XXIII
Fencing in the Dark
My long trek north to Morrell’s took me through the disturbing vistas of the western suburbs: no center, no landmarks, just endless sameness. Sometimes row on row of ranch houses, sometimes of more-elaborate, more-affluent tracts, but all punctuated with malls showing identical megastores. The third time I passed Bed Bath & Beyond and Barnes & Noble I thought I was driving in circles.
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home,” I sang, as I sat in a stationary lane at one of the everlasting tollbooths on the rim road around the city. I was motherless, after all, and forty miles from Morrell’s home.
I flung my change into the box and scoffed at myself for melodramatic self-pity. Real grief lay in Rhonda Fepple’s story: the childless mother. It’s so out of the order of nature, and it exposes you as so fundamentally powerless, to have a child die before you: you never really recover from it.
Howie Fepple’s mother didn’t think her son had committed suicide. No mother would want to believe that of her child, but in Fepple’s case it was because he was excited—he finally understood how Rick Hoffman had made enough money out of his book to drive a Mercedes—and he was going to get one for Rhonda.
I pulled out my phone to call Nick Vishnikov, the chief deputy medical examiner, but the traffic suddenly cleared; the SUV’s around me quickly accelerated to eighty or ninety. The call could wait until it didn’t put my life in danger to make it.
The dogs panted gently over my shoulder, reminding me that it had been some hours since their last run. When I finally reached the Dempster exit I pulled off at a forest preserve to let them out. It was dark now, the park officially closed, with a piece of chain blocking me from going farther than a few yards off the main road.
While Mitch and Peppy excitedly set off after rabbits I stood at the chain with my cell phone, calling first Morrell to tell him we were only eight miles away, then trying Lotty again. She had left the clinic, her receptionist, Mrs. Coltrain, told me.
“How did she seem?”
“Dr. Herschel is working too hard: she needs to take some time off for herself.” Mrs. Coltrain has known me for years, but she won’t gossip about Lotty with anyone, not even to agree with Max when he mocks her imperial manner.
I tapped the phone thoughtfully. If I was going to have a heart-to-heart with Lotty I should do it sitting down at home, but this was Morrell’s last night in Chicago. The dogs were crashing around somewhere near me. I called to them, to remind them that I was here and in charge of the pack. When they’d run up, sniffed my hands, and torn off again, I reached Lotty at home.
She cut short my attempt to express concern at her collapse yesterday. “I’d rather not discuss it, Victoria. I’m embarrassed that I created such a disturbance in the middle of Max’s party and don’t want to be reminded of it.”
“Maybe, oh physician, you should consult a doctor yourself. Make sure you’re okay, that you didn’t hurt yourself when you fainted.”
Her voice took on a sharper edge. “I’m perfectly fine, thanks very much.”
I stared into the dark underbrush, as if seeing it would enable me to penetrate Lotty’s mind. “I know you weren’t in the room with Radbuka last night when he was going on about his past, but did Max tell you Radbuka found a posting on a bulletin board from someone wanting information about Sofie Radbuka? I went on the Web today and found the site. Radbuka is convinced she must have been his mother or his sister; at least, he wrote a long message to that effect. Lotty, who was she?”
“You found Sofie Radbuka on the Web? That’s impossible!”
“I found someone who wanted information about her, saying that she lived in England during the forties,” I repeated patiently.
“Max didn’t think fit to tell me that,” she snapped. “Thank you very much.”
She hung up, leaving me uncomfortably alone in the dark woods. A sense of being both forlorn and ridiculous made me call the dogs back to me again. I could hear them thrashing around, but they wouldn’t come. I had kept them penned up all day—they weren’t going to reward me by being good dogs now.
Before going to the car for a flashlight so I could track them, I made one last call—to Nick Vishnikov at the morgue. After all, the place never closes. When I dialed the number—which I know by heart—I got the one thin piece of luck the Fates were allowing me today: Vishnikov, who pretty much chooses his hours, was still there.
“Vic. How’s Morrell? He in Kabul yet?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Nick—there’s a guy with a head wound who came in this morning. The police are calling it suicide.”
“But you murdered him and you want to confess.” Autopsies make him ferociously cheerful.