Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [80]
“Did she talk to you?” I said.
“What?”
“Mariah. Did she talk to you?” It seemed a simple enough question to me, but Tom Bowden was shifting uneasily in his black leather chair.
“No,” he said, and I sighed. Manfred raised a finger, just at the edge of my vision. He thought the doctor was lying again.
“So what happened?” I said, not seeing how we could get him to be honest unless we started beating on him.
“I cleaned the woman up, with some difficulty,” Dr. Bowden said. “I wanted to call for an ambulance and I told the man so again, but he told me that was out of the question. I went to get my coat to use my cell phone, but he’d taken it out of my coat pocket, and he wouldn’t let me have it. I had to treat the patient, and I didn’t have time to fight with him about the phone. She was clearly in the end stages. Even if I could’ve gotten her to a hospital within the hour—and the nearest hospital was that far away, incidentally—she wouldn’t have made it. She had a massive infection.”
“You’re saying she died that night.”
“Yes. About an hour and a half after I got there, she died. She got to hold the baby.”
We all sat silent for a moment. “So, what happened then?” Manfred said.
“The man asked me to examine the baby, and I found that she was okay, a little feverish, but nothing serious. Other than that, physically, she was fine.”
“The baby was a girl.”
“Yes, yes, she was. Small, but as far as I could tell she would be okay, if she got the proper course of treatment. He asked if I had the right stuff to give her. He was going to take the baby directly to the adoptive parents. I actually had some antibiotics with me in my bag, samples a salesman had given me. I explained the dosage and administration to him, and he carried the baby out of the room. That was the last I saw of the infant. The mother expired then.”
Expired. “And what did you do after that?”
He sighed, as if the complexity of relaying his story was too much for him to bear. “I told the man that we had to call into town. We had to report the death. We had quite an argument. He didn’t seem to understand that it was the law, that the law had to be followed.”
Since you’d already bent it so far out of shape, I thought. “But he let you call, finally?”
“He agreed, as long as I didn’t mention the baby. So the funeral home came to get the poor young woman, and I signed the death certificate.” His shoulders slumped. He’d finally told the worst thing, in his view, and now he could relax.
“You said she’d died of . . . ?”
“Massive infection due to a ruptured appendix.”
“And no one questioned that?”
He shrugged. “No family came forward. The Joyces sent me a check to pay my bill—no more—and after that, if anyone who worked for them got sick, they came to me for treatment.”
It had been very clever of them not to offer Dr. Bowden an outright bribe. I was sure the bill he’d sent had been stiff, and they’d paid it just as they would have under normal circumstances. That had reassured the doctor. And since his practice wasn’t flourishing, they’d thrown him a big bone.
“With a setup like that, why’d you move to Dallas?” Manfred asked. Again, I wouldn’t have gotten into that, but again, I’d underestimated the doctor’s elasticity.
“It was my wife. She couldn’t stand Clear Creek,” he said. “And I’ve got to say, no one there got along with her, either. We were having some real wars at home. About six years ago, I got to talking to a doctor I’d never met before at an AMA meeting. He had a practice in Dallas. He told me his office was coming empty, did I want to take over the lease. It was at the previous price, much lower than new tenants were paying. And he’d throw in the equipment, too, because he was going overseas to a new job at an American consulate in Turkey or somewhere like that.”
Could he really not see how set up that had been? It was like someone attaching a string to a dollar bill and then setting it out on the sidewalk, so he could