by Metsy Hingle
“I’m sure,” she said, and opened the car door.
Jack took her hand and walked with her up the broken and cracked sidewalk to the site of what had once been Lianne’s home. Had it been her home, too? she wondered as she approached the slab. The wind whipped across the lot, sending a chill through her. She sensed Jack’s apprehension and turned to him. “I’ll be all right. But I have to know.”
“All right,” he said, and when she tugged her fingers free, he released her. Bracing herself, Kelly reached down and pressed her palm against the cold cement slab.
Almost at once, she felt the world tilting beneath her feet, spinning her back. Back to another cold day. To another time. To the past. To a house scented by the smell of burning wood in the fireplace. To the sound of a woman’s voice cooing…
“Come on, my precious. You need to lie down for your nap. Daddy’s coming to see us this evening and we don’t want to be all cross because we’re tired now, do we?”
“I wear princess dress for Daddy?”
The woman laughed, a lovely musical laugh. “That’s supposed to be your Christmas dress, Sarah, and Christmas isn’t until next week.”
“Pwease, Mommy?”
“All right. You can wear the princess dress for Daddy, but only if you take your nap.”
“I see it?”
Her mother smiled and her brown eyes twinkled. They always twinkled when Daddy came to visit. She walked over to the closet and took out the dress and hung it at the end of the bed. “Okay, here it is waiting for you. But first you need to close your eyes and sleep for a little bit. Then when you wake up, we’ll put it on and surprise Daddy. Okay?”
“’Kay,” she said, stretching out on the bed. She hugged her teddy bear close and closed her eyes.
“That’s my good baby girl,” her mother said, and after pressing a kiss to her forehead and one to Teddy’s, she slipped out the door.
She wanted to be a good girl. She wanted to sleep like Mommy asked. But her eyes kept opening and she couldn’t stop looking at the dress. It was so pretty, she thought. Blue and silver with shiny stuff on it. A Cinderella dress just like in the movie. Maybe if she put it on, she could go to sleep, she told herself. And wouldn’t Mommy be surprised if she were all ready when she came to wake her from her nap?
So she crawled out of bed, pulled off her jammies and put on the princess dress. She twirled around once, stumbled and fell on her bottom. But she didn’t cry. She hardly ever cried. She got right back up and twirled around again to show Teddy how pretty it was. Then she climbed back into bed, closed her eyes and dreamed of being a princess in a magical kingdom. In the magical kingdom there were big white horses for her to ride and lots and lots of children for her to play with. And her daddy was always with them, so her mommy was always laughing.
Only she couldn’t find her daddy.
And her mommy wasn’t laughing anymore. Neither was the lady she was talking to.
“You shouldn’t be here,” her mommy said in her angry voice.
“I have every right to be here since it’s my family’s money that paid for this place,” the mean-sounding lady said. “Do you really think he’s going to walk out on me? Walk out on our family, especially now when he’s on the verge of becoming one of this nation’s most powerful politicians?”
“He can still have his career,” her mother insisted.
“Don’t be naive, Lianne. A man in his position couldn’t be elected dogcatcher married to someone like you.”
“He loves me and we have a child together,” her mommy told the woman.
“You’re nothing to him. You or that bastard of yours. And I’ll never give him a divorce. Never! Do you hear?”
“Fine! Then we’ll live in sin because I’m not giving him up,” her mommy told her.
“Why you filthy little slut,” the woman yelled. “I’ll kill you before I let you steal him from me.”
A slap followed and her mommy cried out.
“Jesus Christ! What are you doing here? Lianne, what happened?” a man’s angry voice demanded.
“She provoked me and I hit her. She tripped and hit her head against the hearth,” the mean woman said.
“Christ! She’s bleeding. Lianne, darling, are you okay?”
“Yes. Please just get her out of here.”
“Have you lost your mind? You could have killed her?” he accused.
“I did it for you,” the mean woman said. “She was threatening to ruin us, to tell the press about your affair.”
“Liar,” her mommy said.
“She’s the liar. She wants to destroy our family.”
“That’s enough,” the man said. “I could kill you with my bare hands for what you’ve done.”
“Please just go. Both of you leave here now.”
“Lianne—”
“Please, just leave. I don’t want Sarah to wake up and see me like this, to see the two of you.”
Sarah huddled beneath the covers and pulled the pillow over her head. Feeling sad, she tried to fill her thoughts with happy things—of the horses and pretty dresses—until she drifted back to sleep.
Somewhere in her dream, she thought she could hear her mommy asking, “What are you doing here?” again, and a big crash. But she shoved those sad memories aside, not wanting to let go of her dream.
Until she began to cough.
Pushing the pillow away from her face, Sarah sat up in bed and coughed again. Awake now, she looked around the room. It was dark—and she didn’t like the dark. Mommy knew she didn’t like the dark. Why hadn’t she put on her lamp? And what was that yucky smell? She slipped out of bed and hurried over to the chest where the lamp was. She climbed up on the drawer and turned it on. Only she couldn’t see too good. The room was all smoky. Frightened, she jumped off the chest of drawers, fell and hit her knee. Her knee hurt, but her throat hurt her, too. And she coughed. “Mommy? Mommy, where are you?”
She coughed again and ran toward the door. And stopped.
Somebody’s there. On the other side of the door. Somebody was there waiting for her. Not her mommy. Not Daddy. Somebody angry who wanted to hurt her. Hurry! Hurry! Lock the door and hide before the bad person comes in and finds you.
Terrified she turned the lock on the door and raced back across the room. Climbing underneath the bed, she clutched her teddy bear. And she waited. Sarah could feel the anger, the hatred drawing closer. Could read the mean thoughts, “You can’t hide. I’ve killed your mother and now I’m going to kill you, too.”
Fighting to hold in her cough, she watched in terror as the doorknob began to turn.
And Kelly screamed.
She heard Kelly scream. And from her position across the street in the shadows behind the battered shack, she watched as Jack Callaghan shook the sobbing Kelly and held her in his arms.
Had that old witch grandmother of hers told her what had happened? She’d been told the woman had Alzheimer’s, but supposedly even Alzheimer’s patients had moments of lucidity. Or had Kelly remembered that night all those years ago when she’d snuck out of the car and watched the scene between her mother and that woman Lianne? She’d been worried that her daddy had seen her, but he’d been too busy fussing over that bitch Lianne to notice her. Lianne and that brat of hers.
But she’d fixed them. Lianne hadn’t been afraid when she’d seen her come into the house after her parents had gone. So she never saw her pick up the fireplace poker until it was too late. It was then when she saw Lianne’s painting of Sarah and the paint supplies that she’d gotten the idea. She was eight years old, old enough to know about flammable liquids. She’d used the paint thinner, splashed it around the room, then used one of the fireplace matches to light it.
“Mommy!”
Hatred filled her heart as she remembered hearing Sarah cry from the other room. She’d gone to the room, used a towel to turn the door handle. But it was locked.
And she’d been so sure the little witch had burned along with her mo
ther that night. Until that blackmailing son of a bitch Gilbert had shown up, claiming Sarah was alive. Well, she’d put an end to his schemes and she’d stopped the meddling old nun from revealing her daddy’s shameful little secret, hadn’t she? She hadn’t worked this hard just to have Kelly Santos come and mess things up now.
Did you really think that after all this time, I’d just let you come back and steal what’s mine? I stopped you once. I’ll stop you again. But this time, I intend to make sure you stay dead.
Nineteen
After that scene with Kelly at the abandoned house site in Mississippi the previous evening, the last thing Jack wanted to do that morning was to leave her alone—even for a second. But he needed answers and he needed them fast. And the best place to get them was there at the station, he reasoned. So there he was on the phone, barking at some poor clerk, “So where in the hell is the fax you were supposed to send? I’ve been waiting twenty minutes.”
“It should be coming over the machine now, Detective. Yours isn’t the only request we have. We process them in order.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he said, and slammed down the phone, then headed for the fax machine. The cover sheet was spitting out already. He grabbed the grainy sheet that followed, a copy of an article that appeared in the Mississippi newspaper twenty-six years ago, detailing the tragic death of twenty-year-old Lianne Tompkins and her thirty-four-month-old daughter, Sarah, in a fire five days before Christmas. Heading back to his desk, Jack sat down and read the article again.
Tragedy struck in the Magnolia subdivision of Pass Christian only days before Christmas when fire claimed the lives of Lianne Tompkins and her thirty-four-month-old daughter, Sarah. The fire is believed to have originated in the fireplace and quickly spread through the wood-framed house. No smoke alarms were installed in the house. The remote location, where the small homes were used primarily as summer getaways, caused the fire to go undetected for more than an hour before the fire department was notified. According to the fire chief the house was engulfed with flames upon his arrival. After battling the fire for ninety minutes, the chief and his men were able to recover the mother’s badly burned body from the living room, where she was found slumped in front of the fireplace. The nursery was completely gutted by the blaze and it is believed that little Sarah Tompkins’s body was destroyed in the blaze.
Only Sarah Tompkins hadn’t died. She had escaped and been reborn as Kelly Santos in New Orleans. Had Kelly’s father come back to save her? Jack remembered Kelly confessing her fear that her father had killed her mother. Was that what had happened that night? he wondered. And if so, who had saved Kelly? Her father? Gilbert? He didn’t think so. The only other person who would have saved the child would have been Evelyn. After all, she was Lianne’s mother and Kelly’s grandmother.
It was the only answer that made sense, Jack reasoned. If Evelyn feared the person who killed Lianne would come after her granddaughter, she would have wanted to take her someplace where she would be safe. And what place was safer than St. Ann’s and the nun to whom she’d entrusted her own daughter as an infant?
Jack glanced over at Leon’s desk, where his partner was on the phone. He’d filled Leon in on the events of yesterday when he’d returned last night, so when Leon hung up the phone, Jack walked over to his desk and handed him the fax. “Take a look at this.”
“Shit!”
“My sentiments exactly.”
“But how did she get out of that fire without anyone knowing?”
“Meet me in the john, I want to run a theory by you.”
After he and Leon checked to be sure they had the men’s room to themselves, Jack laid out what he thought might have happened and how Evelyn was most likely the one responsible for dropping Kelly off at St. Ann’s.
“I think you might be on to something,” Leon told him. “And given the Tompkins woman’s mental state, she could have let something slip to Gilbert about the baby not dying in the fire. It would explain Gilbert contacting the nun to try to find out where she was now. If her father is some kind of politician, Gilbert could have used that information to blackmail him.”
“My guess is he’d been blackmailing the man for years already.” He saw no reason to tell Leon that there was the possibility that the man had also killed Lianne and that Gilbert had known.
“The only problem with the theory is that Gilbert’s killer was a woman, and according to Kelly, it was the same woman who killed the nun,” Leon pointed out. “So whoever this politician is, and no matter what he’s done, he’s not the killer.”
“No. But I think his daughter is. His legitimate daughter,” Jack amended. “The one whose DNA matches Kelly’s.”
“And you think her next target is Kelly.”
“Yes,” Jack replied.
“You got a plan?” Leon asked.
“Yes. I need you to do some more digging, check out politicians in Mississippi and Louisiana going back thirty years,” Jack explained. “In the meantime, I’m going to work it from another angle and see if I can get a look at some adoption records.”
“Adoption records? I thought Kelly was never adopted.”
“She wasn’t. But her sister might have been.”
“You want to explain that?” Leon asked, a puzzled look on his face.
“If I’m right, I swear I’ll explain it all to you. But if I’m not, an innocent person could be hurt. So for now, I’m going to ask you to trust me on this one.”
“Just watch your step, Jackson. You’re walking a fine line on this one, my friend.”
Leon was right. And he knew it, Jack admitted as he returned to his desk and found the messenger envelope he’d been waiting for sitting on top of his desk. Jack sat down in his chair and ripped open the envelope. And he stared at the copies of Margee Jardine’s original birth certificate—the one that he’d broken enough rules to get and could very well cost him his job. He stared at the mother’s name, Diana Gray. But it was the father’s name that worried him—Robert Jardine. Margee’s biological father and his wife had adopted his own daughter, a child, evidently, who was the result of an affair. He wouldn’t have pegged Robert as an adulterer. The man had served as a member of the Senate for the state of Mississippi before he’d opted out of public life and moved back to Louisiana to join his family’s hotel business.
And it was the man’s political past and ties to Mississippi that he couldn’t ignore now. If Robert Jardine had strayed once and Margee was the result, was it possible that he’d done so again? Could he have strayed that second time with Lianne Tompkins? Damn, if only he’d been able to locate a copy of Kelly’s original birth certificate.
Questions riddled his brain as he tried to compare the facts he had with the people he’d known most of his life. He didn’t want to believe that Caroline Jardine was the woman who argued with Lianne. Nor did he want to believe that Robert Jardine was capable of murder. They were good people, people he cared about. So why had they lied about Margee’s adoption all these years?
Was it possible that Caroline Jardine didn’t know that the child she’d adopted was fathered by her husband? It would make sense, he reasoned. He’d seen Caroline with Margee and the woman truly adored her. Or had she known the truth but had drawn the line at raising a second child from her husband’s indiscretions? He didn’t know the answers and wouldn’t until he could do some investigating. But what he did know, Jack reasoned, was that the Jardine family was powerful. Even without Robert Jardine’s years in the Senate, the name Jardine was equated to royalty in New Orleans because of their hotel empire. They were right up there with the Hiltons. Their public image had cracked a little in recent years when news came from the matriarch of the family, Olivia Jardine, that she had an illegitimate granddaughter. Things had since settled down. But twenty-eight years ago such a scandal would not have been made public under any circumstances. All measures would have been taken to keep such a secret under wraps—just as Margee’s adoption had been kept a secret all these ye
ars. Was Robert Jardine Kelly’s father? Even as the nephew of the matriarch of the hotel dynasty, he was a powerful man with strong connections. An ideal target for blackmail.
“Callaghan! Jerevicious! In my office now,” Big Mike yelled.
Jack looked across the desk at his partner. Leon gave him a what’d-we-do-now look, to which Jack shrugged. He stuffed the items back into the envelope and put it, along with the article and folder, in his desk drawer. He locked it and pocketed the key.
“Looks like Big Mike’s about to bust a gasket,” Nuccio pointed out. “I sure wouldn’t want to be in your shoes right now, Callaghan.”
“Don’t sweat it, Nuccio,” Jack told him. “You just might get that promotion after all.”
“Yeah, by default,” Leon added, and the two of them headed into the captain’s office.
“Shut the door,” Big Mike ordered.
Nuccio was right, Jack decided as he and his partner stood at attention in front of the captain’s desk. Big Mike did look like he was ready to blow. His face was red all the way up to his bald spot, and from the way he was chomping down on the unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth, Jack expected steam to start coming out of his ears at any second.
“Is something wrong, sir?” Leon asked.
“You’re damned right something’s wrong. I want to know why my detectives have been demanding that sealed adoption records be opened, and why they are threatening state employees with jail time if they don’t comply?”
“That was me, sir,” Jack said, taking a step forward. “Leon had nothing to do with it.”
“That’s not how I run this precinct and you know it, Callaghan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you better have a damned good reason for breaking policy or I’m suspending your ass right now.”
“I needed the information for a case, sir,” Jack told him. “It’s part of my investigation of the Gilbert murder.”
“Gilbert?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well what in the hell does his death have to do with sealed adoption records?”
