“No,” Lloyd said.
“What do you mean, ‘No’?” Isabelle wailed. “This is your son. Are you saying you won’t help him?”
“I’ve helped him before,” Lloyd said, “but not this time. This time he’s on his own, and so are you.”
“Hang up the phone, Isa,” Lloyd said, shortening Isadora to the pet name he hadn’t used in a very long time. “You’ve already talked to Alyse?”
I nodded.
“Then take it off the hook. If anyone else calls tonight, we don’t want to hear from them.”
I didn’t sleep that night. Neither did Lloyd. Maybe women are more realistic than men. I had understood my son’s shortcomings all his life. Lloyd had not, and now the idea that his son had betrayed his country had broken my husband’s heart. By the next morning the story was headline news on the local television stations and on the national networks as well. When Lloyd went into the bathroom to shower, I tried calling Alyse. Naturally, Isabelle was the one who answered.
“What kind of parents are you?” she screamed at me. “You’re just going to let your son rot in jail? You’re not going to lift a hand to help him?”
Lloyd came out of the bathroom. “Who is it?” he asked.
“Isabelle.”
“Let me talk to her.”
I handed him the phone. He listened to her in silence for the better part of a minute. I could hear her voice screeching into the earpiece, but I couldn’t make out any of the words. When he was finally able to get a word in edgewise, he said in a tone I had never heard from him before, “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
Then he ended the call and handed the phone back to me.
“What did she say?”
“If we don’t help, she’ll see to it that we never see our grandchildren again. That she’ll take them back home to her folks’ place in Indiana.”
I was aghast. I didn’t care that much about Jimmy one way or the other because I didn’t know him that well. But Alyse?
“Can she do that?”
“Of course she can,” Lloyd replied. “She’s the mother.”
By the middle of the day, friends and neighbors were showing up with covered dishes, almost like it was a funeral. I’m not sure why they do that when no one can stand the thought of eating, but they do and they did, and I tried my best to be grateful. Lloyd had been one of the premier bankers in town. Gunnar had been one of the best-known graduates from the high school, one people had pointed to with a certain pride of ownership. People didn’t talk about that very much as they sat quietly in our living room, commiserating with us. They talked about the weather. They talked about our health.
And then came Sunday morning and the worst call of all, and it wasn’t Isabelle who broke the news. It was Alyse. “He’s dead,” she sobbed into the phone. “Daddy’s dead.”
We were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking our coffee. I had put the phone on speaker so we heard the news together.
“How is that possible?” Lloyd asked.
“They found him in his cell,” Alyse answered brokenly. “They say he committed suicide.”
I heard Isabelle’s voice, shouting from somewhere in the background. “Are you talking to them? Damn it! I told you not to. Get off the phone right now!” The line went dead as she disconnected.
Lloyd put down the phone. “He was guilty,” he said quietly. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken his own life. And someone wanted to spare the country the ordeal of taking him to trial. That’s why they left him the means to do it.”
It was amazing for me to see that in the face of this disaster, Lloyd was the one who was dead calm while I was falling apart.
“I still have some friends in high places in D.C.,” he said. “Let me see what I can find out.”
I had friends in high places, too, but I wasn’t about to call on Alf. Not now. Not ever.
While Lloyd worked the phone, I emptied the refrigerator of casseroles, dumping out the food I knew we would never eat, and arranging the clean dishes, marked on the bottoms with their owners’ names, on the dining room table to await pickup.
It was hours later when Lloyd finally put down the phone. “It was the Russians,” he told me. “Gunn was working for the Russians. He evidently provided them with plans for a new top secret spread-spectrum military communications system. The woman he was working with has already been spirited out of the country. They’re trying to establish her identity.”
“That must have been the woman Alyse saw. Remember? She told us about seeing them together. In the park.”
Lloyd gave me a long look. “If Alyse is in a position to identify a Russian spy, then we have a major problem on our hands. Does anyone else know that?”
“I certainly never told anyone.”
“Neither did I,” Lloyd said. “But if security people from both sides of the Iron Curtain are looking into this matter, then Alyse could be in real danger, especially if she can identify someone the Russians don’t want identified.”
The next few days were a nightmare that had to be lived through. The sun came out and the snow turned to mud and muck. We sat glued to the TV set, hoping for snippets of news. No one called to let us know when Gunn’s services would be. No one invited us to attend, but we heard about it from a local news reporter. The funeral would be held at their Georgetown church on Wednesday afternoon.
“Are you going?” I asked Lloyd.
“No,” he said. “I won’t go where I’m not welcome.”
“I want to see Alyse,” I said. “I want to talk to her and Jimmy at least one more time before Isabelle spirits them off to God-knows-where in Indiana.”
Early Friday morning, I set off on my own, driving Lloyd’s lumbering Lincoln. As the heartbroken widow, Isabelle was the star of the show, and she was making the most of it. I sat near the back in the crowded church and spoke to no one. When the service was over, I went back to the house and let myself into the reception where I hoped to find a chance to speak to Alyse alone.
The house was crowded with people I didn’t know. We weren’t part of Gunn and Isabelle’s circle of friends, so there was no danger of my being recognized. At least I didn’t think so. I stayed in the background, and made sure that when Isabelle moved from one room to another, I stayed one room away.
Jimmy was up to his usual tricks. I saw him sneak a sip from someone’s abandoned glass of wine. Then when his mother approached, he knocked it over and blamed Alyse, who was halfway across the room when it happened.
“You stupid girl!” Isabelle yelled at her. “Didn’t I tell you to watch him? This is all your fault!”
I’m sure Isabelle meant that the spilled wine was all her fault, but I saw the look on Alyse’s face, and I knew how she was taking this—that her father’s death was all her fault. And of all the people in the room, I was the only one who knew for sure that was true.
When Alyse fled upstairs, I followed her and found her sobbing into the pillows piled on her bed. Standing there looking at her, listening to her, I knew exactly how her life was going to turn out with an impish half-brother and a stepmother who was prepared to blame her for every little thing. And in that moment, I made up my mind. It didn’t matter if I was going to be guilty of kidnapping or custodial interference or whatever, I was going to get her out of there, no matter what.
“Alyse,” I said gently, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Tell me something. Do you want to go to Indiana?”
She stopped sobbing. She didn’t look at me, but she shook her head.
“I know you know your father was a spy,” I said softly. “You told me so last summer.”
She nodded again, into the pillows, without raising her head.