When the Bough Breaks by Jonathan Kellerman Page B

child has it rough growing up with a mother like that.”
    “I know what you mean.” I nodded, not knowing what she meant at all but hoping she’d tell me. People usually do when you don’t seem to care.
    “I mean, she’s such a scatterbrain—the mother. Everytime she comes here she forgets something, or loses something. One time it was her purse. The other time she locked her keys in the car. She really doesn’t have it together.”
    I clucked sympathetically.
    “Not that she hasn’t had it rough, growing up doing farm work and then marrying that guy who ended up in pris—”
    “Sandi.”
    We both turned to see a short, sixtyish woman with hair cut in an iron-grey helmet, standing in the doorway, arms folded across her bosom. Her eyeglasses hung suspended from a chain around her neck. She, too, was dressed in white, but on her it looked like a uniform. Her name tag proclaimed her to be Edna.
    I knew her right away. The doctor’s right hand gal. She’d probably been working for him since he hung out his shingle and was making about the same amount of money she’d started out with. But no matter, lucre wasn’t what she was after. She was secretly in love with the GreatMan. I was willing to bet a handful of blue chip stocks that she called him Doctor . No name after it. Just Doctor. As if he were the only one in the world.
    “There are some charts that need filing,” she said.
    “Okay, Edna.” Sandi turned to me, gave a conspiratorial look that said Isn’t this old witch a drag? and sashayed down the hall.
    “Can I do anything for you?” Edna asked me, still keeping her arms crossed.
    “No, thank you.”
    “Well, then, Doctor will be right with you.”
    “Thank you.” Kill ’em with courtesy.
    Her glance let me know that she didn’t approve of my presence. No doubt anything that upset Doctor’s routine was viewed as an intrusion upon Paradise. But she finally left me alone in the office.
    I took a look around the room. The desk was mahogany and battered. It was piled high with charts, medical journals, books, mail, drug samples, and a jar full of paper clips. The desk chair and the easy chair in which I sat were once classy items—burnished leather—now both aged and cracked.
    Two of the walls were covered with diplomas, many of which hung askew and at odds with one another. It looked like a room that had just been nudged by a minor earthquake—nothing broken, just shaken up a bit.
    I casually examined the diplomas. Lionel W. Towle had amassed an impressive collection of paper over the years. Degrees, certificates of internship and residency, a walnut plaque with gavel commemorating his chairmanship of some medical task force, honorary membership in this and that, specialty board certification, commendations for public service on the Good Ship Hope, consultant to the California Senate subcommittee on child welfare. And on and on.
    The other wall displayed photographs. Most were of Towle. Towle in fisherman’s garb, knee-deep in some river holding aloft a clutch of steelhead. Towle with a marlin the size of a Buick. Towle with the mayor and some little squat guy with Peter Lorre eyes—everyone smiling, shaking hands.
    There was one exception to this seeming self-obsession. In the center of the wall hung a color photograph of a young woman holding a small child. The colors were faded and from the styles of clothing worn by the subjects, the picture looked three decades old. There was some of the tell-tale fuzziness of an enlarged snapshot. The hues were misty, almost pastel.
    The woman was pretty, fresh-faced, with a sprinkle of freckles across her nose, dark eyes and medium-length brown hair with a natural wave. She wore a filmy-looking, short-sleeved dress of dotted swiss cotton,and her arms were slender and graceful. They wrapped around the child—a boy—who looked around two or younger. He was beautiful. Rosy-cheeked, blond, with cupid’s-bow lips and green eyes. He was dressed in a white