He’d check when he got home. And forget using the cellular. Anybody determined to listen in on him could buy scanners for them. Shit! Had Nell been overheard saying she had new information about Kelly’s death?
Jesus, he thought, and gunned the car, heading for the nearest pay phone on the edge of town.
“What’s up?” asked Lucy.
“I just realized our phone conversations may no longer be private.” He explained why in the minutes it took to reach the booth.
To his relief, Nell picked up. “Nell, listen-”
“I know. You’re going to be late,” she said without letting him speak.
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes. But maybe we should rethink this.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re going to go somewhere else for dinner.”
“Are you crazy?”
“We’ll pick you up-”
“Just come on over. I can use the extra time to have a bath.” And she hung up.
He tried dialing her back.
Off the hook.
Not this nonsense again.
“Oh, God,” said Lucy when he told her.
As he drove, he figured out how to convince her she needed protection. Hell, maybe she’d even get off on the idea. And he’d call Dan. She might listen to him. But listen she would, because damned if he was going to put anyone else in danger. The entire day he’d agonized over the possibility that he’d gotten Victor killed by encouraging him to play computer detective. He remembered his singing at the piano only two nights ago, and the thought of performing an autopsy on him in the morning became unbearable.
Lucy rode staring out the window.
The quiet between them grew suffocating.
“You know, we could both go deaf in this kind of silence,” he said.
She gave a small, solitary chuckle. “Sorry. I was just thinking how sometimes in the camps, when I felt most overwhelmed and helpless, I’d take care of some small, personal matter, just to get the world back into perspective.”
“Such as?” He welcomed the chance to discuss anything that might get him out of his own head.
“Writing letters home worked best, saying things I hadn’t had the chance to say to the people I loved most. Once I did that with each of my brothers, Mom, and Dad, I usually felt better. At least, it seemed less daunting to face the big problems in front of me.”
“What would you write about?”
“Usually I’d pick something I really liked about the person I wrote to and let them know. And if there were any unresolved quarrels, I’d try to patch them up. That way if something happened to me, I wouldn’t have left precious words unsaid.”
“Sounds like a nice kind of letter to get.”
She grew quiet again, her gaze fixed on the dark blur of forest at the road’s edge. “Would you like me to write one to you?” she asked after a few seconds.
He grew very still. “Yes, I’d like that.”
“Because that’s what I’ve been doing, Mark. Sitting here composing a letter to you.”
“Really?” He drove the next mile without saying anything. “What’s in it?” he finally asked.
“Most I think you already know. How great a doctor I think you are. How much I adore working with your patients and being up here. And how worried I am that I’ve permanently ruined your opinion of me by coming to you under false pretenses.”
She was right. He did know all that. And her failure to be up front with him had stoked his suspicions of her. Once fooled, it was easy to wonder what else she might keep from him. And he still felt a woman as smart as she should have known better, especially about letting her personal issues place evidence at risk.
He was about to tell her so, then suggest they put it behind them and make the best of her time here, when she added, “I don’t know if I can ever win your trust back. I’d like to try, but I won’t stay if my being around makes you feel I compromised you, your practice, or your investigation. Just give the word, and I’ll leave in the morning.”
That surprised him. Her words sounded as if she’d been reading from a carefully written note, with the ring of an ultimatum. But he also knew something else. When this case ended, he’d have to come to grips with the fact his ineptness might have cost a man his life. Measured against that, whatever technical dings his reputation as coroner took in the process would no longer matter. Yet going back to his old existence, living alone in the house where he’d been born and practicing medicine in isolation, would be even lonelier than before, entirely because of her having been here. He realized this without having to think about it or put it into words. It came to him the way an animal senses its terrain is no longer hospitable, through a combination of instinct and intuition that reads a warning to move on and find more fertile ground, yet she’d catalyzed the process. All at once he felt cautious about how to handle the next few minutes with this strange, forceful, and disquieting woman who had entered his life.
“Basically I still think you need me around here, and more than just professionally,” she continued “You’re one lonely bugger.”
He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Any other revelations you’d care to reveal?”
“Yes.”
“Oh?”
She held her head a notch higher. The light from an oncoming car caught the fine lines of her nose and jaw, making him think she looked absolutely regal.
He held his breath, and waited for it.
“I don’t have a fiancé.”
He reacted with a mix of relief, pleasant surprise, and a self-congratulatory he’d-known-something-was-fishy-about-her-engagement-all-along celebration. Where there had been doubt and suspicion seconds before, there was the glimmer of a new possibility here. It had nothing to do with the grim business that seemed to be closing in on them, but a sea change occurred inside his head. As he sometimes did in a tense moment, he laughed. “Why the pretends?”
By the light of the dashboard he could see her face. She pursed her lips, but the corners played at breaking into a smile. “I heard you were a real womanizer and figured it was the best way to avoid trouble.”
“Womanizer? Who told you that?”
“The other residents who’d done a rotation with you. All your patients gabbed to them about the string of women you get up here, and how none of them stay. Let’s see, there was a theater director, a physiotherapist, and a veterinarian-”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Having met you, I personally think they must have been nuts.”
“Well, thank you for that at least. Residents should know better than to believe country gossip-”
“Oh, I don’t mean them. I’m talking about your lady friends, for not wanting to stay, silly.”
He still hadn’t come up with a reply to that when his cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Dr. Roper, you don’t know me,” a woman’s voice said. “I got your number from the book. You answered the phone when I called Victor’s house this morning.”
“Oh, yes. I recall your voice.” He heard her suck in her breath, but she said nothing. “May I know who I’m talking to?”
He listened to her breathing a few seconds. Finally, she said, “ I have some documents that belong to Victor. I didn’t know what had happened when I tried to reach him. I feel terrible, first the firing, and now…”
He slowed, and pulled over to the side of the road. “Let me call you back-”
“No! I don’t want anyone to know who I am.”
He didn’t want to lose her again.
“Then let me give you another number where to reach me.” He’d take the call at Nell’s. She and Lucy could wait in the Jeep. “In about ten minutes?”
“No. I’m freezing my buns off as it is in a pay phone.”
Oh, God. He’d have to risk being overheard. As long as she didn’t say her name, at least she’d be safe. “What documents?” He motioned Lucy to slide over and listen with him. She responded immediately, a puzzled expression on her face.