Prayers For Rain

I met her arched eyebrow with two of my own. “I wouldn’t say I was quite so-”

“Articulate?”

“Verbose,” I said. “But, otherwise, Dr. Bourne, that was the gist, yes.”

Dr. Bourne moved the ashtray a bit to her left so that we could see the small tape recorder behind it. “It’s my legal duty to inform you that this conversation is being recorded.”

“Cool,” I said. “Let me ask you-where’d you get that? Sharper Image, right? I’ve never seen one look so chic.” I looked at Angie. “You?”

“I’m still back at ‘intimated,’” she said.

I nodded. “That was a good one. I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but jeez.”

Diane Bourne shaved some excess ash off against the Waterford crystal. “You two have a very nice act going.”

Angie slugged my shoulder and I swept a hand at the back of her head that she ducked at the last moment. Then we both smiled at Dr. Diane Bourne.

She took another tiny toke off her cigarette. “Sort of a Butch and Sundance thing without the homosexual subtext.”

“Usually we get the Nick and Nora thing,” I said to Angie.

“Or the Chico and Groucho,” Angie reminded me.

“With the homosexual subtext, though. But that Butch and Sundance thing.”

“Quite the compliment,” Angie said.

I turned away from Angie and leaned my elbows on Dr. Bourne’s desk, looked past the swing of the metronome and into her pale, pale eyes. “Why would one of your patients have your session notes in her possession, Doctor?”

She didn’t say anything. She sat very still, her shoulders hunched very slightly, as if preparing for a sudden bite of cold air.

I leaned back in my chair. “Can you tell me that?”

She cocked her head to the left. “Would you repeat your question, please?”

Angie did so. I provided sign language.

“I don’t quite understand what you’re driving at.” She shaved off another sliver of ash in the crystal.

Angie said, “Is it common practice for you to take notes during sessions with your patients?”

“Yes. It’s common with most-”

“And is it your practice, Doctor, to then mail those notes to the patients they concern?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how,” Angie said, “did your notes for a session with Karen Nichols, dated April the sixth, 1994, end up in Miss Nichols’s possession?”

“I have no idea,” Dr. Bourne said with the barely patient air of a matron speaking to a child. “Possibly she took them herself during one of her visits.”

“You keep your files locked?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then how could Karen break into them?”

Her chiseled face slackened along the jawline and her lips parted. “She couldn’t,” she said eventually.

“Which would suggest,” Angie said, “that you or someone from your office gave confidential, potentially damaging information to a conceivably unbalanced client.”

Dr. Bourne closed her mouth and her jaw tightened. “Hardly, Ms. Gennaro. I seem to remember that we had a break-in here a few-”

“Excuse me?” Angie leaned forward. “You seem to remember a break-in?”

“Yes.”

“So there’d be a police report.”

“A what?”

“A police report,” I said.

“No. Nothing of value seemed to be missing.”

“Just confidential files,” I said.

“No. I never said-”

Angie said, “Because I would think your other clients would expect to be notified if-”

“Ms. Gennaro, I don’t think-”

“-confidential documents relating to the most personal aspects of their lives were in the hands of an unknown third party.” Angie looked over at me. “Don’t you agree?”

“We could let them know,” I said. “Purely as a public service.”

Dr. Bourne’s cigarette had turned to a curled finger of white ash in the crystal tray. As I watched, the finger collapsed.

“Logistically,” Angie said, “that would be tough.”

“Nah,” I said. “We just sit outside in our car. Every time we see someone rich who’s approaching the building and looks a little funny in the head, we assume they’re a client of Dr. Bourne’s and-”

“You will not.”

“-we approach and tell them about the break-in.”

“In the interest of the public good,” Angie said. “People’s right to know. Gosh, we’re kinda swell that way, aren’t we?”

I nodded. “No coal in our stockings this Christmas.”

Diane Bourne lit a second cigarette and watched us through the smoke, her pale eyes flat and seemingly nonplussed. “What do you want?” she said, and I detected just the hint of a throb in her vocal cords, a slight ticking not unlike the metronome.

“For starters,” I said, “we want to know how those session notes took flight from your office.”

“I haven’t the faintest.”

Angie lit her own cigarette. “Get the faintest, lady.”

Diane Bourne uncrossed her legs and tucked them to the side in that effortless way all women can and no man is remotely capable of. She held her cigarette up by her temple and gazed at Blake’s Los on the east wall, a painting that was about as calming as a plane crash.

“I had a temp secretary a couple of months ago. I sensed-no proof, mind you, just a sense-that she had been going through the files. She was only with me a week, so I didn’t give it much thought after she left.”

“Her name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“But you have records.”

“Of course. I’ll have Miles get them for you on your way out.” Then she smiled. “Oh, I forgot, he’s not here today. Well, I’ll make a note to have him send that information to you.”

Angie was sitting two feet away, but I could feel her pulse quicken and her blood warm along with my own.

I indicated the outer office with a backward jerk of my thumb. “Miles would be who?”

She suddenly looked as if she regretted ever mentioning him. “He’s, ah, just someone who works for me part- time as a secretary.”

“Part-time,” I said. “So he has another job?”

She nodded.

“Where?”

“Why?”

“Curious,” I said. “It’s an occupational hazard. Humor me.”

She sighed. “He works at Evanton Hospital in Wellesley.”

“The psych hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?” Angie asked.

“He’s their records clerk.”

“And how long has he worked here?”