Free Mortal Remains by Peter Clement Page B

had told him everything. The guy could be making a beeline to find him right now, which would take about a day. Shit, he might already have contacted the Buffalo authorities and a cruiser could be on the way to pick him up.
    Earl lay still. Feeling his heart start to race, he fought the compulsion to get up and peek through the bedroom window to make sure that a squad car wasn’t pulling up to the front door.
    But had she referred to that doctor as Mark? It didn’t sound right. Yet a second physician called Roper in so small a place was unlikely.
    He got out of bed and went to his study to check the directory of licensed physicians for New York State. He skimmed through all the Ropers, finding only one whose office address was Hampton Junction. Except it couldn’t be Kelly’s Dr. Roper. This man’s license number indicated he’d been in practice only seven years.
    The original Dr. Roper’s son? he wondered. That could also be problematic if the father were alive and capable of discussing what he remembered about Kelly. The name Earl Garnet might still come up.
    He undressed and returned to bed, hoping he could escape into sleep, but thoughts of Kelly persisted. He found himself drifting back to 1974.
     
    It had been the time of Watergate, Nixon’s ignominious slide toward the disgrace of his resignation, when the anatomy of the president’s self-destruction, like the Vietnam War, was documented in wall-to-wall television coverage. His downfall seemed suited to the little screen, running daily as it did with the incremental revelations of a soap opera, something Earl and his classmates could tune in to after skipping weeks of episodes without feeling behind in the story. As medical students in their most clinical year yet, they had little time to pay it more attention. But they never missed
M*A*S*H
.
    At the movies, portraits of evil topped the big box office hits. Robert De Niro emblazoned himself on everyone’s memory in
Godfather, Part II
; but for making them cringe, nobody topped Roman Polanski when he sliced open Jack Nicholson’s nose in
Chinatown
.
    As for music, they couldn’t get through a day on the wards without hearing the radio blast Paul Anka’s “Having my Baby” or Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.” In the OR surgeons cut and sewed to newcomer Elton John’s big hit, “Bennie and the Jets.”
    But to Earl’s gang, only one troubadour counted.
    Thousands of tiny flames, each a point of light held aloft, filled the darkness.
    Bob Dylan stepped forward on the stage.
    Robbie Robertson stood to the right of him, lean as a silhouette hunched over a guitar, The Band at his back.
     
    You say you love me,
    And you’re thinkin’ of me,
    But you know you could be wrong.
     
    He snarled the last word, loud and long.
    The crowd roared the words with him.
    “You sing that like you mean it,” Jack MacGregor called to Kelly. Shadows played over his thin face, resculpting its hollows.
    “You better believe I do,” she yelled back. Her eyes danced in the flicker of the tiny fires.
    Earl had rarely seen her look so radiant.
     
    … you go your way
    and I go mine.
     
    It was at that moment she slipped her hand into his and simply held it, the darkness preventing anyone from seeing.
    Melanie Collins leaned toward him from his other side. “Some study group,” she said, then laughed.
    “And we’ll be payin’ dearly for it, children,” Tommy Leannis added from his end of the row, the musical lilt of his Irish sounding false. His constant fear of failure emanated off him like a bad smell and made him a fifth wheel. Yet he insisted on tagging along whenever they knocked off the books for a night, as if he was just as afraid to be alone with all the material they still had to learn.
    “It’s all right, Tommy,” Kelly hollered back at him, never letting go of Earl’s hand. “If an old woman like me can get through, what have you got to worry about? Top five, all of us,” she predicted,