Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (22 page)

Dr. Story was asked if he has a temporal lobe seizure disorder which would account for otherwise inexplicable conduct. He replied, "No."

He remarked he felt the Board had made a final decision. Dr. Story was informed that the majority of the Board was not even aware that an informal interview was being held, that the informal interview was purely investigatory, and that his blanket denial would force the Board to investigate further.

"DOC

Dr. Story again said the accusations were a product of sexual fantasies. He asked if the only way he could prove his innocence was by using character witnesses. He was told to consult an attorney regarding his defense.

Dr. Story was asked again if he could explain why anyone would make such an accusation if it were not true. He said, I am beginning to make connections." One person he suspected of complaining is a member of a family he claims has practiced incest. Another suspected complainant, he said, was involved in making an accusation at a public meeting against a high school coach. The third person Dr. Story suspected of complaining is an ex-employee who was related to a "peeping Tom." No names were mentioned.

Dr. Story also said he suspected two of the complainants were patients who owed him quite a bit of money. One patient has a $1600 bill. She and her husband confronted Dr. Story regarding sexual conduct. Dr. Story said he lost his temper when the husband said what he would think every time he sent Dr. Story a dollar. Dr. Story told the husband he didn't want to accept any money. Dr. Story said the other patient owes him several thousand dollars.

Dr. Story was informed that the investigation would continue and would require personal interviews with the complainants and other patients. He was reminded that his attorney should feel free to contact Ms. Karpan at any time.

27

MINDA BRINKERHOFF

Minda felt more antsy every day. On the phone, the Medical Board kept turning away her questions. Had the necessary five letters reached Cheyenne? That was confidential. Would action be taken? They weren't at liberty to say. Would the victims get a chance to testify? There were no such plans at the present time. The middle child told her mom that making an accusation against a doctor was like throwing a stone into Devil's Canyon. You never heard it hit.

The telephone was in Meg's lower half of the house, and Minda's arthritic hips throbbed as she hobbled down and up to answer. A few people entered complaints ("What are you McArthurs trying to do to Doc Story?"), but most of the callers were victims or friends of victims. The repeated message was, Hang in there. We're with you.

On the street, she was stopped by women she hardly knew. Some stressed that nothing had happened to them, but they had girl friends who'd gone to Dr. Story and ... on and on. Minda suspected that they were really talking about themselves. The conversations were a constant reminder of how stupid she'd been, all the way back to Uncle Bob. As she drove past the sugar factory one day, a radio station reported on a woman who'd been raped by a dentist, taken him to court—and lost. Minda turned the radio off. Money and power usually prevailed; she didn't need a newscaster to tell her that.

Lately her physical problems had been worsening. The Lovell Cleaners had edged into the black, but the spotting fumes burned her throat worse than ever and her hips were inflamed from dragging around on the concrete floors. Any day now she would have to tell her ailing dad that she couldn't hack it—another Minda screw-up. She dreaded the confrontation; her parents had $100,000 invested, most of it from the sale of the farm. Meg's and Danny's shop, Kids Are Special, couldn't meet its overhead. They'd combined the store with the dry cleaners to cut expenses, but the local demand for modish junior styles proved limited. "What are we doing in this business?" Meg complained one day with her typical straightforwardness. "We're farmers." Yes, Minda thought. Without a farm.

Her biggest worry was so painfully personal that she couldn't discuss it. Amber Dawn was almost four now, a beautiful child with tawny skin and big brown eyes. She'd looked different from the other Brinkerhoffs from the beginning. And from the beginning, Minda had clashed with her.

Years later, she was harshly self-critical as she thrashed around and tried to explain the problem. "I still hated myself. After two boys, I didn't want a child who could grow up and be like me. I resented everything about Amber. She wasn't a baby you could hold and cuddle. The boys melted into your arms, but she was long and skinny. It felt like she was stiffening against me. Folks would say, She's a gorgeous baby. Oh, isn't she beautiful? She had blond hair with so much curl in it that people thought I'd had it layered. I was too hard on her. I expected her to be older than her years." She looked down. "I, uh—I wasn't a good mother."

Whenever Minda snapped at the toddler, Arden said things like, "Minda, if you don't do better by that li'l girl, I'm gonna take her away from you. Let her be a kid. Don't expect her to do things perfectly all the time."

At three, Amber trailed Minda like a pup, trying to please. She yelled, "I hate myself! I hate myself! I'm so ugly!" Minda thought, It's me all over again. My worst fears! I acted the same way after Uncle Bob. My mother was always trying to build up my self-esteem. Maybe it's in the genes. . . .

After her final ordeal in Examining Room No. 2, Minda leaned toward the belief that the child had been conceived during a pelvic exam. She remembered how insistently Story had set the due date, and how he'd taken the baby prematurely and caused her to have a "wet lung," and how he'd always given her extra attention.

The deepening suspicions drained her. She wondered how Scott would react if he knew. He was dewy-eyed about "Daddy's girl." Would he turn against Amber if he knew the truth? Turn against Minda? He was still bitter about Story. If she confided her suspicion, would he attack Story and end up in jail?

When weeks passed and nothing was heard from the Medical Board, the middle child showed her husband a copy of a letter she'd written to the famous Wyoming lawyer Gerry Spence, trying to enlist his help. The letter went into detail about Amber's origins. Scott read the letter and said, "It's okay, Minda." She was surprised at his calmness.

"What do you mean?"

"If Amber is Story's, it just means she's something special. It means we're supposed to have her. And we'll love her that much

more."

She was relieved. It was one more secret she didn't have to guard like a hen on eggs. But she still wondered if she would ever be able to treat John Story's child with love.

2M1

ARDEN McARTHUR

On September 1, Arden came across an ad in the Lovell
Chronicle:

Friday, September 9, 5 to 8
p.m.
(6 to 7
p.m
. will be a special program. All are encouraged to attend.)

At the Senior Citizen Building the hospital will host a 25-year anniversary for

DR. STORY for his association with the North Big Horn Hospital

We would ask those who wish to send letters of appreciation to Dr. Story for this occasion to send them to the Personnel Department at the hospital so they can be included.

Arden realized that an instant publicity campaign was being generated by the doctor's admirers. If Dr. Story ever had to go before a Big Horn County jury for violating the fifteen or twenty

women she'd now heard from, some of the jurors would surely be from Lovell. What pleasant memories they would have of this "spontaneous" tribute as they sat in judgment on the honored

guest!

She went to see her fellow churchman and state senator, Cal Taggart, the most influential man in town. Cal was vintage Lovell, the grandson of one of the first settlers. He owned the building where the McArthurs operated the two stores, and she'd always found him fair and reasonable about rents and other sticky matters. She strongly suggested that he use his power to get the anniversary dinner called off" and help run Story out of town.

Taggart reminisced that a hospital manager had come to him in the sixties or seventies with the claim that "Dr. Story's putting his weenie in his patients." He hadn't believed it then, he said, and he didn't believe it now.

"Well, take my word," Arden said. "He hasn't changed."

"You take
my
word, lady," Taggart said with his usual friendly smile. "If you have evidence, you better act on it. Otherwise you better just shut up."

The argument heated up. Taggart's main point was that his family had "doctored" with Story for years and the little man had never made the slightest move on the beautiful Mrs. Taggart or anyone else they knew. "Also," Taggart said, "he's a fine physician and surgeon. One of the best."

"Cal," Arden warned him, "don't help these people cover up."

"Damn it, Arden, you've got a short memory. Wasn't I the mayor when we got rid of Horsley?"

Arden preferred not to think about the Rose Doctor scandal. She knew a set of brothers he'd corrupted. One of them now strolled the streets of Lovell in a funk, his eyes rolling up in his head when he tried to carry on a conversation. Arden suspected that Bob Asay had also been a Horsley patient. She wondered if that was where Uncle Bob had developed his sexual tastes. She and several of her friends were convinced that Horsley had helped create the atmosphere in which behavior like Story's could flourish. There was an awful lot of kinkiness for such a small town.

"What did you do about Horsley, Cal?" she asked. She'd genuinely forgotten.

"Bill was my neighbor and friend. We went duck hunting every morning with my Labs. He got caught with that young fellow at the hospital and we barred him for good. I was on the hospital board that booted him out. I'd do the same to John Story in a second."

"You didn't do the town any favors, Cal," Arden said. "Horsley just kept right on abusing boys in his office at home." She paused. "Now you've got another doctor that's just as bad or worse. What are you gonna do about
hint!"

"Well, this case is different," the senator insisted. "Bill Horsley was guilty."

Still trying to head off the anniversary dinner, Arden called on Joe Brown, who'd come down from Miles City, Montana, to run the new North Big Horn Hospital three or four years earlier. Along with Dr. Story and three others, the fundamentalist Brown was an elder of the Lovell Bible Church.

"Why'd you wait till now to have this dinner?" she asked. "You're being plumb unjust to a lot of women."

Brown said he'd been about to get in touch with her. The hospital board had asked him to look into the Story rumors, and he would appreciate a meeting with her and her daughters. "If there are problems," he said in an earnest voice, "I'd like to know what I can do to help."

When Arden put down the phone, Dean warned in his weak voice, "Don't meet with that guy. You're asking for trouble."

She said that a meeting might help to head off that danged dinner.

They talked for an hour and a half. Minda came along and helped flesh out some of the details, dating to her first complaint and Arden's refusal to listen. She talked in her usual
prestissimo,
not wanting to leave anything out, even her confidental talks with the bishop and the stake president.

The hospital administrator asked a lot of questions about John Abraham's reaction. "It was hard for him to believe it," Minda explained. "Shoot, he didn't know where I was coming from. He'd never been confronted with anything like this. I all but had to get up on his table and show him what happened."

She cried as she described what Story had done to her and Meg. Arden listened and thought, Dear Father in Heaven, how many times will my poor babies have to repeat this story?

Brown seemed concerned. Arden said to herself, Why shouldn't he be? Story is the hospital's big surgeon; he keeps the beds filled.
If
he's abusing women in his clinic, he's abusing them in the hospital. Unless Joe Brown wants to risk a pile of money in lawsuits, he should be the first to take action, whether he shares Story's pew on Sundays or not.

That night, a distressed Minda phoned. John Abraham had just dressed her down for claiming that she'd demonstrated a pelvic exam on the table in his office. "President Abraham was upset, Mom," she said, speaking faster than ever. "I told him I didn't say any such thing. He told me to be careful of what I say and how I say it. He said, 'Watch your step!' Gol, Mom, I'm in big trouble, and I don't even know why."

Within a few days Arden heard other revisionist versions of the private conference at the hospital. In each playback, the McArthur women were cast as buffoons.

By the time she talked to the hospital administrator again, she was as hot as the presser at the cleaners. "Joe Brown," she said, "I am
so
disappointed in you. We came out there in good faith to give you honest information, and you're trying to use it to destroy us. You really don't want to know the truth, do you?"

Brown said something about rumors and gossip; he'd started hearing scuttlebutt about Dr. Story in his first weeks on the job. Arden jumped in, "And you didn't investigate? Did you ever hear that where there's smoke there's fire?"

"Not always," he said smoothly. "Not always." He suggested that she visit his office for some inside information. His tone made it clear that he considered his fellow Bible Church elder a victim, not an offender.