Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“Then I’ll say hello when she’s back,” Mark had said, accustomed to her comings and goings to medical school. But as days turned to weeks with no sign of Kelly, those few words with his dad became the landmark that stuck, not whatever laughing encounter with her that had been his last. Unlikely his take on her with the eyes of a seven-year-old would help explain anything about those final weeks anyway. Hell, he still had trouble reconciling his version of the woman he had known with the grisly remains lying in the mortuary.

He continued to stare at the letter. It at least pinned down one event in the countdown to her murder. The day Kelly and his father planned to have lunch together, presuming they met, she had little more than a week to live.

He pictured them at the Plaza. Had she been as rapturous and exuberant as she sounded in her writing? Was his father happy for her? Did they order champagne? The image of them toasting her well-deserved joy, oblivious to death being so near, filled Mark with sadness. Dreams could be so puny, struggle, hope, and daring so futile. She was on the verge of achieving everything – being a doctor, finding a man who loved her, making a clean break with her past. It made her moment of celebration seem all the more cruel.

Then a chill that had nothing to do with the cold shimmied through him.

That meeting, if it took place, also marked what would be the final two months of his father’s life.

10:00 P.M.

Buffalo, New York

“Can we do a cuddle sandwich now, Daddy?”

Earl looked up from his computer screen to see Brendan, dazed and tousled, totter through the study door. “What are you doing awake?”

“Isn’t Mummy home yet?”

“I’m afraid not.” He stood and picked the boy up. “But it’s back to sleep for you.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s very late.”

“I mean why isn’t she home?”

The vagaries of labor had sabotaged yet another evening of all three of them being together, but try and explain that to a four-year-old. “I told you, sometimes babies don’t want to come out on time,” he said, placing him in bed and tucking in his covers.

“Can’t she make them?”

“Sometimes, but not tonight.”

“She could holler real loud at them, like she does for us when we’re playing outside, and it’s time to eat.”

He grinned down at the budding obstetrical genius. “Mummy won’t be home until long after you’re asleep.”

“I can stay awake.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Look. My eyes are open wide.” He scissored his lids apart with his fingers and grinned like some goofy space creature.

Earl slowly reached toward him with twitching fingers. “Not for long.”

Brendan started to giggle. “Yes, for long.”

“But Mr. Tickle’s here.”

His small hands flew out to grab Earl’s. “No, not Mr. Tickle,” he squealed, wriggling with delight in his bed. “Cuddle sandwich! Cuddle sandwich!”

“Time to sleep, little man.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“Hey, you’re as relentless as your mother.”

“What’s ‘rentless’?”

“Relentless. It means you never give up.”

“Do I get a cuddle sandwich?”

“Okay. Tomorrow morning, you can crawl into bed between Mummy and me, but not until the sun comes up.”

“Promise?”

“You bet. Now good night, and let’s see who can give the strongest hug.”

Brendan’s arms flew around Earl’s neck and squeezed for all their worth. The embrace had the restorative power of a resuscitation. “Night, Daddy,” he said.

Earl gently held him a second longer, pronounced him the winner, and turned out the light.

A quarter of an hour later, alone in his own bed, except for Muffy sprawled on her back, he once again wrestled with what to tell Janet. There’d been small follow-up stories on the evening newscasts, and other New York papers posted updates on their web sites. The only new development was that the NYPD had turned the investigation over to the local authorities in the Adirondacks who had found the remains. Anyone with pertinent information on the case should contact Sheriff Dan Evans or Dr. Mark Roper, coroner. Earl recognized a slough when he saw it, having had his own share of unwanted work dumped on him.

At first he’d felt relief. Recalling the sleepy countryside surrounding Chaz Braden’s estate, he couldn’t imagine there being much of a police force there. Any attention to her murder would probably focus on local acquaintances of hers. It might even be directed at Chaz again, and this time subject his alibi for the day she disappeared to the rigors of small-town scrutiny. After all, weren’t rural murders more apt to get solved than urban ones, what with everybody being into everybody else’s business? It was their equivalent to live theater. Rather than draw the curtains and remain uninvolved, people noticed things, stored them up, and kept them at the ready for later tellings. As long as the case was out of the NYPD’s hands, no one would be stirring up old memories in his former classmates, and he might be home free. So why say anything to Janet and worry her for nothing?

Because he felt as if he was betraying her by staying silent.

He rolled over and picked up the original, well-creased New York Herald article from his nightstand and studied it again. The name of the local coroner, Dr. Mark Roper, seemed vaguely familiar. Now why, he wondered, did it resonate?

Then he remembered.

Kelly had sometimes talked about a Dr. Roper. He was the man who encouraged her to go to medical school and whom she often visited, confiding her problems to him whenever she went up to Hampton Junction. He even counseled her to escape her marriage to Chaz.

Could this Mark Roper be the same man? Hell, if he was, he must be in his early seventies. And that would mean trouble if Kelly had told him everything. The guy could be making a beeline to find him right now, which would take about a day. Shit, he might already have contacted the Buffalo authorities and a cruiser could be on the way to pick him up.

Earl lay still. Feeling his heart start to race, he fought the compulsion to get up and peek through the bedroom window to make sure that a squad car wasn’t pulling up to the front door.

But had she referred to that doctor as Mark? It didn’t sound right. Yet a second physician called Roper in so small a place was unlikely.

He got out of bed and went to his study to check the directory of licensed physicians for New York State. He skimmed through all the Ropers, finding only one whose office address was Hampton Junction. Except it couldn’t be Kelly’s Dr. Roper. This man’s license number indicated he’d been in practice only seven years.

The original Dr. Roper’s son? he wondered. That could also be problematic if the father were alive and capable of discussing what he remembered about Kelly. The name Earl Garnet might still come up.

He undressed and returned to bed, hoping he could escape into sleep, but thoughts of Kelly persisted. He found himself drifting back to 1974.

It had been the time of Watergate, Nixon’s ignominious slide toward the disgrace of his resignation, when the anatomy of the president’s self-destruction, like the Vietnam War, was documented in wall-to-wall television coverage. His downfall seemed suited to the little screen, running daily as it did with the incremental revelations of a soap opera, something Earl and his classmates could tune in to after skipping weeks of episodes without feeling behind in the story. As medical students in their most clinical year yet, they had little time to pay it more attention. But they never missed M*A*S*H .

At the movies, portraits of evil topped the big box office hits. Robert De Niro emblazoned himself on everyone’s memory in Godfather, Part II ; but for making them cringe, nobody topped Roman Polanski when he sliced open Jack Nicholson’s nose in Chinatown .