Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (16 page)

"You can do what we've suggested," he said impatiently, and repeated the Medical Board's tired old formula.

Arden asked, "How'll I find five victims? I'm a housewife, not a detective."

"I'm afraid that's your job," the lawyer said, "not ours."

She remembered how everyone in Lovell had rallied behind the beloved town doctor when his daughter Annette was killed. Why, there'd almost been fistfights over which church would get the funeral! She thought, He's one of our two or three most prominent citizens. If I go up against him, we could lose everything. Dean's right. We could get ourselves run out of town. . . .

Minda kept talking about action, but most of her ideas were on a par with her plan to go back and grab Story's penis. The middle child was still too upset to make much sense.

Meg was sunk in depression. Ever since the childhood trouble with Bob Asay, she'd suffered from deep-seated fears. "Lovell was my oasis, my paradise," she complained to her mother, "and Dr. Story's stolen it from me. I don't know why we don't all pack up and leave." Sometimes she didn't even answer her telephone.

Arden consoled herself that the McArthurs didn't have much more to lose. The clothing store and the dry cleaners were slumping, and the farm was gone. Dean, now under another doctor's care, had had open-heart surgery and several seizures, each more intense than the last. Every night she propped him up and prayed he would last till morning. She thought a lot about the Celestial Kingdom.

For weeks she'd expected her own anger to subside. She prayed and meditated but was rewarded with no burnings in the bosom.

Every day she grew more upset. She thought, What kind of Relief Society president am I if I let that sick man abuse more women? The Lord has given me the job of solving the problem.

But how? The four women who'd phoned after Minda's rape had spoken in strictest confidentiality. She wished she'd paid more attention to the jungle telegraph. People had been trying to tell her the truth about Story for years, and she'd turned them off.

She remembered some scuttlebutt about a member of the Bible Church who'd threatened a lawsuit against Story for bothering her daughter. At the time, Arden had disregarded the tale as typical Lovell gossip.

In a phone conversation, the woman said, "Arden, are you trying to destroy this man?"

"I'm trying to help him," she said nervously. "He can't be helped if he doesn't admit what he did." She described what had happened to Meg and Minda, and said she'd heard that something similar had happened to the woman's own daughter.

"Absolutely not!" the woman exclaimed. "Dr. Story is a fine man. My daughter just came back to town with her baby, and they went straight up to his clinic for a checkup. How can you say a thing like that?"

Arden felt like saying, Woman, I remember when I was as stupid as you. She also thought, Strike one.

She chewed on her pencil and tried to recall Story's words back in the doctors' lounge. Who was it he'd kicked out of his office twenty-four years ago?
Alma Kent.

En route to Sister Kent's house, she spotted Aletha Durtsche crossing broad Shoshone Boulevard in her brisk stride, delivering the mail. Arden admired the letter carrier. She had a nicely chiseled face, butterscotch hair in a neat pageboy, and a laugh that rang up and down Main Street as she delivered to the storekeepers and matched them quip for quip. Raised on a farm, she shared Arden's directness and open manner—neither had ever been at ,
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euphemisms. Aletha was an active Saint, but she wasn't a stick about it. she directed the choir, played piano and taught in primary, coached boys' baseball, worked as a lifeguard and was raising three fine kids.

As Arden put it later, she was "prompted" to pull over. "Aletha," she called through the car window, "do you still go to Dr. Story?"

Aletha started to cry. It was so out of character that Arden jumped from the car to comfort her. "Aletha," she said, "he violated Meg and Minda. Has he ever done anything to offend you?"

She wiped her eyes and nodded.

Arden asked if she would be willing to file a complaint.

"Yes," she said, "I would."

She seemed to want to say more, but Arden interrupted. "I don't want to know the details. That's not my place. Please, Aletha, just write a letter. I'll call you later with the address."

The mail carrier nodded, and Arden drove off.

"I'm sorry, Sister McArthur," Alma Kent said as the two women sat in her front room under a photo display of her family tree. "I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. He said he did
what?"

Arden repeated Story's claim that he'd kicked her out, stressing that she herself didn't believe a word. Could it be that he'd made advances?

"No," the woman said nervously. "Nothing like that ever happened."

Arden didn't believe her and said, "Did you know that if this goes to court, you can be called in?"

"Yes," Alma said, "and all I'd have to say is, I don't remember."

"But you'd be peijuring yourself!"

"I've already talked to a lawyer," the woman said. "All I have to do is deny it. I don't have to admit a thing."

"Well, if you can live with it," Arden said as she got up to leave, "I can too."

Strike two.

Driving west toward the sugar factory, she saw herself falling short of the Board of Medical Examiners' demand. Presuming Aletha added her complaint to Meg's and Minda's, the total was three and not likely to go much higher, judging by the reactions so far. The letter carrier had been a breakthrough, but how many more victims would Father in Heaven send her on the street?

She dropped in at the frame house of a widow she sometimes visited on rounds of compassionate services. The old lady required frequent dialysis. As they talked, Arden asked, "Didn't you used to doctor with Story?"

"Yes," the woman said.

"What did you think of him?"

The woman shook her head.

"Did you quit him?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

The woman shook her head again. Arden asked, "What does that mean?"

When the woman started to cry, Arden said, "I'm looking for people who've been offended by him." She described what had happened to Minda and Meg.

The old woman threw her arms around Arden and began to sob. "How did you find me?" she asked.

Arden said, "I'm . . . not sure."

"Only my husband knew. I went to Story for twelve years before I realized what he was doing to me." Arden held the upset woman till she stopped trembling. She couldn't bear to ask her to write a letter. Maybe if her health improved. But that was so unlikely.

The sun had gone down by the time Arden pulled into the driveway of her last prospect. Years before, she'd overheard Story's name in connection with a child abuse case and dismissed it as gossip. The victim's name had been "Jean Anderson," but she wasn't sure if she had the right Anderson.

Jean Anderson's mother answered the door. She said the incident had happened eighteen or twenty years before, when the child was nine. "He took out his penis and told her he was gonna put something under her to make her feel better," the woman said with no sign of reluctance. "He made her lay naked on his table. She said his penis looked brown. He told her to lift up and then slid it under her hips while he was giving her a hypodermic in her bottom. I went to the police and they said they couldn't do anything. I

ARDEN McARTHUR

wrote a complaint to the State Medical Board, but nothing came of

it."

"Did you keep a copy?"

"I was so angry, I kept it for years," the woman said. "Let me look." Ten minutes went by before she returned. "I can't find it. I'll look later."

"Would you mind writing another letter to the same people?" Mrs. Anderson said she would discuss the matter with her daughter, now married and living in West Jordan, Utah. As Arden drove off, she thought, At least it wasn't strike three.

16

ALETHA DURTSCHE

Physicians are created as much by their patients as by their training, and most patients want to give up all decisions to the omnipotent father figure.

—Bernie S. Seigel, M.D.,
Love, Medicine & Miracles

Aletha drove to her home on Cannon Avenue and told Mike about the meeting on the mail route. "Don't get involved," her husband warned.

"I've got to," the letter carrier said. She was still choked up by the unexpected meeting with Arden McArthur. "No matter how hard it is, I've got to go through with this, or the guy's never gonna be stopped."

Mike asked if she wasn't afraid of the consequences for the five Durtsches. "Yes," she said, "but I don't care. When the time comes that I meet my maker and he Says, Why didn't you stop this? I'll have no excuse other than that I was afraid."

As she sat down to write her letter, the memories flooded back. At fifteen, she'd been a virgin undergoing her first pelvic exam. Dr. Story told her he had to dilate her and inserted something warm. The examination lasted for about a half hour. That was all she remembered except that she'd wondered if sex felt like that. Then she'd put it out of her mind.

By 1970, she was seventeen and pregnant with Mike's child. Dr. Story examined her and kept complaining that he couldn't get the tube in far enough. She thought, Whatever he's doing, it sure feels like me and Mike. There was a knock on the door and the nurse called out, "Doctor, we need you right now."

"What do you need?" he said crisply. For just those few words, he didn't sound like Dr. Story.

"I've got these papers for you to sign."

She could feel the tube slip from her body as he stepped backward. "Just a minute," he said, and then more smoothly, "Just a minute."

He sat on his stool with his back to the door and said, "Put 'em on the table by the door."

Aletha was perplexed. His behavior was so out of character. And that tube felt
exactly
like Mike.

After the nurse left, he resumed the procedure. Good grief, Aletha thought, can it be?

Mike was waiting outside in his pickup. In her usual direct way, she said, "I think maybe Dr. Story just screwed me."

"You mean on the bill?" Mike asked.

"No. I mean really."

"Dr. Story? He'd never do anything like that."

Aletha thought about it and said, "Naw. I guess not. It must've been something that felt real."

They'd married and traveled in the Air Force and come back in 1980 to be sealed in the temple at Idaho Falls with their three children. The church taught that Satan worked extra hard on Saints who were on a course for the Celestial Kingdom, and the warning seemed to apply to the young Durtsche family. Mike was a saloonkeeper's son, a Methodist who'd converted for Aletha. He didn't drink. She wouldn't even sip iced tea; hot, cold or strong drink were forbidden by church law, and she took the admonition literally. She told her husband, "You drink too much pop, and one of these days the promise of the word of wisdom's gonna hit you hard."

Her prophecy was fulfilled and then some. Mike got drunk and had a one-night stand. He told Aletha, "I don't give two whoops about that woman," and confessed to his bishop and stake president. They scheduled a high council court, and when he ignored its summons, he was disfellowshipped. He told Aletha he was sick of being ordered around by ordinary men posing as high priests. "Tell ya the truth," he said, "I'd rather be excommunicated." It seemed to her that he was forcing her to choose between him and the Saints.

But the church was her life. She asked herself, How can my own husband do this to me? We've been through the temple. By golly, he's hurting me, so I'm gonna hurt him.

She swallowed thirty aspirins to shock Mike into getting straight with the church. At the hospital, Dr. Story gave her a drink that made her throw up. Then he sat at the foot of her bed and asked, "Why'd you do it, Aletha?"

"Mike doesn't love me."

He listened as she sobbed out her story. "I want Mike, and I want my church," she said, "and I can't have both."

"Well, you come to the clinic tomorrow," he said. "You're gonna have to have something to relax you a little bit."

The next day, he led her to a chair in his private office and told her he would return. The place looked decorated by Norman Rockwell. An antique brass balancing scale was next to a set of tiny weights. A collection of old-time remedies filled a glass case; she saw Calomel, strychnine sulfate, Asthamador cigarettes, belladonna, syrup of this and elixir of that, sulfur and molasses. An open leather pillbox held crumbling pills in faded colors. Three boxed sets of books adorned a shelf: the four-volume
The Wisdom of Conservatism,
by Peter Witonski; a collection of patriotic biographies of early Americans; and a set containing de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America, The Federalist Papers,
a work by Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith's
The Wealth of Nations.

Aletha turned to the framed documents on the wall. One confirmed that John Huntington Story, M.D., age thirty-two years, a graduate in medicine and surgery, had been admitted to practice in Wyoming on Oct. 6, 1958. She admired the family pictures of Marilyn and the separate ones of their three daughters, including the little lost Annette, and the framed layout showing the eight or ten sets of twins he'd delivered through the years, and the print of a vessel under full sail. There was a picture of a tiger, but she was disappointed to see that it wasn't the stalking beast she'd painted for him on black velvet after he'd cured her son Justin of the croup. The office smelled like baby powder. A Rubik's Cube lay on a shelf.