Pieces of a Whole

by: Betsy J. Bennett

CHAPTER 14

It surprised Olivia that since word got out there were two doctors working in the clinic and there was a chance of seeing one of them that there were more patients they saw on a daily basis, not fewer. She expected waiting times to be less, but people who had been putting off coming in were making the effort before their symptoms got severe. The waiting room was already packed to overflowing when she got in, with three box fans doing nothing but moving hot air around. It was impossible to breathe. She hadn’t seen Richard’s car when she arrived, and would have asked Dora Ann but the receptionist had patients stacked five deep in front of her desk, and was already on the phone, as usual doing nineteen or twenty things at the same time. Olivia went back, started seeing patients, and it was hours later before she had a thirty second break to ask about Richard.

“Where is he?”

Instead of answering, the nurse asked a question of her own. “What did you do last night with Dr. Kimble?” Maggi asked.

“Nothing. You were there. He left not long after. We danced. Spoke.” And a kiss. Her dreams at least had been happy, filled with promise. And she was desperate to kiss him again. She doubted she’d ever get enough of his kisses.

“You scared him off. He called, said he won’t be in for two or three weeks.” She spoke the last few words as if they were a euphemism for never coming back.

“What? I thought he was happy here. Did he say anything else?”

Maggi hesitated. She loved this woman like a mother, would do anything not to hurt her. “He said he took up running. Wanted to thank you for the idea.”

 

Kimble signed in with minutes to spare. Registration came not only with a packet describing the next two weeks but a reading list that would do any med school proud. There wouldn’t be much time for socializing, but being on the campus, holding his weight in anatomy and pharmacology texts, he felt good. He was doing what he needed to do, and it felt familiar. Med school he could handle.

Although he didn’t have a minute to spare, in the minutes before dinner he took the time to call Donna, let her know he was working on reinstating his medical license, knowing she’d be happy. There were so few times in the past he could make his sister happy. He asked about the boys, and the advancing pregnancy, luxuriating in the pleasures of family without worrying someone might be listening in, seeking his location, trying to find him.

After he hung up, he checked the lines in the cafeteria, realized he could spend time waiting or he could take a few minutes for one additional call. Although he hadn’t used it all that frequently, he had the phone number memorized.

“Stafford Police Department.”

For a second there was a twinge, the terror those words elicited, before he tapped them down, and tried to get control of his raging pulse. “Lieutenant Phillip Gerard, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Richard Kimble.”

“Where are you calling from, Mr. Kimble?”

“Is that relevant?”

“Just answer the question.”

“Detroit Michigan.” Technically it was Ann Arbor, but no sense making it easy for the lieutenant.

“I’ll put you through.”

“Dr. Kimble, what can I do for you?”

“Lieutenant Gerard, why the third degree to get through to you?”

He could hear Gerard removing his glasses, knew he was rubbing his eyes. Gerard knew every little detail about him, and to a lesser regard, the converse was true. He knew Gerard. “We get a couple dozen Richard Kimble calls a day, all people who somehow blame me for what happened to you.”

“I have never blamed you. The court system failed.”

“Apparently you are alone in that analysis. Most callers feel that since I was obsessed with your capture I was responsible for keeping your name in the news and thereby making it so that you could not have a moment’s peace. They take it further that if I had been doing my job properly I would have found the one-armed man long before the trial started.”

“That’s a switch. From what I experienced everyone was on your side, wanting to see me, to use their terminology, “fried.” Now total strangers are embracing my exoneration?”

“They all mention Decker’s column.”

“Ahh. He’s got a following.”

“And blame me for the hell you went through.”

“I never once blamed you, especially not in the one interview I gave Decker. And when I spoke at the courthouse, I said that you were instrumental in finding Fred Johnson and my exoneration.”

“It is the main reason I went to see you in Detroit. I needed to see for myself how you were fairing, and if I should take any of the blame for your symptoms.”

“Lieutenant, I understand you were just doing your job. I can’t control my nightmares, but I don’t blame you for them.”

“So what can I do for you, Doctor?”

“I’ve thought of little else since you mentioned to me your belief Helen was not a random victim, but deliberately murdered. I don’t want to believe it, although why her being targeted deliberately is worse than being a random victim, I have no idea. I remembered something Helen said, the day before–.”

“Yes? I’m listening.”

“It was a good day, we weren’t fighting. I had come home early for dinner. She’d been at working, was still in her uniform. I was planning on going back to the hospital later that night. I had a patient fighting leukemia and I wanted to be with the parents when they first spoke with the oncologist.”

“I remember the timeline.”

“Helen said she overheard someone speaking to a patient. She didn’t tell me which patient or if she did, I’ve long forgotten. She said something along the lines of “This guy thinks he’s so almighty important because he’s a big shot, and he says the law will never touch him, that his word is law.” Then the visitor mentioned any number of people, workmen I think is the word she repeated, who were missing and that he, the patient, better not speak of it. The reason she mentioned it to me was the patient had apparently been a victim of a mugging gone wrong, or some sort of random violence. He died on her shift. She didn’t like people to die.

“I don’t have any names, but it would have looked like a suspicious death. I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but it’s all I have been able to come up with.”

“This might be what we want. I’ll look into it.”

After he hung up, Richard Kimble took his quixotic emotions and a stack of medical journal articles from the required reading list, and went into dinner.

 

Although there were classes the first week, mostly there were exams, to see what he and the other doctors knew, where they needed to fill in gaps from their education. The other students seeking medical certification were all foreigners, men from India or Pakistan or a dozen other countries, seeking the better life in the United States. He was probably one of the only native English speakers.

Oddly, there was comfort here, in the tests, in the long hours, in the labs he was forced to take. This was familiar. Med school hadn’t been fun, but he had survived it, and he would survive this, with glowing results. He felt confident that he hadn’t forgotten nearly as much as he had feared. The teachers said nothing, driving him, and the others to exhaustion. Kimble loved it.

He finished the written exams, the practical exams, the long hours of interviews by medical professionals testing not only his knowledge but his dedication. And this was only the end of the first week. He answered their questions honestly, even when they asked about the murder, as if somehow they could trap him into confessing something that was since resolved.

Many of the questions he had answered “I don’t know,” when asked about a treatment, and he tried to explain that they weren’t supplying him enough information. Were there allergies to the anesthetic; could there be drug interactions with other treatments the patient was taking? Were other tests done that he could rule out other potential diagnosis? He would not simply say he would write a prescription and then see the next patient, would not accept what sounded right, when the symptoms presented could have been any of a dozen other things. He wanted, demanded, more information than they were willing to give him.

Although Kimble worked the graveyard shift under supervision at the local hospital emergency room, he had the weekend off, before he was due back in class for the second half.

He wanted to go see Olivia, share with her all that had happened over the past days, but not until he had a triumph…or a failure. He might have called Donna, but soccer camps were in full swing, and he doubted she would have time for anything but stolen moments, and if she had the time, he’d rather she’d sit with her feet up.

But there was something else he needed to do.

He took four hours sleep in his dorm room before he started driving, carefully checking his rear view mirror for police presence as he traveled deeper into Indiana.

The house was familiar. In happier times he had dined here. It was Helen’s family home, where she lived while they were dating, where they would come for long weekends anytime he could get away at work so she could see her parents. Helen wasn’t close to them, but she had been a dutiful daughter and came when her mother needed her. Her mother had needed her frequently.

He stood in the open, on a sunlit day and knocked on the door. The last time he had been here, he had been hunted, had almost been caught. He had snuck in the back door, and out, at dark.

When the door opened, he looked up at Helen’s father, a man who had not aged well since his oldest daughter’s murder. “Ed.”

“Richard. What are you doing here?”

There had been a flash of fear in his eyes. While Ed had never come out against Richard in the same way Helen’s mother had, he had not been comfortable harboring a fugitive, the single time Kimble had come.

“I know it’s an imposition, but can I take a look at Helen’s books and papers again?”

“You’re not wanted by the police any more.”

“That’s right. They killed the man who killed Helen and I’m free.”

“And you’re after her papers?”

“If you still have them.”

“We do. Why? What do you think you’ll find?”

“I’m not sure. When I was here last, there was something that struck me as odd. I’d forgotten it. I had no time for mysteries back then, but lately it’s been bothering me. I want to see if I can find it again.”

“About the murder?”

“Indirectly, yes.”

“Why bother? It’s over, isn’t it?”

He wasn’t sure it would ever be over. “I’ve some questions, things that haven’t settled. Would you mind? It won’t take long, and I won’t stay here. I know it makes Edith uncomfortable.”

“I suppose we owe you, because you found the savings account that helped save my business.”

“I am not after your gratitude. It was Helen’s money, and I know if she had lived, she would have wanted you to have it.”

Ed opened the door wider, let Richard step inside. He pointed up the stairs, to the empty room where years before Richard Kimble and his wife had celebrated their marriage while she visited her parents and they slept across the hall.

Nothing had been changed. He wondered if Edith had even been in this room since the trial, a room that had to remind her of him.

Ed fussed for a few seconds, then handed Richard a box where he kept the papers. He was back a few minutes later with the books that Helen kept. The older man shuffled his feet, looked at his shoes. “You know why she wrote in books?”

“No. Only that she always did. She left my medical books alone, but any novel we’d buy she’d write random thoughts.”

Ed Waverly scratched at the beard he had coming in, a defeatist gesture. “Edith wouldn’t let her write on clean paper, said it was too dear. Can you imagine, forbidding your child from writing?” The statement required no answer and Kimble was grateful.

“I think about that a lot. I should have bought her a diary when she was a child. It would have made her so happy. I was always at work, and honestly I can say while she was growing up I hardly noticed her. When I came home I was tired, only wanted to eat dinner and relax. I’ve had some time to think back on it. I wasn’t much of a father to her. Still I know Helen liked recording her memories, her dreams, traces of short stories that she never intended to write.”

“When we were married, it made me happy to find a scrap of paper she’d written her thoughts on, or open a book and see what she was thinking. She never minded. I think she wanted me to have that insight into her life.” There had been good times in his marriage, tender times. Often her scribbling had been on how much she loved him. He would always love her, always grieve, but maybe he could heal too, move on.

Kimble continued going through the papers as Ed sat on the bed beside him.

“She had so many thoughts she was so afraid she would forget them.”

Richard shook his head. “Her memory was good. She wasn’t likely to forget anything.”

He had thought once perhaps growing up she hadn’t been noticed, a ghost child the parents ignored, and that she wanted to preserve traces of her life in books, to prove she still existed. Ed had confessed the truth as Helen saw it. Her father wanted nothing to do with her. And her mother had been sickly whether truthfully or a hypochondriac, he hadn’t known, had succeeded over the years they had been married not to ask his mother-in-law about her health. Edith liked spending long hours in bed with a cold compress, with memories of perhaps a more glorious time when she had her youth and wasn’t tied down with diapers and dishes. She hadn’t had time for two daughters desperate for her attention. Edith hadn’t noticed Helen until she married, hadn’t loved Helen until she was murdered and it was impossible to correct whatever mistakes had been made. It was Richard Kimble’s belief her grief at Helen’s death was far out of proportion to the attention she had given the child growing up.

And he wondered too if he were guilty of the same sin, that of taking Helen into his life and ignoring her. He had his practice, his patients, his career that he might have loved more than anything else. There was enough guilt to go around.

“My mom and Edith’s mother both had dementia at the end of their lives. I suppose a lot of old people do. She, Helen, worried she’d get it. Why she was worried when she was in her teens and twenties, I have no idea. I wondered if that was one of the reasons that sent her into nursing. She was never interested in old people, but she wanted to be able to understand if some doctor started talking about drug therapy while she was losing her mind.”

He hadn’t noticed evidence of that, doubted it was true. Donna always felt, uncharitably, that Helen went into medicine to catch a rich doctor. While Donna had always been welcoming to his wife, there was no love lost between the two women. If anyone had been terrified of dementia, it was probably Edith.

While Richard scanned through the papers, Ed disappeared for a few minutes, when he returned he looked like a kid who had hit a baseball into the neighbor’s window, not apologetic, but ready to take whatever punishment was to be meted out. “I’ve got all of Helen’s jewelry. We were given it. I don’t want you to think we stole it.”

“The thought never crossed my mind.”

“I wouldn’t let Terry have it, and Edith, well, she doesn’t mind hording it, because it helps her think of Helen.”

“Then let her have it. She’s little enough to remind her of Helen.”

“And the wedding ring? Do you want this?”

Kimble lifted the ring from Ed’s trembling palm and hefted it. There was good weight here, and it glistened in the late afternoon sunlight pouring in through the window as if the original promise still rang true. It hadn’t been scratched or marred by the years she wore it. It shown as beautifully now as it had then. It wasn’t fancy. He had medical school bills and a practice that was still a year in his future, but he hadn’t scrimped either. He had wanted her to have the very best.

He remembered slipping that ring on Helen’s finger, how happy they had been, seeing only good times ahead of them. There had been no fears that she would have a stillborn son, no inklings of the hysterectomy that would bring discord into their lives, no premonitions of murder that would take her life and destroy his. Their love had been encompassing and as they faced the future, they only imagined happiness, and if problems arose, they would be small, easily dealt with. Nothing would ever darken the life of a pediatrician and the lovely social woman he had chosen to be his wife.

Kimble closed his fist around the gold and thought of a woman he would love to marry, as he tried to picture the ring on her finger. No. Not for Olivia. Whether he would ask her to marry him at this point was still moot. He would provide no used token of a former love. He was not the Richard Kimble who originally bought this ring. He’d had a lot of his starry optimism torn away and there were parts of his soul still bloody. If he decided to take a second wife, any wife, he would do it with a slate wiped clean.

“No. No I don’t want this. Let Edith have it. If she doesn’t want it maybe Terry would. Terry should have something to remember of her sister.”

“I’m sorry we—“

He handed the ring back, relieved somehow that he didn’t have it weighing him down. “Ed, I don’t want or need your apology. You did what you had to do. Back then, I shouldn’t have come. I was wanted, and people who harbored me could get in trouble. I knew that when I showed up. I never meant to put you in danger. I thought I could sneak in and out without being recognized, maybe help, but there are a lot of people here who knew me, and my luck ran out.”

He looked down at the book he held, felt his chest explode. Helen’s writing, almost from the grave, filling in questions he’d had. This was what he had been seeking.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“Then did you find what you were looking for?”

“I did. Thanks. Can I take this?”

“Of course. You know your judge got a federal court appointment.”

“No. What?”

“Judge Reistling. He’s on a federal bench now in Indianapolis. There’s talk of his advancement. He’s been in the news.”

Although he had gone through most of his own trial in shock, Kimble hated Reistling, although his lawyer had considered him fair. Although the physician had no knowledge of trials, any trials, especially murder trials, he had felt Reistling had allowed the DA Mike Ballinger too much free reign in allowing testimony that was hearsay to be taken as fact. And he had allowed the Kimble trial to become a media circus, and a Capital case, when none of the evidence supported either.

“No. I didn’t know. I haven’t had much reason to look him up.”

“He’s been picked to fill the Supreme Court vacancy.”

“What?”

“There’s Senate hearings this coming week. If he’s confirmed, he gets on the highest court in the land.”

“Judge Dwane Reistling?”

“Yes. From what I could tell, your case rocketed him to national attention.”

Ballinger had used the publicity to skyrocket his own career. Kimble felt the shiver clear to the marrow of his bones, as he held the book with Helen’s thoughts tighter. “Thanks. I won’t bother you again.” He stood, almost made it to the bedroom door before Ed called him back.

“Wait, before you go, there is one other thing.”

“I’d like to get going. There’s something I have to do.”

“Please, won’t you come downstairs? I can pour you a cup of coffee. Edith won’t be back for a few hours. She made a pineapple upside cake.”

“I’d like—“ he tried, but then finished, “All right,” when he saw Ed’s haggard features drooping further.

At the dining room table, Ed poured coffee, sliced cake, then he disappeared for a few moments. “I’d like you to have this.” He handed Richard a stack of letters in their original envelopes with Helen’s handwriting, all addressed to Edith.

“Helen’s?”

“Yes. She wrote to her mother every week. When you were…when you were considered guilty, Edith wouldn’t read these any more. She ordered me to destroy them. I read them first, to see what kind of devilment you’d been up to with our daughter. I thought…I’m sorry, Richard, I thought if they were as bad as Edith was letting on, I would get them to the police somehow, not that you could get much worse of a punishment than you were given.”

“That’s right. Not much worse than the death penalty. And these letters, were they that bad?” He shivered, thought of the prosecution, wondered what the DA would do with these. Over the years, he had very few clear memories of his marriage, only of her grieving in their room after they lost the baby, and the fights that precipitated.

He held the letters, there were dozens, and his hands shook. It would be like talking to a ghost, this trip into the past where he couldn’t imagine anything but ugliness.

He held them out, tried to give them back. “I think maybe Edith was right. These should be destroyed.”

“No, no, Richard. Please read them. One, then, just one. If it’s too painful, I’ll take them, but I’ll not destroy them.”

No, not when he might need more fuel to ignite a fire sometime in the future. Kimble thought of handcuffs and despair, and perhaps for the first time in his life, of suicide.

“Here, pick one. Trust me.”

There was a clock on the wall, an ugly black cat with a tail that wagged back and forth like a pendulum, and creepy wide eyes that darted back and forth, as if seeking shadows in the dark corners. He had been here when Terry bought it for Mother’s Day. Edith had hated it, said she wouldn’t have it in her home, rejecting the daughter more than the gift. Helen, the peacemaker, had said if her mother didn’t want it, she’d love to have it for her new kitchen, and that had given the gift legitimacy. Edith allowed it to be hung here, where she could see it every day, and perhaps continue to mock it.

The clock had a loud tick, tick, tick, that he could often ignore. But not now as he selected one envelope from the pile. Tick. Tick. Tick. Time was running out, was not a phrase to him. He had literally been in a situation where time had been running out. It felt exactly that way now.

Kimble opened the envelope, feeling a fresh stab of pain as he recognized the clear, bold script of Helen’s handwriting. The date, at the top right, was a few weeks after they lost the baby.

“Dear Mama,

‘We’re still grieving here. I don’t know how we’re going to get past it. I never knew the baby, but for nine months he was a part of me. I felt him kick. I felt the love I had for him grow every hour.”

Richard looked up, swiped at his eyes. “Do I have to finish this?”

“Trust me,” Ed said.

“And while I cry, every morning and every night, Dick tells me how beautiful I am, and how much he loves me. He promises me we can get through this. That the loss will hurt, probably for the rest of our lives, but we’ll get through this.

“He’s a very attentive husband, and any slightest thing I may want he finds a way for me to get it. I wish he had our child in his arms as much as I wish the same for myself. That’s what hurts so much, this loneliness. I had no doubt but that our baby would be healthy. We had no warning. With a father and a grandfather looking after him, how could my baby be anything but healthy? Dick loves children. I never expected that a man could grieve over the loss of a baby. I thought, so selfishly, that it was something only a woman could do. A mother.

“You know he tells me I can consider myself a mother if it makes me feel better. It does. Richard assures me I did nothing wrong, that I ate properly, and exercised and slept. And I know from my nursing classes that sometimes deliveries go so very wrong for no reason at all.

“Now I want to tell you about last night. It was hot. So hot, and I was tired, and I didn’t want to cook. I only wanted to sit on the couch with the fan on and my feet up and wallow in the grief I can do nothing about. I knew he’d be home for dinner soon, and he’s so hungry when he gets home from work, but I couldn’t force myself to cook. Oh, there’s food in the house. I don’t want you to think he’d ever mistreat me, but I only wanted to feel sorry for myself.

“I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself. I know it’s a sin. Really, I have almost everything a woman could want: a man who loves me to distraction, a beautiful home, good friends and family. Did I tell you I wanted to name our baby Ralph? Dick roared, “No son of mine will be named Ralph!” How we laughed together over that. That was only a few weeks ago, and now it seems ages. A more innocent time when we thought nothing bad would ever touch us.

“Anyway I’m getting distracted. Dick came home, hungry. He’d had a busy day. He’s always busy, and there was no dinner. I was ashamed, thinking of myself, and not of him. He works so hard for us. And you know what he did? He said, “Looks like we’ll have to go out for ice cream.”

Can you imagine? Ice cream? I stopped crying. I couldn’t believe it. It was like we were dating again, and he would find these out of the way places to investigate. We had so little money in those days but he’d find hidden parks where we could picnic or just sit, holding hands, watching children on the slides and the swings while we planned our own future. Once we went bowling. Once he found a hot air balloon show. He was so busy with med school, but he would take time every now and then to show me how special I was.

“It was like that. I was so enchanted. Dick wasn’t upset. He took it as an adventure. I found my shoes and did my face and we went out to dinner together. There’s an ice cream parlor down the street, so we went out for banana splits. For dinner! He made me laugh the whole time, saying it had all the necessary food groups and that ice cream was particularly important for keeping both of us sane. He’d never do anything to hurt our relationship.

“I ate until I was sick—almost. It tasted so good. Then we went home together, and he rubbed my feet, and he put the tv on, since he knows how much I love it, and he was asleep within seconds. But in the midst of so much grief, it was such a perfect ending to a miserable day.

“I’ll try to be better tomorrow. I’ve got pork chops to cook. I know he likes them. I’ll bake some potatoes, and there is fresh spinach I can steam.

“Mama, can you imagine, ice cream for dinner? I’m starting to believe him when he says we’ll get through this.”

 

Kimble folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, realized his hands shook, but for an entirely different reason. “When you said Edith wouldn’t read them, I was afraid they were…bad. I didn’t always know what Helen was thinking, but I did try to be a good husband.”

More memories kept flooding back, the crisp Friday nights they’d spend watching the local high school football team defend the town’s honor or the fun they had on their belated honeymoon trip to England, times when they were happy. It was tragic, he thought, how these past few years he had not remembered the happier times.

“Edith only wanted to believe the worst in you, and listening to her, day after day, I started to believe her. But I knew how much Helen loved you. How good you were together. I do offer my apology, but the things they were writing in the newspapers, I didn’t want to believe them, but I did.”

Kimble picked up his coffee cup. The coffee had grown cold, but he held the letters, understood what courage it took for Ed to give them to him.

“Richard, I meant the apology. I did. You were family for a lot of years. Please, we’d be honored if you’d consider us family again. You’re welcome here any time.”

He tapped the envelopes, putting them together before he shoved them into his jacket pocket. “I appreciate that, but I’ve got to get going.”

He checked his watch, knew he could make it back to class if he left now. His license was important to him. Perhaps the most important thing in his life, but he looked at the book he had placed on the passenger seat of his car, and knew he had to make a decision.

Link to Chapter 15