Grave Secret

"Excuse me," I said again, more sharply than I'd intended.



"Oh, sorry," the receptionist said. She took an earpiece from her ear. "I didn't hear you."



"We'd like to see the doctor," I said.



"Do you have an appointment? Do you have a referral?"



"No," I said, and smiled.



Nonplussed, she looked past my shoulder at Manfred, as if hoping to find someone who could explain the phenomenon of a person trying to see a doctor without an appointment.



"I'm with her," he said helpfully. "We both want to see the doctor. It's about a personal matter."



"You're not the daughter-in-law-are you?" The red-headed woman was full of delighted, horrified anticipation.



"Sorry, no." I hated to burst her bubble.



"He won't see you," she said. She'd switched to a confiding tone. Maybe it was Manfred's facial decoration that had won her heart. She was obviously a woman who liked strong style. "He's very busy."



I looked around at the one patient, who was trying to appear oblivious to the interesting conversation we were having. "That's not the impression I get," I told her.



"I'll check, though," she said, as though I hadn't spoken. "What's your name, please?"



I told her. Before she could ask, I said, "This is my friend Manfred Bernardo."



"What's this in reference to?"



She'd never understand the long version. "It's about a case he had around eight years ago," I said. "We want to discuss his findings with him."



"I'll tell him," she said, and rose to her feet. "You'll have to wait your turn."



We did, and when the thin man had left and no one had taken his place in the waiting room, we waited some more.



Pointy Glasses could tell we weren't going to leave, and apparently the doctor decided against sneaking out without seeing us. When we'd been there forty-five minutes or longer, he appeared at the door into the examining area. Dr. Bowden was in his sixties, bald except for a gray fringe. He was one of those anonymous-looking men you'd have trouble describing. You could meet him six times in a row and you'd still have to ask his name.



"All right, I have a moment now," he said. He preceded us into his office, a small room crowded with bookcases, papers, home-stitched framed needlework ("Doctors leave their patients in stitches"), and photographs of himself with a short, very plump woman and a boy. The boy grew up to be a young man in the photos, and then there was a wedding picture of the grown-up son with his own wife.



He settled himself behind the desk, giving a good impression of a busy and prosperous man who was sparing us a few minutes out of the goodness of his heart.



"My name is Harper Connelly, and this is my friend Manfred Bernardo," I said. "I'm here about a death you certified eight years ago, the death of a woman named Mariah Parish."



"I'd been warned you were coming," he said, which startled the hell out of me. "I can't believe you'd have the sheer effrontery to show up here."



"Why not?" I said, completely at a loss. "If Mariah Parish was murdered, it completely changes a very complicated situation."



"Murdered?" He looked as astounded as I was, now. "But I was told... I was told you were alleging that Mariah Parish was still alive."



"No, I've never said that, and I don't believe it. Who told you that?"



But the doctor didn't answer. He looked very concerned, but not as hostile. "You aren't here to dispute my filing a death certificate?"



"No. I know Mariah Parish is dead. I'm just wondering why you didn't fill in the cause of death correctly."



Tom Bowden flushed, and it didn't look good on him. "Do you represent her family?"



"She didn't have a family," I said. "We represent the detective who's looking for her baby." Which, in a way, was true.



"The baby," he said, and he aged five years in thirty seconds.



"Yes," I said, very sternly. "Tell us about it."



"You know how influential the Joyces are," he said. "They could have ended my career; they could have sent me to jail."



"But they didn't," Manfred said, his voice just as severe as mine. "Tell us."



We had no idea what was going on, but it was good to look like we did.



"That night, the night she died, of course I was still practicing in Clear Creek," Dr. Bowden said. He swiveled in his chair to look out of his window. "It was raining that night, pouring, like it is today. I think it was in February. I'd never treated any of the Joyces; they had their own doctors in Texarkana and Dallas and didn't mind driving to go to one of their doctors, miles away." Bitterness crossed his face and left its tracks. "I knew who Rich Joyce was, everyone in town knew him. He was one of those rich men who acts like they're just like everyone else, you know? Old pickup truck, Levis? Like he didn't have enough money to drive any vehicle he wanted!" The doctor shook his head at the foibles of someone who could have anything preferring instead to stick with something plain and familiar.



"Was it Rich Joyce who came to your house?"



"Oh, hell, no," Tom Bowden said. "It was one of the hands, I think. I don't remember what his name was." He was lying. "He said Mr. Joyce's housekeeper was sick, needed me, and they'd pay me extra if I'd come out to the house. Of course I went. I didn't want to, but it was my duty, and there was the prospect that I'd get in good with Richard Joyce. I'm not going to pretend I wasn't hoping for that."



He could have tried to pretend that all day long, and it wouldn't have convinced me. I felt Manfred shift beside me, wondered if he was trying to suppress a laugh.



"What happened?" I asked.



"I went out there in his truck, and we got out in the rain. We went through this big empty house, and we got to a bedroom, and in it was this young woman. She was in bad shape. She had just given birth. Evidently, her labor had started unexpectedly, and from what the man said to me, she hadn't even known she was pregnant."



I tried to absorb that, couldn't. "But you went out there knowing that you were going to treat a pregnant woman, right?"



He shook his head. I didn't know if he was trying to say that he hadn't known, or that he didn't want to talk about it. I suspected he didn't want to add to his feeling of guilt by admitting that he'd known he was going out to the Joyce house to treat a patient under conditions he had to know were illegal or pretty damn near.



"What did she say?" I asked.



"She didn't say much of anything. She was having a very hard time. She was very sick, very sick. Her temperature was high; she was sweating, shaking, and very unsteady. Almost incoherent. I couldn't understand why the man hadn't taken her to a hospital, and he told me that she didn't want him to, that she wasn't supposed to be having the baby, it was a real unpleasant family situation. He told me that the baby was the product of incest." Dr. Bowden's mouth folded up in a way that left no doubt as to how uncomfortable the word made him. "He said she was some kind of favorite of old Mr. Joyce, and she wanted to have the baby without him knowing, and then she would go back to her job and give the baby up for adoption. Her memories were too bad for her to want to keep it."



And you believed this? I wanted to say, but knew I couldn't break the flow of this confession. This was coming more easily than I ever would have believed, and I could only imagine that Tom Bowden had wanted to tell this story for years. I had a fleeting wonder about the kind of background this man must have, to have fallen for any of this. Of course, you had to add in the big dollop of greed that had influenced him.



"She didn't have any family," Manfred said, and after a second Dr. Bowden understood what Manfred was saying. He looked down at his desk fixedly. I could have hit Manfred for his interruption; at the same time, he'd only said what I was thinking.



"I didn't know for sure," Bowden muttered. "The man who'd brought me out to the ranch-I thought he was Drexell Joyce-the son. I figured the baby was probably his. Maybe he was ashamed to tell his grandfather that he'd been cheating on his wife; he was wearing a wedding ring, and Ms. Parish wasn't."



"Did she talk to you?" I said.



"What?"



"Mariah. Did she talk to you?" It seemed a simple enough question to me, but Tom Bowden was shifting uneasily in his black leather chair.



"No," he said, and I sighed. Manfred raised a finger, just at the edge of my vision. He thought the doctor was lying again.



"So what happened?" I said, not seeing how we could get him to be honest unless we started beating on him.



"I cleaned the woman up, with some difficulty," Dr. Bowden said. "I wanted to call for an ambulance and I told the man so again, but he told me that was out of the question. I went to get my coat to use my cell phone, but he'd taken it out of my coat pocket, and he wouldn't let me have it. I had to treat the patient, and I didn't have time to fight with him about the phone. She was clearly in the end stages. Even if I could've gotten her to a hospital within the hour-and the nearest hospital was that far away, incidentally-she wouldn't have made it. She had a massive infection."



"You're saying she died that night."



"Yes. About an hour and a half after I got there, she died. She got to hold the baby."



We all sat silent for a moment. "So, what happened then?" Manfred said.



"The man asked me to examine the baby, and I found that she was okay, a little feverish, but nothing serious. Other than that, physically, she was fine."



"The baby was a girl."



"Yes, yes, she was. Small, but as far as I could tell she would be okay, if she got the proper course of treatment. He asked if I had the right stuff to give her. He was going to take the baby directly to the adoptive parents. I actually had some antibiotics with me in my bag, samples a salesman had given me. I explained the dosage and administration to him, and he carried the baby out of the room. That was the last I saw of the infant. The mother expired then."



Expired. "And what did you do after that?"



He sighed, as if the complexity of relaying his story was too much for him to bear. "I told the man that we had to call into town. We had to report the death. We had quite an argument. He didn't seem to understand that it was the law, that the law had to be followed."



Since you'd already bent it so far out of shape, I thought. "But he let you call, finally?"



"He agreed, as long as I didn't mention the baby. So the funeral home came to get the poor young woman, and I signed the death certificate." His shoulders slumped. He'd finally told the worst thing, in his view, and now he could relax.



"You said she'd died of...?"



"Massive infection due to a ruptured appendix."



"And no one questioned that?"



He shrugged. "No family came forward. The Joyces sent me a check to pay my bill-no more-and after that, if anyone who worked for them got sick, they came to me for treatment."



It had been very clever of them not to offer Dr. Bowden an outright bribe. I was sure the bill he'd sent had been stiff, and they'd paid it just as they would have under normal circumstances. That had reassured the doctor. And since his practice wasn't flourishing, they'd thrown him a big bone.



"With a setup like that, why'd you move to Dallas?" Manfred asked. Again, I wouldn't have gotten into that, but again, I'd underestimated the doctor's elasticity.



"It was my wife. She couldn't stand Clear Creek," he said. "And I've got to say, no one there got along with her, either. We were having some real wars at home. About six years ago, I got to talking to a doctor I'd never met before at an AMA meeting. He had a practice in Dallas. He told me his office was coming empty, did I want to take over the lease. It was at the previous price, much lower than new tenants were paying. And he'd throw in the equipment, too, because he was going overseas to a new job at an American consulate in Turkey or somewhere like that."



Could he really not see how set up that had been? It was like someone attaching a string to a dollar bill and then setting it out on the sidewalk, so he could drag it away and get a passerby to follow the path of the money.



"Jeez Louise," said Manfred. He almost continued, but fortunately he decided to keep his mouth shut.



"Thanks," I said, after I'd tried to think of more questions to ask. "Oh, did someone else come here this morning, asking about Mariah Parish?"



"Ah... yes, as a matter of fact."



Why the hell hadn't I thought to bring pictures of the Joyces with me? I'd done well so far, for someone who didn't know squat about being a detective, but this was a huge mistake I'd made.



"Who was he?"



"Said his name was Ted Bowman."



Oh, not that that was anything like Tom Bowden, oh, no.



"And he wanted..."



Tom Bowden looked troubled, or rather, more troubled. "He wanted to know the same things you two wanted to know, but not for the same reason."



"What do you mean?" I asked.



"It was like he already knew the whole story. He just wanted to know how much I knew about who was involved."



"What did you tell him?"



"I told him I had no idea who the man who brought me to the house was, that as far as I could tell, the last time I saw the baby she was fine, and that I'd never talked to anyone else about that night."