“Your ex-wife’s had a little trouble. She’s over at Mary Immaculate.”
“Trouble! Is she hurt? What happened?”
“No, she’s not hurt, not physically, anyway. We just had a little excitement and the doctors wanted to take a look at her.”
“Sheriff, I’m an ex-cop and I respect other cops, but if you don’t start speaking English to me, I’m gonna-”
“Mrs. Prager called us to her house and when we got there she was
… unhinged and talking a little crazy. Maybe it was all the heartache from yesterday or-”
“Crazy how?”
“She said she got a call.”
“A call. A call from who?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
“Sheriff!”
“She said she got a call from her brother Patrick.”
I’d been to the Mary Immaculate Medical Center only once, back in 1981. I was up in the Catskills looking into an old fire in which some of my high school classmates had perished. One of the dead was my fiercest teenage crush, Andrea Cotter. That’s when I first met Mr. Roth. During the investigation, Francis Maloney suffered a stroke and I rushed to be with Katy. Now as I drove, I remembered that last time, how I prayed for the cold-hearted prick to die. He knew it too. Even with a partially paralyzed face and mild aphasia, he warned me to be careful what I wished for. He was right. Eventually all death wishes come to pass, and the fallout with them.
Vandervoort met me in the lobby. I wouldn’t say he looked worried. Concerned was more like it. Oddly, I found his concern reassuring. As cynical a bastard as I could be, I had never been completely cured of hope. We shook hands.
“What happened, exactly?”
“I got a call at home from dispatch around seven this morning.. Hey, you want to grab a cup of coffee? My treat.” He was avoiding the subject.
“Sure. We’ll talk as we go. You were saying…”
“They said your wife-ex-wife, sorry, called in hysterical, begging for us to get a car to her house. The dispatcher couldn’t get anything out of her about what was wrong, if there’s been a break-in or what. So they sent a car out, but thought maybe I should know too. Like we were talking about yesterday, people up here still know the Maloneys.”
“I’m glad they called you.”
“I got there a little after Robby, that’s the younger deputy who was out at the cemetery with you yesterday. He’s green, but he’s good with people and he’d gotten your wife-ex-wife-”
“Just call her Katy, Sheriff. It’ll make our lives easier.”
“Okay. Well, he’d gotten Katy calmed down, but he couldn’t get anything out of her except that she’d gotten a call. She wouldn’t put the phone down no matter what Robby did. How do you take yours?” he asked as we stepped into the hospital cafeteria.
“Milk, no sugar.”
“Wait here.”
He was back in a minute with our coffees. “Let’s sit before we go up to the Psych Ward.”
“We?”
“Sorry, Mr. Prager. You’re not family anymore. They won’t let you up there without me.”
I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t his doing. It was mine. Divorce impacts couples in different ways. It’s an equation of losses and gains. The gains, however large or small, are usually apparent early on. The losses, as I was discovering, reveal themselves slowly, in painful, unexpected ways. We sat at the closest table.
“When you got there, what happened?”
“I told Robby to wait outside and your-Katy broke down. She said she knew what she was going to say would sound crazy, but it was true. Her brother Patrick had called. She recognized his voice.”
“Christ!”
“Exactly. What was I going to say to that?”
“What did you say?”
“I’m no shrink, Mr. Prager. I said maybe she was just stressed out by what had happened yesterday and how it can get rough sometimes with people you love when they’re gone. But that set her off again. ‘I’m not crazy. It was my little brother,’ she started screaming. Then she started talking about little star or something.”
“Little Star is a pet name she had for Patrick,” I said. I hadn’t heard those two words uttered in two decades.
“Oh, okay. Well, I told her I believed her, but that I needed her to come with me to the hospital. I gotta tell you, I expected that to flip her out, but she came along pretty calmly.”
“Thanks for taking care of her, Sheriff Vandervoort.”
He held his hand out to me. “Pete. Call me Pete.”
“Moe.”
We shook hands again and started for the elevator.
“So what do you make of it, Moe? You know Katy. I don’t, so I’m just asking.”
“Pete, my wife is the least crazy person I ever met. If she says she got a call, I believe her.”
“From her dead brother?”
“I didn’t say that. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to fuck with my family.”
We stepped onto the elevator and had the car to ourselves. He pressed 6.
“Look, Moe, I gotta say this, so hear me out. This is a police matter and this is my jurisdiction. I’d hate for us to be at odds after making nice. You have to stay out of it.”
I didn’t say anything to that. He seemed relieved by my silence. I think he was even less anxious to hear me tell him lies than I was to tell them.
THE DAYS OF involuntary institutionalization have long since gone. It wasn’t even that easy to keep people for observation anymore unless a crime had been committed, so it was no shock to me that the shrink at Mary Immaculate was sending Katy home. A big man with soulful eyes and a calm manner, the doctor’s name was Rauch. He possessed the ability to make you feel you were the most important person in the room and what you had to say was absolutely crucial.
“I’ve given her a Xanax to calm her down and a prescription for more if need be,” he said. “From what I understand, she’s had a lot to deal with in the last thirty-six hours, gentlemen. I am not familiar enough with her to make a formal assessment, but I can say that there are always unresolved feelings when it comes to the death of a loved one. It is no great leap to see how the desecration of her father’s and brother’s graves might stir up those feelings and set her off.”
“So you think she was hallucinating, Doc?” I was glad Vandervoort asked and not me.
“Well, Sheriff, how many confirmed cases of resurrection can you point to? If I had to guess, and this is off the record, I’d say someone called and Katy heard what she wanted or needed to hear. Guilt and wish fulfillment make a powerful and, oft-times, toxic elixir.”
“Thanks, Dr. Rauch.” I shook his hand.
“Mr. Prager, I don’t think Katy is a threat to herself or others, but there is something troubling going on. I would strongly advise you try to get her to seek treatment. When that point comes, I can recommend some good people in the area. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go sign the necessary papers.”
Vandervoort and I had already agreed that I would take Katy home.
“You know, Moe, I am gonna get the LUDs for Katy’s phone, just to make sure. Like the shrink, I believe in guilt, but I’m not keen on coincidences.”
“Me either. Thanks. Can you excuse me a second, I’ve got to call my daughter.”
Our ride back to the Maloney house on Hanover Street consisted of silence bookended around a burst of anger. Early on, Katy wasn’t talking and kept her head turned away from me.
“I’m not crazy, Moe,” she said calmly, head still turned.
“No one says you are.”
“It was him.”
“Patrick? Katy, come on.” I didn’t want to argue with her, but I wasn’t going to placate her either. “Patrick’s dead. You know it. We saw him buried.”
“Did we?” There, she said it. Someone was bound to. “We saw bones and rags and sneakers buried, not my brother.”
“Yeah, Katy, his bones, his rags, his sneakers. The cops confirmed it with dental records. That was Patrick.”
“Then how do you explain the call?”
“Someone’s fucking with you, with us. That’s what all this stuff with the graves was about. That’s why someone screwed around with Jack White’s grave and-”