I groaned. “Poor you.”
“Keeps me off the streets. And speaking of off the streets and out of trouble, how about you, Hannah? Last time I heard, you’d been in some sort of boating accident and two people had drowned.”
“Too true, I’m afraid.” I thought about those desperate moments last spring when someone I’d grown to care about had betrayed me, nearly costing Connie and me our lives.
The ring of another telephone on her end filled the awkward silence. “Sorry.”
“Do you need to get that?”
“No. I’m not officially here. Say,” she chirped in a let’s-change-the-subject tone of voice, “what do you want me to do with this AMA directory I’ve lugged all the way over to the phone?”
I could picture Penny, standing at the waist-high desk with the receiver tucked between her ear and shoulder, her left earring unclipped and resting on the counter in front of her. “I’d like you to look up somebody for me, a Doctor Diane Sturges.”
“Sure.” I heard pages flipping. “Russell, Stanley, Sturges. Diane, did you say?”
“Yup.”
“Got a Charles Sturges, but no Diane.”
Feeling foolish, I remembered what Mother had said about Diane not being a real doctor. “How about a Doctor Mark Voorhis?”
“OK. Underwood, Victor… here we are, Voorhis. He graduated from John Hopkins in sixty-one, did residencies in Oklahoma and St. Louis. It lists an office address in Baltimore.” She rattled it off, but I didn’t need to write it down. It was the Greenspring Center where I had taken Julie.
But I was interested in the time before Baltimore. He must have practiced somewhere. “Where did he go after his residency?”
“Doesn’t say. There’s nothing between St. Louis and his present location in Baltimore.”
“Damn.”
“Wait a minute.” The receiver banged in my ear and I could hear Penny shoving books in and out on the metal shelves. In a minute she was back. “We’re in luck. He’s gotten himself listed in Who’s Who. Got a pencil? Here we go. Voorhis. Between sixty-nine and seventy-nine he was practicing at the Morgan Clinic in Waterville, Illinois. The next year, he shows up in Baltimore, practicing in pediatrics. Looks like he’s been there ever since.”
I did a quick calculation. Diane would have been about thirteen when he picked up sticks and headed east. “I wonder why he left Illinois?”
“Beyond the scope of this book, dah’link.”
“Do you suppose Waterville has a newspaper I could check?”
“Hold on a sec.” I heard the thud of the heavy book closing before I got an earful of the white noise that told me that Penny had put me on hold. While I waited, I pulled out Paul’s Rand McNally road atlas and looked up Waterville, a little town off I-74 about halfway between Bloomington and Peoria. I fiddled with my notes and the pages from Dr. Sturges’s appointment book, making experimental probes under my bandages with an index finger in an attempt to quell the itch. I’d found a particularly satisfying spot and was scratching away when Penny came back on the line. “Hannah? I’m looking at the Nexis listing. There’s the Waterville Gazette, but it’s only been online since ninety-two.”
“Rats.”
“But I did a quick check, and they’ve got the microfilm at the Library of Congress.”
Great. The Library of Congress. Usually the thirty-five-mile drive between Annapolis and Capitol Hill wouldn’t have fazed me. But for the next several weeks of my recuperation, that microfilm might as well have been on the moon. “Say, Pen, in light of my present delicate condition, I don’t suppose you could…” I ventured.
“Sorry, Han, but why do you think I’m burning the proverbial midnight oil? I’m outahere on the red-eye special tonight. You know how hard it is for Ken and me to get our schedules together. I finally talked him into a couple of weeks at my brother’s place in Tahoe.”
“Lucky you,” I said, but truthfully, I couldn’t think of anything I’d like doing less than skiing. My son-in-law, Dante, had talked me into taking a skiing lesson while I was out in Colorado meeting my new granddaughter. After tumbling downhill in a pinwheel of skis and limbs and nearly being beheaded by a novice on his virgin Boogie board run, I didn’t take much to the sport. I maintain that one should grab a bathing suit and head Caribbean-ward in winter. I thought about my new breast quietly taking root under the bandages. Maybe next year.
I thanked Penny profusely and was about to hang up when I remembered what had started me thinking about Voorhis’s background in the first place. “Penny, do me one more favor. Does Who’s Who say anything about a wife?”
Penny sighed heavily. “Now you tell me. I just closed that book, Hannah.”
“I’ll be forever in your debt.”
Pages rustled. “It says he married a Fiona Shenker in 1965.”
I scribbled the name down.
“And someone named Loraine Hudson in 1986.”
“Thanks again, Pen.”
“Anything else you want to know? His mother? Father? Shoe size?”
I chuckled. “No, I think that’s it. You’re the best!”
I hung up and pouted. It would be weeks before I’d be well enough to drive into D.C. and look at that microfilm. I played another game of solitaire, lost, then drummed my fingers on the mouse pad. I was not noted for my patience. I could just hear Mother say, “Hold your horses, Hannah. Those microfilms aren’t going anywhere.” She’d be right, of course. Mother was usually right. She would have warned me about going against doctor’s orders and walking down the stairs, and she’d have been right about that, too. I sat in my chair, longing for my pain pills, and waited for Paul to return home and rescue me.
chapter 18
When Mark Voorhis came up squeaky clean with Maryland Q and A, I wasn’t surprised. With Voorhis’s spotless reputation and charming bedside manner, which I had experienced firsthand, I hadn’t really expected Paul to uncover any dirt about the pediatrician. But Diane was another matter. I was sure that her controversial techniques must have disagreed with somebody, so it was a surprise when she, too, came up with a clean bill of health. Paul didn’t find her listed with Maryland Q and A, of course, since she wasn’t an M.D., but he’d thought to check the state licensing boards. None was aware of any complaints against the woman.
I thought about what Stephanie had told me about her final session with Diane. I wondered what Stephanie had said that upset the therapist enough to cut the session short. Stephanie had been talking about her fear of memories coming back full-blown. What had Diane remembered? Something terrible in her own past? I was convinced that the answer lay in Waterville, Illinois.
Paul needed only minimal arm-twisting before agreeing to go to the Library of Congress to look through the microfilm of the Waterville Gazette. “Who am I this time?” he teased. “Marta or Lewis?”
“I’m rather partial to Lewis,” I said.
Paul tipped my chin up and kissed me. “You know who gets my vote?”
“Who?”
“Jimmy Stewart.”
“Why Jimmy Stewart?”
“Because in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, old Jimmy had Grace Kelly do his legwork.”
“Get out of here!” I bopped him over the head with my pillow.
The rest of the day crawled by. At one o’clock I made the first of my twice-daily calls to Mother in the hospital and we compared health notes. Lately she had been making an effort to sound chipper when we talked, but I could tell it was all an act. Even though I kept our conversations short, toward the end her voice would fade and she’d hand the phone off to Dad, who rarely left her side. I’d ask the inevitable-how’s she doing-and we’d have strained, one-sided conversations where he’d try to answer my questions without upsetting Mother, who, knowing her, would be pretending not to listen.