Ordinarily I would have asked Connie to go; since my disfiguring surgery it made me uncomfortable to be seen naked by anyone other than Paul. But my heart was still pounding, and I had to admit I was simply afraid to be alone. What if those lunatics had intended to kill me and decided to come back later to finish the job? I turned my body toward the wall slightly and asked Connie to hand me the shampoo so I could wash my wig.
Ten minutes later Dennis rang the doorbell. I decided to let them have a little quality time in the studio while I finished washing and drying my portable hair. Later, sitting in the kitchen wearing Connie’s fluffy terry-cloth bathrobe, I described the van and its two occupants. When I got to the part about the ball caps, I thought hard, trying to remember their color and if there had been a logo or anything written on them. Something about the driver of the van was bothering me, too, but I couldn’t think what. By the time I finished telling Dennis everything I could remember, I was absolutely certain of one thing, though. No matter what Dennis thought, my assailants hadn’t been juveniles.
“Sorry. That’s it. That’s all I can remember, Dennis.” Connie had set a cup of hot tea in front of me, and I wrapped my hands around it gratefully.
“Not much to go on.” Dennis closed his notebook and tucked it into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.
“Maybe there’ll be paint chips where they rammed me.”
“We’ll have a look when we pull your car up.”
“My purse is still in it, Dennis.”
“We’ll get that, too.”
“And in my purse-”
“Is this some sort of parlor game? ‘And in my purse there is a dollar and on that dollar there is an eagle?’ ” Dennis smiled to let me know that he was pulling my leg.
“I was going to say, Mr. Smarty Pants, that in my purse is positive proof that Katie Dunbar was pregnant. I found the file in Dr. Chase’s office and made a photocopy for you.”
“Holy cow,” said Connie.
“So Angie was right.” Dennis studied the ceiling. “Yet Chip insists he didn’t sleep with her-”
“And you believe him?” I was incredulous. I described the scrap of conversation I had overheard between Liz and Frank Chase. “Clearly her sister knew about the baby.”
“I wonder why she never said anything?” Connie added hot water to my teacup.
“She probably thought it didn’t matter now that her sister has been found dead. Or maybe she didn’t want to embarrass the family,” Dennis said reasonably.
“Liz doesn’t have an unselfish bone in her body,” Connie remarked. “She would have covered up anything she thought might screw up her chances of getting into law school.”
I plunged my used tea bag up and down, hoping to coax a decent second cup of Earl Grey out of it. “The more I think about that conversation and about those creeps who ran me off the road, the more I’m convinced that Liz has to be involved in Katie’s death.” I sipped my tea and studied Dennis over the rim of my cup. “Liz must believe I know something, but what? I could just kick myself for losing that copy of Katie’s chart.”
Dennis stood up. “I can see I’ll need to talk to those two in the morning.”
“Please, Dennis, don’t bring my name into it.”
“I’ll avoid it if I can.” He lay a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You take it easy, now, Hannah. You know, this used to be a quiet little town until you came to visit.”
The next day at nine I watched as the Pearson’s Corner volunteer firemen dredged my poor car, festooned with brown and gray grass, its rear window a mass of cobwebbed glass, out of the pond. I recognized a couple of the volunteers: Bill Taylor, of course, the would-be novelist, and David Wilson, the guy who had given me the willies at Katie’s funeral. It was Bill, in fact, who waded into the water holding a great iron hook attached to a chain that reeled out behind him. The other end was connected to a tow truck that had been driven into the field and parked on a patch of hard-packed clay near an old chicken coop. I could see the hook, clamped to my rear bumper, just visible under six inches of water.
Bill raised his hand and waved it in a tight circle. The tow truck’s engine began a methodical grind. The chain grew taut, then wound itself around and around a drum as my car emerged from the muck, slowly, inch by battered inch.
As it dangled nose down from the winch, water poured from the windows and from the open passenger side door and finally from the wheel wells and engine compartment. While they waited for my car to drain, the workers clustered around Mrs. Baxter, who had just arrived carrying a thermos, a large jar of lemonade, and a dozen paper cups. She set the cups down on the hood of one of the parked cars and poured out refreshments for the volunteers. She offered me some, but I said I wasn’t thirsty. I felt bad enough about ruining everyone’s Saturday without horning in on the refreshments, too.
I was thinking how nice it might be to live in a town like this where people go all out for folks they barely know when David approached me with a plastic garbage bag of items retrieved from my car.
I picked out a sodden box of Kleenex with two fingers. Gee, thanks. The bag also contained a single tennis shoe and an old pair of gym shorts that had probably begun moldering long before this most recent dousing. “How embarrassing,” I muttered aloud. I upended the bag and dumped its pathetic contents out onto the grass: a thermos (unbroken), a coffee mug (minus handle), three waterlogged CDs (Placido Domingo), an umbrella, two pens, a snow scraper, and the car’s owner’s manual.
“Where’s my purse?” I could dry out the money, I thought, and my credit card should be okay. I turned the bag upside down and shook it.
“Sorry, Mrs. Ives. It wasn’t in the vehicle.”
I was short on patience. “It has to be! Look again!”
David regarded me with steady, unblinking eyes and shook his head.
I covered my eyes with my hands. I was certain that the only copy of Katie’s medical record lay somewhere-along with my checkbook, credit cards, and pictures of Paul and Emily-at the bottom of the Baxter’s pond. If Dr. Chase had destroyed Katie’s file, as Liz had ordered, without that photocopy, it was just my word and Angie’s against everyone else’s.
14
In the wee hours, when dreams are hard to come by and good sense sometimes prevails, I made my decision. If the good citizens of Pearson’s Corner wanted me gone badly enough to kill me, I would leave. My narrow escape from the pond had left me weak and shaking. As mad as I was with Paul, I didn’t want to spend another day in Pearson’s Corner if it meant sleeping with one eye open or flinching every time another car tried to pass me on the road. In the morning I would call Paul and ask him to meet me at the Provincetown Airport, if only I could remember where I had put the scrap of paper on which I’d written his phone number.
In the soft glow from the bathroom night light I could see Connie’s green linen jacket, a tragic canvas of stains and wrinkles, draped over a hanger in the doorway, dripping dry. I thought I had put Paul’s number inside Connie’s jacket, but a frantic middle-of-the-night search of the pockets had yielded nothing.
“You don’t suppose Paul’s phone number was inside my purse?” I said to Connie as we were having breakfast the next morning.
“If it was, you can always look the number up in the phone book. How many Zelcos can there be in North Truro?”
“It’s a rental place, Con. Lord knows whose name the phone is actually listed in.” I sat at the table opposite her and pinched pieces off a slice of dry toast.
“Call the Zelcos in Annapolis,” she suggested. “Maybe someone’s at home who will know.”