Jonathan Kellerman - The Web

The adjoining bungalow was identical, but the interior walls were painted white. More old but well-maintained furniture, a drafting table and stool, easels, a flat file. Disposable pallets still wrapped in plastic sat atop the file, along with trays of oil-paint tubes, acrylics, and watercolors. Ink bottles, pens, charcoal sticks, brushes in every shape and size. Everything brand-new. The price tag on a brush was from an artists' supply store in Honolulu.

Off to one side was a table full of shiny things.

"Shell," said Moreland. "Cowry, abalone, mother-of-pearl. Some hardwood remnants as well. And carving tools. I bought them from an old man whose specialties were USMC insignia and leaping dolphins. Back when there was a trinket business."

Robin picked up a small handsaw. "Good quality."

"This was Barbara- my wife's special place. I know you're not carving right now, but Alex told me how gifted you were, so I thought you might like to…"

He trailed off and rubbed his hands together.

"I'd love to," said Robin.

"Only when your hand permits, of course. It's too bad you didn't get a chance to swim."

"We'll try again."

"Good, good… Would you like to stay here and look around, dear? Or do you prefer to be there as Alex discovers how truly disordered I am?"

It was as gracious a way as any to ask for privacy.

"There's plenty here to keep me busy, Bill," Robin said. "Pick me up when you're done, Alex."

"And you?" Moreland said to Spike.

"Watch," I said. Walking to the door, I said, "Come, Spike." The dog ran immediately to Robin and flopped down at her feet.

Moreland laughed. "Impeccable taste."

When we were outside, he said, "What a lovely girl. You're lucky- but I suppose you hear that all the time. It's nice to have someone in Barbara's studio after all these years."

We began walking. "How long has it been?"

"Thirty years this spring."

A few steps later: "She drowned. Not here. Hawaii. She'd gone there for a vacation. I was busy with patients. She went out for an early-morning dip on Waikiki Beach. She was a strong swimmer, but got caught up in a riptide."

He stopped, fished in his pocket, drew out a battered eelskin wallet and extricated a small photo.

The black-haired woman from the mantel portrait, standing alone on a beach, wearing a black one-piece bathing suit. Hair shorter than in the painting, pinned back severely. She looked no older than thirty. Moreland would have been at least forty.

The snapshot was faded: gray sand, the sky an insipid aqua, the woman's flesh nearly dead-white. The ocean that had claimed her was a thin line of foam.

She had a beautiful figure and smiled prettily but her pose- legs together, arms at her side- had a tired, almost resigned quality.

Moreland blinked several times.

I gave him back the snapshot.

"Why don't we work our way downward," he said, lifting a box from the top of an outer column, carrying it into the office, and placing it on the floor between the couch and the armchair.

The carton was taped shut. He cut the tape with a Swiss Army knife and pulled out several blue folders. Putting on his glasses, he read one.

"Of all things…"

Handing me the folder, he said, "This one isn't from Aruk, but it was a case of mine."

Inside were stiff, yellowed papers filled with elegant, indigo, fountain-penned writing that I recognized from the card he'd left on the bed. Forty-year-old medical records of a man named "Samuel H."

"You don't use full names?" I said.

"Generally, I do but this was… different."

I read. Samuel H. had presented him with gastric complaints and thyroid problems that Moreland had treated with synthetic hormones and words of reassurance for eleven months. A month later, several small benign nerve tumors were discovered and Moreland raised the possibility of travel to Guam for evaluation and surgery. Samuel H. was unsure, but before he could decide, his health deteriorated further: fatigue, bruising, hair loss, bleeding lips and gums. Blood tests showed a precipitous drop in red blood cells accompanied by a sharp rise in white cells. Leukemia. The patient "expired" seven months later, Moreland signing the certificate and directing the remains to a mortuary in a place called Rongelap. I asked where that was.

"The Marshall Islands."

"Isn't that clear across the Pacific?"

"I was stationed there after Korea. The Navy sent me all over the region."

I closed the chart.

"Any thoughts?" he said.

"All those symptoms could be due to radiation poisoning. Is Rongelap near Bikini atoll?"

"So you know about Bikini."

"Just in general terms," I said. "The government conducted nuclear tests there after World War Two, the winds shifted and polluted some neighboring islands."

"Twenty-three blasts," he said. "Between nineteen forty-six and nineteen fifty-eight. One hundred billion dollars' worth of tests. The first few were A-bombs- dropped on old fleets captured from the Japanese. Then they got confident and started detonating things underwater. The big one was Bravo in fifty-four. The world's first hydrogen bomb, but your average American has never heard of it. Isn't that amazing?"

I nodded, not amazed at all.

"It broke the dawn with a seventy-five-thousand-foot mushroom cloud, son. The dust blanketed several of the atolls- Kongerik and Utirik and Rongelap. The children thought it was great fun, a new kind of rain. They played with the dust, tasted it."

He got up, walked to the window and braced himself on the sill.

"Shifting winds," he said. "I believed that, too- I was a loyal officer. It wasn't till years later that the truth came out. The winds had been blowing east steadily for days before the test. Steadily and predictably. There was no surprise. The Air Force warned its own personnel so they could evacuate, but not the islanders. Human guinea pigs."

His hands were balled.

"It didn't take long for the problems to emerge. Leukemias, lymphomas, thyroid disorders, autoimmune diseases. And, of course, birth defects: retardation, anencephaly, limbless babies- we called them "jellyfish.' "

He sat down and gave a terrible laugh. "We compensated the poor devils. Twenty-five thousand dollars a victim. Some government accountant's appraisal of the value of a life. One hundred and forty-eight checks totaling one million two hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars. One hundred-thousandth the cost of the blasts."

He sat back down and placed his hands on bony knees. His high forehead was as white and moist as a freshly boiled egg.

"I took part in the compensation program. Someone upstairs thought it a good use of my training. We did it at night, going from island to island in small motorboats. Pulling up to the shore, calling the people out with bullhorns, then handing them their checks and sailing off."

He shook his head. "Twenty-five thousand dollars per life. An actuarial triumph." Removing his glasses, he rubbed his eyes. "After I figured out what the blast had done, I put in for extended stay and tried to do what I could for the people. Which wasn't much… Samuel was a nice man. A very fine carpenter."

"How'd the people react to being paid?" I said.

"The more perceptive among them were angry, frightened. But many were grateful. The United States extending a helping hand."

He put his glasses back on.

"Well, let's crack another box. Hopefully something a bit more routine."

"At least you tried to help them," I said.

"Sticking around helped me more than them, son. Till then I thought medicine boiled down to diagnosis, dosage, and incision. Encountering my own impotence taught me it was much more. And less. You worked in pediatric oncology; you understand."