He looked different to me now. I didn’t know if it was the new medication, or the beginning of a new life.
“Do you trust me to take you home?” he said.
“I do,” I said.
“Do you want to hear the whole story now?”
“God no,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any story that involves that man for at least six months.”
“Do you trust that I’m on your side?”
“I do,” I said. I did. I was calm. I wasn’t exactly riotous with joy, not yet. My brain and body had a lot of healing to do. But I felt calm.
“I’m taking some time off,” he said. “Ned can run the shop for a while.”
“Good for you,” I said.
“Maybe we can just have fun,” he said. “Start fresh. Hang out with the family. Play Scrabble. Go for walks.”
“Haven’t you noticed?” I said, pointing at my leg. “I have a slight injury.”
“You’ll be like Oscar Pistorius in no time,” he said. “Minus the going to jail for shooting your girlfriend thing.”
We grinned at each other. Mama Estela picked up my bag and shoved it at Dave.
“You two? Six months, you’ll be looking for people to shoot,” she said. She looked at me. “Stay home, get better, see if he’s the good one for you, then back to work.”
“Doing what? You want me to take up my illustrious career as a bouncer again?”
“Stupid girl,” she said. She started to pull me out of the bed by my arm. “Go save the world.” She and Dave got me into the wheelchair, and we followed Mama down the corridor.
“She scares the shit out of me,” Dave whispered to me. He was pushing my chair at a much slower clip than Mama was walking.
“Nah,” I said. “She’s a pussycat.”
“Ha!” Mama Estela called over her shoulder. “Hurry up. Hospitals, too many sick people.”
We followed her outside, into the sun.
EPILOGUE
Six Months Later
Some of what happened in August remained a mystery, at least to us.
The RCMP and the FBI apprehended sixteen members of Michael Vernon Smith’s Family: ten in the United States and six in Canada. Some of them were forthcoming, some were not.
I opted to not learn any of their names. I told Belliveau that unless any of their activities were a continuing threat to me or mine, I didn’t want details.
The Kinder Group had been set up in the States as a legitimate corporate entity, though the social insurance numbers of most of its principals were fraudulent. Fred – who was forthcoming about everything he knew, or at least he seemed to be – said that Garrett Jones was being pressured and strong-armed by Smith. He had a daughter to protect. He might have been skimming money to give to Smith. He had been forced into helping with the escorting side of things, but when he finally balked after Ann was murdered, Smith had him killed. Fred claimed not to know by whom, and as he was being forthright with law enforcement about other activities, there would be no reason for him to lie.
Fred’s case hadn’t gone to trial. Due to the nature of some of the charges – criminal conspiracy, and charges that fell under the aegis of mob-related activities – he was kept in custody.
The boys hadn’t visited him. Neither had Darren or I. Laurence did, once, and came back to the bakery that day silent and with a face like thunder.
Luke was doing Skype sessions a few times a week with Dr. Singh. She’d recommended several good therapists who worked with children, but Luke was insistent on seeing my doctor. He had a hard time trusting new people, and was still quiet and withdrawn, compared to the boy he’d been before that night at Helen of Troy. He stuck to Matty’s side, even more than before.
Darren and I became the boys’ legal guardians. Fred waived all parental rights, and our application went through without a hitch. And Laurence stayed with us for a few months, flying to Manhattan every couple of weeks to see Antonio.
Dave and I were cautious with each other for a couple of months. I switched rooms with Rosen for a while, until I became more confident on the first, and then the second prosthetic. The stairs were killer. I told Dave I wanted to sleep alone, to let things sit for a while. I wanted to get used to my new body, and I wanted to be psychologically ready to hear whatever it was that he had to tell me about his involvement with Smith.
One evening, when we’d all had a good dinner in Marta’s kitchen and a few bottles of Chianti between us, I told Dave I wanted to hear it all. He seemed relieved; I’d started to realize that not coming clean was weighing on him.
Dave had grown up with a single mother, Adele Stewart, in various small towns in Pennsylvania. His dad was a Vietnam vet who had died of cancer before Dave was born. Dave and his mother moved around a lot, and his mother took a series of low-paying, under-the-radar jobs. It was, he said, where he started to learn how to live as different people; he became adept at switching personalities for each school he attended.
When Dave was in his early twenties and living life as an aimless ski bum in Colorado, his mother was diagnosed with her own cancer, and he went home to help nurse her. She told him the truth, then. She told him who his real father was.
Michael Vernon Smith.
She didn’t tell him much, but said she couldn’t die with the lie on her conscience. But she told him that the man was evil. That was the word she used: evil. She had been a young girl, just fifteen, when she met Smith, who was in his late twenties at the time. He was a line cook at the diner where she’d gotten an after-school job waitressing. He was tall and handsome and charismatic, and he had won her over quickly. Within weeks, Dave was conceived.
Smith insisted on marrying Adele, despite her family’s wish that she either have an abortion or give the baby up for adoption. Adele was a good student, and being tied down with a husband and baby at fifteen was not what they’d had in mind for her. But Smith’s charm, along with Adele’s attachment to the life growing inside her, won out. For a few months, she told Dave, everything was okay.
After the baby was born, however, Michael started complaining about how hard it was to afford a wife and child. Everybody in a household, he said, should contribute.
That was the day that he brought home a stranger he’d met in a bar, to have sex with Adele. For the princely sum of seventy-five dollars, the man could do what he liked with the sixteen-year-old girl, as long as he didn’t leave too many bruises.
This continued for nearly a year. Three times a week, sometimes fewer, sometimes more, Adele would be required to “contribute to the household”. When she refused, Michael threatened to get one of these men to do worse to Adele’s own mother. And maybe her father too. Adele complied. She believed him, the monster she had married.
It wasn’t until Michael read her a story from the newspaper over breakfast one morning about a woman who had been arrested for selling her baby daughter to a group of pedophiles that Adele got the strength to escape. She was afraid that one night, the stranger who walked through their door would be there for her baby son instead of for her.
“When he was at work that day, she packed a few things for us, and took me and left,” Dave told us. “She said she literally gathered change from the couch cushions, and she had managed to save something like sixty dollars from the grocery money. She purposefully left her wallet, her ID, behind.” She didn’t want to go to her parents or to any of her old friends. She feared what Michael would do to anyone who helped her. She walked to the bus station with the baby, and bought a ticket for Philadelphia.
Dave said his mother didn’t tell him much about that time, but we could all imagine how hard that must have been. Sixteen, with an infant and no money. By the time Dave could remember anything, they were always decently, if poorly housed, sometimes sharing apartments with other single moms and their kids. Adele had gotten ID by picking names of people in obituaries and going to government offices claiming to have lost her wallet. She had gotten the idea from television, and back t
hen it still worked.
From the time Dave learned the truth about his father until we all met him in California a dozen years later, he had not stopped looking for Michael Vernon Smith. In the meantime, he made himself something of an expert in private investigation and security, apprenticing for some of the best investigators across the country to learn all he could.
But when he finally found his father and learned about The Family, Dave realized it wouldn’t be as simple as just killing the man. “I had to stop them all,” he said. He looked like he wanted a cigarette. He had given them up. “Look at what Danny did, or at least her idea about what to do when she finally killed him. The people he had with him – a lot of them would just have gone on with whatever project they were working on, whatever person they were going after. With some of the psychos he had working for him, he really was just a figurehead.” He looked tired. “I did stop some. A lot of what I’ve been doing for the last years, the jobs I’ve been doing, involved that man.”
It was only very recently, he said, that he’d presented himself in person to Smith. They did a DNA test, and once Smith knew that it was a match, he was glad to welcome his biological son into the fold.
“The only way to stop this was to be on the inside,” he said. “When he flew into Toronto, I knew I had to do it. And from everything we know about him… well, the family bond was important. More as he got older. And once I was here and spending time with you all,” he looked at me, “I couldn’t stand what this was doing to everybody.”
Smith had been careful. Dave had never known that Fred was a member of The Family. He presumed that was one of the reasons Smith had insisted that Dave bring the boys to Helen of Troy on that fateful night.
“I will never forgive myself for that,” Dave said to us. “Never.” I wasn’t sure whether he meant the fact that he hadn’t known about Fred, or the fact that he’d made the decision to do what Smith insisted that night by bringing the twins to the club. For the moment, it didn’t really matter.
Dave had, however, had his suspicions about Cliff King. “I thought King was involved in what was going on, somehow,” he said. “Of course, I didn’t know that it was Fred who’d gotten Cliff involved with The Family back in the day.” Fred had trusted Cliff, who knew nearly everything about our security. He really didn’t know that Cliff had plans to break in that night.
“I don’t know whether he was planning on stealing all the computers and getting the information on The Family to blackmail Smith, or whether Smith sent him in to scare you, or kill you, or who knows what. Maybe pit Cliff King against me to see who would be more loyal or something. We’ll probably never know.”
“Oh,” I said. I felt very sober, suddenly. I had to remind myself that these evil people were dead.
“I killed Cliff King,” Dave said. He looked around nervously. “Ned was watching this place, and I wasn’t far away.”
“When you were supposed to be in Florida,” I said.
“When I was supposed to be in Florida,” Dave said.
“What about the windows?” Laurence said. “Those were supposed to be unbreakable. You installed them.”
“Yes,” Dave said. “That was down to me. And let’s just say that my former associate who did that job is no longer working in the security industry.” I looked at Dave’s face. He was even and still. I’d learned that he was at his most angry when he looked like that. “Whether it makes any difference at this point, the guy wasn’t trying to fuck up your security. He did the same thing for a number of clients around that time. Money. Normal glass is cheaper, and most people don’t test it.”
Darren and Laurence had a few questions, but I didn’t. I’d heard the story, and I knew it was true. I’d felt Jack’s blessing that day on the street in front of Helen of Troy when Dave had shown up. I knew who Dave was, just like I knew who my brothers were. And I didn’t need to hear any more of the story. I didn’t want to even say the name Michael Vernon Smith again, and other than whatever testimony I might have to give at Fred’s trial, I didn’t want to think about him ever again.
The night Dave told us the story, Rosen and I switched back to our regular rooms. And Dave moved into mine.
The next day we had a family meeting, where we all voted to start the process to become a foster family. Garrett Jones’s daughter was in a group home; two foster homes hadn’t worked out for her, and I was having dreams about her, dreams that felt as though they’d been sent by Ginger.
We had a safe home, full of love, and she’d have three big brothers who’d look out for her. Eddie was especially keen on the idea, as he was the non-twin of the under-eighteen set in the house.
“This means that you’ll have to stay in Toronto, Auntie,” Matty said. “You can’t commit to having a kid and then decide to go move to New York or wherever.” My heart broke a little. The boys had lost both of their parents now, effectively. I couldn’t up and leave them. Not again.
“I’m not going anywhere, little man,” I said. “You’re stuck with me like gum on a shoe.”
“Crap, you’ve done it now,” Darren said. “We’re never gonna get rid of Peg-Leg.” I chucked a dinner roll at him, which clocked him on the chin.
Luke was smiling, a better smile than I’d seen for a while. I had to stay. That smile was worth everything.
“You?” Mama Estela said to Dave. “Back to New York? Save the world?” She was eyeing him hard. There was a moment of silence.
“Maybe I can save the world from here,” Dave said. “Maybe I can save it part-time. Besides, this one needs supervision.” He gently punched my shoulder, and I scratched my face and flipped him the bird.
Laurence and Marta went to get dessert.
It was a good day.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing Danny Cleary has been a trip.
Each of these three books has pieces of me embedded so deeply, it’s like they’re printed on my skin. (Now, aren’t you glad you stayed to read the acknowledgements?)
The few years during which this series has been written and published have been tumultuous and challenging for me. As I type this, it’s August 14 2017, and my wonderful, funny, brave eldest sister Pam died two weeks ago. Like Ginger in Cracked, she lived in Orange County, California, though the resemblance between the two ends there. Pam wasn’t my twin – she was fifteen years older than me – and happily, she didn’t follow me down the rabbit hole of crack addiction a dozen years ago.
I’m the youngest of six living children – well, five now. We are all close, but the girls (Pam, Judy, Isobel and I) especially so. We traveled together, woke up the neighbors at my old apartment by doing runway walks on my twentieth-floor balcony singing “We Are Family” at four in the morning, kept an entire gated community in California up the night before Thanksgiving a couple of years ago because we were laughing so hard while playing Pictionary, and while we all live thousands of miles apart (Cali, Vancouver, Toronto, Nova Scotia) and are spread widely in age, we understand each other in ways that baffle people outside the family.
I’m joined to my sisters in a way that I am so grateful for.
Pam read Cracked and Rehab Run probably ten or fifteen times each. She was a great reader, and in fact when I was a very little girl I would pick up the Agatha Christies that she’d put down when she was going out for the evening. She was so cool; I wanted to be reading what she was reading. Very sadly, Pam only got to read the first twenty pages or so of Unhinged. She became ill suddenly in June, and after she went into hospital on June 10 I promised her I’d send the manuscript to her once she was released.
She was never released.
She died on August 1 2017.
* * *
I made a huge error in not including acknowledgements in Rehab Run.
I want to thank my editor of that book, the lovely and brilliant Cath Trechman at Titan Books, who was so incredibly helpful and sweet, despite being more and more pregnant as the writing of the book went along – not to mention d
ealing with a wee one at home at the time! (Women amaze me constantly.) I also want to thank Ella Chappell, who edited this book – she took me on while Cath is on parental leave, bless her! – and her kindness and patience while I’ve been grieving have been a balm to my soul.
I am fortunate enough to have law enforcement and lawyers among my friends and family. (Lawyers! I know! But believe it or not, most of them are quite nice!)
My nephew, RCMP Constable Peter Zacher, was hugely helpful, especially during the writing of Rehab Run. (And just to be clear, I, of course, took certain liberties. The vast majority of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers are not psychopaths. And if there were any errors in my portrayal of the RCMP, it was artistic license, and not incorrect information given to me.)
My old friend, Detective Daniel Silver of the Kingston, Ontario police, provided some strip club info that I didn’t have, but I’m not sure if that was from his position in the police or from his own personal experience. (I don’t judge. Kidding, though – he’s a very happily married man with two lovely daughters.)
As always, my agent extraordinaire, Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory. Sammy and I have been friends for longer than either of us would probably care to admit. And Ali Nightingale, who was my Titan guardian angel, and signed me in the first place.
My readers, my little modern family: Christos Grivas and Lisa Grossi, for friendship and being the best idea bouncers in town. Judy for being an amazing sister AND reader.
The Leslie-Graves: Isobel, Mike, Ian and Madeleine: the love. That’s all. I’d cut my own throat for any of you, any day. Yes, even you, Michael.
And as always, my lovely extended family and friends, especially Marilyn Cleary (no relation), whose love and support has gotten me through many a dark day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barbra Leslie lives and writes in Toronto. Visit her at www.barbraleslie.com, or follow her on Twitter:
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