Twenty years after a shooting death deemed accidental, a respected pediatrician is charged with murdering a man who had been his friend. In those intervening years, the pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Weber, has married his friend's widow and adopted their two children. And during those years, he has proven himself to be a devoted father and spouse as
well as a trusted physician.
Dr. Weber pleads innocent, and his wife believes him. His grown daughters Laura and Lin believe him. Or do they?
As the novel evolves, the mystery at its center deepens into an exploration of divided loyalties and precarious family relationships, of children's need to believe in conflict with their desire for truth.
This suspenseful novel combines elements of the conventional murder mystery and courtroom drama, but goes beyond these into that greater drama of the human heart in conflict with itself.
Inspired by an actual case, Dead Center is really an ancient story in contemporary guise, one wherein betrayal blurs with love, evil with good, hatred with forgiveness, and guilt with innocence. It is also the story of a family that has been wrenched apart by loss for a second time but not, finally, destroyed.

United States, United States of America

Sag Harbor, NY, c2011

PS, 2011

<br><h3> Chapter One </h3> Northern Michigan April, 1970 <p> <p> <i>The body lay on its side, blood darkening hair, sideburns, face, and neck. Flies circled in a steady drone, a few cautiously alighting, and then others, to wade through sweet pools and lakes, drinking their fill. On the other side of the clearing, deer emerged from cedar growth and began grazing on new field grasses, while a wood thrush sang its plaintive three notes, always inflecting the third as if in question. High above the woods, a jet drew a chalk line across the late afternoon sky. <p> At the first sound of vehicles, the wood thrush abandoned its perch and flew deeper into the woods. The deer bounded away. Soon EMS workers were kneeling around the body while game commissioners snapped Polaroids, and people who'd heard of the accident on their police scanners were running up a path toward the clearing. But finally the stir of human activity moved elsewhere as darkness came on and the air cooled. <p> The night filled with the whir of tree frogs in a marsh to the north of the clearing, their electronic-like pulsations near-deafening to one man who'd returned. He was smoking a cigarette down to the calluses on his fingers, ash falling on new blades of timothy and florets of trefoil and wild strawberry. Then he left, and deer returned to graze in moonlight. Tree frogs kept up their mating racket, stopping only at first light when the man came back, another cigarette between his fingers, to study tree line and clearing and the earth where the body had lain. The tang in his mouth from the night before was still there. Soured milk. Nails. Blood. <p> And the feeling in his gut.</i> <p> <p> Hilo, Hawaii 1990 <p> <p> <b>Ben and Karen</b> <p> <p> Ben glanced away from the child's nostril, where he had been delicately angling to secure a small object. Charlotte Hoon, his office manager, was hanging onto the doorframe with one hand and leaning into the examining room. "The police, Doctor, they want to see you. They say come get you." <p> The wobble in her voice caused his heart to lurch into some erratic gallop. "Tell them I'm not finished here." <p> "But they—" <p> "Five minutes." <p> "Okay." She shut the door behind her. <p> The hand holding the tweezers began quivering. Two decades earlier, when he'd first opened his pediatrics clinic on the Big Island of Hawaii, he'd been haunted, daily, by dread. The envisioned details varying, as well as the intensity of coincident chest and gut pain, but never the overall picture. But after several years, when imagination and reality failed to conjoin, the fear that it <i>would</i>, one day, dulled, then finally slipped back into the depths where it riled his dreams at times, but not his overloaded waking hours. A state of mind nearly as troubling as the other, when it occurred to him to think about it. <i>For it's then that it will happen, probably.</i> <p> Something weirdly akin to that old folk saying about a watched pot not boiling. <p> Tears were seeping from the boy's closed eyelids, making the long lashes spiky and beautiful against perfect skin. Ben didn't look at the mother, crowding him, but sensed her tension, the heat of need and fear rising off her. He tugged gently with the tweezers. It was coming. Emanating its stench. <p> His heartbeat swung into some new rhythm that was hardly rhythm at all. He took deeper breaths yet couldn't get enough. The back of his neck felt frigid. Pain hit exactly where he expected it to, radiating outward from the lower left ventricle. Slowly he raised his head but avoided the mother's puzzled look. Instead, he stared at a poster on the wall above the examining table. Type I Diabetes. The colors red and blue and yellow. Lines. Circles. Print. The vulnerable interior, its small tasks, each crucial to survival. <p> Red detached itself from the poster and flowed outward. Bright anthurium red. Oxygenated red. Then darker. Old blood, depleted. Lifeless. His heart bounded and spun, tripped, stumbled, raced to catch up, the tachycardia accelerating toward fibrillation. <i>Look. Colors. Breathe. Breathe.</i> But he was seeing his own heart, dark red and swollen, fat with scarring and ruin. He willed ease. Willed calm. Willed the coronary arteries to open however much they could, and that crown of thorns, the Kranzarterie wreathing the heart, clawing it. But the image too fanciful, too poetic for the event, which was prosaic, and deadly. <p> <i>Just breathe.</i> <p> And then he could envision it: those damaged arteries expanding and pain furling itself again as the organ got enough oxygen to allow the spasm to ease. In the next moment his heart found its rhythm again, and again he leaned over the child. It was coming, this whatever. Giving up its dark niche. <p> And with it the stink of drainpipes and sewers. <p> He studied the object between his tweezers—so many things removed from children's nostrils and ears over the years. And like most of those other microbe-laden things, this too was green-black and furred. It dropped soundlessly into the enamel tray his nurse held, somewhat unsteadily, in her hands. He took the tray and scraped at the thing. A bead. A simple craft bead. Turquoise. <p> The young mother's face brightened with relief and the luxury now, of anger. "I tell him alla time. Stay away from your sister's stuff! But no! What he musta done was hide it up there. Maybe think he take it out later when she don' see. Is that what you think, Roberto? You see what happens?" <p> A familiar theme—a mother's anger when her child knowingly or unknowingly does something dangerous. He removed his gloves and touched the young mother's shoulder. <p> "It's all right now. Roberto will be fine. And the smell's gone as well." <p> "You're all set!" he told the boy. "Just stay away from your sister's stuff." He smiled. <p> The thought came that it wasn't what it seemed. Despite that reopened investigation in Michigan, officers here for a totally different reason. An accident. Some injury, emergency. That's how it worked, crazy reality. All over the place, and a person's life, with its mammoth concerns, a mere fragment of a speck in it all. Not even that. A microscopic nothing. The day would go on, and he within it. His patients would be seen. Tomorrow there'd be others. And starting right now, the imagination would begin churning out its doomsday scenarios again. <p> For a moment it was like breathing freely again—what the little boy must then be experiencing. Air flowing cleanly into the lungs and out again. He opened the door and went to meet them, out of habit extending his hand. They drew guns. In the next minute he was escorted out through his reception area, wrists manacled, an agent on either side of him gripping his upper arms. <i>A warrant for your arrest, Doctor, and an extradition order. You're being charged with first- and third-degree murder ...</i> <p> He saw Karen, his wife, standing alongside Charlotte Hoon. Saw the young mother and Roberto, as well as a number of other children and mothers in the waiting room. Everyone, everything stilled. His heart was working too hard again. He imagined himself dropping to the sidewalk, the rainbow shower tree blossoms there. <p> "Wait!" he heard his wife calling. The officers paused, and that gave him time to will the necessary relaxing. "You can't ... you shouldn't ... he's a <i>doctor</i> ... A <i>pediatrician</i>! There's no need for <i>handcuffs</i>." <p> Then Roberto's mother ran up to them. "What you people doing? You crazy? That's Dr. <i>Weber</i>. He our doctor! What we gonna do, man, if you take him?" <p> And then he and his wife were in a car and the car moving. <p> <p> Karen had always thought it would happen at the clinic and invariably saw herself there, helping Charlotte—as she was on that March day. When Charlotte rolled her chair away from the reception counter, then hurried to the hallway beyond, it was as if it had all happened before, in time. Or else within the images that so often slid readily to mind in those vulnerable predawn moments, the conscious mind newly awake, still snared in dream time and open to whatever darkness the deeper self might want to thrust its way at three or four in the morning. Yet in those dark imaginings, part dream, part hallucination, she hadn't gotten any of the other details right—the vase of green and red anthurium at Charlotte's work area and how, moments after the police and agents arrived, the woman's hand brushed against the stippled milk glass, toppling the birthday array, and then water spilling over various forms, the holy bits of paper that made up so much of their lives. A miniature flood then, a mock natural disaster to mimic the larger devastation rising all around. <p> <i>We have a warrant for his arrest.</i> <p> The State of Hawaii officer polite, apology softening the staccato Island cadence. Three other officers and two agents in business suits stood near the counter. The police officers held their revolvers in open view. <p> Absurd! In a medical office. Children just feet away, in the waiting room. The usually ebullient Hawaiian children frozen statuettes. Then the six officers and her husband leaving the clinic, two of them holding her husband's arms as if he were some feeble patient attempting to negotiate the way back home. <p> Petals on the wet walkway. Rain cloud draping Hilo Bay. Beyond the Kalanianaole Highway, the water pewter-toned. Upland cane fields gray-green, under the roil of cloud. Out on the bay, a three-masted schooner at anchor, causing in her a moment of profound disorientation. In her predawn imaginings there hadn't been any three-masted schooner. Nor rain. Nor the indifferent river of traffic. <p> She heard herself shouting at the officers. They regarded her with sympathy but kept walking. Her husband looked at her—<i>Don't say anything more</i>—and she went silent. <p> They allowed her to sit alongside him in the police cruiser, but he seemed wrapped in that same opalescent shroud over the town and bay. Or else she herself was muffled in some distancing cocoon of fear. Anger there, too, secreting its noxious hatred for her former in-laws who obviously couldn't go to their graves without exacting revenge for the loss of their only son. Hatred one of the Deadly Sins, for it deadened, but who could help it. They'd never much liked her. As a young daughter-in-law, she'd done her best, having them over for Sunday meals and holidays, keeping the house clean and cheerful. Giving them two grandchildren they <i>had</i> loved. But they'd set their hearts on a different girl, apparently, their son's first sweetheart, and maybe that break-up something of a divorce, to their way of thinking. So then, a withholding. And in the barrens between them, burdock and thistle. <p> And now this. <p> Hands clenched. Limbs. Body. A tension that felt like being shaken. <p> At the terminal, arriving tourists appeared apprehensive as they entered the boarding lounge, walking in a clump toward greeters holding signs and calling out names. <i>Kamainas</i> arriving from Oahu or the other islands strode through it all smiling, string-tied pastry boxes in hand. Twenty years ago it had been like that—the confusion and joy of arrival. She could feel Linda's weight in her arms; could see Laura's white-blond hair framing her eyes, those skeptical blue eyes, and pink down-turned mouth as Ben carried her toward the luggage carousels. <p> Karen had looked back at the massive 747 that had brought them so far. White against jungle green. The sky dove-gray. Air like some moisturizer. And vibrant ferns swaying in it. <p> <i>This should do</i>, he'd said, smiling. <p> Now they boarded first, with the agents. She seated on one side of the cabin, with her guard; he on the other. Tourist class. The State of Michigan, she thought, sparing every expense. <p> Sometime in the night came the thought that it had all been blown away the instant the trigger of the shotgun ignited the small explosion within the shell that had killed her first husband. That shot taking even what would <i>be</i>, in time, so that everything that had happened to her afterward, to them both, she and Ben, and to the girls, and to their daughter Katherine, was as if it had never been. <p> In the plane's twilight, she found tissues in her purse and the rosary tossed there before leaving. Cupping the mother-of-pearl beads in one hand, she began saying the old words to herself. When flight attendants made the rounds of the cabin with hot face cloths, she took one and held it against her skin. Images tumbled, assembled: that day in April. So many people in the house, and she locking herself in the bathroom and holding a cloth to blotched face and closed eyes. And in that dark the truth clear as the window panes she'd washed that day: <i>Her fault. The death her fault. And so now this, too.</i> <p> As the plane sliced downward through thin cloud, descending into Chicago's O'Hare, a vast monochromatic landscape appeared, all segmented grays and browns dusted white—not so much landscape, it seemed, as the gears and bits and innards of some enormous machine. Then the curve of Lake Michigan, its wrinkled surface a hammered silver tray. Soon she had to endure the glances of people crowding the aisle, impatient to deplane. <p> Finally the aisle was clear and she could see her husband, still in his seat, bracing his chin, elbow propped on folded arm. As if sensing her look, he turned toward her. <i>It'll be okay. We just have to get through this thing.</i> Then he, too, stood, and soon the two agents had hustled them to another terminal, where commuters glanced up from paperbacks and newspapers and a little boy called out, "Mom! Look! That guy over there's got <i>handcuffs</i> on. Whad'he do?" <p> Linking her arm through her husband's, she walked with her shoulders well back. <i>Nothing. He did nothing.</i> <p> <p> Ann Arbor, Michigan <p> <p> <b>Laura</b> <p> <p> Her answering machine flashed with several new messages, all from Charlotte Hoon. <i>Laura, call me, please. This is my number ... Laura, please call me ... Laura, it is urgent you call me. I wait here for your call.</i> <p> Outside her study window, a raw March day. Black maple limbs lifting and falling in wind. Low rain cloud like smoke from burning tires, moving fast. But she had just seen masses of emerging crocus along the driveway. Tiny green spikes piercing last year's faded brown leaves. <i>God, don't let this be terrible!</i> <p> The impromptu prayer doing little to stop the shaking, nor the vision forming of her dad in the hospital. His "iffy" heart, as he called it, finally giving way. <p> Then she was listening, incredulous, to Charlotte Hoon's narrative. "They come with guns! Like in some movie! An' everybody scared, kids, parents! I say, what you doing? He's a doctor, he don' hurt nobody. But they put handcuffs on him, right in front of everybody. I tell them they're crazy. Parents holler at them, too. They take him to the airport with your mother. She tells me to call you. I have her dogs here. I take care of the orchids, yeah? An' I call Lin and Katherine. Your mother, she wants Katherine to stay at school in Kamuela for now." <p> Charlotte gave careful directions, then lapsed into emotion again. Laura let her talk. It was terrible, but a different terrible than a heart attack, imminent death. Relief muted outrage, but the shaking didn't abate as she told Charlotte she'd start out right away and be there for the arraignment in Tunley that night. She agreed that it had to be a mistake. Her father wasn't a murderer. It was just that some people had it in for him. <p> Two years earlier, news of the reopened investigation had made her physically ill for several days. But after a while, rationality reasserted itself and she'd been able to regard the new investigation into her birth father's death as something engineered by people who needed, still, to assuage loss, find satisfaction in revenge, as in those old blood-soaked Jacobean revenge dramas she'd read in college and thought too over-the-top to be taken as realistic. Eventually she'd convinced herself that it would all pass over like some fierce but brief storm. Her dad was no more a murderer than she was. Or her mother. Her sisters. The law would come to that conclusion, too. But meanwhile it had to go through its torturous—and torturing!—process to satisfy a few vengeful people. <p> <i>(Continues...)</i> <p> <!-- copyright notice --> <br></pre> <blockquote><hr noshade size='1'><font size='-2'> Excerpted from <b>DEAD CENTER</b> by <b>JOANNA HIGGINS</b> Copyright © 2011 by Joanna Higgins. Excerpted by permission of The Permanent Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.<br>Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

2023-06-28