An Honorable Man

by Darlene Gardner

  Sierra eyes misted at his offer. To think that not even a year ago, they’d only spoken to each other at infrequent family gatherings.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this before,” Sierra said, her voice thick with emotion, “but you’re a really good brother.”

  “You never have,” he said, “but now’s a really good time to start.”

  He winked at her and went to tend to their patients, leaving her to think about what he’d said. If Ben was determined to build a case against her father, she should be armed with a defense. Her father’s files could cast serious doubt on whether he’d been acquainted with Allison Blaine.

  Walking quickly out the door and through the hall so nobody would intercept her, she let herself into the room where they kept the noncomputerized records.

  She yanked open the correct file drawer and located the Ns. The trembles came back as she thumbed through the tabs, searching for the last name Nash.

  Nothing, just as she’d suspected. She closed her eyes, feeling relief flood over her.

  She was about to shut the file drawer when she spotted a folder slightly lower than the rest that she’d bypassed the first time around. She tugged it free. Nash, Connor, it read.

  She sucked in a breath, trying to recall if Ben had ever told her the names of his brothers. She didn’t think so. She exhaled. Just because a file existed for a Connor Nash didn’t mean he was related to Ben. The last name Nash was common enough.

  She pulled out the file and slowly opened it. The patient, Connor Nash, had been four years old at the time of the treatment. He’d been brought into the office because of a bump on his head.

  Agreed to see patient because Dr. Goldstein unavailable, her father had scribbled in the notes field of the chart, referring to the pediatrician who’d practiced in town for as long as Sierra could remember. Patient exhibits no signs of concussion. Instructions are to keep a watch on him and follow up with Dr. Goldstein. No treatment necessary.

  She flipped to the information sheet that must be filled out before any patient could be seen. The signature at the bottom was flowing and easy to read: Allison Blaine.

  The room swayed and her legs felt as though they might buckle. She anchored her hand on the top of the file cabinet and breathed in and out. She turned around, half fearing someone would be looking over her shoulder at the incriminating evidence. No one was there.

  She immediately expelled the word incriminating from her head. Like she’d told Ben, it would mean nothing if her father and his mother had a chance encounter.

  Then why had Sierra’s mother insisted her husband had never met Allison Blaine? The woman’s death had been well-publicized. Wouldn’t her parents have discussed it among themselves? Wouldn’t her father have mentioned Allison Blaine had been in the office with her young son?

  The questions crowded Sierra’s brain, making it difficult to think. Only one woman had the answers.

  She dug her cell phone from the pocket of her lab coat and held down the number that speed-dialed her mother’s phone. The phone rang. And rang.

  “Pick up, Mom,” Sierra said aloud.

  By Sierra’s calculations, Rosemary Whitmore’s tour bus should have left Atlantic City by now. That didn’t mean she’d answer the phone. Half the time she didn’t even have the thing turned on.

  Just when she was about to give up, she heard her mother’s voice. “Hello.”

  “Mom. Where are you?”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  Sierra could barely make out her mother’s voice amid the background noise. The buzz of conversation mingled with the hum of what sounded like a motor. “Are you on the bus?”

  “No,” her mother answered loudly. “I’m on the bus.”

  So much for trying to have a conversation. Sierra attempted another question. “When will you be home?”

  “I’m hanging up, Sierra.” Her mother obviously hadn’t heard a word. “Call me when I get home. Probably around noon.”

  Her mother disconnected the call, leaving Sierra listening to silence. She clicked off her phone, then considered what to do. Her mother planned to drive to Indigo Springs later today after she returned from the Atlantic City trip.

  If Sierra waited to talk to her, however, she risked the possibility Ben would get to her mother first.

  She couldn’t afford to let that happen.

  SIERRA PACED THE sidewalk in front of the main clubhouse at the Mountain Village Estates forty-five minutes later, uncaring that a cool drizzle was falling from the cloudy sky.

  The roar of a motor finally sounded in the distance, followed by the appearance of one of the sleek gray buses the retirement community chartered for its frequent excursions.

  The residents who had taken the Atlantic City trip filed off the bus, most of them laughing. They’d either had good luck in the casinos or enough money their losses didn’t sting.

  Rosemary Whitmore was among the last to disembark. Her mother’s somewhat formal clothing—cocoa-brown slacks and a cream-colored jacket—contrasted with the blue jeans worn by the unfamiliar white-haired woman with whom she was speaking.

  Her mother looked up and spotted Sierra. She stopped talking, seemingly in midsentence, then said something to the other woman before moving toward her daughter on high-heeled shoes. “Sierra, what are you doing here? Is something wrong? Is it Ryan? Is he okay?”

  “Ryan’s fine, Mom,” Sierra said quickly. “I just need to talk to you.”

  “Didn’t you remember I’m coming to Indigo Springs today?”

  “I need to talk to you about Dad,” Sierra clarified. She took a breath before continuing. “And about Allison Blaine.”

  A wariness Sierra didn’t want to acknowledge settled over her mother. “I told your young man. Your father never met her.” Her tone was almost haughty.

  “Did Dad tell you that?” Sierra asked.

  Her mother went still and seemed to weigh her next words. “Why do you ask?”

  “Dad treated one of Ben’s brothers when Dr. Goldstein wasn’t available,” Sierra said. “Allison Blaine brought him into the office. The form she filled out is in her son’s chart.”

  Even without sunlight illuminating her mother’s face, Sierra picked up on the way her complexion whitened. The older woman closed her eyes and shook her head. “I forgot about that boy’s chart.”

  Sierra’s heartbeat sped up. “Then you knew Dad was in town when Ben’s mother died?”

  “His mother?” She blew a breath out of her nose. “That explains why he’s so interested in something that happened so many years ago. I should have figured that out myself.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Sierra said.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “I knew.”

  Sierra’s lungs deflated, momentarily robbing her of oxygen. “Then why did you lie?”

  “I had to.” Her mother lowered her voice even though nobody was within hearing distance. “I couldn’t let that reporter turn her death into something it wasn’t.”

  Too much of this didn’t make sense. Sierra briefly told her mother about the allegation Missy Cromartie said her grandmother had made.

  Her mother’s face tightened. She glanced around at their surroundings. The drizzle had gotten heavier. The small groups of residents who had been saying their goodbyes were now hurrying to escape the rain, some heading to nearby condos, others to the cars they’d left in the parking lot.

  “Do you still want that ride, Rosemary?” called the white-haired lady in jeans.

  “No thanks, Helen. My daughter will take me home.” She waved to her friend, then put a hand on Sierra’s back, moving her toward the car. “Don’t say anything else here.”

  Sierra used the few moments it took to drive to her mother’s condo to get her thoughts in order. Her mother seemed content to travel in silence. Even inside the condo, her mother was in no hurry to start the conversation.

  “Wait for me in the sunroom,” her mother suggested,
then opened blinds and turned on lights to counteract the gloomy day. It was raining in earnest now. The golf course was deserted except for a lone Canadian goose that waddled on the fairway.

  Sierra was attempting to convince herself a logical explanation would be forthcoming when her mother joined her, occupying the same seat Ben had when he’d visited.

  “Tell me everything that happened this morning,” her mother said. “Don’t leave out anything.”

  Sierra put her questions on hold. Once she had her answers, she had a sickening feeling her life would never be the same. She relayed the events of the morning, ending with Ben’s second request to check their old records.

  Her mother laid a finger against her chin. “Then you can conveniently misplace the Nash boy’s file.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To protect your father’s name, of course. I thought you understood that.”

  “To protect him from what?” Sierra asked sharply, no longer able to stand the way her mother was dancing around the subject. In a smaller voice, she added, “If you don’t explain soon, I’ll think he did switch the label on that blood sample.”

  Her mother’s mouth shook and her face crumbled. “Under the circumstances, it was the only thing he could do.”

  A patient of Sierra’s had once described what the electric shock felt like when she’d been struck by lightning. Sierra experienced something like that now. She couldn’t form words, not even to ask the obvious question.

  “If he hadn’t done it,” her mother continued after long moments, “somebody would have questioned the drugs in her system. They might have traced it back to your father.”

  Sierra struggled to find her voice. “That doesn’t make sense. Allison Blaine wasn’t Dad’s patient. A doctor in Pittsburgh put her on antidepressants.”

  “I haven’t told you everything yet,” her mother said. “After your father told her that her son was okay, she asked him to give her something for her migraines.”

  Sierra’s heart started to pound in earnest.

  “The office was behind schedule because he’d squeezed in the boy. The people in the waiting room were getting impatient. He gave her some samples he had in the office without checking her medical history. They were only supposed to tide her over until she could make an appointment.”

  Her mother’s story started to make terrible sense. Allison Blaine had been taking an SSRI, a popular class of antidepressant medications.

  “Were the samples triptans?” Sierra named a family of drugs commonly prescribed for migraines.

  “Yes,” her mother said.

  Her heart squeezed. When taken together, the two drugs could carry a grave risk.

  “Dad was afraid her blood would show a high level of serotonin,” Sierra said, thinking aloud. Serotonin was a neurotransmitter that helped relay signals from one area of the brain to another.

  “That’s right,” her mother said. “Your father said the combination could have caused some sort of syndrome.”

  Serotonin syndrome could lead to restlessness, confusion and even loss of muscle coordination. If Allison Blaine had been afflicted, it would explain why her car had been weaving across the center line of the road near the overlook. The horror of her father’s mistake penetrated Sierra’s numbed mind.

  “Dad thought the drug interactions could explain a fall from a cliff,” Sierra said.

  Rosemary nodded unhappily. “I told him he couldn’t know that for sure. She was alone so maybe she did jump. But he blamed himself for giving her those samples without asking what other drugs she was taking.”

  “He should have gone to Alex Rawlings and confessed what he’d done,” Sierra said.

  “He wanted to, but I begged him not to,” her mother said. “Allison Blaine was already gone. Nothing he did would bring her back. I finally persuaded him to switch the label.”

  “You got him to switch?”

  “I had to. You heard me. I couldn’t let him throw away his career and ruin his reputation on something that might not even have been his fault. It could have destroyed our family.”

  “It wasn’t your place to make that determination,” Sierra said. “He falsified evidence.”

  “It was the right thing to do,” her mother insisted stubbornly. “Look what good he did as a doctor, what good he did in the community. He couldn’t have done any of that if he’d lost his license.”

  Sierra doubted it would have come to that. Even if her father had been facing career ruin, it didn’t excuse what he’d done. “It was still wrong.”

  “Don’t you think he knew that? That’s why he had a problem with alcohol.”

  Sierra couldn’t ever remember seeing her father drunk. “Dad didn’t drink too much,” she denied.

  “He was careful never to overindulge in public or in front of you and Ryan, but he most certainly did,” her mother said. “Why do you think he went to the basement to sneak drinks?”

  Her father had kept a flask hidden in his basement office, something Sierra had discovered while she was in high school. “Because you didn’t like him drinking.”

  “That’s right,” her mother said. “I knew it wasn’t good for him. Turns out I was right. He was under doctor’s orders not to drink after his first heart attack but that didn’t stop him.”

  That was news to Sierra, who had been in college when her father suffered his initial heart attack.

  “Don’t you see, Sierra?” her mother continued. “That mistake haunted your father. He paid for his mistake when he was alive. It wouldn’t serve any purpose to reveal it now.”

  Sierra detected the flaw in her mother’s reasoning, even with her mind reeling from what she’d learned. “What about Ben’s father? He thinks his wife committed suicide.”

  “Maybe she did,” her mother said.

  “More likely she didn’t,” Sierra argued. “Don’t you think Ben and his family have a right to know something else might have happened?”

  As a doctor, she’d dealt with the aftermath of death enough times to know how a survivor’s mind worked. If Ben eventually accepted his father’s theory, he might never get past the feeling his mother hadn’t loved her family enough to fight to stay alive.

  “Might have, Sierra,” her mother said. “Why stir things up?”

  “Ben’s stirring things up all by himself,” she pointed out. “He knows Dad played in the Lakeview Pines golf tournament the week his mother died.”

  “That’s not proof, and neither is anything your receptionist told him,” her mother said. “He has no way to verify anything.”

  Sierra’s head hurt. She realized she was clenching her jaw. “You talk like he’s the enemy.”

  “Listen to me, Sierra Whitmore.” Her mother’s voice was steely. “Your father spent his life making up for that single mistake. He has a right to be remembered for the good he did with his life. That’s what your focus should be on. Not on some man you barely know.”

  A man who’d gotten her to open up to him in ways she’d never dreamed possible. He claimed he knew the real Sierra.

  Could that woman live with herself if she failed to enlighten him about the past that continued to haunt him?

  A FEW EXCRUCIATING hours later, Sierra let herself out of her childhood home, where Ryan now lived with Annie, her mother’s voice ringing in her ears.

  “You can’t tell him, Sierra,” Rosemary Whitmore had said over and over again. “Think about your father.”

  If Sierra had anticipated her mother would continually return to the subject of Ben Nash, she wouldn’t have agreed to drive her to Indigo Springs.

  She breathed deeply of air washed clean by the rain, glad to be free of her mother’s stifling presence. Relieved, too, that Ryan had insisted she needn’t bother returning to work.

  She craved time alone to think. To process the ramifications of the disastrous mistake her father had made.

  Her father, who hadn’t been perfect after all.

  She looked to
ward the street, her feet freezing at the sight of the silver convertible at the curb. Ben emerged, his determination evident in his tall, proud carriage.

  His gait didn’t falter when he spotted her. He kept coming, closing the ground between them until he stood at the bottom of the stairs. His lean face appeared haggard, his eyes hooded.

  The time of reckoning was upon her.

  “I came to see if your mother was in town yet.” His monotone belied everything that had passed between them. “Ryan said he expected her today.”

  “She’s inside,” Sierra said.

  His squint wasn’t caused by the sun, which was still obscured by the clouds. “I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  He shrugged stiffly. “You tracked your mother down and warned her about the questions I’d ask. Tell me something, Sierra, is it worth it for me to talk to her now?”

  His implication couldn’t have been more clear. “You think I told her what to say.”

  “Didn’t you?” He didn’t seem angry or disappointed. He sounded…hurt.

  His pain reached out to her until she felt it, too. She needed no more time to think about what to do with her information. All along, there had been only one viable choice.

  “You’re right. It’s no use talking to my mother. She won’t tell you anything.” She was so attuned to his reactions she felt him wince. “But I will.”

  From the flatlining of his lips and hardening of his features, it was easy to see he didn’t trust her. She had only herself to blame.

  She sank onto the porch at the top of the steps, feeling the dampness from the recent rain penetrate the back of her skirt. Yet another expensive garment she cared little if she ruined.

  He stood without moving for a few moments, looking like an implacable force, then climbed the three steps. He lowered himself so that he sat beside her and yet held himself apart, silently communicating what her reluctance to face facts had done to them. The residential neighborhood was virtually deserted at this time of the afternoon. The only sounds were the chirping of birds, the distant bark of a dog and her shallow breaths.