“Thank you very much,” she said to Dr. Kern.
“Not at all. And, as I was saying to Mr. Dwyer, I do apologize about the shotgun. We’ve had vandals lately.”
“I understand,” Donna said.
He smiled at her. She was easy to smile at even though she was six feet tall and could eat your meal and hers in three minutes flat.
He walked us to the door. We said our good-byes again and we ran to the car.
Inside, Donna said, “Boy, did I find some things out upstairs.”
“Like what?”
“Like somebody went through several of the rooms up there and turned everything inside out. Looks like a bomb hit it.”
I started the car and pulled away.
“Aren’t we going to check it out, Dwyer?” she asked as I headed down the road.
“Yeah. But we’ve got to find someplace to hide until we see the doctor leave.”
“Oh, yeah, right. Good thinking.” She had the pure enthusiasm of a sixteen-year-old.
“So I just told Chad to leave me alone. I mean, there wasn’t much he could say after he handed me a ring and I led him into the bathroom and made him watch me flush it down the toilet.”
The subject was Chad, her ex-husband.
A few months ago she’d gone to Mexico on a lonely vacation to forget him. I’d been skeptical about the results, but apparently it had worked. Oh, Chad, who had dumped her for a younger woman and had then changed his mind, Chad was still around, calling her more frequently than her mother, making the sorts of promises that only somebody who has the looks of Robert Redford and the personality of John Davidson can make. She genuinely seemed to be working him out of her life. Lately, I’d even felt some pity for the bastard. I don’t really wish heartbreak on anybody. I was there once myself. I lost thirty pounds and more than a little dignity.
“So he hasn’t called for nearly a whole week,” she said.
“Gosh. Ma Bell must be getting nervous.”
“God, Dwyer, look.”
A black Buick, the sort of car monsignors always drove back in the era of Bishop Sheen, came up to the asphalt, paused, and then proceeded north.
We sat with the motor off in a grove of white birches just off the highway. If Dr. Kern saw us, he didn’t let on.
“Great,” she said, “now we can go back to the cabin.”
We stood in the open area in front of the fireplace, looking around. The place still smelled sweetly of log smoke. The leather furniture needed dusting, the kitchen sink contained some unwashed dishes, and sections of the bookcases needed straightening. But all the same I’d have lived there if they asked me. The freezer alone, over in the kitchen area, must have cost more than my Honda. You could have gotten several head of cattle in it. Live ones.
“You want to start upstairs?” Donna said.
“Sure. Why not?”
She looked at me. “Boy, Dwyer, you don’t seem very up.”
“Three days of rain. It’s starting to get to me.”
Then she said, quite seriously, “You’re being selfish. I’ve never seen you be selfish before.” She leaned over and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. “Think of Wade out there. Think what he must be going through. He’s not sure if he’s a murderer or not. We have to help him.”
I followed her, pretty much down on myself (so it’s raining, big fucking deal; the homeless and hungry and malformed of the world probably have it a bit tougher than I do). When we came to the top of the stairs, Donna stopped and peered into a large den-like room and said, “He cleaned it up.”
I glanced in. “This was the room that was tossed?”
She nodded.
“No wonder he had the shotgun,” I said. “He probably figured we were the vandals coming back-for a second round.”
She led the way inside.
“You think we should look around?” she said.
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
She gave me a half-scowl. “C’mon, Dwyer, you still sound morose.”
I put on fake cheesy smile. “Gee, Donna, I’d love to search this room.”
“That’s better.”
“Up yours.”
“I heard that.”
“I meant for you to hear that.”
“What an asshole.”
We set to work. The first twenty minutes I found nothing interesting. Medical journals filled some drawers; shirts, socks, and underwear filled others. The daybed in the corner, covered with a spread and tossed with colorful pillows, was apparently where Dr. Kern slept. That made sense; the other rooms all had bunk beds, for patients, I assumed.
Then Donna said, “Boy, Dwyer, come over here.”
At the end of the daybed was a big wicker trunk. She had the lid up and was stacking stuff on the floor.
I knelt next to her, pecking her on the cheek as I did so.
What she was setting out for me to see was three decades of Dr. Kern’s history at the sanitarium and here at the cabin. He seemed to feel a true fondness for his patients. The floor was covered with photographs of Dr. Kern at various ages, standing in the midst of grinning groups of people. Most of the photos had been taken in front of the cabin here. The patients looked happy, if a bit distant; presumably they were taking some kind of medication. The clothes they wore recalled their eras exactly, from the silky, feminine print dresses of the late forties (women never looked more like women than in the late forties and early fifties) to the dull pants suits of the seventies. Here was Kern as a young man with thick glasses, a pipe, and a mop of hair that gave him the air of an engineer; a decade or so later his hair was parted, his glasses were horn-rimmed, and he wore a tan work shirt that lent him the look of an archeologist on a distant dig. Only a few years later, he seemed to have aged and become the man he was today, fleshy and benign and bankerly, the eyes oddly vacant of meaning, as if they only perceived and did not judge what they saw. When he was surrounded by grateful patients, he looked happy and competent. But when he was alone — as in the picture that showed him leaning against the door of a 1957 DeSoto — he seemed vulnerable in the way that only a big man can, and more than a bit lost. He might have been a child waiting for his mother after school.
“Look at this,” Donna said. She showed me a piece of parchment. It was Kern’s M.A.M.D. diploma. He was a bona fide shrink — a medical doctor first, a psychiatrist second. He had become a doctor in 1948. The diploma had been issued from one of the state universities.
“But these are the weird things,” she said. She handed me some playbills from the Bridges Theater dating back to the early sixties. Even then some of the stars they’d attracted were big names. Dale Robertson, Keefe Brasselle, Liz Scott, and Donald O’Connor had been among the guest actors. “I wonder why he’d keep those.”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. Unless he has an interest in theater, too.” I looked at the whole stack. They were printed on very glossy paper, faded somewhat now to a yellow-gray. The hairstyles were out of date. O’Connor looked seventy pounds lighter. I kept going through the playbills, which were all pretty much alike, and then I set them down again. Sometimes I’m sort of suffused with understanding of how time passes — how it’s a rush unfolding infinitely from one end of eternity to the other and how our lives aren’t so much as a microsecond in the roar of its passage. Then it’s better to force myself to think of something else, and fast.
“Wow,” Donna said, laughing. “Here are some really strange playbills.”
These were of people more familiar. On the front of one playbill could be seen Wade and Sylvia and David Ashton. They all looked impossibly young and attractive and arrogant. They starred in Noel Coward’s Private Lives.