The Secret Between Us (17 page)

“Eccentric,” Tom confirmed. “He comes by it honestly.”

“How did you escape it?”

There was a short silence, then, “How do you know I did?”

She tried to decide if he was serious or not. “I guess I don’t,” she finally said.

There were a dozen more questions she wanted to ask, not the least of which was why, if Cal was taking Coumadin on the up-and-up, he had chosen not to enlighten the doctors, when a car rounded the corner. It was John Colby’s dark sedan. Waving, she caught his eye.

“I have to run now,” she told Tom. “Thank you for sharing what you did.”

“Your lawyer will be pleased.”

“My lawyer won’t know.” She watched John turn into the alley. “Gotta run. Thanks again.” Ending the call, she walked over to the car. She had an issue with Colby. “What happened Saturday night?” she asked.

“Saturday night?” he echoed, puzzled.

“Someone reported the Hubers to the police.” She stepped back to let him out of the car.

“Ah. That. It was a neighbor. He’s a chronic complainer—calls all the time about car radios blaring. He thought the party was too noisy.”

“Did you tell the Hubers who called?”

“No,” John replied cautiously and looked at her.

“Did they ask if it was me?”

He looked away. “Yes. I told them I hadn’t talked with you at all.”

“But they didn’t accept that.”

“No.” He faced her again. “They claimed it was because Grace wasn’t at the party. Wasn’t she invited?”

“Oh, she was,” Deborah said with a sigh and ran a hand through her hair. “She just didn’t want to go. I lost two patients over this, John. Emily removed the girls from our practice.”

“Oh, hey, I’m sorry.” He sounded genuinely so. “I told her it wasn’t you. Want me to go over and tell her who it really was?”

Deborah feared that would only raise charges that the police were favoring her. “No. If the trust is gone, it’s gone.”

“For what it’s worth,” he confided, “it’s just as well Grace didn’t go. The Hubers used to serve their older girl beer when she had friends over. There’s no reason to think they don’t do the same with Kim. I’d have gone there in person to take a look if the noise hadn’t quieted down, but when I didn’t get another complaint, I let it go. ’Course, I’d be kicking myself right now if one of the kids had wrapped his car around a tree. But there was only that one complaint.” He ran his hand over the curve of his stomach. “It’s a tough call in this town, with so many affluent parents and all. Sometimes you have to take them at their word.” He propped an elbow on the roof of the car. “I saw Grace yesterday.”

Deborah raised her brows. “You did?”

“At the oval. She was working out with the team. Boy, can she run. Left everyone else in the dust.” He smiled. “She reminded me of you.”

“I never ran.”

“No, you swam, but you were fast. Still have those trophies?”

“Uh-huh. They’re in a carton in the basement.”

“Not on display? You should be proud of those things. You did great for the local team.”

Deborah hadn’t thought about the trophies in a while. The last time she had taken them out was to show the kids, and then, only because Karen had gone on about them. To Greg, they were the epitome of convention, won at a time when he had been building houses in the inner city, wearing long hair, grayed shorts, and a week’s worth of sweat. By the time he met Deborah, he had started his business and was growing more conventional himself, but he never warmed to her high school trophies.

Now, in response to John’s question, she shrugged. “Once I got married and had kids, the prizes didn’t mean much. I don’t want to live in the past.”

“That’s smart. It’s not good for the kids. Some just can’t duplicate what Mom and Dad did—not that your Grace isn’t a winner on her own, but you know what I mean. You’re one strong lady. Grace has big shoes to fill. She still into science?”

Deborah nodded.

“Gonna join you and your dad?”

“I hope so.”

“And she wants it, like you did?”

“She says she does.”

“Better be sure about that,” he advised, staring at his shoes. “I know what it’s like to disappoint a parent. You want to be a
what
? my dad used to ask. My family’s all lawyers.”

“You’re the chief of police. That’s not too shabby.”

“There’s a difference, my parents would say if they were alive.” He looked up. “Don’t know what got me going on that. I guess it’s still a sore spot. You’re such a rock, even now after the accident. I worry about Grace. She’s young. She may not be as strong.”

“I think the week just overwhelmed her.”

“I hope she’s not isolating herself from her friends.”

Deborah gave it a positive spin. “She’s just lying low.”

“Huh. Grace Kelly’s girl should’ve done that.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Remember Grace Kelly?”

“Of course,” Deborah said with a touch of unease. “She was living out every young girl’s dream. I was barely into my teens when she died.”

“Remember how she died?”

“She was driving when her car left the road and crashed down an embankment.”

“Mmm. Her daughter had a rough time afterward—you know, the one who was in the car with her. I always wondered about whether she was the one actually driving and they covered it up.”

“But Princess Grace had a stroke,” Deborah protested.

“Well. No matter,” said the man. “Your Grace is lucky. She has you.” He scratched the back of his head. “Say, listen, I really am sorry about the Hubers. I probably should have just come right out and said who’d made the call. I hate thinking I made you lose two patients. If there’s anything I can do…”

“There is,” Deborah said. She was thinking of everything Tom had shared about his brother. She probably should tell John, but she felt—absurdly, perhaps—that she couldn’t betray Tom’s confidence. “Just speed up the accident report, John. You owe me this.”

Chapter 13

Michael’s car wasn’t in the driveway when Deborah got to the house, which relieved her on two counts. First, she truly did want to think that he was out for breakfast. And second, she was pleased not to have to see him so soon.

Parking nearby, she carried her med bag, her coffee, and her untouched sticky bun down the driveway. Three cars were in the small lot there—those of the receptionist, the nurse, and an early patient who had caught a cold from her kids. After diagnosing bronchitis, Deborah sent her off with the proper prescription, and went down the hall. Her father hadn’t arrived.

His office was neat but crowded. Books filled every shelf, relics of the day when journals weren’t digital, and while he was totally addicted to the computer that sat on the side of the desk, he refused to get rid of them. Same with the presents that his youngest patients had given him over the years—Valentines added each year to a decorated board, numerous shells, rocks, and twigs, a primitive clay mug. Each held a memory. For all his dictatorial bearing, Michael was a softie at heart.

“Gone looking for a bottle in the drawer yet?” asked her father, coming up behind her. He dropped a handful of magazines on the desk and flipped on a light.

“No,” she said. “I would never do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s your desk.”

His face was sober. “But you were thinking of it.”

“I was actually thinking about you and Mom,” Deborah said. And yes, it had crossed her mind to check the desk, though she hadn’t drummed up the courage to actually do it. “I would have liked to have had a marriage like yours.”

“You thought you did. I thought you were rushing. He was a hippie, for God’s sake, but you said that was what made him special.”

“It was.”

“Arguable, given what he’s done since, but back then you said you’d found the right guy and that if you waited until after med school, he’d be gone.”

“He was,” Deborah remarked.

“He wasn’t
gone
until two years ago.”

She gave a sad smile. “He was gone long before that.”

“The marriage was bad all along?” Michael asked in surprise.

“Not bad. Just not the same as yours. I chalked it up to our being a two-career couple.”

“You said he was fine with your being a doctor.”

“I thought he was, women’s rights and all. He seemed so modern, the ideal mix of free spirit and realist. At work, he was amazing. He brought unconventional ideas to a conventional field. I thought he was brilliant.” She paused. “I thought he adored me the way you adored Mom.”

“Maybe back then he did.”

“Maybe I misjudged him.”

“Maybe you were too young to judge him at all.”

“Oh, Dad, I was not,” she scolded. “I was no younger when I got married than you were.”

“Things were different in my day. My buddies were being sent to Vietnam, and some of them weren’t coming home. We didn’t have the luxury of time.”

But she shook her head. “Lots of kids still get married young.”

“It’s a socioeconomic thing now.”

“But they do it, and their marriages don’t always fail. So what’s the problem with us?”

“Hey, don’t include me in that.”

“I know. Your marriage was perfect.”

He reddened, his temper heating. “If you’re going to start telling me all I didn’t know about my wife—”

“No, that’s not it. I’m serious. Your marriage
was
perfect,” Deborah insisted. “I cannot remember once when you ever argued with Mom. I thought that was how all marriages were. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I saw things in Greg that just weren’t there.”

Michael sat behind his desk and turned on the computer. “If you fantasized, it was your own doing. I never told you what to expect.”

“No. But kids see their parents, and their relationship becomes the standard.”

He reached for his glasses. “Doesn’t look like your sister saw that.”

“Oh, she did. She knew what you and Mom had. Why do you think she never found the right guy?”

Eyes on the screen, he muttered, “Because she’s prickly.”

“Not prickly.
Picky
. She wanted someone as strong as you.”

He shot her a look. “Don’t flatter me.”

Deborah was suddenly impatient. “I’m not. This is about perception—perception and expectation. I saw a certain model and took certain things for granted. Clearly, I shouldn’t have. But we were talking about Jill. The problem is, expectations can be hard on a child.”

“Jill is not a child.”

“She is. She’s your child. She always will be.”

He looked at her over his glasses. “Don’t we have patients to see?” “She can’t do everything the way you did. That doesn’t mean what she does is bad. The bakery is a fabulous place, and she’s doing it well.”

“Good.”

“Doesn’t that make you happy? What more do we want for our kids than to know they’re happy?”

“Lots. We want security. We want growth. We want them to do better than we did.”

Deborah thought of what John had said. “That may not be possible. What then? Are they failures?”

Her father straightened. “You tell me. You want your boy to play baseball, but he can’t see. Does he actually get satisfaction from those games?”

Deborah thought about her son and fear twisted her heart. “It’s about being part of a team.”

“Sure, that’s what we say. Only, is it? Is he better off being the worst kid on the team—”

“He isn’t the worst kid.”

“He can’t
see,
Deborah. He can’t see to hit the ball, and he can’t see to field it. He is, on the other hand, a good little musician.”

“He’ll never be a concert pianist,” Deborah said, thinking of what her father had done to Jill. “I refuse to pressure him that way.”

“And you don’t think forcing him to play ball isn’t as bad? Come on, Deborah. You can’t see what’s right in front of your nose.”

“I guess that makes two of us,” Deborah said, just as the intercom rang.

Michael jabbed at the speakerphone. “Yes.”

“Jamie McDonough is in Room One, Dr. Barr. Would you tell Dr. Monroe that the Holt children are in Room Two?”

“Fine.” He punched the off button and got up. “They expect us to be there. They expect us to have answers. They
expect
us to cure their ills.” Taking a lab coat from the back of the door, he pushed his arms through the sleeves. “Who cures us?” He glared at Deborah. “We are all we have.”

Technically, Deborah agreed.
Wasn’t that the philosophy she had lived by since the divorce?
We do what we have to do, because no one else is going to do it. It may not be right, but it’s the best we can do.

Coming from her father, though, it was depressing. Drinking cured nothing. If aloneness was the problem, drinking only made it worse. The question was whether what she was doing was any better.

She might have obsessed about it if her morning hadn’t been filled first with office visits, then house calls. Her afternoon wasn’t much better. By the time she reached the gym, she was desperate for distraction, and pushing herself helped.

Later, pulling into a diagonal spot in front of the bakery, she phoned Greg. “Hi. It’s me. Is this an okay time?”

There was a pause. “An okay time for what?” he asked.

“To talk.”

“About…?”

“Us. The kids.”
Can’t see what’s right in front of your nose.
“Maybe what went wrong.”

There was dead silence. Then a curious, “What went wrong when?”

“With our marriage.”

“You want to talk
now
?”

He wasn’t making it easy. “If this isn’t a good time, I can call back.”

“That’s not the point. For months after we split, I wanted to talk. You never let me.”

“I couldn’t. I was hurt. You had turned into someone I didn’t know.”

“Not true. I went back to being the man I was when we first met.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “But it had been a long time, and I found the change threatening.”

“Because I wanted to talk?”

“Because you wanted to tell me why you didn’t want to be married to me.”

“It wasn’t you, Deborah. It was the whole of my life—”

She cut in. “I heard
me
. Right or wrong, Greg, I took it personally. I couldn’t satisfy you as a wife, so you left. I couldn’t satisfy you as a woman, so you married Rebecca. Had you been in touch with her all along?”

“No. Only at the end of our marriage.”

“Did you leave me
specifically
to marry her?”

“No. Once I was gone, it just…fit.”

“And I didn’t. Do you understand why I couldn’t talk? I didn’t want to hear all the things I’d done wrong.”

“So I was the bad guy.”

“Yes.”

“What’s different now?”

She looked out the windshield. The afternoon sun shone on the bakery window, blocking her vision, but she knew that Grace and Dylan were inside. “The anger isn’t working. I’m not sure it’s the best thing for the kids. I’m not sure it’s the best thing for me either.”

“You’re older and wiser now?”

Hearing a note of sarcasm, she said, “There were times in our marriage when I felt so much younger and dumber than you.”

“You never told me that.”

“I didn’t like discussing our age difference.”

“You threw it at me plenty when I left.”

“No, Greg. All I said was that you were having a midlife crisis. Maybe you heard more than I said.”

There was another silence, then a surprisingly conciliatory, “Maybe.”

“I expected my marriage to last forever,” Deborah said. “I wasn’t prepared for what happened. I was humiliated.”

“I’m sorry for that. I probably could have handled it better.”

“How?” she asked. “By giving me a week’s warning?”

“I’d been unhappy for a while.”

“So unhappy that you couldn’t discuss it?”

“I wasn’t supposed to be unhappy at all. That wasn’t in the plan—and I’m not being sarcastic. You weren’t the only one with expectations. It occurs to me that I needed those plans to convince myself that what I was doing with my life was right. Our life together was a show. We did what was expected of the perfect couple.” His voice softened. “I’m not blaming you.”

Absurd as it was, her eyes filled with tears. “I couldn’t move up there with you. I couldn’t, Greg.”

“I knew that.”

“I made calls. There were too many doctors there already.”

“Deborah, you don’t need to explain.”

“I do,” she insisted. “I’ve always felt guilty. I felt like I chose my house and my career over my husband.”

“It wasn’t a black-and-white choice.”

But she went on, desperate that he understand how she had felt toward the end of their marriage. “We hadn’t talked about anything substantial for years.”

“Deborah.”

“If I let you down, I’m sorry. I thought I was doing everything right. But how do we know? How can we see down the road and know what’ll work and what won’t? It’s like driving at night in a torrential rain. You think you know the way, but you just can’t be sure.”

“Are you all right, Deborah?”

She was about to say she was not, when John Colby pulled into the space beside her. Something about his expression said that he had news.

“What’s happening?” Greg asked.

“Lots, I’m afraid. But I’ve just run out of time.”

“Is it something to do with the kids?”

“Nothing that won’t wait another day or two.”

“This is a good time for me to listen,” he said meaningfully.

She heard him. “I appreciate that. Thank you. But I’ll have to call you back.”

She closed her phone before he could say another word, and rolled down her window as John rounded the front of his car and leaned in.

“I talked with the folks at the state lab,” he said. “They don’t like to say anything until they’re done, but so far as they can see, you’re in the clear.”

Deborah was afraid to breathe. “In the clear?”

“There’s no evidence of wrongdoing—no speeding, no reckless driving, no vehicle malfunction. It’s pretty much what we said. There’s no grounds for charges. They’re focusing on the victim now. The preliminary report says he ran straight out of the woods.”

Deborah was a minute following. “
Out
of the woods?”

“He wasn’t jogging along the road. He was in the woods and ran directly out onto the road.”

“There’s no path through the woods.”

“I know. But his footprints were there.”

“Bizarre,” Deborah murmured, not for the first time associating that word with Calvin McKenna.

John went on. “They took pictures of the footprints, but they haven’t finished analyzing them. Could be he went into the woods to take shelter from the rain. Could be he went in to relieve himself. People at school never knew he was a runner. Looks like he kept a lot to himself.”

John didn’t know the half of it, Deborah thought, but to say it would lead to more questions, and to answer them would be a betrayal of Tom.

“I tried to call Hal,” John added, “but he’s off playing racquetball.” He squinted at the bakery. “Grace inside? Oh, there she is.” He grunted. “No. She’s off again. Guess she didn’t want to talk to me.”