Free Mortal Remains by Peter Clement

to preserve anonymity in such investigations. One was dated January 1974, the other June of the same year. They must be misfiled, he concluded, laying them aside.
    The final contents were old newspaper clippings lauding the Braden family’s involvement in the community. A FAMILY AFFAIR read the headline of one. It praised the volunteer work of Mrs. Charles Braden and her daughter-in-law, Kelly McShane Braden, at a local home for unwed mothers called The Braden Foundation Clinic founded by Dr. Charles Braden III. LIKE FATHER LIKE SON ran the lead of another article featuring Chaz helping check out a newborn at another of Dad’s projects, an upscale maternity center in Saratoga Springs.
    Nothing of use, Mark decided. The Bradens were renowned for lending their name to high-profile charities, as well as feeding the family fortune through commercial medical ventures such as high-priced private clinics. In fact Charles had pioneered the concept of combining the intimacy of home delivery with the latest in obstetrical technology in freestanding facilities, then franchised it through a well-known hospital chain. Mark returned the clippings to the file, having no idea why his father had stuck them here.
    Still, he had Kelly’s letter. He’d contact Everett first thing in the morning and tell the detective he’d found proof that she had a lover. Chances were he might have been the mystery man in the taxi.
    To which Everett would say, Who was he?
    And he’d have to admit he didn’t know.
    At that point Everett would probably hang up on him.
    Shit!
    He had another thought. Why hadn’t his father passed the letter on to the police? Obviously he kept it to himself even after she disappeared.
    As Mark picked it up and read it again, it sank in just how abstract Kelly was to him. How different and tormented she must have been from his sunlit memories of her. He never caught so much as a hint of her unhappiness or that she needed to escape from it. Nor had he any specific recollection of her last days in Hampton Junction. He remembered only his father telling him that she’d had to leave without saying good-bye.
    “Then I’ll say hello when she’s back,” Mark had said, accustomed to her comings and goings to medical school. But as days turned to weeks with no sign of Kelly, those few words with his dad became the landmark that stuck, not whatever laughing encounter with her that had been his last. Unlikely his take on her with the eyes of a seven-year-old would help explain anything about those final weeks anyway. Hell, he still had trouble reconciling his version of the woman he had known with the grisly remains lying in the mortuary.
    He continued to stare at the letter. It at least pinned down one event in the countdown to her murder. The day Kelly and his father planned to have lunch together, presuming they met, she had little more than a week to live.
    He pictured them at the Plaza. Had she been as rapturous and exuberant as she sounded in her writing? Was his father happy for her? Did they order champagne? The image of them toasting her well-deserved joy, oblivious to death being so near, filled Mark with sadness. Dreams could be so puny, struggle, hope, and daring so futile. She was on the verge of achieving everything – being a doctor, finding a man who loved her, making a clean break with her past. It made her moment of celebration seem all the more cruel.
    Then a chill that had nothing to do with the cold shimmied through him.
    That meeting, if it took place, also marked what would be the final two months of his father’s life.
     
    10:00 P.M.
    Buffalo, New York
     
    “Can we do a cuddle sandwich now, Daddy?”
    Earl looked up from his computer screen to see Brendan, dazed and tousled, totter through the study door. “What are you doing awake?”
    “Isn’t Mummy home yet?”
    “I’m afraid not.” He stood and picked the boy up. “But it’s back to sleep for you.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s very