The Unbidden Truth (10 page)

B
arbara was too edgy to sit still that Sunday afternoon. She paced in and out of Frank's house, up and down the stairs, to the living room, back to the kitchen. She had talked Carrie into seeing Janey, had introduced them at two that day, and now was waiting for Janey. She would be no later than five, Janey had said. She had a date at six.

“You have to collect the seeds as soon as they get ripe,” Frank said, coming in from his greenhouse. “I swiped seeds from Frazier's hellebore and planted them. The prettiest pink you ever saw when they bloom.”

Barbara looked at her watch again, then stood up and walked out to the back porch. He had known she was paying no attention, and her restless wandering was making him nearly as edgy as she was. He washed his hands and thought about dinner.

 

In Carrie's apartment Janey was saying, “I imagine almost every child has an imaginary playmate at one time or another. Why don't you play the piano and tell me about yours.”

They had been chatting for more than an hour although Carrie had been apprehensive at first. But Janey didn't look like a doctor, and she didn't talk like one. Carrie didn't even know what all they had been talking about. It was more like girlfriends confiding in each other, going from one subject to another, than like doctor-patient talk. Carrie had told her about the only psychologist she could remember. “He asked me if anyone ever touched me in a way that made me uncomfortable, and I told him yes, a lot of them had, and he got all excited. I told him about the doctors, and the people who made me do exercises and things—now I know they were therapists, but I didn't know who they were then—and he looked mad. Not that way, he said. I didn't know what he was talking about.”

But play the piano and talk at the same time? She hesitated.

“I'd really like to hear you play,” Janey said.

Carrie went to the piano. “It isn't concert-ready. The sound's off.”

Janey laughed. “I'm not a musician. If you hadn't told me, I probably wouldn't have noticed.”

Carrie began to play and Janey sat nearby listening. “The imaginary playmate,” she said.

“I don't think I had one.”

“Okay. What about the happiest day of your life as a child?”

Carrie played something fast and shook her head. “I didn't have that, either.”

“Make up a story about an imaginary playmate and tell me what the happiest day of
her
life would have been like. You can tell a story, a fib, a fairy tale, anything.”

“It's just a story, a made-up story,” Carrie said after a few moments. “Like you said, a fairy tale. Is that okay?”

“Sure.”

“She's little, smaller than me, but she sort of looks like me,” Carrie said hesitantly. She glanced at Janey. At her nod, she continued. “She likes to run outside, then back in, then out again, just because she can. She's in a big house. She thinks it must have a thousand rooms, and she can go in them all if she wants to. Sometimes she likes to smell her mother's clothes in the closet. They smell like flowers. Daddy's clothes don't smell like that. They're like the woods.”

She was speaking in a low voice and her hands moved effortlessly over the keys playing Chopin softly as she talked on and on, her voice becoming dreamier as she continued.

“Her Aunt Loony has a big tummy, and she lets the little girl feel the baby moving. It's like magic. She wants Mommy to get a baby too and Mommy laughs, then Aunt Loony and Gramma laugh. And Mommy says when Daddy comes back we'll tell you a secret. She loves secrets. She plays the piano and Gramma comes to sit by me and she plays too, and then she starts to cry and I think I did something wrong, but she says she's crying because she's so happy. I didn't know people cried when they got happy. When Daddy comes home, Daddy and Mommy go to her bedroom and read to her, and Mommy says that when Daddy is done with his work, we'll move to a real house with a garden like Gramma's and we'll have a baby. And I start to cry, and Mommy says I shouldn't be unhappy about it, and I tell her I'm crying because I'm so
happy. We'll have a house and I can go in and out as much as I want to, and I'll have a little sister. So I cry.”

Her voice trailed off and Janey asked softly, “What's the name of the little girl?”

“Carolyn. I like that name better than Carol. So I called her Carolyn. I used to dream about her.”

“But not now?”

“No. I guess imaginary playmates fade out when you grow up. I made up a song for her. It's called,
Please don't cry, Carolyn Frye.
” She played a merry little tune, then abruptly stopped and stood up. “So there's your fairy tale,” she said brusquely. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She hurried from the room.

Janey moved away from the piano and was looking over the library books on a table when Carrie returned. “You offered me coffee awhile ago. I wonder if we could have some now.”

Carrie looked relieved. “Sure. Isn't this a wonderful apartment? It has the neatest coffeemaker. Come on, I'll make some. Did you ever make tamales? I had no idea they were so complicated.”

 

“Bobby, for heaven's sake, light somewhere,” Frank said in his kitchen. “If eye power could make the watch hands move faster, you'd be in tomorrow by now.”

She looked at him. “That doesn't make a bit of sense.”

“Just sit down. She'll be here any minute.”

It was ten minutes in real time, hours in Barbara's time frame, before Janey arrived. Frank went to open the door with Barbara close on his heels.

“Come in. Come in,” Frank said. “It's good to see you again. Did you talk to Carrie?”

Janey shook her head. “No. I talked to Carolyn Frye.”

Then, sitting in Frank's living room, Janey told them about her talk with Carrie. “You have to separate out the background gestalt from the pertinent recalled facts,” she said. “First, going in and out freely suggests that wherever she had lived before, that was not possible. An apartment, a truck life, trailer court? Whatever. Then, not that her grandmother played the piano with her, which she seemed to accept as normal, but that her grandmother cried out of happiness. Her parents went to her bedroom to read to her, and told her to expect a new baby in the family. Again, the implication is not that they read to her, or that there was a bedroom, only that there was a secret that they revealed. And so on. If I hadn't known ahead of time that the memories of a nomadic life were imposed, I would have agreed that her stories were a fantasy.”

She shook her head sadly. “Carrie really has amnesia for a large part of her childhood. Everyone does. We don't form long-term memories before three or even four, and then for another year or so they are sporadic, and usually concern events that disrupt an everyday routine. A birthday party, or a special Christmas gift, something unusual. Between six and seven the memories are firm for most people, but she doesn't have any until she was nearly eight and half years old. The fragmented memories she does have were labeled fantasies, and intellectually she had to accept that and attribute them to her imaginary friend, Carolyn Frye.”

“If we can get her to talk about Carolyn Frye, we might learn what happened to her,” Barbara said when Janey paused.

Janey shook her head. “She needs to be in the care of a professional. Do you know what abreaction means?”

“Reliving an incident, something like that,” Barbara said.

“Something like that,” Janey agreed. “Whatever happened to her wiped out more than a year of her life, not a trace left. That's real, Barbara. If she relives whatever happened, it could be worse this time around without professional help at hand. You can't provide that kind of help, and neither can I. I couldn't take her case and provide the intensive psychological support she needs. Psychologically, she's at risk. Don't push her. You don't batter down a wall unless you have a clear idea of what's on the other side and you're ready to stand by your client and face whatever it is with her.”

Chastened, Barbara asked, “What do you suggest?”

“Normally I'd say she should be under the care of a full-time counselor, but she would have to agree, and I don't think she would. For now, I'd say leave her alone. She's built a strong wall around herself. Just hope it continues to hold until she's out from under the charge she faces, then deal with it.”

 

Dinner was a quiet affair. Barbara was morose and the beef stroganoff was wasted on her, Frank knew. She didn't linger after helping clear the table and accepting her share of leftovers for another day. After she was gone, Frank sat in his study at his ancient desk and strained to hear voices that he well knew were not there. He felt as if there were whispers just out of earshot, and if he tried hard enough he could catch the words. Carolyn Frye, he thought. It was something about Carolyn Frye.

Carrie had been through hell, yet the self she showed the world now was a resilient, self-sufficient young woman. He admired her quite a bit. Carrie. Carol. Carolyn. Who was she?

He worked at the crossword puzzle the way he did most Sunday nights, but his mind kept wandering, and he kept
straining to hear the nonexistent voices, and finally gave it up and got ready for bed. The coon cats settled at his feet like bookends, purring. He drifted, then slept, and suddenly he could hear the words clearly, and he sat up. Carolyn Frye. Robert Frye. It was six-thirty in the morning.

By seven-thirty he was in his office and by eight-thirty he had two file folders on his desk. When his secretary arrived at nine-thirty, she was indignant when she saw him. She never got there earlier than that, since he never showed up until ten or later, but there he was at his desk. After one look at his expression, fixed in a ferocious scowl, she held her tongue and went on to her own office to open the mail. She was even more surprised a few minutes later to see Barbara hurry past her door and go into Frank's office.

“What happened?” Barbara demanded. “Are you all right?” He had had a minor heart attack a few years before, and any call out of the ordinary from him made her own heart race. That morning he had left a message on her office phone to meet him at his office as soon as she could.

“Sit down and read this,” he said, pushing a folder across his desk.

She sat in one of his clients' chairs and started to read, then stopped and looked at him. “My God,” she whispered. She turned back to the newspaper article she had begun. It was in a Eugene newspaper, dated June 20, 1978. The headline said Two Killed in Car Bomb Incident. “Robert Frye and his wife Judith Frye were killed instantly when a car bomb exploded Saturday, June 19. Their daughter Carolyn, aged seven, was critically injured and was airlifted to a critical burn unit in Portland where she is in intensive care….”

She skimmed the article and read the next one. It said that
Carolyn Frye had succumbed to her injuries and died in the Portland hospital where she had been flown. Surviving the tragedy were Judith Frye's mother, Laura Hazlett, and her sister, Louise Braniff, who was also injured. The article went on to mention members of Robert Frye's family in California.

There were many more articles. She skimmed another two or three, then slammed them on his desk. “I want to talk to Louise Braniff,” she said, as grim as Frank was. “Now.”

“I called her. She was at a meeting at the university. I told her we have to see her immediately. She'll go home directly the meeting's over, and meet us there at ten-thirty.”

“Was it solved?” she asked, pointing to the folder.

“No. It was in my unsolved cases files. I remembered the name overnight. But I missed the connection until I read those. I forgot that Louise Braniff's name was listed.”

“That damn bitch,” Barbara muttered, remembering that she had suspected that Louise Braniff had a personal interest in Carrie Frederick.

“Exactly,” Frank said.

Barbara jumped up and walked across the office furiously. She wanted to kick something. No, she thought, not something. She wanted to kick Louise Braniff. She returned to Frank's desk. “That says Carolyn died. How did she end up in Boston hospital with a different name?”

“Let's ask Louise Braniff,” Frank said, as angry as she was.

B
arbara drove slowly down the broad, tree-lined street searching out house numbers, then stopped looking at them when she spotted the black Saab in a driveway. She pulled in behind it. The house before them was a stately three-storied mansion, with meticulously maintained landscaping of shrubs and evergreen trees. Neither she nor Frank spoke when she pulled on the hand brake and they left the car and went to the front door. It was opened almost instantly at her ring.

Louise Braniff was as carefully groomed as she had been the first time Barbara saw her, today in a simple rose-colored linen skirt suit with touches of gold at her throat and in earrings.

“Ms. Holloway, come in. I just arrived myself.” She looked past Barbara at Frank and nodded. “You called?”

“My father and colleague,” Barbara said brusquely. Frank nodded and they stepped into the house.

“Has anything happened? Is Car—Ms. Frederick all right?”

“Use her name,” Barbara said. “Carolyn.”

Louise paled and held on to the doorknob with a white-knuckled grip. “You know?” she whispered.

“We know. We have to talk,” Barbara said.

Louise nodded, released the doorknob and walked ahead of them down a wide hallway, motioning for them to follow. The house appeared to be as well maintained as the front yard, with gleaming white woodwork, wide-plank polished floors, scattered Oriental rugs, good art on the walls. They walked past two or three open doors to other rooms, past a broad, carpeted staircase, and entered a room with wide windows and walls of filled bookshelves.

Louise motioned to matching tapestry-covered chairs, and seated herself on a love seat. When she faced Barbara she looked as if she had aged ten years since opening the door for them. “How did you find out?”

“What difference does it make?” Barbara said. “The question is why the charade, the hocus-pocus, the lies you told?”

Louise closed her eyes for a moment, then, with her head bowed, she said, “I had to. Does she know?”

“No. She thinks her name is Carol Frederick. What's going on, Ms. Braniff? What are you up to?”

“I'm trying to protect her,” Louise said in a low voice. She drew in a breath. “Much of what I told you is true. I really did go to hear her play and encouraged others to hear her. We really did intend to send her to Hamburg. Then she was arrested. I knew the others would back out, and I didn't even approach them after that.”

“You're paying for her defense yourself? Is that what you're saying?”

She nodded.

“Jesus,” Barbara muttered. “If you recognized her, knew she was your niece, why didn't you acknowledge that, take her in, tell her the truth? What game are you playing?”

“I was afraid to, for her sake,” Louise said. “She mustn't know the truth, ever. I'll pay whatever it costs to free her, and then I'll send her to Hamburg myself. But she can't know the truth!”

“You blindfolded my daughter, put her in a straitjacket and put her in harm's way,” Frank said roughly. “We deserve an explanation.”

“You would have done the same thing,” Louise cried. “I would do anything to protect her, and so would you for your child. She's all I have left,” she said, then fell silent.

Frank stood up and walked to a window across the room and stood with his back to them. “I think you'd better start back at the beginning,” he said. He swung around. “What happened here back in 1978?”

Louise moistened her lips. She was still very pale, visibly shaken, and her voice was unsteady when she spoke again. “Judith and I grew up in this house,” she said. “She married Robert and moved to the Washington area with him, but every summer they came for a visit.” With her head lowered, she went on. “They came that summer, just Judith and Carolyn. Robert was working for Senator Atherton, on a fact-finding mission in California. He planned to come for just a few days later on. Carolyn was a magical child,” she said softly. “Like a beautiful bird flying all over the house, to the garden, upstairs, down, laughing. She was so precocious. Judith and I were playing the piano, a Chopin and Liszt dialogue in music, and we kept getting our hands tangled, and broke up laugh
ing. In just a few minutes we heard Carolyn playing, trying to do both parts. She could play anything she heard once. Then Mother sat with her and they played it together. She was so gifted, truly magical. She had just turned seven, an exquisite, rare prodigy.”

Her voice had thickened, and Barbara realized that she was weeping, oblivious of the tears. Frank started to say something, and Barbara motioned for him to wait. In a moment Louise started talking again.

“Robert came on Thursday that week, excited about what he had learned. I don't know what it was. All Judith had said was that it was a fact-finding mission. They were planning on moving back to the West Coast. She was pregnant, and didn't want another child in a high-rise apartment building. We were all so happy.” She sniffed, then stood up. “Please, excuse me.” She hurried from the room.

Frank reseated himself, and he and Barbara waited in silence for Louise to return. She was composed when she got back, but her eyes were red-rimmed, and she had a box of tissues with her.

“On Saturday morning,” she said, “they had packed a rental car and were ready to leave for Senator Atherton's ranch out by Pendleton. Robert was behind the wheel and Judith was at the door. She had opened the back door for Carolyn when Carolyn remembered Tookey. That was her stuffed elephant.” Her voice became fainter now. “She said, ‘I have to get Tookey,' and she started to run. I thought I remembered that it was in the breakfast room, and I had started back to the house when Robert turned on the ignition and the car exploded. I was knocked down, unconscious. I woke up in the hospital and Cyrus, my husband, told me that Judith and
Robert were dead and Carolyn was critically injured in a Portland hospital. I lost my baby that day, six months pregnant, and I was in the hospital for another ten days. Cyrus told me that Carolyn had died. Someone had delivered her ashes and a death certificate. He had Robert and Judith cremated, and later we had a memorial service for them all.”

No one spoke when she became silent again.

“You recognized her when you went to hear her play?” Barbara said after a few moments.

“Not at first. It was pleasant, but not…not spectacular. It was when she started the medley. She did that by the time she was five, played phrases of one thing then another along with bits she improvised. I stood up to get a better look at her.” She closed her eyes again and cleared her throat. “I thought briefly that I could see Robert on one side of her and Judith on the other, merging into her, fading into her, and I knew. I nearly fainted, and fell back into my chair and couldn't move again until she finished and walked out. I started to run after her, but I realized what it meant, and I didn't move.”

“What do you mean, what it meant?”

“Who has the power to falsify a death certificate?” she cried in anguish. “To provide ashes? To make a hospital, the doctors, others go along with such a monstrous lie? And for what reason? They must have thought she knew something, that she had overheard a conversation, had seen something. Someone meant to kill them all with that car bomb. They might still be out there, the people who wanted her dead. She can't know the truth! She is Carol Frederick and she has to remain Carol Frederick!” She was weeping again. “It would be better for her to go to prison than to learn the truth and put herself in jeopardy.”

Frank's tight-lipped anger had dissipated, and now he said in a very gentle voice, “You don't plan to enter her life at all?”

“I can't,” she whispered. “I told my attorney to change my will. Everything is for her, and I'll set up a trust fund for her immediate use following the trial, but she can't know who it's from or why. I can't let her know me or even see me. She might remember.”

Frank stood up. “Ms. Braniff, we have a lot of things to discuss. I wonder if it's too impolite to ask for coffee now, take a little break.”

She jumped up, obviously relieved to be asked to do something. They all went out to her kitchen.

 

Later, sitting in a lovely green-and-white breakfast room with jalousie windows overlooking the garden, they continued to talk. Louise had recovered her composure, and even smiled when she said that Carolyn had started to call her Aunt Loony by the age of two. “They didn't come the summer she was five,” she said. “She had chicken pox that summer, but they came for Christmas and she met Cyrus for the first time. He said he was sorry he had missed her birthday because she had stayed home with chicken poops, and she was so delighted. She called him silly, and he said, ‘Child, show some respect, I am your uncle.' She said, ‘Uncle Silly' and that was his name from then on. Aunt Loony and Uncle Silly.” She gazed past Frank out the window and added, “I prayed that my child would be exactly like her.”

“Did you speak with Senator Atherton?” Barbara asked.

“Not right away. We were paralyzed with grief. Mother collapsed and never really recovered. She died four years later. And I was injured, in the hospital, and was told there would
never be another pregnancy….” She sighed. “Later, we learned that Robert had called the senator from here on that Thursday night, but that was several months later when Cyrus was going over the bills and found the record. Then I called Atherton. He had told the police there was no mission, that he had understood that Robert was simply visiting his family in California. When I called, he repeated that. The investigators decided it was a case of mistaken identity, that Robert had not been the target, and they didn't know who had been. The whole thing was shelved and forgotten.”

They talked for a long time. Cyrus had been transferred to New York City, and she had not been able to go with him. She couldn't leave her mother, who had become ill and clung to her the way a child might, fearful when Louise left the house, afraid of cars, afraid of strangers. Cyrus had come back on visits a few times, but they had drifted apart and ended up divorced. Mostly she talked about the child Carolyn had been, and when Barbara and Frank prepared to leave, she asked almost timidly, “Will you tell me about her life, what she has been doing, where she has lived?”

Barbara told most of it, leaving out Adrienne Colbert's role almost entirely. Then she said, “She's very strong, Ms. Braniff. She has survived what few others could, and she'll continue to survive and grow.”

“It's a wonder she isn't stark raving mad,” Frank said. “They stole a year and three or four months out of her life, and convinced her that she couldn't remember that period because she had amnesia, and that all her other memories were fantasies.” He patted Louise's hand on the table. “She's levelheaded, intelligent and self-reliant. You should be proud of her,” he said. “She's a remarkable young woman.”

A few minutes later, driving, Barbara cursed bitterly, and Frank did not say a word, did not clear his throat, but simply stared grimly out the windshield.