The Waltz

Glittering crystal chandeliers hung above the undulating ballroom as a full orchestra played Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. Despite her wallflower status, thirty-something Rydun Foss grinned, blood pulsing with energy. She sipped a glass of pinot noir, swaying as she watched her parents dance together with their full attention. They were the Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers of the gathered dance club, only their love was not an act.

So, when her father fell back, she set down her glass and leaned in, but didn’t quite take it in. She somehow dissociated to the Challenger explosion two years earlier on January 28, 1986.

Clocks slowed time. His skull slammed into the marble floor, teeth blasting upward and sideways like scattering rocket blasters. Couples waltzed past in disbelief.

When the Challenger exploded, Rydun had picked up a University telephone receiver and dialed her father. Space exploration was something they cared about; he as an aeronautical engineer; she as the adoring daughter of an aeronautical engineer.

“Daddy,” she’d shouted. “The Challenger! It just exploded!” She was prone to exclamations when her insides ran amuck.

Silence. Distractions, no doubt spread across his desk.

“The one with the teacher!” Rydun had been adamant he join her shock and grief. “The Challenger blew its top!”

“The Challenger.” He illuminated each syllable. There was another long pause. As if he was being pulled to earth from esoteric heights. He cleared his throat, his tenor turned tight. “The one with Christa McAuliffe.”

Rydun imagined his chocolate brown eyes then, milky with sadness; his wrinkled forehead resting against a freckled, ringed fist.

She must go to him. She felt an inner compulsion. She floated like a bumper car, into and around frozen, stunned patrons.

The shock of white bangs covering his black eyebrows had been dyed pink. Who would do such a thing? He wouldn’t like it at all.

His gaunt cheeks, normally sporting a meticulous, classic goatee, appeared misshapen as a popped balloon. What was happening?.

“He was poisoned.”

She snapped her head round to discover which lips uttered these words, but the pressing crowd blurred around her.

“That handicapped Cambodian,” hissed some snake in the crowd.

“No, it was the betrayed Russian from East Berlin,” insisted another.

A fraternity of engineers announced their observations as if they had the right.

“Today’s meeting was rife with motive,” declared a firm baritone. “Ulf’s designs were far-reaching.” The balding, bulbous man Rydun might have recognized, had her brain functioned.

Daddy’s body lay prone on white marble.

“Poison?” Shivers circumnavigated her tall, thin frame.

His fall had been epic. One minute he was spinning mom, doing that lilt and grin he flashed as they wrapped each other in a squeeze. The next…

What meeting? Daddy was a design engineer. Who poisoned anonymous design engineers?

Straight backward he’d gone; a keeling rocket, shattering teeth and bone upon contact with solid, polished rock.

She was beginning to regret the wine. Feeling sick to her stomach, she shoved people aside and knelt beside Mom. Mom’s focus was Daddy. “Ulf! Ulf! Get up! What are you doing? Ulf! Ulf! Get up…”

The orchestra stopped playing.

“Serendipitous, that he should come face-to-face with his design effects… Oops.” The loud voice cut out even as a second voice added, “His cluster bomb mangled that poor Asian…”

Rylun’s heart pounded despair and rage. “YES!,” she screamed into the void. “He was stuck designing cluster bombs. But he said he designed them the best he could; he wasn’t the one who dropped them on Cambodia!”

Sudden, loud tapping of a microphone, “Let us pray for our good friend Ulf.” A clergy man hushed the outspoken.

Counting freckles scattered across his aristocratic nose, Rydun, freckled herself and still redheaded, experienced a rush of pure awareness: a realm with no boundaries.

“He was a good man: an ethical man,” the pastor said.

Lightheaded, she felt Daddy’s energy rise, wrap around her, comfort her. Knew beyond a doubt, her beloved father was dead. Of unnatural causes.

Someone had poisoned Daddy. She needed to understand why.