“You’re not the only one responsible if everyone knew what was happening.”
Ken shakes his head. “One time I was asleep, and I woke up for no reason, and when I looked out the window I thought there was a ghost out there. She was wearing something white, I guess that was it. She had the kid with her that time—he was only a baby and I figure she didn’t want to leave him with Hollis. I can’t say that I blame her. Nobody wanted to confront him, but we should have. We should have gone to him.”
It is getting colder, even now, but Susie and Ken stand there, unmoving.
“ ‘If your hand or foot should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter into life crippled or lame than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into the eternal fire.’ Matthew 18:8.” Ken Helm pauses to clear his throat. “It would have been a blessing if someone had stopped him.”
They finally head toward Susie’s parked truck. When they get there, Susie shakes Ken’s hand before she opens the door. She has never before noticed that his eyes are green.
“It’s the sun,” he says, to explain why his eyes are watering, and of course Susie nods, even though the sky is filled with clouds and the light is hazy at best.
“Don’t worry about the Judge’s delivery,” Ken says as Susie gets into her truck. “I’ll make him a nice, neat woodpile.”
On the way home, Susie stops at the Red Apple to pick up a few things—some yogurt, a box of fancy bakery-style cookies—but instead of turning left on Route 22 and going home to have lunch with her dogs, as she usually does, she turns right and drives to St. Bridget’s Hospital. Leave it be, Ed keeps telling her, but how is she supposed to do that, especially now that she has that vision of Belinda dressed in white standing beside the woodpile in Ken Helm’s yard?
Susie parks in the nurses’ lot, and props her Bugle parking sticker up against the windshield. The bad thing about living in a small town is that everyone knows your business, but it’s a good thing too, since it makes for connections which crisscross each other more often than the strands of a spider’s web. Susie has known Maude Hurley in the billing department at the hospital for ages. In fact, she dated Maude’s son, Dave, for quite a while, and remembers mostly that he was a terrific ice-skater and too perfunctory in bed. Maude, however, was a pistol, and Susie always enjoyed going to her house for Sunday dinners. Now, when she goes to the billing office, Susie brings the fancy chocolate chip cookies as an offering, but she doesn’t need to bribe Maude for information.
“Honey, everybody knew about Belinda,” Maude says.
But unfortunately, all of Belinda’s hospitalizations date to the time before admissions were computerized. Try as she might, Maude can’t call up anything on her terminal.
“That’s that,” Susie says, disappointed and starting in on the chocolate chip cookies herself.
“Not likely,” Maude says, and she leads Susie down to the basement of St. Bridget’s, to a room filled with ancient, mildewed files, suggesting that if anyone discovers her, Susie should say she’s gathering information for the hospital’s fiftieth anniversary.
Maude, Susie believes, would have made a great mother-in-law, and she gives the older woman a hug before getting down to work. It takes an hour and a half, but Susie finally finds what’s left of Belinda’s file. The file, however, covers only the last two years of Belinda’s life. The upside, if one can call it that, is that even in that relatively short period of time there were four admissions. More than average, Susie would guess, but proof of nothing. Two of the entries are illegible, but the other two—“broken mandible,” “fifteen stitches”—send chills along Susie’s spine. What, exactly, she can do with this information, she’s not sure, at least not until she notices Dr. Henderson’s name at the top of the page in the listing for the patient’s physician.
Susie eats from a container of yogurt while sitting in her parked truck; then she heads over to Main Street, where, to her surprise, Dr. Henderson agrees to see her, although he has a waiting room filled with patients.
“Are you writing an article about Belinda?” he asks when she brings up the name.
“I’m just interested.”
“In?”
“The circumstances of her death, for one.”
Susie would have guessed that Dr. Henderson, who’s known to be cool and businesslike. would insist that the circumstances of a patient’s death were privileged information, but he seems relieved to be talking about this subject. He takes off his glasses and leans back in his chair.