Birthright

by Nora Roberts

  He looked over as he wife came in, wheeling a chrome-and-glass cart. “No, no, sit,” she said, waving at Jake when he started to get up. “I’ll deal with this. I can tell you’ve already started to talk.”

  “I told Barbara about my conversation with your father.” Hank sat back with a sigh. “I have to be honest with you, Callie, I believe this woman who approached you is mistaken. Marcus Carlyle had a very good reputation in Boston. I would never have referred your parents to him otherwise.”

  “Hank.” Barbara set down a tray of tiny frosted cakes, then brushed a hand over her husband’s arm. “He’s been worried that if there’s any possibility of this being true, he’s somehow responsible.”

  “I sent Vivian and Elliot to Carlyle. I urged them both to look toward adoption.”

  He closed a hand over his wife’s. “I still remember when I had to tell Vivian she needed a hysterectomy. She looked so young and small, and damaged. She wanted a child, desperately. They both did.”

  “Why did you recommend Carlyle, specifically?” Callie asked.

  “I’d had another patient whose husband was infertile. We had explored alternate methods of conception, but they were disappointing. Like your parents, they got on waiting lists through adoption agencies. When my patient came in for her annual exam, she was overflowing with joy. She and her husband had been able to adopt a child, through Carlyle. She sang his praises, couldn’t say enough about him. With my specialty, I often deal with patients who can’t conceive, or can’t carry a pregnancy to term. And I’m in contact with other doctors in my field.”

  He picked up the glass of lemonade Barbara served. “I heard good things about Carlyle. I met him shortly after at a patient’s home during a dinner party. He was well spoken, amusing, compassionate and appeared to be committed to helping families form. I recall that’s exactly how he put it. Forming families. He impressed me, and when Elliot and I were discussing his concerns, I gave him the recommendation.”

  “Did you recommend him to others?”

  “Yes. Three or four other patients, as I recall. He called to thank me at one point. We discovered a mutual passion for golf and played together often after that.” He hesitated. “We became what you could call professional friends. I can’t help but think there’s some mistake, Callie. The man I knew could not possibly be involved in kidnapping.”

  “Maybe you could just tell me about him.”

  “Dynamic.” Simpson paused, nodded to himself. “Yes, that would be my first description. A dynamic man. One with a fine mind, exquisite taste, distinguished bearing. He took a great deal of pride in his work. He felt, as I recall him saying, that he was contributing something with the emphasis he’d placed on adoptions in his practice.”

  “What about his own family,” Callie pressed. “People he was close to—personally, professionally.”

  “Professionally, I couldn’t really say. Socially, we knew or came to know dozens of the same people. His wife was a lovely woman, a bit vague. That doesn’t sound right,” Simpson said with an apologetic nod. “She was quiet, devoted to him and their son. But she seemed . . . I suppose I’d say insubstantial in her own right. Not, now that I think of it, the sort of woman you’d put with a man of his potency. Of course, it did become common knowledge that he enjoyed the company of other women.”

  “He cheated on his wife.” Callie’s voice went cold.

  “There were other women.” Simpson cleared his throat, shifted uncomfortably. “He was a handsome man, and again, dynamic. Apparently his wife elected to look the other way when it came to his indiscretions. Though they did eventually divorce.”

  Simpson leaned forward, laid a hand on Callie’s knee. “Infidelity may make a man weak, but it doesn’t make him a monster. And if you’ll indulge me. This child who was stolen was taken from Maryland. You were placed in Boston.” He gave her knee an avuncular pat, then sat back again. “I don’t see how the two events could be connected.”

  He shook his head, gently rattled the ice in his glass. “How could he know, how could anyone, that there would be an opportunity to steal an infant at that time and place, just when an infant was desired in another place?”

  “That’s something I intend to find out.”

  “Are you still in contact with Carlyle?” Jake asked him.

  Simpson shook his head, leaned back. “No, not in several years. He moved out of Boston. We lost touch. The fact is, Marcus was considerably older than I. He may very well be dead.”

  “Oh, Hank, how morbid.” Looking distressed, Barbara lifted the cake plate to press one of the petits fours on Callie.

  “Realistic,” he countered. “He’d be ninety by this time, or close to it. He certainly wouldn’t be practicing law. I retired myself fifteen years ago and we moved here. I wanted to escape the New England winters.”

  “And play more golf,” Barbara added with an indulgent smile.

  “Definitely a factor.”

  “This woman, the one in Maryland,” Barbara began. “She’s been through a terrible ordeal. I don’t have any children, but I think anyone can imagine how she must feel. Wouldn’t you think, in that sort of situation, she’d grasp at any straw?”

  “I do,” Callie agreed. “But sometimes when you’re grasping at straws, you get ahold of the right one.”

  Callie leaned back against the seat in Jake’s car and shut her eyes. She was glad he’d insisted on driving now. She just didn’t have the energy.

  “He doesn’t want to believe it. He still thinks of Carlyle as a friend. The brilliant, dynamic adulterer.”

  Jake shoved into reverse. “And you were thinking that description sounds familiar.”

  So he hadn’t missed that, she thought, and felt the threat of a headache coming on. “Let’s just step away from that area.”

  “Fine.” He shot backward out of the driveway.

  She couldn’t do it, she realized. She couldn’t work up the spit for a fight. More, she just couldn’t drag herself back over that old, rocky ground.

  “I can only be pulled in so many directions at once.”

  He stopped the car, sat in the middle of the street until he’d fought back the resentment. He’d promised to help her, he reminded himself. Hell, he’d pushed his help on her. He was hardly doing that if he buried her under his own needs.

  “Let’s do this. We just walked out of the house. Neither one of us said anything yet.”

  Surprise had her asking a simple question. “Why?”

  He reached out, rubbed his knuckles over her cheek. “Because I . . . I care about you. Believe it or not.”

  She wanted to drag off her seat belt, crawl over and into his lap. She wanted his arms around her, and hers around him. But she would never give in to her desires. “Okay, we just got in the car. My first comment is: We didn’t exactly make Hank and Barb’s day, did we?”

  He put the four-wheeler back in drive. “Did you expect to?”

  “I don’t know what I expected. But I know, even though he doesn’t want to believe me, I’ve made another person miserable and worried and guilty. And he gets to be miserable and worried and guilty over the other patients he recommended Carlyle to. Just in case they’re in the same situation. Then you figure, gee, how many people did those people pass to Carlyle?”

  “I’ve been thinking that would be a vital element of his business. Client word of mouth. Upscale, infertile clients who network with other upscale, infertile clients. You’d even get some repeat customers. All this working, basically, the same base. And you get your product—”

  “Jesus, Graystone. Product?”

  “Think of it that way,” he countered. “He would. You get the product from another pool altogether. Lower- to middle-income. People who can’t afford to hire private investigators. Young working-class parents. Or teenage mothers, that kind of thing. And you’d go outside your borders. He wouldn’t take his product from the Boston area while he worked in Boston.”

  “Don’t pee in your
own pool,” she muttered, but she sat up again. “He’d have to have some sort of network himself. Contacts. Most people tend to want infants, right? Besides, older children won’t work. Gotta stick with babies. And you wouldn’t just go wandering around aimlessly hoping to find a baby to snatch. You’d need to target them.”

  “Now you’re thinking.” And the color had come back in her face, he noted. “You’d need information, and you’d want to make sure you were delivering a healthy baby—good product, good customer service, or you’d get complaints instead of kudos.”

  “Hospital contacts. Maternity wards. Doctors, nurses, maybe social services if we’re dealing with unweds and teenagers, or very low-income couples.”

  “And Jessica Cullen was born?”

  “In Washington County Hospital, September 8, 1974.”

  “Might be worth checking some records, finding Suzanne’s OB, maybe jarring her memory some. You’ve got Lana digging for Carlyle. We can dig somewhere else.”

  “Maybe I am still hot for you.”

  “Babe, there was never any doubt. Plenty of motels off the interstate. I can pull off at one if you really need to jump me.”

  “That’s incredibly generous of you, but I still have a little self-control left. Just drive.”

  “Okay, but you can let me know when that self-control hits bottom.”

  “Oh, you’ll be the first. Graystone?”

  He glanced over, saw her studying him with that considering expression. “Dunbrook?”

  “You don’t piss me off as much as you used to.”

  He caressed her hand. “Give me time.”

  At seven, Lana was folding laundry. She’d scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom, had vacuumed every inch of the house and had, to his bitter regret, shampooed the dog. She’d done everything and anything she could think of to keep her mind off what had happened to Ronald Dolan.

  It wasn’t working.

  She’d said terrible things to him, she thought as she balled up a pair of Tyler’s little white socks. She’d thought worse things than she’d said. Over the past fourteen months, she’d done everything in her power to ruin his plans for the fifty acres by Antietam Creek.

  She’d gossiped about him, complained about him and bitched about him.

  Now he was dead.

  Every thought, every deed, every smirk and every word she’d said were coming back to haunt her.

  The dog went barreling by her as she lifted the hamper to her hip. He set up a din of barks, attacking the front door seconds before someone knocked. “All right, all right, now stop!” She gave his collar a tug with her free hand to pull him down on his haunches. “I mean it.”

  Even as she reached for the door, Tyler came streaking down the steps. “Who is it? Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. My X-ray vision must be on the blink.”

  “Mommy!” He fell on the dog, in a giggling fit.

  Lana opened the door. She blinked at Doug as both Tyler and the dog flew at him.

  “Stop it! Elmer, down! Tyler, behave yourself.”

  “I got him.” To Tyler’s delight, Doug scooped him up under his arm like a football. “Looks like they’re trying to make a break for it.” Holding the squealing boy, he reached down to rub the black-and-white dog between the ears. “Elmer? Is that Fudd or Gantry?”

  “Fudd,” Lana managed. “Ty loves Bugs Bunny cartoons. Oh, Doug, I’m so sorry. I completely forgot about tonight.”

  “Hear that?” He turned Ty so the boy could grin up at him. “That’s the sound of my ego shattering.”

  “I don’t hear nothing.”

  “Anything,” Lana corrected. “Please, come in. I’m just a little turned around.”

  “You look pretty.”

  “Ha. I can’t imagine.”

  She was wearing shorts, petal pink ones cuffed at the hem, and a pink-and-white striped T-shirt. There were white canvas shoes on her feet and little gold studs in her earlobes. She’d clipped her hair back at the nape. And automatically reached back to make sure it was in place.

  She looked, he thought, like a particularly delectable candy cane.

  “Question. Do you always coordinate your outfit for laundry day?”

  “Naturally. Ty, would you do me a favor? Would you take Elmer up to your room for a few minutes?”

  “Can I show him my room?”

  “He’s Mr. Cullen. And maybe later. Just take Elmer up for now.”

  Doug set Ty on his feet. “Nice place,” he said as Tyler dragged his feet up the stairs with the dog in tow.

  “Thanks.” She looked distractedly around the now spotless living room with its pale green walls and simple child-resistant crate furniture. “Doug, I really am sorry. It just went out of my mind. Everything did after I heard about Ron Dolan. I just can’t get past it.”

  “Something like this has everybody in town in shock.”

  “I was horrible to him.” Her voice broke as she set the clothes basket on the coffee table. “Just horrible. He wasn’t a bad man. I know that, knew that. But he was an adversary, so I had to think of him as bad. That’s how I work. You’re the enemy, and I’ll do whatever it takes to win. But he was a decent man, with a wife, children, grandchildren. He believed he was right as much as I—”

  “Hey.” He put his hands on her shoulders, turned her around. “Unless you want to confess to going out to Simon’s Hole and bashing him over the head, it isn’t your fault. Beating yourself up over doing your job doesn’t accomplish anything.”

  “But isn’t it awful that I can think better of him dead than I did alive? What does that say about me?”

  “That you’re not a saint and that you need to get out of here for a while. So let’s go.”

  “I can’t.” She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. “I’m not good company. I don’t have a sitter. I—”

  “Bring the kid. He’ll like what I had in mind anyway.”

  “Bring Ty? You want to bring Tyler?”

  “Unless you don’t think he’d enjoy going to see a tripleX feature. But my opinion is, you can never start your sexual explorations too soon.”

  “He already has his own video collection,” she replied. “You’re right, I would like to get out awhile. Thanks. I’ll run up and change.”

  “You’re fine.” He grabbed her hand, pulled her to the base of the steps. No possible way he was letting her change out of those little pink shorts. “Hey, Ty-Rex! Come on, we’re going out.”

  The last place Lana expected to spend her Saturday night was in a batting cage. The amusement center boasted three, and three more for children under twelve. It also held a miniature golf course, an ice-cream parlor and a driving range. It was noisy, crowded and thick with overstimulated children.

  “No, no, you don’t want to club somebody with it. You just want to meet the ball.” Behind her, Doug leaned in, covered the hands she gripped on the bat.

  “I’ve never played baseball. Just some catch with Ty in the front yard.”

  “Don’t try pulling your deprived childhood on me as a bid for sympathy. You’re going to learn to do this right. Shoulders first. Upper body. Then your hips.”

  “Can I do it? Can I?” Ty demanded from behind the protective screen.

  “One generation at a time, slugger.” Doug winked at him. “Let’s get your mom started, then you and I’ll show her how real men bat.”

  “Sexist remarks will not earn you any points,” Lana informed him.

  “Just watch for the ball,” Doug told her. “The ball’s going to be your whole world. Your only purpose in life will be to meet that ball with this bat. You’re the bat and the ball.”

  “Oh, so this is Zen baseball.”

  “Ha ha. Ready?”

  She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, nodded. And hated herself for being such a girl, for actually squealing and cringing as the ball popped out of the machine and flew toward her.

  “You missed it, Mommy.”

  “Yes, Ty. I know
.”

  “Strike one. Let’s try again.” This time Doug kept her trapped between his arms and guided her motion with the bat as the ball pitched toward them.

  The knock of bat on wood, the faint vibration in her arms from the contact made her laugh. “Do it again.”

  She knocked several more, all to Tyler’s wild cheers. Then testing, she leaned back, looked up so her lips nearly grazed Doug’s jaw. She waited until his gaze shifted down to hers.