Chapter 16 - The Phantom in the Ward
We found Dr. Julian Hargrove at the Shady Pines Convalescent Center in Ephrata. He was ninety-two years old, hooked to a low-flow oxygen concentrator, his fingernails thick and yellowed like horn. His room smelled of menthol ointment and tapioca pudding.
When Vance laid the 1994 x-ray report and the photograph of the .22 slug on his bedside tray, the old man didn't look at the paper. He looked at the window, where the late afternoon sun was turning the snow on the hemlocks into bruised violet.
"I didn't have a choice," Hargrove wheezed, his chest rattling with every breath. "James didn't just have money. He had the surveyor’s maps for the county sewer easement through my family’s property on the Cocalico. He told me if I called the state police, he’d have the drainage line routed through my water well. He’d ruin three generations of land."
"You let him take a four-year-old child with a bullet against his brain stem out into the snow," Vance said, his voice terrifyingly quiet.
"The bullet was stable," Hargrove whispered, his watery eyes blinking slowly. "I took the lateral film myself. It was wedged between the squamosal suture and the dura. There was no active hemorrhage. If I tried to operate, with the pediatric neurosurgical tools we had in ninety-four, he would have bled out on the table. The boy’s best chance was to let the bone encase it."
"And you lied on the chart," I said, stepping into his field of vision.
Hargrove looked up at me. His rheumy eyes traced the line of my nose, the shape of my cheekbones, the scar behind my ear. His lips began to tremble.
"You look like her," the old man whimpered. "Margaret came to my office three weeks before she died. She showed me the bruises on her forearms. The cigarette burns on the inside of her thighs. She said, *Julian, if he kills me, he’ll make sure nobody ever finds me. Promise me you won't let him take the boy.*"
"And you let him take me anyway," I said.
"He came back six months later," Hargrove said, tears leaking down the yellowed folds of his cheeks. "With a woman. A girl from the Mennonite community out near New Holland. Caroline. She was twenty years old. Scared out of her skin. James had her wearing Margaret’s wool coat. He introduced her to everyone as his wife. He told her if she ever spoke about the boy’s headaches, if she ever let a doctor touch his head, he’d put her in the same ground he put Margaret."
"Where is she now, Julian?" I asked. "Where did Caroline go?"
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Hargrove reached out with a trembling hand, pointing toward the drawer of his nightstand. "She was here. Two days ago. She brought me an envelope. She said she couldn't keep the salt on the table anymore."
***
