Out Of The Deep I Cry

manners and play nice.”

“I always play nice. I’m like the real-life version of that Jerry Orbach guy on Law & Order.” Lyle stroked his bushy gray eyebrows.

“Except that Jerry Orbach is a lot better looking than you.” Russ stumped back down the hall to the interrogation room. Balancing on one crutch, he unlatched the door and pushed it open. He wanted to be sitting when Debba Clow and Burns came in. He figured the sight of him balancing precariously as he lowered himself into a chair wouldn’t do much good for his image as the Guy in Charge.

He had just stowed his crutches under his chair when Noble escorted Debba and Burns in. Russ watched her as she took in the room’s windowless, institutional green walls and the steel case furniture bolted to the floor. Her eyes widened and she turned to Burns. That’s right, honey, this is the real deal, Russ thought. Scary, isn’t it?

Burns looked at him coolly. “Don’t be intimidated, Debba. You’re here doing them a favor.” He took the chair across the table from Russ. Debba checked the seat beside Burns before settling in it, as if there might be something waiting to bite her.

“Just to avoid misunderstandings, we like to run tape when we’re asking questions.” Russ smiled in what he hoped was an easy, nonthreatening way. “It’s easy to forget who says what, and this way there’s a record for us all to refer to. So, Debba. Do we have your permission to tape you?”

She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Okay,” she said.

“And we will want a copy within twenty-four hours,” Burns added.

Russ nodded at Noble, who had taken up his position by the door. Entwhistle pressed the recording button set in the wall. “Okay, then,” Russ said. “For the record, this is Russ Van Alstyne, and I’m interviewing Deborah Clow-”

“I prefer Debba,” she said.

“We need your legal name on the record,” he said.

“Deborah Clow. Today is Monday, March twenty-seventh, and it’s”-he glanced at his watch-“nine-forty A.M. Deb, we have your consent to tape this, right?”

“Yeah. Yes, you do.”

“Deborah Clow is accompanied by her attorney, Geoffrey Burns.” Prick. “Debba, I want you to think back two weeks ago to Sunday night, March nineteenth. You met with Dr. Allan Rouse. Did he call you, or did you call him?”

She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Dr. Rouse called me,” she said.

“Were you surprised? Since you two had a run-in just a week before?”

She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Yeah. I was. Surprised.”

“What was the subject of his phone call?”

“Pardon?”

“What did Dr. Rouse want to talk about?”

She looked at Burns. Christ, this was going to take forever if she had to get his okay for every word out of her mouth. “Mr. Burns, you’re pretty quick on the up-take,” Russ said. “Maybe you could tell your client that you’ll interrupt if there’s anything you don’t think she should answer. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll be here for a very long time.”

Burns nodded to Debba. “It’s okay. Rest assured, I’ll jump in if he goes over the line.”

Sentence by sentence, Russ led her through the events of that evening. Her language was stilted, the way some people got when they knew they were being recorded, but her account was substantially the same as the one she had given him that Friday in Clare’s living room. She had agreed to meet him because he had kept insisting he was going to show her the truth about vaccines, and she thought anything he said to justify himself might be ammunition in her custody fight. No, she didn’t think her lawyer for the custody dispute would approve. No, she didn’t know where the directions he gave her would lead to. No, she didn’t see him until she arrived at the spot along the county road. Yes, they were each alone. Dr. Rouse had led the way through the trail to the tiny cemetery. He had a flash-light. She didn’t. No, she hadn’t been afraid of him. “I’m at least as big as he is,” she said. “I figured if he got weird on me, I could take care of myself.”

“Were you contemplating having to use force to defend yourself?” Burns asked before Russ could get his next question in.

“No,” Debba said. “I believe in nonviolent resolutions. Discussion, not disruption.”

Russ thought he remembered seeing the same sentiment on a bumper sticker on her car. It hadn’t impressed him then, either. “How does that jibe with your breaking into Dr. Rouse’s clinic and trashing one of his examining rooms two weeks ago?”

Burns’s arm shot in front of Debba like a parent holding a kid back at a stop-light. “That’s irrelevant to Dr. Rouse’s whereabouts,” he said. “You don’t need to address that, Debba.”

Russ waited a beat, and when it became apparent she was going to follow counsel’s advice, he went on. “What did Dr. Rouse say to you when you reached the graves?”

She looked at Burns. He nodded. “It’s hard to remember,” she said. “It was cold and dark, and I was thinking that I had made a major mistake, because obviously, he wasn’t going to tell me anything about the vaccines he had been using on the children of Millers Kill.” She caught a strand of her long, curly hair and wrapped it around one finger. “He told me to look at the dates on the headstones. He wanted me to understand how deadly and contagious some of the epidemic diseases were. Please. Like I hadn’t already spent two years reading up on them.”

Burns laid his hand on her arm. “Just stick to the question.”

“Oh. Okay. He had this idea that the epidemic wasn’t just the disease, but the effects of the disease. He said the parents of those four children died when their kids did.”

“What?” Those kids died in 1924, and he knew that whatever had happened to Jonathon Ketchem, he had been alive and kicking until 1930.

“I think he was speaking metaphorically. You know, they died inside. For a supposed scientist, he used a lot of metaphors. He was going on about links in the chain, about how each death sent ripples across the water, until more and more lives were swamped.” Russ must have been giving something away in his expression, because she nodded to him, her long corkscrew hair bouncing up and down. “Yeah, I didn’t know what to make of it, either. You can see what I meant when I said it was hard to tell what he was talking about.” She pushed some of her hair away from her face. “Then he said that if anything happened to my children, I would never forgive myself. Now, up to that point, I was feeling a little sorry for him, because I could tell he meant well, and he seemed to be in total denial about the role his vaccinations have played in screwing up kids’ health. But when he said that, I got mad.”

Geoff Burns was on her statement before she had time to draw breath. “When you say you got mad, Debba, do you mean you attacked the doctor?”

“Of course not.”

“You shouted at him? Threatened him in some way?”

“No. I got mad. I told him I thought between the two of us, he was the one who needed help, not me. Then I told him he should either give me the flashlight or escort me back to the road, because I was going home.”

“What did he do then, Deborah?” Russ leaned forward slightly. This would be the meat of it.

“I turned to go, and I took a few steps, and he must have tried to follow me, because I heard him kind of yell- you know, that noise people make when they’re falling on ice?”

He nodded. Oh yeah, he knew that noise.

“When I turned back toward him, he was laid out in front of one of the stones. I grabbed his flashlight and I could see that he had whacked himself pretty hard, he was bleeding and all.” She glanced over at Burns, as if to check if she could use the word blood.

“What did you do?”

“I helped him up the trail, back to where we had parked the cars. I took a better look at his gash, and I offered to drive him into town, but he turned me down.” She spread her hands in appeal. “How was I to know? He was the doctor, not me. Besides, if you’re a parent, you see plenty of head cuts over the years. They always bleed like crazy, but they don’t amount to anything.”

“So what happened next?”

“I watched him get into his car and turn it on. It was running, I saw the exhaust. Then I took off. That’s the