3. Ostranders First Confession
Ostrander's First Confession
He came at seven in the morning, before the practice opened, and he brought a coffee cake he did not touch.
I want to describe him properly, because this is the last book and because Walt Ostrander is the reason there is a story at all.
He was seventy-seven that spring. He had got smaller in the four years I'd known him — that specific shrinking that happens fast in the mid-seventies — and he had a hearing aid now that he was theatrical about, and Dolores had died in the autumn, which he had mentioned to me once, in a sentence, and then never again.
He still wore the parrot shirts. He still came by twice a month.
He had never, in four years, sat in my courtyard without talking.
He sat in my courtyard for eleven minutes without talking.
Floss got up from under the table and put her head in his lap, which is what she does, and he put his hand on her and looked at the fountain.
"I've had that in my head for twenty-eight years," he said eventually.
"Tell me."
"She came in on the third of November in 1998 and I fixed a broken tooth.
" He said it the way you'd say something you had rehearsed enough times that it had gone smooth.
"She was twenty-two. She'd been a patient since she was eighteen — she came in on her own, no parents on the account, paid cash, always paid cash, always on the day.
Worked at Cabrillo's on the wharf. Nice girl.
Funny. Told me once she was saving for a house, at twenty-two, on a waitress's money, which I thought was the most Santa Barbara thing I'd ever heard.
" His hand moved on the dog's head. "She'd broken the corner off an upper lateral.
She said she'd fallen on the stairs at work.
And there was a bruise along her jaw on the left, here, about four days old, going yellow at the edge. "
"And you asked her."
"I asked her." He nodded slowly. "I asked her twice.
I said, Casey, that's a strange way to fall, and she said the stairs are wet, Dr. O, you should see them.
And I said, is somebody hurting you. In those words.
In that chair, in that room, in 1998." He finally looked at me.
"And she looked at me — and Lila, I have thought about this look every week for twenty-eight years — she looked at me like I'd said something embarrassing, and she laughed, and she said, 'Dr. O, honestly.
' And then she changed the subject, and I fixed the tooth, and I wrote down what I saw, and I told her to come back in two weeks, and she said she would. "
"And then?"
"And then she didn't come back in two weeks," said Walt Ostrander, "because on the fourteenth of November she went missing, and it was in the paper twice, and I read it, and I did nothing."
The courtyard was very quiet. Somewhere out on Anacapa a delivery truck was backing up.
"Walt—"
"Let me do it," he said. "I've had twenty-eight years to get it in order, at least let me say it in order.
" He put both hands flat on the table. "I called the police department on the nineteenth of November, 1998.
I spoke to a desk sergeant. I said I was a dentist and I'd seen the girl on the third and she'd had an injury I didn't believe the explanation for, and I thought somebody ought to know.
And he took my name, and he said thank you, doctor, we'll pass it on.
" He stopped. "And nobody ever called me back.
And in February the paper said they didn't suspect foul play and she'd talked about leaving town.
And I thought: well. There you are. They know more than I do. She probably did go. Girls do."
"That's not nothing," I said. "You called. You did call."
"I called a desk sergeant and I let it go," said Walt.
"That's what I did. I was forty-eight years old, I had a mortgage and two kids and a practice, and a girl I saw twice a year didn't come back for a two-week check, and I made one phone call and let a man I never met tell me it was handled, and then I went and looked at teeth for another eighteen years.
" He shook his head slowly. "And every time.
Every single time after that, Lila — and there were others, there were four or five over the years — every time somebody sat in that chair with a story that didn't fit, I wrote *pt anxious*, and I asked, and they said no, and I let it go, because that's all you can do.
And that's true. That is genuinely all you can do. And it has never once been enough."
Floss had not moved. She had her whole head in his lap and her eyes shut.
"I sold you this practice," he said, "because Dolores wanted Palm Desert and because my hands had started doing a thing on long crowns.
That's what I told you. But the other reason is down those stairs in a gray cabinet, and it's got about six charts in it, and one of them is hers, and I have not been able to go into that basement since about 2009. "
"Walt, you went down there with me in 'twenty-three. For the Vance boy's file."
"I know," said Walt Ostrander. "You'd have gone without me."
I got up and went around the table and put my arms around a seventy-six-year-old man in a parrot shirt, in my courtyard, at half past seven in the morning, and he sat there and let me, and after a while he patted my forearm twice, which was as much as he was going to do.
"Right," he said, when I'd sat back down. "Where are we. What do you need."
"Walt, you don't have to—"
"Lila." He pulled the coffee cake toward him, finally, and cut a piece he still didn't eat.
"There is a woman on the Westside who has been waiting twenty-eight years, and a police department that has to reopen a file that says *no foul play* with somebody's name on the bottom of it, and a dentist in Ventura who is going to take ten weeks to say what you and I already know.
I have a card index in that basement that nobody living can read but me.
And I am seventy-six years old and my wife is dead and my hands shake and there is precisely one useful thing left in me.
" He looked up, and his eyes were wet, and he was not going to acknowledge it, and neither was I.
"So don't you dare be gentle with me. What do you need? "
I thought about it.
"I need to know," I said, "who drove her home."
Walt frowned. "What?"
"Walt, you did a composite on an anterior tooth under local.
You don't drive somebody home for that. But you wrote *adv.
f/u two weeks* and you wrote *pt anxious*, and you are the only dentist I have ever met who writes down, on every chart, in the margin, whether somebody came in alone.
" I leaned forward. "You did it to me about the Vance boy.
You said Harriet brought him in. You said she paid cash.
You've been doing it for forty years because it's how you keep track of who belongs to whom. "
Walt Ostrander looked at me across an untouched coffee cake for a long moment.
"I'd have to see the chart," he said slowly. "The margin's not always — it's not a system, Lila, it's just a thing I did."
"The chart's in my office."
"Then get the chart," said Walt Ostrander.