Claimed: The Dark Christmases Trilogy

by Z. L. Arkadie

  “You were the one who saved her?” Sabrina asked.

  Zach scowled at the reporter as he guided Katie to her feet and walked her out of sight of the camera.

  Jasper ripped his eyes off the interview to glance at Zach. I saw appreciation on his face.

  Sabrina made a comment about how tragic and painful their story was, “as we can see.” She then asked Bryn when she had learned that Amelia Christmas wasn’t her mother. Bryn looked as if she was second-guessing her decision to set up the interview but realized it was too late to turn back.

  “Did you know that the authorities are looking into a claim that Amelia Christmas was kidnapped?” Sabrina asked.

  Bryn stared at her. “No,” she finally said. “I don’t think that’s true. If it were, then…” She shook her head adamantly. “Not true, and I think we’re done here.”

  “I understand,” Sabrina said in a soothing tone. “Thank you for sharing your story with us. That’s all for now. Stay with us as this story develops over the coming days.” She gave one last tight-lipped smile for the camera, and the color bars came up.

  Jasper rubbed his face as the room remained silent. Then he glared at Bryn. “You don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “We’ve done the right thing,” Dale said.

  If looks could kill, Jasper’s glare would have put Dale six feet under. “Bryn, did he talk you into this?”

  I could see the little girl who knew better than to cross her big brother behind Bryn’s eyes as her expression vacillated. “Not really. It was both of us.”

  Jasper flexed his jaw while staring at Bryn. “Everyone who’s part of production, get out.” His tone reflected a sort of constrained rage.

  There was no doubt that he meant business. His presence was so threatening that even I wanted no part of what was to come next. But I continued standing by his side, ready to scamper out of the room the moment he asked me to.

  Sabrina glanced at Bryn as if she wanted to thank her for the interview, but then she focused on Jasper and seemed to think better of it. When the last person on the production team had left the room, Jasper walked over to pull out a chair and motioned for me to sit down.

  My chest was tight with anticipation of what could possibly come next as I sat. Jasper took the seat beside me and leaned forward, setting his elbows on his knees. His eyes were on Beth. “I’m sorry for what my father did to you.”

  Beth watched him as if he were a swarm of deadly bees about to descend on her and sting her to death.

  “We’ll pay you restitution,” he said.

  Bryn grunted bitterly. When we both turned to her, she was shaking her head.

  “That’s your solution? Throw money at this fucking problem?” Bryn asked, snarling.

  He threw up his hands. “What more do you want? You just brought our family down.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Bryn snapped back. “And you know it. Jasper, if you want, you can stop this whole fucking process. You can make us all out to be liars, and everyone would believe you!”

  He was very still for a moment and then sat up straight and readjusted in his seat. He released a pent-up breath. “I’m not going to do that.”

  Bryn’s eyes widened in disbelief. “No?”

  “No.” He glanced at me then settled his attention back on Katie and Bryn. “The question Sabrina Lowland asked you about Amelia is based on the truth. It seems when you hired Holly to investigate our family, she did a hell of a job.”

  Oh gosh. I didn’t know what to say or do. I wished I could have continued sitting there like a fly on the wall.

  “Bryn didn’t want to be imprisoned by your family anymore,” Dale said.

  Jasper pointed a finger at him. “Shut the fuck up. You’re lucky she fucking loves you, at least for now.”

  “No, you shut the fuck up!” Dale roared back. “And is that a threat?”

  Jasper rose to his feet, fists balled, standing like a towering menace. “I will toss you the fuck out of here if you say another word.”

  Perhaps it was the calm way in which Jasper spoke that made Dale flop his hand at Jasper, shake his head, but keep his mouth closed as he sat. I’d been around Jasper frequently enough to know he didn’t make empty threats.

  Jasper composedly retook his seat. “Beth…”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “Um, yeah?” She hacked into her fist.

  “Are you currently taking any drugs?” Jasper’s tone was like that of a doctor.

  “No,” she said, sounding like a little kid who said she hadn’t done it after getting caught in the middle of a naughty act.

  “Are you open to drug-abuse rehabilitation?”

  “I’ve been sober for six months,” she said with a nod. It was clear she wanted to convince Jasper that she wasn’t just a druggie nobody. “I lived a long time on the streets. But now I have this job, and it pays me enough to keep a place where I’m warm, and I have some food in the refrigerator too.”

  Jasper’s expression hadn’t change. “Are you willing to enter a proper rehabilitation center?”

  This time, Beth nodded more enthusiastically. “Yes, I sure am.”

  He looked at the two men in the room. “My sisters and their mother are returning to the compound with us.”

  “No, we’re not, Jasper,” Bryn said. “Dale and I are going back to LA.”

  “Arthur and two other men were in the vicinity earlier. He wants leverage. Until he’s fully neutralized, you, Katie, and Beth will be kept in a secure location. No arguments. You will go of your own volition or not.”

  “You said ‘Arthur’?” Beth squealed.

  Jasper’s gaze fell on her.

  “Well, Dale is coming with me,” Bryn said.

  “No, I’m not,” Dale said.

  “What do you mean?” Bryn asked. Her tone was flat.

  Dale hopped to his feet. “I mean I’m done with your fucking family.” He stormed toward the exit. “Call me when you can come out to play.”

  Bryn got up to run after him after he opened the door and rushed out into the hallway.

  “Bronwyn Henrietta Christmas!” Jasper roared.

  She stopped in her tracks, facing away from us with her shoulders slumped.

  “Let him go.” Jasper’s voice was less harsh. “You know how dangerous the Valentines are. They’re almost neutralized. Don’t make the end result harder than you already have.”

  I expected Bryn to lash out, but instead, she hugged herself and broke down and cried.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Zach couldn’t fly back to the compound with Katie. He had to return to his shifts at the hospital in Queens, where he worked as a resident. Jasper had flown him on his own private flight back to New York City and insisted that he stay in his apartment in Manhattan, where he would be kept under guard. Zach didn’t want any special treatment, but Jasper was able to convince him by explaining that as long as Katie loved him, he could be used as a pawn in a long-standing war between families that was close to ending.

  Jasper gave him two choices. “Go with them back to the compound or live within my security measures.”

  Zach tried to present a third option, which was have Jasper’s security personnel come to his small apartment, which was above a meat store. Jasper wouldn’t budge, and after Zach saw pictures of the place, his arm didn’t need to be twisted any longer. So Bryn and Katie returned to the compound together, while Beth was flown west to begin her time at a famous drug rehabilitation center in the California desert.

  Jasper and I had one more stop before securing ourselves in the luxurious compound where Jasper promised we would finally relax, make love, and eat a lot of Chef Bart’s food. We had flown to Charleston, West Virginia.

  It was early in the evening when Jasper’s rental car rolled to a stop in front of a white house with large, tall eaves facing the front, flanked by a redbrick fireplace on each side of the house. Warm light glowed along the edge of the curtains. Even though the yard was covered with s
now, it had a lot of space. The trees had been beaten by the cold spell that had befallen the country that winter, but I could tell that in spring, their branches would carry healthy green leaves. The mailbox was made like an old tree house and had the name Hollander engraved on the front.

  “This is it,” he said, looking at the house in awe.

  “Yep,” I said, still studying the scale of the property Jasper’s grandparents had made for themselves, trying to assess what sort of people they were.

  “What are you thinking?” Jasper asked.

  I quickly turned to look at him. If Jasper asked that question, then he wanted me to really tell him the truth, no sugarcoating. “They seem to be people of means.”

  “I suspect my father had something to do with that,” he hissed.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Perhaps. I’m sure you’ve been trying to find any payments that were made to them.”

  “I have.”

  “Any luck?”

  He hesitated as his eyebrows pulled together. “No.”

  I faced the house again in time to see another light turn on in the part that appeared to be the living room. The grandparents were definitely home and actively moving from room to room.

  An unexpected yawn escaped me. “Sorry about that.”

  Jasper reached out to take my hand. “I’m glad you’re here with me, but if you prefer to rest, we can check in to a hotel and come back tomorrow morning.”

  I was worn out, that was for sure, but I’d spent years pressing on despite exhaustion. Plus, we were about to embark on a significant piece of the puzzle to the mystery of Amelia Christmas’s past. My body was tired, but the investigative journalist in me had the stamina of a superhero. We were about to discover if Harold and Marie Hollander’s gene pool was as despicable as Randolph Christmas’s.

  I squeezed his hand. “I’m fine, my love. We’re here now, so let’s not drag out the inevitable.”

  He nodded. Earlier, Jasper had vacillated between contacting the Hollanders to let them know he would be visiting and just showing up on their doorstep. The second option prevailed. But we already knew his grandparents had been contacted the previous morning with the information that their daughter had passed. Jasper’s friend at the bureau told him that as someone who’d been working with missing persons for fifteen years, he couldn’t say for a fact that the Hollanders had known their daughter was still alive. He told Jasper that Marie Hollander had broken down over the phone at the news that her daughter had lived long enough to become a grown woman. Then they pressed for details about her life. Jasper’s contact told them he would share more once he knew more. Of course, that was a stalling tactic.

  Jasper was at the Hollanders’ home to learn what they truly knew and to tell them what they didn’t know. However, ever since that conversation with his bureau contact, he had taken the edge off of his anger toward his grandparents, which told me that even though he wasn’t willing to voice it, he had some ray of hope that they were good people.

  Jasper surveyed the scene again and asked me to say seated. He got out of the car, shuffled around to the front, and opened my door. After I got out, we smiled pensively at each other.

  “You look beautiful this evening,” he said.

  I beamed at him. “So do you.”

  Our kiss was short but as warm, sensual, and sweet as usual. Even under the circumstances, my mind floated to that familiar place it went to whenever Jasper kissed me.

  As we walked up the driveway, I wasn’t sure if Jasper knew how tightly he was gripping my hand. When we made it to the snow-layered sidewalk, he took a deep, steadying breath. I wasn’t sure he was aware of that, either. Here was the brave man I had come to know—cool, calm, and collected in the most contentious situations, and though he was clearly more nervous than usual, he kept going as our breathing and the sound of our feet scrunching the ice resonated. Then we made it to the porch. Without taking another second to collect himself, Jasper rang the doorbell.

  Chapter Seventeen

  A tall, slender man wearing casual pants and a thick navy-blue cable-knit sweater stood in front of us. He asked who we were, and Jasper gave him the name of his contact at the FBI. Harold Hollander opened the door immediately.

  The two men, grandson and grandfather, studied each other. The moment was very odd, as if Harold—who was quite handsome with his piercing blue-green eyes, supple lips, and hair grayed at the temples of his angular face—were staring at a picture of himself from nearly forty years before, and Jasper was seeing into his future.

  “Who are you?” Harold asked. The question seemed to escape him involuntarily. He cleared his throat.

  “Who is it, Harry?” a woman asked from somewhere in the house. She was close, and I could hear her moving closer.

  Then a beautiful woman with almond eyes, a swan’s neck, and long limbs arrived to stand by her husband’s side. The woman, who appeared to be in her early sixties—as did her husband—looked into Jasper’s eyes then slapped a hand over her mouth and gasped against it.

  Jasper’s expression was unreadable. “I’m Jasper Walker Christmas.”

  Harold frowned as if he were chewing on a lemon. “Christmas?”

  “Yes. I’m Amelia Christmas’s son. You may know her as Doris Hollander. Your daughter.”

  Marie had not yet moved her hand away from her mouth. She had bent over and was sobbing into her palm.

  The inside of the Hollanders’ home looked like the houses of people my parents used to take advantage of. Trinkets were set on shelves along with framed photos of young kids and adults, all having their unique rendition of Jasper and his grandfather’s gorgeous eyes. It was clear the couple had had more children. Amelia/Doris had more siblings as well as nieces and nephews.

  As we all sat at the table, I found myself wondering what all of Jasper’s discovered relatives would think when they saw him. He was not your ordinary human being. He was like a gladiator in the world of mere men. In a sense, that was what his sick father had striven to make him.

  The air was thick and full of tension. Marie was making coffee, and Harold was still checking out Jasper. It was as if he couldn’t take his eyes off the grandson he never knew existed.

  “Are the two of you married?” he asked Jasper.

  “Not yet,” Jasper replied.

  I hid my surprise. He hadn’t even proposed to me. We had communicated that we never wanted to leave each other’s side, but he hadn’t been bold enough to put it in terms of that life-altering M word.

  Harold glanced at his wife as though he was looking for her to join him and provide him some comfort.

  “My father’s name is Randolph Christmas. Have you ever heard of him?” Jasper asked.

  Harold’s eyebrows ruffled and then released.

  “Randolph Christmas of Christmas Industries,” Jasper continued.

  Marie sat down close to her husband and linked arms with him as the coffee brewed.

  “I didn’t know him personally, but I know of him.” Harold turned to his wife, who kept shaking her head. “Are you saying that man had our daughter?”

  Jasper’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You didn’t know?”

  Harold showed us another of Jasper’s facial expressions when he pursed his lips and glared at his grandson. “No, I did not know. If I knew where my daughter was, I would’ve called the authorities. And if I knew that man had my daughter”—he pounded the table with the tip of his finger—“I would’ve killed him with my bare hands.”

  Jasper looked at me, puzzled, and then reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his mother’s diary. “I want to read you something.”

  My eyes expanded. I hadn’t even known he’d brought the diary. He started reading what he’d read to me that morning, the part where Amelia or Doris accused her parents of being paid off by Randolph Christmas.

  “That never happened. My daughter was not for sale!” Harold bellowed.

  I touched Jasper’s arm, signaling to him that I had s
omething to say. “Could you tell us what happened on the day your daughter went missing?”

  “Yes,” Marie said, gazing at the table as she nodded. “After school, Doris went to a friend’s house and never came home. The girl’s name was Penelope Donaldson. She said…”

  Harold raised a hand to stop her from speaking. “It was the ceremony, honey.” His tone was filled with regret.

  “The ceremony?” Marie asked.

  His eyes seemed to turn down at the corners as he looked at Jasper. “I’m a retired scientist. At the time of Doris’s disappearance, I was working for United Alliance Laboratories Chemicals.”

  “That’s our company,” Jasper said.

  Harold shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Randolph Christmas owns it.” It sounded as if Harold had to make it clear that he was mentally severing any connection Jasper may have had with Randolph. “Then you know how it works?”

  Jasper nodded. “Our scientists engineer what we need, but they’re also free to create whatever they wish, as long as we are named on the patent and paid fifteen percent of all financial gain.”

  Harold eyed Jasper and then told him the name of the chemical agent he had created and what it was used for. “We had a ceremony for my achievement. I brought my family. My daughter and your father were both there.” Harold turned to his wife. “I mentioned how I didn’t like the way he looked at her. Do you remember that, Marie?”

  “I remember it,” Marie said sadly. “I didn’t take you seriously. I called you crazy, but you were right.”

  “The next week, she went missing,” Harold said.

  Jasper cocked his head. “He returned that patent to you in full.”

  Harold nodded thoughtfully. “I never knew why. It didn’t make sense. If only I had…” He pressed his lips together. “I just didn’t expect a man like him to do something like that.”