Unbreathed Memories (16 page)

“The faces of abuse are often very similar. Sometimes what you hear from other people in the group … it’s like holding up a mirror to your own life.” Gwen spoke slowly and distinctly, as if she thought I might have trouble understanding her.

“I’m sure I’ve never been abused.”

Mindy raised an eyebrow and shot Gwen a knowing glance. She reached into her purse and extracted a silver case with the initials A.G. engraved on the lid, flipped it open, and took out a business card. “Here.” She laid the card flat on the table and shoved it across to me with two slim fingers. “Call me. Anytime. I’ll be there for you.”

Gwen smiled at her friend, then turned to me. “Mindy’s a wonderful mentor.”

I sent a smile back across the table. “Do you do this for everyone, Mindy?”

Mindy started to answer, but Gwen cut her off. “No.” She paused and at a nod from Mindy continued. “It’s odd, but when we first joined the group we thought—this is
so
great! We’ll have all these new friends to share our problems with. But it didn’t happen that way.”

Mindy shook her head. “No. Gwen and I have been best friends for years. We met at a good, old-fashioned tent revival, didn’t we, Gwennie?”

Gwennie nodded.

“But we’ve never become close with any of the others,” Mindy continued.

“Why?” I asked.

“I think it’s because we sit in these weekly meetings, throwing up our lives, examining each other’s vomit, so to speak. It’s embarrassing. Once I ran into Toni on the street, and we simply ducked our heads and walked on.”

“Why did you invite me here, then?”

“I think we have a lot in common, Hannah, and I want to help.”

“I appreciate it, Mindy,” I said, tucking the card into my shirt pocket. “But as I said, I’m certain I’ve never been abused. I would
know
if something like that had ever happened.”

Gwen laid a hand on my shoulder. “Just listen to your Little Girl this week. See what she has to say.”

“I’ll do that,” I promised. But as I left them in the parking lot and climbed into my car, I was confident that the only thing my Little Girl was going to tell me this week was that nice as they were, these ladies were freaking nuts.

chapter
11

The following morning, at o’dark-thirty, as
they say in the Navy, I got up and drove Ruth to the airport. Ordinarily I would have parked in the short-term garage, shouldered half her luggage, and, after a pit stop at the Starbucks concession, accompanied her to the departure gate. But I was still PO’d with my sister for bailing out on us. Perhaps a little bit jealous, too. She was flying to Paradise, after all, leaving me in … well, the word “hell” came to mind.

Even though she was going halfway around the world, the embrace I gave Ruth was perfunctory. My heart thawed sufficiently to help pile a purse, which was almost as large as her small rolling carry-on, on top of her big suitcase. She smiled, waved, turned, and dragged the precariously teetering tower of bags away. “Bon voyage,” I called after her. I stood by the open trunk of my car and watched until she and her luggage had been swallowed by the automatic doors.

On my way home, I remembered to stop at Hecht’s in the Annapolis Mall to purchase two special bras that
hooked in the front, something my plastic surgeon had recommended. At home, I scratched “bras, two” off my To Do list. I brewed a pot of tea and let it steep while I considered the other items on the list. Defrosting the ancient basement refrigerator could definitely wait; there was hamburger in there left over from midshipmen cookouts in 1997. And just the thought of cleaning the hall closet made me sneeze. I laid the list aside.

I decided to write to my Little Girl while last night’s session was still fresh in my mind. I had found a suitable notebook at the mall and nearly bought it, before remembering that Emily had given me a notebook and a matching pen for Christmas several years ago, back when I’d been doing nonstop complaining about my boss and the other oddballs I had to work with at Whitworth & Sullivan. Emily thought it would help if I kept a diary. I recalled stashing the notebook in the living room desk, but when I looked, it wasn’t there. Funny, I could see the darn thing in my mind’s eye almost everyplace in the house. After a thirty-minute scavenger hunt that sent me wandering from my cookbook shelf to the basement office to my bedside table, I finally found it, under some sheet music in the piano bench.

“It needs to be pretty,” Mindy had said. Well, this certainly qualified. Emily’s gift was bound in pink-and-blue flowered cloth, with lace trim printed on. I took the notebook to the kitchen, poured my tea into a large mug, and sat at the kitchen table with the notebook lying open and accusingly blank in front of me.

What the heck was I going to say?

Hello, Little Girl
, I finally wrote.
How are you?

Fine
, she said.
But a little hungry
.

My Little Girl wanted comfort food. Macaroni and cheese.

Hannah, you are not getting into the proper spirit of things
. I tried again, casting my mind back to my childhood. How far back could I remember?

I slouched in my chair, thinking. San Diego, of course, when I was ten. Before that, Italy. Italy remained in my mind like an impressionistic painting, a kaleidoscope of happy, sunny images. The mountains, the sea. Marita, the maid, young and giggly, not many years older than Ruth and me. Her handsome boyfriend, Paolo, who won our hearts with his silly acrobatic tricks. Before Italy had been Pensacola and that wretched boy next door who always called me Hannah Banana. And before Pensacola? I sucked on the end of my pen, pushing the retractable button in and out with the tip of my tongue. Norfolk was a blur, yet some memories bobbed to the surface, clear and sharp. I remembered building a fort with Ruth in the woods behind our house. I remembered sending a dead raccoon out to sea on a makeshift raft, like a Viking funeral.

I shut my eyes. An image materialized behind my lids. An image of a backyard wading pool with me lying in it, my hair floating around my head, my eyes staring up into the bright summer sky. I was swishing my head back and forth, feeling the sticks and lumpy lawn under the thin vinyl bottom of the pool. Ruth on a nearby swing, laughing, her legs, ankles crossed, rhythmically slicing across the trees that framed my view of the Virginia sky. Daddy was nowhere in the picture. I knew he’d been at sea.

I remembered our pets. My mother favored orange tabby cats—Marmalade and Sunshine—and we’d once had a big, galumphing sheepdog named Snowshoes. Had I had a favorite doll? I didn’t remember.
Hmmph
. If I couldn’t remember my own doll, I doubted I could
remember Georgina’s. Besides, I never liked Cabbage Patch dolls; never understood the attraction of those little scrunched-up, withered-apple faces. Emily had been six when the Cabbage Patch mania swept the country. She called me the meanest mother in the world when I refused to scratch and claw my way through the lines at Toys “R” Us or buy a ticket on the Concorde and fly to Europe to buy her a Cabbage Patch Kid like everyone else’s mother.

I sat up straight.
Wait a minute!
That had been the Christmas of 1983! Georgina had to have been, what, in her twenties? Cabbage Patch Kids had been fairly new then. Georgina couldn’t have owned one much before then! Nobody could.

I padded downstairs to the computer and turned it on, fiddling with the mouse while I waited impatiently for Windows to load. When the desktop appeared, I clicked on the AOL icon and went to Lycos.com on the Internet. “Cabbage Patch Kids,” I typed on the query line.

Almost three thousand hits. People all over the world were collecting the little tykes. One redheaded baby boy doll had been auctioned for three hundred dollars. Holy cow! Seeing stuff like that made me want to turn out the attic. There might be a lucrative market for those old fondue pots and lamps made out of wine bottles that I couldn’t bear to throw away.

I paged down, clicking on various sites maintained by avid Cabbage Patch Kid collectors. Just as I thought. Even if Georgina had owned an original Xavier Roberts doll shipped straight from Babyland General Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia, instead of a later doll by Coleco, Hasbro, or Mattel, she was still way too old. Cabbage Patch Kids had been invented in 1978, when Georgina was twenty.

The sooner I talked some sense into my crazy sister, the better. I remembered what Ms. Bromley had said. Maybe this was just the kind of proof I needed to make Georgina see reason. I dialed Georgina’s number, but no one answered. By now I was wondering if Scott had taken his family on a vacation without telling anybody. I left a message saying I would call back, then considered what to do next. I didn’t feel much like talking to my Little Girl again, although I had to admit she’d been extraordinarily helpful about the Cabbage Patch Kid.

The pages from Dr. Sturges’s appointment book lay where I had left them on the desk.
C. Cameron
was next on my list. I had jotted down a possible telephone number with an address on Keswick Road. I dialed the number, and when a woman answered, I went into my spiel. “Ms. Cameron, this is Betty Smith from the Baltimore Police.”

“Yes?” She sounded meek, almost frightened.

“I’m following up on a few things from the other day.”

Suddenly her voice became guarded. “Haven’t I talked with you before? Your voice sounds familiar.”

Strangely, she sounded familiar, too. Suddenly the faceless voice on the other end of the line acquired plump cheeks and a dark brown ponytail held back with a red barrette. Claudia from All Hallows! I tried to make my voice sound like a cross between Debra Winger and Lauren Bacall instead of the Minnie Mouse range I sometimes slip into when I get excited. “No, you talked with Officers Williams and Duvall.”

“I could have sworn …”

I moved on quickly, not giving her the leisure to think. “Do you know of anyone who had a grudge against the doctor?”

“No one. She was helping us!”

“Irate husbands? Angry fathers?”

“How would I know that?” She became wary. “What did you say your name was?”

“Smith, Betty Smith. Baltimore Homicide.”

“Look, Ms. Smith. I already told you. Dr. Sturges was the kindest, most generous woman I’ve ever known. I can’t think of
anybody
who’d want her dead.”

A gravelly voice in the background wanted to know how long she was going to be on the telephone and demanded lunch. “Look,” she said, “I gotta go. Why don’t you give me your telephone number and I’ll call you back if I think of anything.”

Oh, hell
. The only Baltimore telephone number I knew by heart was Georgina’s. I improvised a number recklessly and hung up, practically throwing the receiver into the cradle. I wondered whose number that was and hoped that Claudia would never have occasion to use it.

I added a line for Claudia Cameron to my list. Next to her name I wrote “Father?” After that evening at All Hallows, Claudia’s description of her abuse made me wonder where
her
father had been on the afternoon of January 15. He could have just as much motive as our father for getting rid of Dr. Sturges.

I studied the names in the doctor’s appointment book, looking for other possible matches with members of the group at All Hallows, but other than Claudia and JoAnne, none seemed likely.

I was so lost in thought that when the phone rang, I dropped my pen. I could see from the caller ID that Scott was on the line, calling from his cell phone.

“Hi, Scott.”

“It’s not Scott. It’s me, Georgina.”

“Oh, Georgina! Hi!”

“I hate it when you do that, Hannah. That caller ID of yours is spooky.”

“It wasn’t my idea. It was Paul’s. He likes to know when someone is calling from the academy.”

“Well, it’s weird.”

I guessed she was speaking from her car, because her voice kept fading in and out. I needed to find out, because I didn’t want to say what I was about to say if she was in control of a moving motor vehicle. “Where are you?”

“In the backyard, picking up the kids’ toys.”

So far so good. “Georgina, I want to tell you something and I want you to think about it.”

“How mysterious! What?”

“Cabbage Patch Kids were invented in 1978.”

The line hissed and crackled for an eternity before Georgina spoke again. “So?”

“You were twenty years old in 1978.”

“I honestly don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Hannah.”

“Just think about it, Georgina.”

I wondered how I could ask this next question without letting on that I knew more than I ought to about her therapy group. And then I thought, so what if she knows? Maybe it would help the truth get through her thick skull. “When you weren’t home last night, I went by the church looking for you.”

“I wasn’t there. Choir rehearses on Tuesday and I usually practice on Friday.”

“But I ran into Lionel.”

“Lucky for you.” She snorted.

“Doesn’t he ever go home?”

“From time to time. His wife’s something of a battle-ax.”

“Lionel told me about a therapy group that meets at the church and mentioned that you used to attend it.”

“What a tattletale!” She sighed. “I did go for a while, but I was finding the private sessions with Dr. Sturges much more helpful. Besides, I was practically living at that church. I needed a break.”

“Did you get involved with that group because it met at the church?”

“Quite the other way around.”

“How do you mean?”

“I heard about the organ job from one of the members in the group.”

I nearly dropped my cup. “So, how did you find out about the group itself?”

“Through the children’s pediatrician, Dr. Voorhis. After Julie I was going through a spell of depression, and during one of Julie’s well-baby visits, he recommended Dr. Sturges. In a way, that’s why I called.”

“Huh?”

“I think I’ve found a new therapist. Dr. Voorhis recommended him, too.”

“That’s great!” I said, hoping that it was. If the new therapist was from the same school as the old one, though, Georgina could be looking at years more of the same expensive nonsense.