The Unbidden Truth (13 page)

“Passable,” Darren said. “I've driven worse roads.”

“It could get worse,” she said.

“Oh, it will. Let's give it a go.”

The road became much worse as soon as they rounded a big boulder. He slowed down, shifted gears and kept moving forward over rocks and rutted tracks, so badly eroded in places that the road was indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. Jouncing, lurching, followed by a cloud of dust that caught up with them now and again, they kept going. He slowed to a crawl when they came to a dry streambed, then headed downward and up the other side. The truck tilted, straightened, tilted again as they inched their way over more rocky ground, steadily climbing now. Finally, he came to a stop.

“There it is,” he said.

Below, in a verdant valley, was a ranch house shaded by golden cottonwood trees, several manufactured homes in a cluster beneath another copse, cars and a truck, and a corral with horses grazing.

“Paradise in hell,” Darren said, shifting gears again to begin the descent into the valley.

B
arbara knew that Atherton and his wife, both eighty years old, lived here with their son Craig and his wife, Wanda, and their three grown children, all in college. Wanda opened the door at her knock. She was round-faced, with blond hair drawn back in a French twist, and she was dressed in jeans, boots and a Western shirt. Her expression was not friendly.

Barbara introduced herself, then said, “I have an appointment with the senator.”

A tall, lean man stepped into a wide hall behind Wanda and beckoned Barbara. “Atherton,” he said. To his daughter-in-law he said, “I'll speak with Ms. Holloway in my study.” He looked past her. “Your friend is welcome to come in and wait.”

“He said he'll wait out there.”

“As you please. This way.”

He took a few steps toward another door and waited as she
passed Wanda and entered the room. It was handsome with bookshelves lining two walls and windows overlooking the porch beyond. A massive desk, easy chairs covered with worn leather, and a rich-looking Navajo rug furnished the room. He indicated a chair and waited for her to sit down, then sat opposite her with his hands on his knees.

“As I told you on the phone, I have nothing to add to the story I told the investigators years ago. You have traveled far over bad roads for nothing.”

“I was hoping that by making an appointment several days in advance you would have had time to refresh your memory.”

“My memory is fine,” he said.

In fact, there was little about him to suggest that he was eighty years old. He looked healthy, with deeply tanned skin, thick white eyebrows and bright blue eyes. His silver hair was trimmed and his hands were steady, although prominent dark veins indicated advanced years.

“I believe that,” she said. “Let me tell you a story. In 1978 Robert Frye was doing a job for you, one that cost him his life, that killed his wife and injured her sister, who then lost her child. Carolyn Frye was critically injured and removed to a distant hospital. She didn't die, although the surviving members of her family were told otherwise. Months later, when she came out of the fog of anesthetics and painkillers, she was told she had a different name, a different birth date making her more than a year older than she was, and different parents who had died in an accident. When she persisted in remembering a forbidden past, she was punished.”

He did not move as she spoke. Now he stood up and walked to his desk and seated himself behind it. She understood perfectly what that meant, since it was what she often
did when she had to take control of a situation. She followed him and stood before the desk and leaned forward with both hands on it.

He swiveled and gazed out the windows. “I told the investigators all I know about that,” he said. “As far as I was aware, Robert was visiting his family in California.”

“Senator,” she said, “you will tell me today in the privacy of your study what I need to know, or I will subpoena you and you will make that statement under oath before a judge and jury. And, Senator, I will refute it and impeach you.”

She left the desk, walked to the bookshelves and examined the titles in the silence that followed. One wall held many of the same law books that filled Frank's shelves. The other held histories and biographies, archaeology, some philosophy, books of exploration: Lewis and Clark blazing the Oregon Trail, Byrd's march to the North Pole, Thor Heyerdahl's adventures on the
Kon-Tiki
…Not superheroes in red capes, but ordinary, fallible men undertaking extraordinary tasks.

When she heard movement she turned to see him rising. He stood with his back to her, still looking out. “Over there,” he said, “beyond that knob a few miles, scientists are digging up dinosaur bones. Nothing stays buried, does it? Eventually, time, weather, possibly the indifferent hand of fate, stirs the past and it all rises again.”

He turned toward her then. “May I look inside your purse?”

She picked it up and put it on his desk. His examination was cursory.

“Thank you,” he said. “Please, excuse me, I forgot my manners. I'll ask Wanda to bring coffee and have some refreshment taken out to your friend.” He inclined his head in a slight bow and left the room.

 

Minutes later, once again seated in the leather-covered chairs, with coffee at hand, he regarded her levelly and said, “May I ask what your interest in that affair is?”

“Carolyn Frye is my client,” she said. “I have to know to what extent her life is threatened.”

“I see. I had never heard of you, Ms. Holloway, before you called. Since then, of course, I have done a little research. Criminal law. With an exemplary record. Also said to be discreet.”

She shook her head. “I can't promise discretion. I can try to keep confidential anything you tell me, but I can't guarantee silence.”

“I understand,” he said after a moment. “Of course, one's client must take precedence. I also studied law once.”

“I know you did.”

“We've both done a little research,” he said with a wry smile. He continued to study her as if to gauge how much she had learned about Robert Frye as well as about himself.

Impatiently she said, “Senator, as you mentioned before, that's a long drive from Eugene, and it will be no shorter returning. Can we get on with it? I know Robert Frye was working for you, I know he was murdered following a phone call to you, and I can surmise a great deal from other clues. Smuggling is involved, both into and out of Mexico and points beyond, no doubt. The only thing we have that might be of interest to illicit buyers in Central America are weapons, and the only thing to such buyers in the States would be drugs.”

He nodded. “Yes. You must understand that little mail received in a senator's office is ever seen by him. Various gatekeepers screen it, and it is diverted to the proper staff member to be dealt with. In the year we're discussing Robert brought
a letter to my attention, and I must tell you that I honestly can't recall what it said. It was written by a Mexican girl or young woman in stilted schoolgirl English, and it mentioned slave labor and proof that it existed. I asked Robert to look into it. I was on the committee with oversight of INS at the time, and the letter was of some interest. I never saw that letter again, and that is all I can recall about it.”

He sipped his coffee and put the cup on the table at his elbow. “I'm allowed three cups a day,” he said. “I try to make it last as long as I can. But, please, help yourself to more if you like.” As she did so, he continued. “Accordingly, Robert did look into it. He flew to California and from there on to Mexico to interview the girl. He was fluent in Spanish. When he returned, he said slave labor was not the issue, but he believed it was something much bigger—smuggling that involved guns and drugs. I blame myself for allowing him to proceed after that. It called for trained investigators.” He paused again, this time gazing past her at the windows, as if thinking again about the bones being exhumed.

He pulled his gaze back to her and continued. “In June, his vacation time was coming, and he planned to spend it following leads he had uncovered. He called me late on that Thursday. I was due to fly home the following day, and we agreed to meet here on Saturday. He said, during that call, that he had unearthed facts that would incriminate people in high places, that he had enough to deliver the kingpin, that he would bring it all over here and we could decide our next move.”

“Did he give you details, names?”

“No. As I said, it was quite late in Washington. He knew he would find me in the office as I was finishing a great deal of work before I left. In the middle of our conversation he ex
cused himself, and I could hear him tell his child to go back to bed. She had overheard part of our conversation, and he cut it short soon after that.”

“That's why you spirited her away,” Barbara said. “She might have known too much.”

He nodded. “Exactly. I knew no more than I have told you, but she might have known more. Robert was not a trained investigator for criminal matters. He was indiscreet on the telephone and might have been more indiscreet in the privacy of his home.”

“There was a leak in your office,” Barbara said.

“There must have been,” he said heavily.

“And you denied everything.”

“Yes. On Saturday, the day of the car bomb, I received a letter here at the ranch. No warning, no concrete threat, just a picture of Craig and Wanda and their three-month-old infant, my grandson, pasted over a picture of an explosion. That's when I called the FBI to protect Carolyn, and I denied everything.”

He picked up his coffee cup and drained it, hesitated, then refilled it. “I returned to Washington and personally searched Robert's files and found nothing concerning this. I also went with the police to Robert's apartment to recover files that he might have taken home, and again there was nothing relating to this matter. If he had had anything there, someone else had gotten to the material first, or else he had it all with him and it was destroyed in the blast and fire. In either case, there was nothing tangible.”

“Then you retired from the Senate,” she said. “Washed your hands of the whole affair.”

He nodded. “I brought dishonor to my office, to the mem
ory of a fine young man, to everything I had held dear or even holy. I served out my term and did not run again.” He drank more coffee, keeping his blue eyes focused on her in an unblinking gaze. “A few years later the entire Iran-Contra scandal was exposed, and I felt almost vindicated. If what Robert had learned had been a precursor to that matter, fate had arranged to reveal it without his aid, without my aid. I argued with myself that I could have offered nothing. The argument was hollow. In the end we all behave according to our personal inherent selfish needs. I valued my family over my ideals and beliefs.”

She stood up and walked to the window but saw nothing of the scene before her. “Back to my original question,” she said, turning to face him. “Is Carolyn Frye in danger today?”

“I think not. Those involved in the Iran-Contra affair were investigated, put on trial, sentenced. Even though some of them have risen to the top once more, much the way pond scum always rises, that chapter in their lives is now history of no interest to anyone. If I may offer advice, I would say leave it alone, Ms. Holloway. That path will take you nowhere. I never knew the fate of Carolyn Frye. It was understood from the start that I would not be told of her new identity or her destiny. When I read of her death, I did not know if it was true or fabricated. I see no possibility for anyone else to have learned more than I knew about that or, at this date, for any of them to care.”

“Except,” Barbara said, “someone was responsible for the bomb that killed her parents, and that person could have a vital, selfish interest in knowing if she survived. As you and I both know, there is no statute of limitations on murder.”

D
arren was leaning against the truck when she left Atherton's house. He opened the passenger door as she approached and she climbed in.

“I thought I'd take a different route home,” he said when he got behind the wheel. “Okay with you?”

She nodded. He waved to someone, and a man lounging on the wide porch waved back. Darren began to drive. “They were keeping an eye on me,” he said. “No horse rustling allowed, something like that. Also, a boy brought me coffee and offered beer. Not bad treatment for a suspicious character.”

He headed out a gravel road for Pendleton. “We'll take the interstate over to 97, head south. There's a state park over there where we can pack it in for the day. Are you all right?”

She roused. “Sorry. Thinking. I'm fine.” Then she lapsed into silence again, and he said nothing more.

Wishing she had her laptop along, she began to compose mental notes, although she knew she was not likely to forget a thing the senator had said. How much truth, how many lies? She stared out her side window and admitted she could not say with any assurance that anything he had said had been truthful. He had been a skilled politician, an attorney, trained to reveal no more than he wanted to. A little later she was startled to see the broad blue Columbia River on her right. The thirty or more miles they had covered already had passed unnoticed.

The river appeared to be placid, static, like a landscape painting, not a moving body of water. “When we get time travel,” she said, “my first trip will be to a time when the Columbia was wild, untamed, when it crashed and foamed and made geysers of white water here and there, with waterfalls and pools of deep blue water where giant fish swam.”

“Yeah,” Darren said. “Or when the ice dam broke and that great inland sea roared out with a wall of water fifty feet high, scouring everything in its path.”

“And met the Pacific tidal bore coming in,” she said, seeing it in her mind's eye, “and the two bodies crashed together with thunder you could hear for a hundred miles.”

Now they had reached the interstate, and the giants were trucks thundering past. Modern behemoths. What man hath wrought. She fell into silence again, once more absorbed in her own thoughts.

Darren made his exit from the interstate at Highway 97, and the high Cascades were off to the right, and desert and fields of irrigated winter wheat on the left. The newly sprouted wheat was deceptively tender-looking but hardy enough to withstand the cruel winter coming soon. Where no irrigation
reached, the desert asserted itself. Soon they left the wheat fields and there was only the high desert scrub.

A little before five Darren pulled into the state park and wound through it to a spot with a few juniper trees and a picnic table. There were several other campers in the park, even a tent. He selected a site well separated from them all.

After they climbed from the truck, she moved restlessly about the campsite as he began to take out the propane stove, pots, the water can.

“Is there anything you want me to do?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“I think I'll take a walk,” she said.

He looked at the sky. It was not dark, but the shadows were lengthening, and the sun had gone behind the mountains.

“I won't go far,” she said, and started up the road that meandered through the park. It wasn't cold, but probably would get cold again overnight, although not as frigid as the previous night. Here, closer to the river, the temperature would be moderated. She wished she could see the river and realized she wanted to be home, to make certain Frank was all right, that Carrie was all right. She walked faster, then abruptly turned and retraced her steps. What if someone had followed them? She chided herself for becoming spooked but continued back to their campsite, and was relieved to see Darren alone there. He had made a fire in the fire pit.

“Potatoes roasting in foil,” he said. “Steak with mushrooms and onions coming up, and deli slaw. What more could a person want?”

“A glass of wine,” she said.

“Right. But we'll call it Kool-Aid.” He busied himself in the back of the truck, brought out a plastic glass and handed
it to her. “I think they frown on alcohol in the state parks,” he said, taking out a second glass.

She sat on a log near the fire and watched the flames for a time. “How long before it's soup?”

“Half an hour to forty minutes.” He turned the potatoes with a long fork.

“I have to tell you what this is all about,” she said.

He sat on another log, and she told him everything she knew about Carrie. “I don't know if I can trust Atherton. I don't know if he lied when he said he didn't know her identity. And I don't know if any of that has anything to do with the murder of Joe Wenzel.”

“But you think it's connected.”

“Yes. The point is she's at risk, and my actions might have increased that risk. I could have left her in the county jail, or I could have chosen not to have Janey talk to her. I could have chosen not to talk to Atherton. Everything I've done might have put her in more jeopardy. Now I don't dare do anything that might cause her to remember her past. I can't ask if she overheard anything, or saw anything that might be dangerous.”

She sipped wine. “I can't change any of that. It's done and she's at risk, but you don't have to be. Before, it was simply an unspecified danger, but now you know how serious it could be. People who plant bombs don't care how many they injure or kill. You and Todd have nothing to do with this, and it isn't fair to involve you.”

“All right,” he said. He stood up and took her glass from her, went to the truck, poured more wine and handed it back.

“What do you mean ‘all right'?”

“I mean you've told me. You're absolved of any responsibility on my behalf or Todd's. I asked you before if she would
be at less risk somewhere else and the answer was no. That hasn't changed.” He picked up the fork and turned the potatoes again, then turned on the camp stove and set a skillet over the burner. “Ten minutes.”

“Darren, you have to consider Todd.”

“Oh, I do.” The skillet began to smoke and he put a large steak in it, drew back when a larger cloud of smoke rose, then faced her. “Last year when he turned twelve I told him about my past history, my sojourn in the desert, all of it. Afterward, he looked me in the eye and he said, ‘It's okay, Dad.' He trusts me, Barbara, and the gravest risk I see for him is the loss of that trust. If he ever suspected that I turned my back on a friend in trouble, that trust would vanish, and I value it too much to let that happen. Now, do you like your steak moderately well done, rare, what? Don't say really well done or I'll hang up my chef's hat.”

They ate at the picnic table and by the time they were finished and the coffee was ready, night had fallen. Sitting again on the logs by the fire, Darren said, “I think I'll suggest ghost towns for our next collecting expedition. This country is thick with them. Of course, there's not much to see.”

“Oh, Todd will repopulate every one of them with ghosts and goblins, specters and monsters lurking in every shadow. He'll love it.” She stretched her legs to get her feet closer to the fire. The air had grown much colder.

Darren stood up and went to the truck, returned with the ponchos. “You'll toast your toes and your backside will freeze,” he said behind her.

She felt his hands on her shoulders and stiffened.

He began to massage her shoulders. “It's a heavy world, Barbara. You don't have to carry it twenty-four hours of the
day. Put it down. We'll be home in the afternoon tomorrow, and you can pick it up again then.”

She remembered what they had told her about him at the clinic, that he had magic in his hands. True, she thought, as second by second she felt the weight lifting.

“That's better,” he said a few minutes later. He draped a poncho over her shoulders and back and returned to his log.

He began to talk about the different trips he and Todd had made over the years. “We take pictures and have posters made from them. He's accumulating quite a collection. When we get the rec room finished, he intends to paper the walls with them. I think you're right. He'll love ghost towns.”

“I'd think you would hate the desert,” she said. In the firelight his face looked almost ruddy against the blackness behind him.

“The first two years were pretty hellish,” he said. “But you sort of get the rhythm of it. You begin to understand that today will be like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today. Cooler in the winter, but still the same. So you learn to stay out of the sun from around ten until five or six, do the heavy lifting around dawn or after dark, and draw a lot of mental pictures of trees and brooks. I didn't mind it after the first couple of years. This desert isn't like that. Up here you don't know from day to day if it will rain, snow, be blazing hot or freezing. And sometimes you get the perfect day, like today. Like now.”

She ducked her head.

“Barbara,” he said softly. “I know you have a trial coming up. I won't get in your face while you prepare for it. But no promises for afterward. Fair enough?”

After a moment she said, “I just can't think of afterward right now.”

“Okay. Listen.” From far away a coyote was calling.

 

“Another beautiful day,” Darren said when she stepped down from the truck the next morning.

It was. The sun was bright but not glaring yet, and the air had a hint of moisture. That would vanish soon, but it felt good at the moment. After breakfast Darren tidied up the truck, secured everything in its proper place and they both rolled up their sleeping bags. She strapped hers to her backpack and they were ready.

“Let's stop at Sisters for soup and salad,” he said, fastening his seat belt. “And we'll be home by three-thirty or so. Tired?”

“Not really. What I am is gritty, down to the bone gritty. What I desperately need is a shower.”

“I wasn't going to mention that,” he said.

“Some free legal advice,” she said. “The pot should be very careful in making remarks about the kettle.”

“Noted.” Laughing, he began to drive.

 

They pulled to a stop before her apartment complex at twenty minutes after three. Darren got out with her, retrieved her backpack from the truck and carried it to the door. “I'll take it up for you,” he said.

She shook her head. “It isn't heavy.” Then, feeling a strange awkwardness, she said, “Thank you, Darren.”

He nodded, suddenly as formal and stiff as she was. “You're welcome. It was my pleasure.” He returned to his truck and she entered her building.

She had a list of to-do things lined up: first call her father and reassure him that she was home safe and sound and would be by later, a very long hot shower, look over her e-mail, go to Frank's, eat and pick up the reports she had asked Bailey to leave with him, come back home and read…

 

Across the river Carrie had been startled that afternoon by Herbert's bellow from the backyard, asking if she wanted to go shopping with him. He said he never climbed stairs when he didn't have to. “You have just so many units of energy you start the day with,” he had explained. “Say it's ten. You use up one just getting ready for whatever's going to happen. You know, shower, shave—well not you, but some of us—make a bite to eat, like that. Use two or three doing little things, straightening up, fixing this or that, if you're working you use a lot more, and later making dinner or just driving around. See what it begins to add up to? It all takes its toll. And if you need a lot of energy when the tigers come marauding, you just plain don't have it. I believe in conservation of energy, yes, ma'am, I do.”

They had gone shopping. He had money, she suspected, since she had seen what kinds of things he had put in his cart—expensive wines, a large brick of imported cheese, a larger prime rib roast…He called the wine selection piss-poor and began to talk about the sherry bars in Madrid rhapsodically. “That's all they offer to drink,” he had said. “Sherry. A hundred, two hundred different kinds of sherry, some brick red, some as pale as water, and they keep bringing these little dishes with tapas, so you got to keep on drinking, trying them all. Wouldn't do to miss out on the best one. Tapas, that's the way. Little shrimp, breaded fried mushrooms, great big smoked oysters, deep-fried octopus…”

That day in his truck going home with her meager supplies and his big bags of groceries, she had said, “What are you running away from? Don't tell me you aren't. You keep a good eye on your backside.”

He looked sheepish. “Well, now. It's like this. I had this job down in California, fixing up a few things, and a pretty little lady comes sashaying along and she says, ‘Whatcha doing?' And I say, ‘Since you can't get no reliable help no more, I decided to do this myself.' And she looks sort of interested and first one thing, then another, and somehow she gets the impression that I sort of own that estate. Mighty fine estate it was, tennis courts, stable, the works. A man would be right proud to own an estate like that. Anyways, one of the other guys working around says that someone tipped her off and she's looking for me with a baseball bat, and I figure it's about time to look up my old pal Darren. And here I am.”