Mortal Remains Read online

  “You killed her! I know you did. I’ve known it for twenty-seven years.” Samantha’s anger brimmed into tears, a few of which coursed down her cheeks, leaving faint tracks in her makeup.

  Chaz went white.

  Walter came running up and tried to take her by the elbow. “Samantha, for the love of God!”

  She shoved her husband’s hand away and looked at him, her stare fierce, her tears stopping as quickly as they’d come. “This man murdered our Kelly, I know he did. And he has to be brought to justice. He has to!”

  As Samantha verged on the edge of hysterics, Mark realized just how unsteady, even volatile her emotions were.

  While everyone nearby remained too shocked to move, her husband managed to slip an arm around her shoulders, whisper into her ear, and begin to walk her to the exit.

  Suddenly Braden Senior was at his son’s side.

  “Unfortunate dear,” he said loud enough for all to hear. “Overwrought, understandably.” Once Walter McShane had led his wife out of earshot, Charles turned to the rest of the group, and added, “It’s tragic, but the woman’s sadly unstable. Of course she’s distraught, but has always been far too emotionally charged and changeable. Bad for Kelly, bad for the marriage. Sorry for the disruption, but I’m sure I can count on your understanding.”

  The sheer unflappability of the man took Mark’s breath away, until he noticed Braden’s right fist was clenched so tightly that the knuckles were white.

  Chaz eyed the remnants of his drink and placed it untouched back on the bar. The color still hadn’t returned to his face. But when he saw Mark looking at him, he responded with an angry glare.

  The embarrassed silence slowly dissolved as people resumed their conversations in small groups.

  Mark turned to resume his own conversation with Earl and Janet, but saw them headed for the door.

  On impulse he followed at a discreet distance, not at all sure what he would do.

  “So tell me about Kelly,” Janet said, settling back in her chair.

  Earl paused with his fork halfway to his mouth.

  He and Janet sat across from each other at a table by one of the big windows in the main dining room of the Plaza Hotel. It offered a view of Central Park across Fifty-ninth Street, but he’d barely noticed. He also found the food tasteless – most of his dinner remained on his plate – and Janet was uncharacteristically quiet. Despite sensing his act about Kelly grow rapidly transparent, like a con artist hooked on his own lie, he continued the sham. “What everybody said about her gave a pretty good picture.” His breezy tone sounded false to his own ear.

  Janet’s glacial blue eyes held steady on him. Finally, she reached across the table, touched his hand, and interlaced her fingers with his. “It’s time you told me what’s up here.”

  He felt sheepish. “It’s ridiculous. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you right out – didn’t want to worry you was the main reason. I’d hoped the story would go away. The NYPD obviously weren’t interested, and after a few days of holding my breath, nobody from Hampton Junction came knocking on my door either. But now, by keeping quiet, I’ve made such a big thing out of something that happened so long ago-”

  She raised the fingers of her free hand to his lips and silenced him. “Earl, what’s the deal? Were you two lovers?”

  He sat there, feeling caught, his quiet serving as an admission of… of what? Not guilt. He felt more regret and sadness than shame. “How did you know?”

  She shook her head, obviously incredulous that he had to ask. “I could understand it being a shock – all these years you believed she’d escaped, and now you find out she had been murdered. But your needing me to be with you at the funeral, your being in a daze for the last week, then your letting slip about Kelly’s cloud game-”

  “I’m sorry-”

  A waiter arrived to clear away their plates, and Earl welcomed the hiatus in his apology, then had no idea what to add when he left.

  “She was married,” Janet said after a few seconds, almost to herself.

  “I know, but as I told you before, there were problems, big ones.”

  She shook her head and gave him a smile as if he were an errant medical student. “And you got involved with a woman old enough to know better. What’d she say? ‘Mister, my husband doesn’t understand me’?”

  “It wasn’t like that. In fact she hardly ever talked about her husband’s problems.”

  “Then how was it? My God, Earl, I mean I knew I wasn’t the first in your life, and you weren’t my first, but I sure never messed with married men. Considered them tainted meat.”

  Earl winced at Janet’s characteristic candor. Yet she didn’t seem to be upset so much as pensive. “What can I say, Janet? Over the first few years of med school Kelly and I spent a lot of time talking together. She told me the trouble she was in, and I was young and stupid. I guess I got caught up in rescue fantasies.”

  “You guess?”

  Nothing, not even a lifetime of medical experience, had ever enabled Earl to unravel the mysterious power Janet possessed to make him explain himself. He knew only that once she got him started, he found it hard to stop.

  “Okay, so I was an idiot. But I don’t regret trying to help her. As Chaz became increasingly abusive and controlling. I honestly thought she and I were good for each other, that we’d get her out of her mess, then see about us. Besides, you weren’t anywhere in sight to ‘save me from myself,’ as you so often put it, for about another fifteen years.”

  “Hey!” she said softly. “Of course you tried to help her. You’re a compassionate, caring man. It’s one of the many things I love in you.”

  “I mean, it’s not like I’ve been nursing a flame for her all these years.”

  “I know.”

  “Hell, I haven’t even thought about her in two decades.”

  She sat back again. “And that confuses you – how it still can hurt, as if you lost her all over again?”

  Like a surgeon probing for physical signs, she’d put her finger exactly on his pain. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Since I read about her body being found, I’m all tangled up in feelings from when I was twenty-four. Even though I’m not that young guy anymore, I can’t cut myself loose. Weird, eh?”

  “Not so weird.”

  “No? It is for me.”

  She grabbed his hand again and gave it a squeeze. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “It wouldn’t help any. What to do now is the important question.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The newspaper article I showed you? I’m the mystery man in the cab.”

  As did most surgeons, Janet had nerves of steel, and even the nastiest surprises couldn’t catch her off guard. Yet her pupils pulsed wide. “That was you?”

  “Yeah, and maybe the cops haven’t taken up the chase just yet, but that Dr. Mark Roper will be trying to pin a face on him.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “So do I go to him or the NYPD and make a clean breast of things before they get to me? As nice as Roper was, he made me nervous.”

  Though they’d been talking barely above a murmur, she leaned forward close enough to whisper. “And confess you were having an affair with her? That’s nuts!”

  “It’ll be worse if I say nothing and Roper or his sheriff find me out on their own. At the very least they could charge me with obstruction of justice, now that it’s officially a murder case.”

  “And how the hell will you explain not coming forward for twenty-seven years?”

  “I had a lot of reasons, some pretty complicated, but I could make them understand.”

  “Try me first. I’m a lot more sympathetic.”

  “Okay. For starters, from the very beginning she made me promise never to reveal our affair.”

  “Jesus, Earl, give me a break!”

  “Hear me out. At first I thought she wanted to avoid a scandal. Adultery is no small thing, and back then it was a very big deal. But, no, that wasn’t
it. She told me later that she really didn’t give a damn what people thought, that she worried about Chaz and how he’d react if he ever found out. The possibility of losing her obsessed him, which fueled the abuse, to the point she figured not only did she have to make a clean break – disappear, change her name, and start over – but he must never know about our affair because it might enrage him even more.”

  “She wouldn’t even trust you enough to tell you where she was headed?”

  “Refused, but the issue wasn’t a lack of trust.”

  “What then?”

  “I told you it was complicated.”

  “ ‘Screwy’ is the word I’d use, Earl.”

  “Okay, okay! She wouldn’t tell me because she insisted she wasn’t going to ruin my life with all her baggage.”

  “Her baggage?”

  “Will you just listen? She knew she’d already jumped into Chaz’s arms to escape her parents. As a result, she didn’t entirely trust her feelings about me, wasn’t sure whether she loved me or was just using me to escape again. She promised to contact me if she ever figured it out and the time was right.”

  “When the time was right? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “There were other issues, too. Ones that even I hadn’t thought of until she warned me.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as how powerful the Braden family was at the hospital and NYCU. If Chaz ever did find out about me and Kelly, not only would he go after her, she was certain he’d get ‘Daddy’ to pull enough strings that I’d never graduate from medical school. So she remained adamant I do nothing to risk that happening, such as trying to follow her, and refused to tell me where she’d be in case I might come anyway.”

  Janet mulled that over a few seconds. “But after no word from her at all, you didn’t get suspicious something had happened?”

  “Of course! I was frantic. I even took my month’s vacation and went searching for her, despite the promise I made. But just like the police said, there were no leads.”

  “Didn’t you ever think then she might have been killed, that her husband had gotten to her after all?”

  “At the time I couldn’t think of anything else. Whenever I saw Chaz Braden in the hospital, I could barely keep myself from grabbing him by the throat and demanding to know what he did with Kelly.”

  “Yet you still didn’t go to the police.”

  He felt his cheeks start to burn again at the thought of how he’d floundered around like a complete wimp – so detestably opposite to the man he’d become. “No, I didn’t. I made a decision to keep quiet and save my ass.”

  Janet’s eyebrows quirked.

  “I’m not proud of it,” he continued, “but logically, I couldn’t see any point in doing otherwise. The police already suspected Chaz, and were investigating him big-time. Me, Jack, Melanie, and Tommy Leannis – we’d all told the cops everything we knew about her relationship to him, how possessive he could be, and verbally abusive. If I had confessed our affair, it would have taken their attention off him, maybe even shifted it to me, disgraced Kelly, and probably tanked my chances at NYCH. So I kept my mouth shut.”

  “But when the police didn’t make a case against Chaz-”

  “I again considered taking matters into my own hands. I even began to follow the creep, waiting for a chance to get him alone.”

  “My God, Earl-”

  “Don’t worry. I came to my senses before anything happened. What I saw, the way he ran around, red-faced, pestering everyone in my class, even me, to find out if we knew where she’d gone, I began to think maybe he hadn’t done anything to her and couldn’t find her either, that she had just run away after all, gotten rid of her ghosts, and didn’t see me as part of her life anymore. It took a long time, but eventually I accepted it…”

  As he talked, he realized just how immature his desire to rescue Kelly had been. Yet he let himself be so stupidly vulnerable back then, enamored by a notion as old as Galahad, Lancelot, and Robin Hood – saving damsels in distress. Talk about naive. What’s more, the belief that he’d pulled it off – helped her get away clean from Chaz and freed her from her own ghosts – it was simply the way he needed to see things, the better to sustain himself while he got over her.

  Had he learned from his folly? In a way. After all, he went into a career in ER, where he could rescue people from their worst physical catastrophes, after which they’d be whipped out of his department to face their personal demons in the care of others. It was a disconnect that suited him just fine to this day.

  He reached for her hand. “I would have helped her differently now. I guess that’s part of what’s got me so tangled up – knowing I might’ve made a difference if I hadn’t been so clueless.”

  “You still don’t believe Chaz killed her?”

  He sighed deeply, as if to exhale his doubts. “I must have been wrong about him, too. His looking for her was probably a cynical act he put on to throw us off. It obviously worked.”

  She slouched in her seat. Anyone looking at her would have thought she was studying the chandeliers and frowning in disapproval.

  “So do I go to the police?” he said after what felt like minutes.

  She looked directly into his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Earl, you expect the cops to believe a story like this? Let’s see. They couldn’t pin anything on Chaz in 1974. Now they find the body, and you pop up with your tale of being the mystery man, of having been her secret lover, and, what I predict will be their personal favorite, you didn’t tell anyone because you’ve been maintaining a noble silence all these years. They’ll fall down laughing, then have a field day twisting it all around so you look guilty as hell. As for what the press would do to you, don’t even think about it.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Talk to a lawyer.”

  He lay wrapped in layer after layer of sleep, the kind that enveloped him only after he and Janet made love.

  Yet a ringing drilled into his head.

  He felt Janet’s leg draped over his, and opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in his own bed.

  Instead, ornate swirls on the ceiling of their hotel suite spun like pinwheels in the ever-changing, neon glow from outside the window. He glanced at his watch and saw it was only 10:00 P.M.

  After dinner they’d no sooner gone upstairs and closed the door to their room than Janet pulled him to her. “I want us to forget everything, at least for now,” she whispered, her lips at his ear.

  His own desire had swelled to meet hers, displacing all anxiety, and he lost himself in her arms, for a while.

  “Dr. Garnet here,” he said, fumbling the receiver to his ear.

  “Dr. Garnet, it’s Mark Roper calling. I hope it’s not too late to disturb you, but I wanted to catch you before you left town. I think you’d be interested in seeing my father’s old medical file on Kelly.”

  “What?”

  “It contains a letter describing a man she met, someone she loved.”

  Garnet felt his heart quicken. “Really.”

  “I suspect he’s the one she got into the taxi with the night before she disappeared.”

  Earl felt a chasm open at his feet. Into it fell Janet, Brendan, his life. “I see.”

  “Do you? Shall we have breakfast together to discuss it?”

  A dozen floors below, Mark hung up and stared at the ceiling. Garnet’s agreement to meet with him vanquished any doubts he had about him being Kelly’s lover. Not bad for a part-time coroner from the sticks. Twelve hours in New York and already he’d uncovered the secret that had stumped the NYPD for twenty-seven years.

  He’d followed Garnet and his wife back to their hotel, then booked a room for himself, dumping his plan to return home that night. After reviewing all his files on Kelly, he went down to the hotel’s business center, where he spent time on the Internet planning what he would do.

  Having successfully completed the next step, hooking Garnet into a tête-à-tête, he felt like celebr
ating.

  Grabbing the phone, he called a number he knew by heart.

  “Dr. Caterril speaking,” said the woman who answered.

  “Hi, Mandy. It’s me.”

  “Mark?”

  “The one and only. And how’s the most beautiful veterinarian in all of Manhattan?”

  “I’m fine, but where are you calling from?” She sounded put out rather than excited.

  “The Plaza. I was down here on a coroner’s case, but unexpectedly had to stay the night and wondered if we could get together.”

  Her silence gave him a sinking feeling.

  “Well, I would have loved to,” she said after a few seconds, “but I can’t tonight.”

  He heard a male voice in the background. Mandy lived alone.

  “Of course,” he said, immediately casting around for a way to say good-bye without embarrassing either of them. “I just took a chance, never expecting even to find you in on a Saturday night. Stupid of me not to have called before and set something up.”

  She laughed. “I won’t argue with that, Mark.”

  “Well, next time lots of warning.”

  “Yes, I’d like that. Perhaps we could have lunch.”

  Ouch! He’d been demoted. From lover to former boyfriend status, all in an instant, suitable for get-togethers in public places, a greeting kiss on the cheek, but the rest of her body arched safely away from him. “Take care, Mandy.”

  “You too.”

  Definitely taken down a few rungs. Well, what did he expect? He hadn’t exactly broken her door down with return visits or rung her phone off the hook after her last weekend at Hampton Junction. To be honest, he hadn’t bothered because he knew there was no point. Mandy Caterril would never be happy away from her poodle practice in Manhattan. Just like Shauna, the uptown physiotherapist, before her, or Cindy, the TriBeCa theater director, before them.

  East Side, West Side, all around the town. The tune popped into his head. Wonderful, beautiful, fun women from every part of the greatest city on earth, and not a hope in hell any one of them could cope with being the mate of a country doctor. As far as they were concerned, he’d made a mistake choosing to practice where he had.