Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [79]
“But they didn’t,” Manfred said, his voice just as severe as mine. “Tell us.”
We had no idea what was going on, but it was good to look like we did.
“That night, the night she died, of course I was still practicing in Clear Creek,” Dr. Bowden said. He swiveled in his chair to look out of his window. “It was raining that night, pouring, like it is today. I think it was in February. I’d never treated any of the Joyces; they had their own doctors in Texarkana and Dallas and didn’t mind driving to go to one of their doctors, miles away.” Bitterness crossed his face and left its tracks. “I knew who Rich Joyce was, everyone in town knew him. He was one of those rich men who acts like they’re just like everyone else, you know? Old pickup truck, Levis? Like he didn’t have enough money to drive any vehicle he wanted!” The doctor shook his head at the foibles of someone who could have anything preferring instead to stick with something plain and familiar.
“Was it Rich Joyce who came to your house?”
“Oh, hell, no,” Tom Bowden said. “It was one of the hands, I think. I don’t remember what his name was.” He was lying. “He said Mr. Joyce’s housekeeper was sick, needed me, and they’d pay me extra if I’d come out to the house. Of course I went. I didn’t want to, but it was my duty, and there was the prospect that I’d get in good with Richard Joyce. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t hoping for that.”
He could have tried to pretend that all day long, and it wouldn’t have convinced me. I felt Manfred shift beside me, wondered if he was trying to suppress a laugh.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I went out there in his truck, and we got out in the rain. We went through this big empty house, and we got to a bedroom, and in it was this young woman. She was in bad shape. She had just given birth. Evidently, her labor had started unexpectedly, and from what the man said to me, she hadn’t even known she was pregnant.”
I tried to absorb that, couldn’t. “But you went out there knowing that you were going to treat a pregnant woman, right?”
He shook his head. I didn’t know if he was trying to say that he hadn’t known, or that he didn’t want to talk about it. I suspected he didn’t want to add to his feeling of guilt by admitting that he’d known he was going out to the Joyce house to treat a patient under conditions he had to know were illegal or pretty damn near.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She didn’t say much of anything. She was having a very hard time. She was very sick, very sick. Her temperature was high; she was sweating, shaking, and very unsteady. Almost incoherent. I couldn’t understand why the man hadn’t taken her to a hospital, and he told me that she didn’t want him to, that she wasn’t supposed to be having the baby, it was a real unpleasant family situation. He told me that the baby was the product of incest.” Dr. Bowden’s mouth folded up in a way that left no doubt as to how uncomfortable the word made him. “He said she was some kind of favorite of old Mr. Joyce, and she wanted to have the baby without him knowing, and then she would go back to her job and give the baby up for adoption. Her memories were too bad for her to want to keep it.”
And you believed this? I wanted to say, but knew I couldn’t break the flow of this confession. This was coming more easily than I ever would have believed, and I could only imagine that Tom Bowden had wanted to tell this story for years. I had a fleeting wonder about the kind of background this man must have, to have fallen for any of this. Of course, you had to add in the big dollop of greed that had influenced him.
“She didn’t have any family,” Manfred said, and after a second Dr. Bowden understood what Manfred was saying. He looked down at his desk fixedly. I could have hit Manfred for his interruption; at the same time, he’d only said what I was thinking.
“I didn’t know for sure,” Bowden muttered. “The man who’d brought me out to the ranch—I thought he was Drexell Joyce—the son. I figured the baby was probably his. Maybe