by Linda Keir
And if she was right about her mom’s relationship with Dallas Walker: eew. She’d seen pictures of him, and he wasn’t bad looking, although his hair had been going gray and was obviously getting thin on top. Mr. Kelly was better looking, when she thought about it. Double EEW. Granted, there were times when even Tate could act super immature, but he didn’t have beard stubble, a beer gut, or any of the middle-aged problems she heard Dad’s friends moaning about, like having to get up and pee a bunch of times at night.
The worst thing about all of this was that, if the basic story of her parents’ relationship was a lie, how could she trust anything else she’d taken for granted? She’d been keeping Tate at arm’s length because she didn’t want to be judged against her parents’ perfect relationship, when in all likelihood, she had something that was more real and more honest than they did.
With her thoughts spiraling, she wasn’t going to drift off anytime soon.
Sighing, Cassidy turned on her bedside light and got up, thinking leftover toasted ravioli and late-night TV sounded perfect. She could even pour herself a half glass of Mom’s wine.
On the stairs, her eyes trailed across Mom’s wall o’ nostalgia, settling on a tiny, handwritten scrap in a three-by-five frame. Four lines of verse, unsigned.
“Careful you don’t drown in that.”
She drinks, laughs, turns on her heel
Her voice a bell that can’t be unrung
“Would you rather be drowning with others, or swimming alone?”
One of Mom’s poet friends, she’d always thought.
Could it be the poet boyfriend? Hiding in plain sight all these years?
She continued on to the kitchen, raided the fridge and Mom’s wine, and had just turned on the TV in Dad’s den—muted and tuned to ESPN—when it hit her. She’d stared at pictures of Dallas Walker, interviewed his former students and colleagues, and read every trace of biographical information about him she could find, but she’d never read a single line of his poetry.
There were books in practically every room of the house. The bookcases in the den were filled with titles that reflected her father’s tastes: mysteries, history, and sports biographies. She left her snack on the ottoman and scanned the spines, then went into the living room, where neatly arranged hardbacks filled the built-in shelves. Literary fiction, biographies, memoirs, coffee-table books.
Her mom had curated carefully, shelving like with like. Contemporary cookbooks in the kitchen. Vintage cookbooks and bartender’s guides in the butler’s pantry. Travel books in the downstairs hall. A small hutch on the back porch had gardening books.
Heading back upstairs, she found an odd selection of worn paperbacks in the reading nook off the landing, mostly by foreign authors. There was also a shallow bookcase haphazardly packed with paperbacks dating to her parents’ college days and, possibly, their parents’ college days. Then she remembered a half-height bookcase on the third floor where she’d seen shelves of extremely slender volumes.
She went up quietly, careful not to wake Whitney and Owen or Mom and Dad. After turning on the light, she sat cross-legged on the floor, walking her fingers along the spines of plays and poetry until she found it: American Son by Dallas Walker. She opened the book to the back flap and looked at the author photo, which was an image she hadn’t seen before, his sandy hair thicker and not yet graying, his face smooth and unlined.
He stared at the camera with real intensity. Poet Face.
Opening the book, she found an inscription on the title page.
To Andi, my sharpest pupil,
“Who would believe us?”
Dallas Walker
Heart pounding, she hurried downstairs and held it up to the scrap on the wall, comparing the curls of the question marks, the slashed dots above the i’s, the diagonal strokes of the capital W’s.
The handwriting was a perfect match.
Chapter Fifty
Ian was usually up before Andi on weekends, but they’d left the land of usual with last night’s revelations, and it was somehow fitting that Andi had slipped out of bed and headed downstairs first. Even more unexpected was the sound of Cassidy’s voice rising up into the back stairway as Ian made his way down into the kitchen. Her words stopped him from taking another step, although they weren’t actually her words at all.
“The water is nickel gray / Lowering clouds and the gift of a new day / Who should we tell? / Who would believe us?”
“Another very nice reading,” Andi said curtly, “although you’re exaggerating the ‘poet voice.’ He certainly never sounded like that.”
“Well, obviously, I never heard him,” said Cassidy. “And I hadn’t even read him until now.”
Ian, having stopped midstride, quietly put his feet on the same riser, leaning against the wall and listening.
“Why the sudden interest?” Andi asked.
“I guess I wanted to see the big picture, and it suddenly occurred to me you might have a copy. Did he give this to you?”
“I bought it, and he signed it for me when I was a student in his class,” Andi said. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“The inscription seems a little personal.”
What was the inscription? Ian wondered. He’d never even seen the book in the house.
Andi sighed, clearly struggling to remain patient with their determined daughter.
“That was Dallas. He always signed with lines from his poems, and he often chose things that were cheeky. Suggestive. He always pushed against the boundaries of acceptable behavior.”
Ian hated the slight tone of admiration in his wife’s voice.
They were silent for a moment, and he wondered whether the conversation had run out of steam. He waited for a covering noise so he could thump down the stairs and breeze into the room as if he hadn’t heard anything.
Then Cassidy spoke again, and he remained frozen.
“I went to see Roy.”
“In prison?” Andi sounded as alarmed as he felt.
“Jail. He’s been accused, not convicted,” Cassidy said tartly.
“If Mr. Kelly sent you to interview an accused criminal in jail, that is far outside the bounds of—”
“Appropriate behavior? That’s rich, Mom.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Cassidy.”
“Mr. Kelly didn’t ask us to do it.”
“Us?”
“Tate went with me,” Cassidy mumbled. “But I did the interview alone. And, for the record, Mr. Kelly will be almost as freaked out as you are right now when I tell him.”
“I am not freaked out,” Andi said unconvincingly. “I assume he claimed he was innocent?”
“He said nobody would believe him, but he has faith in higher powers,” Cassidy told them.
Ian pictured his daughter being searched by guards, escorted to a visiting room, and sitting across from the hulking Roy.
“It’s a good thing he found religion,” Andi said. “He’ll need it. And if ever anyone needed to—”
“So you did know him?” Cassidy interrupted excitedly.
Ian felt light-headed and realized he’d hardly been breathing. As much as he wanted Cassidy to keep going so he could learn more, Andi needed to put a stop to the interrogation.
“I met him once,” she said instead.
“For long enough to form an opinion.”
“It only took a second to see what that guy was all about.”
“Apparently, he felt the same way about you,” Cassidy said. “He asked me if I was a wild child. Like you were.”
Ian took the last of the stairs in a rush, his decision to intervene made involuntarily. He’d wanted to listen for whatever it was he couldn’t put his finger on—the thing he could feel she was hiding—but couldn’t listen a second longer while Cassidy picked Andi apart.
“I can’t believe you’re confronting your mother using the words of a criminal,” he said as he burst into the room to see Cassidy sitting on one side of the island and Andi stan
ding on the other.
“Morning, Dad,” said Cassidy sarcastically.
“How much have you heard?” asked Andi, her eyes showing more relief than fear.
“Enough,” he said. “Cassidy, your mother was not a ‘wild child.’”
“But she was involved with Dallas Walker, wasn’t she?” Cassidy said.
“Did Roy tell you that?”
“He told me to ask you about it,” Cassidy said. “So now I am.”
He looked at Andi, whose pleading expression told him she wasn’t sure how or even whether to answer. Now that he’d arrived, she seemed more than willing to defer all questions to him. “Your mother doesn’t have to answer personal questions about her past if she doesn’t want to.”
“So you’re okay if an innocent man is framed for a crime he didn’t commit?”
“I seriously doubt Roy is an innocent man,” Andi said. “He was definitely a drug dealer.”
“That doesn’t make him a murderer.”
Ian was flabbergasted. “How are you even making this leap in his defense, Cassidy?” he demanded.
“It seems like there’s a case for reasonable doubt when a bracelet my mother made was on the wrist of her dead teacher,” Cassidy said with an intensity Ian found chilling. “She’s trying to keep her involvement secret, but she was right in the middle of this!”
In the silence that followed, Ian felt he could hear every creak, every subtle sound their old house made. How many more minutes until Whitney and Owen thundered down the stairs?
An intimate inscription, a gifted bracelet—Ian remembered well the one Andi wore, and had no idea Dallas had had one himself. Traces of Dallas Walker seemed as ubiquitous as blood spatter at a crime scene.
Andi sighed deeply. “This isn’t a conversation I wanted to have with anyone, much less my daughter, the investigative reporter.”
“Were you seeing Dallas Walker?”
Caught, unable to lie to their daughter’s face, Andi gave the tiniest nod.
“The bracelet was a Christmas present,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m horrified that he was actually wearing it when he died.”
“Were you cheating on Dad?”
At seventeen, Ian had agonized over this very question and the timing of her I need some time to be me speech. As an adult, he’d resigned himself to not knowing—and now Cassidy had simply asked.
“Never! I broke up with your dad before anything happened.”
“But you did have a secret affair with your teacher.”
“It was wrong,” Andi said. “But it was complicated, too.”
“It’s not like I don’t know this happens.”
“At Glenlake?”
Cassidy shrugged. “Glenlake, here in St. Louis, wherever. Everybody knows someone who knows someone. But it’s usually not their mother. And I don’t know of anyone else who felt they had to help cover it up, like the way I deleted the photo of the bracelet from the server so no one else would see it and ask questions.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Ian. “You erased evidence?”
“Protect the family and the Copeland name at all costs, right?” said Cassidy jadedly. “Besides, it was taken by a photojournalist for the local paper, so it wasn’t like I was tampering with evidence or anything. And it’s not like the police don’t know about it.”
Numb and not sure how to answer, Ian opened a cabinet, took out a mug, and poured himself a cup of the coffee Cassidy or Andi had made.
“Thank you, Cassidy,” Andi said in a small voice. “I never ever wanted anyone to know I was involved with . . . him.”
“How did it happen?” asked Cassidy.
“It seems pathetic now,” Andi said, meeting Ian’s eyes beseechingly. “I really was happy dating your father. But Dallas was a famous poet, and he told me again and again how special and talented I was. I believed him, and somehow it made sense that we should be together.”
“He was grooming you,” said Ian, for his own benefit as much as theirs.
“How long did it last?”
“Until he disappeared.”
“You mean died.”
“When I heard they’d found his body, suicide or an accident involving drugs and alcohol seemed like the logical possibilities,” Andi said. “And I couldn’t help but wonder if I was partly responsible.”
“Because you were having a relationship with him?”
“We’d been having . . . difficulties,” she said, nodding.
“That’s not on you,” Ian heard himself say. “He was a grown-ass man.”
Andi sighed. “In a lot of ways, he was younger than we were.”
“So one moment you were seeing each other, and the next he was gone?” Cassidy asked.
“Pretty much,” Andi said. “Until his body was found, I truly thought he’d just taken off without saying a word. Now that Roy has been arrested, of course it suggests other possibilities.”
Ian sipped his coffee, which tasted bitter and burned. Cassidy must have been up much earlier than either of them and brewed the pot. With a sour feeling in his stomach, he wondered why Andi didn’t tell Cassidy she and Dallas had broken up before he disappeared. That would be a small but mitigating fact.
“How did you feel when that happened, Mom?”
“I was mad at Dallas,” Andi said, her voice cracking as she looked at Ian. “But I was more embarrassed and upset with myself for falling for him in the first place.”
Andi spent the day floating above herself, not really there at all as she crisscrossed the city. She dropped Whitney off at a lacrosse clinic, then headed out to Chesterfield to catch part of Owen’s soccer game before grabbing Whitney again and heading back home to fetch Cassidy, who wanted to spend the afternoon with her sister at the mall. Andi made it to an afternoon yoga class while Ian dropped Owen at a laser tag birthday party and sleepover, but she couldn’t focus inward, steady her breath, or do anything more than arrange her limbs in the various poses.
When Andi got home, Ian was out on a run. She had just enough time to shower and get dressed before they were due at a cocktail party down the street.
And then, just as Andi stepped into the shower, Ian appeared in the bathroom.
“I’ll hurry,” she said.
“No need,” he said, pulling his T-shirt over his head and tossing it in the laundry hamper. “I just got off the phone with Biz and Cope. They’re taking the kids for dinner and a movie.”
“Wonderful,” Andi said, feeling a disproportional sense of relief as the hot water streamed down her breasts and stomach. “How did you make that happen?”
“Biz called. I mentioned that Cassidy was wiped out from all the work she’s been doing in the journalism seminar and after Roy’s arrest just wanted to come home to take a break. Biz was on speaker, and Cope said it sounds like everything is squared away.”
Squared away.
Andi turned around and let the water spray her neck and shoulders. The gall of Roy, intimating that he knew anything about her—to her own daughter, no less. Thank god Ian had come to her defense. How had she not realized, as he apparently did, how much Dallas had manipulated and groomed her?
Unexpectedly, Ian opened the shower door. Cool air flowed in around him.
“Ian, I should have told you more. Sooner. I wouldn’t have talked to Cassidy about anything at all if she hadn’t been down there waiting for me. I—”
“It’s okay,” he said, putting his finger to her lips. “You told Cassidy what she needed to know. And me, too.”
“I did break up with you before anything happened. I swear.”
“It’s all ancient history,” he said, slipping off his running shorts and stepping inside. He kissed her insistently, convincing her that the revelations of the last twenty-four hours had done nothing to diminish his desire for her.
Afterward, they lay together, his arms encircling her.
“I’ve always loved you,” he said. “We were meant to be together.”
�
�I’ve always loved you, too,” she whispered.
“That’s all that matters, right?”
“Right,” she told him.
Chapter Fifty-One
If Cassidy had learned one thing from Mr. Kelly’s seminar, it was to use the element of surprise to her advantage. She’d totally done that yesterday. Reading Dallas’s poems aloud was a brilliant touch, if she said so herself. She’d been hoping to get each of her parents alone, but when Dad literally ambushed them, the moment got downright raw.
Fortunately, instead of putting her on a plane, train, or, god forbid, back on the bus, Dad had decided to drive her back to school himself. Which meant she had a chance to learn even more.
They were somewhere between Springfield and Bloomington when she finally decided to break the silence.
“I’m sorry you had to make this drive, Dad,” she told him.
“I have some business up there, anyway,” he said, checking the rearview mirror as he changed lanes.
She watched a line of bare trees whiz by and thought idly about how spring seemed to arrive weeks later at Glenlake than in St. Louis.
“I’m also sorry . . .” How to say it?
He glanced over at her, an eyebrow raised.
“That I accused you guys,” she said lamely. “Of being involved.”
“We are involved, however inadvertently.”
“I feel bad about making Mom go through all that. Making her say her big secret in front of you.”
“It was a bad time that neither of us wanted to relive.”
She was hungry, and she had to pee, and the next exit was twelve miles away. But she felt as though the moment the car doors opened, the pressure would be released, and the conversation would be over. She took her chance.
“What do you think happened?” she pressed.
“To Walker?”
“If Roy didn’t do it.”
That got her another glance, no raised eyebrow.
