Sing It to Her Bones (15 page)

Mrs. Quigley struggled to her feet, but before the doctor could get away, I thought I’d better let him know I was there. I crossed the room, grinding one of the brat’s crayons into the carpet with my heel. “Dr. Chase, I’m Hannah Ives. I can see you’re very busy, but I just wanted to know if you would be able to see me today. I fell off my sister-in law’s boat—”

Dr. Chase ran a hand through hair that was thick and dark, except for a bald spot in the back the size of a pancake. “Of course, but I’ll probably be another hour or so.” He spoke to Mrs. Quigley. “Excuse me for a minute, will you?” The phone was ringing again, and he reached over the counter to answer it. With the receiver tucked between his ear and shoulder, he retrieved a clipboard with a blank form attached to it along with a ballpoint pen on a string. He made a scribbling motion with his fingers, then nodded in the direction of the waiting room. I gathered from this pantomime that I was to have a seat and fill out the darn thing.

I took the clipboard, mouthed a thank-you, and eased myself into the chair that had been well warmed by the mother-to-be.

Numbers! So many numbers. And boxes to check (both sides). Sometimes I could almost forget that I’d had cancer until something like this cropped up as a grim reminder. I hurriedly filled out the medical questionnaire
and turned to more interesting matters, true facts that can only be gleaned by reading old issues of
People
and
Time
. I didn’t know that Loretta Young had had a daughter out of wedlock with Clark Gable! Amazing! Doctor’s offices can be such educational experiences, like standing in long checkout lines at the grocery, catching up with the tabloids. I was in the middle of an article about Fergie, Duchess of York, when the phone rang. Nobody picked up. It rang and rang and rang, insistent and shrill. I couldn’t stand it. I crossed to the counter, reached out, snatched the receiver off the hook, and said, “Doctor’s office.” Someone wanted to cancel an appointment. I wrote the information down on a slip of paper torn off a prescription pad, then returned to my magazine.

The blond kid was eventually dragged away from his artwork by a father with nerves of steel and the patience of Job, and the room gradually emptied until it was just me and the old fellow sitting next to me. By now his chin had dropped to his chest, and he was snoring loudly.

Dr. Chase appeared and waved a man dressed in overalls, like a farmer, out the door. “Sir?” I jiggled the old guy’s arm. “Sir. I believe you’re next.”

He awoke with a snort. “Hunh?” When he finally remembered where he was, he stood, patted both breast pockets of his tweed jacket and produced a brown plastic prescription vial. “Just need a refill.” He thrust the empty container in the doctor’s direction. “For this.”

Dr. Chase smiled. “I am sorry you had to wait so long, Mr. Finch, particularly when it wasn’t necessary. It says here on the label ‘two refills.’ Just take this bottle directly to the pharmacy next time. No need to wait here.”

“Oh.” Finch turned the bottle in his hands and stared at the label, looking forlorn. “Lucy would have known that.”

“I’m sure she would have. I’ll call the pharmacy for you, shall I? Then it’ll be ready when you get there.” Dr. Chase escorted Finch to the door with one arm encircling his shoulders. When the old man was safely away, Dr. Chase flipped a sign on the door from Open to Closed, pushed it shut, and leaned back against it with a sigh. “Whew! What a madhouse! My nurse is down with the flu, and my office manager was called out of town early yesterday on a family emergency. Phone’s been ringing off the hook.”

“Yes, I know. I took a call for you. A Mrs. Allen apologizes profusely and says she won’t be able to keep her appointment at ten tomorrow.” I handed him the scrap of paper along with the clipboard and the questionnaire I had filled out.

He studied the note first, then tucked it into the pocket of his lab coat. “Well, thank heaven for small favors.” He scanned my questionnaire. “Oh, right. You’re Paul Ives’s wife.” He appraised me over the top of his glasses, and I hoped he’d been too busy to watch the local news this week.

I shifted my weight uncomfortably from one foot to
the other and waited to be embarrassed, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, his eyes moved rapidly down the page. I could tell by the raised eyebrow when he got to the mastectomy part.

“You’ve had a rough week, haven’t you?” he said at last. “First finding the body. Now, what’s this about falling off a boat?”

“Well, I didn’t fall off … not exactly. I just sort of hung off. Pulled the muscles here.” I touched my left side. “It’s awfully painful.” I rotated my shoulder.

“Can you raise your arm?” He demonstrated by extending his arms to his sides like a football referee calling off sides.

I held my arms out from my body at a ninety-degree angle. “That’s as far as I can stretch without screaming.”

Dr. Chase grinned. “If you can do that, I shouldn’t worry. There’s probably nothing that a day or two of taking it easy won’t cure. Wait here just a minute.”

He disappeared down the hall and through a swinging door. He appeared again a few minutes later with a handful of colorful packets. “Here are a few painkillers. Should be enough to get you through the next couple of days.”

I cupped my hands as a few dozen packets cascaded into them. “Cute,” I said.

“They’re samples. Pharmaceutical companies inundate me with the stuff. Thought I’d save you a few bucks.”

I crammed the tablets into my purse. “Thanks, Doctor. What do I owe you?”

“Not a thing. You answered the phone. Remember?”

I shrugged. “No problem. It was self-defense. Ringing phones make me crazy.”

Dr. Chase began pulling down the window shades, preparing to close the office for the day. I didn’t want to leave until I had asked him about Katie, but in spite of all the time I’d just spent sitting in his waiting room thinking, I still hadn’t come up with a subtle way to phrase it.

“Connie tells me you inherited this practice from your father,” I blathered.

“That’s right.” He flipped a switch on the wall, and the Muzak went quiet in the middle of an orchestral version of “My Way.” “Dad and I began working together in the early nineties.”

“When did your father pass away?”

“Almost three years ago. He just seemed to give up after Mom died. You know, some days it’s hard for me to believe that they’re both gone.”

Dr. Chase continued turning out lights while I tried to think how I could ask my questions without betraying Angie’s confidence. “Was the body I found—was Katie Dunbar ever a patient of your father’s?”

Dr. Chase looked thoughtful. “Could have been, I guess. Almost everyone in town was at one time or another. I don’t exactly know. I was still in medical school when she disappeared.”

“I was just wondering if there might have been anything in Katie’s medical file that could have shed some light on her death.”

“I doubt it. But even if there were, it’s probably long gone. I had my father’s inactive files shredded last year.”

“Shredded? Don’t you have to keep medical files forever, or have them microfilmed, or something?”

“We’re only required to keep inactive files for seven years, thank God, otherwise …” He gestured toward the back of the office. “Here, let me show you something.”

Dr. Chase passed ahead of me through a swinging door that led into a dark hall. Within a few feet the hallway widened into a rectangular room that might originally have been an elegant dining room. Now, however, the room was filled with row upon row of lateral file cabinets, four drawers high and crammed with folders, enough, I thought, for every man, woman, and child in Chesapeake County, maybe even the state of Maryland.

Dr. Chase pointed to the desk, where a stack of charts teetered precariously in a standard wooden in box. Other files were fanned out over the desktop. “That’s just the patients I’ve seen since yesterday.” He tapped my questionnaire. “Don’t know when I’ll get your chart made up and filed if my office manager doesn’t return soon. I’m still waiting to hear back from the temporary agency. The woman they sent yesterday was a disaster.”

I had a brainstorm. “How much were you paying for the temp?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry. I suppose that sounded a bit nosy, but I didn’t intend it to be. I’m in between jobs at the moment. I’d be happy to fill in, but just until Nora gets back.”

“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“Don’t think I’m volunteering to do it for free! Just pay me whatever you were paying the temp agency.”

Dr. Chase stared at me, disbelief written all over his face.

“Don’t worry,” I added. “I’m experienced. Ask Connie. Until recently I managed a large office in Washington, D.C.”

He brightened perceptibly. “That’s not what was worrying me. How about your injury?”

“Will I have to lift heavy boxes?”

“No.”

“How about three-hundred-pound patients?”

“Hardly!”

“So, just as long as I’m lifting nothing heavier than a file or a telephone, and I don’t run out of these”—I patted my purse—“I should be all right.”

“Can’t deny that I need the help.” He waved his arm in the general direction of the reception area. “I don’t even know how to forward the darn phones to the answering service.”

“I can do that, too.”

Dr. Chase removed his lab coat and hung it on a nearby coat-tree. Looking vastly relieved, he pulled a linen sports jacket off a hanger and shrugged into it. “Then we have a deal. Tomorrow at seven-thirty? Your first assignment is to call the temp agency and tell them thanks but no thanks. And the phones?”

But I had lifted the receiver and was already punching buttons. “My pleasure.”

We left the office together a few minutes later, the pain in my arm all but forgotten. Tomorrow, I thought, there’d be no need to bother the good doctor. I would help Dr. Chase with his overdue filing and look for Katie’s file, if it still existed, myself.

chapter

11

Connie stood behind her workbench and
scowled at me. “You’re out of your tree, Hannah! You’re in no shape to go back to work. You should be resting.”

I nibbled on an Oreo. “If the doctor thinks I’m okay, who am I to argue?”

“I think his need for a temporary receptionist is clouding his medical judgment.” Connie agitated her paintbrush in a mason jar of turpentine, then wiped it on a rag she had tucked into the waistband of her jeans.

“It’s only a few days, Connie,” I said, polishing off the cookie and helping myself to another from a cellophane package that lay open on the counter. I thought I’d use the money to pay down my VISA, which was out of control. Paul worries that I treat my
credit card limit like a goal. I’d been trying to watch my spending recently, but the way I felt about my husband just then, it would serve him right if I decided to indulge in a little retail therapy and max out all my credit cards.

I watched Connie paint a brown-gold streak on a gourd that was going to be a rooster and decided not to tell her what I had learned from Angie about Katie’s pregnancy. At least not until I had discovered whether it was true or not. In her present mood I knew Connie would accuse me of meddling, and I didn’t want her snitching to Dennis. Not just yet anyway.

We had tuna casserole for dinner, made just the way I like it with cream of mushroom soup and green pimento olives, followed by rum raisin Häagen Dazs eaten right out of the carton, with two spoons. Between decadent mouthfuls I tried to call Paul but kept getting the blasted answering machine. Hoping he’d be better about returning my call, I left Dr. Chase’s office telephone number as well.

The next morning I wiggled stiffly into my little black dress. Connie appeared at breakfast in a more tolerant mood, so I was able to borrow a green blazer and a Monet “water lilies” scarf from her closet. “Take care of that scarf,” she warned.

“Is it special?” I wondered if it had been a gift from Dennis, but Connie wasn’t saying.

“Just take care of it, that’s all.”

Dr. Chase was already at the office when I pulled into the driveway and parked my Toyota next to his
blue Crown Victoria. In the darkened reception area I could see he had left the shade raising and light turning on to me. That done, I stuck my head into the medical records room. “I’m here.”

The doctor was bent over at the waist, flush-faced, elbow deep in a lateral file. “Thank goodness!” He straightened and poked at his glasses where they had slid halfway down his nose. He showed me where to hang my jacket and find the coffee, then gave me the twenty-five-cent tour of the office, ending up in the file room where we had started, in front of a large desk set into an alcove that used to be a fireplace. Over the mantel were mounted lighted panels where the doctor could read X rays. Farther along the wall stood a Xerox machine.

I ran my fingertips along a row of folders, each one distinguished by a set of multicolored tabs. “What do these colors mean?”

“We assign a color to each letter of the alphabet. Each medical chart gets marked with the colors representing the first three letters of the patient’s last name. Makes them easier to file.”

I must have appeared more competent than I felt because the doctor abandoned me almost at once with the appointment book and a suggestion that I pull the charts for today’s patients.

Holy cow! Searching for Katie’s chart was going to be easy
. I consulted the appointment book and made a small production of pulling charts for an Abbott and a Morris before inching my way in the direction of the lateral files where I knew the D’s began: Danville,
Dickson, Donner. I thumbed past chart after chart until I arrived in the vicinity of the green, yellow, and orange tabs that told me I’d reached DUN territory. I found what I was looking for between Dubonnet and Duncan. Frieda and Carl had charts, and there was one for Elizabeth Marie. I looked inside. There appeared to have been no entries in the record since 1988, when Liz left for college. As I shoved the charts back into place, I puzzled over this; if the inactive files had been shredded as Dr. Chase had told me, why had Katie’s file gone missing while Liz’s was still there?