Chapter 38
Vivian Stillwater was not the lady in the lake.
Maggie looked at Declan and saw that he was just as taken aback as she was by this new information. Ingrid’s search for Vivian’s fate had turned up no record of any hospitalization or cremation, no death certificate. The woman had effectively been erased from all official records.
“How did she end up in the hospital?” Declan asked. “You said she had an accident.”
Cathy nodded. “It’s a strange thing. We know she managed to drive all the way from Purity, because her car was later found abandoned in a ditch on the New Hampshire side. She must have gotten confused or lost, because the police said she was walking barefoot on a road a few miles away when she was hit by a car. At the time she had no purse, nothing to identify her, so she was admitted to the hospital under the name Jane Doe. I didn’t find out where she was until days later.” Cathy paused, said quietly: “She never woke up from her coma.”
Maggie looked at the photos on the wall and focused on an image of two young women, their red hair windblown, their eyes crinkled in midlaugh. “Is that you and your sister?”
“Yes. Our girl trip to the Grand Canyon. She was a big hiker. Me, not so much. But she talked me into going down the Bright Angel Trail. It turned out to be the best day of my life.”
Bertie returned to the living room, carrying a tray of teacups and a plate of Danish butter cookies. The tragic story of Cathy’s sister had cast such a dark shadow over the room that the plate of cookies sat untouched. They were silent as Bertie poured the tea, fragrant with an exotic blend of jasmine and coconut, and handed out the cups.
“It is a sad story, isn’t it?” said Bertie. “I’m sorry I never met Vivian.”
“Oh, she would’ve loved you, Bertie,” said Cathy. “She adored saucy young men, almost as much as I do.” She gave a rueful shake of the head. “Which probably explains why I’ve been married three times.”
“After she was admitted to the hospital,” Maggie said gently, “who came to visit her?”
“Not a soul. Only me. When it became clear she wouldn’t improve, she was moved to a long-term care facility. Her health insurance covered all the expenses, thank God, because I certainly couldn’t afford it. And that’s where my beautiful sister ended up. Lying in a coma for three years, shriveling away to this—this mummified version of Vivian. It upset me to see her like that, but I never stopped visiting her. Every weekend, I’d sit by her bed, hoping she’d respond to my voice. Squeeze my hand, blink her eyes, something .” Cathy sighed. “Then one morning, they called to say she’d passed away during the night. Three years in a coma, and she was gone. My beautiful, brilliant sister.”
Bertie took her hand. It was clear from the way they looked at each other that he was more than just a nurse’s aide; he was family, and they were comfortable, simply sitting together and not saying a word.
“You said your sister had health insurance,” said Declan. “Was this from her job?”
“Yes. Some government research institute in Washington.”
“Washington? Where she was planning to drive, after visiting you.”
“Yes. I think she was going to meet someone about a new job. I know she wasn’t happy about the work she was doing in Maine. There’d been disagreements with her colleagues, especially the man in charge.”
“Would that be Dr. Greene?” said Maggie.
“Oh, Vivian never told me any of their names. Or much about their research project, for that matter. It was government stuff, you know, hush hush. She said I’d find it all boring anyway, and she was probably right. I never had a head for math and science, but Vivian, that’s what she loved. Even if she didn’t much care for the people she was working with.”
“What was the problem with these colleagues?”
“They made her feel unappreciated, unheard. She was probably smarter than any of them, but that’s how it was in those days, if you were a woman. You could work twice as hard as any of the men, but you weren’t valued or listened to. Even if you had an advanced degree in neurochemistry, like she did.”
“Neurochemistry?” Declan said, glancing at Maggie.
“I have no idea what that really means. But it got her a job right out of graduate school.”
Outside, the rain had turned to a drizzle and mist clouded the window, blurring the landscape to gauzy shades of gray. The tea in Maggie’s cup was lukewarm, its aroma now dissipated, but she continued to cradle the cup in her hands as she considered what they had just learned. Vivian Stillwater had been a neurochemist, a woman known for her reliability. If Vivian said she’d be somewhere, you could count on it, Cathy had said. Yet brilliant, reliable Vivian had somehow driven her car into a ditch and wandered, barefoot and confused, onto a highway.
“This project in Maine that she was working on,” said Maggie. “Did it have something to do with testing pharmaceuticals?”
Cathy looked up from her teacup, her eyebrow raised. “How did you know?”
By the time they drove home that evening, the fog had rolled in, a curtain so thick that it felt like the rest of the world had fallen away, that she and Declan were traveling through a spectral landscape that headlights could not penetrate.
“Her records were deliberately wiped,” said Maggie. “That’s why Ingrid couldn’t find out what happened to Vivian Stillwater. It was all redacted—her death certificate, her hospital stay, the police report of her accident. Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide that information.”
“But they didn’t erase the news archives of the good old Purity Weekly ,” said Declan.
“A small-town newspaper with a whopping circulation of a thousand?” Maggie shook her head and laughed. “They probably thought it wasn’t worth the effort. Still, they managed to erase her in almost every other way. Twenty, thirty years from now, there’ll be no one left alive who remembers how Vivian died. Or what she was doing in Maine.”
“Now we’re back to our original mystery. If that wasn’t Vivian’s skeleton in the pond, who do those bones belong to?”
“I have no idea, but it feels like it’s all connected. Vivian Stillwater. The lady in the lake. The attack on Zoe Conover.” She peered ahead, into the fog. Darkness had fallen, and the weak beams of their headlights illuminated a shifting landscape of mist curling over pavement. “At least now, we have a pretty good idea who Vivian was working for. Who they were all working for.”