Fan-Fiction

Pieces of a Whole

written by Betsy J. Bennett

CHAPTER 2

He didn’t sleep. Exhaustion poured through him, made him ache, made him dull, but sleep would not come. So this is what freedom feels like. He wondered if he should go out, crawl under the lilac bush, hide. He’d gotten some of his best sleep over the past few years, outside, evading the prying eyes, the strangers, the police.

Instead of sleeping, he paced, puffing one cigarette after another in an endless routine that filled hours. The ashtray was full. He supposed he should empty it, start afresh. Donna would worry if she discovered he was up all night. His sister wanted him happy, didn’t realized how impossible that was at the moment. Happiness was something he no longer understood.

As he smoked, he would pull aside the curtains to look out into the night-quiet street. It was a habit he hadn’t broken himself of, yet. There was always the possibility of danger, of police cars appearing, ready to take him back to jail, back to face the verdict he had never accepted. Although now, freed, perhaps he lied to himself. It was easier to fear his planned execution than it was to accept that now exoneration meant he could do anything, go anywhere without worry.

He had been happy once, he supposed. Once, when he had finished his internship, when his new wife and he were trying for a baby to make their family complete. That was a long time ago. He had been in practice with his father, putting in long hours, loving every minute of his chosen profession, and honestly perhaps he ignored Helen. Perhaps he took her for granted.

No perhaps about it.

Then, when they lost the baby, his grief brought him deeper into his practice, putting in even longer hours with children belonging to other parents, children he could hold, and somehow they eased the hole in his heart. Helen had no such balm. He had ignored her then, not recognizing her deepening post-partum depression in the face of his own shattered loss. He thought adoption would make it better. That only brought a deeper rift between them. She wanted a baby of her own, not some discarded child of another woman. It wasn’t to be. Before they could resolve the problems between them, she had been murdered.

He never had time to grieve her loss. He was arrested two days after finding her body. No one believed his story of the one-armed man. They searched. He supposed the police did their due diligence, even if he thought they should have looked harder. But why should they, when the lawmen of Stafford, Indiana were convinced they had their man?

His medical practice was gone, as was his house, all the furnishings Helen had delighted in. All gone. Donna, bless her, had stored his car, not wanting to sell it. Her husband brought it back, and he and the boys had spent the afternoon washing it, paste waxing it, vacuuming it. A normal activity for a Saturday that for Richard Kimble was anything but normal. Now it sat outside on the driveway. She said it was registered and insured in her name, but he could change it to his anytime. A car. He couldn’t believe the luxury of owning a car, something he had always taken for granted. He could go anywhere, anytime, a free man. It hadn’t sunk in yet.

Time moved slower at night, seemed to take forever. Two o’clock. Three o’clock. Four. He grabbed his keys. He had money. Although most of the funds from the sale of his house had been used on lawyers and appeals, he had what amounted to a fortune from the sale of his father’s practice and his father’s estate. Donna and Ray, his brother, had protected his interest, anticipating the time when he would be freed. Money wasn’t the problem. He felt he was going insane. It would take time before he could accept freedom and exoneration.

He found the cemetery easily enough. It was where his mother had been buried. And now his father. Two years ago, he had been unable to attend his father’s funeral. Donna confirmed his suspicions: there were probably fifty plain-clothes policemen staking out the funeral on the off chance that the fugitive Richard Kimble showed up. Even Gerard had been there, but then Gerard had been obsessed, seeking only Richard’s capture.

Kimble now had mixed feelings about the police lieutenant. Gerard blamed himself for the escape, probably blamed himself for the train wreck as well. Gerard had only wanted him recaptured, except there were times when the lawman could have shot him and didn’t, could have accused him of kidnapping and didn’t, and this last time, when of all unexpected emotions, Kimble met compassion.

After the train wreck, as he escaped into the woodlands, wearing one handcuff, Richard had thanked God. He hadn’t had much opportunity to thank God since then. He had his life, but he had been living in hell.

Often, crushed in the back of a moving produce truck or with his thumb out, hitching a ride at three in the morning, or taking another meaningless, menial job, Richard thought his life might be easier if he ended it, let the police take him. Then he would be recognized by a policemen or someone simply reading the news, and he would run, and run, and run, desperate to clear his name. He had wanted to live so desperately then. What shocked him was he wasn’t so interested in living now.

Dawn was just painting the eastern sky pink when he found his mother’s headstone. He laid flowers, found at an all-night grocery, on his mother’s grave. That they were overpriced and past peak bothered him, but he refused to show up empty handed. Richard knelt, closed his eyes, tried to find peace.

“Mom, I suppose you heard. I’m free. After all this time, I’m free.” She had been long dead before Helen’s murder and the trial, but his childhood had been ideal and his memories of his mother good.

The night was absolutely silent. A few of the more defiant stars were still visible, not willing to cede to encroaching daylight. The slight breeze, coming in from the west brought cold air, but he was used to it. He turned from his mother’s headstone to the one beside it. His father had believed in him, in his innocence, had handed him money the one time he made it back to Stafford, which had helped considerably. He couldn’t always find a job and would rather go hungry than steal food. He wanted no additional charges when he was finally caught, for as much as he deluded himself, Richard Kimble knew he would be caught eventually.

The morning was cold, the dew thick. Shadows hid most of the cemetery, giving the area an eerie, supernatural feel. He would have come later, waited until sunrise but the vultures in the form of the media would be camped out on the Taft’s lawn again, and he didn’t want to be followed. He just needed half an hour of peace to come to terms with his past, if either were possible: peace or coming to terms. There was a time Richard believed in both. Not any longer.

Above him, and hidden in trees, song birds vocalized the morning. In this place of death, life was asserting itself. Reds joined the orange and yellow of the sunrise. The black sky was slowly giving rise to the crystal blue of day. It would be a beautiful, cloudless day in Indiana.

He knew beauty. He had seen it countless times in the faces of mothers holding pink cheeked, sleeping infants, sated with breast milk while he spoke of immunizations and well baby check-ups. He had found it in boys playing baseball in the rain, and young girls with pigtails pushing their dolls in strollers. As a doctor, he found beauty as an otherwise strong man cried while he held a child dying of heart failure or leukemia. He had seen it too, countless times in the arthritic hands of strangers who had offered him cold water and a sandwich as he made his way from the bus stop to another ambiguous town, not asking questions when clearly it was obvious he was on the run from the law. Those people had understood the kindness of sharing what little they had and the grace of letting him keep his own secrets.

The tombstone under his fingers felt lifeless, so he traced the name carved deep into marble: Dr. John Kimble. His fingers were no longer the soft hands of a physician, now they were the course, calloused hands of a day laborer. But he was proud of them. He had survived. Against all odds he had survived life on the run. What remained to be seen was would he survive as a free man?

“Dad, it’s over. They let me go. I’m free. I want you to know how grateful I am for your support, your belief.”

John Kimble had been a great man, a compassionate, professional doctor. Richard had been honored to join his practice, to talk over difficult cases late into the night. Undoubtedly he learned more from his father than he ever had in medical school or his residency. Generations of children had survived chicken pox and broken arms from bicycle falls and football injuries under his watchful eyes. The children in Stafford had thrived under the knowledgeable eyes of the Doctors Kimble.

Again running seemed like an option, so he turned around, faced the headstone. Richard Kimble was an intelligent man, a man who had been trained to maintain life, and pronounce death, anything after that he had no concept of. But as he spoke, he understood he was alone, that his words were not heading to the heavens, and that he verbalized only for his own edification.

“Dad, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” He wanted to be a doctor, go back to his previous life, but too much had changed. He was not the Richard Kimble of six years ago. “I really could use your advice.”

And he knew as he said that, as he knelt in the cold morning grass, what his father’s advice would be. “Take your time. Get your feet under you. You’re a doctor. Probably the best I’ve ever seen. You need to put all this ugliness behind you and learn to be happy.”

That last would probably be the hardest. He had no idea how to be happy any longer. He had been too busy staying alive to seek happiness. Oh, he had found traces of it over the years, in a woman’s arms, or teaching horseback riding, or performing an emergency C-section to save a woman and child as police closed in around him in the midst of a raging forest fire. Then before he could get comfortable, see if he could feel happiness again, the tides would turn and Richard would have to run, panting and terrified, seeking shadows and strangers and any form of transportation going out of town.

“Dad.” Words were coming hard, he swallowed, tried to think of what to say. He cleared his throat, dug his hands into his jacket pockets before taking them out again, needing the affirmation of touching the headstone. “I wanted to be there, when you were dying. You have to know that. Donna told me you called out for me. I’m sorry. You know I would have if I could.”

At least his father hadn’t been alone. There had been a couple of nights, after a gunshot wound to his shoulder, when infection started, and he had no place to hide, no job to take, no food, when he hid in an abandoned barn, wrapping himself in molding hay to keep warm, praying the infection wouldn’t go systemic. Then, as he fought fever and hallucinations, he thought he spoke to his father, that he had somehow been there, in the hospital room as John Kimble lost his fight. In the hospital room, amid the beeping monitors and the slowly dripping IV, he had also seen Roy and Donna, her husband and boys, and oddly enough, his long dead mother.

Kimble finger combed his hair, sought the sunlight, as if clarity could be found there. Fever dreams. As a doctor he understood them. What he hadn’t expected was that he would find comfort in them. Then, through luck more than anything else, when the morning came, the fever broke, slowly the wound started healing, and he was able to move on, find food, and another town, another chance. There had been fever dreams since then, but they merged into nightmares, an obsessed man hunting him, a murder charge that had to be answered. He hated to sleep, for since then, there had been no comfort to find.

It was getting late. All signs of the sunrise had vanished, and the sun was making progress. Nine, he thought, maybe. Almost nine. As a man on the run, generally the only timepiece he had was the sun. He didn’t want to be here if anyone else came to pay respects to their loved ones. But then, he didn’t want to be here at all, but he had one more stop.

After relentless questioning, Donna had told him where Helen was buried, and with tears in her eyes had begged him not to go. “She’s not there, Dick,” Donna had insisted. “Remember her as she was.” There was no joy in that, he had no need to tell his sister. The last time he had seen Helen she had been laying on their living room carpet, her head bashed in. Within forty-eight hours of uninterrupted questioning, he was arrested for murder, and trapped in a prison cell, facing a long trial and after what was understood to be his inevitable execution.  He had had no time to grieve, no time to get the image out of his mind and put Helen Kimble to rest.

Helen had been a gentle woman and kind, would have made a fabulous mother if the fates had been kinder to them. She glowed during pregnancy, had cherished morning sickness for her obstetrician told her morning sickness generally meant a healthy baby. They had laughed picking out the crib, the dresser, the small mobile that they hoped would help a new baby have happy dreams, then hand in hand they had run home and made love all afternoon, one of the few times he had taken to be with her when he could have been working.

She went back to work as a nurse almost immediately after the still-birth, needing to keep busy, although she hadn’t worked at all during their marriage. She had kept her nursing license current, for it gave her pride, but she was the wife of a doctor, and that gave her bragging privileges at the country club. The Kimbles were financially comfortable. She had no need to work. But the house was empty during the day, especially the room they had painted together, a pale blue, for she wanted a son, and he, who had no preference, realized should fate deliver a daughter into their arms, that they could decorate the room with pink curtains and sheets fit for the princess they intended to spoil every minute of her life.

Fate was not kind, had not been kind for the past six years.

Following Donna’s directions, Richard found the gravesite, and felt a knife to his heart. She had been right to warn him.

HELEN WAVERLY

BELOVED DAUGHTER AND SISTER

INNOCENT VICTIM OF MURDER

 

Then the dates of her birth and death. “Helen Kimble,” he growled deep in his throat, “beloved wife.” And the ‘innocent’ was a direct shot at him. For back then, and the six years that followed, he had proclaimed his innocence in her murder, a statement that his in-laws never accepted.

He dropped the flowers, turned around, almost started running out of reflex as he caught movement out of the corner of his eyes. He didn’t like when people snuck up on him. Often it was a police officer with a gun, a vigilante seeing a human trophy.

“Donna. What are you doing here?”

She stepped forward, timidly, touched him gently on the shoulder, hoping he would lose that hunted animal expression he wore so visibly. “I wanted to explain.”

He thrust a hand toward the headstone, fingers clenched in a tight fist. “You think I need an explanation for this?”

“They were grieving too,” Donna insisted.

“The hell they were. This wasn’t indicative of grief. This was a direct shot at me.”

“Call them. Let them know you’re free.”

“No. I’ll not waste the breath. I stopped by to see them a few years back. They were in financial trouble. I knew Helen had a rainy-day fund in her own name. I offered it to them.”

“When you could have used the money?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I wanted to help.” It wouldn’t have done him any good. It’s not as if he could have walked into the downtown bank and claimed the money for himself.

Although she never discovered most of what happened to him during the four years he stayed a fugitive, Donna knew her brother. It didn’t surprise her that while on the run for years without a penny to his name, he would endanger himself in order to offer money that without a doubt he needed more, in order to see to the Waverly’s comfort. Richard had compassion for everyone he met.

“I’m sorry.”

With her statement, anger started draining from him. “This is not your fault. You have nothing to apologize for. They wanted to accuse. For years I gave them a perfect target. I even wondered once or twice if Helen married me as quickly as she did just to get away from that house.”

She smiled, caught his eyes so he would know she teased. “We always thought she was in a family way, that’s why people get married so quickly.”

“God, I wish that that were so, but no, we came pretty close, obviously, but I never touched her before we were married. And Donna, the Waverlys are not all bad. Helen’s sister Terry believed in me. That meant a lot at the time. Her mom was all but bedridden with her hatred of me, but Terry offered support.”

Donna looked around, studying the cloudless blue sky, the other tombstones, the grass at their feet. She shifted, as uncomfortable as he. They had fought as children, it was obligatory for brothers and sisters, but they had always been close, especially since Helen’s murder.

“I’m sorry, about the headstone. I feel responsible.”

“I’ll never blame you for this. This isn’t your type of humor.”

“Whatever you think, they never saw it as funny. They were grieving.”

“Of course they were. They had a doctor in the family and all of a sudden he turned out to be a snake in the grass. And they lost their bait to catch another one. Still to this day I don’t think they expect Terry to marry as well.”

Donna shifted her pocketbook from arm to arm, moved her feet in the dew-thick grass. She looked up, blinked, but met his eyes directly. He could see her pain, deeply etched into her face, knew that he had done that, and there was no way he could erase it. He wished he could offer her comfort, but in this macabre place, he had none for himself, none to offer her.

She swiped at her eyes, smearing mascara. “They came to us, said they wanted to be in charge of the headstone. We were going to trial soon. Picking the headstone, planning the funeral seemed like one more thing on top of everything else. We were glad for them to take it off our hands. Leonard and Dad and I had no idea what they were planning.”

Kimble dug his hands into his pockets, wished for a cigarette but he hadn’t shoved a pack in his slacks before he took off that morning. Donna rarely smoked and would surely tell him he smoked too much. His hands shook with the need for nicotine for the comfort of holding a cigarette. What kind of a doctor was he?

“Almost ten years of marriage, and Helen doesn’t even get her last name on the stone.” She had loved her new surname Kimble. For months, who was he kidding himself, for years, he would find slips of paper where she had practiced signing her name, Helen Kimble, and in every book either of them owned. It was not possessive, at least not possessive of things, rather her of him. And he had been so in love with her at the time that it made him proud to see it.

“We can amend it,” Donna insisted. As a child, she had been a peacemaker too.

“No. Let them have their petty victory. Whatever they think, whatever was written in the papers, we had a good marriage. A loving marriage.” He crumpled down on the soft grass against the headstone, his body going boneless, his breath coming in deep pants. He clamped his eyes shut, trying to see the past, the real past or the one he was rewriting, he had no idea.

“Still, I wasn’t sure I loved her at the end. God, wouldn’t the prosecution love to get a hold of that confession.”

Donna knelt beside him, her hands cupping his face, forcing him to look at her. “Dick, don’t say that. No one was a more devoted husband than you.”

He pulled deep gasps into his lungs, felt he was suffocating. He kept his eyes closed, they were unreliable anyway, facing a tombstone of a vibrant woman who should have had additional decades of life to celebrate. “No, you’re wrong. I knew she was hurting after we lost the baby. It’s harder on a woman. She nurtured that child in her womb, felt her hormones change, her body adapt. Night and day she felt him kick.” He had assured her that too was the sign of a healthy pregnancy.

They had been so happy then, enjoying the intimacy of noting the tenderness of her breasts as her pregnancy advanced, the excitement of working out what they would name this child of their love. With laughter over coffee and blueberry muffins, they talked of college prospects, of playing baseball in the back yard, of fielding their own team. They planned on getting a dog when their child was old enough, a scrappy thing from the pound so the child could learn responsibility of feeding it, of taking it for walks. They debated endlessly whether to let this fictional dog sleep on the child’s bed. Richard was all for it, Helen feared germs and fleas and mud on the sheets.

Innocent times. Innocent worries. At least all his memories hadn’t faded into the past. Too many times on the run he had tried to remember Helen, her laugh, what she liked to eat, how she would tilt her head and look at him like he’d lost all his brain cells before jumping up, wrapping her arms around him, and chasing him to the bedroom where their intimacy would revive them.

“I was hurting, too. I didn’t have the words to offer her. If she had been a stranger, one of the mothers of my patients, I would have been sympathetic, would have offered at least a kind word, if not some kind of therapy. But my own wife, all I could do was work longer, ignore her.”

“Richard, no!”

“I would have been kinder to her if she had been a patient. Don’t you think that’s a bitter pill to swallow? Don’t you realize it’s been haunting me every night since the murder?”

“I don’t believe it. Not for a second. You’re starting to believe the things the press wrote about you, when of every person on this planet, you’re the one who knows the truth. I watched you with Helen. I saw how devastated you were in the hospital, holding her, loving her.”

“Before things got ugly.”

“Yes, Dick, if you want it that way, before things got ugly, and if they did get ugly you have to place the blame firmly where it belongs: Fred Johnson. He’s the one who brought ugliness into our lives.”

Donna put her arms around his neck, dropped her face against his white shirt. “The whole family was devastated when you lost your son, lost the chance for any more.”

He was a man who was always prepared with a handkerchief even when on the run. He handed it to her, waited while she wiped her eyes. “I never got to hold him. Never got to name him. I wanted a baby. We wanted a baby.”

“I know. We all wanted a baby.”

He had been sitting with his legs outstretched, now he brought his knees up, as if preparing to get to his feet, to escape, as he had so many times before. “One thing you don’t realize, these past four years when I was running, I was running from myself as much as I was from Lt. Gerard and the death penalty. I didn’t like to remember how I treated her after the fetus died. That’s guilt I’ll carry with me the rest of my life.”

She hit him, one good solid thunk against his upper arm. Someone had to pound some sense into him. “Richard, you’re talking like Helen committed suicide. She didn’t. Helen was going through a rough patch, but she would have survived it. Your marriage would have survived it.”

He shook his head, denying her compassion or his own nightmares, he had no idea. He had no idea what his life would have been like had Fred Johnson never entered it. Would he and Helen have survived the death of their hopes for a family? Would they have found other means to heal the rift between them? He had no idea. Never once had they spoken of divorce. That was a fact both the defense and the prosecution had brought up, with far differing conclusions.

He touched a leaf, rubbed it gently between his fingers. “You planted geraniums.”

“Helen always loved geraniums.”

“She did it for me.”

“I didn’t know that. You never were partial to them when we were growing up.”

“Long story, not important now. But thank you. That’s important to me. They’re important, because they remind me of happier times.”

“We both need to take that advice, Richard. We need to concentrate on happy times, not only in the past, but what we can make in the future.”

A cardinal flew by, a bright flash of red that Helen always called a living Christmas ornament. Life passing by. The bright showy males, the duller, but equally proud females would come to the birdfeeders in the winter months and she was always happy to see them. “Donna, these past years, they had to be hard on you too.”

She strangled the damp handkerchief she still held. “You’re alive, Dick. You’re free. That’s all I ever wanted.”

“And the boys?”

Her smile, quick and joyous, indicated a mother’s pride. “They are good. You can see that for yourself. They are self-assured, active young men. They’re doing well at school and on the soccer field there’s no stopping them.”

“No, the notoriety. Did it affect them? I’m sorry, all those years, I never thought to ask.”

She settled herself on the grass beside him, almost as if there should be a picnic basket, a flask of iced tea between them. “They were teased quite a lot at first, but they learned to stand up to the bullying. I think it made them better people. They weren’t victims. I don’t ever want you thinking of them as victims. They love you, Dick. They always have and it pleased me that they never doubted your innocence.”

He wished he could catch sight the cardinal again, wished he could see life, any life in this three acre testament that all life ends. But the bird was long vanished. He closed his eyes, pulled air into his lungs slowly, then exhaled, a calming technique that didn’t work, although he had not given up on it just yet.

“They’re good kids. You’re doing a great job with them. I wish Helen could have gotten to know them better. I know Helen kept her distance from you. I hoped seeing healthy kids might have eased some of her pain. It helped me. I know she couldn’t look at them without remembering our loss.”

Donna picked up the flowers he had dropped, nervously picked at them. “I wish I could have helped her more. Bringing over tuna casseroles was all I could think to do. It wasn’t much.”

“Don’t blame yourself. I wasn’t there to give her the support she needed. I thought going back to work would help her. And when she was working, she wasn’t drinking. She never would have jeopardized her patients that way.”

“Take time you need to grieve, Dick. I know with the trial, you didn’t get the chance.”

“Yes. There’s so many things I need to grieve. I don’t know if I have it in me. To grieve eventually you have to accept what happened. I miss Helen. I do. There were times when I was hiding in some dark little hole in hell all I wanted was to see her smile one more time. To beg her forgiveness. I wonder if I should have given her a puppy. I know it sounds trite, but she was so desperate to have something to love and so frightened of loving another woman’s child. I don’t know if you know this, but she had an aunt who took in a foster child, went through all the paperwork and the long months of agony of adoption, only to have the birth-mother change her mind at the last minute. Helen watched the pain that caused. It would literally be losing a second baby if it happened to her.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“That’s why she was so frightened. God, Donna, I miss her. I wanted to go to her funeral, but even if I had been able to go, it would have been a circus. Already the press wanted my head on a platter. I don’t know why. Other women get murdered, other murderers sentenced, and it’s just life as usual. I became the poster boy for depravity.”

“Don’t think of that any more. I want you only looking ahead, to what the future holds.”

He took her hand, prepared to get to his feet. “Let’s get out of here. This place is morbid.”

She hesitated, wouldn’t stand. “Dick, before we go, there is one other thing. I don’t want to hurt you, but I’d rather you hear it from me, than from a stranger.”

“What?” his question was filled with dread, and she watched as his body tensed, as he prepared to run. Before the murder, he had been a competent man who faced difficulties head-on without flinching. Now she silently grieved for the pain he exhibited, the pain she would have to add to.

“We bought this plot too,” she said, patting her hand on the grass beside Helen’s grave.

“For?” he asked without thinking, then she knew the exact second he recognized the significance. “Mine.”

“By the time they released Helen’s body to us, the trial was over. We still had the appeals to go, but it only made sense. The prison wrote to us. Said when we’d be able to collect your…your body.” She was crying openly now, her cheeks wet. She used his handkerchief, wished she too could run from everything that had happened over the past six years.

“Logical.”

“We didn’t want to. You have to understand that. But your lawyer told us to be realistic.”

“His ideas of realistic and mine are miles apart.”

She stood, couldn’t sit there a second longer and waited while Richard got to his feet as well. “We don’t have to use this. Ever. I want you to know that. If you move away and find someone else to love and if you finally die eighty years from now surrounded by sixty great-grand children, get buried there.”

“Sixty,” he said, “egads,” with just the right inflection that she wrapped her arms around him in love and her tears stopped.

Link to Chapter 3