Chapter 26: Phone Call
Carolyn Skate arrived at the office earlier than usual because she’d had a hard time sleeping. Usually she slept like the dead; her dad had liked to tell her that when she was young (that careful half-lidded-eyed way he had of looking at her at times) and she’d never forgotten. He’d called her his “little zombie” when her mother had not been around and as she’d gotten older and his memory had receded to a comfortable place in her mind, she’d thought of this moniker as a well-intentioned play on her personality. She had been quiet as a child, secretive even. It was something her mother had never made note of but as the years passed her father’s secret nickname had never escaped her. In fact it had dug down to a safe place, had become part of a nostalgic memory that propped up with any thought that came of the man. This morning, however, it had not been so welcome. She’d awakened in the middle of the night in a dead sweat. Panting. Her hands drawn up into claws. And the strangest thing was that she could remember nothing of the episode that had brought her around. She’d gotten out of bed at 4:30, made a huge pot of coffee and waited for the paper. By the time it came she’d already taken a shower and dressed. Even so, she paged through it like an automaton, hardly aware of the words she was reading.
By 5:45 she’d been in her car heading for the office.
She liked arriving when no one else was around. Her father had been a solid blue-collar worker (for thirty-four years he’d worked as a Safety Inspector at Exxon) but he’d always beaten into her brain the necessity of college; her mother, on the other hand, had been the dutiful helpmate, always in the house and about its business. She was sixty-eight now and sequestered in an Alzheimer’s ward of a local nursing home. Carolyn still visited her every weekend, rain or shine. But she’d gone off to college, suffered through the interminable generalized courses of her Freshman year until she’d taken the Introductory to Psychology class. After that, time had passed like water through a sieve. She’d found her mark. On his deathbed, her father, the man she’d always looked up to, had squeezed her hand and smiled a deathly white smile across the equally white sheet of his hospital bed and thanked her. Thanked her for doing what he’d been unable to imagine. She passed through Georgetown University’s graduate program as an honor student, funded entirely from the government’s pocket, until she’d emerged one day with her doctorate. Ready to take on the world.
And she had.
The only thing she’d ever been unsuccessful at had been relationships and even now she wondered if that, too, didn’t have something to do with her father. But as her courses and intuition assured her, there was no sense in questioning ghosts. The answers one could procure were tenuous at best and never satisfactory. Her child had become her work. And coming to the office was like coming home.
She walked over to the receptionist’s desk and checked the mail in the In-Box. Nothing pressing, nothing her workers couldn’t handle on their own. She set down her coffee mug and chanced a look down the hall. Toward her office. So much of her life took place back there, behind that closed door. So many confessions, so much regret and disappointment. College had not prepared her for that. The steady stream of disaffected people, in and out her door seeking sanctuary. How many had she supplied that equally tenuous property? That was a depressing thought also. Her door was partially open and from here she saw the foot of the couch. It’d been with her from the start even though no one really elected to spill out their troubles in its embrace. But nonetheless, it stayed. And why? It kept her grounded, reminded her constantly of her own insecurities and failings. Like the albatross around the old mariner’s neck. Because, in actuality, that’s what it was. She left the mug where it was and walked down the short hall to her office. Pushed open the door with her right hand. Looked down at the couch.
Her own Scarlet Letter.
She walked into the office and trailed over to her desk. Sat down, her eyes still on the couch. It’d been almost four years and the sight of it never failed to humiliate on some primal level. The detective, James Arnold, immediately washed across her mind. Her failing. He’d come to her for help and she’d destroyed his marriage, come close to destroying her career. The couch was a constant reminder. He’d been one of the youngest detectives on the force when they’d started, referred to her from a client’s service she’d long since quit. Seven years her junior and startlingly child-like she’d thought. The shooting she was supposed to help him through had been the gate she’d gone gladly through. Her looks, his manner, slowly drawing her in to the point of no return.
It had been an early morning then, too.
She’d reached out and touched his face. Even now, she had no idea how or why she’d done such a thing. But she had. And the want in his face had took over; her own head in his hands as he whispered in her ear. She’d found herself on the couch below him, her mind spinning at a million miles an hour, shuffling off her skirt even then as her mind screamed warning. But by then he’d been inside her and there was no turning back. She’d watched his eyes and, even now, she had to admit, there was nothing she could have done to change a thing. It had seemed like the final chapter to a satisfying, though forbidden, book.
And that, really, was what it was.
Never again had he ventured into her office. And it was only weeks later that she learned he’d told his wife of the indisgression, and the woman was in the process of leaving him. They had two little children, both girls, ages three and five. She’d taken them and moved out of state. And still he had not called. For a year she’d never uttered another word to the man. Not a single word. She broken her professional code, even now for reasons she could no more fathom than the man in the moon. But then, late one Friday afternoon, he’d called to set the record straight. He was still working for the force, living in a small one bedroom apartment downtown and sending most of his check in child support. He said he didn’t blame her, that it was just something he’d had to do, both the transgression and the subsequent telling. He assured her she’d done no wrong; that things had just suddenly fallen apart and the world had continued to move regardless.
And she, meanwhile, still had no clue as to his motivations. It made her small, apparently unprepared for the profession she’d thought she was in such tight control over. She’d let it lie dormant for a year, called him on a whim when she thought he might be able to provide some information on a client’s problem she was trying to unravel. And he’d helped her. Had never mentioned that one thing that lay like a stone in her heart. And so it goes.
She considered turning on the television mounted on the wall in the back corner near the bookshelves. Immediately decided against it; the quiet was too dear. For a long, lost, lonely moment she thought herself the only one in the world, a victim of her own secrets.
Then the phone rang. Her hand, still close to the mug, jerked forward and overturned it. The coffee spilled over the edge of her desk to the carpet below. But she made no move to get up; her eyes were glued on the caller ID. That number. Her mind a fugue, she reached over and gripped the handset, brought it to her ear.
“Carolyn,” she heard. Her voice caught in her throat and a long moment of silence beaded out across the centuries. Now, it came again as a question, “Carolyn?” She breathed in deeply and eyed the coffee edging over the end of the desk.
“James,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s me.” She chanced another look at the couch. “Was wonderin if you’d be in this early.”
“Just got here,” she lied, her mind spinning. “Couldn’t sleep,” and she coughed, even then glancing around the office as if afraid someone was spying on her. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What’s up?” An alarm sounded in her head, putting her on guard immediately.
He started to say something, was interrupted by a voice at the far fringe of her hearing. A woman’s. She stood up and walked over to her bathroom to get a towel (the coffee would make a hell of a mess) all the while chiding herself silently for calling up such a quest
ion, considering their past. She heard him bark something over his shoulder. “Yeah, I know,” he finished as a seeming afterthought before turning his attention back to her. “Carolyn,” he said for the third time (the charm?), then, “busy as hell over here.”
“Uh huh,” she returned, fetching a towel from the rack by the sink and turning back to her office. Before she could say anything else he went on.
“Listen, got something might interest you.” She waited for a moment for him to continue but he didn’t. Reminiscent of how many of their earliest sessions had gone. She threw the towel onto the top of her desk, one corner catching the spill.
“Shoot,” she said only because she could think of nothing else.
“I just pieced this together,” he said. “Something kind of odd came up.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t really have anything much, but something in the back of my head said give you a ring.”
“I’m all ears.”
“The woman you gave me to check out, that Patsy Standish…”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, we got a missing person on the wire yesterday. House untouched, car in the driveway, neighbors didn’t see anything. Hell, for all I know he might have skipped town for a million different reasons, or he might be right here under our noses. No big deal except for one thing.”
“Yes?”
“An address. His previous residence. Seems our missing character used to live at the current address of one Patsy Standish, your Patsy Standish. I can’t tell you the guy’s name but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out.”
“Really,” Carolyn said, sitting back down at her desk, the spilled coffee forgotten now.
“Really.” She could almost see him grinning grimly through the phone. “Just thought you might like to know.”
“Yeah, you were right. I do.”
He laughed humorlessly. “Hey, what can I say? Just trying to keep the customer satisfied. You satisfied?”
“Not really. Intrigued, yes.”
That short burst of laughter again. “Yeah, well…that’s about it. Least for the moment. Right now this thing’s as new as wet paint. Though it doesn’t hurt to have someone else snooping around too, if you get me.”
“I do,” she said. “And James…”
“Yeah?”
“I appreciate this. I don’t know why, but I do.”
“Yeah, well one hand washes the other, huh?”
“That it does,” she said. Within another minute Doctor Carolyn Skate sat alone, thoughtfully staring out the window into the parking lot, searching for something in her mind that she could neither identify nor even rightly explain.