Dennis Lehane: Since We Fell

Rachel was still stuck on “young lady,” but she nodded.

“So, so, so, this coven has raped me. What other word could apply? They have wrecked my good name and destroyed my relationships with my family and my friends. But that’s not enough, is it? No. Now they want to pick my bones. They want what little money I have left. So I can spend my remaining years destitute. So I can die on a cot in a shelter somewhere, a friendless nothing.” He splayed his fingers over the stack of paper. “In these pages are all the dirty facts about these dirty women. Write about them. Show the world who they are. I’m handing you your Pulitzer, Rachel.”

“I’m not here for a Pulitzer,” Rachel said.

His eyes grew small. “Then why are you here?”

“You said you had information regarding my mother.”

He nodded. “After.”

“After what?”

“After you do the story.”

“That’s not how I work,” Rachel said. “If you have information about my mother, just tell me and we’ll see—”

“It’s not about your mother. It’s about your father.” His eyes flashed. “As you yourself said, it’s a small region. People talk. And the story about you, my dear, was that Elizabeth refused to tell you who your father was. We pitied you, you know, all the good townspeople. We wanted to tell you but none of us could. Well, I could have. I knew your father quite well. But doctor-patient confidentiality laws being what they are, I couldn’t reveal his identity against your mother’s wishes. But now she’s dead. And I’m no longer allowed to practice.” He sipped his coffee. “So, Rachel, would you like to know who your daddy is?”

It took Rachel a moment to find her voice. “Yes.”

“What’s that?”

“Yes.”

He acknowledged that with a downward flick of his eyelids. “Then write the fucking story, sweetheart.”

The more Rachel dug — into the court records and the very files Browner provided — the worse it got. If Dr. Felix Browner was not a serial rapist he was giving the best impression of one Rachel had seen in some time. The only reason he wasn’t in prison was because the one woman who had pressed charges within the statute of limitations, Lianne Fennigan, had overdosed on Oxycontin the final week of his trial, just before she was set to testify. Lianne survived the overdose but was in rehab the day she was supposed to deliver her testimony, and the DA accepted a plea that included revocation of the doctor’s license, six years’ probation, six months’ time already served, and a gag order, but no prison time.

Rachel wrote up her story. She brought it with her to the diner in Millbury, pulled it out of her bag as she sat across from Dr. Felix Browner. He gazed at the small sheaf of pages but remained still.

“What,” he said, “you don’t believe in thumb drives?”

She gave that a tight smile of acknowledgment. “You look happy.”

He did. He’d shit-canned the Jimmy Buffett look for a crisp white shirt under a dark brown suit. His hair was slicked back and heavily gelled. His caterpillar eyebrows were trimmed. His face had color and his eyes gleamed with possibility.

“I feel happy, Rachel. You look stupendous yourself.”

“Thank you.”

“That blouse brings out the green of your eyes.”

“Thank you.”

“Is your hair always so silky?”

“I just had a blowout.”

“It becomes you.”

She beamed her own bright smile his way. His eyes pulsed when it landed and he laughed a small private laugh. “Well, Lordy,” he said.

She said nothing, just nodded in a knowing way and held his gaze.

“I think you can smell that Pulitzer.”

“Well,” she said, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” She handed the pages to him.

He settled into his chair. “We should order drinks,” he said absently as he began to read. As he turned the first page, he looked across at her, and she smiled with encouragement. He read on and his brow knitted as anticipation transmogrified into consternation, then despair, and finally outrage.

“This,” he said, waving off the waitress’s approach, “says I’m a rapist.”

“Kinda does, doesn’t it?”

“This says the women’s chemical dependency and alcohol abuse and sexual piggery are due to me.”

“Because they are.”

“This says I tried to extort you into wrecking these women’s lives a second time.”

“Because you did.” She nodded pleasantly. “And you slandered them in my presence. And I bet if I did even a little digging at your local watering holes, I’d find evidence you slandered them to half the male population in western Mass. Which would be a violation of the terms of your probation. And that means, Felix, that when the Globe runs that story you are going straight to fucking D block.”

She sat back, watched him go speechless. When he finally met her eyes, his swam with martyrdom and disbelief.

“These hands” — he raised them — “brought you into the world.”

“Fuck your hands,” she said. “We have a new deal. Okay? I won’t file that story.”

“Bless you.” He sat up straight. “I knew the moment I—”

“Give me my father’s name.”

“I’ll be happy to, but let’s order a drink and discuss that idea.”

She took the pages from his hand. “Give me my father’s name right now or I file this story” — she pointed at the bar — “from that phone.”

He slumped in the chair, considered the ceiling fan that rotated slowly above him with a rusty squeak. “She called him JJ.”

Rachel placed the article back in her bag to hide the tremors that ran from her hands to her elbows. “Why JJ?”

He turned his hands up on the table, a beleaguered supplicant to fate. “What will I do now? How will I live?”

“Why did she call him JJ?” Her teeth, she realized, were gritted.

“You’re all the same,” he whispered. “You bleed men dry. Good men. You’re a pestilence.”

She stood.

“Sit.” He said it loud enough that two diners looked their way. “Please. No, no. Just sit. I’ll be good. I’ll be a good boy.”

She sat.

Dr. Felix Browner removed a single piece of paper from his suit jacket. It was old and folded in four. He opened it and handed it across the table to her. Her hand shook even worse as she took it, but she didn’t care.

At the top of the page was the name of his clinic: Browner Women’s Health Clinic. Below that: “Father’s Medical History.”

“He only came to my office twice. I got the impression they fought a lot. Pregnancies scare some men. Settle around them like a noose.”

Under “Last Name,” in neat block letters and blue ink, he’d printed “JAMES.”

That’s why they’d never found him. James was his surname.

His first name was Jeremy.

Jeremy James had been teaching full-time at Connecticut College, a small liberal-arts institution in New London, Connecticut, since September 1982. That same year, he bought a house in Durham, a town of seven thousand, sixty miles straight down I-91 from where Rachel grew up in South Hadley, and about a ten-minute drive from the house her mother had rented in Middletown, the year Rachel came down with mono.

He married Maureen Widerman in July 1983. Their first child, Theo, was born in September 1984. Their second, Charlotte, a Christmas baby, arrived at the end of 1986. I have half siblings, Rachel thought, blood relations . And she felt, for the first time since her mother had died, as if she were tethered somewhere in the universe.

With his full name in her possession, Rachel had Jeremy James’s entire life laid out before her in under an hour, or at least the portion that was a matter of public record. He became an associate professor of art history in 1990 and a full professor with tenure in 1995. By the time Rachel tracked him down in the fall of 2007, he’d been teaching at Connecticut College for a quarter century and now chaired the department. His wife, Maureen Widerman-James, was the curator of European art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Rachel found several pictures of her online and liked her eyes enough to decide she was the way in. She’d looked up Jeremy James online and found his pictures as well. He was bald now and heavily bearded, and in all the photos he looked erudite and imposing.