The veterinary building was right on the edge of the Hudson itself, an old building from the eighteen hundreds, resurrected with concrete and brick and decorative wooden pillars, discreetly identified by a small sign over the main door and a pair of old oaken statues of a cat on one side and a husky on the other. Inside, behind the large glass windows, I could see a pair of white-robed attendants busy behind the main counter.
Brice said, “We’re here.”
I wanted to tell him tomorrow would be the here day, the day when the plane landed in Florida. Nothing else counted. This was only a preliminary show to get me up to speed.
A couple of times Brice glanced at me to see how I was taking it. I wasn’t sweating. There was no catch in my voice. I followed him into the building, met the two attendants, then went through a pair of swinging doors into a neat animal hospital. But that wasn’t what Thomas Brice wanted to show me.
The bedroom was in the very rear of the building and the second I entered it I knew it had been hers.
There was a smell to it that belonged to her and the accoutrements on the wall shelves and the dresser top were exactly the same as she’d had in her own room years ago. That kind of taste apparently didn’t have to be reacquired. I opened the closet door and again knew exactly who the garments hanging there had belonged to. Even the light fragrance hadn’t changed.
Brice closed the door and turned to me. “You’re sure now, aren’t you?”
“Nearly,” I told him.
On the bed was an old-fashioned photo album. Brice thumbed open the leather snap fastener and there in 5×7 color snapshots was my dark-haired, hazel-eyed Bettie. She was beautiful and unmarked and smiling a huge smile right at me. At nobody else, just at me. All I could say was a softly heard “Damn!”
She was still young, beautiful beyond belief, plainly dressed, but a total knockout. And yet a strange blankness possessed her features.
Brice was saying, “This was taken a month and a half after she was washed ashore.”
“But...”
Brice interrupted: “She was like a newly born baby here. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t understand, but she showed emotions. She took to my father right away, like a newborn kitten responding to its parent’s teaching.”
My voice was barely audible. “Animalistic?”
“No,” Brice reassured me. “Very human, but a fully grown, well-developed newborn child.”
“There were no memories?”
“None at all.”
I turned the pages of the album and watched Bettie develop, little by little, characteristics emerging step by step. I noticed the date on the photographs and saw that they were taken at regular intervals and understood that this was a medical case study by a competent researcher.
When I glanced up at Thomas Brice, he explained, “Going by what the police had released to the press, we knew that her life was in absolute jeopardy if this information ever got out. However, there were no relatives to contact, no inquiries made about her health and if my father hadn’t seen a small blurb in the old Sunday News about you being on the case, we would never have known whom to contact.”
“But you didn’t contact me!”
“No. And I can understand your resentment. But the young woman you knew didn’t exist. My father knew that exposing the woman she had been in any way would be enough to get her killed. We gave her a fresh start.”
“Damnit, I could have—”
“Captain, I didn’t make these decisions, my father did. And if you want to take it up with him, I’ll direct you to the appropriate cemetery.”
I said nothing.
“Contacting you someday was always a possibility. Dad did a lot of probing before he realized the truth and knew you two had planned marrying. He watched your career and came to know you were one of the honest ones.”
“There are plenty of honest ones—”
“No offense, Captain. After all these years, I didn’t know how you’d feel about your... your lost love. But I found that you were still single, even after retirement, and decided to follow my late father’s wishes, and contact you.”
After looking at the photos, it was hard to speak.
Brice asked, “Are you comfortable with all this?”
“Not completely,” I told him.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know.”
“That’s not it.”
“What is, then?”
“Somebody has got to pay for twenty lost years.”
“They may be dead.”
“I’ll kick over their tombstone,” I said.
There were papers to be signed and attested to by witnesses and a Notary Public, papers issued by the bank to be affixed with my name, and when it was all over I was the legal guardian of a woman I had promised to marry two decades ago. My heart was beating a reserved tattoo. I left all the legal papers in Dr. Brice’s office safe. Later I’d get a certified copy at my new address.
Damn, a new address? I hadn’t lived out of state since I was a kid, and couldn’t even wonder what it would be like. Then I’d have a picture of Bettie blossom in my mind and it didn’t matter at all anymore.
And the transformation would be simple. There would be no debts to pay off, very little to pack and move, no big friends to say so long to and a happy retirement from then on.
Who was I kidding?
Someplace there would be a hole in the program. Something would crack, then it would split, and a sharp-nosed reporter would spot a story. Ex-Killer Cop Moves to Sun City! Or maybe, Top Gun of NYPD Takes on Retirement Home! There were tabloid newspapers that would eat that kind of thing up.
And then somebody would remember, and somebody would worry, and somebody would call in the shooter soldiers who carried modern artillery on their persons and have access to more sophisticated weaponry at their beck and call.
It didn’t matter how many would be killed in the shootout as long as the main target was acquired and silenced permanently. And the main target would be plural. Bettie, then me. Or me first if they wanted to quell the firepower.
It took me two days to get everything in order. A single man doesn’t get entangled in many things, so shipment was a snap. The moving company did it all. Two cartons, the disassembled four-poster bed, Bettie’s old desk, my swivel chair and a few odds and ends, and I was ready to go. At the last minute I cashed in my plane tickets, deciding to drive and have transportation at hand all the time. A one-day trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, then another day’s drive to Sunset Lodge.
The end would be the start of the beginning.
Chapter Three
The two-day drive was an easy one. Traffic was sparse between seasons and at the beginning of the second day I got up before five, had a light breakfast and was on the road long before six. Seven hours later I crossed the Florida state line and stayed on Interstate 95 until I hit the east-west highway that would take me to Sunset Lodge. Along the way, the road passed the site of another complex named Garrison Estates that was still partly under construction.
A series of neat billboards set well back off the macadam highway told its story. There were no renters. Each dwelling was occupant-owned, oceanside swimming and fishing areas very accessible, police and fire protection adequate and privacy guaranteed, starting with a monitored gate entry.
Money had gone into this development, the kind that older people who enjoyed peace and quiet and an early-to-bed and late-to-rise lifestyle would enjoy. Several luxury-model vehicles passed me by, well-attired elderly in the front seat. In two of them a woman was driving. If Sunset Lodge was anything like Garrison Estates, I could risk a sigh of satisfaction with the good doctor’s choice of residence for his adopted daughter, my Bettie.