Marx drained his coffee cup and smacked it on the table. “Forget it: that’s one of her persistent rants. Fantasies. A lover who was murdered by her father, or one of her father’s colleagues, or the military, or the FBI. She journals about him, she talks about him—it gets none of us anywhere. You’d be a new audience for her, so she was probably trying to seduce you into listening to her by giving you what you want—a sighting of your runaways. I’m sure she made it up.”
He started to stand, but I said, “The bartender took the phone away from her before Sonia said much, but she offered a detail that makes me think she truly did see Ferring and Veriden. Is she friendly with anyone here, any of the other therapists or residents who she might have confided in? I need to find the cemetery where this lover is buried.”
Marx frowned. “First of all, I can’t and won’t violate the privacy of other residents by giving you access to them. And anyway, I thought I’d made it clear that Sonia never had a lover, at least not as a fourteen-year-old.”
I eyed him steadily. “I still want to find the graveyard where she saw Emerald Ferring. Even if the lover is a phantom, I presume the cemetery’s real.”
14
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist
The Kiel house was hidden from the street by a tangle of unkempt shrubs. When I pushed my way up the walk to the front door, I saw cracks in the redwood-shingled siding, while the walk itself could have used some rehab. A VW Passat, crusted in dirt, sat in the drive. Lights were on in the back of the house, but when I rang the doorbell, no one came.
The Kiels had a comfortable retirement income, at least according to LifeStory. Perhaps the bribes they paid St. Rafe’s to keep their daughter made it hard for them to maintain their home.
They lived on Quivira Road, about three miles from the shelter, in a warren of short, curving streets and cul-de-sacs near the north side of campus. I’d gotten lost—humiliating for a Chicagoan supercilious about small-town life—but I kept finding myself at a fountain in the middle of a roundabout on the edge of campus. On my third circuit of the fountain, I finally found the right entrance to the maze.
“If the Kiels have anything helpful to say, let me know,” Marx had said as he left me. “It would be a first, but our motto at St. Rafe’s is ‘Hope.’”
It was the closest he’d come to humor in our hour together, and it wasn’t a comfortable sort of joke.
I checked my messages while I waited on the Kiels’ doorstep. Still no answer from Cady Perec about whether her grandmother knew Dr. Kiel, but I suppose teachers set a bad example if they text while conducting classes.
I pinched my nose, trying to keep from falling asleep. Maybe Sonia had been playing me, hoping for a new audience, as Randy Marx thought. Maybe I was chasing a mirage. I rang the bell again and saw movement at the window next to the door. The watcher dropped the curtain and opened the inner door.
“We don’t talk to Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
The woman who snapped at me had a bony face thrust forward on her neck like a turkey’s. Pale blue eyes under hooded lids flicked from me to the walk behind me: she was ready to fly back into her tree if I made a sudden move.
“Have you ever seen a Jehovah’s Witness?” I said. “They travel in groups. Besides, the women always wear stockings and long dresses.” I had on jeans with a green wool blazer and a cream pullover. Not missionary wear.
“What do you want, then?”
“To talk to Shirley or Nathan Kiel. To let them know I’m the person who found their daughter early this morning and probably saved her life.”
The lines around the woman’s mouth deepened. She muttered something that I couldn’t hear through the outer door, although it didn’t seem like an expression of undying gratitude. After staring at me suspiciously for another few seconds, she flung the door open, so abruptly I barely had time to jump out of the way.
“Well, come on in, then, and get it over with. There’s no reward, in case you were hoping.”
I followed her into a room whose furniture was almost invisible under stacks of newspapers and magazines. The dust was so thick that I started to sneeze.
“Are you Shirley Kiel?” I asked, hoping she was an undertaker that I wouldn’t have to talk to.
“Yes. Sonia’s mother.” I wouldn’t have thought you could pack so much venom into those two words. It was hard to tell which she hated more—Sonia or being her mother.
Shirley led me to the back of the house, to a kind of sunporch next to the kitchen. I tripped on a Mixmaster set in the middle of the kitchen floor and just managed to keep from falling by grabbing the edge of the kitchen counter. My hand came away with some furry orange stuff on it.
My stomach turned. People have criticized my lackadaisical housekeeping, but compared to this I could have entered an America’s Top Homemakers contest and come away with first prize. I turned on the sink tap, holding my fingers between the water and a crusty pot, while Shirley Kiel stared at me in growing impatience.
I hastily wiped my fingers on my jeans and joined her at the sunporch. A light baritone shouted from somewhere above us, demanding to know who was here.
“Sonia Bernhardt’s been in a major play!” Shirley shouted back. “Her chief backer is here, wanting us to applaud her.”
She didn’t wait for a response but stumped out to the porch. It faced south and was glassed in, so that even on a cool day it felt almost too warm. Plants on a shelf along the south wall were on their last stalks, although a few showed a little greenery.
Shirley sat in an armchair whose end tables held open crossword-puzzle books. She picked up one and wrote in an entry. I shrugged and took all the books and magazines from a wicker chair, stacking them on another side table and pulling the chair up so I was facing her.
“I was told you weren’t much interested in your daughter, and I can see that it’s true, so I won’t take a lot of your time.”
Shirley Kiel sat back in the chair, jaw slack, as if I’d slapped her. The puzzle book fell to the floor. “You don’t understand,” she said feebly.
She was right: I didn’t understand what it was like to have a child, let alone one who was grown and who was beyond my ability to help or cure. The pain would perhaps make you numb yourself with crossword puzzles. Make you apathetic to the dirt and debris around you. And maybe it would make you belittle your daughter’s own pain by pretending it was melodrama: Sonia Bernhardt.
“What’s she done this time to embarrass me?” The light baritone had swept into the room.
I turned to look. Nathan Kiel was a short man with a stocky body, but the force field of anger around him was so large that it seemed to push me against the back of the chair. His bio said he was eighty, but the brown eyes in his square face were alert, alive, even if the life was fueled by fury.
“I doubt she had you in mind,” I said dryly. “Do you know that she’s in a coma at the hospital?”
He grunted, affirmation I suppose. “And you are?”
“V.I. Warshawski. I’m a detective. I’m here from Chicago, trying—”
“You knew? You knew Sonia was in the hospital and you didn’t tell me?” Shirley’s pale eyes turned dark.
“What would you have done? Enacted one of your own dramas for me?” Kiel snorted. “Celia Cordley called me this morning—”
“Oh, Cee-Cee.” Shirley spoke with heavy sarcasm. “Another of Nate’s groupies, anxious for the approval of the great doctor. She hasn’t learned yet that his approval only comes if she spends the rest of her life following him around like an anxious puppy. You should tell her what happened to Ma—”
“Will you shut up?” Kiel bellowed. “I want to know what this detective is trying to stir up here in Lawrence. My daughter is seriously ill and very weak emotionally and morally. If you’re preying on her, you could open yourself to major litigation.”
“Dr. Kiel, you’re supposedly an impressive scientist, but you and logic parted company some miles back down the road. F
ar from preying on your daughter, I saved her life.”
“You knew there was a detective in town interested in Sonia and you didn’t tell me?” Shirley blazed again.
Kiel scowled. “Gertrude called me this morning. Apparently this detective spoke to Cady yesterday, got her worked up all over again, and Gertrude was afraid she’d come here to harass me. As she has!”
“Gertrude Perec,” I said. “Is she a family friend, a sister scientist—”
“She was Nate’s secretary,” Shirley spit at me. “She was that mirror that you hear about, the one who reflects men back at twice their normal size. Another one of Nate’s female groupies who thought he walked on water. Men tend to see through him. If Gertrude had had to live with him—”
“No one could keep sane in the same house as you. No wonder your daughter—”
I’ve never learned to do that two-finger whistle, but when I have to, I can hit the A above high C. I stood and let it fly. Kiel and Shirley both stopped shouting and stared at me.
“You’ve answered one of my questions with this repulsive display. I don’t know if you’re entertaining each other or yourselves, but you’re definitely making me sick to my stomach.”
Kiel started to speak, but I shut him up. “My turn, then it’s your turn. It’s called conversation. I am a detective, from Chicago, looking for a missing woman who grew up in Lawrence in the 1950s and went to the University of Kansas. She came back here with a young man who is a videographer, to film her origin story. In trying to find where Ms. Ferring lived as a child and a young adult, I met Cady Perec at the historical society. She took me to meet her grandmother. I also put up flyers asking if anyone had seen Ms. Ferring and her videographer.
“Sonia called me at two this morning, saying she had seen them taking photographs on her dead lover’s grave. By the time I got to Eighth and Rhode Island, where she’d phoned from, your daughter was in a coma, close to death. I called 911.
“All I want from you are answers to two questions. No, three. Who was Ms. Kiel’s truelove? Where is he buried? And have you been to the hospital to see your daughter?”
Shirley had started to snarl something about Sonia’s truelove, but my last question muted her.
“You’re a stranger in a strange land,” Kiel said. “You don’t know me, or my wife, or our daughter, so don’t sit in judgment on us.”
A vein over his right eye was throbbing. I hoped he didn’t have a stroke while I was talking to him.
“If you will tell me where your daughter’s dead lover is buried, I will leave—I will get out of your hair, I promise.” I’d started to say leave you in peace but realized in midsentence that wasn’t a country either of them was like to inhabit.
Shirley darted a glance at her husband. He was frowning at her with more ferocity than ever.
“Sonia’s belief that she had a lover was the start of all our troubles. She became infatuated with one of my graduate students when she was fourteen. She imagined it was reciprocated, and of course it wasn’t. The whole episode was humiliating in the extreme.”
“Sonia stalked him,” Shirley said. “Of course he couldn’t complain to Nate—Nate runs his lab like a medieval fiefdom. He owns his students, and if they divide their loyalty with a spouse or a sport, woe betide them. Besides, Matt—the student, Matt Chastain—was terrified that if he complained about one of Nate’s children, Nate would take it out on him. Nate doesn’t like being crossed.” The last words came out in a childish, taunting tone.
Kiel made his swatting gesture again. “If I’d ever gotten a tenth of the respect in my own home that I got—”
“Sonia stalked Matt Chastain,” I interrupted. “Is this who Mrs. Kiel thought Dr. Cordley should know about?”
Shirley cawed raucously. “Everyone knows about Matt.”
“Did your daughter kill him?”
The silence in the room became so absolute that I could hear the drip from a faucet down the hallway.
“Who have you been talking to?” Kiel finally asked, his voice little better than a whisper.
“No one, at least not about her killing Matt Chastain. Did she?”
Another silence stretched out. Finally Kiel said, “No. She didn’t kill him. He . . . made a disastrous decision regarding an experiment I was conducting. Helping conduct. He couldn’t face the consequences, and he ran away. No one has heard from him since.”
“Sonia refused to believe he disappeared,” Shirley added. “She built a fantasy around him, that he was really in love with her but that Nate—or the government or maybe the Russians—murdered him to keep him from her.”
“And whose fault was that?” Kiel snarled. “Who filled her head with those garbagey romance novels you gorge on—”
“Save it for when I’ve left,” I snapped. “I can’t tell you how vile you sound or how unpleasant it is to listen to you. Given that your daughter thought Matt Chastain had been murdered, where did she think that had happened?”
“Wherever it was she was spying on him at the time. Poor Chastain. He was one of the weakest students I ever had, both scientifically and morally, but he didn’t deserve Sonia.”
15
And Besides, the Mensch Is Dead
Kiel vanished on his tagline. I could hear him stomping up a flight of stairs and then a door slamming. His man cave, perhaps, where he gnawed on raw alligator and brooded over how little recognition his wife and bipolar daughter gave him.
Shirley tracked him with her eyes, her expression malevolent. After he shut his door, she heaved herself to her feet and led me silently to the front of the house.
I handed her one of my cards, urging her to phone me if there was something else she could tell me about where Sonia might have last seen Matt Chastain. The graveyard Sonia was obsessed with could easily be a metaphor for her own buried hopes; perhaps Matt had talked to her there, kissed her, done something that made her feel that a particular spot was sacred.
“It was over thirty years ago, so I don’t remember.” Shirley pushed open the outer door. “Anyway, everyone was confused. What was real, what was imaginary, how could I know? I wasn’t there.”
“What happened?” I said. “What went so wrong with the experiment that Matt Chastain felt he had to run away?”
“Nate doesn’t confide in me.”
I would have believed her more readily if she hadn’t swallowed a sly smile before answering.
“I don’t know anything about this kind of work, but something going wrong with an experiment—was there an explosion? Were people hurt? Or did something your husband worked on make people sick?”
She looked startled, even alarmed. “I don’t know, and anyway, I just told you, it was a long time ago.”
“But your daughter must have seen something, if it terrified her so much that she had to cover the memory with the protective story that Chastain had died or been killed.”
“My daughter,” and she again invested a shocking amount of venom in the two syllables, “was sneaking out of the house and trailing around after poor Matt. Dr. Chesnitz says the most likely scenario is that she flung herself at Matt, who rejected her. She was fourteen, overweight, not the kind of girl anyone would respond to, let alone a young man in his twenties. Chesnitz says that in Sonia’s mind Matt had to be punished by death. Thinking he was murdered helps her blot out the memory of the rejection and turn him into an idealized figure who was in love with her.”
“It sounds like a convenient theory,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She thrust her head forward in her signature turkey move.
“Keeps anyone from asking too many questions about what really happened, or where, or how.”
She started to bristle, but I interrupted to ask if her sons kept in touch with Sonia.
Her expression darkened. “I wouldn’t know. They couldn’t take Nate, his bullying and his moods. Stuart went to school at Bowdoin, out in Maine, never came home after his sophomore year, and Larry, he w
ent to college in Oregon and stayed out on the West Coast. If they talk to Sonia, that’s something you’d have to ask them.”
“It must be hard to have them so far away,” I said, trying to infuse some sincerity into my voice.
“That’s my business,” she said roughly. “Don’t you have to be someplace else?”
I suppose I did. I stepped outside but stopped to say, “If it wasn’t Matt Chastain you thought Dr. Cordley should know about, who was it?”
Shirley smiled in a wolflike way that showed all her teeth, which were stained from coffee or cigarettes or maybe the fuzzy orange stuff on her kitchen counter. Even a fantasy lover would have brought more comfort to her daughter than that smile. She shut the door on me without speaking.
“I hope your dog mother never looked at you like that,” I said to Peppy when I got back into the car.
Peppy licked my ear sympathetically. An hour with the Kiels made me feel as though I needed a bath in some kind of fumigation sink, the kind where they pummel your body with steam jets. As a substitute I spent an hour in the open air with my dog.
We left the car a block from Gertrude Perec’s house and ran to a nearby park. This one had winding paths that led down to the south side of the river. Peppy flushed a rabbit and jumped in and out of the water. I ran along the river’s edge, letting cool air and motion empty my mind. By the time we returned to the car, I was feeling easier, almost as though I’d had five hours of sleep instead of four, almost as though I’d spoken to my own mother instead of Sonia Kiel’s.
“You stink,” I told Peppy, who grinned at me happily, “but at least it’s a good honest stench.”
I climbed into the passenger seat to look up Matt Chastain, Kiel’s errant graduate student, leaving the door open so I didn’t have to breathe quite so much rotting dog. If Sonia had been fourteen when Chastain vanished, then he’d disappeared in the early eighties, before everyone’s history had been digitized.
I searched news stories and law-enforcement databases but didn’t find any reports of a public-health disaster involving Kiel or Chastain. Whatever had happened, I guess it had bruised Kiel’s sensitive ego more than anything else.
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