Vultures At Twilight Part 18

'Mr Jacobs.' The foreman came over to us. 'Do you want these chairs to go?'

'Everything,' he said, getting to his feet. 'Ada, Lil, thanks.' And he walked back to where the Ha.s.sam painting had been tidily crated into a custom plywood box. He examined the joinery and gently rocked it from side to side. 'Good, this goes in my car.'

TWENTY-FOUR.

How did this happen? I wondered as I approached the two cardboard cartons that had been delivered to my doorstep. What was Ada thinking?

'I can't do it, Lil,' Tolliver had said over the phone after we'd finished Evie's cleanout. Ada and I had been having tea in my kitchen, reminiscing about our friend, and, of course, speculating about the murders. Not to leave her out, I'd put the phone on speaker. 'I can't look at them. I know I have to do something with them,' he'd explained. 'But if I gave them to the police without knowing what was in them, it might just be a horrible waste of their time. What am I supposed to tell them? My husband read these and got depressed, and maybe that has something to do with why he was murdered. They'll think I'm nuts. They already think I did it. I keep waiting for them to come and lock me up.' He'd sighed. 'I feel trapped. I can't just throw them out. Someone has to go through them.' Before he asked, I could feel it coming. 'Would you do it for me?'

And before I could stop her, Ada had agreed. Of course, now she was conveniently out of the house with Aaron on some shopping expedition just as the boxes arrived and I was getting out of the shower. In the spirit of fairness, I threw on a wrap-around dress, and, still in slippers, let myself into her condo and had the delivery guy from Tolliver's shop leave one of the three cartons in her foyer.

The boxes were heavy and crisscrossed with clear packing tape and silver duct tape that had been used and peeled back. I got a serrated knife from the kitchen and sawed through the layers.

'Oh my.' So many spiral-bound notebooks, like the ones I'd buy for my daughters each year before the start of school; different sizes and colors, the work of a lifetime. Where to start? It was overwhelming. And not that I believed in ghosts, but there was something eerie about this stack of writings from a girl who had gone insane and committed suicide. The scent of death lingered. I know it was just my imagination, but sitting there, I had a foreboding, that maybe I should have called Mattie or Hank and had them taken away. 'You promised,' I reminded myself. More accurately, Ada had promised. Still . . .

I pulled out two of the books and settled back in my blue-and-white upholstered wing chair. I switched on the lamp and flipped open a red notebook. On the inside cover, she had written her name and what I took to be a room number. The first entry was dated June 15, 1998.

Fresh book, fresh life. Nice . . . sweet. I should be nice and sweet. The road to freedom is nice and sweet. Wendy, a nice and sweet name, pity the girl can't follow. Like follow the leader. Maybe if I let my name lead, and I followed all would be well. In a world without pills, in a world without doctors. Come for your medicine, nice, sweet girl. Take your pills in a world without thrills. Come Wendy Wendy Wendy. Come Wendy Wendy Wendy.

Roar my faithful nurse. 'Med time. Med time.' Meet her at the station, it's in my contract. Show more enthusiasm, swallow pills, become sweet and nice, nice and sweet, like good and plenty, I'd be good to eat.

Well, fresh book, new book, sweet book. I must take my meds. Good meds sweet meds, sugar-coated pills, yummy yummy yummy. Screaming in my tummy.

I calculated her age in 1998, somewhere in her mid twenties. Within two years she would be dead. I wondered if there was significance to this being on the top. Was this one that Philip had read? I turned the pages.

June 30, 1998 They gave me privileges in my prison without crime. When can I leave, Dr Kluft, Dr Kluft? He smiles; I'm doing better, better every day. Now that I take my pills, I have privileges and wander grounds, beneath watchful eyes. I feel their eyes, heavy through my back as I sit and write. Eyes that search me out and strip me naked. I face the shallow pond, with its fake waterfall that fools the frogs. How deep is the pond, enough for Ophelia to float away? I think not. My privileges do not extend that far. The eyes would pull me back and tie me down. Strap me to the bed. Tie me down, tie me down.

My tongue like dust. It's the pills. It's the pills. Haven't s.h.i.+t in four days. It's the pills. It's the pills. I squint to see the frogs. It's the pills. It's the pills. But without them, they won't let me feel the gra.s.s or see the frogs, or, dare I hope, leave.

Come Philip, sweet brother. I will be good this time. I will be good. I promise. I will sit in my room, that overlooks the Nillewaug. I will not move. I will not worry you or Tolliver. I will do as I am told, I will take my pills and never s.h.i.+t again. I will squint at the frogs and do as I am told. I will not be sweet Ophelia Plath floating in the pond; it's probably too shallow anyway.

I wondered if anyone had read these while she was alive. Had they been part of some therapy? Had she read them to her doctor? In the end, she did drown, perhaps at the very pond she'd sat beside.

I turned pages, focusing on the small careful writing that even in its symmetry betrayed a fine drug-induced tremor, like someone with Parkinson's. She wrote daily, many of the entries an accounting of the groups and the therapies that she had attended. Some like poems and many spoke of death; her death. Occasionally, she dropped little hints of what had happened in her family, but vague and off-center.

July 22, 1998 I find a tree and I sit down.

I follow ants as they merry round.

I speak to the man with gray threaded beard I call to brother, bent and weird.

I call to mother with tears in her voice I touch father who left no choice.

I sit with ants as they merry round I dream of Freedom dug deep in the ground.

I wonder if dirt will tickle my toes, stick in my hair?

Clog my nose?

Will it take the pills that swirl in my blood?

Will it fly me to heaven when the doctor is done?

The phone rang, and I was startled. I checked the caller ID, and picked up.

'Ada?'

'Lil? I've found something. At least I think I have.' Her voice was tentative.

'You're looking at the journals?' I asked.

'Yes.'

'I didn't hear you come home.'

'We got back an hour ago. The poor girl.'

'I know,' I agreed. 'I just started. What did you find?'

'Come over, or better yet, why don't I bring it there.'

'I'll put on water.'

'Lovely. And, Lil . . .'

'Yes.'

'Brace yourself.'

TWENTY-FIVE.

I stared at the torn and dirt-spattered page. It felt as if someone had punched me; the room swam and my heart pounded. I couldn't breathe.

'Lil, I'm sorry.' Ada's voice sounded disconnected. She stood behind me and tried to give some perspective. 'We shouldn't take it literally. The girl wasn't in her right mind. It was some fantasy or wish she had.'

Her words made sense, but they were no antidote for the venom that had leapt off the page. How could someone say these things? They couldn't be true. I forced myself to focus on the crumpled paper. The notebook it had come from was mangled and dirt smeared. It stood out from the rest that were all carefully arranged and stacked.

'It was on the top,' she had said.

Like the mushrooms in Alice In Wonderland it had demanded attention read me read me. And, like the mushrooms, it changed everything.

The page was dated May 14, 2000. Very close to her death. The writing was wild and angular, much different from the careful printing in the book I'd looked at earlier. I forced myself to reread the hateful prose.

Take me to my lover, mother Drive me in your car.

Curl my hair, s.h.i.+ne my shoes Twinkle twinkle little star.

He'll touch and probe Explore my wonders As above the heaven thunders.

No, you mustn't Don't touch me there Your nurse will wonder Is she your wife?

She'll see my blush My virgin's blood.

She'll know you've touched I've come undone.

Take me to my lover, mother In the Main Street manse just down the road.

A pretty girl in a big white house.

My bicycle won't carry I shouldn't go that far.

He'll touch me in my privates His tongue will search me out He'll poke and prod My wonders, lady Then hide away the dribble bits With cotton from his cubby He'll sponge me gently.

Then send me to my Mummy.

When he's done.

He's had enough.

He's taken all.

I've come undone.

There had been more to her verse, but the page was torn, as though she had reread her poem and found it too offensive . . . or someone else had.

I couldn't move. I couldn't think. I felt Ada beside me. I knew what she must be thinking; how could she not?

'It wasn't Bradley,' I said. 'It's completely ridiculous.' She was insane after all; this was some sort of delusion. Didn't her mother go into the examination room with him? I tried to remember; it was typical for parents to go in with their children. But wasn't Wendy Conroy older when she came to visit? When the problems had started, she had been a teenager. With teens, he usually left the parents outside in the waiting room. Outside with me, his nurse . . . or is she his wife?

What was it Bradley had said? I pictured his face, his pale blue eyes that crinkled with his smile. 'When they get to a certain age, they won't tell me what the problem is if their mother's in the room. Usually around eleven or twelve, I ask Mom to stay outside. You'd be amazed at what some of the kids ask me, but it's perfectly normal. They all want to know about s.e.x.'

We had laughed about that, how fifty percent of what he did was closer to being a psychiatrist than a general pract.i.tioner. People were forever stopping him in the street, asking for advice. It didn't seem to matter if it was related to their belly pain or their in-law problems. It had always filled me with a quiet pride that my husband, my Bradley, was someone that people came to with their problems.

And now this, from the mind of a tortured young woman came obscene accusations. I wanted to burn it.

'Could she have been talking about someone else?' Ada asked.

'I don't know. Bradley was her doctor for years. He was everyone's doctor. No one has ever said something like this, or hinted. This is outrageous. And he can't defend himself.'

'Lil.' She sat beside me. 'We can't jump to conclusions. Wendy Conroy was psychotic. There's no way of knowing the truth. They're poems; maybe it's a metaphor? She saw a lot of doctors; maybe it had nothing to do with Bradley. She could have been talking about one of her psychiatrists, or some other kind of doctor.'

I tried to listen, my mind raced; she was talking about Bradley. The white house, me filling out appointment slips in the waiting room, 'cotton from the cubby'. I pictured his tidy office, with the gla.s.s-fronted cabinets stocked with everything needed, whether to handle an emergency delivery or to set a fracture. Maybe he had given her a gynecologic exam and it had become twisted into one of her delusions. That could happen, couldn't it? A young girl on the brink of madness, what would she think of the stirrups and the speculum? Although, he always had me or Gladys, his nurse, a.s.sist him with gynecologic exams. He never did them without a chaperone in the room . . . but is that true?

I couldn't even entertain that what she alleged had actually occurred. Bradley was not a pedophile.

'It was right on top,' Ada had said. 'It may have been her last journal, I've been flipping through the others, and they're all older. Some from when she was a teenager.'

'Why would she write that?' I put the book down, resisting an impulse to tear it up, to burn it.

'Tolliver said she was very sick. It's probably a delusion. I'm sure it has nothing to do with Bradley.'

I felt numb. 'He was the only doctor in town, certainly the only one on Main Street. He was the only one she ever saw. At least until her problems started. Then there were a lot of doctors. A lot of psychiatrists, neurologists . . .'

'Maybe it was one of them?' she offered.

'I can't do this,' I said. 'I know we promised Tolliver, but it's too much.' My stomach churned; how could she say things like this? And there was no way to answer back. She and Bradley were dead; what possible use could this serve? And what other accusations lurked inside those college-ruled pads? 'Ada, I need to take a walk.'

'I'll go with you.'

'No, I need to think . . . I have to think.'

'Lil, are you sure?'

I headed for the door, and looked back at her. My thoughts were swimming, everything turned upside down, including my feelings for Ada. 'I need to think,' I stammered, barely able to find words, and before she could object I walked out.

A crisp leaf-whipped October wind buffeted my cheek as I headed down my walk toward the road.

It was too much. Two years after burying my husband, this girl, although she was a woman when she wrote that entry, accused him of molesting her over a decade before. It was obscene. It was not my Bradley . . . It couldn't be.

Without thought to direction, I headed toward the walking path that circled the ten-acre lake in the center of Pilgrim's Progress. Geese squawked as I pa.s.sed, and a pair of swans headed toward me, antic.i.p.ating I'd come to throw breadcrumbs. I stared at the crushed gravel and thought about Bradley and the year of our courts.h.i.+p. He was older than I was, twelve years, but I was no child. I was twenty-one. And didn't pedophiles like them young; wouldn't that argue against his guilt? Our s.e.x life had been good. Although, I didn't have much to compare against. I'd been a virgin on our wedding night. Ours had been a quiet sort of lovemaking. Not the romance novel, bodice-ripping kind of thing. For lack of a better word, it was normal and gentle; and, over time, less frequent. But he'd hold me at night, before we went to sleep. We kissed every night and every morning. I could still feel his Sat.u.r.day morning stubble against my cheek.

I remembered the late-night emergency calls, his black bag always ready by the front door. Sometimes our bell would ring at two or three in the morning and I'd get up with him, throw on my robe and slippers and go down to meet whatever emergency had come knocking. How many children with croup or broken bones had there been? How many drunken men who had fallen, and rather than stumble home bruised to their wives, had come to Bradley to get patched up and to practice their excuses. He was the keeper of secrets and I was his partner. He took to the grave the knowledge of which men had cheated on their wives and visa versa. There were things he would never write in his patients' charts. 'We'll just keep this between the two of us,' he'd say, after administering a shot of penicillin to a local alderman who had contracted gonorrhea in New York City. He knew all the little-town lies and truths that if they ever leaked could destroy families and careers. He knew of the abortions and even mercy killings; he never judged. 'It's hard enough,' he'd say about a family struggling with a terminally ill parent. 'You have to give them choices, help them through.' On more than one occasion, I know he hastened death with the gentle kiss of morphine. He was there at the birth of his patients and we always attended the funerals. Not once was he sued. And while our move to Pilgrim's Progress was supposed to presage his retirement, he practiced medicine until the day he died.

He'd loved Grenville, even though he'd been born outside of Boston. We would joke about how you couldn't really be accepted in Grenville until you'd lived here at least three generations. But he had been accepted, and respected, and loved.

I veered from the footpath edged with clumps of purple and rust mums, and headed toward the road. Everything here in Pilgrim's Progress was too tidy. I needed to see something older, something real. I thought about going back for the car but I needed to walk. I moved quickly toward the gated entrance to the community and turned right on to Cedar Swamp Road.

As I pa.s.sed Miller's farm and the riding stables, I thought of Wendy's poem. There were a couple other doctors in town, none of them in white houses, none of them GPs. And most of them weren't even around when Bradley was in practice. For years he was the only physician in Grenville. More importantly, he had been her physician.

I cleared the end of the road and turned left on to Main Street. I took in the shops and houses that had watched Town Plot for the past two centuries. The few Victorian mansions, with their multi-hued paint and busy gingerbread trim, were the most recent additions to the stoic colonial and federal homes. Even the office buildings dated back to the 1840s. Familiar, like the back of my hand, yet it all looked different, as though someone had taken Grenville and turned it into a movie set. I had always taken pride in how well we cared for the town; the yearly tree plantings, the near-fascistic historical society which mandated the size and style of every sign, door knocker or mullion placed on the antique homes. I loved the symmetry of Town Plot with its absence of graffiti, litter or other urban blight. As I walked past the one-room schoolhouse, now the headquarters for the historical society, I overheard a pair of tourists.

'It's so perfect,' said a woman in Hawaiian print culottes and a blue cardigan as she read the bronze plaque.