My head reeled. I tried to imagine what I would do if I caught Paul fondling Emily. I felt like flying across the sanctuary and tearing this creep’s face off with my bare hands, slowly, strip by painful strip.
“Your wife found out about it, didn’t she?”
His silver eyebrows nearly met. “My wife?”
“The first Mrs. Voorhis. She couldn’t live with that knowledge, could she?”
“What do you know about that?”
“I can read old newspapers, Dr. Voorhis. I know about the suicide note.”
Suddenly I began to panic. What if the lectern mike wasn’t patched in? What if Lionel had actually thrown the switch when he was showing it to us earlier? What if I had turned it off instead of on? I would have to lure the doctor closer to the microphone in the pulpit.
I stepped out from behind the security of the lectern feeling small and vulnerable. Dr. Voorhis stood only twenty feet away.
“You don’t know anything, Mrs. Ives. My wife was deranged. That note you refer to was full of delusional crap.”
“If it was all crap, why did you leave Waterville?”
“Small town. Smaller minds. There were some who believed the lies Fiona told about Diane and me. She was a disturbed woman, Mrs. Ives. Very disturbed.” He took another step in my direction and I retreated, inching toward the pulpit as casually as I could without alarming him.
“But Diane came to believe it, too, didn’t she, Dr. Voorhis?”
Since our conversation began, the doctor’s attention had never wavered from my face, but he stared at me then with frightening intensity. “It’s a dangerous thing when a doctor wanders down a pseudoscientific path and suddenly begins to believe all the garbage she’s been peddling.”
“Tell me, what happened the afternoon she died?”
We stood face-to-face, separated only by the three steps that led from the sanctuary up to the chancel. “She said she had something important to ask me.” He smiled, remembering. “Diane was always asking me for advice about something-taxes, investments. So when I got to her office I was completely blindsided. To put it simply, she attacked me. She held me responsible for her mother’s suicide, for having to leave her friends in Waterville.” He stroked his tie. “Seems I’d ruined her life. Balls! She was a successful student because of me. She became a respected therapist because of me!”
“Why did you kill her?”
He thrust a hand into his jacket pocket, and I held my breath. Did he have a gun?
“I didn’t mean to,” he said at last. “It was an accident. Diane threatened to ruin my career. I tried to talk sense into her, of course, but I’d never seen such hate! After all I’d done for my daughter, she was out to ruin me.” He touched a spot on his cheek, as if it were still tender from a blow. “She came at me, swinging with both fists. Then she started screaming. She was hysterical. I just wanted to calm her down, for Christ’s sake. Somehow we ended up on the balcony… I’m not sure what happened next. She just tumbled over the railing.” Voorhis’s dark wool suit, so well-tailored only minutes before, suddenly didn’t seem to fit correctly. “I loved her so much…”
“You have a curious way of showing it.”
“Ah, yes. The abuse. That’s a laugh!” He paused, one hand still in the pocket of his jacket. “She started it, you know. When she was three. She loved to take a bath with her daddy. Then when she was five, she kept crawling into my bed, begging for a back rub. At first it was just cuddling. But then…” He lounged against the first pew, lost in thought. “Such a sexy little girl. So provocative, I couldn’t help myself; no man could. You should have seen how she dressed in junior high-those skintight miniskirts and low-cut tank tops. Half the time she didn’t even wear a bra. I begged Fiona to do something about the way Diane dressed, but she didn’t. Oh, Diane knew what she was doing, all right.”
“That is sexual abuse,” I insisted. “No matter what her age, no matter what your relationship with her was, you had all the power. And if you used that power to pressure your daughter into a sexual relationship, your wife was right. Diane was being abused.”
I studied his face, searching it for signs of understanding. “Dr. Voorhis, even if Diane walked into your bedroom stark naked and came on to you, as a responsible adult you should have said, ‘Whoa. We’ve got a problem here.’ You were her father! Why didn’t you get her some professional help?”
He looked confused. “One night not long after Diane turned fourteen, she asked me to stop. And I did. It was over.”
That may have settled the matter for him, but not for me. “But, Dr. Voorhis…”
He advanced. “How can I make you understand?”
I retreated. I raised my hand as if to steady myself against the pulpit, but I was carefully feeling around for the microphone cord. If Voorhis got any closer, I planned to grab the microphone and scream the church down. I know it sounds insane under the circumstances, but I almost smiled, imagining Lionel sitting down below in his headphones, fiddling with his dials. I would rupture his eardrums for sure.
“That day in her office, she said she hoped I’d get AIDS or Alzheimer’s disease. She told me she’d dance on my grave the day I died.” Tears glistened in his eyes and he seemed somewhere far away. “She was Daddy’s special little girl.”
My searching fingers found the microphone cord, and as I began to curl them around it, Dr. Voorhis suddenly snapped to attention and took another step toward me. “As much as I loved her, I couldn’t afford to have this become public knowledge.”
I stalled for time. He was so close that I could tell that the paisley swirls on his tie were actually multicolored fish. “You got away with it before, in Waterville,” I said. “You could get away with it again.”
“Ah, but that was a very different time and place, Mrs. Ives. Very different. Nowadays, a man can be branded guilty of sexual abuse on the flimsiest of evidence-branded with an indelible A, if you will, that all the evidence to the contrary cannot erase. No, I can’t afford to have even a hint of this known. I work with children, Mrs. Ives. It would ruin me.”
His voice was steady and so calm that I was totally unprepared for what came next. Voorhis’s arm shot out and circled my neck in a dangerous embrace, slamming my forehead against his chest. I managed to grab the microphone cord, but it dangled loosely from my hand.
Voorhis reached around me with his left hand. I felt it slide slowly, almost sensuously down my arm until his hand reached mine and he was able to prize the microphone from my fingers. His arm tightened around my neck, like a vise, and my nose was squashed flat against his tie. I could barely breathe, let alone scream.
A sudden jerk nearly snapped my neck. Voorhis had yanked the microphone cord from its socket. Seconds later, he looped the cord around my neck and was using both hands, those hands that should have been dedicated to healing, to draw the cord tight. I couldn’t speak, swallow, scream, or breathe. I clawed at the ever-tightening cord, but couldn’t get my fingers under it.
I aimed a knee at his groin. A yelp told me I’d made contact with the target, but the pressure around my neck only increased. Voorhis’s face, inches from my own, remained impassive. Except for a thin sheen of sweat across his brow, he could have been preparing his taxes or waiting in traffic for a light to change. The space behind my eyes turned red with the pulsing blood inside my head, then black, as waves of darkness washed over me. My knees buckled.
When you’re dying, they say your life passes before your eyes. Not so. My last thought before I slipped into unconsciousness was Listerine. His breath smells of Listerine. Imagine! Remembering to use a mouthwash before setting out to kill somebody.