“I understand there was a lawsuit.”
Time froze. Tilly drew in a long breath as if trying to gather herself. “His parents took me to court, claimin’ I didn’t like their boy. That I was neglectful and poisoned him on purpose. It was plum awful. But the judge dismissed the charges. I couldn’t get out of Philadelphia fast enough. It was in the newspapers, and there wasn’t nobody gonna hire me there. That’s when I moved to Ashland.”
“Do you remember the date of the incident?”
She nodded. “How could I ever forget? It was Wednesday, April twenty-second, 1964.”
Radhauser made a note of the date and then stood to leave. “Thanks for your honesty, Miss Tilly.”
He liked to think he could sense when someone told the truth, but it wasn’t always easy. Humans have lied since they learned to speak and they’ve gotten good at it, especially when the truth threated their life and freedom.
“Am I a suspect now?” she asked, as if reading his mind.
He gave her a sad smile. “In my business, everyone is a suspect until I learn the truth.”
Radhauser checked his watch. Gracie had an appointment with an oncological surgeon in Medford at 3 p.m.
He needed to ask Vernon to follow up and verify Tilly’s story.
Chapter Nine
Radhauser drove Gracie to the Oncology Clinic in Medford, near the Rogue Valley Medical Center. They arranged for her mother to pick up Lizzie from nursery school and keep her through Saturday morning cartoons. After about a fifteen-minute wait, a heavyset nurse, with a smile far too wide for her job, ushered them into a small office, its pale green walls lined with diplomas celebrating medical school, residency and fellowship completions. It seemed Dr. David McCarthy was well-trained in oncology and women’s health.
In the past few days, Gracie had gone through all the tests her Ashland obstetrician felt were reasonable for a woman in her fifth month of pregnancy. When the ultrasound showed the cyst to be a solid mass, they did a mammogram. According to the American Cancer Society, it was relatively safe to have a mammogram when pregnant as only a small amount of radiation was focused on the breast. Gracie wasn’t happy with the word relatively but her doctor convinced her she needed the test. Technicians placed a lead shield on her belly to block any possible radiation scatter reaching the baby. When the mammogram came back suspicious, too, they did a biopsy.
They’d been called into the clinic for the results and a plan of action. Gracie kept telling him he should be at work, reminding him he was in the middle of a child murder investigation, but he couldn’t let her go through this by herself. He was more scared than ever, but was trying hard to hide it from his wife and daughter. Gracie and Lizzie were his life and there was no way he could imagine a world without either of them in it.
Gracie sat in one of the burgundy leather chairs facing Dr. McCarthy’s massive desk. Radhauser took the other one. The air freshener, plugged into the wall beneath the window, filled the room with a scent meant to calm patients into believing they were camping in a forest of pines. Radhauser shook his head. Like that could happen to anyone sitting on this side of an oncologist’s desk.
He held Gracie’s hand as they waited and tried to push a lot of feeling through his fingers and palm. Radhauser wished he were the kind of man who could express his love in words more easily. He squeezed a little tighter.
“I don’t know why they couldn’t phone us with the biopsy results,” Gracie said. “Why do they make us come all the way over here?”
He didn’t want to think about the most obvious answer—the results were positive. Besides, it wasn’t a long drive. Medford was less than a half hour from Ashland.
Her face darkened. “What if it’s bad news? What if the biopsy shows I have cancer? What about the baby?”
He was saved from having to reply by a soft tap on the closed door. A few seconds later, it opened. The oncologist was about forty-five and wearing a pale blue oxford shirt and khaki pants beneath his white lab coat. There was a pager on his belt. “Mrs. Radhauser, I’m Doctor McCarthy,” he said, shaking her hand. “I’m an oncological surgeon here at Rogue Valley Medical Center. Your obstetrician has referred your case to me.” He was telling her things she already knew, his tone somber and not a hint of a smile on his face.
“Please call me Gracie,” she said. “And this is my husband, Winston.”
He nodded to Radhauser, stepped forward and shook his hand, then took the high-backed leather chair behind the desk and opened a manila folder.
Radhauser reached over and clasped Gracie’s hand again.
“I have the biopsy results on the mass in your right breast,” the doctor said. “And I’m afraid it’s not what we’d hoped for. The mass is malignant, Mrs. Radhauser. Gracie. You have an aggressive form of ductal carcinoma. I’m very sorry.”
Radhauser heard the breath rush out of her body. His mind went blank for a second, as if an electrical current shocked him. He looked at Gracie. She looked at him, and in that moment—that terrible moment—they were connected to each other by a thick band of fear. Fear not only for themselves and Lizzie, but for their unborn child. For a moment, neither of them could find the words to speak.
He could tell Gracie fought tears and he knew she didn’t want to break down in front of Dr. McCarthy.
“Will you give us a few moments alone?” Radhauser asked.
“Of course. Just open the door when you’re ready to continue.” Dr. McCarthy stood, turned sharply on his heels like a soldier and marched out of the room without another word, closing the door behind him.
Radhauser kneeled on the floor beside her, rested his arms along the armrest on her chair, then leaned in close.
Tears were streaming down Gracie’s cheeks.
Not knowing what else to do, he stood, put his hands under her armpits, lifted her up off her feet and held her as tightly as he possibly could.
Her shoulders heaved as she sobbed.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Cry it out.” There was nothing he could say or do to change the shock and the fear of having received a diagnosis like this one. But he needed to be strong. He needed to be there for her and put his own feelings on hold. He tried to think of what he might say when the crying stopped and the reality sunk in.
After a few moments, when her body stopped heaving, he set her feet back on the floor facing him, and took her shoulders in his hands. “We can beat this, Gracie. You’re young and you’re strong.” He reached down and stroked her belly. “And we have two very good reasons to fight.” It was all he could do to stop himself from dissolving into a pool of tears, too. “I’ll be with you. Every step. I’ll be there beside you.”
Radhauser didn’t know what he said that eventually reached her, but she stretched across McCarthy’s desk and grabbed a handful of tissues from the box he kept near the edge. She wiped her face, blew her nose, tossed the tissues into the trash can and then looked up at him and smiled. A great big Gracie-can-do-anything smile.
He felt tears welling again and fought them back. It was something that was happening a lot during the last few days. Each time he talked to or thought about Gracie, an avalanche of tears threatened to wash over him.
She gave him a brave shrug. “Tell the doctor I’m ready. Let’s see what it is we’re facing.”
“That’s my girl,” Radhauser said.
* * *
McCarthy explained that because of the pregnancy, their options were somewhat limited. He recommended a mastectomy with axillary lymph node dissection to determine if the cancer had spread.
“And if it has?” Gracie asked.
“I’d recommend termination of the pregnancy and an immediate course of chemo and radiation. You are premenopausal and breast cancer is far more dangerous to someone your age.”
“No,” Gracie said. “Absolutely not. I won’t abort our baby.”
Radhauser put his hand on her forearm.
The muscles in her arm tightened if she were physica
lly holding on to her child.
“Let’s not make a hasty decision,” he said. “We can have other babies, Gracie. Think about Lizzie. She needs her mother. We both need you. And your health has to be our top priority.”
“I won’t do it,” she said. “Not under any circumstances. It goes against everything I believe about being a mother. It took us more than two years to get pregnant with him. What if I can’t get pregnant again? This is our son, Wind. We’ve heard his heartbeat and I’ve felt him move inside me. Our son’s name is Jonathan Lucas Radhauser. That makes him real. That makes him a person. I can’t just kill our son because it might be better for me.” The tears were pouring down her cheeks again.
McCarthy slid the tissue box forward on his desk.
Radhauser grabbed several and handed them to Gracie. Fear sat like a heavy weight on his chest. “What about a lumpectomy?” he asked.
“We could do that,” McCarthy said. “But because we can’t start chemo or radiation therapy until after your wife delivers, a mastectomy is the safer bet to prevent spreading.”
Gracie spoke up. “If you take out the tumor, surrounding tissue and some nodes, and the tissue and nodes aren’t malignant, wouldn’t a lumpectomy be sufficient?” She looked at Radhauser and smiled. She believed this might actually work. It was there—a slice of hope in her eyes.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” McCarthy said. “You’d be taking a big risk.”
There was the feeling of a beat being skipped when he said that. And neither she nor Radhauser acknowledged it. They just wanted to keep going in the direction Gracie was leading them.
But McCarthy wasn’t letting them off the hook. “In all cases with this type of cancer, even if the area surrounding the tumor is clean and the lymph glands are, too, we still do chemotherapy and radiation. This is an aggressive form and there is no guarantee it won’t spread during the four months we have to wait for you to deliver the baby.”
Gracie sat quite still for a moment, then turned to Radhauser. Her eyes filled again and she pushed the heels of her hands into them like a small child. Then she moved them and her gaze met his with an expression that chilled him. She looked defeated and actually bent over her belly, bowed by the kind of grief that wouldn’t allow her to sit up straight.
He moved to touch her, but she drew away.
“I’ll give you some time to think about it,” Dr. McCarthy said. “I’m due in surgery. But my nurse can set things up for you.”
“If I have the mastectomy, will I be all right?”
“There’s a good chance,” he said. “Especially if your nodes are clean.”
Before Gracie and Radhauser left the clinic, they scheduled a mastectomy for the following Monday.
He drove Gracie home.
She was silent the entire trip, staring vacantly out the window.
The helplessness he felt at not being able to do anything for her was difficult to manage. He wanted to tell her that life was hard and sometimes it knocked the wind out of you. But he wasn’t sure it was a message she wanted to hear so he remained silent.
As soon as they walked into their house, Gracie collapsed on the sofa, holding her face in her hands.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, resolved to do whatever she asked of him.
“Just go to work,” she said. “I’ll be all right. I’m going to take a long bath.”
He changed into a suit for Skyler’s memorial, then stepped back into the living room. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.” He had to return to the police station. Murphy called him in for a meeting on the Skyler Sterling murder at 6 p.m. in order to accommodate Gracie’s appointment.
“No, you won’t be back soon,” she said. “You know Murphy is going to pull an all-nighter.”
He cringed and felt his shoulders involuntarily slump. “No, he won’t. He’ll expect me to attend the memorial service for Skyler. I’ll check it out and leave early.”
She gave him a knowing smile, then headed toward the master bedroom.
As he started for the door, he heard the water running in the bathtub. He was halfway up the driveway to the barn where he parked his patrol car when he turned around and ran back.
He sat on the bathroom floor and rested his arms along the edge of the tub. A part of him wanted to strip and get in with her. The hell with his case. The hell with everything except Gracie and what she needed right now. She used bubble bath and the sweet smell that rose all around them, Tahitian Coconut, was palpable. The label on the bottle showed half-naked natives dancing around a roaring fire pit. A culture that didn’t believe in western medicine. A society where a doctor would never surgically remove a woman’s breast.
“If I die,” Gracie said, closing her eyes so she didn’t have to look at him when she said it, “I want you to get married again.” She opened her eyes and shot him a look that said she meant business. “And not to some bimbo who happens to be pretty. I want you to find a good mother for our kids.”
Gracie was capable of a frightening kind of honesty that he generally admired. But he wasn’t ready to hear or even think about the possibility of her death.
“You’re not going to die,” he said. “I won’t let you.” But even as he uttered those words, he remembered the agony of Laura’s death, the overwhelming feelings of emptiness and loneliness.
“I know how hard this is on you, Wind. I can see in your eyes how worried you are. And if we add that to the upcoming clemency hearing and what’s going on with your case, you’re pushing yourself too hard. I know you think you’re strong and can take on anything the world hands you, but I’m worried about you. You don’t sleep and you aren’t eating regular meals.”
“I’m fine. As long as I have you and Lizzie, I’m tough as shoe leather and can spit nails.”
She smiled then, another genuine Gracie smile that made her dark eyes sparkle, and he fell in love with her all over again. He leaned further into the tub, took her face in his hands and kissed her long and hard on the lips.
“You better get to that meeting, lover boy,” she said. “You don’t want Murphy having an aneurysm.”
* * *
Heron had alerted Radhauser that a typist in the ME’s office told her boyfriend, an over-zealous reporter for the tabloid The Talent Tattler, that Skyler Sterling was murdered. The boyfriend wrote and released his story. Heron was livid. He fired the typist, reminding her of the confidentiality agreement she’d signed.
So, Radhauser wasn’t surprised to find news vans lined up on the plaza in front of the police station—the kind with a satellite receiver on top and the name of the television station painted on the side. There was one for each of the local affiliates for NBC, CBS, and ABC.
He pulled into his parking space. A knot rose in his stomach as a fist of reporters jockeyed to attack him. He stepped out of the Crown Vic.
Captain Murphy stood outside the front doors, trying to pacify the reporters, their cameramen following close behind them. Murphy looked agitated—even from a distance of ten yards, Radhauser spotted the sweat on the captain’s forehead. Three reporters rushed toward Radhauser, sticking their microphones in his face.
“What can you tell us about the murder of Skyler Sterling? Is the story in the Tattler true?”
Not intending to tell those vampires anything, he kept walking.
“Is it true he was only nineteen months old?”
“Was there evidence of sexual abuse?”
The questions came at him like a hive of bees buzzing. Radhauser fought his way through the crowd and pushed open the police station door, the last question echoing inside his head.
“Do you have any idea what killed him?”
He was certain Murphy would soon be asking him for an answer to that and another question. Who killed Skyler Sterling and why? There was a fair amount of circumstantial evidence against Bryce, but no matter how hard Radhauser tried, he couldn’t come up with a motive. Rage. Jealousy. Revenge. None of them fit.
Reg
gie was another story. And Dana may have wanted to reunite with him so badly that she killed her own child. What if Tilly wasn’t telling the truth? What if she deliberately poisoned a four-year-old child in Philadelphia?
Radhauser grabbed Murphy by the arm and dragged him back inside, locking the door behind them. “Bunch of fucking leeches.”
Murphy wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “How the hell did the media find out about this so quickly?”
“I asked Heron to hold off on releasing the autopsy report until after the memorial service and burial.” He told Murphy about the typist and her reporter boyfriend. “I hate that it happened, but at least the drug wasn’t mentioned in the article. It gives us something to sort out the crazies who will no doubt call in their confessions.”
“I’ve had four already,” Murphy said. “One of them claimed the angel Gabriel descended in her living room and commanded her to send Skyler to heaven.”
“Maybe we need to hire a temp just to man the phones.”
“What we need is a suspect in custody, Radhauser. And we need one fast.”
“I’m working on it, Captain. Vernon and McBride searched the scene with a warrant. If there was anything to be found in the Bryce house, I’m sure they found it.”
Radhauser listed the possible suspects and filled his captain in on everything they had so far.
“Talk to every psychiatrist in Jackson County, and I don’t give a damn about patient confidentiality. Find out who prescribes Haloperidol and to whom. Check out pharmacies, too. See if you can find a connection to the dead kid.”
“I’m already on it,” Radhauser said. “Vernon is working on the warrants.”
A River of Silence Page 9