Guilt by Silence

by Taylor Smith

  “Did he mention any recent rafting excursions?” Chaney asked.

  “No,” the doctor said, looking puzzled. “I would have been surprised if he had. This isn’t rafting season—too cold and the water’s too slow for a decent run. Besides, he couldn’t enjoy it the way he used to.”

  “His bum knees,” Chaney said.

  “Yes, ski injuries. He’d had pins put in. But how did you know that?”

  “We spoke to a very conscientious fire fighter in Taos,” Chaney explained. “They’d received information on the suspected victims and were trying to make a positive ID. He was sifting through the wreckage, looking for evidence—dental remains, orthopedic pins, anything—when the feds pushed him off the case. Tell me, could Larry still manage a raft if he had to?”

  “Oh, sure, I suppose he could. It would be uncomfortable, but he could do it.”

  “How did Larry seem when you last saw him, Rachel?” Mariah asked. “Was there anything unusual about his behavior?”

  “Not particularly. He was a little pensive, perhaps, but it was a nice evening. We spent it reminiscing about the good old days.” She shook her head. “It’s funny, because after I got word about the accident, I almost felt that he’d had a premonition something was going to happen.”

  “A premonition?”

  “It’s silly, I know. It’s just that he seemed to want to make amends, apologize for any mistakes he felt he’d made. You know how it is. Every relationship has unexplored reefs that eventually hang us up. But that was one of the most honest conversations Larry and I had had in years, and we laid a lot of old issues to rest.” At that moment, the telephone on her desk sounded. Dr. Kingman reached back and picked it up. “All right,” she said after a pause. “Get them prepped in the examining room, will you, Beth? I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  When she replaced the receiver and turned to Mariah and Paul, they were making moves to get up. “We don’t want to keep you, Rachel.”

  “But where is this all heading?”

  “Maybe nowhere,” Mariah said. “It’s still too sketchy to jump to any conclusions.”

  “What about Scott Bowker,” Chaney asked, “the other American who was in the van that night? Did you know him, Rachel?”

  “No, I never met him. I had heard of him, though.”

  “How so?”

  She shrugged. “This is a small town and a lot of these people are my patients. I hear the gossip.”

  “What gossip?”

  “Bowker was relatively new at the lab, had been there only about eighteen months. He was brilliant, they say, but prickly. Didn’t fit in very well, made no friends.”

  “Do you know why?”

  She nodded. “There’s a lot of anxiety in this town. With the end of the Cold War, some people are wondering if there’s a future for places like this. The lab is struggling to shift gears, cut back the nuclear weapons work and find a peacetime mandate.”

  “Swords into plowshares?”

  “Something like that. But it’s not as easy to do as you might imagine. It’s like turning around an oceangoing supertanker—takes a lot of time and maneuvering. Apparently, Bowker had been brought in to help define the ‘new look’ of the lab, but he had a tendency to lay guilt trips on people when he thought they weren’t shifting gears fast enough. Gave them the ‘mesa of doom’ line once too often, I think. People don’t like being told that their life’s work has been immoral.”

  “So no one was brokenhearted to see the end of Scott Bowker?” Chaney asked.

  “Well, no one wished him dead, if that’s what you mean, but the mourning period for Bowker was brief, I’m sure. Not that he’d have cared. I don’t think he was any happier with the lab people than they were with him.”

  “What about Larry, Rachel? How did he feel about the changes at the lab?” Mariah asked.

  “He felt they were long overdue. Larry had stayed on because he was getting close to retirement, but he had long ago lost his fascination with the destructive potential of the atom and recognized the arms race for the insanity it was. He was a real ‘atoms for peace’ proponent, in the end.” She sighed deeply. “He could have done a lot of good here. I miss him.”

  From the other side of the wall, they heard a bump and then a couple of childish, high-pitched giggles.

  “We should let you get to your patients, Rachel,” Chaney said.

  Dr. Kingman nodded, frowning. “But I still don’t comprehend what it is you’re after. If I understand you correctly, you think Larry was involved in some sort of murder-suicide plot. That just doesn’t seem credible.”

  “No,” Chaney agreed. “It doesn’t.”

  “And so?”

  “We can’t prove anything. But personally, I don’t think those five men are dead. I think their services have been bought, and the accident was staged to make it look as if they had died. Covering their tracks so they could disappear.”

  “Bought? Who would want to buy their services?”

  “There are any number of nasty customers for the kind of skills those men could offer, Rachel,” Mariah said. “That’s the really scary thing about all this.”

  “It doesn’t fit, Mariah. Larry would never do something like that.”

  “Are you sure? There are a lot of things I thought David could never do, but I was wrong.”

  Dr. Kingman shook her head firmly.

  “All we have at the moment are gut-level suspicions,” Chaney said, “and pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together. If there is another explanation, I’d like to know what it is. In the meantime, Rachel, could we ask you to keep this conversation to yourself? We wouldn’t want to get anyone up in arms over what may be nothing more than paranoia on our part.”

  Dr. Kingman studied him and then Mariah, and finally nodded. “All right,” she said. “But I think you’re chasing illusions, to be perfectly honest.”

  “Maybe so,” Mariah agreed as she and Chaney headed for the door. “And if we are, then I for one will be happy to go home to my daughter and try to put our lives back together.”

  “Your daughter?” Dr. Kingman broke into a smile. “I didn’t know you and David had adopted a child. That’s wonderful!”

  “Adopted? No, Lindsay was our reunion gift to each other,” Mariah said, her own smile a little sheepish. “She was born nine months after David came to Washington. She’s thirteen now. I wish you could have seen them together, Rachel. They were just crazy about each other. Losing him has been awfully hard on her.”

  Dr. Kingman had her hand on the door but stood there, not moving and looking troubled, studying Mariah’s face.

  “Rachel? What’s the matter?” Mariah asked. The doctor glanced at Chaney and then looked back to Mariah, obviously hesitant. “It’s okay. You can say whatever it is in front of Paul.”

  The older woman’s discomfort was apparent. “It’s just that—”

  “What, Rachel?”

  “Forgive me, Mariah, but that’s just not possible.”

  “What’s not possible?”

  “That you and David could have a child.”

  “But we do. She’s with his parents right now. Believe me, Rachel. I carried her for nine months and I was there when she was born. Whatever else may or may not be going on here, I can assure you that she, at least, is not a figment of my imagination.”

  “That may be, but—”

  “But what?”

  “I’m sorry, Mariah, but don’t you see? David Tardiff couldn’t have fathered a child—with you or anyone else. After the accident in his lab, David was left sterile.”

  19

  Leaving Chaney to bid a quick farewell to the doctor, Mariah stormed out of Rachel Kingman’s office building and into a park across the street. She broke into a run, her mind reeling as she raced down the asphalt walk. Paul’s voice, calling her name, followed her across the park, but she ran on and on. When he finally caught up to her, she had come to a halt outside Fuller Lodge. Chaney slumped against a park
bench, gasping.

  Before 1942, when the federal government had taken over the private boys’ school at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project, Fuller Lodge had been the school’s main dining room. After the scientists moved in, the lodge was the site of intense brainstorming sessions, as Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and other brilliant minds of the day earnestly debated the most efficacious method to produce a massive nuclear blast. Mariah stared at the building, its rustic chinked-log construction belying its lethal history.

  “Well?” she said stonily. “Aren’t you going to ask?”

  “Ask what?” Chaney said, still breathing hard.

  “Who Lindsay’s real father is?”

  “No, not unless you want to tell me.”

  Mariah gripped the back of the bench, closing her eyes as she swayed unsteadily, feeling the earth disappearing from under her feet, her whole world swept away. The sense of vertigo was overwhelming, producing intense nausea.

  Opening her eyes suddenly, she lurched toward a clump of bushes and threw up violently, her stomach continuing to convulse long after it had been emptied. When the wrenching heaves finally ceased, her ribs ached.

  Feeling Chaney’s hand on her back, she straightened shakily. He handed her a handkerchief dampened with snow, which she held against her face, forcing herself to breathe deeply until the trembling slowed. Paul put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the bench. They sat there quietly for a long time, the sun warm on their faces as it turned the light snow to puddles on the sidewalk.

  “It all makes sense now,” Mariah said at last.

  “How so?”

  “David. The way he was after he left Los Alamos and showed up on my doorstep. With Lindsay. In Vienna.”

  Chaney said nothing, but she knew when she glanced up at his face that she wasn’t making the least bit of sense.

  She exhaled sharply. “I hadn’t heard from him in months before he came back into my life. I missed him terribly, but he wasn’t answering my letters or phone calls. I thought he must be involved with someone else. Then one day he showed up—thin, tired-looking. It was the only time, except for those last weeks in Vienna, when I ever saw David depressed. He told me about the fire, how the tech died, but nothing about getting hurt himself.” Mariah wrapped her arms across her chest as the tears started flowing freely. “I would never have turned him away. He should have known that. He should have told me.”

  Chaney was quiet as she rocked slightly back and forth.

  “He had always wanted children,” she said finally. “It may be one of the reasons I left him in the first place—after the rotten childhood I’d had, I couldn’t face the thought of bringing a baby into the world. Then, a few weeks after David moved in with me, I discovered I was pregnant. He seemed very subdued about it—I guess now I know why. But after a few days, he seemed to get used to the idea, and there was no looking back after that. He bonded so tightly with the baby—even before she was born—that I convinced myself he was the father.”

  A kaleidoscope of images suddenly flashed across her mind, images of David and Lindsay. David in the delivery room, holding the tiny wet bundle, earnestly introducing himself to his new daughter as the nurses exchanged amused glances. The baby and David stretched out on the sofa sleeping, her little fingers wrapped in the comfy fur of his bare chest. David leading a two-year-old Lindsay out on the ice on her first pair of double-bladed bobskates. David stubbing his toe in her darkened bedroom as he laid a trail of gold glitter from the window to her pillow where she had left her offerings for the tooth fairy. Lindsay’s red ponytail bouncing joyously above her perch on David’s shoulder when her team won the Midget Softball Championship.

  “But you must have known he might not be the father,” Chaney said quietly.

  Her eyes snapped up. “Of course I did! I’m not an idiot, you know! Don’t you think I agonized over it? For nine months, I had nightmares about giving birth to a bald baby with bushy eyebrows.” Mariah’s eyes went soft and a small smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “And then Lindsay was born, and she was so beautiful and she looked like nobody except her tiny, perfect self and David loved her so much.” She glanced up, realizing she was rambling again. “It might sound crazy, but from the moment she was born, I never, ever considered the possibility that she could be anyone’s child but David’s. Because he was her father, in every way that mattered.”

  Chaney nodded and turned to watch two mothers and their young children strolling across the quiet park. “Frank Tucker,” he said at last.

  “Yes. Are you shocked?”

  “No. I could see the night of the party that the two of you have a special bond.”

  “It’s not what you think. He’s a very dear friend, but there’s never been anything between us. Except once. It’s hard to explain—it just happened.” Mariah groaned and slammed her fists into her thighs. “Oh, hell, that’s so lame! I never let Lindsay get away with an excuse like that. Things don’t ‘just happen,’ I always tell her. We’re responsible for our actions.”

  “We’re human, Mariah. We make mistakes.”

  “Frank and I made a mistake, a terrible one. One we both regretted as soon as it happened.”

  “His wife was still alive, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, it was just before David came to Washington. Joanne Tucker was dying, really dying, after fighting so hard and for so long. Her leukemia had been in remission, but she was getting weaker all the time and they knew she wouldn’t pull out of the next relapse. One night, Frank and I were working late. My car battery was dead when we went to leave, so he gave it a boost and then followed me to make sure I got home all right. Joanne and the kids were away at her parents’ place in Pennsylvania for a couple of days. It was her last visit home. Frank was leaving the next day to bring them back.”

  Mariah and Chaney watched as a squirrel ran across the walkway toward the lodge, coaxed out of hibernation by the unusual springlike weather. It paused, its tail flicking joyously, then darted off again.

  “It had been a crazy day at work and we hadn’t eaten, so when we got to my place, I invited him in. It was innocent. I’ve always liked Frank Tucker. He’s a gruff old bear, but he’s honest, a real straight-shooter. Nothing phony about him. And I was one of the few people who wasn’t afraid of him—I guess that’s why we got along. Anyway, we ate, we drank a bottle of wine. We talked, about nothing much at first, but it was comfortable, you know? Neither of us had had anyone to unburden ourselves on for a long time. I was lonely. Frank was the rock in his family, trying to hold it together by sheer force of will.”

  She closed her eyes briefly as if to block out the memory. Finally, she opened them again.

  “Frank started talking about Joanne, how he’d spent most of his marriage living in fear of losing her. But strong as he was and hard as he’d tried, he couldn’t stop it from happening. He was hurting so much, Paul, and so scared about what was coming. And then, all of a sudden, he just crumpled. That tough old bruiser just sat there in my kitchen, tears flowing down his face.”

  Mariah was crying now, too.

  “I didn’t mean for anything to happen. Neither of us did. I just put my arms around him and held him while he cried. And then, God forgive me, I kissed him. He held on to me, like a drowning man grasping for a rope. Before we knew what was happening, we were in my bed.” Her nails bit into the palms of her hands, clenched on her thighs. “Afterward, we felt terrible. Joanne had been so good to me. And Frank was in agony over what he had done—to her and to me. He blamed himself, but it wasn’t his fault.”

  Mariah held Chaney’s wadded-up handkerchief against her aching chest. When she exhaled, a long, shuddering sigh came out.

  “For a while, it was awkward,” she said, “but eventually, Frank and I managed to revert to our old relationship. A couple of days later, David showed up. And then I found out I was pregnant.”

  She stood abruptly and began walking along the path. Chaney followed and pu
lled up alongside her. “So there you have it,” she said. “The whole ugly story.”

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Mariah. You reached out to comfort a friend in pain. Caring is not an indictable offense, in my book.”

  “I condemned you for the same thing after that night on the ambassador’s terrace.”

  “I suppose. The difference is, of course, that when I kissed you, you didn’t respond.”

  She hesitated. “A part of me did,” she confessed. “I’m not a stone, you know.”

  “I know that. But you resisted,” Paul said, “which still makes you the better man, Gunga Din.”

  “No. Look what a mess I made of things.”

  Chaney stopped walking and grabbed her arm. “Just hold on a minute, Mariah. Maybe you made a mistake, although I’m not convinced what you did was so awful, under the circumstances. But the result of that mistake was Lindsay. And not only is she a joy in her own right, but the two of you made David happier than he would ever have expected to be, given what happened to him here. So let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?”

  “But don’t you see? The lie came back to destroy us in the end. She knew—Katarina Müller knew the truth. She must have. That’s what she meant when she told you our family was a sham. And that was what she used to blackmail David.”

  “How could she know?”

  “Someone must have gone digging into his past, found out about the accident in the lab and put two and two together. Whoever that is would be the most likely person to have hired Katarina Müller.”

  “But even if she had threatened to expose the truth, David couldn’t have believed he would lose you over it. After all, you had played a part in building the illusion.”

  “Not me, Paul! It wasn’t my reaction David was afraid of—it was Lindsay’s. Her daddy was her hero. If she found out he wasn’t her biological father, who knows what might have happened? David would never have let her be hurt like that. And what if she’d wanted to know her real father? David would have been terrified of losing her, or of being in any way diminished in her eyes. I think he would have done anything to avoid that, including letting himself be compromised by that woman.”