11:45 A.M.
“Telephone, Dr. Garnet,” said a clerk in the nursing station, her eyes scanning his face. “Should I take a message?”
Her politeness disconcerted him. Everyone in the department had been treating him with kid gloves all morning. Obviously they all knew something was wrong. Normally that same clerk would stack up seven calls on hold, expecting him to take every one of them pronto, and he would have thrived on it.
He took the receiver from her. “Dr. Garnet speaking.”
“Earl! It’s Ronda. Did you read in the Herald that they found the body of that medical student you and my sister used to hang out with at NYCU, the one who disappeared?”
New York City University had been where he attended medical school.
He hesitated. “Yeah. I saw that this morning. A real shock.”
“Must be. From what Melanie has told me about those times, I know the three of you were good friends.”
“That we were.”
“Better you be forewarned. The police will probably want to talk to everyone who knew her.”
Exactly what he’d already figured, but hearing someone else say it made the squeeze he’d been feeling in his stomach cinch tighter. “Probably. I appreciate the heads-up. Did you reach Melanie?”
“I tried to call, but the hospital couldn’t track her down. I left a message with her answering service. I’m going to be in Peds all day, so she’ll be able to reach me.”
“Well, thanks, Ronda.”
The call gave him a new worry. Not about Ronda. They’d been friends for years, ever since Melanie told him to look up her kid sister when he moved to Buffalo to join the staff at St. Paul’s. At the time Ronda had been starting her own specialty training in pediatrics. Now, twenty-four years later, she was married, had two kids, and was a veteran in her field. He and Janet had often enjoyed the company of Ronda and her husband during hospital functions. At the St. Paul’s annual picnic, her kids played with Brendan.
No, the problem lay in who else Melanie Collins might have gossiped to about Kelly McShane and him being such “good friends.” After all the new headlines, someone in their class, however oblivious of him and Kelly in 1978, might suddenly suspect the truth if unintentionally prompted by Melanie now. The police would be investigating murder this time, not a disappearance, and that was likely to make everyone they talked to turn amateur detective.
“Dr. Garnet, there’s another call for you on line three. It’s the police.”
“What?” His voice sounded overly loud.
The clerk frowned at him. “They found the body of a teenage boy in a crack house on the east side. It’s a DOA, but they want to know if we can make it official and do the paperwork. It’s our district.”
He felt the band around his stomach release a few notches. “Better we don’t do a slough,” he said. “I’ll handle it myself.”
Getting lost in an hour’s worth of forms and someone else’s heartbreak was just the diversion he needed.
“But I could tell them to bother another hospital-”
“I said I’d do it!”
The young woman’s jaw dropped.
Immediately he regretted having snapped at her. “Sorry,” he muttered, retreating into the hallway.
Keep hold of yourself, Garnet. Or when the police did come for him, his entire staff would say, “Well, he has been acting on edge lately.”
Chapter 3
That same day, Tuesday, November 6, 1:00 P.M.
Hampton Junction
Running was a drug to Mark.
Miss a day, he felt lousy.
Two, downright depressed.
Three, and he was convinced he had cancer.
He always followed the same route, turning left onto the road at the foot of his driveway, following it downhill a few miles toward town to loosen up, then going west on Route 4, a winding uphill grind that led farther into the mountains. How far he took it depended on the time he had and the caliber of tension he was trying to work off. Practicing medicine in a small town had different pressures than those of urban centers, but they were every bit as weighty.
This afternoon a heavy fog had settled into the valley. The tiny droplets it left on his face as he ran felt pleasantly cool, but it rendered the road, the forest, and anything else more than thirty feet away invisible, isolating him in a gray sphere of vague shapes. Yet as he passed through a corridor of towering maples and white birches, their foliage formed a canopy of iridescent orange and gold that floated above him like a gaily woven tapestry of silk. The effect became hallucinatory, and he inhaled deeply while he ran, as if to breathe in the color. The moist air filled his nostrils with the fresh smell of wet leaves, an aroma he found every bit as welcoming as the familiar scent of polished wood that greeted him whenever he entered the house he had grown up in.
Hampton Junction, Saratoga County, in the southern Adirondacks, was his home. An odd little town, its houses, businesses, and two churches stood scattered in a disorganized pattern as if the founders had thrown a handful of jacks into the hills, and wherever one landed, somebody built something. It continued to grow in an equally haphazard fashion. The official population of 2,985 – the number according to the sign on the highway – hadn’t changed since he was a kid. “No one ever seems to die in Hampton Junction without someone being born,” went the joke among locals. In truth, nobody could keep track of the population anymore. With the surrounding countryside so full of chalets, the count for the whole area could swell to twenty thousand on a weekend, then shrink back to the core group on Monday.
He grew up here. His love of the outdoor life was one of the reasons he’d returned after med school. He avidly hiked, kayaked, or skied whenever possible, thriving on the endless sweep of mountain wilderness that surrounded him. The hills and peaks, having engraved themselves on his psyche, looked as right to his eye as their rocky surfaces felt to the palms of his hands when he climbed them. Thick deciduous forests in summer. Massive, blue-green conifers rich with growth the year round. The panoply broken only by tumbling mountain streams, surging rivers, and cold lakes. He found it a place of powerful beauty and awe-inspiring solace.
Yet these mountains weren’t for everybody. Too much of them for too long at the wrong time, and a person with a troubled mind could end up so dwarfed by the vastness, so engulfed by the silence, and so hemmed in by the press of the forests that he panicked. That was the reason he’d forced Dan to take the diving course in Hawaii when they did three and a half years ago, just about six months after Dan’s wife had left him. Heartbroken though not showing it, no kids, and working twenty-four/seven, but still, to Mark’s eyes at least, a lost soul, Dan started to keep a wary eye on the surrounding hills. Mark knew he desperately needed the break. Sensory deprivation, isolation psychosis, fractured self-image – the terminology for it in textbooks was endless. “Bushed,” the locals called it.
Mark took pride in never having had to wrestle this demon. His secret – conquer and reconquer the wilderness – put the curve of his Telemark turn or the imprint of his boots on it before it ever got to him. He also got out regularly, choosing medical conferences in places that allowed him to feast on theater, dive in warm blue water with limitless visibility, or climb above the tree line where nothing surrounded him but open space.
The pitch of the road steepened, and his legs started to burn. Normally he welcomed the challenge and usually increased his pace at this point, wanting to push himself to the maximum. Today he glanced at his watch and started back. He and Dan were to meet with a cold-case specialist from the NYPD in less than an hour. But with the ease of his descent, the melancholy that he’d been trying to work off returned.