“At least for the next few days,” Jean said, intent on being as vague as possible. “What about you?”
“I’ll stay till Friday morning, then I must get back. I have patients I need to see. Fortunately I had shows already taped, but now I can’t delay work on the new ones. Anyhow, as of Friday my room has been reserved by someone attending the lightbulb convention, or whatever it is.”
“One hundred top sales reps are being honored,” Jean told him.
“More honorees,” Mark said. “I hope all one hundred make it home safely. I assume you’re going to respond to President Downes’ plea to be at his place for cocktails and a photo shoot tonight.”
“I don’t know a thing about it,” Jean protested.
“He’s probably left a message on your phone. It shouldn’t take too long. From what Downes said, he wanted to make it a dinner, but Carter and Gordon already have dinner plans. Actually, I do, too. My father wants me to have dinner with him again.”
“Then I guess your father answered the questions you said you were going to ask him,” Jean suggested.
“Yes, he did. Jeannie, you know half the story. You deserve to hear the rest of it. My brother, Dennis, died a month after he graduated from Stonecroft. He was supposed to start Yale in the fall.”
“I know about the accident,” Jean said.
“You know something about the accident,” Mark corrected. “I had just finished the eighth grade at St. Thomas and was starting at Stonecroft in September. My parents gave Dennis a convertible for his graduation. You probably didn’t know him, but he excelled in everything. He was number one in his class, the captain of the baseball team, the president of the student council, great-looking and funny, and a genuinely nice guy. After four miscarriages my mother had managed to produce the golden child.”
“Which was hard for you to compete with, I would think,” Jean observed.
“I know people believe that, but actually, Dennis was great to me. He was my big brother. Talk about hero worship.”
It seemed to Jean that Mark was talking more to himself than to her. “He played tennis with me. He taught me how to play golf. He took me for rides in that convertible, and then, because I bugged him so much, he taught me how to drive it.”
“But you couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen,” Jean said.
“I was thirteen. Oh, I never drove on the street, of course, and he was always in the car with me. Our house has quite a bit of property. The afternoon of the accident, I had been pestering Dennis all day for a ride. Finally, around four o’clock, he tossed me the keys and said, ‘Okay, okay, get in the car. I’ll be right there.’
“I was sitting, waiting for him, counting the minutes till he got in so I could be the hotshot driving the convertible. Then a couple of his friends showed up, and Dennis told me he was going to shoot some baskets with them. ‘I promise you’ll have your chance in an hour or so,’ he said. Then he called out, ‘Turn off the engine and be sure to put on the parking brake.’
“I was disappointed, and I was mad. I slammed into the house. My mother was in the kitchen. I told her that I’d be glad if Dennis’ car slid down the hill and crashed into the fence. Forty minutes later it did slide down the hill. The basketball net was at the base of the driveway. The other guys got out of the way. Dennis didn’t.”
“Mark, you’re the psychiatrist. You have to know that it wasn’t your fault.”
The waiter was back with the sandwiches and coffee. Mark took a bite of his sandwich and sipped the coffee. It was obvious to Jean that he was struggling to keep his emotions in check. “Intellectually, yes, but neither of my parents was ever the same toward me after that. Dennis was the Christ child in my mother’s eyes. I can understand that. He had everything. He was so gifted. I heard her tell my father that she was sure I had deliberately left the brake off, not to deliberately hurt Dennis but hoping to pay him back for disappointing me.”
“What did your father say?”
“It’s what he didn’t say. I expected him to defend me, but he didn’t. Then some kid told me that my mother had said that if God wanted one of her boys, why did it have to be Dennis?”
“I heard that story,” Jean admitted.
“You grew up wanting to get away from your parents, Jean, and so did I. I always felt we were kindred spirits. We both threw ourselves into academics and kept our mouths shut. Do you see your parents much?”
“My father lives in Hawaii. I visited him there last year. He has a lady friend who’s quite nice, but he proclaims from the rooftops that one marriage cured him of ever walking down the aisle again. I spent a few days around Christmas with my mother, who seems genuinely happy now. She and her husband have visited me a few times. I admit that it does make me gag a bit to see the two of them holding hands and nuzzling each other, when I think of how she behaved with my father. I guess I’m over resenting them, except for the fact that at age eighteen I didn’t think I could turn to them for help.”
“My mother died when I was in medical school,” Mark said. “I wasn’t told that she’d had a heart attack and was dying. I would have jumped on a plane and come back to say good-bye to her. But she didn’t ask for me. In fact, she said she didn’t want to see me. It felt like the final rejection. I didn’t attend the funeral. After that I never came home again, and my father and I have been on the outs for fourteen years.” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I decided to be a psychiatrist. ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ I’m still trying.”
“What were the questions you asked your father? You told me he answered them.”
“The first one was why he didn’t send for me when my mother was dying.”
Jean wrapped both hands around the coffee cup and picked it up. “What was his answer?”
“He told me that my mother had become delusional. Shortly before she had the heart attack, she had gone to a psychic who told her that her younger son had deliberately released the brake because he was jealous of his brother and wanted to hurt him. Mother had always believed in the possibility that I had wanted to damage Dennis’ car, but the psychic put her over the edge. That may even have brought on the heart attack. Want to hear the other question that I asked my father?”
Jean nodded.
“My mother couldn’t stand any kind of drinking, and my father liked to have a drink in the late afternoon. He’d sneak into the garage where he kept some booze hidden on the shelf behind the paint cans, or he’d pretend to be cleaning the inside of his car and have a little cocktail party of his own. Sometimes he’d sit in Dennis’ car and have his nip. I know I left that brake on. I know Dennis didn’t go near the car. He was playing basketball with his friends. Certainly my mother wouldn’t get into the convertible. I asked my father if he had sat in Dennis’ car that afternoon, having his couple of scotches, and if so, didn’t he think it was possible he might have released that brake accidentally?”
“What did he say?”
“He admitted that he was in the car and got out of it only a minute or so before it rolled down the hill. He never had the courage to tell my mother, not even when that psychic poisoned her mind about me.”
“Why do you think he admitted it now?”
“I was walking around town the other night, thinking of how people go through life with unresolved conflicts. My appointment book is filled with patients who are living examples of that. When I saw my father’s car in the driveway—that same driveway, incidentally—I decided to go in and, after fourteen years of silence, have it out with him.”
“You saw him last night, and you’re seeing him again tonight. Does that mean a reconciliation?”
“He’s going to be eighty years old soon, Jean, and he’s not well. He’s been living a lie for twenty-five years. He’s almost pathetic, talking about how he wants to make it up to me. Of course he can’t, but maybe seeing him will help me understand and put it behind me. He’s right about the fact that if my mother knew he had been drinking in the car and had
caused the accident, she would have gotten rid of him that same day.”
“Instead, on an emotional level she withdrew from you.”
“Which, in turn, contributed to the total sense of inadequacy and failure that I remember feeling at Stonecroft. I tried to be like Dennis, but I certainly wasn’t as good-looking. I wasn’t an athlete, and I wasn’t a leader. The only time I felt any sense of camaraderie was when some of us worked a job together in the evenings our senior year. We’d go out afterward and have a pizza. Perhaps the good part is that I learned compassion for kids who have it tough, and as an adult I have tried to make their paths a little smoother.”
“According to what I hear, you’re doing a good job of it.”
“I hope so. The producers want to move the show to New York, and I’ve been asked to join the staff of New York Hospital. I think I’m ready to make the change.”
“A new beginning?” Jean asked.
“Exactly—where what can’t be forgiven or forgotten may at least be relegated to the past.” He raised his coffee cup. “Shall we drink to that, Jeannie?”
“Yes, of course.” As badly as I was hurt, it was worse for you, Mark, she thought. My parents were too busy hating each other to understand what they were doing to me. Your parents let you know they preferred your brother, and then your father deliberately let your mother believe the one thing that she could never forgive you for. What did that do to your soul?
Her instinct was to reach across the table and lay her hand on his, the same gesture with which he had comforted her yesterday. But something held her back. She simply could not trust him. Then she realized she wanted to pick up on something he had just said. “Mark, what was the evening job you worked at during senior year?”
“I was with the office clean-up crew in a building that has burned down since then. Jack Emerson’s father got a bunch of us jobs there. I guess you weren’t around when we were joking about it the other night. Every one of the guys who is an honoree pushed a broom or emptied wastebaskets over there.”
“All of you?” Jean asked. “Carter and Gordon and Robby and you?”
“That’s right. Oh, and one more. Joel Nieman, a.k.a. Romeo. We all worked with Jack. Don’t forget, we were the ones who didn’t have to practice for games or travel with teams. We were perfect for that job.” He paused. “Wait a minute. You should know that building, Jean. You were Dr. Connors’ patient.”
Jean felt her body turn icy. “I didn’t tell you that, Mark.”
“You must have. How else would I have known it?”
How else, indeed? Jean wondered as she pushed her chair back. “Mark, I have a few phone calls to return. Do you mind if I don’t wait while you get the check?”
74
Ms. Farris was in the studio when Jake returned to school. “How’d you make out, Jake?” she asked as she watched him struggle to close the door while he carefully juggled the heavy camera, moving it off his shoulder and onto the desk.
“It was an adventure, Jill,” Jake admitted. “I mean Ms. Farris,” he quickly amended. “I decided to do a chronological womb-to-the-present account of Laura Wilcox. I got a great long shot of St. Thomas of Canterbury Church, and as luck would have it, there was a baby carriage outside. I mean a real baby carriage, not one of those strollers or rollers or whatever they stick kids in these days.”
He was taking his recorder out of his pocket as he took off his coat. “Freezing out there,” he complained, “but at least the police station was warm.”
“The police station, Jake?” Jill Farris asked cautiously.
“Uh-huh. But let me explain in chronological order. After the church, I got some background pictures, to give people who don’t live here a sense of the community. I realize I’m doing this story for the Gazette, but I fully expect it to be picked up by larger publications and to find a wider audience.”
“I see. Jake, I don’t want to rush you, but I was just leaving.”
“This will only take a minute. Then I photographed Laura’s second house, the McMansion. It’s quite impressive if you like that sort of tacky grandeur. It has a big front yard, and whoever lives there now has stuck a few Grecian statues on the lawn. In my opinion they look pretentious, but it will make readers understand that Laura did not have a ‘surprise lunch’ childhood.”
“ ‘Surprise lunch’ childhood?” Jill Farris asked, bewildered.
“Let me explain. My grandfather told me about a comedian named Sam Levenson who said his family was so poor that his mother bought cans off a pushcart for two cents each. They were that cheap because the labels had fallen off, and nobody knew what was inside them. She’d tell her kids that they were having a ‘surprise lunch.’ They never knew what they were going to eat. Anyhow, the pictures of Laura’s second house reflect a solid middle-class, even slightly upper-middle-class upbringing.”
Jake’s expression darkened. “After I took some long shots of the houses surrounding Laura’s former home, I drove across town to Mountain Road where she had lived for the first sixteen years of her life. It’s a very pleasant street, and, frankly, the house is more to my taste than the one with the Grecian statues. Anyhow, I’d barely begun to shoot when a squad car pulled up and a most aggressive policeman wanted to know what I thought I was doing. When I explained that I was exercising my right as a private citizen to take photographs in the street, he invited me to get in his squad car, and he drove me to the station house.”
“He arrested you, Jake?” Jill Farris exclaimed.
“No, ma’am. Not exactly. The captain questioned me, and since I felt I had been of valuable service to Investigator Deegan when I alerted him that Laura Wilcox sounded extremely nervous when she called to ask the hotel to hold her room, I felt I had the right to explain to the captain that I was a special assistant to Mr. Deegan in the investigation of Laura’s disappearance.”
I’m going to miss this kid when he graduates, Jill Farris thought. She decided that it wouldn’t hurt to be a few minutes late for her appointment at the dentist. “Did the captain believe you, Jake?” she asked.
“He called Mr. Deegan, who not only did not back me up but suggested that the captain should toss me in jail and then lose the key.” Jake looked hard at his teacher. “It’s not funny, Ms. Farris. I feel Mr. Deegan broke a trust. The captain, as it turns out, was much more sympathetic. He was even kind enough to say that I could finish my photos tomorrow, since I got to take only a few pictures of the house on Mountain Road. He did warn me that I’d better not trespass on anyone’s property. I’m going to develop today’s film now, and with your permission, I’ll sign the camera out again tomorrow and finish my shoot.”
“That’ll be fine, Jake, but remember, those older cameras aren’t being made anymore. Don’t let anything happen to it, or I’ll be the one in trouble, not you. Now, I’ve got to run.”
“I’ll guard it with my life,” Jake called after her. I mean it, he thought as he rewound the roll of film and removed it from the camera. But even though the captain warned me not to set foot on anyone’s property, for the sake of getting proper coverage for my story, I have to commit an act of civil disobedience, he told himself. I intend to get pictures of the back of Laura’s house on Mountain Road. Since no one is living there, I’m sure I won’t be noticed.
He went into the darkroom and began developing the pictures, one of his favorite tasks. He found it thrilling and creative to watch people and objects begin to emerge from the negatives. One by one he clipped the prints on a clothesline to dry, then got out his magnifying glass and studied them carefully. They were all good—and he didn’t mind saying so himself—but the single shot he’d been able to take of Laura’s house on Mountain Road before the cop showed up was the most interesting of the lot.
There’s something about that house, Jake thought. It makes me want to put my head under the covers and hide. What is it? Everything is in shipshape condition. Maybe that’s it. It’s too neat. Then he peered closer. It’s the sha
des, he thought triumphantly. The ones in the bedroom at the end of the house aren’t the same as the others. In the picture they come through a lot darker. I didn’t notice that when I was shooting, but the sun was pretty bright then. He whistled. Wait a minute. When I looked up the Karen Sommers story on the Internet, I think I remember that she was murdered in the corner bedroom, on the right-hand side of the house. I remember a picture of the crime scene with those windows circled.
Why not show a separate picture of just those two windows in my story? he asked himself. I could point out that there is a dark aura surrounding the fatal room where one young woman was murdered and where Laura slept for sixteen years. It would give it a nice, eerie little touch.
To his disappointment the enlargement of the photograph revealed that the difference in color was probably caused by interior dark shades that had been drawn behind the decorative ones visible from the street.
Or should I be disappointed? Jake asked himself. Suppose someone is staying there who doesn’t want a light to show? It would be a great place to hide. The house has been renovated. There’s furniture on the porch, so I assume it’s furnished. No one lives there. Who bought it anyhow? Wouldn’t it be a scream if Laura Wilcox owns her old house and is holed up there now with Robby Brent?
It’s not the dumbest hunch I’ve ever had, he decided. Should I bounce it off Mr. Deegan? he asked himself.
The heck I will, he decided. It’s probably a crazy idea, but if there’s anything to it, it’s my story. Deegan told the captain to toss me in jail. Now he can just go fly a kite. He gets no more help from me.
75
Sam’s visit to Dorothy Connors’ home lasted exactly the fifteen minutes he had promised her. When he saw how infirm she was, he proceeded gently, and he quickly surmised that the concern she had shown was for her late husband’s reputation. Knowing that made it easier for him to get to the point.