Chapter 11

  

The days dragged on. The following week arrived, but no call from Joe. Saturday afternoon, I came home from grocery shopping and found a note pinned to my door. “Stopped by to say hello. No news on Brooks. I’m still tied up, but I will see you soon. Joe.”

Damn. Even his note made me feel warm. I wish I hadn’t gone shopping when I did.

I put away my groceries and decided to call my father, the man my mother insisted had spoiled me for all other men. The accusation was unfair. If one of my parents was to blame for my failed relationships with men, it was my mother, Emily Solaris.

I stopped calling her “mom” when I was twelve.

She was stunningly beautiful and totally self-absorbed. When she wasn’t shopping, she was drinking and then, as she aged, she was mostly drinking.

She had no time for me.

My father spent extra hours at his university in those days, to avoid her and, I suspect, the anger he felt. With his long work hours and her devotion to liquor, I was isolated and on my own.

By the time I was six, I was making my own breakfast. I learned how to wash my own laundry and braid my own hair. I had a few friends at school but never invited them to my house.

On weekends, my father tried to compensate. If my mother started her breakfast with a beer, he and I would go for a walk or to an exhibit at a museum or an early movie. Thaddeus Solaris was tall and blue-eyed and white-haired by the time he was thirty. My defender, my best friend, my rock.

The nurse who answered my father’s phone said, “He’s not having a good day, Dr. Solaris. Tomorrow might be better.”

I asked for him anyway, always hopeful the sound of my voice would transform him from Alzheimer’s patient back to the laughing, extraordinary man I cherished.

“Daddy?”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Red, Daddy. Meredith.”

“I don’t know any Meredith.”

I tried again. “I’m your beautiful red-haired girl.” He had written that description on all my birthday cards and Christmas presents.

“Emily?”

“No, Daddy. Red...Meredith.”

“I don’t know any Red Meredith. This number is on the Do Not Call List. Don’t call again.”

The nurse came back. “Maybe tomorrow,” she whispered. “Sorry. His good days are fewer and fewer.”

She was being kind. The “good days” were gone. They had gradually faded away during the years after Emily had died. Now they were gone for good.

“The best science professor I ever encountered,” Kenny Ross had said. Kenny was Dad’s primary physician and had been one of Dad’s favorite biology students. “I miss him terribly,” Kenny had said the last time I visited my father in the Alzheimer’s care nursing home. “I wish I could do something, but it’s downhill from now on, Red.”

Kenny discouraged me from moving my father from Ohio to a facility closer to Mountain West University. “At least he’s physically comfortable here. He might not do well in new surroundings and, unhappily, it won’t make his memory better. I’m sorry, Red, Ohio or Nevada, he still won’t know who you are.”

He only remembered her.

When I was little, I loved her. But she didn’t love me. By the time I was mature enough to understand her alcoholism was a disease, I was conditioned to the distance between us. I had stopped hoping she would ever overcome her addiction. Had she lived, we might have worked out some sort of relationship. But Emily Solaris drank and drove and ended her life with her head and her beautiful hair smashed against a windshield.

My father never recovered. Two years after her death, he burned the research notes he was working on and resigned from the university. The man who had kept me company, told me jokes too raunchy for my age, critiqued my papers, listened to my stories, sat in the front row of all my school plays and cheered my soccer games, disappeared into senility. I changed my graduate school destination to Ohio so I could be with him. I got a job with an Ohio newspaper just so I could be home to care for him. But I was no more help to him than he had been to my mother.

“You cannot save your parents,” a therapist told me at the time. “You can only save yourself.” That was after my first broken engagement. After a second disastrous love affair, I put my father in the nursing home and left Ohio.

I went to bed uneasy, filled with sadness about my father and anxious about what disaster might occur next. And what might happen with Joe.

  

The next morning I lay in bed, relishing thoughts of Joe Morgan, when his sister called. Elaine’s voice was strained. “Red, one of my reporters got several interviews with people on your faculty. Seems many of them came away from the police interviews thinking Henry might have been murdered, pushed down the stairs. The police won’t confirm but they won’t deny either. They just give me the ongoing investigation routine. Red, I’m sorry, I know this is still rumor, but it’s already hit the blogs and I can’t sit on this for long.”

“Elaine. I know you can’t. I just wish Detective Morgan and friends had more definitive information. If Henry was pushed down those stairs, I wish there was some evidence.”

I called Joe on his cell.

“Red, I’m as frustrated as you are. We all are. But getting evidence in a situation like this takes time. Sometimes weeks. Only TV shows get evidence quickly.”

“Simon Gorshak?”

“Nothing concrete yet but there may be someone up at Lake Tahoe at the Cal-Neva Casino who can help. The guy’s away today, but I’m driving up there tomorrow afternoon when he’s supposed to work a shift.”

“Can I come along?”

“I thought you had a fulltime job of your own.”

“I do. But it’s been two weeks since Henry’s death and finding out more about how he died is as important to me as it is to you. The school can do without me for one afternoon. And please don’t worry, I’ll wait in the car and stay out of your way.”

A pause. “Okay, you can come with me. But you can’t go near my informant.”

“Agreed. I know a good place for dinner after your interview.”