“Really,” he said, trying to keep his body and face relaxed. “Who am I?”
She took another deep breath and hugged herself as though she needed to protect her body from him. He could see the muscles along her jaw tighten.
“You’re my husband’s bastard son by the French whore he had an affair with in Paris.”
She spat the words at him, then her eyes opened wide as though the viciousness of her words startled her.
Paul had never raised a finger against a woman, but in that moment he had to clench his fists to keep from leaning across the ottoman between them and slapping her. Not for himself, but for his mother. His face flamed.
He sucked in a breath and tried with only moderate success to stay calm and relaxed. He did manage to force a smile, but from the way Karen recoiled, he must have looked pretty scary. She got up to go to the bar.
He stood when she did. “I’m much more than that,” he said. “I am Paul David Delaney’s one and only legitimate son. He married my mother in France. Your son is the bastard.”
“Liar!” she screeched, and flew at him.
Her fingers reached out to claw his face.
He caught her wrists and held her at arm’s length. “Stop that!”
“Liar, liar, liar!”
She had the strength of a tiger defending her cub.
She kicked at his shins, tried to bring a knee up into his groin, twisted and squirmed to break his hold on her arms, all the while screaming, “Liar!”
He felt his right arm begin to tremble. She’d be able to break his hold as soon as his strength gave out.
“Honey?” came a plaintive voice from the hall.
“I’m fine, Marshall. We’ll be out in a minute.”
“It’s the truth,” Paul hissed through gritted teeth. “Calm down, for God’s sake. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She stared at him openmouthed.
“Hurt me?” She began to shake. “You don’t want to hurt me?” Suddenly she was laughing hysterically with her head thrown back so that he could see the sinews in her aging throat.
She went limp. He slid his left arm around her waist and led her to the couch.
When he let her go, she collapsed with her face buried in her lap. The sobs that were half laughter continued to rack her.
Paul poured two fingers of bourbon into a crystal glass, dropped in a couple of pieces of ice and took it to her. “Here.”
For a moment he thought she’d slap the glass out of his hand.
Instead, she reached out with shaking fingers, took the glass and brought it to her mouth using both hands.
She drained the bourbon in one gulp. “Another,” she said, and held the glass out to him.
“I don’t think so. Can I get you some water?”
“Said the executioner as he lifted the ax.”
That sent her into another fit of laughing and crying. He stood and watched her. If she’d calm down, he could talk to her, but not like this.
“All right. Water. Lots of it.”
He brought her a tumbler filled with ice and water. Again she took it and drank it so greedily that water ran down both sides of her open mouth and dripped off her chin to form dark circles on her sweater.
She handed the empty glass back to him, but didn’t ask for more. When he turned back to her after putting the glass on the bar, she was watching him warily.
He sat down across from her on the ottoman.
“Can you prove it?” she said quietly.
He nodded. “I have the papers. I have affidavits from the mairie in which they were married and from the witnesses. I even have the seal from the American Embassy that my…that he had to get in order to be legally married in France.”
She closed her eyes. “I don’t understand. How could he be married and marry me?”
“He couldn’t. Not legally.”
She shivered. Her eyes were now very frightened. “We were never married?”
“You lived with him until he died. Even if you were never legally married, you would be considered a common-law wife.”
She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “A common-law wife? My God, that’s what trailer trash say when they’ve been shacking up for years without ever getting around to making it legal.” She looked at him calmly for the first time. “How much?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“How much do you want to go away and leave us in peace?”
“Mrs. Lowrance, I have plenty of money.”
“Then what? Do you want it all? What do you know about cattle or soybeans or cotton? Trey has…my God, he has a home, a family, a place in this community. To tell him he’s the bastard son of a bigamist, that he’s going to lose everything he owns, everything he loves, to some French interloper who literally dropped out of the sky…” She leaned back against the couch. “I’ll kill you first.” The words were as matter-of-fact as a comment about the weather.
“You haven’t been successful so far.” He thrust his hands into the pockets of his slacks and walked away from her. After a moment he turned back. “I came here to do precisely what you surmised. Take everything. Own it, make it mine the way I’m making that house mine. I planned to reveal the secret of my birth in a way that would most damage the Delaneys.”
“What have we ever done to you?”
It was his turn to laugh. “What have you ever done to me? Let’s see. David Delaney convinced my eighteen-year-old virgin mother to marry him secretly. Believe me, in France marrying in secret is extremely difficult. He worked it out carefully. He didn’t give her the right information about his family, who he was, where he lived. All because she wouldn’t go to bed with him or pose nude for him without a marriage certificate.”
“So she forced him to marry her.” Karen gave a little nod of satisfaction.
“She loved him, but she didn’t believe in sex before marriage. Old-fashioned idea, but then, she was an old-fashioned girl. She also didn’t believe in divorce. I have seen some of her letters to my aunt. She didn’t give a damn if the two of them starved in a garret while he studied art and she worked in her father’s coffee shop. She wanted to spend the rest of her life making him happy.”
He sighed. “Funny thing is, she did make him happy. For three whole months. Until the powerful Delaney clan decided it was time to reel him in, bring him home, put him to work at a real job, marry him off to the girl next door. When he left for America my mother truly believed he meant to come back to Paris. How long did it take you all to convince him to stay? That he’d be happier as a planter married to you?”
She stuck out her chin. “Not long.”
“He never knew she was pregnant with me. Maybe if he’d known—”
“He would have gone back to France? I seriously doubt it. After all, he must have known he might want to disappear, otherwise why give your mother false information?”
“I can’t deny that. But we were talking about what the Delaneys did to me. Marrying my mother, getting her pregnant and then abandoning her was only the first step. She spent the next six years and every dime she could save trying to find him. She finally did. And when she confronted him, he killed her.”
“What?” Karen surged to her feet. “Now that is a lie. My husband would never harm a gnat, much less a woman he’d supposedly loved.”
“Killed her,” Paul kept on as though she hadn’t spoken. “And buried her body so that it’s never been found. So while your Trey was being raised by doting parents and grandparents who surrounded him with luxury, my uncle Charlie and my tante Helaine struggled to support two of their own children and me on a plumber’s salary.”
“You don’t seem to have been hurt by the process.”
“I was hurt in ways you could never know. But I survived, I made a little money and then, lo and behold, just when I’d completely given up hope of ever finding and punishing my father, I found him, never mind how.”
“And you’re so certain he is the man who fathered you?
”
“Aren’t you? You’re the one who had Trey steal my toothbrush.”
Her gasp told him he’d guessed correctly. He risked a smile. “Took me a while to tumble to that one. How closely does our DNA match? We’re only half brothers, after all. I assume you didn’t secretly exhume my father just to get some hair follicles.”
“I had to know for certain. DNA is the only sure way.”
“If you had asked me to provide you with blood for a DNA test, I’d gladly have given it to you. But that would have meant telling me you suspected who I was. Then you’d have had to tell Trey. You didn’t want to do that, did you.”
“Of course not.”
“You recognized me that first day, didn’t you. I assume I’m enough like my father to trigger some memory in you. What I don’t know is why you didn’t simply think I resembled your dead husband without making the connection that I might be his son.”
“Because I’ve been expecting you for over thirty years.”
“You knew about me?”
“I was positive he’d had an affair with someone in Paris. I knew he loved her, or thought he did. I didn’t know she’d had a baby, but I worried about it. The last few years I pushed it to the back of my mind. I thought we were safe. The nightmares haven’t been so frequent.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You said you intend to take everything.”
He shook his head. “No, I said that’s what I’d intended to do when I first drove through Rossiter and saw the mansion was half-derelict and up for sale.”
He shrugged. “I wanted to take it all, make the remaining Delaneys admit their sins and grovel in the dirt. I wanted you all brought low.” He looked up at her. “But I never intended to keep any of it. I wanted to hand it back to you like a lord conferring a fiefdom on a serf. To have to thank me for giving you your lives back. And then I planned to put the house on the market and leave town.”
“And now?”
“Now you have faces.”
“So what do you plan now that we have faces?”
“I don’t know. I still want to find my mother’s grave and give her a decent burial if possible. And I want the Delaney family, if not the law, to acknowledge privately not only what my father did to her, but that I am his legitimate son.”
“I see. So I suppose I won’t have to kill you, after all.”
“Not if you help me find my mother.”
“I can’t. I don’t know what happened to your mother, but I do know my husband didn’t kill her.”
“You can’t know for certain.”
“How do you know she didn’t disappear voluntarily? That’s she’s not living in Phoenix or Los Angeles with a whole new family?”
“There’s evidence she came here to meet my father. Then she disappeared before she could tell her family she’d found him. She’s not living some other life somewhere else.”
“Then someone she met on the road killed her.”
“Too big a coincidence.”
“Coincidences happen.”
“Not that conveniently, they don’t.”
“You have evidence?” she asked.
“Let’s say I have knowledge.”
“But why are you so certain David killed her?”
“Nobody else knew about her, so nobody else had a motive to kill her.”
“The whole Delaney clan had reason to kill her,” Karen said softly. “I might have if I’d met her and known who she was.”
“Did you?”
Karen shook her head. “No.” For the first time she looked at him with real compassion. “There is another theory. She had been abandoned with a child. You said she was struggling financially. If she found out that David was married with another child, maybe she couldn’t take it.”
“You’re saying she might have committed suicide.”
“Isn’t it a possibility?”
“Never. First, she was a devout Roman Catholic. Suicide is a mortal sin. She would never have endangered her soul, no matter how unhappy she was. Second, because of me. She would never have abandoned me without a word. She loved her sister, too. They were on excellent terms when she left. Then there’s the problem of her body. She didn’t know this part of the country at all. If she’d walked off into the woods and hanged herself from the nearest tree, somebody would have found her. The same with stabbing. She didn’t own a gun or know how to use one, and she had no access to poison. If she had killed herself, she would have wanted her body to be found. She would never have left me in limbo all these years.”
“This is obviously not the first time you’ve thought this through,” Karen said.
“I’ve thought of very little else for thirty years.”
“And yet you must have been a good student with a good record to get into the Air Force Academy.”
“You’re saying I should have become a drug addict or a juvenile delinquent?”
“It wouldn’t have been outside the realm of possibility.”
“It was for me. No matter how much I believed she was dead, for a child, that’s merely another form of abandonment. My father had already abandoned me. I decided there were two ways to go. To hell—to show them how badly they’d messed me up. Or to the top—to show them I didn’t need them.”
“When is she supposed to have died?”
“The last day we know she was alive was the twenty-first of August, 1974.”
Karen sat up. “The twenty-first of August. Thank God.” She clasped her hands in front of her and closed her eyes. “Then David didn’t kill her.”
“How can you know that?”
“I not only know it, I can prove it.” She surged to her feet and began to walk around the room. “It may take some time to get you the proof, but I swear I can get it.”
“What proof?”
“His alibi.” She turned to him, her face now radiant. “Every year from the time Trey was born until David died in 1977, we rented a condo down at Destin, Florida, for the last three weeks in August. He couldn’t have killed your mother. He was in Florida with me.”
“Even if you were registered for the whole time, he could have caught a plane back, killed her…”
“You were against coincidences before, now suddenly you’re willing to consider this nonsense.”
“And I suppose you have the same alibi?”
“Yes. Neither of us slipped back into town to commit a murder.”
“She might have found out he was in Florida and kept on going until she got there. I may have been looking for her in the wrong place.”
“She didn’t. No one would have told her where we were.” She frowned at him. “Condos keep records, and even if they don’t, Marshall is a bear about tax records and bank receipts. It may take a week or two, but we will come up with the proof that we were in Florida.”
“Can you fly a plane?”
“Good grief, no. Neither could David.”
“Did you tell Trey your suspicions?”
“Certainly not. He still doesn’t know. He thinks you’re exactly who you say you are.”
“Then who did you get to screw up my plane?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The person who punctured my oil line so the engine would quit thirty minutes into my flight.”
For a moment she simply gaped at him. Then her eyes shifted to her right. He saw her chest heave. “I hired no one.”
“And the stirrup leather? Did you pay one of Trey’s grooms to cut it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Somebody has been making inept attempts to kill me, or at least hurt me. Any idea who?”
She refused to look at him.
“If you didn’t tell Trey who I am, what did you tell him exactly? Can he fly a plane?”
She stammered. “He…he took a few lessons, but the ground school bored him. Trey’s a good boy. He’d never do anything like that.” She looked into Paul’s eyes. “He likes you, God help him. He told me so. I wa
rned him how dangerous you were to us, but…” Her face blanched.
“But not why.”
Karen shook her head. “Only that you could cause terrible trouble for the family.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “I told him that somehow you had to be forced to go away and leave us alone.” She closed her eyes, “Dear God, he said not to worry, he’d take care of it.”
Paul handed her the telephone. His face was grim. “Call him. Get him over here. Now.”
“Please, if you bring in the police—”
“Call him.”
She called. Trey wasn’t home. Paul hit the button for the speakerphone. Karen saw what he was doing, but didn’t stop him.
“Mother Karen,” Sue-sue said, “I thought he was with you. He said you called him and asked him to come over.”
“How long ago did he leave?”
“An hour or so. I tried to stop him. He’d been drinking. Lord, I hope he hasn’t had an accident with the car.”
“I’m sure he’s fine. Don’t worry.” Karen let the phone drop into its cradle. “Trey never drives drunk, and I most certainly did not call him to come over.” She looked up at Paul. “I’m frightened. We’ve got to find him before he does something that can’t be fixed.”
“I’m not certain any of this can be fixed.”
“Please, nobody’s been hurt. We’ll pay for your airplane. You know now that David didn’t kill your mother and neither did I. Just go away and leave us alone.”
“I can’t. Not yet.” He picked up the telephone, dialed Buddy Jenkins’s office, identified himself and asked the dispatcher if there had been any automobile accidents reported that evening. He glanced at Karen. “None that you know of. Okay. I’ll explain later, but at the moment I need you to tell Buddy to locate Trey Delaney. His wife says he’s been drinking and he’s out in his truck.” He listened and turned to Karen. “The dispatcher says a few minutes ago his truck was in front of his office in Rossiter.”
“He’s probably inside getting even drunker.”
“Nerving himself up for another little accident?”
Karen grabbed his arm. “I told him that if you hadn’t bought that damned mansion, you’d never have come to town.”
“You think he’d try to destroy the house? That’s nuts.”
House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) Page 22
