Guilt by Association (35 page)

It took her less than five minutes to undress, wash off her makeup and brush her teeth, pull a nightgown over her head and slip between the sheets, leaving only the lamp on Ted’s side of the room lit. In addition to trading the double bed he had shared with Barbara for twins, Ted had fashioned a kind
of partition out of draperies which had the effect of splitting the space in half.

Karen lay stiffly in the unfamiliar bed, staring at the unfamiliar half-room, and wondered what on earth she was doing there.
This house, which had always echoed with light and laughter, now seemed like a silent tomb, with menace lurking in every corner.

“Please, let me go to sleep,” she whispered into the shadows. “Let the morning come quickly. Let the girls come back early.”

The mist became fog, collecting at her feet, stealing up her legs, swirling about her body, engulfing her. Soon, she could see less than a yard ahead through the thick gray soup. She looked frantically around, searching for the path that had been there just seconds before—but it was gone, gone in the fog, and she was lost and alone. With him.

She knew she couldn’t stand still, she had to keep going. She plunged ahead blindly, running as fast as she could, knowing that outrunning him was the only thing that would save her. Her breath was coming in short, hard gasps now, and a sharp pain began to knife its way through her chest, but there was no stopping. Above the pounding of her heart, she could hear him behind her, getting ever closer.

She summoned one final burst of speed to push herself forward and fell head over heels into a thicket of bushes. Familiar bushes, with brambles that scratched her skin and snared her hair. She knew she had been there before. With every last ounce of energy she possessed, she tried to scramble free, but it was too late. He was already there.

The flames licked around the logs in the fireplace, radiating a comforting warmth. Ted sipped at his champagne and thought about what he had done. He had married a woman who didn’t love him because he didn’t want to be alone any longer. Yet he felt more alone now than he had before.

He couldn’t fault Karen, he knew. She had been totally honest with him. He was the one who had insisted it didn’t
matter, that he could live with it. But had he been honest with her, or with himself?

It was their wedding night, the only one they would ever share, and all he had wanted was to sit quietly with her for a while and perhaps talk a bit, not about anything terribly important, just to know that she was warm and alive and really there with him. Only she had fled instead, and he didn’t know how he was supposed to interpret that.

They had always been so easy with one another, so companionable, that her abrupt departure had thrown him off-balance. He thought back over the past several weeks, in search of any clue that might help him understand, but he could find none. She had been her warm, beguiling self right through all the wedding preparations, arranging the details of the reception, moving her things into place, putting most of her furniture into storage, subletting her apartment. They had seen each other almost every day, discussing at length every decision that needed to be made. And through it all she had been so positive, seemed so happy.

During the ceremony, she looked beautiful in the dress that Jenna had designed, and her eyes sparkled. Her hand even quivered engagingly when he slipped the ring onto her finger. And then, at the Four Seasons, she was absolutely radiant, smiling and laughing a lot, standing beside him with her arm tucked in his.

No, it was only after they left the restaurant that her mood changed, once they were alone with each other. He wondered if the one thing neither of them had wanted to happen had happened, after all—that, in getting married, they had indeed spoiled their friendship.

The fire so lulled him and his thoughts so absorbed him that he didn’t know how long the sound had been pushing against the edges of his awareness before it forced its way in. It was an eerie sound, part moan, part sob, part shriek, more like a wounded animal than anything human, and it took him several seconds to realize that it was coming from inside the house. He was on his feet in an instant, crossing the living room in three strides and charging down the stairs.

Karen appeared to be in the throes of a nightmare. She had obviously been thrashing around the bed because she was all tangled up in the sheets. The harder she struggled, the more ensnared she became, and the more ensnared she was, the more desperate her cries became.

Ted touched her shoulder, shaking it gently to awaken her. “Karen,” he whispered. “Karen, wake up.”

But she only gasped and shuddered and pulled away.

He shook her a bit harder. “Karen, it’s all right,” he told her. “I’m here, you’re safe. It’s only a bad dream.”

The bedding was soaked with perspiration, and her nightgown was slippery as she resisted him, so that he had difficulty getting a firm grip on her. He sat down on the side of the bed and, reaching over, tried to pull her into his arms, to hold her to him and rock her back and forth as he had done so often with one or another of his daughters during the first years without Barbara. But she wouldn’t let him. While his daughters would wake up and calm down as soon as they realized where they were,
Karen flailed at him, her sobs and screams growing louder and more urgent.

With one hand, Ted snapped on her bedside lamp, hoping that the sudden light might awaken her and she would see that he was with her and there was nothing to fear. But when he looked, he saw that she was already wide awake.

“It was just a bad dream, that’s all,” he soothed, still trying to catch hold of her and remembering how she had been the one to get Amy past her bout with nightmares. “Just a bad dream. It’s all over now, see? You’re in your new home and I’m right here and you’re perfectly safe.”

But his words didn’t seem to make any difference. Her fists continued to lash out against his chest as though her life depended on fighting him off, and she was staring at him as though’he were a monster from hell.

1981

Who shall fill up his cup, for he
has drink enough to spare.

—
Theocritus

T
he Boeing 727 slid smoothly up to the gate at San Francisco Airport, the door opened, and the United States congressman from California, followed by his wife and their two-year-old son Adam, stepped out and started the long walk toward the terminal.

At forty-three, his handsome face was beginning to show the wear that was often called “aging” in a woman and “character”
in a man. A light frosting of gray dusted his dark hair.

“Congressman Willmont,” called a pretty young reporter, detaching herself from a loose knot of newspeople on the other side of the security barricade and brandishing a microphone in his face. “Rumor has it that you’ve come home early to announce for the Senate. Do you have any comment on that?”

The congressman flashed a dazzling smile and allowed his aquamarine eyes to twinkle ever so briefly.

“Miss Evans, isn’t it?” he asked the attractive blonde.

“Yes, sir. Janice Evans, Channel Seven.”

“Well, Miss Evans,” he said, scooping a half-asleep Adam up into his arms as the cameras began to click, “you know I never comment on rumors.”

“Make an exception,” the brown-eyed blonde urged.

“Come on, Congressman, give us a break,” another of the journalists complained. “It’s been a slow news day.”

Robert Willmont chuckled. “I wondered what you were all doing out here in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Help us out.”

“I’d like to, but the simple truth is, my family and I have come home for the holidays, just as we do every year.”

“But why two weeks early?” someone asked.

“If you must know,” the congressman replied pleasantly, “my mother hasn’t been very well, and it’s important to me to spend as much time with her as I can.”

This was not news. Amanda Drayton Willmont’s health had been precarious for as long as any of them could remember.

“Perhaps your wife would tell us,” the persistent Janice Evans pursued. “Mrs. Willmont, how would you like to be the wife of a United States senator?”

Elizabeth Willmont smiled, the way she had been taught from early childhood to smile at prying strangers.

“I’m very proud of my husband in whatever capacity he chooses to serve,” she replied.

“Come on, Bob,” a veteran from the
Chronicle
urged. “You
do
want a shot at that Senate seat, don’t you?”

“Someday, perhaps,” Robert agreed. “But right now, I’m perfectly comfortable in the seat I have.”

“Someday’s awfully indefinite,” someone objected.

“I’ll make you all a promise,” Robert said. “When I decide to run for higher office, you’ll be among the first to know.”

“Thanks for nothing,” someone else muttered.

“Would you rather be among the last?”

Most of the group shrugged good-naturedly.

“Whenever you’re ready,” a KRON mainstay drawled, “all you have to do is whistle, and we’ll come running. You do know how to whistle, don’t you, Bob?”

Everyone hooted, including the congressman, but his smile was turning brittle around the edges by the time Randy Neuburg pushed his way through the crowd.

“Where the shit have you been?” Robert snarled as his aide quickly ushered the Willmonts toward the exit.

“Caught in a traffic jam,” came the reply.

“This wasn’t supposed to be a media event, goddamn it. No one was even supposed to know we were coming in today. Now I’m standing here with egg all over my face—will I run, won’t I run?”

“Sorry, boss,” Randy apologized. “There must have been a leak.”

“Well, see how fast you can get us out of here.”

“The limo’s right out front. I’ll send it back for the luggage.”

Randy Neuburg had served as Robert’s aide since the charismatic partner of Sutton, Wells, Willmont and Spaulding had been elected to Congress three years earlier. He was unusually bright and intuitive for one so young, and totally committed to the causes Robert espoused, and Robert had very wisely plucked him from the associate ranks of the law firm and taken him to Washington.

Like the man he worked for, Randy was a product of Harvard Law School, but unlike Robert, he was West Virginia born and bred and had completed his undergraduate work on scholarship at Princeton. It was a sense of adventure that prompted him to accept the offer that the San Francisco firm tendered him in the spring of 1977. He had never been to the sand-and-surf nirvana called California. It was a sense of destiny that persuaded him to sign on with Robert. Two summers clerking for a West Virginia state senator had left him with a lingering taste for politics.

Randy was a skinny youth who developed into a slight man, with large ears, an unruly shock of red hair almost as bright as Elizabeth Willmont’s, a face full of freckles, and clear blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses that never lost sight of an objective. Some of his less charitable schoolmates at Princeton used to liken him to Alfred E. Newman, the character from
MAD
comics, but Randy shrugged the epithet off. Let them say what they would, he knew he was smarter than the whole lot of them put together.

To underscore that, he went back to Princeton for his fifth reunion, counselor to a United States congressman—and a
congressman who was enjoying a growing reputation as a real up-and-comer at that.

It was the Ridenbaugh case that first catapulted Robert’s name onto the front pages and evening newscasts around the state.
Joseph Ridenbaugh was accused of swindling some three hundred people out of almost $15 million dollars by selling home sites for the Happy Sands Retirement Community in a part of the California desert that had no water and no hope of getting any for less than $250,000 per house. When the whole scheme began to unravel, Joseph liquidated what he could, transferred the balance of his assets into his mother’s name, and took off for Trinidad.

Robert accepted the case on behalf of one Samuel Pappas and the 302 other persons who had been defrauded. He launched an intensive investigation that some felt more closely resembled a witch hunt. Together, he and a new associate assigned to him—one Randy Neuburg, fresh out of Harvard—spent three months digging into every corner of Joseph Ridenbaugh’s life, hunting for any legal lapse that would give them what they needed. Just when they were gray with exhaustion and about to concede defeat, Randy unearthed an ancient partnership agreement between Joseph and his mother, Alice, with no recorded dissolution, that had somehow slipped through the cracks.

Applying a liberal interpretation to the agreement, Robert argued that its existence made the mother as liable as the son.
He attached every piece of real property he could find in Alice Ridenbaugh’s name and sued the partnership. The defense attorney hoped the jury would feel sorry for the gray-haired lady who claimed to have no head for business and no idea about her son’s activities.

They didn’t.

When the dust finally settled, the duped investors got at least some of their money back and Alice Ridenbaugh was facing criminal prosecution as an accomplice to fraud. Joseph, having set up house with a native girl on Trinidad, showed no inclination of returning to the United States, at least not as long as his Cayman Islands bank account held out.

Robert was heralded as a crusader, a champion of the little man, a benefactor of senior citizens. Two months after the verdict,
he was approached by a certain group of people who suggested he might consider running for the United States Congress.

Robert was nothing if not quick to take advantage of an opportunity. With a prayer of thanks to
Pappas
v.
Ridenbaugh,
and with the full weight of the old Drayton name and his law firm’s connections behind him, he jumped feet first into the political whirlpool. Even in the affluent district where he campaigned, he was able to defeat the conservative incumbent by a comfortable margin.

“It played almost like the war-hero scenario,” Randy, a student of history, observed on the day after the election.