“But then you would have had trouble with your little side business,” Dash said.“Did you know Henry had fathered a child?”
Noreen was trying to work out what Dash had just said about the side business, but the new topic was too juicy for her to resist.
“I saw the pregnancy test results,” she said.“He ran the test and put it in her chart himself.This made me curious because he never did that, so I went to check and see what he was hiding.”
“You needed the information to protect him,” I said reassuringly.
“Someone had to.The fool.Henry Wainwright was the best man I ever knew,” she said.“And the finest doctor.Kind, decent, good to his core.He had no business getting tangled up with a girl young enough to be his daughter, and frankly she had no business pursuing a man that far out of her league.”Her voice didn’t waver, but something behind it did.“He deserved better than what he got.”
“Did you have feelings for him?”I asked.“Beyond professional loyalty.”
She picked up her coffee mug and set it back down without drinking.She looked at the crossword.Then she looked at me.
“That would be silly,” she said.“He obviously wasn’t attracted to women his own age.”
I didn’t dig further into that can of worms.
“We know it was you, Noreen,” Dash said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do.It sounds like you were running a pretty slick operation.But you made a mistake.”
Her mouth opened and closed, and I knew she was dying to ask what she did wrong.
“I’ll tell you,” he continued.“You made a mistake in handwriting the notes.Neat block lettering, slightly tilted.Very consistent, very distinctive.”He paused.“You transcribed Henry’s notes into patient files for years because you were the only one who could read his handwriting.You’d write in cursive until you got to certain medications, or if there were important notations that needed to be more visible.And then you switched to block lettering.Just like the blackmail notes.Patterns never lie.”
“Well, I’ll be,” she said, staring at Dash in awe.“I guess I should have been more careful about that.”
Then she laughed and I felt chills dance up my arms.
“I ran that clinic,” she said.“Not helped run it—ran it.The schedules, the correspondence, the billing, the patient relations, the board communications, the supply orders, all of it.I transcribed Henry’s chicken scratch into something a human being could actually read, which was itself a full-time job.I dealt with difficult patients and difficult board members and difficult insurance companies, and I did it all without being asked twice and without making a fuss.”
She paused, her breathing ragged.
“And do you know what Henry said to me on my twentieth anniversary at the clinic?He said, ‘Noreen, I don’t know what we’d do without you.’That was it.No raise.No bonus.Not even a thank you card.And when the clinic closed after he died, I got nothing.Not a letter of reference.Not a word from James.Nothing.”
There was a tremor in her voice that belied the gentle expression on her face.
“I’d been sitting on information about half of Grimm Island for years,” she said.“Patient files.Private correspondence.Phone calls people had in the waiting room thinking nobody was listening.I was always listening.I knew which prominent families had secrets they’d pay to protect.Which public figures had habits that would end their careers.Which marriages were held together by nothing but mutual embarrassment.”She looked at Dash.“It started as a thought.And then it became a letter.And the payment came and nobody came looking.So I wrote another letter.And another.I needed a good retirement system after all.”
“How many?”Dash asked.
“Several people over the years,” she said, shrugging.“A city councilman whose painkiller problem would not have gone over well with his constituents.A pharmacist who had been very generously medicating himself.A family on the island with a daughter whose medical history would have been enormously embarrassing to their social standing.A few others.I was never unreasonable.I only asked for what people could afford.And on Grimm Island, people can afford more than most.”She looked at Dash with something close to pride.“I retired at sixty-five and haven’t worked a day since.My brokerage account is quite healthy.”
“James and Henry both decided to stop payments at the same time.Would you have killed James next?”
She snorted.“Of course not.James was an idiot.But Henry.I knew when Henry decided to stop paying that he’d start digging to find out who it was.He would have gotten to me.It was only a matter of when.”
She set the mug down.
“You knew his schedule,” I said.“You knew he was staying in Charleston the night before he died and his house would be empty.”
“Correct,” she said.“And I knew it was Lila Mae’s day off.I took benzodiazepines from the sample cabinet.”She said it all in the same even voice.“I drove to the island before dawn that morning, with the rain coming down.The house was empty, and I let myself in through the back, put the pills in the decanter and left.I saw the blackmail note on his desk and knew I was making the right choice.”
“I think we have different understandings of what right choices are,” I said.“You came back later that night?”
“The storm helped,” she said.“It kept getting worse and there were power outages so it was pitch black out.I parked down the block with my lights off.Black rain slicker, hood up, gloves already on.I knew Henry was home because his car was in the drive.Henry had a generator and I could hear it buzzing.But the lights were all off downstairs.I let myself in through the back like before and climbed the stairs.I’d been in that house enough that I could have walked through blindfolded.I listened to him talk to his sister.That was a real eye-opener.At first I thought he might be talking about me.”Her voice rose in pitch excitedly.“Then I waited in the hallway and watched through the crack in the door while he sat at his desk and poured himself a whiskey.He was going through papers and trying to read, and I could tell he was struggling with the drug.The drug takes time, but once it starts working it’s mighty.So I bided my time and went in to see him.
