“What did she say?” I asked.

“She didn’t say much of anything. She was having a very hard time. She was very sick, very sick. Her temperature was high; she was sweating, shaking, and very unsteady. Almost incoherent. I couldn’t understand why the man hadn’t taken her to a hospital, and he told me that she didn’t want him to, that she wasn’t supposed to be having the baby, it was a real unpleasant family situation. He told me that the baby was the product of incest.” Dr. Bowden’s mouth folded up in a way that left no doubt as to how uncomfortable the word made him. “He said she was some kind of favorite of old Mr. Joyce, and she wanted to have the baby without him knowing, and then she would go back to her job and give the baby up for adoption. Her memories were too bad for her to want to keep it.”

And you believed this? I wanted to say, but knew I couldn’t break the flow of this confession. This was coming more easily than I ever would have believed, and I could only imagine that Tom Bowden had wanted to tell this story for years. I had a fleeting wonder about the kind of background this man must have, to have fallen for any of this. Of course, you had to add in the big dollop of greed that had influenced him.

“She didn’t have any family,” Manfred said, and after a second Dr. Bowden understood what Manfred was saying. He looked down at his desk fixedly. I could have hit Manfred for his interruption; at the same time, he’d only said what I was thinking.

“I didn’t know for sure,” Bowden muttered. “The man who’d brought me out to the ranch-I thought he was Drexell Joyce-the son. I figured the baby was probably his. Maybe he was ashamed to tell his grandfather that he’d been cheating on his wife; he was wearing a wedding ring, and Ms. Parish wasn’t.”

“Did she talk to you?” I said.

“What?”

“Mariah. Did she talk to you?” It seemed a simple enough question to me, but Tom Bowden was shifting uneasily in his black leather chair.

“No,” he said, and I sighed. Manfred raised a finger, just at the edge of my vision. He thought the doctor was lying again.

“So what happened?” I said, not seeing how we could get him to be honest unless we started beating on him.

“I cleaned the woman up, with some difficulty,” Dr. Bowden said. “I wanted to call for an ambulance and I told the man so again, but he told me that was out of the question. I went to get my coat to use my cell phone, but he’d taken it out of my coat pocket, and he wouldn’t let me have it. I had to treat the patient, and I didn’t have time to fight with him about the phone. She was clearly in the end stages. Even if I could’ve gotten her to a hospital within the hour-and the nearest hospital was that far away, incidentally-she wouldn’t have made it. She had a massive infection.”

“You’re saying she died that night.”

“Yes. About an hour and a half after I got there, she died. She got to hold the baby.”

We all sat silent for a moment. “So, what happened then?” Manfred said.

“The man asked me to examine the baby, and I found that she was okay, a little feverish, but nothing serious. Other than that, physically, she was fine.”

“The baby was a girl.”

“Yes, yes, she was. Small, but as far as I could tell she would be okay, if she got the proper course of treatment. He asked if I had the right stuff to give her. He was going to take the baby directly to the adoptive parents. I actually had some antibiotics with me in my bag, samples a salesman had given me. I explained the dosage and administration to him, and he carried the baby out of the room. That was the last I saw of the infant. The mother expired then.”

Expired. “And what did you do after that?”

He sighed, as if the complexity of relaying his story was too much for him to bear. “I told the man that we had to call into town. We had to report the death. We had quite an argument. He didn’t seem to understand that it was the law, that the law had to be followed.”

Since you’d already bent it so far out of shape, I thought. “But he let you call, finally?”

“He agreed, as long as I didn’t mention the baby. So the funeral home came to get the poor young woman, and I signed the death certificate.” His shoulders slumped. He’d finally told the worst thing, in his view, and now he could relax.

“You said she’d died of…?”

“Massive infection due to a ruptured appendix.”

“And no one questioned that?”

He shrugged. “No family came forward. The Joyces sent me a check to pay my bill-no more-and after that, if anyone who worked for them got sick, they came to me for treatment.”

It had been very clever of them not to offer Dr. Bowden an outright bribe. I was sure the bill he’d sent had been stiff, and they’d paid it just as they would have under normal circumstances. That had reassured the doctor. And since his practice wasn’t flourishing, they’d thrown him a big bone.

“With a setup like that, why’d you move to Dallas?” Manfred asked. Again, I wouldn’t have gotten into that, but again, I’d underestimated the doctor’s elasticity.

“It was my wife. She couldn’t stand Clear Creek,” he said. “And I’ve got to say, no one there got along with her, either. We were having some real wars at home. About six years ago, I got to talking to a doctor I’d never met before at an AMA meeting. He had a practice in Dallas. He told me his office was coming empty, did I want to take over the lease. It was at the previous price, much lower than new tenants were paying. And he’d throw in the equipment, too, because he was going overseas to a new job at an American consulate in Turkey or somewhere like that.”

Could he really not see how set up that had been? It was like someone attaching a string to a dollar bill and then setting it out on the sidewalk, so he could drag it away and get a passerby to follow the path of the money.

“Jeez Louise,” said Manfred. He almost continued, but fortunately he decided to keep his mouth shut.

“Thanks,” I said, after I’d tried to think of more questions to ask. “Oh, did someone else come here this morning, asking about Mariah Parish?”

“Ah… yes, as a matter of fact.”

Why the hell hadn’t I thought to bring pictures of the Joyces with me? I’d done well so far, for someone who didn’t know squat about being a detective, but this was a huge mistake I’d made.

“Who was he?”

“Said his name was Ted Bowman.”

Oh, not that that was anything like Tom Bowden, oh, no.

“And he wanted…”

Tom Bowden looked troubled, or rather, more troubled. “He wanted to know the same things you two wanted to know, but not for the same reason.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It was like he already knew the whole story. He just wanted to know how much I knew about who was involved.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I had no idea who the man who brought me to the house was, that as far as I could tell, the last time I saw the baby she was fine, and that I’d never talked to anyone else about that night.”

“And he said?”

“He said that was good news; he’d heard the baby had died and he was glad to know that she had survived. He said I better forget about that night, and I told him I hadn’t thought about it in years. He warned me that someone else might come asking questions, and he told me whoever came would be someone who was just trying to create trouble by saying Mariah Parish was still alive.”

“What did he tell you to do about that?”

“He told me it would be in my best interest to keep my mouth shut.”

“But you talked to us anyway.”

For the first time, Tom Bowden met my eyes. “I’m tired of keeping the secret,” he said, and I believed him. “I got divorced from my wife anyway. My practice isn’t doing too well, and my whole life hasn’t turned out like I thought it would. I date this downward slide from that night.”