instead of the police?”
“I’m sure they will
be,” I lied. With the unsubstantiated suspicions we had about the Donovans being related to Jen’s disappearance, there would be no chance we could get the police to back us up.
Allie, who hadn’t spoken a word since hello, held up a flyer she had gone back to take off the bulletin board near the lobby entrance. “You run drug trials here?”
He nodded. “Yes, a great many of them.”
“How does that work?” she asked.
“Pharmaceutical companies that have new drugs approved by the FDA for trial come to us. We carefully screen for people whose medical conditions fit the profile, and we conduct trials according to the specifications we are given. It is a specialty of ours. That flyer is for the purpose of recruiting volunteers.”
“Why do you do it?” Allie asked.
“It is worthwhile work, and it enables us to provide traditional medical services to our patients at reasonable cost. That’s not an easy thing for a hospital to do in this day and age. Now, if you don’t mind my asking, what does all this have to do with Mr. Donovan?”
I knew where Allie was going with this, so I jumped in. “Have you done work for Sean Lassiter?”
Finally, Gates changed his facial expression from painted smile to a mixture of annoyance and concern. “We don’t discuss our clients. That is privileged.”
“So Lassiter is a client?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I asked.”
“I really have nothing to say about that.”
The conversation took a downhill turn from there, and Gates became noticeably less forthcoming. Within ten minutes we were ushered out; apparently my celebrity status had its limitations.
“You struck a nerve when you mentioned Lassiter,” Allie said when we got into the car. “I’d bet anything he and Lassiter are connected somehow.”
“I thought so too. If Donovan worked here, and Lassiter has a connection to the place as well, then you could be right.”
“About what?”
I smiled. “We could be getting somewhere.”
On Borrowed Time Page 10