Clear and Convincing Proof (14 page)

Color flared on his cheeks, then drained away swiftly, leaving him waxy looking, like old ivory. Barbara took a step toward him; he waved her away. “Get out, just get out,” he said. “Think about it. Get back to me after you've thought about it.”

 

In a booth at the Electric Station Restaurant, with a crab Louie salad in front of her, Barbara realized that she had been paying less than rapt attention to
Will Thaxton when he said, “What's wrong? Case gone sour on you?”

To her dismay she found that she couldn't tell him about her meeting with Dr. Kelso. Will talked about his clients and their problems without hesitation, with gleeful elation or even scorn at times, but she could not do that. “I hope not,” she said. “Just thinking, and listening. I can also chew gum and walk at the same time.”

“Have you a clue about what I've been telling you?”

“Of course. An Italian woman and an Englishman got married many years ago and there's a question of title to some property in England.”

Will groaned. “I give you romance, intrigue, mystery, you give me Cliffs Notes. But that's the gist. Pay attention now. I'll be in Vancouver and then Victoria for about a week probably, and depending on what I find out, I may have to go to England and Italy. Do you want to go with me?”

“To Victoria?” She shook her head. “I'm up to here in work right now.”

“Not to Victoria. To England and on to Italy. As my assistant. All expenses paid.”

“You've got to be kidding. Your assistant? Come on.”

“I'll need an assistant to help me resist those cool gray-eyed British beauties and those hot-eyed Italian women. I'll work a couple of hours a day, three, four days a week, then do a little sightseeing. I understand that to get to Italy from England, one must
go through France, and we all know about those sultry-eyed French femmes fatales. I'll need a lot of assistance.”

She laughed. “You'll need blinders and a chastity belt.” Then sobering, she asked, “When will you go?”

“I won't even be sure I will go until I get back from Victoria next week. Is your passport in order, just in case? If it's on, will you go?”

“Oh, God, why didn't this come up two weeks ago? You know I've taken a new case. I don't know where it will be next week, or two weeks from now. Let me think about it while you go dodge the rain in Victoria and Vancouver.” Then she added, “But I'll make sure my passport is up-to-date.”

 

When she entered the office after lunch, Maria handed her a memo with several names—calls while she was out. “Mrs. McIvey sounded like she was crying,” Maria said. “Really upset.”

“Thanks,” Barbara said, taking the memo. Bailey's name was on it, along with one or two others who could wait. She went to her own desk and called Annie.

She sounded as if she were still crying, her voice choked and thick. “I have to talk to you,” she said.

“I'll come over,” Barbara said. “Are you at the residence?” Annie said she was and Barbara told her to stay there. “Ten minutes,” she said. “Hang on.”

She called Bailey's number and got his answering machine. “I'm going out,” she told it. “Be back around four-thirty.”

It was almost two-thirty, and whatever was on Annie's mind wouldn't take more than two hours, she thought, hanging up. Bailey could call back, or drop in.

Spring had vanished, and winter was back with heavy gray skies and a cold wind. Rain, sleet, snow weather, probably all three, she thought, driving to the residence. Annie was waiting near the door apparently, for it opened even before Barbara could touch the bell.

Annie's eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, her cheeks blotchy from weeping although she was not weeping then. “No one else is here,” she said. “Let's sit in the living room.”

A fire was burning low in the grate, and as before the house felt almost too warm, but welcoming. Barbara pulled off her jacket, then warmed herself before the fire. “What happened?”

Annie sat on the sofa. “I used to keep a diary,” she said, then stopped and shook her head. “The lawyer told me I should keep a journal. When I asked him about the prenuptial agreement, he said I should. So I'd have something to show, how life was with David, I mean.”

It sounded incoherent, but Barbara didn't interrupt as Annie talked about writing down what was going on from day to day in the first years.

“I brought them here with me, three diaries, and I put them in a dresser drawer upstairs in my room. But I kept thinking I should get rid of them, burn them up. And today I decided I would. In case the
police come back and search here, find them, or something.”

She looked and sounded so miserable that Barbara had to resist the impulse to go over and pat her hand. She was afraid that the first show of sympathy might bring on another paroxysm of weeping.

“I brought them down when I came home for lunch,” Annie said, her voice so low it was almost inaudible. “I just started opening one at random, not really reading or anything, I meant to tear out pages and start burning them, but I saw—” She wiped her eyes as tears filled them. Angrily then, she said, “Someone cut out pages. Someone read them and cut out pages.”

She couldn't restrain the tears any longer, and weeping, she said, “Someone read them, all of them. He said, the lawyer said I should put them in a safe deposit box, but I didn't. And someone read them—” She couldn't go on.

Barbara walked to the kitchen, got a glass of water and took it back for Annie. She moved a box of tissues closer to the young woman and waited.

“I'm sorry,” Annie said after another minute. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes, drank some of the water.

“Okay,” Barbara said, sitting close to her. “Tell me about the diaries. Where are they now?”

Annie pointed to a tote bag, and Barbara reached in and pulled out three red-bound notebooks. “Is this all of them?”

“Yes.”

“May I keep them for the time being?”

“Yes. I want you to take them with you.”

“You understand that I'll read them?”

Annie nodded. “They aren't really like diaries,” she said. “I mean, I didn't put down what I was thinking or feeling, things you expect in a diary. It's more like a record of our marriage, what he said, what I said, what he did. Not every day, just now and then.” She drank more of the water. “I thought, from what the lawyer said, that I might have to show them to a divorce judge some day.”

Barbara thought for a moment, then said, “Annie, you have to tell me the truth. I know you met Darren at his place at least once, but you denied it. Did you meet him more than that one time?”

Annie shook her head violently. “No. That wasn't what I thought you meant. I thought you meant romantic meetings, something like that. That night, I had to warn him that David was going to put some terrible things in his personnel file. Someone had to warn him so he could leave and not be forced out with that on file.”

“Was that in a diary?”

“I wrote about our fight,” she said, not looking at Barbara. “That was the last thing I wrote. That page is gone.”

“Okay,” Barbara said. “Who had access to them? You said you had them in a dresser drawer. No lock?”

“No. I never even thought of a lock. Not in this house.”

“Is the house kept locked up during the day?”

“No. We're back and forth a lot. They never locked the back door.”

“Where did you keep them before you came back here?”

“In my dresser. We had separate rooms. He—David—never even came into mine. I went to his when he…when we slept together.”

“Annie, again, tell me the truth. Why did you stay with him?”

Annie seemed to shrink a little.

“You thought you could put up with a bad marriage for ten years and then collect a settlement, alimony, something like that?”

“Yes,” she said faintly. “I thought of it as a bad job you had to endure for the pension, or like being an indentured servant for a certain length of time.”

“Did you put anything like that in the diaries?”

“Not really. I put in the number of months or years remaining. No explanation, just the number.” In a rush, she said, “I really wanted to drive up to Portland that day, just to think. I didn't play the radio, or a CD or anything. I kept thinking that he would wreck Greg and Naomi's lives, ruin Darren, ruin anyone who got in his way without a second thought. He hated the clinic and wanted to destroy it, make it into something else, something that would be his alone. He was jealous of it, said he'd played second fiddle to it all his life and was through doing that. I didn't think I could take it for five more years.

“I was trying to talk myself into leaving, then I
was trying to convince myself that I could stand it for five more years. Maybe go back to school, work in classes around his schedule. Make him pay dearly eventually. Then I knew I had to leave. It was like a loop, going around and around, getting nowhere. I wanted to vote for the foundation and I was afraid to. He knew how I felt about Naomi and Greg, and even Darren. He used that, used me, used everyone he could. I hated him so much! God, I hated him so much!”

Her voice was low and intense as the words rushed out. “He would do something particularly foul and later on he would take my hand and we'd go to his room and he'd undress me, and I'd forget. God, I'd forget. He could do that, make me forget the other times, and then I'd hate him even more, and hate myself for letting it happen like that. I started leaving mentally when he touched my hand, I felt like I was someone watching us from a distance. I think I must have been losing my mind, disassociating. I looked it up. It's a sign of mental illness.”

Her voice dropped lower and lower until she was barely audible, as if she were thinking out loud. “He was killing me, I think. Then, when I saw that he would take the clinic for himself, drive Greg and Naomi away, ruin Darren, I knew it couldn't go on, but I didn't know what I should do. Around and around.”

She was rambling, Barbara understood, voicing things she had never said before, perhaps things she had never thought before. Barbara waited her out,
thinking hard. When Annie finally became still again, Barbara said, “Do you know what was on those missing pages?” Annie shook her head. “What we'll do is make a note of the last entry date before each one and the entry date that follows. Like this.” She opened one of the diaries at random and found the cut edge of a page. “The date before this one is October four, and the next one is November nineteen. Over the next day or two, try to think if anything unusual happened during those periods. Use a calendar. Was it a weekend? Your birthday, his? There could be a reason why those particular pages were cut out. You and the person who stole them know what that reason is. You just have to work at remembering.”

Carefully she went through the three notebooks. There were nine missing pages, cut out with a razor probably, so close to the center that it might have gone unnoticed for years. Annie's handwriting in the earliest entries was almost childish, the writing of a schoolgirl. The latest entries were written in a much bolder script, with more slant, less precision. Some looked as if they had been written in a rush of passion, of fury.

When they finished, Barbara put the diaries in her briefcase, pulled on her jacket and regarded Annie for a moment. “You have to live with it,” she said. “Someone out there knows a lot about you and your marriage, and that's going to be hard to take. You have to put up a front, pretend you don't know anyone has tampered with your journals, that anyone is aware. If anyone noticed that I was here today and
asks questions, tell them it was just more of the same. No more than that. No wandering about alone in the dark. Keep your door locked and put up a good front. And try hard to reconstruct what was on those missing pages. It could be important.” Annie looked so wretched, pale and wan and frightened that Barbara said, “Hang in there, kid. I'm on your side.”

Then, driving back to the office, she realized how much she meant that. She
was
on Annie's side.

B
ailey was showing Maria a card trick when Barbara entered the office. He grinned at Barbara, then said to Maria, “Just put it on top of the stack.” She put a card down, and he picked up a second stack and placed it on top of her card. “Now you see it, now you don't,” he said. He picked up the entire pile and showed her the bottom card. “Four of clubs. Right?”

“How did you do that?”

“Recess is over, kiddies,” Barbara said. “Maria, go on home when you're ready. Come on, Bailey. Work.”

“Do you want coffee?” Maria asked.

“Just about a gallon,” Barbara said, going past the reception desk to her own office. She tossed her jacket onto a chair and sank down into one of the
comfortable chairs by the coffee table. “What do you have?”

Bailey slouched over to the bar cabinet, opened it and helped himself to Jack Daniel's. Barbara didn't say a word. He acted as if he truly believed it was his and there was nothing she could do to dissuade him. Months earlier she had promised to install a wet bar if and when he delivered, and there it was. Now and then she let the bar run dry just to get a rise from him.

“First,” he said, settling down on the sofa. “More on Darren. You want the long version or the short?”

“Is the long version in there?” she asked, pointing to his old duffel bag.

“Sure is.”

“Then wrap it up. Short version.”

“Okay. His mom and dad split while he was out camping. Then twelve years ago, the dad was busted along with about a hundred other guys in the LAPD, just one of their regular house cleanings. He turned state's witness and got a suspended sentence and afterward dropped off the earth or something. Gone. Mom got a divorce and then married a farmer and is doing okay. Kid sister married Danny Canto, the original Teflon kid. Mucho arrests, nothing sticks, still out roaming and doing whatever it is that keeps him in chips and beer and convertibles. Four kids. Point is, that's an unsavory bunch, and a gun might be the easiest thing they could provide as a favor for a relative. Also, some of the kids who camped out with Darren have since returned to
their evil ways and moved up in the world. Way I heard it is that the cops here are looking for a current connection.”

Barbara scowled at him. “Okay. Next.”

“Castle,” he said. “The neighbors didn't want to talk about her at first, then they did. You know how that goes. The old lady was married to an associate professor, respectable folks, well liked, all that. The daughter Marion took off when she was about sixteen or seventeen. The old man died, Grandma lived alone for years, and then daughter Marion came home. She was a dopehead. The tenants upstairs moved out a few months later, too much noise, too many strange men coming and going, fights, just too much. So the old lady died and Marion was in charge of the house. She sold off everything worth a dime and hung out with the wrong crowd. Noisy parties, drugs, cops calling. Suspicions of drug dealing, no proof. And the place began to look like a slum. So Marion died of an overdose and Erica Castle came. Note the last name. No father listed anywhere, but there she was, and she dived in and started cleaning up the place. Darren came along, moved in upstairs and helped clean up. Nothing between them that the neighbors can see. And so far no one saw Darren leave that morning that they can recall.”

He drained his glass and held it up in an inquiring sort of way. He never helped himself to more than one drink without asking permission. She nodded and he got up to refill his glass. “Anyway,” Bailey said, “the neighbors are coming around to giving her
the good housekeeping seal of approval. They were curious about where she goes every day after she gets home from school, but word got around, maybe through Darren, that she does volunteer work at the clinic, and they like that. She appears to be as clean as a whistle.”

“So her word probably would hold up,” Barbara said. “I wonder if something of her mother didn't rub off on her, though. Look into her background a little. Before she came to Eugene, I mean.”

He nodded.

There was a tap on the door and when Barbara called come on in, Shelley entered carrying a tray with the coffee carafe and cups. “Maria said you were in conference. Anything for me?”

“In a minute. You're not in a hurry to get home or anything?”

“Nope.” She sat down and poured coffee into two of the cups, handed one to Barbara.

“Anything else?” Barbara asked Bailey.

“I came across a book celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the clinic. It's a pretty good history of the place. That's it.” He began to root around in his duffel bag and brought out a thick folder and a glossy coffee table book.

Barbara nodded, opened her briefcase and pulled the three diaries out. Briefly she described her meeting with Annie, then, pointing to the books, she asked, “Can you lift prints from them? Annie's and mine will be there. Who else's?”

He eyed the books without touching them.
“Maybe. Got a big envelope? Don't want to handle them without gloves any more than I have to.”

She got up to bring him a large envelope, and watched him pick up the books by the edges and place them inside. “That's first, by tomorrow if you can do it. I want to read through them, but not until you're done. Next. Lorraine McIvey, the first wife. She's put herself in the game and I want to find out something about her, what she's up to and why she's been talking to the police. All you can dig out—friends, boyfriends, pastimes, the works.”

He raised his eyebrows, then shrugged. He rarely asked why verbally; his body language was enough.

She ignored the implied question. “And then, and this will take a little time—” she paused when he began to fish in his duffel bag and brought out a notebook “—I want as precise a timetable as we can get about the movements of everyone in that clinic the day of the murder, from the time they left home until they arrived and afterward until about eight in the morning. And an accurate layout of the clinic and garden, the residence and a map of the alley and surrounding streets. Someone besides Dorothy Johnson might have seen something, or possibly one of them should have seen something and didn't. I want to be able to place them all.”

“And you want all this by tomorrow morning,” he said.

“That's how it goes,” she said.

“I'll need to bring in hired hands,” he said.

She understood that it was a warning that it would
begin to get pricey. “Get them. That's it for now. The diaries first, as soon as possible. Okay?”

“Okeydokey.”

After Bailey left, Barbara filled Shelley in with more details about her talk with Annie. “I know she lied to me before, but I don't think she was lying today,” she said. “No one could fake the crying spasms. Naomi Boardman said that David humiliated Annie when he was alive, and then again after he died, and he's still doing it. She's suffering, knowing that now someone else is aware of how deep that humiliation really was.”

“She stayed with him hoping to collect,” Shelley said.

Barbara studied her for a moment, reflecting on the note of condemnation in the words and tone. “Yes,” she said. “She was hoping that. She was crazy about him when they married, according to all accounts, truly infatuated. Think of her disillusionment when it became clear that he was simply using her, how hurt she must have been. She reacted the way a child might, vowing to get even, to get revenge, justifying herself by thinking of it as indentured servitude, to be endured for a limited time, and then retribution. I don't condone what she did, I'm just trying to understand her better. And she might not have told me the whole truth yet, I'm well aware. But let's leave that for now. I had another interesting conversation today. A busy day, all in all.”

She told Shelley what Dr. Kelso had proposed, and before Shelley could comment, she said, “I don't
want to discuss it right now. I want us both to think it over and talk about it tomorrow with Dad.”

Shelley looked deeply troubled, but she nodded. “I don't understand how the first Mrs. McIvey has come into the picture,” she said after a moment.

Barbara remembered that Shelley had not been present when Frank told her about Lorraine McIvey's contesting the will, and she repeated what he had said. “So she's been confabbing with the cops, and she's dealt herself in. And now you know as much as I do about everything.”

Shelley grinned. “I doubt that. Anything you want me to do?”

“Not at the moment. Go home, give Alex a kiss for me. See you in the morning.”

 

Alone in the office Barbara started making the many notes she always made after a day's work. She had put Bailey's reports and the clinic book in her briefcase—homework for later. Then she thought about what Annie had said: David McIvey had hated the clinic, resented it, was jealous of it. Had Kelso's children felt that kind of resentment? He claimed that if they inherited, they would sell their shares in a minute. No love lost there, she mused. Busy fathers, neglected children. It seemed very sad; so many children grateful for the attention they had received, the care they had been given at the clinic, while the children at home seethed with resentment.

She left her computer and got the book about the clinic from her briefcase, poured another cup of cof
fee and read, pausing at the many pictures of patients, of the two doctors who had founded the clinic and made it work, taking turns at being resident doctor, while keeping their own pediatric practices going for more than twenty-five years. Then they had bought the residence and brought in a full-time resident doctor.

Frank had said zealotry in a good cause was still zealotry, she thought, studying a photograph of David McIvey's father, a very handsome man back in the seventies. And David had been jealous because his father was caring for other people's kids, and not his own. Unloved? He must have felt unloved. Emotionally starved until he had become incapable of love? That was the picture she was getting of him.

He had charmed Annie, dazzled her, married her, and too late she had learned that sex and creature comforts without love were meaningless. And her love, when turned, became blinding hatred.

It was after eight and suddenly she felt ravenous; her stomach was making weird noises of protest and a headache was coming on. Hunger headache, she decided, thinking of the lamb shish kabob in her freezer—Frank's gift. As she started packing up things to take home, she remembered how it had been when she had been growing up and her father had worked the kind of hours she was keeping now.

Frank and Sam Bixby had started their two-office law firm at about the same time the two doctors opened their clinic, four young professionals determined to succeed. But Frank had always had time
for her, she recalled, always. Or he had made time. She could remember clearly how he would put aside a paper he was reading and turn his full attention to her on occasion, never in any way suggesting that his work was anywhere near as important as she was. He had taken care of her, his kid, and he was still taking care of her, she thought, smiling slightly, thinking again of the leftovers in her freezer.

She locked her notes in the safe, checked the office and went home.

 

“Kelso's either as shrewd as Satan or he's a fool,” Frank said the next morning when she told him about her meeting.

“Or maybe just desperate,” Barbara said, turning to Shelley. “Well?”

“It seems that Dr. Kelso might actually think Annie killed McIvey, and he wants you to make certain that someone else is accused instead of her.”

Barbara nodded. “I know,” she said. “Shelley, how much of the work that you do here is for clients we get through Martin's Restaurant?”

“I don't know. I never thought of it that way. Some weeks it seems that's all I do. Twenty-five percent, thirty-five. I don't know.”

Barbara turned an appraising gaze to Frank. “How about your prestigious firm? How many pro bono cases a year?”

“Make your point,” he said sharply.

“I just did,” she said. “That clinic will be up for grabs as soon as Mrs. Kelso kicks. Dr. Kelso
knows that. I kept thinking of him and his partner working their butts off for half a century, scrounging for volunteer help, for donations, for grants, and all to be able to take in their thirty-five percent or more of nonpaying patients. I said before that the clinic isn't my concern. I was wrong. I find that the clinic has become my concern. I intend to save it if I can.”

“Christ on a mountain!” Frank jumped up, glared at her and then around at the office, and abruptly sat down again. “What if you decide that Annie actually pulled the trigger? Or if Darren Halvord did? You can't play both sides.”

“I was up pretty late last night thinking about this,” she said. “You're right, I can't play both sides. I didn't agree to work for Kelso. I turned him down, remember. But I intend to try to find out the truth, and I don't intend to wait for the police to get their asses in motion. If it turns out to be Annie or Darren, or both, I'll have to decide at that time what next. Right now, I don't know what's next in that case.”