Birthright

by Shay Savage

  “But what exactly is he doing for them?” My own paranoia sets in as I try to come up with a plausible reason this supposedly random guy would be following my Cherry. “Do you think he’s…he’s protecting Cherry?”

  “If he is, it means she’s working with them. Either way, we have a problem.”

  Cherry working with the Ramsays?

  I taste bile in the back of my throat. This can’t be right—it just can’t be. Cherry is sweet and naïve and couldn’t possibly be involved with people like the Ramsays. It’s just not possible.

  Is it?

  I should have killed that guy when Pops told me to.

  “We need to have him picked up,” I say. I glance at Pops, waiting for him to remind me of his previous advice about Cherry’s date, but he just leans against the wall, smirking. “We need to know what he knows.”

  “Agreed,” Antony says.

  “I want to know who the fuck her real parents are, and why the Ramsays are interested in her. If he’s working for them, he might be able to give us the answers we need.”

  “I can pick him up tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow. No fucking way. I want that guy right here and right now. Cherry can’t possibly be involved in any of this, and I need to hear that from his mouth.

  “I want to talk to him now.” I move around the desk and pull open a drawer.

  “Why the rush?” Antony asks.

  I reach into the drawer and grab the gun and holster inside. I can’t help but see the black velvet box sitting next to the weapon.

  “Antony?”

  “Yeah, boss?”

  I take out the velvet box and hold it up.

  “I was going to do this next week at the end of the festival.” I open the lid to display the brilliant diamond solitaire inside.

  “I understand,” Antony says when he glances at the box.

  “Do you?” I lean against the desk, place the diamond between us, and force him to look at me. I hope the panic that is starting to rise inside of me isn’t obvious. “I’m serious about this, cousin.”

  “We’ll get your answers before then.” He nods, and I can see his throat bob as he swallows. “I swear.”

  “We need to get those answers now.”

  “I’ll go see if the car is in front of her place.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “No, boss.”

  “What?” I slam the gun down on the desktop in front of me.

  “If she sees you there…we don’t want to risk that.” He takes a step away from the desk and holds up his hands. “I’ll get a couple of the guys together—people Cherry hasn’t seen before—and we’ll take care of it. I’ll stay out of sight. Once we have him, I’ll call you.”

  I have to admit that Antony is right. I can’t risk Cherry looking out her window and seeing me grabbing someone out of a car. She’s far less likely to recognize Antony from that distance. As long as Antony stays out of sight, the risk is minimal.

  “All right,” I finally say, “you go get him.”

  “Boss, before we go pick him up, there’s more you should know.”

  “Jesus, Antony—I don’t think I can take any more right now.” Giving up on trying to hide how this information is affecting me, I drop down into the chair and try to slow my breathing and heart rate. My hands are starting to shake, and I press them to my thighs to conceal their trembling.

  “I know, Nate, but I need to tell you. I can’t walk out of here until you have all the information I have. It’s about where I found the original birth certificate.”

  “Where?” I look up again, apprehensive.

  “Right next to this one.” He places yet another copy of Cherry’s forged birth certificate on the desk.

  “Where?” I ask again, knowing full well that I am not going to like the answer.

  “In your business files,” he says quietly. “From the dates of the other documents, I’d say Micha placed it there about two weeks before we found him in the woods.”

  “How do you know Micha put it there and not Pops?”

  “Because it was in a file from March of last year,” Antony says. “Carlo was in Seattle, working out that document deal with Franks. Your father was out of town that whole month before Micha was found. Micha made sure the information was dated, and I think his handwriting is on some of it. There’s also some stuff about the club, and Pops didn’t give a shit about the club.”

  “What? And he does now?” I look over at Pops and laugh.

  “Who does what?” Antony narrows his eyes.

  “You think he gives a shit about the club now that he walked in there once?” I point my thumb in Pops’ direction. Antony glances up, but instead of asking Pops outright, Antony turns back to me.

  “When did he go to the club?”

  I roll me eyes and stare at the ceiling for a moment before glaring at my cousin.

  “Forget it.” I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter. Get back to Micha.”

  “Okay.” Antony gives me a strange look before he continues. “The gist of it is, Micha had a copy of Cherry’s forged birth certificate.”

  “So he had it, but why? Do you think…you think the Ramsays killed him because he was looking into Cherry’s past?”

  “I think there might be a connection.” Antony rubs his jaw as he ponders. “The timing fits, at least. Why would Micha have a copy of this at all?”

  “Did Cherry know Micha?” I can’t even believe I’m suggesting the idea, but my imagination is starting to run wild. Did my brother know Cherry before I ever met her? Did he figure out she was somehow tied to the Ramsays? “Do you think that’s why she’s here?”

  “I can only look shit up, boss; I can’t read minds. It seems a little too coincidental though I suppose it could be an accident.”

  “An accident,” I mutter and then laugh.

  “Boss?”

  “Accident, Maryland,” I say. “That’s the name of her hometown. At least, that’s what she’s told me.”

  “Right. I remember that.”

  “What else did you say was in there?” I ask.

  “You mean in Micha’s file?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there wasn’t a lot. Let me get the whole thing.” Antony leaves the office to retrieve the file.

  “You think you’re playing her,” Pops says, “but maybe it’s the other way around.”

  “Fuck you,” I mutter. “Whatever is going on here, I don’t think Cherry knows anything about it.”

  Even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m starting to doubt them.

  “You’re even more naïve than she appears to be.”

  Antony comes back into the room with a file folder in his hands. He drops it on the desk and opens it up.

  At the front of the file is one of those advertising mailers full of coupons to various local businesses, unopened. The postmark date on the envelope is the second of March, last year. Antony flips the small stack of papers to the back and finds that the last item in the file is an empty business envelope, also postmarked during the previous March.

  “If Micha wanted to date his research without putting a date on the file, this is how he’d do it.”

  “Yeah, Pops has talked about doing things like this before. March second to March tenth. What else is in there?”

  “The original birth certificate and the copy were right after the first envelope,” Antony says. He places the documents back where he found them. “Then there’s the rest of it.”

  He flips through each item slowly.

  The first is a group of receipts stapled together. When I pull them apart, I find a receipt from a Mexican restaurant in Cascade Falls and two invoices addressed to the Big O. One is a shipping invoice for various bottles of wine, and the other listed a variety of cheeses and their price per pound.

  “I remember this,” I say, holding up the invoices. “Micha wanted to do a wine and cheese pairing at the club.”

  “Yeah, that sounds familiar.
I thought it was a stupid idea. Did you notice the address on the cheese receipt?”

  I take a closer look at the receipt and immediately see what he’s talking about. I let out a long breath.

  “A cheese shop in Accident, Maryland.”

  “Yeah. Weird, huh?”

  “Too weird.” I shake my head. “What about the restaurant?”

  “No idea why it’s in there.”

  I replace the receipts and look at the next item. Behind the invoices is a grainy, black-and-white photo of a man ushering a very pregnant woman into a boxy, nineties-style sedan. On the back of the photo is a sticky note with “72 S. St” written on it. I pull it off and hold it up to Antony.

  “What do you think this is?” I ask, and Antony takes the paper from my hand.

  “Do we have a family code I don’t know anything about?”

  “Not unless no one told me, either.”

  “The ‘S’ could stand for south.” He hands the paper back to me.

  “South Street?” I flip the paper over, but there’s no other information.

  “Yeah. It could be an address.”

  “Is this on the west side? I didn’t know there was a South Street in Cascade Falls.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “If it isn’t a street in Cascade Falls, where is it?”

  “Maybe it’s a safe deposit box number, or a locker number, or a PO box number.”

  The final item in the file is a newspaper clipping. It doesn’t contain a date or a newspaper name, just a short article about an antique shop being temporarily closed due to the owner’s illness.

  “This is Cherry’s aunt’s shop.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that.”

  I shake my head. I can’t make heads or tails out of any of this. Why was my brother investigating Cherry a full year ago? What does this have to do with his death or her birth parents? Most importantly, what does Cherry know about any of this?

  “What the fuck is going on here, Antony?”

  “I don’t know, boss.” He leans against the desk and looks over the documents splayed in front of us. He huffs a breath through his nose. “I think we need a second opinion.”

  “If you mention Nora, I’ll break your jaw.” The last thing I need is my nosy, opinionated sister digging around in all of this and throwing it back in my face.

  “No, not your sister—Threes. He’s really good at mysteries and puzzles, and he might be able to piece shit together better than we can. If we pick that guy up, we’re going to need Threes anyway, so we might as well tell him why.”

  Threes isn’t pleased about being woken up at four in the morning, but he stumbles down the stairs to hear us out. Antony brings him up to speed, and then Threes goes over the information in the file himself.

  “This does look like Micha’s handwriting,” Threes says as he holds up the sticky note. “He always made those weird sevens with the mark across them like that. I don’t know about a South Street though.”

  “It must not be in Cascade Falls.”

  “What about this place in Maryland?” Threes picks up the newspaper article. “Does it have a South Street?”

  Antony takes a moment to look it up and then confirms that Accident, Maryland, does indeed have a South Street.

  “What is at 72 South Street?” I ask.

  “Invalid address,” Antony replies. “There’s a post office in that block though.”

  “So, maybe a PO Box?” Threes suggests.

  “Maybe.” I hate making guesses like this. Anything and everything is possible, and there isn’t enough information to make a decision based on it.

  “But no key,” Antony says, “not that we’ve found anyway.”

  Threes sits back, looks over the information for a minute, and looks back at me. His eyes narrow.

  “Is your shirt buttoned wrong?” he asks.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I grab at the buttons, release them, and start buttoning my shirt correctly. “Will you stay on target, please?”

  Threes snickers, then lets out a long sigh.

  “I could put all this together better if I’d had some coffee,” he says, “but this is what I gather so far. For whatever reason, Micha was looking into Cherry right before he was killed. Cherry has a poorly doctored birth certificate that didn’t come from us, and the Ramsays are the only people who might have a reason to alter her information. Do you know who the woman in the photograph is?”

  “Not sure,” Antony says, “but the guy with her is definitely Roland Ramsay, so she might be Leanne. That was his wife’s name, right?”

  “Yeah, that could be her,” Three says with a nod. “They’ve both been dead a while, so we won’t get any info from them.”

  “We also don’t know which baby of hers she’s carrying there,” I say. “There’s no date on the photo. It could be Janna or Jay.”

  “It’s black and white because it’s been scanned,” Antony says, “not because it’s that old. Janna and Jay are only two years apart. They were both born around that time.”

  “She’s a year older than me,” I say, “and Jay is a year younger, if I remember right.”

  “And Cherry is your age,” Antony reminds me. “You were born just a few days apart, according to the forged birth certificate, anyway.”

  “I’m gonna say it,” Threes says slowly, “because no one else seems to want to. It could be Cherry. That’s what we’re all thinking here, and someone has to come out and say it.”

  He looks straight into my eyes like he’s waiting for me to take a swing at him, and I have to admit that I’m tempted. I preferred it when we were all dancing around what was in front of us, but now I can’t deny that it’s possible.

  “The timing is right,” Threes says as he keeps his gaze on me. “Leanne could have had another child between Janna and Jay. You have to admit that it could be Cherry.”

  “She did come here looking to find her birth parents,” Antony says quietly.

  “They see it,” Pops whispers in my ear, “so why can’t you?”

  I swallow hard, trying to rid myself of the burning taste in the back of my throat. This can’t be happening, not after everything has been going so smoothly, so perfectly. Cherry can’t possibly be involved with the Ramsays. I know she can’t.

  I think.

  I’m not going to get anywhere without more information, so I turn my gaze to Antony.

  “Go pick up that guy tailing her—Aaron. Take whoever you need with you. Just make sure none of them have met Cherry.” I turn to Threes. “You get the barn set up. We’ll all meet there. I want to know everything that guy knows.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  *****

  I drop my ass on a bench in the barn, trying to tune out Aaron’s final, gasping breaths. My head is pounding from the stress and lack of sleep, and my hands are starting to shake a little. I should probably lay off the caffeine for a while.

  We’d been here all day, doing everything Threes could think of to get information out of Cherry’s internet date, and I’m beyond exhausted. Aaron admitted to working with the Ramsays but not until after he was thrown out of the Big O. Apparently, that pissed him off enough to switch sides. He claims he has no idea why the Ramsays wanted him to tail Cherry, and he was only supposed to report her comings and goings, not protect her from anything. He said he knew nothing about Micha or why my brother could have been looking into Cherry’s past right before he was killed.

  In my heart, I want to believe Aaron’s words. I want to think that Cherry knows nothing of her past, just as she’s told me. I don’t want to even consider that she might know more about her heritage than she’s let on.

  Then again, I don’t know if I can believe anything Aaron says. I can’t make sense of what’s going on here at all. For the first time in months, I have what might be a lead on my brother’s death, and it looks like it might involve my girlfriend.

  I can’t deal with this.

  I suddenly realize I have
n’t called Cherry today, and it’s starting to get late. I’m pretty sure I can’t keep my voice steady on the phone, so I type out a quick excuse.

  Nate O: Sorry I haven’t managed to call today. Working late tonight. I’ll have to get back to you after work tomorrow. Hope you’ve had a wonderful day, my Cherice!

  She replies quickly and with far more typos that she usually sends.

  I’ve hand an intersting day. I’ll tak to you tomorrow. Gnight Nate.

  I narrow my eyes at the screen, trying to read between the lines that may or may not be there. Why was her day interesting? What had she been doing? Had she, as Antony and Pops suspect, been meeting with the Ramsays? Had she seen Aaron’s abduction, and she went to tell them about it?

  If she had seen Antony and company picking the guy up outside her apartment, and she had no idea what was going on, wouldn’t she have called the police? She hadn’t. I would have heard about it if she had.

  “Any normal person would have called the police,” I say softly.

  “Maybe she’s the one who did it,” Pops says. “Maybe she put that gun to your brother’s head and pulled the trigger.”

  “No. She couldn’t have done that.”

  “You don’t know shit.”

  My muscles tense; I grit my teeth and close my eyes tightly. If I look at him, I’m going to take a swing at him, and I don’t want to do that in front of the others.

  When I open my eyes again—some amount of control regained—Antony is heading in my direction, wiping his hands on a bloody towel.

  “He’s done,” my cousin tells me. “It won’t be long now.”

  “Do you think he told us everything?” I ask.

  “As far as I could tell,” Antony replies. “If he did know anything else, it’s kind of a moot point now.”

  “True. Still, how do we know he was telling the truth?”

  “Honestly, boss, this guy ain’t no pro. He squawked before I’d even broken a finger. He’s just some asshole who thought he’d get one over on us by working with the other side. I think he regretted it in the end.”