A Stranger's Wish (32 page)

“Do you think they’d print it if it weren’t? The evidence must be pretty solid, or they’d never risk the legal consequences.”

Still shaking his head, the man shuffled off to his unknown business, and I walked slowly to my car.

Poor Irene! What must it be like to wake up one morning and find you’re married to a criminal? I couldn’t imagine.

I cocked an eyebrow. If she hadn’t already known.

I actually felt sorry for Nelson, the poor little twit. It was going to be bad enough for him without having the kids rag on him about his stepfather. How the mighty are fallen.

Friday morning’s
Intell
story took my breath away.

HURLBERT CAUSES GIRL’S DEATH

He Deserted Young Lover for Irene

In front of me was a picture of Adam Hurlbert and a lovely young woman identified as Cathleen Geohagan. I stared at the photo. She was gorgeous, truly beautiful with her radiant smile. No wonder her father had said I didn’t look like her.

The
Intelligencer
Journal
has learned that Pennsylvania’s home and family candidate for the United States Senate, Adam Hurlbert, 52, was involved in a sexual relationship as recently as last year with Cathleen Geohagan, then 21. When he left her without warning for Irene Parsons Carmody, the widowed daughter of Pennsylvania governor Benjamin Parsons, Geohagan collapsed. A short time later she took her life by mixing alcohol and prescription drugs.

Not only did Hurlbert’s marriage to Irene Carmody allegedly lead to the death of Cathleen Geohagan, but shortly thereafter Geohagan’s mother, Doris Geohagan, 62, suffered a massive stroke. Mrs. Geohagan lives today comatose in a nursing home with no hope for recovery.

The girl’s bereaved father, Everett Geohagan, 64, now childless and a virtual widower, shared with this reporter from his nursing home bed his great and continuing sorrow that a man capable of such cruel and immoral behavior seeks to be elected to one of the highest offices in our land. “Dare we trust a man who behaved as Adam Hurlbert did?” Everett Geohagan asks. “His opportunistic transfer of affections killed my daughter as surely as if he’d pulled the trigger of a gun he was pointing at her. And for what? So he could be senator?”

Another article on the front page, a follow-up to yesterday’s tax evasion story, was an account of Hurlbert’s arrest. He had surrendered to authorities at his home upon his return from Pittsburgh the previous evening. Accompanying the story were pictures of the police at the door of the Hurlbert home and another of Hurlbert in the backseat of a police car, looking drawn but defiant. There was even a picture of Irene looking brave and loyal with poor, bewildered Nelson by her side.

When I finished reading as I waited for my first students of the day to arrive, I crumpled the
Intell
and stared ahead blankly.

So Mr. Geohagan—for he had to be the source of all this information about Cathleen—had gotten his revenge for the wrongs he felt Hurlbert had done him and his family.

But at what a price!

He had smeared his daughter’s reputation.

He had paraded his ill and defenseless wife.

He had endangered my life not once but repeatedly—all for his own ends.

Everything he’d done since I’d met him was meant first to protect, then retrieve those precious papers so he could give them to—I uncrumpled the paper and searched for the byline on the articles—Barnum Hadley. The man with no chest.

The night in the closet, the attempted and actual purse snatchings, the watchers at the farm, the man on the stairs, the man in the woods, the flight for my life at the storage garage, all were because of Mr. Geohagan.

I looked at the paper again and studied the picture of Irene. Standing behind her and Nelson was a tall, anorexic man identified as William Bozner, Adam Hurlbert’s campaign manager. He was the man with Adam the night of the rally and robbery at Park City. He was also, I realized now, the man I had seen visiting Mr. Geohagan, the man to whom Mr. Geohagan had pledged his trust.

“You can trust me, Bill,” Mr. Geohagan had said.

Hah!

Somewhere along the line the Hurlbert forces had found cause to distrust Mr. Geohagan and sent Bozner to talk with him. Why? What had happened to rouse their suspicions? How had he attracted their attention?

Were the men who threatened to kill me Adam’s men hired to foil the threat? Of course they were. It made sense.

First they searched Mr. G’s apartment, as I knew only too well, but all they found was me. Their concern intensified with their failure to find information, as did their need for said information. Since Mr. Geohagan was confined because of illness, they began following the one with ready access to him, the one who ran his errands, mailed his letters, and sat with him by the hour. Me.

And did Mr. Geohagan warn me? No. Just the opposite. He knowingly allowed me to remain in ever greater danger. I had poured hours of care and prayer into this man, and all I got was a knockout punch in my emotional nose.

And I’d felt so guilty when I let the presence of the key slip to Jake and Clarke. How he must have laughed.

Lord, how could he do this to me? It’s not fair!

I sighed deeply but couldn’t enjoy my mope because twenty-five second graders came piling into the room. Putting Mr. Geohagan firmly from my mind, and forcing him from my thoughts the many times he returned through the long, hard day, I took care of my kids. Finally, when school was over, I drove slowly to Holiday House.

One hard question kept racing through my mind. As I pondered it, I drove automatically. I think I stopped at the proper stop signs and red lights. I think I obeyed the speed limit. I think I stayed in my lane and ran over no errant pedestrians. At least, no officer pulled me over for a violation.

Am I sorry I gave so much time and care to Mr. Geohagan?

What had compelled me to return again and again to visit him? Why was I willing to mail his letters and run his errands, to hold his hand and talk about my private life, to encourage him and let him encourage me?

The answer was very important because it would show me a lot about myself. Did I do these things out of pity or sympathy for a lonely, old man? Did I do them to show everybody what a nice person I was? Did I do them so people would
tell
me what a nice person I was? Did I do them because he needed somebody, and I was willing to be that somebody? Did I do it because I wanted to model God’s love to him?

All the above, I had to admit. A mixture of motives at best. The trouble was that I now realized the object of my sympathy wasn’t worth it. I understood that being nice, at least in this case, was just a synonym for being dumb, for being taken advantage of, for being manipulated and being too naive to realize it.

But he did need you
, that soft voice whispered into my anger and bitterness.
He still does. You did the right thing. Being taken advantage of is not the worst thing in the world.

Hah!
I yelled silently as I shut my ears to the breath of God and elbowed my way self-righteously through the TV crews and newsprint reporters clogging the front lawn of Holiday House.
Hah!

And just how long would it be before these media people wrote about Kristie Matthews, the dumb and gullible enabler that Mr. Geohagan deployed to accomplish his plans, even from his hospital bed? I could hardly wait for the embarrassment and invasion of privacy.

Only by waving down a passing nurse who had seen me here several times before was I able to talk my way past the new security guard at the front door.

“You need a list of regular visitors,” I said tartly, just before I let the door slip shut in the man’s face. “Some of us are important around here.”

He pushed the door open and called politely after me as I stalked across the oriental carpets, “A list is being drawn up now, miss.” He smiled sweetly as he withdrew his head.

I ground my teeth. I hated being one-upped on any day. Today it made me crazy.

I burst into Mr. Geohagan’s room full of rationalized and justified feelings of betrayal. Did I have a speech planned for him! It’d burn his ears, flay his skin, pull out his emotional fingernails.

I stopped short at the sight of the wizened old man lying in the bed, eyes closed, oxygen cannula at his nose. Somehow, in the time since I’d realized what he’d done, in my mind he’d grown two heads and begun to breathe fire. He was an unrepentant Darth Vader, an evil Ming the Merciless, a gluttonous Hannibal Lechter.

But he wasn’t a monster. He was a sick old man who looked worse than ever. And he needed me more than ever whether he realized it or not.

He must have sensed my presence for he opened his eyes, saw me, and smiled.

“I was afraid you’d never come back,” he whispered.

“I came to yell at you,” I said as I walked to the bed. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so upset.”

“Not even over What’s-his-name?”

“Different ballgame. Today you hurt me more than he has, and that’s no small accomplishment.”

“I had to tell, you know,” he said earnestly. “It wouldn’t be fair to people to let them elect Adam. You understand that, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t,” I said firmly. “And please, Mr. Geohagan, don’t condescend to me by making false claims of altruism. If you were really concerned about justice and fairness for the people and all those other ethical issues, you’d have gone to the police quietly ages ago. You’ve obviously been collecting this information for a long, long time. You waited until now to release it because now is when it will hurt and humiliate Adam most.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.” He began pleating his sheet in agitation, just as he had the first time we talked about Cathleen.

“You’re right. I don’t understand. I guess I can accept that you could use me to help accomplish your schemes, even endangering my life—”

“I never meant that!” he said quickly, but I kept on.

“—but I just can’t understand what you did to Cathleen and Doris. Explain to me how you could tarnish Cathleen’s memory before the world, how you could parade your defenseless wife in public.”

He looked at me, his eyes suddenly cold, his lips pinched together with anger. “You don’t have any acquaintance with hate, do you?”

He was right. I didn’t.

“Remember the day Bill Bozner came to visit you?” I said.

Mr. Geohagan nodded.

“You lied to him. You said he could trust you.”

“No lie.” His voice was full of virtue. “He could trust me to do exactly what I did.”

He had truly convinced himself that he was guiltless.

“Why did Bozner even think at that point that maybe he should distrust you?”

The old man grinned. “They had never once suspected that for years I’d been saving every evidence of Adam’s financial indiscretions and wrongdoings I could get my hands on.”

“Right,” I said dryly. “You’re the King of Duplicity. But how did you ever have access to that information in the first place?”

“I was comptroller for Hurlbert Construction from its beginning, Kristie. Didn’t you know?”

I stared at him. “Comptroller?” I thought of the apartment and the garage. They certainly didn’t indicate a man with a position of that importance or the salary that went with it. I wondered about the house he had sold, the one he had shared with Doris and Cathleen, the one I had never seen. “All I knew was that you worked for him. I assumed in construction itself.”

“Not me,” he said. “I’m a CPA, a Wharton School MBA. I’ve been on the inside of Hurlbert Construction from the get-go. I’ve always known exactly where the company stood financially, where
he
stood financially. I never cared that Adam was taking kickbacks or evading his tax payments. Everyone does that. But if he ever got caught, I was vulnerable as the company’s CFO. I was just making certain I wasn’t going to be his scapegoat or get taken down with him.”

“Even back then?”

“Always. Or at least from the beginning of his dishonesty, anyway. He was straight at first. The greed kicked in later.”

“But how’d they know to be distrustful of you
now
, after all those years?”

“You sent them letters.” He looked at me with great satisfaction. “You sent them letters.”

“I sent them letters?”

“Think you’re innocent, huh? You’re not!” He was gleeful. “You sent them the letters! The first said
I know all about you!
and the second said
Think no one knows about your financial secrets? Just wait!
”

I stared at him as I remembered the letters. They’d been in his shirt pocket that day in the emergency room. He’d given me one to mail the first time I’d visited, and I mailed the second on my way to spend the night in his closet. And I’d teased him about contributions!