by Karen Young
“As you say, behavior has consequences,” Anne said, wanting to lash out and hurt them as they’d hurt her.
Franklin stood looking shattered by her reaction. What had he expected? That he could tell her of his infidelity and the twisted circumstances of her birth and adoption and she’d shrug and say, Oh, well, you’re happy now, so all’s fine?
“Franklin,” Beatrice said, tugging at his sleeve, “we’d better leave now. Anne will want to be alone.”
“Yes, I certainly do,” Anne said, skirting the table to avoid the possibility of touching either of them. She stood with her back against the counter. “Thanks for the muffins.”
Franklin put out a hand. “Annie—”
She wrapped her arms around herself, unaware that it was exactly the way Beatrice stood. “Please, Dad, just go.”
Anne didn’t move until she could no longer hear the sound of their car. The minute she was sure they’d had time to get far ahead of her, she flew through the house, collecting her purse and car keys before dashing out onto the porch. Down the steps at a reckless pace, she reached her car and literally threw herself inside and behind the wheel. Without a thought for her seat belt, she roared away from the lodge, startling Pug Morris by missing the front bumper of his pickup by a hair.
All the way to Belle Pointe, her mind teemed with the shock of it. Her blood boiled at the injustice of it. She thought of a childhood missing so many things. Ordinary, kid stuff that her friends took for granted. Many times her mother had simply been too sick to listen to adolescent chatter. Or tolerate the noise of teenage music. Or attend her piano recitals. Or sit through her high school graduation ceremony when Anne, as valedictorian, had spoken. But she’d accepted it all because she loved her mother. Had accepted that it was simply a cruel fate to be saddled with an incurable, mean-spirited, fatal disease.
It was no excuse that her father was shortchanged as a husband, she told herself. It was one thing to be resentful, another to have an affair! Having an affair was selfish and despicable.
She shot through the gate at Belle Pointe in a cloud of dust and drove the lane that led to the house in under a minute. Although she never noticed, Buck was in a pickup bouncing along off-road in the distance. Spotting the Mercedes, he came to an abrupt stop.
She wasn’t sure what bothered her more, that Franklin had been unfaithful to her mother or that there’d been secrets in her family intentionally kept from her. Everyone who’d been important in her life had known but her. She felt stripped and exposed. Was this the way Buck’s mother felt at the possibility of her secrets being laid bare for the world to see? Did everybody have secrets but her?
She stopped the car and only then realized she was crying as the beautiful facade of Belle Pointe blurred in her vision. Struggling to get hold of herself, she fumbled in her purse searching for a tissue. She’d come instinctively to Buck, but not to cry on his shoulder, but just…just because, she told herself. Compared to the loss of her baby, this was a mere bump in the road. And she’d made it through the miscarriage and a very rocky patch in her marriage, so she could make it through this.
Hands trembling, she reached for the ignition to restart the car and leave. And go where? Back to the lodge? It was too lonely and isolated. Certainly not to Franklin and Beatrice’s house. And the Spectator was cordoned off. Maybe she would just pack up and go back to St. Louis. Buck would probably drop everything he was doing here and come back with her. He’d asked her over and over to do just that.
She was startled when the door was wrenched open suddenly. “What’s the matter?” Buck demanded, looking shaken. “What’s happened?”
All her defenses crumbled like a sand castle in the path of a tidal wave. The keys fell with a clatter at her feet as she launched herself into his arms and burst into tears with all the abandon of a six-year-old betrayed by her best friend.
“Oh, B-Buck!” she wailed.
“What’s the matter, baby? Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, clinging to his shirtfront. “No. Yesss…”
“Jesus. What? Where? Did someone—”
“Nooo, n-not that.”
“What then?” Buck angled back to get a look at her face. “Is it Franklin?” All he got was more mute movement of her head. Holding her arms, he gave her a little shake and spoke sharply. “Tell me what’s happened, Anne.”
“Dad. It’s D-Dad. And—and B-Beatrice.” With that, she dissolved into a new spate of weeping.
He looked confused. “You just told me it wasn’t Franklin. Are they hurt?”
“No.” She moved back into his embrace and pressed her cheek to his heart. “Oh, Buck. It’s…I just…n-never thought—”
With a sigh, Buck looked around and made a decision. Slipping an arm around her waist, he guided her to the front door. “Let’s go inside and you can tell me what this is all about.”
She shook her head vehemently. “No, I don’t want your mother—”
“Ma’s gone. She has some kind of appointment. Claire’s working at Jack’s campaign headquarters and Paige is at school. Miriam sees nothing, knows nothing.” He opened the door. “Come on, let’s go inside now.”
He went with her through the foyer, past the formal living area on toward the back to the room that had been his father’s library. “Here, we can talk in here.” With a gentle push on her shoulder, he urged her down on a leather couch and stepped to a credenza against the wall.
While he poured her a drink, she rested her head against the back of the couch, her gaze roving over the books lining the shelves of the bookcases. For years, she’d wanted to explore the library at Belle Pointe, but now she found she had no interest whatsoever in Buck’s heritage. Only her own.
“Here. Drink this.” Buck put a small glass filled with brandy in her hand and watched her take a gulp. “Whoa, easy.”
Making a face, she coughed and patted her chest, but finally managed to croak, “That was awful.”
“Uh-huh. Now,” he said, “tell me why you’re so upset.”
She looked at him sadly. “Dad and Beatrice are my parents.”
Twenty-One
Buck eased himself down on the couch beside her, keeping his gaze on her face. “Franklin and Beatrice are your parents. Didn’t I know that?”
“No, Buck, I mean they’re really my parents. My biological parents.”
He stared at her. “Get out.”
“It’s true.” Her voice rose and she teared up again.
He instantly reached over and gathered her in his arms. Tucking her beneath his chin, he began rubbing her back. “Come on, honey. Don’t do that. Just give me some details here. You know this because…?”
Nestled in Buck’s embrace, she still felt blindsided and angry, but somehow it wasn’t the shocker it had been an hour ago. “I know it because they confessed everything.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“They felt guilty. They knew I’ve been trying to get a lead on my biological parents through the Internet. The reason I went out last night was to get my laptop. If they’d been honest with me from the start, I wouldn’t have needed it.”
“Yeah, but Paige wouldn’t have stood a chance in that fire if you hadn’t shown up to get your laptop.”
“That’s the only good thing I can think of in this whole mess.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” With just a trace of a smile, he tipped up her chin to look into her eyes, still running a soothing hand up and down her spine. “I can think of at least one other pretty good thing.”
“They had an affair, Buck!” she said, pushing away in exasperation. “Dad was unfaithful to my mother. Then, when Beatrice came up pregnant, they had the nerve to somehow talk my mother into adopting their baby.”
“Their baby. That would be you.”
She was quickly recovering. Moving away from him, she sat up straight on the couch, wordlessly accepting the handkerchief he held out. “I feel like such an idiot. I should have been suspicious when
he left New England to move to a small town in Mississippi. I was suspicious, darn it, but my relationship with Dad was so solid that he could have told me the world suddenly went flat and I would have believed him. So when he gave me those smarmy reasons for retiring early to manage an obscure weekly after a stellar career in the most prestigious location on the east coast, of course I believed him.”
“Smarmy?”
“What would you call it if you found out circumstances in your family weren’t what you’d been told all your life?”
“You want the truth?” Buck said dryly. “I’d trade my screwed-up family for parents like Franklin and Beatrice in a heartbeat.”
“Well, I can see I’m not going to get any sympathy from you,” she said huffily.
“Just so I’m clear here, when do you think they should have told you?”
“Right away,” she said indignantly. “Before they got married.”
“Yeah, I can see how that would have set up a lovely relationship between you and your new stepmother…mother.” When she opened her mouth, he reached out and shushed her with one finger. “How long did this affair last?”
“They claim only the one summer.” She jumped up and began prowling the library. “He swore he never got in touch with Beatrice again after that, although she said she and my mother corresponded.”
“I bet she sent pictures.”
Anne paused at that, reluctantly imagining the way a childless Beatrice would have felt seeing the baby she’d given up grow from infancy to adulthood without ever touching her or hugging her or hearing her voice. Without ever having the right to do any of that.
“And why did Beatrice give up her baby?” Buck was asking.
“Hmm?” Distracted, she studied the spine of a book. “She was nineteen and a college student. Her father sent her off to a relative somewhere.”
“Hmm, pregnant and in disgrace. Must have been tough.”
She replaced the book and looked at him. “How about my mother whose husband admitted he’d been unfaithful?”
“I see her as a good person, too.”
“Too?” She put her hands on her hips. “You don’t see anything dishonorable in what they did?”
“I know how it feels to love somebody so much that nothing else matters if you aren’t with that person.”
Disarmed, she went back to the couch where he still sat.
With her head cocked, she said, “I sound like a self-centered, spoiled rotten, only child, don’t I?”
“Maybe just a little.” With a grin, he tugged her down on his lap and linked his arms around her. With his chin resting on her shoulder, he said, “Let’s think about this for a minute. Beatrice didn’t have to tell Franklin she was pregnant. But she knew as long as he was married to Laura, he’d never have a child of his own. And if she lived long enough, even if he married again, he might have been beyond siring more children. It sounds to me as if Beatrice wanted him to raise their child.”
She stroked the backs of his hands as he held onto her. She always felt so warm and secure with Buck’s arms around her. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“Pretty generous of her, too…especially since it meant she sacrificed any chance of contact with you. Couldn’t very well call them up and ask to come to your next birthday party, could she?” He kissed the nape of her neck. “Without wishing you any unhappiness, she must have seen the trouble that sent you here to Tallulah as an ill wind bringing a rainbow.”
A gift from the gods. With a pang, Anne recalled the words.
They sat in silence for a while. “All things considered,” Buck said finally, “they paid a dear price for that summer affair.”
With Victoria occupied with an engagement elsewhere and the rest of the family out of the house, Anne was persuaded to stay at Belle Pointe. In John Whitaker’s library, Buck sprawled on the leather couch and watched his wife’s fascinated scan of the bookshelves. “We can leave together after I’ve wrapped up a few things with Oscar and his crew. Meanwhile, you can explore Belle Pointe. Start with the journals.”
She closed a book and replaced it where she’d found it. “Did you forget? They’re impounded behind police tape at the Spectator until the investigation’s over…along with my laptop.”
“Nope. I swung by and told Jack Breedlove that they were priceless Whitaker heirlooms. He agreed and I’ve got them in my SUV. But I’m not sure I want to leave them here at the big house. I’d like to keep an eye on them, but no matter where I stash them, they’re yours to examine to your heart’s content.”
“Really? With or without your mother’s approval?” she asked.
“I’ll tell her, sure, but I don’t need her permission, sugar. The journals are as much my property as hers, more if you want to get technical about it. I was born a Whitaker. My mother is a Whitaker by marriage.”
At last, she thought gleefully, trying to keep a straight face. A chance to read Belle Pointe history written by people who knew it, lived it, loved it. She would need her laptop to make notes. “Did you think to pick up my laptop?”
“They didn’t find it, so I don’t have it.”
She paused, forgetting the book in her hand. “It was in plain sight on that table I was using for a desk. You couldn’t miss it.”
“I was all over your tidy little work station.” He watched her carefully replace the book. “It’s not there. I was hoping you might have locked it up somewhere.”
A tiny frown drew her eyebrows together. “It has to be there.”
Buck let out a breath and got to his feet. “Is there a particular reason why you need it? I mean, other than your adoption notes.”
“That wasn’t the only thing I have on it,” she told him. Then her eyes widened, meeting his. “Buck, someone took it because of my notes from the archives!”
“I think it’s a possibility.”
“This is getting more and more bizarre. Mostly I entered stuff I simply found interesting…for the book I haven’t decided to write.”
“Such as the accident where Jim Bob Baker died?”
“I included that, yes. As well as the death of his brother. Mostly it was all like that, bits and pieces that don’t mean much and certainly don’t shape up into any kind of theme.”
Buck was frowning. “I didn’t know Jim Bob had a brother.”
“You wouldn’t have known him as you weren’t born when he died. He was Tallulah’s only Vietnam casualty. It struck me as one of those cruel twists of fate, you know? A mother loses both her sons. How sad is that?”
“One of those little nuggets that authors tuck in the pages of a book about a town that’s pretty unremarkable otherwise,” he guessed, smiling at her.
“But who’d want to steal it?”
“Best guess? The person who decided to destroy the archives. The person who took the pictures off the walls.”
She stared at him. “Someone removed the pictures?”
“Actually, Jack noticed it. He mentioned it this morning when I contacted him about the journals. Seems before he announced for the senate, he was down in the archives doing research about other campaigns in Tallulah. He didn’t pay much attention to the photos on the wall, but he noticed they were there. And now they’re gone…at least some of them.”
“You think Pearce took them? Old photographs?” Her face was blank with confusion. “Why would he do that? As a record of the town’s history, they’re spotty at best. Plus, duplicates probably exist somewhere.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “My God, Buck, why would Pearce take such an awful chance? He knows you suspect him. Has he lost his mind?”
He sat on the corner of the desk that had belonged to his father and several Whitakers before him. “I’m not sure Pearce is behind all this,” Buck said thoughtfully. “I had a come-to-Jesus talk with him this morning and either he’s become a helluva lot better liar than he used to be or he’s as baffled as I am.”
“This is so unbelievable,” she murmured.
“Yeah, mor
e than you know. He flipped out when I mentioned the hunting accident. I still think there’s something fishy there. I meant to take a look at the books before now, but I haven’t had time.”
Suddenly a thought struck Anne. Buck could sense something, and asked, “What is it?”
She moved across the room to a window. “It’s probably nothing, I mean, there’s no way—”
He straightened, watching her gaze out. “Tell me and we can both puzzle over whether it’s something or nothing.”
“It’s about the pictures on the wall,” she said, turning to look at him. “Generally speaking, they were taken of events that had relevance to the town. For example, if there was a huge rainstorm and the front page ran a picture of kids playing in high water in the street, that wouldn’t have been considered significant enough to frame. Such discrimination doesn’t exclude you, however,” she added dryly. “As the town’s only world-class athlete, you were up there right along with a dedication of the Whitaker Library, the swearing in of every mayor, a rare visit by the Governor once upon a time—that kind of thing. But what I just remembered was a picture of Rudy Baker.”
“Who?”
“Pay attention. The Vietnam soldier I just told you about. Jim Bob Baker’s brother. His picture was on the wall.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Because he was the only Tallulah soldier killed in action, his death was covered in the paper. Paige actually found it. I recall she commented on his looks. He was very handsome in a dark and wicked sort of way.”
Buck gave a dismissive shrug. “I don’t see any connection…”
“Well…I’m getting there. It’s kind of far out, so don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. I’m listening.”
“Your mother and Rudy Baker had a fling that ended when he was drafted and sent to Vietnam.”
