Dan sipped at his coffee. “You’re sure nothing’s missing?”

“Nothing.” Mark downed his tea in a gulp and refilled the cup from a blue pot big enough for ten. Seated at the kitchen table, he grew impatient with Dan. “He checked to see what information I had on her.”

“But I can’t just accuse Chaz Braden of looking at your files because you think one piece of paper was out of order.”

“I know it was out of order, Dan. I’m meticulous about not mixing up the pages of a medical file. Of course Chaz did it. Who else would care?”

“I don’t know. But if someone busted in here, he did the neatest job of breaking and entering I’ve ever seen.”

“He came in here. That coat on the basement floor didn’t move itself.”

“But the locks haven’t a mark on them. No forced windows. Not so much as a missing pane of glass. If you weren’t obsessive about your papers, we’d have never suspected anyone was here. I doubt Chaz Braden has those kinds of skills.”

Mark’s stomach muscles tightened. “Maybe he hired somebody. Besides, anyone could have picked that basement lock.”

“It would take a real expert not to leave at least a scratch or two. And how would Chaz even know you had Kelly’s old medical file?”

“He must have overheard me telling Earl Garnet.”

Dan sighed and took another sip from the mug with the caption SLOWLY APPROACHING FORTY written on the side. Mark always reserved it for his visits. “If you made better coffee,” he said, pulling a sour face and pushing out of his chair, “I’d stick around. As it stands, I figure the ghost who broke in here is long gone. But I do suggest you get a better lock on the basement door.”

He thanked Dan for coming and saw him to the door. As for his assertion the intruder was long gone, that could be, but Mark dug out his old baseball bat from the basement and put it in the front closet, just in case.

He laid out the contents of Kelly’s file on his kitchen table sheet by sheet, like a deck of cards in a game of solitaire. Then he went over and over them. He still couldn’t see any patterns or sequences by which he could connect one to the other.

Only guesses.

Such as the reason his father saw Kelly for therapy. The logical assumption – she’d been working through her problems with Chaz, or maybe even her unresolved issues with her parents. But why five years? Most support therapy interventions went on for twelve months, sometimes twenty-four, unlike psychoanalysis, in which the progress got measured in decades.

Or how the other two matters she’d mentioned in her letter – I can’t leave and let them go unresolved – might tie in with the discrepancies in her phone bill. Suppose she actually reached Chaz at the maternity center and threatened to go public about the M and M cases if he didn’t let her go. That call could have been what got her killed. It would certainly be a conversation Chaz would not want revealed. If that were the case, however, wouldn’t it have been simpler for him just to admit she’d contacted him, then make up some benign story about what was said? He shouldn’t have had to risk an elaborate lie and claim he never even spoke with her. No, there had to be some other explanation.

But empty theorizing wouldn’t get him anywhere. He needed some way to check out his hunches.

He shifted his gaze to the morbidity-mortality reports that seemed to be so in order and looked at where Melanie Collins’s signature appeared.

Last night over the phone she’d gone on at length about Chaz. A lot of what she said was, “Kelly told me he berated her night and day… Kelly said his rages frightened her… Kelly felt repulsed when he wanted sex.” Maybe Kelly also confided how Chaz mismanaged his patients. Or perhaps Melanie had seen for herself.

But would Earl mind if he called her, after being so explicit about dealing with his former classmates himself? Surely not. That was for people like Tommy Leannis, who clammed up to outsiders.

He dialed her number and got a busy signal.

Try again later.

In the meantime he went back out to the Jeep and carted in the boxes that Dan had discovered in the White House. Now why the hell had his father collected all these? he wondered, first unpacking what amounted to stacks of birth records from the home and laying them out in piles on the floor. At least they were already in chronological order, spanning the years from 1955 to 1975. He made a quick estimate of the total by counting out one hundred of the documents, then using the height of them as a measure. Approximately thirty-two hundred women delivered their babies over the twenty-year period, a good two-thirds of them in the first decade of operation. Each record had a six-digit number, same as a hospital chart, but carried no identifying information about the mother other than her age and area code. The personal data, he figured, must have been kept separate for confidentiality reasons. Flipping through them, he saw that most of the women had been young, some lived in upstate New York, but the majority came from New York City. The specifics as to the infants – sex, physical status at birth, the presence of any congenital defects – was standard. The death certificates – he’d thumbed through only twenty-one of those for the home – were in keeping with the number of babies he would have expected to die, given the perinatal mortality rate of seven per thousand that prevailed at the time. The papers also indicated that a great majority of the infants became wards of the state in public orphanages, yet in a separate pile, the records showed that the home arranged private adoptions for 180 of the babies. The bottom line – everything seemed in impeccable order.

Next he laid out the birth records for the maternity center in Saratoga Springs. There’d be no site to visit there. Dan had stuck in a note saying the building had been torn down in the 1980s, replaced by a health spa.

The height of this pile reflected nearly double the number of births at the maternity center as compared to the home, six thousand by his estimate. But the place had approximately the same number of infant deaths, only twenty to be exact. Money and good prenatal care halved the going rate for mortalities.

He spent the next few hours meticulously studying the documents but still couldn’t find anything wrong. Another time, perhaps, when he wasn’t so tired, and he began to gather up the papers, wondering if for now he shouldn’t lock everything in the White House for safekeeping. But having had virtually no sleep for thirty-six hours, he settled on putting the records in his drug safe instead.

His gut started to burn like an overused muscle, the result of too much tea, no supper, and a whole lot of frustration. He made himself a sandwich and poured a glass of milk.

This time when he called Melanie, she answered on the first ring.

“Hello?”

She sounded tired.

“Hi.”

“Mark! Are you still in New York?”

“No, I’ve retreated back to the woods.”

“Ahhh – that’s a waste.”

“I know.” He laughed.

“I’d like to see you,” she replied.

“Next time I’m in town.”

“Mark, I could use some country air.” It sounded like an order.

Whoops! “Great. Let’s arrange it sometime. But after hunting season’s over. It’s like a remake of Deliverance around here right now.” What were white lies for but to let everyone back out of embarrassing corners with feelings intact?

She gave her throaty chuckle. “How about a couple of weeks from now?” she persisted.

Oh, brother. On second thought, why not just have her come? Like nuts to the squirrels, it would give Nell and company enough to chew on the whole damn winter. “Melanie, I have to ask you something. Do you mind if we talk business a sec?”

“Shoot!” Her voice had snapped to attention.