Unbreathed Memories (27 page)

We wound around and around as we ascended, and I was thanking my lucky stars I wasn’t any wider in the hips or especially prone to dizzy spells. At the top, we emerged through a door in the wall of the chancel just to the right of the altar. The door would be hidden from
the congregation by the carved wooden bulk of the organ. “This is how our organist gets from the front of the church to the back balcony without interrupting the service.” Lionel gestured toward the balcony, several hundred feet away. “The choir sits up there.”

I wondered how Georgina managed to play the organ and conduct the choir at the same time, separated as they were by what seemed like half the length of a football field. Lionel must have read my thoughts. “There’s another organ in the balcony, Mrs. Ives. Not a fine pipe organ like this one, of course.” He stroked the wooden case lovingly. “But adequate.” He polished an imaginary fingerprint off the case with the sleeve of his jacket.

“And the microphones?” Connie inquired. “Where might they be?”

Lionel snapped out of his reverie. “Ah, yes. The microphones. Let me show you. We have several.”

The pulpit at All Hallows was also carved of dark wood, but much more elaborately than the organ. I counted twelve full-length statues of the Apostles around its base. An eagle, its wings spread out to hold whatever papers the priest preached from, decorated the top. Three short steps led from the chancel up to the pulpit. Lionel tiptoed up the steps, opened a small gate, then stepped inside the pulpit. “One mike is here.” He pointed to a lavalier-style microphone that hung from a hook just inside the gate. “Father Wylands just clips it to his robe before he begins, although why he needs a lavalier mike, I couldn’t say. It’s not as if he ever
goes
anywhere while he’s preaching.” He stepped out, closing the gate behind him.

I noticed the long cord attached to the microphone and asked, “Aren’t these microphones usually wireless?”

Lionel smiled down at me condescendingly. “Well, yes. But Father is hopelessly old-fashioned … and frugal. We’ll use these until they wear out, I’m quite certain.”

He waited until I had backed down the steps out of his way, then swanned after me, crossing the chancel to a lectern, also made of wood, but of a much plainer design. “We’ve a stationary microphone here,” he explained. “It’s so the readers can be heard by the congregation. Some of the women—” He stopped, looked from Connie to me, and evidently decided that whatever he had been about to say about women as readers wouldn’t sit well with a pair of female private detectives. Instead, he pointed to a toggle switch mounted on the underside of the lectern. “But if I flip this switch here, the lectern can be patched into the recording system as well.”

Connie had been observing this performance in silence. “Any other microphones?” she asked. “Like in the back?”

Lionel shook his head. “No, no. That’s it.”

“How can we be sure they’re working properly?” I asked.

Lionel’s face assumed a pained expression, as if we were questioning his integrity. “They work every Sunday. I don’t know why they wouldn’t work now.” I stood my ground and simply stared at the man until he felt compelled to fill the silence. “But perhaps we should test it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps that would be best. Connie?”

Lionel bobbed and weaved his way back toward the spiral staircase with Connie at his heels. I checked my watch. Six-fifteen. In forty-five minutes we should know one way or the other about Dr. Voorhis.

I was standing at the lectern looking out over the empty pews and trying to calm my jittery nerves when Lionel materialized behind me. “Mrs. Ives?”

When I could breathe again, I said, “Yes?”

“When I get everything ready to go, I’ll send the other Mrs. Ives up to tell you. Then you just speak into the microphones in a normal voice.”

“Like this?” I leaned close to the microphone and intoned, “ ‘ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves …’ ”

He raised both hands, palm out. “Not
that
loud, Mrs. Ives.”

I straightened and took a step backward. “Like this? ‘… did gyre and gimble in the wabe.’ ”

He smiled a thin-lipped smile. “Much better.” He executed an elegant about-face. “About five minutes,” he called over his shoulder, and disappeared back down the rabbit hole.

“ ‘All mimsy were the borogoves,’ ” I continued, addressing the board on which the numbers for the hymns for the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany were displayed: 119, 123, and 128. I recognized 128—“We Three Kings.” I tried out the tune with “and the mome raths outgrabe,” but it didn’t fit.

“Very enlightening.” The familiar voice of Dr. Voorhis, smooth as satin, came at me out of nowhere.

“I haven’t gotten to the best bits,” I said into the shadows. I tried not to think about the Jabberwock, especially the bit about the vorpal blade that went snicker-snack.

Voorhis emerged from the baptistry alcove just to my left and stood squinting up at me in the dim light.

“You’re early,” I said, stating the obvious.

“I like to be prepared.” It was a statement of fact, cool and dispassionate. “I knew who you were, you see.”

“How? My note was anonymous.”

“When you telephoned Claudia pretending to be from the police, Claudia was concerned. She called me. I simply dialed the number that had appeared on her
caller ID. Need I tell you that it didn’t ring at the police department?” I remembered, sheepishly, the threatening call my mother had answered on my phone. “I was going to pay you a visit in Annapolis, but then your note arrived.” His teeth, long and narrow, flashed white. “This arrangement is much more convenient.”

I wondered how long he had been standing in the alcove, listening. If he knew about the microphones, my proverbial goose would be cooked. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“There’s a side door, Mrs. Ives.” He gestured toward the baptistry behind him. “It responded conveniently to manipulation by credit card.”

“I see.”

Voorhis took a tentative step forward, then paused in the side aisle, blocking my view of a marble memorial shelf on which someone had placed a vase of fresh flowers. “You said you had something to discuss, Mrs. Ives. So, here I am.” He waved a ringed hand. “Discuss.”

My fingers found the toggle switch on the lectern. Praying it wouldn’t respond with a telltale click, I turned on the microphone. I steadied myself with both hands gripping the lectern. “The very fact that you’re here, Dr. Voorhis, answers one question.”

“And that is?”

“That you sexually abused your daughter, Diane.”

“Abuse?” His hand rested on a pew. I could see the glint of a stone in his Johns Hopkins ring. “What nonsense! I loved my daughter, and she loved me. She was my joy, and I hers. Our times together were … special.”

My stomach lurched, and it was all I could do to keep from throwing up. I could tell by the expression on Dr. Voorhis’s face that he actually believed what he was saying.

“But she was only a child!”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. I didn’t abuse Diane.” He addressed me as he would a difficult and not very intelligent child. “Mrs. Ives, Mrs. Ives. How can it possibly be abuse, when she enjoyed it, too?”

My head reeled. I tried to imagine what I would do if I caught Paul fondling Emily. I felt like flying across the sanctuary and tearing this creep’s face off with my bare hands, slowly, strip by painful strip.

“Your wife found out about it, didn’t she?”

His silver eyebrows nearly met. “My wife?”

“The first Mrs. Voorhis. She couldn’t live with that knowledge, could she?”

“What do you know about that?”

“I can read old newspapers, Dr. Voorhis. I know about the suicide note.”

Suddenly I began to panic. What if the lectern mike wasn’t patched in? What if Lionel had actually thrown the switch when he was showing it to us earlier? What if I had turned it
off
instead of
on?
I would have to lure the doctor closer to the microphone in the pulpit.

I stepped out from behind the security of the lectern feeling small and vulnerable. Dr. Voorhis stood only twenty feet away.

“You don’t know anything, Mrs. Ives. My wife was deranged. That note you refer to was full of delusional crap.”

“If it was all crap, why did you leave Waterville?”

“Small town. Smaller minds. There were some who believed the lies Fiona told about Diane and me. She was a disturbed woman, Mrs. Ives. Very disturbed.” He took another step in my direction and I retreated, inching toward the pulpit as casually as I could without alarming him.

“But Diane came to believe it, too, didn’t she, Dr. Voorhis?”

Since our conversation began, the doctor’s attention had never wavered from my face, but he stared at me then with frightening intensity. “It’s a dangerous thing when a doctor wanders down a pseudoscientific path and suddenly begins to believe all the garbage she’s been peddling.”

“Tell me, what happened the afternoon she died?”

We stood face-to-face, separated only by the three steps that led from the sanctuary up to the chancel. “She said she had something important to ask me.” He smiled, remembering. “Diane was always asking me for advice about something—taxes, investments. So when I got to her office I was completely blindsided. To put it simply, she attacked me. She held me responsible for her mother’s suicide, for having to leave her friends in Waterville.” He stroked his tie. “Seems I’d ruined her life. Balls! She was a successful student because of me. She became a respected therapist because of me!”

“Why did you kill her?”

He thrust a hand into his jacket pocket, and I held my breath.
Did he have a gun?

“I didn’t mean to,” he said at last. “It was an accident. Diane threatened to ruin my career. I tried to talk sense into her, of course, but I’d never seen such hate! After all I’d done for my daughter, she was out to ruin me.” He touched a spot on his cheek, as if it were still tender from a blow. “She came at me, swinging with both fists. Then she started screaming. She was hysterical. I just wanted to calm her down, for Christ’s sake. Somehow we ended up on the balcony.… I’m not sure what happened next. She just tumbled over the railing.” Voorhis’s dark wool suit, so well-tailored only minutes before,
suddenly didn’t seem to fit correctly. “I loved her so much …”

“You have a curious way of showing it.”

“Ah, yes. The abuse. That’s a laugh!” He paused, one hand still in the pocket of his jacket. “She started it, you know. When she was three. She loved to take a bath with her daddy. Then when she was five, she kept crawling into my bed, begging for a back rub. At first it was just cuddling. But then …” He lounged against the first pew, lost in thought. “Such a sexy little girl. So provocative, I couldn’t help myself; no man could. You should have seen how she dressed in junior high—those skintight miniskirts and low-cut tank tops. Half the time she didn’t even wear a bra. I
begged
Fiona to do something about the way Diane dressed, but she didn’t. Oh, Diane knew what she was doing, all right.”

“That
is
sexual abuse,” I insisted. “No matter what her age, no matter what your relationship with her was, you had all the power. And if you used that power to pressure your daughter into a sexual relationship, your wife was right. Diane was being abused.”

I studied his face, searching it for signs of understanding. “Dr. Voorhis, even if Diane walked into your bedroom stark naked and came on to you, as a responsible adult you should have said, ‘Whoa. We’ve got a problem here.’ You were her
father
! Why didn’t you get her some professional help?”

He looked confused. “One night not long after Diane turned fourteen, she asked me to stop. And I did. It was over.”

That may have settled the matter for him, but not for me. “But, Dr. Voorhis …”

He advanced. “How can I make you understand?”

I retreated. I raised my hand as if to steady myself
against the pulpit, but I was carefully feeling around for the microphone cord. If Voorhis got any closer, I planned to grab the microphone and scream the church down. I know it sounds insane under the circumstances, but I almost smiled, imagining Lionel sitting down below in his headphones, fiddling with his dials. I would rupture his eardrums for sure.

“That day in her office, she said she hoped I’d get AIDS or Alzheimer’s disease. She told me she’d dance on my grave the day I died.” Tears glistened in his eyes and he seemed somewhere far away. “She was Daddy’s special little girl.”

My searching fingers found the microphone cord, and as I began to curl them around it, Dr. Voorhis suddenly snapped to attention and took another step toward me. “As much as I loved her, I couldn’t afford to have this become public knowledge.”

I stalled for time. He was so close that I could tell that the paisley swirls on his tie were actually multicolored fish. “You got away with it before, in Waterville,” I said. “You could get away with it again.”

“Ah, but that was a very different time and place, Mrs. Ives. Very different. Nowadays, a man can be branded guilty of sexual abuse on the flimsiest of evidence—branded with an indelible A, if you will, that all the evidence to the contrary cannot erase. No, I can’t afford to have even a hint of this known. I work with children, Mrs. Ives. It would ruin me.”

His voice was steady and so calm that I was totally unprepared for what came next. Voorhis’s arm shot out and circled my neck in a dangerous embrace, slamming my forehead against his chest. I managed to grab the microphone cord, but it dangled loosely from my hand.

Voorhis reached around me with his left hand. I felt
it slide slowly, almost sensuously down my arm until his hand reached mine and he was able to prize the microphone from my fingers. His arm tightened around my neck, like a vise, and my nose was squashed flat against his tie. I could barely breathe, let alone scream.

A sudden jerk nearly snapped my neck. Voorhis had yanked the microphone cord from its socket. Seconds later, he looped the cord around my neck and was using both hands, those hands that should have been dedicated to healing, to draw the cord tight. I couldn’t speak, swallow, scream, or breathe. I clawed at the ever-tightening cord, but couldn’t get my fingers under it.