Second Chance (17 page)

I put that call on hold and dialed the other number,
the one that Ethan had called from the motel room, the one for The
Medical Pool.

A woman answered as sweetly as if she were already
sitting there by the rented bed, mopping my brow.

"You have reached The Medical Pool. How may we
help you?"

I said to her. "My name's Ethan Pearson. I
called you last night, remember?"

"Of course, I remember, Mr. Pearson," the
woman said reassuringly. "Was Rita available?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Rita Scarne. The nurse you requested for
emergency service. We paged her at home and transferred your call,
don't you remember?"

lt appeared that Ethan had made two calls for the
price of one.

"Yes, I did talk to her," I said, jotting
down the name "Rita Scarne" on a yellow pad. "But I
seem to have misplaced her home number."

"Not to worry. I can find it for you." She
went off the line for a second. "Are you ready?"

"A1l set," I said.

"555-1543. Remember, if she's not home, try at
Holmes Hospital."

"Thanks again," I said, hanging up.

I'd just tried the number, thinking it was K mart.
But it wasn't K mart. It was a nurse named Rita Scarne. Since she
obviously wasn't at home I called Holmes Hospital. The patient
information service told me that Rita Scarne wasn't on duty that
afternoon. They suggested I try Rollman's, where Nurse Scarne also
worked part-time.

Rather than phoning Rollman's I drove over to the
hospital on Burnett. The attendant at the door recognized me from the
day before.

"If you come back to see Dr. McCall, he ain't
here. Had a meeting to go to."

"Nurse Rostow will do," I told him.

He checked to make sure Nurse Rostow was at her
station, then passed rne through. I took the elevator up to the third
floor and followed the arrows around the typing carrels to Sam
McCall's office. Ms. Rostow smiled at me as I walked up to her desk.

"I hadn't expected to see you again so soon, Mr.
Stoner."

"I hadn't expected to be back."

The woman nodded at McCall's door. "He's gone to
a board of directors meeting and won't return today."

"This may be something you can help me with."

Ms. Rostow's face lit up pleasantly. "I'll
certainly try. Have a seat."

I sat down across the desk from her. "Do you
know a nurse named Rita Scarne?"

"Of course," she said smartly, as if it was
the first round of a quiz show. "Miss Scarne has worked here
since late 1974. On and off."

"You mean she's part-time?"

"I meant precisely what I said," the woman
said. "Miss Scarne was a full-time nurse here. In fact, she was
chief of the nursing staff for a short while.

"A very short while," she added.

"Something happened?"

Nurse Rostow hesitated this time before hitting the
buzzer. I had the distinct impression that she didn't care for Rita
Scarne and would have told me why if her professional ethics hadn't
blocked the way.

"There was some trouble," she said, feeling
her way around the block.

"With a doctor?" I asked curiously.

"No," she said. "Miss Scarne had . . .
she didn't behave professionally on the wards."

Judging from the blush in old Ms. Rostow's cheeks I
had the feeling that the trouble had been sexual.

"I shouldn't have told you that," she said,
looking embarrassed. "Rita's an excellent nurse, who has been
quite successful in private practice. She is very much in demand. The
problem I referred to is old business. Very old."

I changed the subject to spare her any more
embarrassment. "When was Rita Scarne head nurse here?"

"In late 1975 and '76."

"So she might have had contact with Herbert
Talmadge?"

"I couldn't say for sure. She was head nurse, so
it's quite possible."

I was thinking of the transcript I'd read—the
interview from 1976 in which Talmadge had made his awful confession;
Isaac Goldman, the intern from St. Louis, had been Talmadge's
psychiatrist at the time. But throughout the interview Goldman had
been assisted by someone else, someone with the initials R. S. I'd
assumed R. S. was another psychiatrist, now it occurred to me that it
might have been head nurse Rita Scarne. She had to have some
connection with Talmadge—some connection that was obvious to Ethan
Pearson—or I couldn't see why Ethan would have phoned for her.

"Is Miss Scarne on duty today?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. I can check, if you'd like."

"Please."

She picked up a phone, pressed a couple of buttons,
and asked, "Is Nurse Scarne on duty?"

After a moment she hung the phone up daintily and
said,

"No, Miss Scarne is not here today."

I sighed. "It's important that I get hold of
her."

‘
*Have you tried Holmes Hospital? Or her house?"

"She's not at Holmes, and I don't have her
address."

"I can help you with that," Ms. Rostow
said. She flipped through a Rolodex and scribbled an address down on
a notepad. "Here."

Rita Scarne must have made a good living, because her
home was on Ridge Road in Amberley Village. That's where I decided to
go next.

20
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Rita Scarne's house was in a wooded dell on the east
side of Ridge Road—a two-story Colonial with rounded doors, Dutch
windows, and a steep cross gable in front. A black-topped driveway
led down to it through a small stand of oak trees. It was just a
little past three when I got there, but the sun was already beginning
to set. The slanting light caught in the bare limbs of the oaks,
turning them gold. Heavy shadows enveloped the trunks, stretching
across the yard and up the brick walls of the house.

The driveway terminated in front of a built-in
garage. The garage door was open and a green Audi was parked inside.
There was a sticker on the rear bumper—"Nurses Are the Best
Medicine."

It was a very expensive place—a little too
expensive for an unmarried nurse, I thought. But for all I knew she
had other sources of income.

I got out of the Pinto and followed a cement walkway
to the front door. It was cold in the shady dale and so quiet I could
hear the wind creaking in the maples like house noises in the night.

I peered through the small leaded-glass window in the
front door before ringing the bell. All I could see was sunlight
pouring through French windows at the end of a tiled hallway. When I
pressed the buzzer, a woman appeared in the hall. I backed away from
the window as she came up to the door and opened it.

"Yes?" she said in a husky, sensuous voice.

Rita Scarne, if that was who the woman was, was a
tall, hefty blonde in her mid-forties, with an attractive sunbeaten
face and slanting, plum-colored eyes. She was wearing a white mu-mu
without much on underneath it, judging from the way the fabric clung
to her large breasts and heavy hips. She'd made an early start on the
evening, because her breath smelled of bourbon. Her sexy blue eyes
looked a little clabbered with it.

"Rita Scarne?"

"That's me. Who are you?"

"My name is Stoner, Ms. Scarne. I wonder if I
could talk to you for a minute."

"About what?" the woman said with half a
smile. She ran one hand up the jamb of the door, rested the other on
her hip and stared at me afresh, as if she liked my looks and didn't
care if I knew it.

"It's a personal matter. I promise not to take
up much of your time."

"You're not selling something, are you? Like
encyclopedias?"

I smiled. "No. I just want to ask you a few
questions."

"All right. Go ahead."

"Maybe we could talk inside? It's pretty cold
out here."

She closed her eyes thoughtfully then said, "Why
not?"

And waved me through the door.

"If you're selling insurance, Mr. Stoner, I'm
going to be very disappointed," she said as we walked down the
hallway to the back of the house. She turned right at a doorway, and
I followed her into an enclosed patio, full of cane furniture. The
back wall was all glass, and the sun pouring through it filled the
room with light.

The woman sat down on a fan-back chair. I sat on a
small pillowed sofa across from her. There was a bottle of Old
Grand-dad on a small table to her right. Just the bottle—no
glasses. "So what is it you are selling, Mr. Stoner?" she
said wryly.

"Nothing. I'm a private detective."

"You're kidding," the woman said, looking
aghast. She almost reached for the bottle but caught herself.

I took out my wallet and showed her the photostat of
my license.

"I'm working for a man named Phil Pearson. A
psychiatrist—"

"I know who he is," the woman said sharply.

Rita Scarne gave me a cold, suspicious look—a far
cry from the bedroom eyes she'd been making at the front door. "Why
would Phil send you to me?"

"He didn't send me. I came because of his kids,
Ethan and Kirsty. They've been missing since last Thursday. Pearson
hired me to find them."

"I still don't understand why you care to me."

"There's a strong possibility that Ethan Pearson
tried to call you last night, Ms. Scarne. At least, he called your
agency, The Medical Pool, and they transferred his call to your
number. He also received a return phone call from a woman."

"Why would he call me? I haven't seen Ethan or
his sister or Phil in years."

"He didn't call?"

"I wasn't even here last night. My sister was
house-sitting for me."

"She left no messages?"

"
No."

"
And you didn't call Ethan?"

She just stared at me.

"Do you have any idea why he would have called
The Medical Pool for your number?"

She thought about it for a second. "I did work
for Phil once. But that was a long time ago."

"
Doing what?"

Rita Scarne gave me an irritated look, as if she were
offended by the question;by the idea of being questioned at all. "He
hired me to look after his wife, Estelle, if it's any of your
business. The experience left a very had taste."

The woman pursed her lips as if she could still taste
it.

"Was Estelle Pearson in your care in l976?"

Rita Scarne hesitated a moment then nodded, yes.

"That would have been right before she died?"

"Yes," she said bitterly, as if I'd pulled
the admission out of her like a tooth. "I was her nurse when she
died."

"So Ethan would have remembered you from that
time?"

"Oh, yes," the woman said with a dull
laugh. "He would have remembered me. "

"You had problems with him?"

"You could safely say that. Ethan was a very
disturbed kid. It was difficult for me to do my job with him around.
He was always spying on me, bossing me about, trying to catch me up.
And when he wasn't snooping he was getting in the way. He scarcely
left me or his mother alone for a minute. It was exhausting—that
kind of attention. And counter-productive."

"You mean he kept you from doing your job."

"
I mean he kept driving his mother crazy,"
she said, losing patience. "Look, the little bastard didn't want
Estelle to recover. If she recovered he wouldn't have had her all to
himself. When she was depressed she used to dote on his attentions.
As she got better she had less time for him. And that really pissed
him off. You could see it in his face—a cold, venomous rage."

After thirteen years Rita Scarne's revulsion for
Ethan Pearson was still as intense as if he'd just insulted her the
day before. I figured that that kind of hatred had to be mutually
felt, which made Ethan's apparent desire to get in touch with the
woman inexplicable. Unless he and Kirsty felt that they had no
choice—that Rita Scarne knew something that no one else could tell
them.

I said, "Do you remember another patient of
yours from the mid-seventies. A man named Herbert Talmadge?"

Rita Scarne's blue eyes went dead. "Herbert
Talmadge?"

"He was a patient at Rollman's when you were
head nurse there. Ethan has been looking for him for years now. It
could be that was why he contacted you. He may have thought you knew
how to find Talmadge."

"That's ridiculous!" The woman's face
filled with high spots of color. "I don't even remember this
man. Why would I know where he is? What do I have to do with it?"
She brushed her cheeks with the palms of her hands as if she was
trying to wipe the blush away. "I think you better leave,"
she said angrily. "I don't care to talk about this. I don't care
to be reassociated with that fami1y's problems. I'm not guilty of
anything."