Regarding the other two matters, we must discuss those. Whatever I plan for myself, I can’t leave and let them go unresolved.
“She could be referring to something her husband did wrong with these two cases.”
“But you just said, apart from a close call, they were free from screwups.”
“That brings us back to your original question – why your father would bother to hang on to them. He must have still thought something seemed wrong. After all, even a case review can miss mistakes.”
“Not often.”
“They would if the doctor in question was an amoral son of a bitch intent on covering them up and had successfully falsified the records. Maybe Kelly and your father wanted to subject Chaz’s work to a bit more scrutiny.”
Earl knew he’d made spectacular leaps in logic to entertain such an extraordinary set of conclusions. He also knew they’d have to go through the original files in their entirety to ever prove what he’d just suggested. Even then, supposing his hunches were correct, they still might not find anything incriminating if Braden had covered his tracks well enough. But this was the first sign that evidence against Chaz might exist after all – evidence that would show he’d made lethal mistakes, then tried to hide them, and that Kelly found out, perhaps confronted him – he grabbed the order sheet from Mark, his excitement growing.
“I think I can make out a few other names from my class. Two of them, Tommy Leannis and Melanie Collins, attended the memorial service. And check this out. According to her signature here, Melanie seems to be the one who counteracted the order for digoxin and saved the day. With the license numbers of the people I don’t recognize, I could track them down for questioning as well. Maybe a few of them will tell me whether they remember anything screwy about working with Braden on cases involving digoxin. Most of us recall errors by our former professors, though we wouldn’t dare talk about it much at the time.” As he spoke, a sense of exhilaration swept through him. After nearly two weeks of holding his breath, helpless to do anything – the worst kind of agony for someone whose every instinct in a crisis is to act – he had something concrete to pursue.
“Wait a minute,” said Mark. “I’m the one to follow up on that. You and Kelly weren’t as discreet as you think.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the last thing you need is for one of your former classmates to put two and two together the way I did and nail you as the mystery man. Somebody is liable to do exactly that if you show undue interest in solving Kelly’s murder. I can just hear Chaz Braden suggesting the idea that his wife had realized she’d made a mistake having an affair, but you killed her when she tried to break it off. The NYPD would be back in the case and on your ass in a flash.”
“And I’ll say the mistake she made was to tell Braden she intended to leave him, and he killed her for it.”
“Terrific. The cops will throw you both in jail-”
“Mark, I’m doing it, and that’s that. The only hope I have of ever getting free of this mess before it destroys my whole fucking life is to catch the real killer, presumably Chaz Braden. The people we need to talk with at NYCH – classmates, nurses, and doctors – they’re all of the era when I did my training there. Chances are they’ll still consider me one of them and will open up, despite pressure from the Bradens on everyone to keep their mouths shut. Even the ones who think they don’t have any information, if I can get them reminiscing, might spill something useful.” He turned back to Kelly’s file. Nothing but a bunch of newspaper clippings remained. “Now what the hell are these?” he said, picking them up. Unaccustomed to being opposed or explaining his actions once he’d made up his mind, he considered the issue of who would do what closed. The sooner Mark realized that asking Earl Garnet to stay hands off and lay low was tantamount to telling him not to breathe, the better the two of them would work together.
“Articles about the good works of the Braden bunch,” Mark said in a quiet voice, the argumentative tone from seconds ago vanished.
Obviously a fast learner.
Earl skimmed through them as best he could, the faded cuttings not having reproduced well in the photocopier. They seemed unremarkable. “Mean anything to you?” he asked.
Mark shook his head. “Nothing, other than my father saw fit to keep them.”
Earl laid them aside. “That’s it?”
Mark didn’t answer immediately. He still seemed subdued by their little dustup.
Get over it, Earl thought, watching him take another sip of tea.
“Not quite,” he said, putting down his cup. “I want to know if Kelly ever talked to you about her relationship with her mother.”
“No. She was estranged from her parents, but never seemed to want to talk about it. Why?”
“Twice now Charles Braden has given the impression that he thinks Samantha had a pretty sick relationship with Kelly. At first I thought he was just being manipulative, subtly blowing smoke, trying to take the heat off his son by making us go after her, but seeing the woman’s behavior this afternoon, maybe she does bear looking at.”
An image of scars the size of ropes popped back into Earl’s mind. “After Kelly’s disappearance, what did your father say?”
“As I told you after the memorial service, only that she’d gone away.”
“Did you ever overhear him suggest Samantha might have harmed her?”
“No.”
“What about later, when there was no word from her? Any show of worry from him that maybe something had happened to her, and she didn’t run off after all? In other words, was he less blind than the rest of us?”
“There was no later, not for him. As I said before, after Kelly’s service, he died that September.”
Earl immediately regretted being so curt with the Q &A. “I’m so sorry, Mark.”
The younger man’s muscular physique seemed to shrink in on itself. “Yeah. I missed him a lot.”
Earl instinctively sensed it was his turn to encourage talk. But not by asking questions. Simply by listening.
Mark took another sip of tea. “My mother died two years earlier, meningitis – an accidental stick with a needle from an infected patient – so after his death, my aunt Margaret moved in to raise me.” He paused and smiled. “Crotchety, rough as sandpaper on the outside, but someone real special where it counted. I sure knew I was loved…”
As Mark talked about his childhood, he noticeably skirted how his father had died, and Earl didn’t ask. Losing both parents so close together had to have scarred the boy. Yet here he was, apparently tough-minded, certainly personable, and, Earl suspected, a dedicated doctor. He’d have to be, choosing to work solo in such an isolated place that held so many devastating memories for him. Or maybe keeping to himself was the legacy of what he’d been through.
“… I didn’t take over my father’s practice so much as resurrect it. Aunt Margaret, like my mother, had also been a nurse, so when he died, she advertised for a new doctor to come in and replace him. It never happened. His patients ended up going all the way into Saratoga Springs. But as my residency neared the finish, just about everybody in the community besieged me to pick up where he left off.” Mark leaned back in his chair and studied the bottom of his cup, momentarily lost in his own thoughts.
“And why did you?” Years of eliciting painful histories from reluctant patients also taught when a nonthreatening prompt or two would keep a person talking.
“Drawn to it, or maybe lured is the word. The shrinks would say I was probably looking for the dad I lost by trying to be like him. And for happiness. I had it there, until everything changed.”