by Regina Doman
But will you keep my secret?
Your secret will be safe with me. All your secrets.
HIS
“Ben, have you finished with those notes I gave you last week?” Dr. Anschlung queried as she came in the door.
Fish rubbed his hair, which was getting too long again, and winced. “No, I’m sorry. I forgot. I had meant to do them over the weekend, but things…cropped up.”
“Oh,” his boss hovered between his desk and hers. “I’m sorry. I know you have a lot going on right now, with your sister-in-law…”
“No, I’m sorry,” Fish said. “I shouldn’t have forgotten. I’ll have them for you by tomorrow.”
He chastised himself after she left. This wasn’t the first time he had let things at work slip. Visiting Rose took a large chunk of his evenings, and now this extra investigation work…and he needed a haircut, he hadn’t cleaned his apartment in weeks, and it certainly was a good thing that Dr. Anschlung was patient as well as brilliant.
His cell phone rang. “Mr. Denniston?”
“Yes?” he checked the number, and didn’t remember it.
“This is Sister Veronica from the hospital. I wanted to let you know that Sister Genevieve just returned from Rome and said she would be happy to meet with you. She asked me to set up a time.”
“Thank you, Sister,” he said, grabbing a pad and paper. Regardless of the toll it was taking on his normal life, he had to continue investigating. For Rose’s sake.
When he met her on Saturday, he found Sister Genevieve to be a pleasant thoughtful nun in a modern white habit, quite upset to hear about Rose’s accident. She told him as much as she could remember, and answered all his other queries as best as she could. She didn’t seem to mind that Fish asked some rather strange questions.
“Would you have spoken to anyone at Robert Graves Memorial Hospital about your interview with Rose?” Fish asked, just to cover his bases.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s not much interaction between us. They’re quite a different kind of hospital from us.”
“So I understand,” Fish said wryly. “Some of Rose’s friends protest outside the hospital every Saturday.”
“Oh, I’m not sure that’s such a good thing,” Sister Genevieve said, blinking. “I think that’s a bit too confrontational. I’m not certain it actually does much good.”
“I suppose it keeps human rights violations in the public eye,” Fish said. “It helps that the protestors are firmly committed to non-violence.”
“Well, I can certainly appreciate a non-violent witness,” the nun said, seeming relieved. “I suppose we are in some ways to be a scandal to the world—in a good sense, that is.”
Out in the car, Fish realized he had come to a dead end. After staring at the cold night beyond his windshield, he tried not to feel discouraged. After a moment, he dialed his brother’s number, and Blanche picked up.
“Hi, Blanche. How are you?”
“I’m okay. The baby seems to be fine,” she said, and he could feel the pain in her voice. “How’s Rose?”
“She’s fine, too,” he said, knowing how inadequate a word it was. “Is Bear home yet?”
“No. Something wrong?”
“Just trying to find our mysterious suspect in the barn, and I ran into a dead end.”
“How so?”
“Well, I just spoke to the last person that Rose interviewed the day she fell, a Sister Genevieve, and found no connection. I’ve done everyone else, and I can’t think of where to go next.”
Blanche paused. “What about that nurse she interviewed, Lucille Johnson?”
“I didn’t know about her,” Fish reached for his notebook. “Who is this?”
“When I was up visiting with Bear during the play, I went with Rose to interview this nurse who was working in a private home. She was—well, she was a little strange.”
“Do you remember where the house was?”
“Somewhere in the town where the college was. Let me see——I think it was on Brown Street.”
“Do you know where she got the contact from?” Fish was writing rapidly.
“I’m not sure—did you check her notes?”
“They’re missing.”
“Then check with her professor. I think Paul was in her class. He would know the teacher’s name.”
“Blanche, you are a lifesaver,” he told his sister-in-law.
“I’m glad,” she said, with irony. “I hope it helps, Fish.”
“I have a funny feeling that it may,” he said.
19
...From time to time, young men would try to get through the hedge of thorns, but none succeeded...
HIS
It took a few days before Fish found the information and set up an interview with the nurse, Lucille Johnson. He met her in the private home that Blanche mentioned. Nurse Johnson seemed a little agitated, bouncing her foot while she talked to him.
“It’s rather odd that your sister-in-law was doing a research paper on comatose patients, and now she’s in a coma herself,” she commented.
“Yes, that’s what we’ve all thought too,” Fish agreed.
“You say that she fell off a loft in a barn and cracked her head?
“Yes,” said Fish.
“How did that happen?” asked the nurse.
“Well, it seems that she was looking for the notes of some interviews that her dad had done years ago—”
“Yes, I remember she said something about that,” Lucille cut in. “She said he had done some kind of investigation on the hospital years ago for abusing patients or something like that and she was trying to find his notes in some old barn.”
“She told you that?” asked Fish.
“Yeah. I was a little offended by it actually. I had a good experience working at the hospital for thirteen years and I can tell you there is nothing like that going on there. That stuff about patient abuse is just nasty rumors. That’s why I was a little offended that your sister-in-law would be wasting her time on something like that. But my old supervisor at the hospital said that kind of stuff just comes with the territory.”
A flash went through Fish’s mind. “Your old supervisor? You mean Dr. Prosser?”
“No she’s the director of the hospital. My supervisor was Dr. Schaffer. Do you know Dr. Prosser?”
“Actually, I do. We had dinner together at a restaurant a few months back. Dr. Schaffer was in the party as well.”
“Really?” asked Lucille, impressed.
“Yeah. It was a dinner party with other doctors and professors from the University where I work,” Fish explained. No need to tell her that I didn’t exactly hit it off with them. “So you told your supervisor about your interview with Rose?”
Seeming to feel more at ease with this knowledge of Fish’s apparent familiarity with Dr. Prosser and Dr. Schaffer, Lucille continued, “Yes. The next time my patient had to have some tests done at the hospital, I saw Dr. Schaffer at lunchtime and I told her all about the interview. She thought the part about looking around in a barn for the old notes of a dead reporter alleging patient abuse at the hospital was actually kind of funny. ‘What a way to do research for a college term paper!’ she laughed. She said she’d have to tell that one to Dr. Prosser so they could both have a good laugh.” Lucille chuckled. Apparently remembering Rose’s current condition, she concluded in a subdued tone, “It’s a shame it ended so tragically.”
“Yes,” Fish said, a little stiffly. “You wouldn’t happen to remember what day you had lunch with Dr. Schaffer, would you?”
“Oh, I think it was about a week after my interview with your sister-in-law, so that would be November 16th I guess.”
The date Rose had fallen from the hayloft in her family’s barn. There it was: the connection that Kateri and the nuns had predicted would surface. It was almost eerie.
After his conversation with Lucille Johnson, Fish drove to Mercy College and looked for Kateri, but was unable to locate her.
Giving up temporarily, he walked through the melting snow to Sacra Cor dorm.
Paul was getting out of his bright blue car, dressed in green medical scrubs. “Hey there!” he called cheerfully, swinging his backpack onto his shoulders. “What’s up?”
“Where were you?” Fish asked, taking in the full hospital outfit, mask and all.
“Doing paramedic stuff,” Paul said. “It’s really great. I go to a hospital in Pittsburgh and help out in the emergency room. It’s a side job for me. Lots of fun stuff, but it’s a long drive.” He stretched his hands. “Now I can really admire you for visiting Rose as much as you do,” he said. “It’s quite a trip there and back.”
“It’s worth it,” was all Fish could think to say. “I’m looking around for Kateri. Have you seen her?”
“No. But I rarely see her except when she’s with you.” Paul looked at him again. “You found something out, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Fish said, exhaling. “I did.”
“Come on inside and tell me, if you have time,” Paul said.
Fish followed him to his room, and they found Alex lying on the floor, his feet up against the wall, engrossed in reading a textbook.
“Oh. Hi,” he said when they came in.
“Ben has got some news for us,” Paul said.
“Really?” And Alex swung into an upright position and crossed his legs. “What?”
“Found the impossible connection,” Fish said. And told them what he had learned from Nurse Lucille Johnson.
Alex whistled. “That’s really, really bizarre,” he said and cracked his neck. “So this might supply a motive for why the mysterious stranger was in the barn. I feel like we’re closing in on something.”
“It looks fairly positive,” Fish said.
“Do you think it was Dr. Prosser?” Paul asked.
“Possibly. Kateri would say, quite probably. It could be anyone who was involved in the illegal activity that Dan Brier was researching.”
“But we tend to think it’s Dr. Prosser, because she’s the big wig at the hospital, and if she wouldn’t go to the barn herself, she could have sent a goon out there,” Alex said. “Veddy good. It would be interesting to find out where Dr. Prosser was on the day Rose fell. But I don’t know how you’d find that out.”
Fish shrugged. “I suppose a computer hacker could get into the hospital computer and access her day planner to find out.” He glanced around. “Are any of you hackers?”
Alex scratched his chin and said, “My dad actually knows quite a bit about that sort of thing. I could ask him. Plus, there are a couple of guys at the college who are good with computers—A.J., maybe—but I don’t know if they’re that good. Then again, if you are that good with computers, I don’t suppose it’s something you brag about. And it’s really rather dubiously moral.”
“True. Well, we’ll have to look for a way to find that out.” Fish rapped his knuckles on the wall, thinking. “I’m going to go find Kateri.”
Fish decided to make a trip to the chapel, and on his way there, met Kateri. He took her aside and told her what he had found out.
When Kateri heard his report, she was thrilled, as Fish had suspected. “I hope we can prove this,” she said, tossing her hair, which today was tied back in a huge ponytail. “I’m sorry, but that woman is a public menace.”
“Don’t get too eager,” Fish warned her. “All we have is a tentative connection, and not a very definite one. Dr. Schaffer might not have gotten around to telling Dr. Prosser. Or if she did, it may not have been before Rose’s fall in the barn. And if she did find out before Rose was in the barn, we haven’t proved—and probably will find it difficult to prove—that she did anything about it.”
“I’ll keep praying that the truth comes out,” Kateri said. She punched his arm. “Thanks, Fish. You’ve been doing a lot of hard work on this. You keeping up with your own classes okay?”
“Now that you mention it, barely,” he said ruefully. “I’m just doing what I can to get by. But I figured I was probably going to have a rough semester anyhow, so I took fewer courses than I usually do.”
“Well, take care of yourself. You don’t always look like you’ve slept well.”
“I rarely do.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, her eyes darting over him. “Have you seen a doctor?”
“Yes. And I keep refusing to take medications he offers to put me on,” Fish said. “I keep hoping the problem will correct itself. Besides, I’ve always been suspicious of strong drugs.”
“That’s not an entirely irrational suspicion. But I hope things get better for you.”
“Hope so too, though it doesn’t seem likely to happen soon,” he said.
He said goodbye, and went into the chapel. After genuflecting, he noticed a familiar blue habit in the front pew, and felt his usual wariness return. He knelt in prayer, but was not too surprised when several minutes later, there was a gentle touch on his shoulder.
“Hello Sister,” he whispered courteously.
“How are you, Fish?” she asked.
He nodded. “And you?”
“We are all well. Is there any news?”
He couldn’t suppress a sigh. “There is.” He rose, genuflected with a silent prayer, and went outside to tell her.
But the nun didn’t seem quite as exhilarated as he had predicted. Instead, her forehead creased. “It’s promising, but it’s not quite proof,” she said. “Is it?”
He was a bit pleased that she could see that. “No, it’s not. But I wanted to tell you, all the same.”
“We will keep praying,” she said, touching his shoulder again. “More will come out, in God’s time.”
Alex called his dad that evening, and handed the phone to Fish. Fish and Mr. O’Donnell talked for a while about computer hacking and the issues involved, including the moral ones. Mr. O’Donnell said he would look into the possibility. Fish went back to the University of Pitt, mulling over the problem and trying to figure out if there was any other way of finding out what Dr. Prosser had been doing on November 16th.
“Have you seen Dr. Prosser since that dinner party you took me to at the French restaurant?” he found himself asking Dr. Anschlung the next day he was at work—a Thursday. He had just finished copying grades onto the computer database from Dr. Anschlung’s written transcripts.
The blond woman paused at her desk, putting her head to one side. “Prosser? Oh, I remember. That terribly unpleasant hospital director. The one who hated men.” She made a face that Fish found very funny.
He couldn’t help smiling. “Yes, that would be her.”
“The last time I saw her was before Christmas at a Shakespeare conference with Professor Brock. And they were tête-à-tête the whole time, quite intense. I was sitting next to them during the talks and found it quite rude. It was a shame, because the lectures themselves were really fascinating, but the doctor and Brock simply sat there whispering like two flustered schoolgirls the entire time. I couldn’t help wishing they could have brought their personal business somewhere else.”
Fish had a strange feeling. “Dr. Anschlung, you don’t happen to remember when that conference was, do you?”
“I have it on my calendar somewhere. Feel free to look if you want,” Dr. Anschlung said. “Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering.”
After she had departed for the day, Fish flipped back through her desk calendar from the previous year, scanning the blocks of dates. At last he found it: November 16th: Colloquium on Shakespeare, 9-5 pm. Dinner with Storck and Brock. It was even in his handwriting.
And it was on the day that Rose had fallen from the barn.
“She couldn’t have done it,” Fish said flatly to Rose’s friends.
They were sitting in the lounge of the girls’ dormitory: Fish, Alex, Paul, Leroy, James, and Kateri. Donna, who as usual had been with Kateri, was sitting in a corner of the couch, where she was attempting to study and not listen.
“There would have been no time for her to do anything about it, even if she knew. Lucille Johnson would have been at the hospital talking to Dr. Schaffer some time between noon and one o’clock. Rose fell in the barn around 3 o’clock, if we can take what Donna says as evidence. Realistically, that’s only about two and half hours at the most.” They all looked at the blond girl.
Donna nodded from her place where she was sitting with her homework. “I was there around two forty-five,” she said quietly, flushing. “I had to work that out for the police.”
“And according to my boss, Dr. Prosser was sitting right next to her until five at this Shakespeare thing, and then they went out to dinner. She didn’t even take any phone calls that Dr. Anschlung could tell.” Fish rubbed his forehead, where he could feel a headache beginning. “So we have to give up on her as a suspect.”
“I don’t see why she should be excluded entirely,” Kateri said angrily. “After all, she does have a motive.”
“But no opportunity,” Alex said. “And, hate to say it, that counts for something.”
“Well, I’m not going to stop suspecting her,” Kateri said, rather unreasonably, getting up from the couch. “Come on, Donna. Let’s get to dinner. I have a night class.”
Fish rose as the two girls got up. He could tell that Kateri was upset, and just wanted to leave. As he was feeling frustrated himself, he couldn’t think of any consolation to give her.
Kateri stormed from the lounge with Donna following her.
“She just needs time to cool down,” Alex predicted. “It’s hard to let go of a theory you’ve committed yourself to.”
“I know,” Fish said with a groan. “But the other thing I thought of that makes it even more difficult to pin this on Dr. Prosser is this: What are the chances she’d know where the barn was anyway? Put that together with her time and location the day Rose fell, and I just don’t see any possible way she could have been the person in the barn—or have sent anyone else there in her stead—even if she had known about Rose’s activities via Dr. Schaffer.” He picked up his coat. “I’ve got to get something to eat myself.”