Mortal Remains Page 3

  “… Prilosec, Flagyl, and Biaxin ought to do the trick…”

  “… an ECG, blood gas, and nuclear scan of his lungs for starters…”

  “… albuterol by aerosol and IV steroids…”

  He kept wondering if Chaz Braden had killed her after all. Yet why him, when he could have divorced her, ruined her burgeoning career, gotten back at her any number of ways? He continued to pummel himself with questions, sadness pulling him inside out one second, outrage filling him like a balloon the next.

  Well practiced at putting on his “everything is fine” face for his patients and troops during the worst of cases, he could feel the tightly contracted muscles of his jaw and knew he looked drawn and tense. “What a lousy actor, you are,” he muttered, disgusted with the pale imitation of his usual take-charge presence, knowing he shouldn’t continue to work with his mind in such a tumult. “Can you cover for me?” he asked Dr. Michael Popovitch, his portly second-in-command, and one of his closest friends.

  Michael looked up from a cut hand he was suturing and eyed Earl over a pair of bifocals. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Of course. I’ve got some personal business to take care of.”

  “Go to it.”

  Earl walked quickly to his office, where he could steady himself in private. He flopped into the high-backed chair and ran his fingers through his gray hair. The steady shush of the air ducts in the tiled ceiling pressed in on him.

  Away from the distractions of ER, he felt the initial numbing effect of the news subside as the slower, crawling emotions of grief took over. A tightness in his gut crept up to his chest, and sadness, no longer alternating with an urge to pistol-whip Kelly’s killer, overwhelmed him. Its intensity surprised him; he’d not thought about Kelly for years. Perhaps the reaction felt so strong because he’d always told himself she was thriving somewhere, happy with a career, a man, maybe kids. That’s how he’d imagined her when he first started to shut her out of his thoughts so that he could get on with his life and how she had remained until today, sealed up in rarely visited memories, but alive. Now her murder seemed fresh and recent-

  A sharp knock interrupted his thoughts.

  Susanne poked her head around the door. “Sorry, Dr. Garnet. We just got two ambulances from a three-car pileup on the ninety and another’s on the way. Michael says he apologizes, but can you come?”

  Michael wouldn’t have had him called unless he was really needed. “I’ll be right along.”

  Getting to his feet, he felt heavy, as if walking underwater. He heard a siren in the distance coming closer by the second, and his heart quickened. No matter how many years he’d had in the pit, that sound always got his adrenaline pumping. Rushing through the hallway toward triage, he tried to clear his mind for the work ahead, only to have more questions intrude.

  Should he go to the police? Tell them everything? Or keep his mouth shut and hope they never found out? It had been such a long time. But if the police started searching for the man in the cab again…

  An old fear swept through him, a dread of discovery he’d lived with since the day she disappeared. He couldn’t say for sure when it finally faded away, sometime after he left New York at the end of his residency in 1978. Now it came back, a contagion roaring out of remission.

  11:45 A.M.

  “Telephone, Dr. Garnet,” said a clerk in the nursing station, her eyes scanning his face. “Should I take a message?”

  Her politeness disconcerted him. Everyone in the department had been treating him with kid gloves all morning. Obviously they all knew something was wrong. Normally that same clerk would stack up seven calls on hold, expecting him to take every one of them pronto, and he would have thrived on it.

  He took the receiver from her. “Dr. Garnet speaking.”

  “Earl! It’s Ronda. Did you read in the Herald that they found the body of that medical student you and my sister used to hang out with at NYCU, the one who disappeared?”

  New York City University had been where he attended medical school.

  He hesitated. “Yeah. I saw that this morning. A real shock.”

  “Must be. From what Melanie has told me about those times, I know the three of you were good friends.”

  “That we were.”

  “Better you be forewarned. The police will probably want to talk to everyone who knew her.”

  Exactly what he’d already figured, but hearing someone else say it made the squeeze he’d been feeling in his stomach cinch tighter. “Probably. I appreciate the heads-up. Did you reach Melanie?”

  “I tried to call, but the hospital couldn’t track her down. I left a message with her answering service. I’m going to be in Peds all day, so she’ll be able to reach me.”

  “Well, thanks, Ronda.”

  The call gave him a new worry. Not about Ronda. They’d been friends for years, ever since Melanie told him to look up her kid sister when he moved to Buffalo to join the staff at St. Paul’s. At the time Ronda had been starting her own specialty training in pediatrics. Now, twenty-four years later, she was married, had two kids, and was a veteran in her field. He and Janet had often enjoyed the company of Ronda and her husband during hospital functions. At the St. Paul’s annual picnic, her kids played with Brendan.

  No, the problem lay in who else Melanie Collins might have gossiped to about Kelly McShane and him being such “good friends.” After all the new headlines, someone in their class, however oblivious of him and Kelly in 1978, might suddenly suspect the truth if unintentionally prompted by Melanie now. The police would be investigating murder this time, not a disappearance, and that was likely to make everyone they talked to turn amateur detective.

  “Dr. Garnet, there’s another call for you on line three. It’s the police.”

  “What?” His voice sounded overly loud.

  The clerk frowned at him. “They found the body of a teenage boy in a crack house on the east side. It’s a DOA, but they want to know if we can make it official and do the paperwork. It’s our district.”

  He felt the band around his stomach release a few notches. “Better we don’t do a slough,” he said. “I’ll handle it myself.”

  Getting lost in an hour’s worth of forms and someone else’s heartbreak was just the diversion he needed.

  “But I could tell them to bother another hospital-”

  “I said I’d do it!”

  The young woman’s jaw dropped.

  Immediately he regretted having snapped at her. “Sorry,” he muttered, retreating into the hallway.

  Keep hold of yourself, Garnet. Or when the police did come for him, his entire staff would say, “Well, he has been acting on edge lately.”

  Chapter 3

  That same day, Tuesday, November 6, 1:00 P.M.

  Hampton Junction

  Running was a drug to Mark.

  Miss a day, he felt lousy.

  Two, downright depressed.

  Three, and he was convinced he had cancer.

  He always followed the same route, turning left onto the road at the foot of his driveway, following it downhill a few miles toward town to loosen up, then going west on Route 4, a winding uphill grind that led farther into the mountains. How far he took it depended on the time he had and the caliber of tension he was trying to work off. Practicing medicine in a small town had different pressures than those of urban centers, but they were every bit as weighty.

  This afternoon a heavy fog had settled into the valley. The tiny droplets it left on his face as he ran felt pleasantly cool, but it rendered the road, the forest, and anything else more than thirty feet away invisible, isolating him in a gray sphere of vague shapes. Yet as he passed through a corridor of towering maples and white birches, their foliage formed a canopy of iridescent orange and gold that floated above him like a gaily woven tapestry of silk. The effect became hallucinatory, and he inhaled deeply while he ran, as if to breathe in the color. The moist air filled his nostrils with the fresh smell of wet leaves,
an aroma he found every bit as welcoming as the familiar scent of polished wood that greeted him whenever he entered the house he had grown up in.

  Hampton Junction, Saratoga County, in the southern Adirondacks, was his home. An odd little town, its houses, businesses, and two churches stood scattered in a disorganized pattern as if the founders had thrown a handful of jacks into the hills, and wherever one landed, somebody built something. It continued to grow in an equally haphazard fashion. The official population of 2,985 – the number according to the sign on the highway – hadn’t changed since he was a kid. “No one ever seems to die in Hampton Junction without someone being born,” went the joke among locals. In truth, nobody could keep track of the population anymore. With the surrounding countryside so full of chalets, the count for the whole area could swell to twenty thousand on a weekend, then shrink back to the core group on Monday.

  He grew up here. His love of the outdoor life was one of the reasons he’d returned after med school. He avidly hiked, kayaked, or skied whenever possible, thriving on the endless sweep of mountain wilderness that surrounded him. The hills and peaks, having engraved themselves on his psyche, looked as right to his eye as their rocky surfaces felt to the palms of his hands when he climbed them. Thick deciduous forests in summer. Massive, blue-green conifers rich with growth the year round. The panoply broken only by tumbling mountain streams, surging rivers, and cold lakes. He found it a place of powerful beauty and awe-inspiring solace.

  Yet these mountains weren’t for everybody. Too much of them for too long at the wrong time, and a person with a troubled mind could end up so dwarfed by the vastness, so engulfed by the silence, and so hemmed in by the press of the forests that he panicked. That was the reason he’d forced Dan to take the diving course in Hawaii when they did three and a half years ago, just about six months after Dan’s wife had left him. Heartbroken though not showing it, no kids, and working twenty-four/seven, but still, to Mark’s eyes at least, a lost soul, Dan started to keep a wary eye on the surrounding hills. Mark knew he desperately needed the break. Sensory deprivation, isolation psychosis, fractured self-image – the terminology for it in textbooks was endless. “Bushed,” the locals called it.

  Mark took pride in never having had to wrestle this demon. His secret – conquer and reconquer the wilderness – put the curve of his Telemark turn or the imprint of his boots on it before it ever got to him. He also got out regularly, choosing medical conferences in places that allowed him to feast on theater, dive in warm blue water with limitless visibility, or climb above the tree line where nothing surrounded him but open space.

  The pitch of the road steepened, and his legs started to burn. Normally he welcomed the challenge and usually increased his pace at this point, wanting to push himself to the maximum. Today he glanced at his watch and started back. He and Dan were to meet with a cold-case specialist from the NYPD in less than an hour. But with the ease of his descent, the melancholy that he’d been trying to work off returned.

  As a boy he’d understood only that Kelly had left for her own unexplained reasons. The possibility of her being dead never once entered his mind. As a result he unquestioningly carried this version of events forward over the years, continuing to see her disappearance through the optimistic gaze of youth, determined to protect at least that piece of childhood from the harsher scrutiny of his adult eye.

  Even now a particle of hope, a relic from his days with her – the part of life before his father died when it seemed easy to keep dark terrors at bay – insisted she couldn’t have been murdered. But his clinical self, trained to stare at the worst possible truths and not flinch, knew differently.

  Only in his memory did Kelly still gleefully win at Monopoly, stride through wildlife parks, and send sizzlers across strike zones.

  Flashbacks of her crowded in… she arrived to baby-sit him wearing overalls… they made some fudge… he put chocolate freckles all over her face, and they tied her blond hair in two ponytails with red ribbon, like Daisy Mae’s from his comic books…

  He started to sprint.

  “Feels like I’m stepping on dog shit,” the man who walked between him and Dan complained. His leather soles kept slipping on the wet mush of fallen leaves that coated the sidewalk. “Is it always so soggy up here?” His breath hung white in the mist, and his frizzy gray hair glistened from the moisture it picked up from the air.

  “Pretty much, this time of year,” Dan said. “We’ve already had a few dumps of snow, but the rain washed it away. Still, good shoes are a must.”

  Mark’s own hiking boots had no such traction problems.

  Their visitor, Detective William Everett, a cold-case specialist from the NYPD, shivered and dug his hands deeper into the pockets of a light tan raincoat. Short in stature, his craggy face had the pasty gray complexion of a smoker, and he chewed gum about sixty times a second.

  Reformed, Mark figured, recognizing a chiclet that the man had popped in his mouth as a common nicotine substitute. But he’d quit too late. A mewing wheeze accompanied every word he said, and his chest heaved from walking up the gentle incline.

  “Must be nice when you can see everything, though,” the detective added, peering into a fog so thick it made the houses along the road appear to be little more than looming gray cubes. “Or is this as good as it gets around here? Christ, you need a fuckin’ foghorn just to take a hike.”

  A hike? Not with him along, or they’d end up carrying him. “You caught us on a bad day,” Mark said, slowing his step so as not to set too fast a pace for their visitor. The man looked fifty going on seventy, and the loose semicircles sagging from under his eyes suggested a lifetime of being tired.

  “Still, even like this the air’s a whole lot cleaner than in New York,” Everett continued. As if to prove the point, he inhaled deeply, only his effort ended in a paroxysm of coughing that doubled him over. He spit on the pavement, then, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, added, “So tell me about your town. This is the playground for the horsey set, isn’t it?”

  “Not really,” Mark replied. “We’re above the money belt.”

  “The what?”

  “The wealth. It’s more down around Saratoga.”

  “So the woman was dumped far away from where she lived?”

  “Not too far. The Braden estate is only nine miles south.”

  “But you said the money-”

  “Every town along the railroad took a flyer on being great someday,” Dan cut in. “Saratoga Springs made it. Hampton Junction ended up a leftover water stop from the heyday of steam locomotives. Our roots are blue-collar, not blue-blood, but we’re proud of it.” He had a way of sounding defensive when dealing with outside officials, whatever their stripe. His speech would unwittingly elongate into a bit of a drawl, and, with his portly frame stuffed into a fleece-lined bomber jacket that strained at the zipper, he’d come off like a cross between Rod Steiger and a Rotary Club booster.

  Mark figured the awkwardness stemmed from Dan being an outsider himself. As far as the locals saw such matters, a person could move to Hampton Junction, live and work in the place for twenty years, yet still not be “from here.” Since Dan had arrived from Syracuse a mere decade ago, the townspeople considered him a newcomer, and, as he confided to anyone who would listen, it bugged the hell out of him.

  “We tend to be more a lunch bucket crowd, our inhabitants mostly descended from train people,” he continued, proprietary as any native son. “The crystal-and-silver bunch generally drew the line at building their big estates twenty miles south of this area. If it weren’t for the fog, you’d see clapboard houses are the preferred style. As for all our vacationers and weekenders, they can’t afford luxury addresses close to the horse race set either. You’ll find them squirreled away in cottages and cabins all through the woods. Of course, there are exceptions, places where people have gone all out-”

  “The Bradens were among those,” Mark said, wanting to rein in the conversation closer to the busi
ness at hand.

  “Really?” The New York detective briefly pondered the fact. “Now why would a family that powerful want to be away from their own kind and off by themselves?”

  Mark shrugged.

  “I don’t know their reasons for sure,” Dan said, “I suppose it’s because they’re what I’d call quiet money. They like to enjoy it with their friends, not show it off.” Dan’s voice had become normal again, the drawl gone and his manner casual, as if nothing had happened. But authority had been established and boundaries marked – Dan’s way of trying to make himself appear an insider, at least to the eyes of a visitor.

  “What about here?” Everett said, nodding to a massive shape that emerged from the gloom at the end of the street. “Is this more quiet money?”

  “The quietest there is,” said Dan. “Welcome to Blair’s Funeral Home.”

  Even in the mist the structure appeared substantially bigger than anything they’d passed. Stepping through an elaborate wrought-iron gate guarding the entrance, they followed a well-raked path that meandered up a sloping lawn. What little foliage remained on the surrounding trees glowed a muted orange, like a bed of coals smothered in ash. As they drew closer the three-story mansion took on a warm yellow hue, and white railings of a long wraparound porch became easily visible. Capping the structure, a cupola with a black-shingled roof pointed upward like a witch’s hat.

  Mark grimaced at the thought of what awaited them inside.

  Everett gave a soft whistle, “Christ, it’s bigger than Gracie Mansion, where our mayor lives. Same paint job, though, except this one isn’t peeling… his is. Death must pay good here.”

  Dan chuckled. “Not from us locals. We live forever. But the part-timers, the outsiders, after ruining their health with big-city stress and pollution, they all want plots where they spent their summers, sort of the ultimate vacation. Mr. Blair can hardly keep up.”