Guilt by Silence

by Taylor Smith

  “Free?” Mariah cried. “Do you think I got off free, Stephen, seeing my husband and child hurt like that?”

  “It’s not enough!”

  “It’s me you’re really angry with, Stephen,” Frank said. “Leave Mariah out of it.”

  “Oh, right—protect her. No, Dad, I’m more than angry with you. I hate your guts. I want to see you hurt, too, for what you did—hurt bad. And I know the best way to do it.” He raised the gun toward Mariah.

  “Stevie, no!” Carol cried. “This is insane!”

  “You don’t know what they did, Carol! Stay out of this, because you just don’t understand!”

  “What don’t I know, Stephen? What don’t I understand? That Lindsay is our half sister? I know that!”

  Stephen froze and his head snapped toward his sister. “What?”

  “I know it,” Carol repeated. “For God’s sake, Stephen, put that thing away.”

  “Carol,” Mariah whispered. “How do you know?”

  “I suspected it after you came back from Vienna and I saw Lindsay. She’d grown incredibly, and changed. She was a little girl when you left but she’d turned into such a young lady.”

  “But how—”

  The other three stood motionless as Carol walked over to a bookshelf by the fireplace and shuffled through it, finally finding what she was looking for. It was an old leather-bound album, and she opened it to reveal sawtoothedged photographs held in place with black corners. Carol flipped the pages and then brought it over to Mariah.

  “I used to love these old pictures when I was a little girl,” she said.

  Mariah took the album and examined the page Carol tapped with her finger. On it was a black-and-white photograph of a wedding party. The bride and groom were seated, surrounded by a half-dozen other people, the men in high starched collars and dark suits, the women in dropped-waist dresses, shirred, tucked and lace-trimmed, their hair pinned up in the Edwardian style that preceded the bobs of the twenties. Mariah’s eyes moved along the formally sober faces arranged around the couple. When she came to a young girl in the upper right-hand corner of the photograph, she froze. The girl had pale skin and dark eyes. Her curly hair was twisted and coiled on top of her head, but unruly wisps escaped at her cheeks. Although the photograph was black-and-white, there was no mistaking that that hair had to be red. Her gauzy linen dress had a high lace neckline, but she looked as if she would have been more comfortable in jeans and a sweatshirt.

  “It’s Lindsay,” she whispered.

  Carol smiled a little and nodded. “In a couple of years, I think. Actually, this is Granny Tucker—Dad’s mother. She was fifteen when this picture was taken. The bride is her older sister. It’s one of the few pictures we have of Gran and the only one of her as a girl. It looks like my Alex got her red hair, too, but Lindsay’s a dead ringer. She couldn’t be anything but a Tucker.”

  “Oh, Carol!”

  Frank’s daughter took back the album and, after one last look, closed it and returned it to the shelf. Then she turned to face the others.

  “So you see, Stevie, I do know. When I first saw Lindsay again after Vienna, it took me a while to figure out why she looked so familiar. I came over here one day to hunt through the albums when Dad was at work. I don’t say I wasn’t hurt when I realized what must have happened. But in the end, she is our sister, and she’s a wonderful young girl. You must see that.”

  “That’s not the point! It’s not about Lindsay. It’s about these two, and what they did to our mother.”

  “What did they do to her?”

  “Come on! You know this would have hurt her!”

  “But it didn’t, because she never knew about it.”

  “Carol, I’m sorry,” Frank said. “I loved your mother. When I lost her, it was like losing my own life. I never meant to do anything to hurt her.”

  “I know that, Dad. She loved you, too. I’ll tell you what did hurt her, Stevie,” Carol said, turning once more to her brother. “It was the thought of Dad being left alone. Do you know what she told me that last time she went into the hospital? It was just after Mariah and David got married. Mom and I were alone, for once not pretending we didn’t know what was coming. She needed to talk about it. And at one point, Mom said she was sorry that David had shown up because she had secretly hoped that Dad and Mariah would get together after she was gone. She knew that Mariah is a good person and has been a good friend to Dad.”

  “I don’t want to hear this!” Stephen screamed.

  “You need to hear it! Honestly, Stephen! You’re my brother and I love you, but you’ve always been so wrapped up in yourself that you couldn’t see anyone else’s point of view—especially Dad’s. He may not have been the most demonstrative father in the world, but he loved us. He worked hard to make our lives as normal as possible. He took care of Mom, us, the house—everything. How easy do you think that was for him? Why can’t you see that he’s not Superman and forgive him his mistakes?”

  “Because to me he always seemed like Superman,” Stephen cried, “and he hated me for not being strong, too. I tried to be like him, but I couldn’t and so he never approved of me.”

  “That’s not true,” Frank protested. “I never wanted you to be like me!”

  “You could never accept me for what I am! You never touched me, never told me you loved me. You were always so closed off. You still are.”

  “I don’t mean to be, Stephen. It’s the way I was raised. People didn’t touch in my family, kept their feelings to themselves. I know it’s not good, but I never learned to be any other way. You’re my son and I do love you. I always did, even if I didn’t always understand you.”

  “Mom understood me. So did David—he was the only real friend I ever had. I miss them. God! I miss them so much!”

  “I know you do,” Frank said quietly. He stepped closer as Stephen stood trembling. “Give me the gun now, son. It’s all over.”

  “No!” Stephen cried, jumping out of reach with surprising speed, given his size. “She can’t get away with it anymore!”

  “Stephen, put it down!” Carol cried. “Mom would be very angry if she saw this. You know she would. Think about someone other than yourself, just for once! Think about Lindsay—she’s our little sister. She’s already lost the only father she ever knew, the father she loved. For God’s sake, Stevie,” she added softly, “we lost our mother. Don’t make Lindsay lose hers, too.”

  Stephen hesitated, his hands shaking visibly. Mariah watched him warily, her peripheral vision taking in the placement of furniture in the room, trying to decide which way to dive if his finger began to move on the trigger. It was then that she noticed a shadow moving across the living-room window behind him. There were people outside—Neville’s people, she realized wearily. One way or another, whether Stephen shot her or not, it was all over now.

  They stood motionless for what seemed an eternity as he wavered. And then suddenly, he broke, spinning around and thundering out of the room and down the front hall.

  “No!” Mariah screamed. “Stevie, don’t go outside! Frank! Don’t let him go out there with the gun!”

  Tucker glanced at her and then at the window, his face registering instant comprehension. He shot toward the hallway like a bullet, but the front door had opened before he was even out of the room. There was a moment of confusion outside: panicky shouts, rapid footsteps. And then a hail of loud retorts, like a fleet of trucks backfiring. Then no sound at all, except a father’s anguished groan.

  Epilogue

  On New Year’s Day, nineteen days after Stephen Tucker died on his father’s doorstep, a commercial airliner on a regularly scheduled flight from West Africa to Paris was hijacked. Arabic linguistics experts called in to analyze recordings of cockpit conversations with the three hijackers determined from their accents that they were Libyan. The pilot was forced to detour to New York’s Kennedy International Airport. Once on the ground at JFK, the hijackers released several of the passengers, mostly nati
onals of countries deemed “friendly to the cause of freedom.” One of the passengers carried a list of demands—along with a chilling threat.

  The hijackers were calling for the release of a number of prisoners held on terrorist charges in Western Europe and the extradition to Libya of U.S. military personnel involved in an air raid on the desert encampment of Colonel Ghaddafi in order that they might face a war crimes tribunal. The hijackers also demanded twenty million dollars in gold. If their demands were not met, they threatened to detonate a nuclear device that, although small, would depopulate much of New York City and render a good part of the Atlantic seaboard uninhabitable for decades to come. In a subsequent telephone call to the New York Times, the hijackers repeated their threat and claimed to be a suicide squad who would gladly meet Allah as martyrs of the Holy War before they would surrender to the Great Satan.

  The standoff at JFK continued for thirty-six hours. Behind the scenes, American and international police and intelligence forces scrambled to confirm the identity and sponsorship of the hijackers and to gauge the validity of their threat. In order to prevent mass hysteria and gridlock on roads out of New York, the possibility that a real nuclear device could be on board was downplayed. Among press members covering the siege, however, rumors circulated that the terrorists had obtained an experimental weapon stolen from a Russian research facility. No credence was given to this report by official sources, who cited the efficacy of arms control agreements in preventing just such a disaster.

  At 4:00 a.m. on day three of the crisis, the aircraft was swarmed by a special commando squad. All three hijackers were killed. One hostage died later of gunshot wounds and nine others were hospitalized for their injuries. Although the raid on the aircraft lasted only four minutes and all of the survivors were quickly hustled away for debriefing, a journalist who happened to be near one of the returning S.W.A.T. team members thought she heard him say that the attack was launched after a device was detonated but failed to produce a nuclear explosion. At a news conference later that day, federal officials produced seven handguns, three Uzi submachine guns and several grenades and knives that they said constituted the entire arsenal of the hijackers. Upon further questioning, they denied categorically that a nuclear device had ever been on board the aircraft. The threat, they said, had been a ruse.

  For some time afterward, news commentators speculated on the conflicting reports. Some alleged a cover-up. Others doubted this, but suggested that nuclear terrorism was an inevitability. Learned experts were trotted out on both sides of the debate to confirm that crude nuclear weapons were either notoriously easy to manufacture and steal or, alternatively, far too complex and unstable to meet the mobility and ease-of-use requirements of the average renegade with a cause. Some reputable commentators suggested that the Kennedy device had been real, but the hijackers, thankfully, had bumbled.

  In the weeks that followed, rumors circulated of a covert operation to wipe out the training facilities and arms supply lines that the hijackers had used. At the same time, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and various governments, including Washington, declared unceasing vigilance in their efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

  It was a classic case of announcing that the barn door had been shut after the horses had already escaped.

  On a Saturday afternoon in mid-January, Paul Chaney and Mariah Bolt stood just off Constitution Avenue in downtown Washington, watching his son and her daughter race around the circular skating rink between the Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery. The air was crisp and cold. Lindsay’s hair flamed out behind her as she lunged ahead, matching the younger boy’s energy with her long and increasingly strong glides.

  “Lindsay’s doing great out there,” Chaney said. “Almost got her old form back.”

  Mariah gave a satisfied nod. “She’s so stubborn—she won’t quit until she’s even better than she used to be. She skated every day while we were in New Hampshire. There’s a coed hockey league that she’s determined to join next year.”

  “Jack’s starting to play this year, too.”

  “He’s a nice little boy, Paul. The two of you look like you’re having a good time this weekend.”

  “It’s a new experience. Up to now, we’ve never had more than a few hours at a time together. We’ve got almost ten years to make up for, but this is a real breakthrough. It’s dicey, though,” he added. “I don’t want to tread on his stepfather’s toes. He and Phyllis are doing a good job with Jack and this isn’t easy for them. But Jack has asked and they’ve agreed that he can spend occasional weekends and holidays with me.”

  Mariah glanced up sharply. “Does this mean you’re staying in the States?”

  Paul turned to face her. “Yup, it’s a done deal as of yesterday. You’re looking at the new anchor and co-producer for a weekly investigative news program to debut on ABC in the spring. We go into preproduction next month.”

  “Paul, that’s wonderful! Congratulations!”

  “Thanks. The concept is exciting and I’m looking forward to it. And,” he added, watching her closely, “we’re going to base the program here in Washington.”

  Her stomach did a quick somersault. “Washington?” The calm in her voice belied the gymnastics going on inside.

  He nodded. “That was one of my objectives when I went after the CBN bureau chief job. I was really bummed out when I got fired and thought I’d have to go back into the trenches.”

  “I would have thought you’d want New York. There’s a lot going on there and you’d be closer to Jack.”

  “It’s an easy hop from here. Compared to where I’ve been for the past ten years, this commute will be a picnic. And,” he said, looking at her intently, “I was very motivated to try to line up a Washington-based job.”

  “Ah, yes, the allure of government intrigue.”

  “There’s that, of course,” he said, turning back to the rink. “But I had more personal matters in mind.” His eyes never left the kids on the ice, but it was obvious that he was practically holding his breath in anticipation of her reaction.

  Mariah hesitated, not entirely sure how to react. It was altogether too much, too soon—and yet not a surprise. She had known all along that sooner or later they would have to address the question left hanging since the day after Stephen Tucker’s death, when she and Paul had parted for their respective Christmas destinations: whether what had happened between them was an ending or the possibility of a beginning.

  After the disaster on Frank’s doorstep, Stephen’s body had been whisked away, George Neville holding the police at arm’s length on some national security pretext when they responded to a call from an anxious neighbor. Frank fell into a dark and self-recriminating silence, and there was no comfort that Mariah could offer him in the immediate aftermath of his son’s death. In the end, the only thing she could do was leave the family to grieve in peace.

  When she returned home, a car was idling across the road from her driveway. Chaney had waited with Neville’s people at Langley while Mariah went to confront Frank, and they had driven him to the condo when word came that it was all over and Mariah was on her way home.

  Paul jumped out of the back seat as soon as she pulled into the garage, striding quickly toward her and wrapping an arm around her shoulders as he led her into the house, pausing only to hit the garage-door button. It dropped against the bitter cold as the two of them sought refuge from the night. There was no one else Mariah would have wanted to be with right then—but she very much needed to be with Paul.

  There is always a certain poignancy about making love to someone for the first time—the gentle surprises in each new touch, the warm explorations and discoveries as bodies learn to fit together. And with Paul, Mariah discovered, there was the added sweetness of complete trust, made more acute by the intense bond that develops when two people come within a gasp of dying together.

  Still, as they pulled apart from one another at Dulles Airport the n
ext afternoon—Paul on his way to retrieve his father’s car in New Mexico and return with it to Phoenix, Mariah to New Hampshire to be with Lindsay and David’s family and to visit his grave for a long, soul-searching commune about the secrets they had kept from each other—there was an unspoken agreement between them not to try to explore what, if anything, could follow.

  They had talked on the phone a couple of times over the holidays, and Paul had told her he was going to New York to see about a job. For two weeks, she had heard nothing. Then, the previous evening, he had called to say he was back in Washington and that his son was with him. They set up a skating excursion for the next day, leaving all questions hanging until they could meet face-to-face.

  “Paul,” she said now, “I’m not sure I’m—”

  “—ready. I knew you were going to say that. I know it’s too soon after David and I don’t want to put pressure on you—or scare you off—but I’d like to be there when you decide you are ready. I just don’t know if that’s presumptuous on my part.”

  Mariah sighed. “It’s not that I don’t feel anything for you. You know I do. But it’s not that simple. I have more than myself to think about—there’s Lindsay, too. She looks happy out there at the moment, but she’s still got a lot of pain, both physical and emotional, that she’s dealing with. God knows, being thirteen is hard enough, but after everything she’s been through this past year, I’m afraid I’ll blow it if I’m not careful right now. We need time to stabilize—me as well as her.”

  “I can understand that,” he said, nodding. “Have you decided about…you know?”

  “Whether to tell her the truth? Yes, I’ve decided. Part of me rejects the idea of keeping secrets any longer. That’s what got us into trouble in the first place. But I talked it over with Frank and Carol, and they’ve agreed with me that it would be a mistake to tamper with Lindsay’s memories of David. He was the only father she ever knew and his love was the most important pillar of her young life. It would be criminal to undermine that now, when she needs it most. We were lucky that George Neville arranged to keep the details of Stephen’s death under close wraps—Lindsay thinks it was an accident. And Carol has been wonderful. She wants very much to stay close to her sister, under any circumstances. Eventually, it might be possible—or necessary—to tell Lindsay everything. I don’t know. For now, we’ll take things one day at a time.”