Greely's Cove Page 2

  Like Tiny in his prime, Stu stood six-three and weighed two hundred and forty-five pounds. Like Tiny, he had played on the defensive line in high school, had gone to college at the University of Washington and then on to law school. But unlike Tiny, Stu had not become a lawyer and thus could not join his father’s lucrative, small-town practice, as had been the family dream ever since Stu could remember. Unable to cut the mustard academically, he had quit law school and returned to Greely’s Cove to become a policeman and ultimately the police chief—possibly because he had married the mayor’s daughter. Since failing in law school, he had never been able to look his dad squarely in the eye. Or himself, either, for that matter.

  He parked in the muddy lot of City Hall, which dominated the corner of Frontage Street and Sockeye Drive. At the rear of the ancient building was the firehouse, with its huge, jointed door. Inside it was a single late-model pumper truck, painted not the traditional red but a regrettable yellowish green, which had become a standard color of the fire service. On the first floor were the city offices, such as they were, and upstairs was a council chamber that sometimes doubled as a courtroom. In the basement—or “garden level,” as the police laughingly called it—was the headquarters of the Greely’s Cove Police Department.

  A visitor who came down the concrete steps of the main entrance would find himself looking through a steel-mesh screen into a cramped cubicle, where sat the dispatcher, who doubled as a receptionist. If the visitor’s business were legitimate, the dispatcher would press a button that unlocked a door in the reception area, and the visitor could enter the “inner sanctum,” which included a squad room that smelled of cigarette butts and Lysol; a detainee cell with steel bars and a heavy door; and the chief’s office, which Stu shared with his secretary.

  Big-time operation, Stu Bromton often said with a wry chuckle.

  Two men waited in the chief’s office. One was Dave Putney, assistant county prosecutor, a wisp of a man with prematurely thinning hair. Because this was a Saturday, he wore a yellow sou’wester rain jacket, unzipped and open at the front, over khaki trousers and running shoes, rather than his customary Brooks Brothers three-piece and brogues.

  The other was Dr. Alvin Lonsdale, a forensic pathologist summoned from the state medical examiner’s office to assist in “processing” a suicide. Lonsdale was near retirement, paunchy and jowly faced, possessed of a wrinkled grin and a belly laugh that reminded Stu of Ed McMahon.

  “The team of Putney and Lonsdale,” said Stu in his radio-announcer voice, pushing through his office door, “is on the case, so don’t worry, Virginia, we’re in good hands.” Both men smiled, even though they hated being called out on weekends, especially to out-of-the-way little burgs like Greely’s Cove. “You guys get any coffee?” asked Stu after trading handshakes.

  They hadn’t gotten any, but a bellow from the chief brought the dispatcher scurrying in with two Styrofoam cups full of something very much like coffee—steamy, black, and more or less liquid.

  “Careful with that stuff,” Stu warned his visitors, “it’ll grow hair on Formica.”

  Dr. Lonsdale grimaced after taking a sip, then opened the manila folder he had brought with him. “Trosper, Lorna Ann Moreland,” he read. “Age thirty-six, artist, divorced, mother of a thirteen-year-old boy. God, what a waste.” He glanced up at the police chief. “I’ve seen her medical records, Stu, and I’ve seen the coroner’s preliminary report. We’ve been over to the mortuary to look at the body, and everything we’ve got so far shouts suicide. But before I say so without an autopsy, I want to know everything you do.”

  “Fair enough,” said Stu, taking the chair behind his paper-strewn metal desk. “I go way back with her, ever since she married my best buddy back in law school. They were good people, both of them. Had some bad breaks, though.”

  “Like a kid who turned out to be a drooling basket case?” interjected Putney, the assistant prosecutor.

  The chief managed a small smile that masked his annoyance over the remark. “They never got a definitive diagnosis on Jeremy, as far as I know,” he explained. “Some doctors said he was autistic, others said he was severely retarded. Whatever it was that he had wrong with him, he was a real burden—not only financially, but emotionally. Carl and Lorna’s marriage couldn’t take the strain of it, which isn’t so surprising, if you ask me. Marriages go belly-up over a lot smaller things than that.”

  “Amen,” said Putney, whose tone suggested that he spoke from bitter experience. “But I hear that Lorna finally found a doctor who could help the kid. That would seem like a reason to go on living, wouldn’t it? I mean, you find someone who can help the son you thought was beyond help, and life takes on new meaning, wouldn’t you think? You’d have every reason to live, right?”

  “Maybe not,” said Stu. “I talked to the doctor this morning—name of Craslowe, practices right here in town.”

  “What kind of doctor?” asked Lonsdale.

  “Clinical psychologist, specializes in kids. I’ve seen his sheepskins, and they’re impressive as hell. He’s English—went to Oxford, Cambridge, some big school in Austria, or some-damn-where. Anyhow, he moved to town last winter and hung out a shingle on the old house at Whiteleather Place. Lorna heard about him and took Jeremy to see him. Now, I don’t have any idea what Craslowe did, but whatever it was, it worked—almost overnight. Suddenly Jeremy’s talking, playing with other kids, learning things, even reading—”

  “Oh, come on, Stu,” said Lonsdale, with a chuckle. “These children don’t attain reading skills that quickly, and many never do.”

  “I swear to God, Doc: The kid learned to read. Before Lorna took him to see Craslowe, he couldn’t even dress himself. Within months—weeks, really—he could read and carry on conversations just like an adult. Sounds kind of eerie, I know. Like everybody else in this town, I was blown away by it, I really was.”

  “You were going to tell me,” said Putney, “why this miracle caused the mother to kill herself. Why wasn’t she wild with joy?”

  “According to Craslowe,” said Stu, “her son’s rapid progress threatened her definition of herself.”

  “Come again?”

  “She always saw herself as Jeremy’s provider and defender, know what I mean? Fed him, washed him, cleaned up his messes, protected him from the cruel world. We’re talking about a creature that only a mother could love, and she loved him with everything she had. Then all of a sudden—almost without warning—he turns out to be a real person who can look out for himself. He can even read!” This he aimed at Lonsdale specifically, “Lorna finds out that he’s probably been learning things all his life, that his condition has misled everyone to think he’s hopelessly retarded. It dawns on her that she’s been deceived all these years—”

  “And it also dawns on her,” interrupted Lonsdale, anticipating, “that someday Jeremy may no longer need her as a provider and protector.”

  “Exactly. Her definition of herself unravels. She’s no longer the person she had forced herself to be during all those years when Jeremy was sick. Being an artist, she’s the sensitive type anyway, and she can’t cope. She falls into a deep, dark depression, her personality disintegrates, and she ends up in the Subaru with the engine running.” Here Stu Bromton’s voice became dangerously thin, and an uncomfortable silence ensued while he collected himself, while the medical examiner and the prosecutor studied the black-and-white tiles of the floor, the mint-green paint on the walls.

  “I’m still having trouble with this miracle recovery,” said Lonsdale finally. “As a doctor myself—”

  “Yeah, some doctor,” jabbed Putney, grateful for an end to the silence. “You’re a forensic pathologist, for crying out loud. You do autopsies. You wouldn’t know what to do with a patient who’s still breathing and giving off heat.”

  Lonsdale gave out one of his trademark belly laughs. “Okay, so I’m not an expert on the inner workings of the human mind, but I took the mandatory psych courses in college and med
school, and I know enough about the subject to be skeptical of miracles, that’s all. I’d say an autopsy is in order, under the circumstances.”

  “And I’d say he’s right,” chimed in Putney. “A rule of thumb with any suspicious death is to order an autopsy.”

  “Oh, come off it, guys,” protested Stu. “This is hardly a suspicious death. You’ve got a suicide note in Lorna’s own writing. You’ve got statements from her friends about her depression over the last six months and a plausible description of her mental state from a respected shrink. Plus, you’ve got my personal voucher that she didn’t have an enemy in the world. Why do you need to cut her up and put pieces of her in bottles, for Christ’s sake?”

  “We getting a little squeamish in our middle age, Chief Bromton?” asked Putney snidely. “I thought you were a seasoned cop, big guy. You know why we do autopsies. As for the suicide note, I’d like to run it by the questioned-documents examiner in the Seattle crime lab. It’s scrawly enough to raise a question about whether it’s really Lorna Trosper’s handwriting, and on top of that, I’m a little confused about the content. A professional opinion wouldn’t hurt.”

  Stu was on the verge of pleading, something he detested and almost never did. “Dave, Al, I knew Lorna Trosper. My wife was one of her closest friends. I—we loved her. If there was the slightest chance that she died because of foul play, I’d be screaming for an autopsy, and I’d be pounding on somebody’s desk in Olympia to get the State Patrol in here with a homicide team.”

  “The Patrol’s probably thinking about opening a branch office here”—Putney chuckled derogatorily—“since you’ve been keeping them so busy looking for your missing citizens. Death investigation might become the major industry of Greely’s Cove! Disappearances, suicides—all you need now is a bona-fide homicide, Stu, and you’ll have it all!”

  The chief ignored the crack. “Look, guys, I know Lorna killed herself, and I’m satisfied about the reason. My oldest buddy—her former husband, who still loved her a lot, by the way—is on his way here from back East to take care of the arrangements. Spare me the ugliness of telling him that Lorna’s body is in Seattle, being sliced open and chopped to pieces in a medico-legal autopsy. Can you do this for me? For old time’s sake? Please?”

  Against their better judgment, after trading long and leery stares, Putney and Lonsdale acceded to the chief’s request. They affixed their signatures to official forms, certifying their findings that Lorna Trosper died by her own hand.

  And they ordered no autopsy.

  Mitch Nistler’s mind swam upward toward full consciousness, upward toward light and sound, guided by Dr. Hadrian Craslowe’s strong and reassuring voice.

  “... three, four, five—you are nearly awake now, Mitch—six, seven, eight...”

  He was ready to break through, and he was glad. The sleep of hypnosis was never a refuge for him, never a place of warmth and rest.

  “... nine, ten. There, now. You’re fully awake. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Mitch blinked several times, but he doubted that he was fully awake, for Dr. Craslowe’s face was still hazy and indistinct. Ripples of distortion floated through his field of vision.

  “Why don’t you have a sip of water?” offered the doctor, and what Mitch saw next assured him that he was not yet fully awake but still tied with dream threads to the hallucinatory world below. (Below?) An antique crystal pitcher ascended from its spot at the far end of the ebony table and glided through the air to the good doctor’s strangely deformed hand. The old man poured water into a long-stemmed glass and handed it across the table to Mitch.

  The cold water jolted him to full alertness, and he became aware of the horrid taste in his mouth. What in the hell have I been eating? he wanted to croak. Even before guzzling the water he had felt full, as though having just devoured a huge mound of rotting meat. The hellish taste coated his tongue and throat, extended up into his nasal passages. He tried unsuccessfully to flush it away with water.

  “You’re experiencing the taste again, I see,” said Dr. Craslowe, smiling his craggy smile. “Nothing to worry about, I assure you.”

  Mitch Nistler gulped a little more water, then set the glass aside. “It’s more than a taste this time,” he gasped, nearly gagging. “There’s a smell with it.”

  “Hardly abnormal, dear boy,” said the doctor in his broad.

  British accent. “Taste and smell are closely affiliated senses. You are merely experiencing a psychosomatic artifact of the hypnotic experience. It’s rather common, actually. The sensations won’t last long.”

  Mitch wanted to believe him, but the taste, the smell, and the lump in his gut gave no signs of leaving. Once he had gotten food poisoning—years before, while doing hard time in Walla Walla. A friend of his, who worked in the prison cafeteria, had smuggled three pounds of roast beef into the cell block and stored it unrefrigerated under his bunk. Mitch had shared in the “feast” late one night and had awakened hours later with cramps, chills, and an ugly taste in his mouth. He’d known that only one thing could cure his agony: throwing up, which he did in the uncovered toilet that occupied a corner of his tiny cell. He had clung to the toilet bowl like a drowning man to a rock, flinching and trembling throughout most of the night, wishing he were dead.

  He wanted to throw up now, but he fought the urge with deep breaths.

  “Well, I suppose that will be all for today,” said Dr. Craslowe, rising from his huge, wing-back chair. “I’ll see you next week, then?”

  Mitch fought down another wave of nausea and steadied himself against the edge of the massive ebony table. These sessions were taking their toll. Each one seemed to produce a stronger “psychosomatic artifact,” or whatever the hell the doctor called the demon in Mitch’s mouth. He felt sick and weak, and he wanted the sessions to end, even though Dr. Craslowe was treating him without charge.

  To make matters worse, the treatments were not working: Mitch noticed no softening of his hunger for alcohol, which the therapy was supposed to cure. As a matter of fact, he fully intended to duck into Liquid Larry’s on his way back to the mortuary for a triple threat (three shots of gin in a beer mug, over ice, topped off with tonic), after which he would crunch down a roll of Breath Savers in order to hide his boozy breath from old Matt Kronmiller’s nose. Kronmiller was the mortician, Mitch’s boss. Today especially, Mitch would need the jolt of a triple threat—to deaden the horrific taste in his mouth and purge himself of the dark unease he was feeling.

  “Shall we say Saturday, as usual?” pressed Dr. Craslowe, donning his thick, steel-framed glasses, enlarging his watery gray eyes. “The weekends are best for me, I daresay.” He rendered his craggy smile again, and Mitch caught a glimpse of ancient dentures. “My regular patients demand the lion’s share of my time during the week, I’m afraid”—meaning that he reserved weekdays for those who could pay, Mitch figured—“and Mrs. Pauling has asked for Sundays off.”

  As though on cue, the doctor’s assistant glided into the room, carrying Mitch’s anorak. She was a lithe, olive-skinned woman with almond eyes. Nearly as tall as the doctor himself and young enough to be his granddaughter, she carried herself rigidly erect. Unlike the doctor, she seemed never to smile.

  Mitch Nistler struggled with himself. If he could just find the strength to utter the word no, he would be free. He desperately wanted to see the last of this sunless mansion called White-leather Place, where the doctor lived and practiced. He wanted to be free of Craslowe, whose unsettling eyes and long face suggested impossible oldness, though the actual wrinkles and folds marked a man in his midsixties or not much older. A simple “No!” would deliver him of hypnotic jaunts into the chilly well of the subconscious, from which he always emerged with vague fears and, lately, a putrid taste in his mouth.

  But the “No!” would not come. Mitch’s tongue confronted it, tripped over the n sound, and got no farther.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Nistler?” asked Mrs. Pauling in her middle-class Englis
h clip. Her strong hand clamped around his elbow, shoring him up. “You seem a bit off-balance.” Her voice seemed full of genuine concern, perhaps even pity.

  “Nonsense,” said Craslowe. “He’ll be right as rain in a moment. He’s had a particularly lively hypnotic confrontation, that’s all. Isn’t that so, Mitch?”

  Mitch gazed into the doctor’s avuncular face as the latter helped him into his anorak. The smile never wavered. It beamed kindness and concern and confidence; but more than anything else, it conveyed authority, ancient and incontestable, not to be denied.

  “Yeah,” said Mitch hoarsely. “I’ll be right as rain.” He dropped his shivering gaze to the Persian carpet beneath his feet and wished with every cell in his scrawny body to be out of this house, away from its dusky antiques and smothering tapestries. He craved sunlight, the smell of rain, a clean breeze. He craved distance between himself and Whiteleather Place.

  “So, it will be Saturday next, I presume,” said Craslowe, helping the little man with the zipper of the coat, squaring him away.

  “Saturday next,” agreed Mitch Nistler.

  Seconds later he was out the door and down the walk of the looming Victorian mansion, climbing behind the wheel of his rusting ’73 El Camino. The engine burbled to life, and the rear wheels of the half-car/half-pickup truck sprayed rock chips into the clumps of yellowing shrubbery as he roared away.

  Behind the front door of Whiteleather Place stood the doctor and his helper, staring into each other’s eyes, searching and reading, scarcely needing spoken words.

  “Will he be all right?” asked the raven-haired Mrs. Pauling at length, breaking the silence.