Unbreathed Memories (25 page)

While I held my breath, Paul shoved his chair back and reached for the battered briefcase he’d propped against a table leg. He extracted a sheaf of papers from the side pocket and held them out to me. “Here are photocopies of everything I found.”

I snatched them from his outstretched hand. “You sweetheart!”

“They’re roughly in order.”

My heart began to pound as I shoved my plate away, flicked some grains of rice onto the floor, and arranged the photocopies on the table in front of me. The one on top showed a simple invitation-style announcement bordered with a Greek key design. It introduced Drs. Warner and Millicent Rickert to the Waterville community and invited patients to look to the clinic for all their medical needs. The next photocopy was from the society page. It described a farewell party held for Diane Voorhis at the Waterville Country Club, sponsored by someone in the Junior League, the mother of one of Diane’s little friends. The article was dry and about as interesting as reading the stock market quotes—I mean, who
cares
what kind of flowers decorated the tables—until the final paragraph:

Diane, 13, will be relocating to Baltimore, Maryland, where her father, Dr. Mark Voorhis, is going into private practice. Fiona Voorhis, his wife of fifteen years, a popular member of the Junior League and an active member of St. Anthony’s church, died in August.

I sensed Paul staring at me. I whistled and looked up.

“What did she die of?”

“Read on, McDuff,” he said with a twinkle.

Since everything seemed to be arranged in reverse chronological order, I dived straight to the bottom of the stack. Under a picture of an attractive woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Diane Sturges was the headline:
LOCAL WOMAN FOUND DEAD OF CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING
. I checked the date. On a Tuesday night in August of 1979, Fiona Voorhis had been discovered
dead in her car, a Volvo station wagon, when her husband returned home following his rounds. He told police he had heard the engine running, but by the time he opened the garage and pulled his wife from the car, it was too late.

“Where was Diane?” I asked Paul.

He laid a finger on a photocopy featuring several pictures of a barn fire. It was from the following week’s paper, and it carried more details. The night her mother died, thirteen-year-old Diane had been attending a church camp in nearby Durham.
Poor thing
, I thought.
No wonder she was so screwed up, losing her mother like that. And so young
. The police had found a suicide note, but its contents had not been revealed. Family friends had reported that Fiona had been recently despondent. Again, no cause for that depression was given. The final article dealt with the inquest. Fiona Voorhis’s death was ruled a suicide. I counted on my fingers. Five months later, Dr. Voorhis had sold his practice and he and his daughter were on their way to Baltimore. I wondered why.

I turned the photocopy over, as if expecting something to be printed on the back of it. “That’s it?”

Paul nodded. “Isn’t that enough?”

I paged through the articles again. “I would give my eyeteeth to know what was in that suicide note.”

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.”

I had to agree with him. “It’s an odd thing, though.”

“What’s odd?”

I shuffled through the photocopies. “Did you notice that the
Gazette
reports on everything under the sun—birthday parties for two-year-olds, high school dances, junior varsity basketball scores, the weekly menus at the school cafeteria …”

“And your point is?”

“There was a farewell party for Diane, but none for the good doctor.”

“Maybe he didn’t want a party. He was the grieving widower, don’t forget.”

I ignored him. “Makes me wonder all the more about that suicide note,” I said. “The earlier articles hint at something more—that she was found dead under suspicious circumstances—but the reporter writing about the inquest doesn’t even hint at anything suspicious or unusual.”

“Let’s ask Dennis.”

Paul’s suggestion surprised me. I’d thought about Dennis, too, but was glad that Paul had been the one to bring it up, not me. Perhaps his sister’s boyfriend, being a policeman, could find out something about the case, maybe even learn the contents of the suicide note. “
You
call him,” I prompted.

“Why me?”

“I’m always asking him for stuff. He already thinks I have a screw loose. The request might sound more reasonable coming from you.”

“I doubt it.” Paul stood, came around behind my chair, and rested both hands on my shoulders. “He’ll just think I’ve joined the Hannah Club.” He kissed the top of my head. “But since you’re an invalid and completely at my mercy, I’ll give it a shot.”

Surprisingly, Paul reached Dennis at home. Widowed a little over a year, Dennis Rutherford divided his time between the Chesapeake County Eastern District police station where he worked and Connie’s farm. From my one-sided vantage point, pinned by pain to my chair and listening to Paul as he wandered around the kitchen with the portable phone pressed to his ear, I
gathered that Dennis had reluctantly agreed to make some discreet inquiries, but that he wouldn’t guarantee to share the results with me. Paul promised to meet him for a beer and a long-overdue chin wag, or whatever male-bonding activities men get up to over beer when their womenfolk aren’t around. “There!” He laid the phone on the table and turned to me. “Satisfied?”

I aimed my sweetest smile in his direction. “Very.”

Paul covered his eyes with both hands. “Aieeee! It’s the saccharine death ray!”

“And only one of my extraordinary talents not presently under reconstruction.”

Paul circled the table, leaned down, and brushed his lips against the back of my neck. “Dennis also thought you’d like to know that the Baltimore police still don’t have enough evidence to charge your father with anything.”

I relaxed against him. “That’s good news.” I reached back and caressed his cheek, enjoying the prickly feel of it against my skin.

“It’s after eight. Can I help you upstairs?”

I took the hand he offered and pulled myself up unsteadily. “Thanks.” I had expected to hobble upstairs on my own—I was doing much better at stairs these days—but Paul surprised me by scooping me up as if I were a blushing bride. I wrapped my arms around his neck. He was panting slightly but trying not to show it when he arranged me gently on the bed in our room.

I laid the back of my hand dramatically against my forehead. “I feel like a heroine in a romance novel, a fragile lily doomed to expire from consumption.” I faked a dainty, ladylike cough.

He tucked the comforter around my legs and began to chuckle.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m just remembering something. When I was a kid, my dad loved opera. Long before there was a Kennedy Center, we’d take the train up to New York to hear the Metropolitan Opera. Saw Leontyne Price in
Aida
once.”

“You never told me that!”

“Never came up before.”

I wondered what there was about
Aida
to make somebody laugh. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t
Aida
a tragedy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then what’s so funny about going to the Met?”

Paul parked himself on the edge of the bed. “Well, I’d been to a lot of operas—
Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, La Bohème
—but in all that time, I’d never seen a thin soprano. The first time I saw
La Bohème
—I must have been about ten—I goggled at the bloated diva who was practically bursting out of the seams of her Mimi costume and couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about.”

I must have looked puzzled.

Paul crawled onto the bed next to me, fully clothed. He plumped up a pillow and sandwiched it between his head and the wooden headboard. “If you recall, Mimi’s dying of consumption. I figured if she wanted to eat herself to death, that was her problem!”

I bent double with laughter, pressing the comforter against my abdomen. “Oh, help! You are a bad, bad boy!”

His arm encircled my shoulders and I leaned my head against his chest. “I certainly hope so,” he whispered into my hair.

chapter
19

Ever notice how you can go for days and days
and nothing much happens? Get up, eat, sleepwalk through the day, eat, go to bed? Then all of a sudden—
bah-bing
—everything seems to happen all at once.

It began on Lincoln’s Birthday, the day I saw my plastic surgeon. This miracle-working woman, whose office was decorated with her own paintings and sculptures, had created another masterpiece. My breast. A beautiful, healthy pink mound that stood tall and proud upon my chest. I was thrilled to be the owner of a boob that I didn’t have to take out of a drawer every morning.

While the doctor warned me to examine myself often for telltale signs of rejection, I stood in front of the mirror, half listening, wearing not much more than a goofy grin and admiring my newly matched pair. I was enormously pleased; so pleased that after I left the office, I had to control an irrational desire to show off Dr. Bergstrom’s remarkable handiwork to everyone I met.

I fantasized strolling up Maryland Avenue from shop to shop. “Look at this,” I’d say to Jehanne, the curly-headed
barista
at Seattle Coffee. And she’d go, “Why, Mrs. Ives, wherever did you get that?”

I had permission to drive again, too. After we returned home from the doctor’s, I left Paul happily puttering in his basement workshop and celebrated my new freedom with a trip to the grocery store. I wandered up and down the aisles as if greeting old friends—the coffee bins, the dairy case, the gourmet food counter—then carried some English muffins, cheddar cheese, and a carton of half-and-half through the checkout, managing to keep my shirt on the whole time.

My second solo outing caught me totally by surprise. I had spent the early part of Friday afternoon getting my prescribed exercise by strolling along the Naval Academy seawall, a bulkhead of heaped-up boulders and concrete that edged the academy shoreline from the Visitors’ Center all the way to Hospital Point. I began my walk at the end of the seawall nearest the Visitors’ Center, stopping to enjoy a panoramic view of Annapolis harbor. In Feburary only a few hearty cruisers and die-hard sailing live-aboards were anchored in the scenic harbor. In summer, though, it would be a different story; boats would be anchored wall-to-wall, and you could practically walk to Eastport without getting your feet wet. I smiled. Eastport. Home of Severn Sailing Association, the school where Paul had spent many dollars and hopeless hours trying to turn me into an accomplished sailor.

I had stopped to rest at the submarine memorial near Trident Light and had just parked my buns on the topmost step, when the cell phone in my parka chirped. Ruth was calling from a pay phone in the Los Angeles airport to tell me she was on her way home. Worry and guilt had gradually eroded her ability to concentrate on her
spiritual growth. She’d left Bali after discovering an escape clause in the travel agency’s contract that allowed partial refunds for bona fide medical emergencies.

Seven hours later, I met Ruth at BWI, gave her a hug, told her she’d need to heft her own luggage into my trunk, and drove her straight to University Hospital in Baltimore.

Mother was overjoyed.

Ruth was in tears.

I paced. I couldn’t keep my shirt on, quite literally. “You gotta see this, Mom.” I drew the privacy curtains across the glass partitions that separated Mother’s room from the adjoining ones. I unbuttoned my shirt and unfastened my bra. “Tah-dah!” I flashed my mom. “What do you think?”

Mother beamed. “Beautiful, Hannah. A work of art.”

From a bedside chair Ruth studied my chest with interest. “Weirdest show-and-tell I’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so proud of anything in my whole life,” I declared while reassembling my clothing. “It’s a shame I can’t show off Dr. Bergstrom’s work to everybody.”

“Speaking of everybody, where’s Daddy?” Ruth wanted to know.

Mother managed a grin. “He’ll be back in a bit. He went home to bathe and change his clothes after I complained that he’d been wearing the same olive-green trousers for the last three days and I was sick of looking at them.”

Ruth brought Mother up to date on her abbreviated trip while I listened jealously. Morning walks to the rice paddies, meditation, herbal steam baths—it sounded positively divine. After an hour, Daddy joined us, smelling like Ivory soap and having changed into a pair of
freshly pressed khaki pants and a red plaid shirt. His hair was still damp. I listened impatiently while Ruth repeated it all for him, but Mother didn’t seem to mind. She smiled and asked questions as if it were the very first time she’d heard about colonic hydrotherapy.

Ruth’s Conduit Street cupboard had never been so thoroughly bare, so I made her come to our house for dinner. Carryout was on the menu again, a particular specialty of mine. Ruth happily joined Paul and me in the kitchen, where we heaped our plates high and dug in.

That was where Connie and Dennis found us a few minutes later, our teeth sunk into slices of garlic bread and our forks fully draped with spaghetti puttanesca from Cantina d’Italia.

I wiped tomato sauce off my chin. “Hi, you guys.”

Dennis removed his leather jacket and draped it over the back of a vacant chair. “Got something you’ve been waiting for, Hannah.” He laid a photocopy of a fax on the table. “It’s from the Waterville police department. Came in today.”

“You are amazing!” My dinner was forgotten. “But how are you able to show this to us?”

Dennis pulled a chair out for Connie, waited until she was seated, then sat down himself. “It was all part of the official court proceedings. Although Mrs. Voorhis’s note was never made public, the gist of it certainly leaked out.”

Connie wriggled out of her jacket, leaned forward to snitch a strand of spaghetti from my plate, and continued, “Small wonder, when you read what it says.”