Accidental Happiness (35 page)

“So you got it? At the magazine?”

“I’ll know in a day or two, but it looks good.”

I hugged him. He felt solid, and real. For months I’d been embracing the idea of Ben. Something between longing and memory. Derek had bones and skin. I rested my face against his shirt. “That’s great.”

“So tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll go to the mountains.”

“Tomorrow.”

Just the thought of our departure eased some of the lines on Lane’s face.

“Dr. Harris is in Blowing Rock for the day,” the receptionist said.

I had the doctor’s name and number on the invoices for Reese’s medicine. I called when we got thirty miles or so outside of Boone, about the time it occurred to me that I couldn’t just walk into his office unannounced and hope to see him before the beginning of the week. Doctors, unlike freelancers, had pretty tight schedules.

“We weren’t planning on staying around too long,” I told her. “We need to find out if a patient, Reese Melrose, has come in during the last couple of days. We’re her relatives and—”

“Reese Melrose?” she asked, sounding more alarmed than the inquiry should have generated. “Let me put you on hold for a couple of minutes. Can you do that?”

“Sure.”

Derek kept his eyes on the road and the scenery. We had our windows down and the sunny air had just enough chill for comfort. “You’re on hold?” he asked.

I nodded, looked out my window at the low stone wall and the steep drop on the other side. Leaves hadn’t begun to change, but the hazy blue mist that hung over the rolling mountains looked like every postcard I’d ever seen of Appalachia. I wondered why I’d never come before.

“Yes.” The woman came back on the line. “Ms. . . .”

“Melrose,” I said. “I’m Melrose too.”

“Oh, a relative. Right.” I could almost hear the relief in her voice. “Dr. Harris has to give a talk today at one o’clock. But he’s free for about an hour after that. Do you mind meeting him in Blowing Rock? He’s got an afternoon clinic there, so he won’t be back here today.”

“Is that a town?” I asked. It sounded vaguely obscene, but I kept my own sick thoughts to myself.

“Yes.” She laughed. “I know it sounds odd. But it’s a tourist attraction too. A large overhanging rock with a legend and everything. You should go see it. But listen, if you’ll give me your number—I’m guessing this is a cell phone, right?”

“Right.”

“I’ll have Dr. Harris call you directly and you can figure out a place to meet and talk.”

After I hung up, we rolled up the windows and I got out the map. Sure enough.
Blowing Rock.

“Okay,” I said to Derek. “A slight change of location.” I sorted out the new route, told him what we should be looking for, and we continued on in silence, letting the scenery distract us from all the questions that Reese had left behind.

I met Dr. Harris at a local diner. The town—a village, really—looked like something out of Tom Sawyer. Shops on one side of the street, a park with a gazebo on the other. Dr. Harris was a large man, not overweight, but thick, imposing. By contrast, his demeanor was that of gentler size.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said, sitting down to join me at the table. He made the chair look like something out of a preschool classroom. “I’ve been concerned since Reese left, but I had no way of following up on her.”

The waitress came with menus.

“Coffee?” she asked.

We both smiled up at her. Nodded.

She turned our china coffee cups right side up on the saucers and poured.

“Did you drive up by yourself?” he asked. “My secretary said you came from Charleston. That’s a long way.”

“No, I came with a friend. He’s off hiking around. We both thought I should probably talk with you by myself. This is all pretty confusing.”

“I can imagine,” he said, emptying a second sugar packet into his cup.

The waitress came back, pad in hand, and we ordered sandwiches. After she left, I launched into my questions. We both knew why I’d come. No need to pretend we’d met for a social visit.

“I’m guessing the answer is no from the sound of things,” I said, “but has Reese been back here in the last few days? She left without letting any of us know.”

“I haven’t seen her since she took off from the hospital in exactly the same way.”

“The hospital?” I had a mental picture of Reese running through the street with a hospital gown flying open as she made her getaway. “She was that bad?”

“She’d had a series of episodes, was apparently distraught over some disagreement with her ex-husband, thought he had an agenda with the daughter that upset her. Although it’s hard to say what really happened. We had some new treatment options we thought would improve her situation dramatically, but . . .”

“She took off,” I finished for him.

“She took off,” he repeated.

The food arrived, but I felt too intent on conversation to waste time with a BLT. “She at least tried to continue treatment,” I told him.

“How’s that?”

“The prescriptions you gave her,” I explained. “She filled them at some online pharmacy. Actually, she had them filled in my name because she’d taken my credit card, but that’s another story. Anyway, she’s been taking the meds for a couple of weeks, although she did have a kind of relapse or spell that lasted a few days about a week or so ago and—”

“What prescriptions?” he cut me off, looked genuinely confused.

“Three or four different kinds of pills.”

He shook his head, took a sip of his coffee, and let out a long sigh.

“I didn’t write anything for her,” he said finally. “But I did misplace a prescription pad. I thought it must be lost in my car.”

“That can’t be good.” I didn’t know where to go with all of it. I didn’t care to send Reese to jail. Partly for her sake, and partly for mine. I seemed to be the only option for guardianship in that event, and much as I had come to care for Angel, the idea of full-time responsibility scared the hell out of me. “That’s not why I came here. I guess I should get to the real reason I’m trying to find her, Dr. Harris. I’m concerned about her, of course, but it’s her daughter, Angel, who really takes the brunt of these disappearing acts.”

“She’s a lovely child, and it’s a valid concern,” he said.

“Is she in danger?”

“Well, the good news is that Reese has no aggressive tendencies, not that I’ve seen. It’s possible that—”

“No.” I stopped the analysis, determined to get to the point. “With her condition, is there a problem with her driving? Or is there a likelihood that she would become . . . I don’t know, unable to keep Angel safe? I mean, she’s looked after her all these years.”

“Ms. Melrose,” he said, looking suddenly concerned. “Have you spoken with anyone, any physicians about her problems?”

“Just my doctor. I showed him the invoices for the prescriptions. He explained the kind of medications they were. In his opinion.”

“I thought you had more in-depth information about her problems. There are HIPAA regulations regarding patient information. I just thought that you were familiar . . . What kind of relation are you to her?”

“She was married to my late husband,” I said, already fishing around in my pocketbook for the papers.

“I’m afraid I can’t openly discuss her problems. If she confided in you or you sought treatment for her, it’s one thing, but I can’t discuss any additional information.”

“Look at this,” I said, laying the guardianship document on the table between us. “These papers ask me to look after Angel if something happens to Reese, but it also says something about being medical power of attorney.”

He looked at the papers for a long time, flipped back and forth, reading the paragraphs in detail. One page in particular he read several times before he put it down. Then he looked up at me. “What would you like to know?”

“Well first, I guess, were you her neurologist? How well do you understand what was going on with her in terms of symptoms and the progression?”

“We had a neurologist who consulted on Reese.” He still seemed to be weighing something in his mind, calculating how much to say. He glanced again at the papers, then back at me. “But she was admitted on my service.”

“And you are . . . ?”

He leaned forward, rested on his elbows. “I am a psychiatrist.”

I looked at him, waited. But he was waiting too. Waiting for me to catch on, I suppose. Waiting for me to sort something out. I had no trouble believing he was a psychiatrist. Getting an opinion out of him was like taking out a deep splinter. “Is that typical?” I asked. “With MS?”

“I wasn’t seeing Reese for multiple sclerosis.”

“Then what?” I asked point-blank.

He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, then opened them, as if trying to clear his vision before he went on.

“I see that your husband signed the papers. He’s deceased?”

“He died about three months ago.”

“But you haven’t signed them. Did she make this change? To your name?”

“That’s what the second, most recent notarization is,” I told him.

“If you want me to speak frankly with you,” he said, “I think you should sign that document.”

I looked at him, wondered if I’d decided that’s what I’d do. Would I agree to Reese’s request? I thought about Angel, the last few times with her. If for no other reason, I had to do it for Ben. But I realized it wouldn’t just be for Ben. The thought amazed me.

“Ms. Melrose?” The doctor was waiting.

“I’m going to sign it,” I told him. “I need a notary. We left so quickly after I found out she was gone. I’m going to agree to this. Please take my word for it.”

He looked at me for a few seconds. Sized me up, I suppose. Then he settled back in his chair. “All right,” he said.

“So what were you treating Reese for?”

“Delusions,” he said. “Auditory hallucinations, episodes of paranoia. And . . . she also had symptoms of a condition that did not exist in her.”

“Oh, my God!” I could see Reese at the cottage, falling. The strained effort at getting up, then asking for her cane. Could someone make that up? Why would they want to? “Her MS was fake?”

“Not fake,” he said. “Delusional. She believes that the disease is real, among other things. The medication we’d started her on helped her have a better grasp on reality for brief periods of time. I felt very excited for her. But as far as her MS went, for all that she went through with symptoms, she might as well have had it.”

“But she doesn’t.”

“No,” he said. “She doesn’t.”

“How did she know about all these?” I handed him the invoices for the prescriptions, and he glanced down at them briefly.

“Research,” he said. “Libraries. Internet. She’s convinced she has it, and she’s smart. As I said, some of our breakthrough medications have had good results with delusional disorder. I had high hopes, but she left before we could see any results.”

“Delusional disorder. Is that some kind of schizophrenia?” I struggled to process what he’d just told me.

“It’s less intrusive. People who suffer with it are highly functional with behavior that falls into the range of normal most of the time.” He sipped his coffee. “But they have persistent delusions that often involve being threatened in some way or having the symptoms of an illness, as Reese does. Nonbizarre things that could occur in reality. No space aliens or anything like that. Makes the illness harder to pin down until someone figures out that these things aren’t real.”

The place had cleared out entirely. We sat at a window table while all around us the waitstaff goofed off, began putting out settings for the dinner crowd.

“You said she had auditory hallucinations? She hears things that don’t exist?”

“Yes, but the hallucinations aren’t the prominent feature of the illness. They occur only as they feed into the delusions.”

He pursed his lips, seemed defeated in a way, as if talking about Reese reminded him of the one that, literally, got away. “What did she hear?”

“We’ve had a couple of examples, but the most worrisome involved Angel. Reese told us that she left her daughter with a friend when she was admitted to the hospital. She’d had a particularly bad day. She came to me with her arm all but paralyzed by what she called her condition. I said I wanted to admit her, and she went off to talk to someone, this friend. She said she asked her to meet Angel at home when the child walked back from her day camp at the school. They lived in apartments just across from the elementary building, so Angel walked back and forth. This
friend,
she said, would stay with little Angel.

“In retrospect, I should have seen a red flag. People with this problem can be very convincing. Well, just before she left the hospital—oh, about three days into her stay, the nurses said—Reese got a phone call from her little girl. I found out later that a neighbor suspected the child was alone and tried to get her to open the door. She wouldn’t. So the neighbor called Child Services and they went over there. They thought they heard someone inside, but when they forced the door, there was no one there.”

It was the most he’d spoken at a stretch. He looked exhausted, and I got the feeling he blamed himself a little for not seeing beyond Reese a little better. Protecting the child more.

“So Reese just left her there alone?”

“She honestly believed she wasn’t alone. But the police investigated. No one named Janet lived in any of the apartments. No one Reese worked with had ever actually seen her. She didn’t exist, Ms. Melrose. I know it’s hard to grasp, but these things are as real in her mind as I am to you. After she left the hospital, went back to her daughter, well, who knows what Reese thought was happening? Who she thought had come to the door? And to answer your question from before, yes, I do believe the child is most likely in danger. I’ve spoken to the authorities here about it, in fact, but they haven’t been able to come up with anything—speeding tickets, parking violations—that would give them a clue. I thought we were stuck until you called. That’s why my office got in touch with me so quickly. Reese will never be a physical threat to the child, in my opinion; but her delusions, the things she believes and acts on, could very well be dangerous for the girl.”