Dying to Remember Read online

  Barnes motioned to the television. “Do you know the answer to that?”

  Dr. Vincent looked at the screen. Vanna White stood beside a phrase with several of the letters revealed: _ E _ E _ B E _ _ _ E _ L _ _ _. He studied it for a moment as a contestant guessed the letter S and Pat Sajak replied, “No, there are no Ss.”

  “No,” Dr. Vincent answered finally. “Do you?”

  “‘Remember the Alamo.’”

  Dr. Vincent pulled up a chair. “That’s very good, Dr. Barnes.”

  “I knew it before they showed the L.” Barnes turned off the television. “But there’s a problem. I remember what I had for dinner last Valentine’s Day, yet I don’t have a clue what I ate for breakfast this morning.”

  “Well, the food here isn’t very memorable.”

  Barnes waited for a serious reply.

  “Do you recall how long you’ve been watching television?” asked the psychiatrist.

  Barnes thought about that. This was Wheel of Fortune, of course, a half-hour show, but had he watched it from the beginning or only partway through?

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “What’s happened to me?”

  “You’ve had a bout of food poisoning.” The psychiatrist reached into a manila folder and took out a sheet of paper with several black-and-white photographs on it. “These are pictures of people you should know. Do you recognize them?”

  Dr. Vincent was testing for prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. Barnes had seen this disorder once, unexpectedly, in a female patient who’d suffered a stroke following cardiac bypass surgery. For her it had been permanent. And profound. When her husband walked into her hospital room, she couldn’t figure out who he was until he spoke to her. This despite the fact that she could describe every feature of his face.

  Barnes glanced at the first picture. Yes, he recognized the person. “Abraham Lincoln.” He rattled off the others: “Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein . . .”

  “Very good.” Dr. Vincent seemed pleased, relieved, as he slid the paper back into the manila folder. “We used to have our prime minister on there, but nobody recognized him.” He chuckled at his joke.

  Barnes said nothing, too preoccupied with his memory deficit to appreciate any levity. He was still trying to remember the beginning of Wheel of Fortune.

  “I’m glad to see you passed that test,” continued Dr. Vincent. “And clearly you also don’t have any speech problems. We’d been concerned that your, um, damage might have extended into the parietal lobe. But clearly you don’t have a problem with speech. So let’s move on, shall we?”

  Barnes wanted to move on, and he understood the necessity of neuropsychiatric testing, but he felt uneasy with what they might find. His impairment could be worse than either of them suspected.

  “I’d like to try something different,” said Dr. Vincent. “I’m going to ask you to remember three objects for me. All right?”

  Barnes shifted uneasily. “How about a cigarette first?”

  “No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”

  “Not you. Me.”

  “You don’t smoke, either. You quit two weeks ago.”

  Two weeks? “The only way I could quit for two weeks is if I was in a coma.”

  Dr. Vincent nodded. “Yes, well, you were. It’s now been more than two weeks since you’ve had a cigarette, and you won’t have another one as long as you’re in the hospital. You may think you need them, but the fact is you’ve gotten over your addiction to nicotine, and any need you perceive is purely psychological.”

  Now that Barnes thought about it, he didn’t actually need a cigarette. He wanted one to help him relax, to hold in his fingers and distract him, but not to take the edge off the jittery discomfort that used to come over him when he went too long without one. Maybe, at least for the time being, he really had kicked the habit.

  “Now, I want you to remember frog, apple, and umbrella.” Dr. Vincent enunciated the words as though talking to a child. “Can you repeat those?”

  “Frog, apple, umbrella.”

  “Good, very good.”

  Barnes knew the doctor was just trying to encourage him, but the man’s tone was unacceptable. “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t patronize me. I speak three languages, I have two Harvard degrees, and I’m a world authority in cardiothoracic surgery.”

  Dr. Vincent’s pasty skin turned red. “I’m not patronizing you. I’m evaluating you.” Then, changing the topic, he said, “Let’s continue, shall we?” He cleared his throat. “I need you to do an exercise . . . Starting with one hundred, please subtract seven and keep going.”

  Barnes was tempted to ask why but decided the request was harmless enough. “One hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine, seventy-two, sixty-five, fifty-eight, fifty-one, forty-four—”

  “That’s fine,” Dr. Vincent interrupted. “Now tell me the three words I asked you to remember.”

  “Three words?” Knowing how psychiatrists worked, Barnes realized he must have been told those words just a few minutes ago. His heart began to pound, and he suddenly felt hot.

  Dr. Vincent seemed oblivious. “Yes. I asked you to remember three words. I said them, and then you repeated them. Do you remember what they are now?”

  Barnes concentrated. What had he been doing a few minutes ago? Reading? Watching TV? He glanced at the dark picture tube of the television and thought he remembered watching it, but the program slipped his mind.

  “Do you remember any of the three words?” Dr. Vincent repeated.

  “Um . . .” Barnes said the only thing that came to mind. “Frog?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Dr. Vincent smiled.

  Barnes felt a rush of relief.

  “Do you remember any of the others?”

  Remembering another word seemed more daunting than reading the psychiatrist’s mind. It must be a noun, Barnes thought. “Pear, maybe.”

  “Close. It was apple. Do you remember that now?”

  The thrill of recalling frog had been replaced by the frustration of not recalling apple. “No.” Barnes clenched a fistful of blanket. “I can’t remember anything. I can’t even remember what happened the week before I came here.”

  Dr. Vincent raised an eyebrow. “Before the poisoning? Now that’s . . . that’s unexpected. Your memory of that should be intact.”

  “Well, it isn’t. Bits and pieces—eating mussels in the restaurant, and afterwards. But that’s about it. I don’t even remember saying good-bye to Elizabeth. What happened to me?”

  Dr. Vincent frowned. “We weren’t sure until a few days ago. From the start, scientists at our Atlantic Research Laboratory suspected a toxin secreted from a diatom consumed by the mussels.”

  “A diatom?”

  “That’s right. A diatom is algae.”

  “I know what a diatom is.”

  “Yes, well, fourteen other people from your hotel were poisoned, and two died. Most of the others had a relatively mild course. They were hospitalized for only one or two days and recovered fully. It seems this toxin produces more serious illness in males and also in the elderly, maybe because of increased sensitivity of receptors in the affected areas of the brain. Throughout Canada there were a hundred and seven cases of this food poisoning. The contaminated mussels were cultivated off the shores of Prince Edward Island—the east coast, probably the Cardigan River estuary—and they were flown in the day that you and others at your hotel ate them.”

  “What type of toxin was it?” Barnes asked.

  “At first our scientists guessed paralytic shellfish poisoning, but the symptoms in experiments with mice weren’t what you see with that. To make a long story short, you were poisoned by something called domoic acid, produced by a type of blue algae.”

  “Domoic acid,” Barnes repeated, hoping that saying it to himself might help him remember it. “How do you spell that?”

  Dr. Vincent spelled it
for him, and Barnes wrote it on a piece of paper.

  “You probably don’t remember,” said Dr. Vincent, “but we ran a PET scan on you yesterday. Are you familiar with that technology?”

  “Somewhat.” Barnes didn’t like to admit not knowing a medical procedure, even if it wasn’t in his area of expertise. “It’s a diagnostic tool in radiology, like a CAT scan or an MRI.”

  “Yes. We also did a CAT scan and magnetic resonance imaging, and both of those were negative. But a PET scan is different. It measures glucose metabolism in your brain. You know that your brain uses this sugar as its sole source of energy. Therefore, if the brain cells are alive, they must be utilizing and metabolizing glucose. In your case, the cells around the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes don’t metabolize glucose.”

  Barnes felt a knot in his throat. A significant amount of cell death in those regions could cause a permanent impairment. “Why those areas?” he asked.

  “Probably because they’re located around the ventricles of the brain,” said Dr. Vincent. “That region has an incomplete blood-brain barrier, allowing the domoic acid to penetrate.”

  Barnes knew that the blood-brain barrier is a natural blockade to many drugs and toxins. If that barrier had been a little more effective, the toxin would have been relatively harmless; a little less effective, and he would have suffered massive brain damage. “So this toxin has destroyed much of my medial temporal lobes,” he said. “And that may be irreversible?”

  Dr. Vincent paused before answering. “That might appear to be the case, but the brain oftentimes compensates in ways that are subtle and poorly understood. When one part is damaged, the surrounding viable cells may take over that function. There’s much we don’t know about this, but regardless, I would expect your condition to improve somewhat.”

  “Somewhat,” Barnes echoed. He couldn’t help but think that meant “very little.”

  Dr. Vincent regarded him earnestly. “We won’t know for at least a couple of weeks and perhaps not for a couple of months. In the meantime, there are things we can do to help, and even if you don’t recover more of your short-term memory, we can still improve your level of functioning.”

  “I doubt that. How can I do anything meaningful without short-term memory? I sure as hell can’t perform bypass surgery. What am I supposed to do if I don’t remember from one minute to the next what’s happening?”

  “Perhaps you can assist others,” Dr. Vincent suggested.

  Barnes remained silent. Of course he could assist. Anybody could assist—even medical students who couldn’t identify the major branches of the coronary arteries. Assisting in surgery was only a small step above doing nothing at all.

  “Regardless, we can work on ways to improve your memory.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like visual rather than auditory encoding. You may be able to remember an image better than a spoken word. If I ask you to remember frog, you may be able to recall it for a longer period of time if you form an image of a frog in your mind, rather than just trying to remember the spoken word.”

  He couldn’t believe he’d been reduced to trying to remember the word frog. But at least he wouldn’t have to face this handicap alone. Elizabeth would be there. He tried to recall his last conversation with her. Nothing came to mind, not even saying good-bye before the conference.

  He remembered planning his trip to Toronto several months ago, but he couldn’t recall boarding the plane to fly to the meeting. Now that he thought about it, he also couldn’t remember giving his seminar at the conference, even though parts of dinner with Cheryl later that day seemed uncannily clear. The mussels—plump and juicy. Coarse strands of dark seaweed-like hair had stuck out of the center of a few of the mollusks, and pulling off the tufts had been difficult.

  All these details he could remember—even steam from the white wine broth rising from the bowl—yet he couldn’t recall saying good-bye to Elizabeth. His last memory of his wife was of her giving Rex a bath. He’d handed her a towel, and she’d needed it more than the dog. Rex had rubbed up against her and had soaked her oversize T-shirt, and then the dog had shaken himself and spattered water all over her. When was that? Eight days before the conference, he figured. Eight days. He wondered whether the other memories would return.

  “Do you know whether my wife was here earlier today?” he asked Dr. Vincent.

  The psychiatrist paused before answering. “Let’s not talk about her just yet. Let’s talk about you.”

  The man was avoiding something. Something about Elizabeth. Had she found out about Cheryl? That was one secret—one mistake—he wanted to keep to himself. All right, he decided. One thing at a time. They could talk about Elizabeth later.

  But he couldn’t stop thinking about her. She knows, he thought. How could she not?

  He only hoped she would forgive him.

  Chapter 8

  Elizabeth Kramer Barnes had been gunned down in the front hallway of her five-bedroom house, along with the family dog. Detective Gordon Wright and his partner had been assigned the case, and that was fine with Wright, even though two other unsolved murders currently took up most of his time. This new case would be high profile: a prominent surgeon’s wife, herself a surgeon, murdered in her own home. Of course, in these types of homicide investigations, the husband is always a suspect, but his alibi—being comatose in another country—was pretty good. Still, Barnes could have hired someone. He wouldn’t have been the first.

  Before Wright had come to Massachusetts, he’d been involved in the case of the physician in Ohio who’d cut his wife into pieces and buried her in the basement. That’s why the lieutenant had given him this one; Wright had experience with physicians’ murdered wives. This despite the fact that he was incapable of understanding how anyone could do such a thing.

  Maybe he was becoming too sensitive. Cops are supposed to get hardened by the things they see—the cruelty and senseless homicides—but that hadn’t happened to him. Cruelty made him appreciate kindness. Homicides made him value life.

  Wright had a lot to be thankful for. He’d been married for seven years, and he loved his wife as much as the day they’d met, despite the limitations and hardship that plagued her daily life. Up until a few years ago, they’d gone hiking, canoeing, and even cross-country bicycling. That was before the accident, before she’d followed Trixie, their cat, out the window onto a ledge to try to rescue her. They’d both fallen, two stories. The cat had walked away, only to get run over and killed by a car during the commotion that followed. Karen broke her back and severed her spinal cord. She would never walk again, never feel anything from the waist down.

  Karen was a teacher, an associate professor in the English Department at Boston University. Wright had met her one autumn afternoon climbing Mount Washington in New Hampshire. They’d stumbled along the same path on the way down, after a fog had descended upon the mountain and he could barely see his feet through it. He and his partner, Marty Gould, had heard voices below them, and they’d called back and forth until they met as a group.

  Karen had been with Andrea, a friend of hers visiting from Minnesota, but Wright had hardly noticed the other woman. He’d been captivated by Karen’s easy smile and carefree nature. She had long, curly hair the color of the red maple leaves that graced the lower mountainside, and hazel eyes that seemed to grab hold of him.

  After introductions, they all headed down the mountain together. They ended up on the wrong trail and had to hitch a ride fifteen miles with a couple of college students to get back to their cars. Wedged into the backseat of an old subcompact with worn-out shocks, Wright and Karen fell in love. Even now, he could still recall her animated conversation and the sensation of her hip pressed against his during the bumpy trip to the other side of the mountain.

  Ten months later, in a ceremony with half the police in the precinct, Gordon and Karen had exchanged wedding vows. They tied the knot in Boston, on the esplanade along the Charles River near the Longfellow
Bridge. Marty Gould served as the best man. Andrea had been there, too, and Gould dated her briefly. He tended to go through women faster than cheap shoes, although Wright had a feeling Gould’s current girlfriend, Gloria, would outlast all the others combined. She and Gould had been an item now for three months, and they still hadn’t moved past the early romance stage. Gould had even bought a new overcoat and shoes with thicker heels to make him look a little more stylish and a little less stocky, and he’d gotten rid of his lucky hat that was about twenty years old.

  Gould had been Wright’s partner since two weeks after Wright had transferred to the precinct. They had little in common, but that seemed to work better for them. With “good cop/bad cop,” Gould was always the latter. Until he partnered with Wright, he’d typically done just “bad cop,” but Wright had convinced him the combination worked better, and that wasn’t easy to do, considering Gould had single-handedly extracted a confession from Larry Baxter, the Butcher of Back Bay, a serial killer who’d practiced his profession on stranded motorists. Not only that—Gould had made the man pee his pants during the interrogation.

  Now Gould and Wright typically did interrogations together, and Wright usually asked the first question. Like hammering a nail, he would get it started. Gould would pound it in.

  Wright couldn’t wait to get a crack at Christopher Barnes. He looked at the file on his desk but didn’t pick it up. He didn’t need to. Everything in it was already in his head.

  “Hey, Gordy.”

  He looked up to see Gould standing there. “Marty.”

  “Just heard something on our Elizabeth Barnes case.” Gould turned a wooden chair around and sat down with the back between his legs. “Our prime suspect just woke up from his coma.”

  “Well, he’s prime only because we don’t have anyone else,” Wright reminded him. “Being in a coma is a pretty good alibi.”

  “He did it,” Gould insisted. “Nine times out of ten it’s the husband. I’d bet my left nut.”