One We Love, The (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

I
t took nearly an
hour to sort through my client roster. Only a few clients would really have
difficulty transferring to an interim counselor while I dealt with Regina’s caseload.
Two were in full-blown crisis mode, and a third had abandonment issues so
severe that she would hang up the phone before the other caller could say good-bye.
But the majority was in a relatively good place, either nearing the end of
treatment or so firmly entrenched in denial that a couple of weeks apart
wouldn’t set us back. I hoped it wouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to
settle my obligations. Any longer than that and I risked exposing how
dispensable I apparently was.

Sighing, I leaned my head back against the worn cloth of the
chair. For all my whining, I really did recognize my obligation to Regina. Even
without the legal arrangement, I should have jumped at the chance to pay back
the debt I owed. Should have.

The truth was I didn’t like thinking about Regina because doing
so called to mind painful memories, not the least of which involved a certain,
hunky, former boss hiding out in the West. I toyed with the idea of calling
him, just picking up the phone and punching out the number I’d never dialed
before, but had memorized, just in case. Despite their differences, I’m sure
he’d want to know about Regina’s accident.

But not from me.

I sat up, snatching the papers Bob had foisted on me.
Professional
Executor?
I’d never even heard the term before, although the concept made
sense.

Unlike most legal documents, this one was comprised of
simple, easy-to-understand language. I scanned quickly trying to get a feel for
the job. Despite my light perusal, Regina’s dedication to her wounded charges
rose off the pages as though the ink were scented with her own special brand of
fanaticism. I skipped ahead to a section titled “Specific Instructions to my
Professional Executor” and slowed to read more carefully. While Bob had touched
on the essentials of my new duties, Regina spelled out a veritable to-do list
for following up with her clients.

I finally smiled—leave it to Regina to take care of her
people from beyond the grave—and started taking notes.

 Toward the end of the instructions was a section of
general, housekeeping-type information. The form stated where I could find extra
sets of keys to her offices, including the file cabinets, closed files storage,
malpractice insurance policy, and managed care contracts. Very tidy.

Wait a minute.
Offices?

I went back to the beginning and immediately self-diagnosed
myself with an exotic form of visual processing disorder, because apparently
I’d blacked out what I’d read. The will very clearly stated that my
responsibilities included her clinic duties
and
those at the domestic
abuse shelter. The place where, after I was attacked, she’d dragged me for
group therapy and self-defense classes, the place where I’d vowed to never
return. The place, after all, where Regina had saved lives and, literally,
given her own.

Shit.

Sue met me at the donut shop across the street from the HP
& Me club. We could have met at the club, but, Higher Power
notwithstanding, the coffee was crap and we’d have had to share our donuts with
the two or three grizzled drunks who always hung around the lobby, bitching and
cheating at pinochle.

Sue became my sponsor shortly after I’d stumbled into AA,
hung-over and desperate, nearly ten months earlier. I would have liked a
sponsor who fed me cookies on rainy days and listened to all my sad stories.
Someone I could go to when life got too scary, which felt like all the time.
Someone whose gentle nature let me grow like a seedling in the sun.

Instead, I got Sue.

In all fairness, I picked her. A retired middle-school
teacher, she was born cranky and stayed that way, seeing no reason to change
since it was obvious, to her at least, that the world was at fault, not she. I
shudder to think what she must have been like drunk. Nevertheless, she guided
my sobriety with a combination of tough love, gritty wisdom, and the implicit
threat of a beat-down should I fall off the wagon. She was, in a word,
formidable.

Unfortunately, back during the days following the attack and
Marshall’s leaving, Sue had met Regina. And liked her. They got along. They’d conspired
to protect my sanity and health in ways that I, in my depressed haze, hadn’t
been privy to and would probably never understand. In short, they’d formed an
unholy alliance.

Although Sue had attended the visitation the night before,
she hadn’t been able to come to the services this morning. I told her about meeting
Emma, Regina’s sister, and how different from each other they seemed to be. We
pondered the variability of DNA in siblings for a moment. Then, I showed her
Regina’s will, or whatever it was, and waited while she read it.

“I’ll be damned,” Sue said. “So, what do you think?”

“I think you’ll be damned, too. You swear too much.”

My comment elicited a snort and a much bigger cuss word, but
didn’t succeed in distracting Sue from her question. Sponsors, like therapists
and moms, have a bit of bulldog in them. Or in Sue’s case, a lot. She gave me
the one-eyebrow-raised stare.

“What do I think? I think it sucks. I hate it,” I answered.
“And I hate that I hate it. I don’t want the extra responsibility, for one
thing. And yes, I know that’s horrible of me—especially after everything Regina
did for me.

“I mean,” I continued, “she knew how screwed up I’ve been
after Robert’s death and all the rest. I’m a mess, and I’m just getting my shit
back together. Why would she choose me for this job?”

“Why did she?”

“I don’t know.” I stared out the window to the AA club.
Regina had known I was an alcoholic; she was the only one at work who did. She
also knew, better than anyone did, how ravaged my life had been just a few
months earlier.
Why
had
she chosen me?

“She must have trusted you,” Sue said, breaking into my
reverie.

“But she trusted the women at the shelter more. I saw her
with them. That shelter was her life. Why didn’t she appoint one of them?”

“Maybe you should ask her lawyer,” Sue said. “And you could
also ask her what happened two weeks ago that made Regina change her will.”

“What are you talking about?”

In answer, Sue pointed to the date on the document: Tuesday,
September 2 of this year. Whatever had factored into Regina’s decision to
appoint me professional executor had occurred very recently. Two weeks ago, as
Sue pointed out.

What the hell?

CHAPTER FOUR

A
fter a night
spent staring dry-eyed into the dark, I dragged myself out of bed. Siggy, my
recently acquired cat, snuggled down in the warm curve of my pillow with a soft
grunt. He watched with apparent incredulity as I stumbled around getting
dressed in the dawning light. We are not morning creatures, Sig and I.

I slapped a new nicotine patch on my back and set forth to
seize the day, stopping for coffee twice on the twenty-minute commute. Between
caffeine jitters and the pee-pee dance, I could barely manage typing the alarm
code and opening the lock on the clinic door. Thankfully, the bathroom was just
off the lobby and I made it in time to avert serious embarrassment.

The clinic was empty. I knew better than to expect Bob
before noon, and the rest of the therapists wouldn’t be in for another couple
of hours. Lisa, our office manager, might be in before that, but I still had
the place to myself for a while.

Eerie.

Without clients and co-workers, the place felt like a stage
set: empty and devoid of purpose. The phrase “if walls could talk” came to mind,
and I couldn’t shake a sense of the accumulated anguish that would be seeping out
of the walls if that were true. I stopped off in the lounge to set up a pot of
highly unnecessary coffee, before hurrying to Regina’s office.

Bob had given me the master key, but despite my unease, I
hesitated outside the door. A weighted sensation smothered my coffee jitters,
making it hard to breathe. My heart thumped against the pressure.
Heart
attack? Regina’s ghost?

Obligation.

Forcing a deep breath, I walked in.

Our offices were the same size and furnished with the same
crap commercial furniture. Regina, however, had had nearly two decades to place
her stamp. She’d filled her room with eclectic folk art, a few travel souvenirs
judging by the I-Heart-Ireland coffee mug, and a profusion of small
remembrances from clients—the kind that couldn’t be refused without hurt feelings,
but which fell on the angels’ side of ethics.

 Even Regina’s flooring was symbolic. My clients traversed
the standard brown-flecked industrial strength carpeting that ran throughout
the clinic. Regina had brought in a handspun area rug—the faded pumpkin
background backlit a curling tree in browns and greens: the Tree of Life.

She’d re-covered the loveseat too. Across the back, someone
had tossed a celery-colored afghan. It lay there, soft and warm, ready for the
next person who, regardless of the current season, might be caught in her own
winter of the soul. I picked it up, brought it to my face.

Regina’s scent—as clean and crisp as fresh sheets snapping
on the line—filled my head.
Had she made this herself?
The weave looked
handmade, and I couldn’t find a label or tag anywhere. I folded the fabric
carefully, setting it back on the loveseat. I’d need to find out who was
entitled to Regina’s personal effects; I assumed her sister Emma, but I hadn’t
gotten her phone number and didn’t know her last name. The lawyer would know.

Setting my purse on her desk, I pulled out a notebook and my
copy of Regina’s will. Feeling like an intruder, I sat at her desk, flipped to
a new page in the notebook and made a list of people I’d need to call. Regina’s
lawyer, definitely, and then Emma. Clotilde, the shelter director. I’d need to
make sure she was aware of Regina’s will and make an appointment despite the
fact that I’d never, ever wanted to set foot in the shelter again. Considering
a fourth name, I debated with myself. Was I being silly? Overreacting?
With
a sigh, I wrote “Detective Blodgett.”

Didn’t want to talk to him again either.

It was too early to call any of them. I pulled out Regina’s
client list and grabbed the nearest stack of files. I’d have to read each one
carefully, reviewing the clinical progress notes before calling each one. It
was time-consuming work, work that would require my full attention, my total commitment
to people I’d never even met.

This I could do.

I busied myself checking Regina’s client list against the
files piled on her desk, making notes, creating new lists dividing clients into
tentative groups: those to be referred, those to invite to a grief support
group, those who might need immediate attention and so on. The task was absorbing,
which is why it took me several attempts at cross-checking a particular file
with Regina’s client list to realize that it didn’t belong to the clinic.
Didn’t belong
in
the clinic, for that matter.

At first glance, it seemed like a typical manila file
folder, although rather more beat up than usual as though recycled from a
previous use. The stickers were different, too. Every office has its own
system, using stickers or some other marking on the exterior of the file to
indicate various information. Our clinic used colored circles to indicate
activity status; a green circle meant an active client, red meant a closed
case. We also had a system to indicate whether the client paid by private means
or through an insurance carrier, and, if the latter, which?

The file I held had none of these indicators and, in fact,
the client’s name had been neatly handwritten in black ink on the label tab
instead of printed on a computer-generated label. No case number either.

I didn’t recognize the name—Tammy Long—although that didn’t
mean much. If it weren’t for this situation I wouldn’t have known any of
Regina’s clients’ identities. There were a half-dozen progress reports inside,
all in Regina’s slanted, spiky handwriting. I paged past them, coming to the client
info sheet clipped to the back of the folder. I was looking for information on
the client but the first thing that caught my eye was the letterhead: a deep purple
logo—three linked feminine figures protectively encircling a fourth—centered on
the header with the agency name, Devlin House for Women, underneath.

What was Regina doing with a shelter file here?

It didn’t make sense. Standard practice holds that files are
never removed from their parent agency, unless perhaps if they are to be
archived at a separate, designated site. Regina knew this.

A quick examination of the stack dredged up five more. Six
files, in total, belonging to Devlin House that had no business being here in
the clinic. Worse, only three of them were Regina’s own clients. One belonged to
another therapist whose scrawled signature was both unfamiliar and illegible.
Regina had taken them from the shelter, but for what purpose? It seemed so out
of character. Regina followed rules. She may have bitched about them or, more
likely, walked a picket line against them, but she wouldn’t have simply broken
them without a very good—an overridingly
important
—reason.

I sat back in the chair, thinking. There were too many
unusual circumstances in Regina’s death, in the recent changes to her will, in
this latest discovery for me to feel comfortable. Yet, what did I really know?
The sister Regina had little contact with didn’t know she knitted? A couple of files
had been misplaced? Perhaps Regina had absentmindedly placed them in her
briefcase, brought them to this office. Maybe something was going on with her
medically? Something that could account for her distractibility—if that’s what
it was—and cause her to lose her footing or be disoriented resulting in a fall.

Or I could easily be overreacting. I acknowledged that. On
the other hand, I told myself as I gathered up the files and headed to the copy
machine, another mysterious “something” had made Regina change her executor of
many years to me as recently as a couple of weeks ago. I scanned the records as
I fed them to the copier. The dates ranged from March 2007 to this August—all
had been closed out. So whatever the reason for her keeping them, it wasn’t
because they were current clients.

I glanced at the clock. My co-workers would be straggling in
any minute ready to start the workday. I didn’t want them to find me illicitly
copying files from another agency. My actions were just as wrong as Regina’s
taking them, and I’d never be able to explain the nebulous doubts that I was
reacting to. I didn’t understand them myself.

My other problem was where to hide them. I didn’t dare hide
them in plain sight in the file room, something I’d tried once before with
disastrous results. Hearing the front door open, I grabbed up the papers
willy-nilly and fled back to my office. As I hastily reassembled the paperwork,
I realized I should simply take the original files back to the shelter and
leave the copies in Regina’s office. No one would know they were duplicates
since I was the only one with access to both agencies. Hiding in plain sight.
Again.

What could go wrong?