The Lobotomist's Wife(70)

Ruth watched the boy’s eyes grow wide as she clutched more tightly to the attaché case in her hands. “Um, okay. Um, just a minute.”

Ruth watched as the boy walked to the far end of the room where the uniformed men were talking. They stopped for a moment and looked at her, and then one walked in her direction. He was a solid-looking man; perhaps he had played football in school. He didn’t seem old enough to be the captain, but he certainly had more gravitas than the one who had greeted her. She stood up taller.

“Ma’am, I am Officer Johnson, would you like to come sit down?” He ushered her toward a wooden chair next to what seemed to be his desk. “Charlie said you’re here about a murder?”

“Indeed.” Ruth nodded and began removing the files from her leather case and piling them on the desk. “It happened several years ago now, but I have the proof right here. My husband killed his patient. Not in the hospital, in his office. You see here—it says she died.” Ruth pointed to the page in Robert’s files. “He did it. He killed her.”

“Ma’am, I need you to slow down please. Can we start with you telling me your name?”

She blanched. Of course, this was the next step, but she was suddenly winded by the enormity of what she had to do.

“My name is Ruth Emeraldine Apter.”

Even as the words crossed her lips, she felt the respect she had worked for her entire life falling away. The family name that had belonged to captains of industry, who built America and underwrote this town, the hospital, and so many charities, would now forever be associated with barbarism. Failure.

But she had no choice. The lives she would save were more important.

Officer Johnson looked suddenly serious. “Mrs. Emeraldi—Apter. Are you saying that your husband killed someone at Magnolia Bluff?”

“I am.”

Ruth spent the next fifteen minutes explaining the nuances of lobotomy to the group of officers now circled around her, most of whom had previously heard about the heiress and the famous doctor who lived at Magnolia Bluff but knew little more. Then she took them through every aspect of Robert’s notes on Mrs. Rice in painstaking detail. How there hadn’t been one lobotomy, but three. How the woman had hideously deteriorated over the years. Ruth was grateful for the photos and even placed the intake picture next to the final one, where Mrs. Rice looked so obese and unwell, to underscore the extent of the failure.

“So even then, when she was in this state and clearly hadn’t been helped by lobotomy, he performed a third one. And this time, he went too far; her brain started to bleed, and she died.” Ruth looked up at them, expecting them to share her shock and outrage. To be readying themselves to make an arrest. Instead, they stood calmly, mildly nonplussed.

“Okay, and then?”

“And then what?” she asked impatiently. What more did they need?

“Ma’am.” Officer Johnson smiled kindly with an expression that Ruth recognized all too well. She had smiled in the same way at frantic patients at the hospital. “We can see that you are very upset. And this is unfortunate. But—”

“But what? Do you not understand? My husband is not a surgeon. He has no surgical license. Still, he performed surgery multiple times on the same patient, and ultimately killed her. He is a killer!” She stood, pointing again at the final paragraph in the file.

“Mrs. Apter, you seem to be hysterical. I am not sure what you want us to do here.”

“Hysterical? How dare you, sir!”

“Okay, okay. Calm down. As I said before, this is all very unfortunate. But I don’t see the evidence of any wrongdoing. Unless—is the family looking to press charges?”

Ruth slowly shook her head no. She hadn’t spoken to the family but had seen correspondence in the file thanking Robert. She assumed he had found a way to invert the truth for them too.

“People sometimes die in surgery, right? I would think that, since you run a hospital yourself, you would know that a lot better than we do.” Officer Johnson stood up and put his arm patronizingly around Ruth’s shoulders. “I’m guessing you and your husband had a bad fight, right? And I can see that you’re real mad at him. But there is no evidence of any foul play here, ma’am. I’m afraid there isn’t anything we can do.”

“I see.” Ruth stared at the officers in disbelief as her face turned crimson. She hurriedly gathered her papers.

“Do you need an escort home? You do seem upset, ma’am.”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.” Ruth ducked her head, ashamed, and walked as quickly as possible back to her car. Sitting stiffly behind the wheel, she took slow, deep breaths to steady herself until she got home. She felt humiliated and confused. How was what Robert did not murder? How could the police not care?

She walked aimlessly through the house. There had to be another way, and she wouldn’t stop until she found it.





Chapter Forty-Three


Two days later, Ruth rubbed her watering eyes as she looked out her study window to the ocean. She felt as though she had been on the phone since she left the station.

“You know I will do whatever I can to help you, Ruth. But it’s been over a decade since I performed a lobotomy with Robert. Any of those patients would be too far in the past to matter.”

“I understand, Edward. I didn’t really think you would have anyone, but . . . I just don’t know where to turn. How can it be that Robert has performed thousands of lobotomies and I can’t find a single person willing to file a formal complaint?”