Read Out Of The Deep I Cry Online

Authors: Julia Spencer-Fleming

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Out Of The Deep I Cry (30 page)

BOOK: Out Of The Deep I Cry
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Burns looked at him coolly. “Don’t be intimidated, Debba. You’re here doing them a favor.” He took the chair across the table from Russ. Debba checked the seat beside Burns before settling in it, as if there might be something waiting to bite her.
“Just to avoid misunderstandings, we like to run tape when we’re asking questions.” Russ smiled in what he hoped was an easy, nonthreatening way. “It’s easy to forget who says what, and this way there’s a record for us all to refer to. So, Debba. Do we have your permission to tape you?”
She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Okay,” she said.
“And we will want a copy within twenty-four hours,” Burns added.
Russ nodded at Noble, who had taken up his position by the door. Entwhistle pressed the recording button set in the wall. “Okay, then,” Russ said. “For the record, this is Russ Van Alstyne, and I’m interviewing Deborah Clow-”
“I prefer Debba,” she said.
“We need your legal name on the record,” he said.
“Deborah Clow. Today is Monday, March twenty-seventh, and it’s”-he glanced at his watch-“nine-forty A.M. Deb, we have your consent to tape this, right?”
“Yeah. Yes, you do.”
“Deborah Clow is accompanied by her attorney, Geoffrey Burns.”
Prick.
“Debba, I want you to think back two weeks ago to Sunday night, March nineteenth. You met with Dr. Allan Rouse. Did he call you, or did you call him?”
She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Dr. Rouse called me,” she said.
“Were you surprised? Since you two had a run-in just a week before?”
She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Yeah. I was. Surprised.”
“What was the subject of his phone call?”
“Pardon?”
“What did Dr. Rouse want to talk about?”
She looked at Burns. Christ, this was going to take forever if she had to get his okay for every word out of her mouth. “Mr. Burns, you’re pretty quick on the up-take,” Russ said. “Maybe you could tell your client that you’ll interrupt if there’s anything you don’t think she should answer. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll be here for a very long time.”
Burns nodded to Debba. “It’s okay. Rest assured, I’ll jump in if he goes over the line.”
Sentence by sentence, Russ led her through the events of that evening. Her language was stilted, the way some people got when they knew they were being recorded, but her account was substantially the same as the one she had given him that Friday in Clare’s living room. She had agreed to meet him because he had kept insisting he was going to show her the truth about vaccines, and she thought anything he said to justify himself might be ammunition in her custody fight. No, she didn’t think her lawyer for the custody dispute would approve. No, she didn’t know where the directions he gave her would lead to. No, she didn’t see him until she arrived at the spot along the county road. Yes, they were each alone. Dr. Rouse had led the way through the trail to the tiny cemetery. He had a flash-light. She didn’t. No, she hadn’t been afraid of him. “I’m at least as big as he is,” she said. “I figured if he got weird on me, I could take care of myself.”
“Were you contemplating having to use force to defend yourself?” Burns asked before Russ could get his next question in.
“No,” Debba said. “I believe in nonviolent resolutions. Discussion, not disruption.”
Russ thought he remembered seeing the same sentiment on a bumper sticker on her car. It hadn’t impressed him then, either. “How does that jibe with your breaking into Dr. Rouse’s clinic and trashing one of his examining rooms two weeks ago?”
Burns’s arm shot in front of Debba like a parent holding a kid back at a stop-light. “That’s irrelevant to Dr. Rouse’s whereabouts,” he said. “You don’t need to address that, Debba.”
Russ waited a beat, and when it became apparent she was going to follow counsel’s advice, he went on. “What did Dr. Rouse say to you when you reached the graves?”
She looked at Burns. He nodded. “It’s hard to remember,” she said. “It was cold and dark, and I was thinking that I had made a major mistake, because obviously, he wasn’t going to tell me anything about the vaccines
he
had been using on the children of Millers Kill.” She caught a strand of her long, curly hair and wrapped it around one finger. “He told me to look at the dates on the headstones. He wanted me to understand how deadly and contagious some of the epidemic diseases were. Please. Like I hadn’t already spent two years reading up on them.”
Burns laid his hand on her arm. “Just stick to the question.”
“Oh. Okay. He had this idea that the epidemic wasn’t just the disease, but the effects of the disease. He said the parents of those four children died when their kids did.”
“What?” Those kids died in 1924, and he knew that whatever had happened to Jonathon Ketchem, he had been alive and kicking until 1930.
“I think he was speaking metaphorically. You know, they died inside. For a supposed scientist, he used a lot of metaphors. He was going on about links in the chain, about how each death sent ripples across the water, until more and more lives were swamped.” Russ must have been giving something away in his expression, because she nodded to him, her long corkscrew hair bouncing up and down. “Yeah, I didn’t know what to make of it, either. You can see what I meant when I said it was hard to tell what he was talking about.” She pushed some of her hair away from her face. “Then he said that if anything happened to my children, I would never forgive myself. Now, up to that point, I was feeling a little sorry for him, because I could tell he
meant
well, and he seemed to be in total denial about the role his vaccinations have played in screwing up kids’ health. But when he said that, I got mad.”
Geoff Burns was on her statement before she had time to draw breath. “When you say you got mad, Debba, do you mean you attacked the doctor?”
“Of course not.”
“You shouted at him? Threatened him in some way?”
“No. I got mad. I told him I thought between the two of us, he was the one who needed help, not me. Then I told him he should either give me the flashlight or escort me back to the road, because I was going home.”
“What did he do then, Deborah?” Russ leaned forward slightly. This would be the meat of it.
“I turned to go, and I took a few steps, and he must have tried to follow me, because I heard him kind of yell-you know, that noise people make when they’re falling on ice?”
He nodded. Oh yeah, he knew that noise.
“When I turned back toward him, he was laid out in front of one of the stones. I grabbed his flashlight and I could see that he had whacked himself pretty hard, he was bleeding and all.” She glanced over at Burns, as if to check if she could use the word
blood
.
“What did you do?”
“I helped him up the trail, back to where we had parked the cars. I took a better look at his gash, and I offered to drive him into town, but he turned me down.” She spread her hands in appeal. “How was I to know? He was the doctor, not me. Besides, if you’re a parent, you see plenty of head cuts over the years. They always bleed like crazy, but they don’t amount to anything.”
“So what happened next?”
“I watched him get into his car and turn it on. It was running, I saw the exhaust. Then I took off. That’s the last I saw of him.”
“Where did you drive to, once you left?”
“I needed gas, so I drove over to the Quik-Fill that’s by the Kmart. I was seriously shaken up by the weird stuff that had happened. I didn’t want to go straight home. So I went to Clare’s house.”
“Why Reverend Fergusson?”
Debba tilted her head, twisting another strand of hair around her finger. “She had told me, when we… during that thing at the clinic”-she glanced over at Burns, checking to see if she was on dangerous ground-“that I should come talk to her anytime. I thought… I had a lot of stuff in my head, and I thought she could help me sort it out and make sense of things.”
Russ nodded. “When you say that’s the last you saw of Dr. Rouse, do you mean alive? Have you seen his body at any time after you left him Friday?”
“Ugh. No.”
“Have you seen him alive any time after you left him Friday?”
“I told you, no.”
Burns tapped the table. “Don’t badger my client, Chief Van Alstyne.”
Russ ignored him. “You say after you reached the trailhead, you took a closer look at Dr. Rouse’s injury. How did you do that? With his flashlight?”
“Yeah. He sat in my car and I turned on the lights and took a look. He had a handkerchief, a real cloth one, and he kept it pressed against his cut.”
Crap.
“How long was he in your car?”
“A few minutes, maybe. He seemed really exhausted. That’s when I tried to get him to let me take him home, or to the hospital or something.”
This was not what he wanted to hear. Rouse taking a breather in the car was totally plausible. There wasn’t any other sign of him in the car-no indication that she had stuffed him in the trunk or laid him out in the backseat. If Lyle and Kevin didn’t find anything in her house, there was no way they were going to connect Clow with Rouse’s disappearance. The DA wouldn’t even bother with their paperwork-it would go straight into the circular file. “What time was it when you left Dr. Rouse?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe seven-thirty or so?”
“And it took you an hour to get gas and reach Reverend Fergusson’s house?”
“I guess. I wasn’t in any hurry.”
“Did you make any other stops?”
“Nope.”
“What time did Dr. Rouse contact you?”
“It was after dinner, so… between six and six-thirty.”
“Which?”
She looked at Burns before answering. “Closer to six, I guess.”
Burns placed both hands on the table. “I think that just about covers it, don’t you, Chief?” He stood up. “Ms. Clow has covered all the events of that night in which she played any part. She’s been nothing but cooperative, both today and during the night Dr. Rouse disappeared. I trust there won’t be any need for further questioning.”
Debba glanced at Russ, then at Burns, checking to see if she really could just get up and leave.
“I’m sure Debba here understands that we need to do everything that we can to find Allan Rouse,” Russ said.
Burns hooked a hand under Debba’s arm and levered her out of her seat. “Then I suggest, Chief, that you stop hounding my client, get off your butts, and start tracking the man down.”
Chapter 27
THEN

 

Tuesday, March 29, 1955

 

Allan checked the address on the mailbox against the one scrawled on the paper in his hand. This was it? This cruddy little house on Ferry Street was where his last hope for med school lived? If he didn’t know that Dr. Farnsworth had no sense of humor, he’d think the old guy had been jerking him around. But he was the one who had set up this meeting between Allan and the founder of the new clinic. There must be more to Mrs. Jane Ketchem than met the eye. Allan looked at the peeling green paint on the door of the tiny barn and the front room’s sun-bleached curtains, whose barely discernible pattern was distorted through the ripples in the window glass. There certainly couldn’t be less.
He took the granite block steps in one stride and knocked on the door. It jerked open, startling him so he nearly tumbled backward off the top step. The woman standing there stared at him. “You must be Allan Rouse,” she said.
He recovered his balance. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Mrs. Ketchem. You’re late.”
He saw she was buttoned into a navy coat, with a knit hat tied beneath her chin. Oh, Christ, had he blown it without ever getting a chance to present his case? “I’m sorry,” he began, “I was-”
“I’m due to volunteer at the clinic. You can walk with me.” She reached behind her and snatched a purse and gloves from a hall stand. He jumped out of her way as she swung out the door, shutting and locking it in one efficient movement. She tugged on her gloves and narrowed her eyes as she gave him the once-over. “Is that all you’re wearing?”
“Uh…” he gestured toward his mom’s Chevrolet. “My coat’s in the car. Can I drive you?”
“I’d rather walk. It keeps your joints young.” She nodded toward the car. “Well? Better get it if you’re coming along. It’s raw out today.”
Allan stumbled down the steps and loped across her bath mat-sized lawn. He retrieved his coat, a long, heavy thing that had been his brother Elliot’s, and slipped into it while following Mrs. Ketchem down the sidewalk. Evidently, she didn’t wait for stragglers. He fell into step beside her, and studied her in quick glimpses that could be passed off as checking out the ways home owners had tried to individualize this row of identical houses. If Mrs. Ketchem’s joints were young, they were the only part; she was gaunt and rawboned, with deep grooves running from her nose to her chin and tomahawk-slashed creases radiating out from her eyes.
“Dr. Farnsworth tells me that you want to become a doctor.”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“Why?”
Because I’ve always been the smartest one in my class and I don’t want my brains to shrivel up behind a desk. Because I don’t ever want my fate to be decided by some faceless, cigar-puffing board in Cincinnati. Because I don’t want to work for thirty years with nothing to show for it but a paid-up mortgage on a house nobody wants to buy. Because I want respect, and money, and to travel on jet planes to places where no one has ever heard of Millers Kill.
None of which was what financial-aid boards and admissions officers wanted to hear. “Because I want to use my gifts-my facility with science, my curiosity, my empathy-to help people. Not in a lab, but hands on. One-on-one.”
“Have you thought about alternate careers? Medicine should be a calling, you know, not something you pursue because you can’t think of anything better.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, ma’am. Since I was a kid. I was the one who was always collecting hurt pets and trying to treat them.”
BOOK: Out Of The Deep I Cry
10.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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