Guilt by Silence
Page 15
“Hello, Mrs. Tardiff,” she said. “Hello, Lindsay.”
Lindsay looked over when she heard her name. “Hi! You came! Did you see that goal just now? My dad got the assist.”
“Yes, I did. You must be very proud—he is a fine player.”
Lindsay nodded. “I bet he gets the next goal. They’re creaming these guys!”
Tanya and Mariah smiled as Lindsay returned her attention to the ice, where the players were lining up for the next face-off. “She is such a vivacious child,” Tanya said. “Like her father. He is a very nice man, your husband.”
“We think so.”
“She doesn’t really look like him but she has his personality, I think.”
Mariah nodded. “She’s definitely her daddy’s girl. When she was born, the doctor let him cut the umbilical cord. David picked her right up and his was the very first face she saw in this world. They’ve been a team ever since.”
“How wonderful. Not many fathers are so close to their children.”
Tell me about it, Mariah thought grimly. “How about you, Tanya? Do you have children?” A shadow passed over Tanya’s pretty, round face, and she turned to watch the players on the ice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
Tanya was silent for a moment. Then she shook her head and sighed deeply. “I had a child,” she said quietly. “A baby girl.” She looked down at the hands she was wringing. “She died when she was two.”
“Tanya, how awful. I’m so sorry.”
Their eyes met and Mariah saw an unhappy woman desperate to confide something. Why Baranova had picked her, she couldn’t guess.
“She was sick from the day she was born. Her skin was yellow—her liver was damaged. And she was mentally retarded,” she added quietly. “It was fortunate she died young, perhaps, because she would have had a very difficult life. But she was still a beautiful baby.” Baranova’s eyes were bright as she turned her gaze back to the rink. Mariah doubted that she was focusing on the noisy action down there. She waited while Tanya composed herself. “It was my fault,” she said finally, looking again at Mariah. “Something is wrong with me—something inside. I had two miscarriages before my baby was born. They said the fetuses were deformed.”
Mariah began to protest, horrified at the guilt this woman was inflicting on herself. “But that doesn’t mean—”
“No, you don’t understand. My father was a nuclear physicist, like me—like Dr. Tardiff. He was involved in designing nuclear weapons for the Soviet military. I grew up in a secret community where there was a weapons facility. I left when I went to university. But many people who grew up in that town have since had health problems—cancers, miscarriages, infertility.”
Mariah’s eyes grew wide as she realized what the woman was saying.
“It was the radioactive materials they were working with. The safety measures were inadequate. Old nuclear reactors and waste were just dumped in lakes where we swam, or buried in fields where we played as children.”
“Oh, no,” Mariah breathed.
Tanya’s eyes flashed angrily. “Those brilliant scientists! They could build weapons of great complexity and terrible beauty, but they couldn’t keep their children safe.”
Blue-sky guys, Mariah thought, grimacing.
Tanya turned to her anxiously. “Mrs. Tardiff—”
“Mariah.”
“Mariah,” Tanya repeated, a smile flickering across her features before being replaced again by a nervous frown. “I wanted to talk to Dr. Tardiff, but I do not dare approach him at the IAEA offices. There are other Russians there. Some of them are KGB—they are everywhere. It was very difficult for me even today to get away by myself.”
“Why do you want to talk to David?”
“Because your people need to know. My government is desperate for hard currency. There are powerful people who will do anything—they have no conscience. Our security people,” she added, dropping her voice, “they tell us that all Americans in the U.N. are CIA agents. But even if he is, I know Dr. Tardiff is a good man.” She glanced at Lindsay and then to Mariah. “A man with a family like yours, I feel I can trust.”
Mariah cast her eyes around the arena, studying the few spectators, but they all seemed to be concentrating on the action on the ice. Lindsay was engrossed in the game, too, oblivious to the grave conversation taking place between her mother and Tanya. Mariah looked back to Baranova, who was biting her lip anxiously. Leaning forward, she pretended to watch the hockey game. She glanced again at Tanya and gave her head a brief nod in the direction of the ice. The other woman also leaned forward.
“Let’s pretend we’re discussing the fine points of the game here, okay?” Tanya nodded and focused on the rink. Mariah pointed a finger in the direction of the players, as if she were explaining a play. “I can help you, Tanya,” she whispered. “You were right not to approach David. Don’t—not ever. It could be very dangerous, for you and for him.”
She heard Tanya’s sharp intake of breath and saw her coat sleeve tremble but, to her credit, Tanya kept her cool, even applauding as David’s team scored another goal. When the noise died down, and Lindsay finished clapping them on the back, Mariah carried on.
“Where did you tell people you were going when you came out today?”
“To the Hofburg Museum.”
“Good—now here’s what you’ll do. Do you know the café called Wienerhaus? It’s a little place, just a couple of doors from your office.”
“Yes, I know it.”
“All right. Today’s Saturday. Starting Monday, make sure you walk past it every morning on your way to work. Look at the doorframe, the bottom left corner. Bottom left, got that? Look for a green thumbtack. When you see it, leave the office early and go to the Hofburg Museum between three and four in the afternoon.”
“Where in the museum? It’s very large.”
“Don’t worry about that. You’ll be spotted.”
“What if I cannot get away?”
“Then go the next day, or the next. But always between three and four, okay? Someone will come up to you in the museum and ask for the time. When you tell them, they’ll ask if you’ve seen Montezuma’s feather crown at the ethnological museum. That’s how you’ll know it’s the right person.”
“Feather crown,” Tanya repeated. “And then?”
“You’ll be told what to do next.” Mariah glanced at Tanya, whose eyes were open wide and fixed unblinking on the ice. She reached out and gave the woman’s arm a quick squeeze. “Don’t be afraid, Tanya. The person who meets you will tell you how to get to a safe place to talk. You’ll be fine, I promise.”
Tanya blinked and looked at Mariah, then nodded.
Oh, Tanya, Mariah thought bitterly as she turned into her driveway, who was I to promise you’d be safe? I turned out to be as bad as the blue-sky guys. In the end, I couldn’t protect you or my family.
Up in her bedroom, Rollie Burton heard the hum of the garage door opening.
After Mariah left with Lindsay, he had gone through every room in the house, checking the layout. Eventually, he had gone back to her bedroom to wait, amusing himself by rummaging through her drawers, fingering her lingerie, holding it up against his acne-scarred face, breathing it in.
He moved to the window now. Standing at the corner, out of sight, he watched as the Volvo pulled up the driveway below and disappeared into the garage. A moment later, the car door slammed. From the kitchen, he heard the inside door close and then a series of beeps. He froze at the sound of voices until he remembered that the phone had rung twice since he had entered the house a couple of hours earlier. She was playing back the messages on the answering machine—the callers had sounded like kids, he recalled.
Reaching into his pocket for the ivory-handled knife, he padded silently across the carpet to the door of the bedroom, listening to her movements downstairs. He would wait, he decided. With luck, she would come upstairs soon. If not, he’d go down and get her.
10
Her purse was sitting on the kitchen table, Stephen’s diskette inside. Mariah checked her watch—almost one o’clock. She went to the freezer and pulled out the mince pies she had baked earlier in the week for Frank’s party. She had been planning to spend the afternoon making a Bûche de Nöel—a Yule log cake—as an added surprise, but the CHAUCER file was more pressing. First the file, then the cake, she decided. The computer was up in Lindsay’s room.
As she picked up her purse, her glance fell on the large manila envelope that Lindsay had brought home from school. She put her handbag down again and took up the envelope, examining her name on the outside, then moved to the drawer near the telephone to find the letter opener. The blade sliced the flap cleanly. Giving the envelope a tip and a shake, she held out her hand to catch the contents as they slid out.
During the few months she had lived with David in New Mexico, Mariah had often seen tarantulas on sale in tourist shops. They were usually embedded in Plexiglas, mummified souvenirs of one of the desert’s less lovable residents. The only live ones she had ever seen were in exotic pet stores, but she had never gotten over the dread that one of the arachnid monsters would show up in their Los Alamos apartment one day. Even now, a mere photo of the hairy beast would send shivers down her spine.
So when the black, hairy thing fell out of the envelope and landed on her outstretched hand, she screamed and leaped back, dropping both the envelope and the creature. The envelope landed on the floor on top of it. Mariah stood wedged against the kitchen counter, staring at the floor in openmouthed horror, waiting for it to crawl out.
When nothing happened after a few seconds, she slipped around the walls to the broom closet, her eyes never leaving the manila envelope. Pulling out the broom, she gripped it by the handle with both hands and raised it to waist level, bringing it down hard, over and over, on the envelope. Then, cautiously, she turned the broom around in her hands, using the handle to slide the envelope off the remains of what lay underneath. She expected a sticky mess, but the paper slid easily away from the black, hairy whorl. Mariah gripped the broom and frowned, then peered more closely. Finally, she bent down and prodded it with the broom handle before her fingers reached out and picked it up.
It wasn’t a tarantula. It wasn’t a spider at all. It was hair—a few curls of black hair flecked, she saw as she examined it, with gray. Mariah stared at her palm and at the familiar dark locks lying there. It was David’s hair, she was certain. Then her gaze drifted back to the envelope. Shifting the broom handle under her arm, she picked up the envelope and stood again.
She turned it over and looked at her name typed on the outside: MARIAH BOLT. Not Tardiff. Not Mrs. Bolt-Tardiff, as mail from Lindsay’s school usually came addressed, but her own name—the name she used professionally.
She peered into the open end of the envelope and realized that there was something else in there—several stiff sheets of paper, which she gripped between her thumb and forefinger and withdrew. They were three eight-and-a-half-by-eleven photographs. Grainy, the kind shot under low light conditions. A man and a woman, naked, on a bed, in various positions of lovemaking. She had long blond hair. His was dark, curly. In all three photos, both faces were clearly identifiable.
David and Elsa.
Upstairs, Rollie Burton had heard her scream and his senses had gone on full alert. The blade snapped open in his hand as he edged out into the hall, listening. He crept toward the top of the stairs and peered down, but there was no way to see into the kitchen from that vantage point.
A repeated banging noise brought him to a halt again, straining to hear over the sound of his heart pounding in his ears and the muffled shouts of children playing on the road outside. Downstairs, the banging stopped and then there was silence again.
He gripped the blade tightly and started down the stairs, balls of his feet descending silently onto the treads, one by one, pausing to listen after each step, his back plastered against the wall.
When she cried out again—a deep, primal, choking sob, like an animal mortally wounded—he felt his blood run cold. What the hell is going on down there? he wondered.
Mariah swallowed the anguished scream that had risen in her throat and slumped into a chair, dropping the photographs on the table. They lay there, splayed out, mocking and sinister.
It was one thing to know that David had been having an affair with Elsa. To feel the hurt. To imagine how it had happened. To remember the lies she had told herself the nights David had said he was working late, when she had known instinctively something was amiss.
It was another thing altogether to be confronted with the tangible evidence of his betrayal. To see David touching that woman in ways he should never have touched anyone but her. To see Elsa’s smug smile as she wielded her power over him. To see, in one photo, David’s beautiful eyes looking up at her crouched over him, pleading with her for something that Mariah apparently had not been able to give him.
She closed her eyes and clenched her fists, fighting down nausea, pushing away the pain and anger, willing herself to put it into the compartment where she had locked the other hurts in her life, reaching instead for the strength to analyze what this meant. Why had she been sent the envelope? Why now? Her eyes snapped open. How had a teacher at Lindsay’s school come into possession of these photos?
No, she reminded herself, not a teacher—a man Lindsay hadn’t recognized. But who? Why did he want Mariah to see the pictures? And why have Lindsay deliver them, instead of sending them directly to Mariah herself?
To prove a point, Mariah realized. To prove that they knew where to find her child and that she was vulnerable. And not just Lindsay, she thought, looking at the dark locks still clasped in her fist. David, too.
It was a game of terror they were playing with her, teasing, threatening. But who? And what did they want her to do? Or not do, she suddenly thought. What are the rules here? How do I know how to play along if I don’t know the rules or objectives of the game?
There was only one objective as far as she was concerned, Mariah thought grimly. To protect her family. Lindsay was probably safe for the moment, over at Carol’s, but she should call Frank anyway, ask him to go and get her and take her back to his place.
And David. David was a sitting duck in the nursing home. Someone had been there once already, she realized, tightening her hand over the hair in her fist. It was easy enough to do. There was no security to speak of at the home. Getting past the receptionist and the nurses’ station was simple—Mariah had often passed by unnoticed when staff was preoccupied with the telephones or a patient or visitor.
She rose from the chair and went to the trash bin under the sink, dumping the hair into it. Then she propped the broom against the counter and turned to the phone. Before she phoned Frank, she would call the nursing home and ask if anyone had noticed any new visitors over the last couple of days. Ask them to keep an eye on David—maybe move him closer to the nurses’ station. She picked up the phone and searched for the number of the home.
“Hang it up, pretty lady.”
At the sound of the voice, Mariah dropped the receiver. It clattered on the counter as she spun around.
“I said, hang it up,” Burton repeated. He was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the front hall. Mariah stared at his pockmarked face. Then his hand moved and she spotted the glint of the blade. She reached behind and her hand groped along the counter, her eyes never leaving him. When she located the receiv
er, she hung it back in the wall cradle.
“Who are you?”
But he just smiled.
“Do you want money? I haven’t got much cash on hand, but there are credit cards in my purse right beside you. Help yourself and then get out.”
“Get out? Aren’t you the bossy one?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you, Mariah.”
Her stomach dropped as she watched his eyes move down her sweater. Strange eyes, mismatched, she realized. One blue, one green. “How do you know my name?” she whispered.
His eyes moved up to her face and he licked his lips. “I know a lot about you, Mariah. I know where you go. I know what you do. Seen you without all those clothes on.”
“You followed me from the pool the other night.”
“Yeah. I almost had you, too. That old man—I was real annoyed.”
“What do you want?”
But he only smiled again. Then his gaze fell on the photos on the table. He stepped closer to them, keeping the knife in front of him where she could see it. “Nice pictures,” he said, picking one up and examining it. “You like looking at pictures like these, Mariah?”
“No.”
He snorted. “Sure you do. You buy these, or is this someone you know?” She said nothing, only glared. His head snapped up. “I asked you a question!”
“Someone sent them to me.”
“Kinky friends you’ve got. But a woman like you, Mariah, I bet you’d rather do it than look at it, wouldn’t you? Me, too.” She gritted her teeth. He put the picture back down on the table and turned to her. “I know what you need, Mariah,” he said, a slow grin rising on his thin lips. “You’re all alone. You need a man.”
The fury exploded in her so suddenly that she caught him off guard. Her hand grabbed the broom, still propped next to her against the counter, and she lunged. As the end of the handle embedded itself in his solar plexus, he doubled over. The knife fell out of his hand and clacked along the floor. She pulled back and then lunged again. It was a mistake—he dodged and the broom handle glanced off his shoulder. He reached up, grabbing it before she could pull it away. There was a split second when they stood face-to-face, and Mariah saw the cold anger in his terrible, mismatched eyes.