by BETH KERY
At the idea of resuming her schedule of spending the night in his bed, wrapped in his arms.
The night was still and quiet. There were a million stars in the night sky. Alice wasn’t sure if it was her sharp anticipation in seeing him or if she was getting used to his silent nocturnal movement in the dark woods, but unlike most nights, when he surprised her, she turned to him just before he touched her back. Instead, his hand slid along her T-shirt and cupped her shoulder. Alice stepped toward him and went up on her tiptoes, both her hands pressed against the solid wall of his chest.
She found his mouth in the darkness unerringly. Her kiss was hungry; she held nothing back. All the feelings that she’d been stifling found an outlet in that kiss.
It only took him a split second to get over his surprise at her attack. Then his arms were closing around her, and he was joining in that wet, wild kiss.
After a delicious moment, where Alice felt her toes curling in her tennis shoes, she reluctantly came up for air.
“I’m still mad at you for keeping things from me,” she breathed out against his lips.
“Exactly how am I supposed to know what to tell you and what not to tell you, when you send me so many mixed messages?”
She bit her lip, unable to answer his question as concisely as he’d asked it.
“I know I’m sending mixed messages,” she conceded. “What else can I do? I’m confused.”
“Understandable.”
“But you shouldn’t have treated Thad like that,” she whispered. “You’re far too protective of me, Dylan. I’m an independent person. I always have been. I don’t want to live in a cage.”
A breeze caught the tops of the trees that surrounded them, making them sigh softly. It suddenly struck Alice that she was having this conversation with him in the pitch black, where she couldn’t see him. Maybe that made it easier, somehow. When she looked into his deep, magnetic eyes, she sometimes lost herself.
“I respect that,” he whispered stiffly after a moment. “And I still don’t think you should be giving anyone carte blanche with your loyalty, but I do understand that Schaefer has become your friend. For better or worse.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Why are you so protective of me? If you can’t stop doing it, you at least have to tell me why. It isn’t twenty years ago, Dylan.”
“Not now,” he whispered tensely. She felt his hands tighten on her shoulders and sensed he was peering into the darkness around them, searching the shadows. He really was paranoid. Wasn’t he? “All right, we’ll talk,” he said finally. “But not here. Up at the house.”
They were silent for the rest of the trip to the castle. Once they’d arrived at the terrace doors, he quietly told her to use her key to make sure it worked. It did. She disarmed the security system, too. When they reached the kitchen, he told her to go on upstairs and he’d bring them something to drink.
In Dylan’s suite, she strategically sat on the couch in the sitting area before the fireplace. She wanted to talk to him, and didn’t need the distraction of the great luxurious bed or the smoking memories of what they’d done in it on previous occasions.
Dylan entered a few minutes later. He wore a dark red plain T-shirt and jeans that emphasized his body in the exact right places. She ate up the vision of him, all big lean male, a man who was supremely confident in his physicality, who knew his power and strength, and precisely how to use it. He carried two glasses. She guessed the one with the dark brown liquid was Dr Pepper. A strange giddy feeling went through her at this evidence of mundane familiarity on his part. His favored drink was club soda with a lime twist—which he carried right now—or expensive French brandy, when he wanted alcohol. He’d never blinked once early on when she’d named her favorite unsophisticated, sugary beverage.
He set their glasses on the coffee table before the couch, reached into his back jean pocket, and plopped a box of Sweet Adelaides on the table next to her drink.
She grinned unabashedly and reached for the box. “Thanks.”
Sweet Adelaides were a Durand bestseller. Along with Jingdots, they were Alice’s longtime favorite sweets. Alice had recently learned that Marie, Dylan’s cook, kept a huge jar filled with various Durand candies on the counter in the castle kitchen. She felt shy but happy, too at Dylan’s little gift. Which was stupid, of course. She opened the box and poured a few of the caramel, peanut, and chocolate candies into her hand, giving Dylan a sideways smile.
“You really must love me if you’re willing to feed my chocolate addiction.”
He sat down on the cushion next to her and leaned back, draping one arm across the back of the couch. Alice paused in the process of popping the candies in her mouth, her hand stilling several inches below her chin. His T-shirt stretched over his wide muscular chest and lean torso. His strong, jean-covered spread thighs were a distraction, too, but it was what she read in his dark eyes that snagged her attention.
“I do.”
She’d been attempting to be light, but suddenly everything seemed dead serious. She felt her cheeks warming.
He smiled. “I know you come by the love of chocolate honestly. It’s in your genes.”
A tingling sensation went through her forearms. Slowly, she opened her palm and stared at the chocolates she held there. She’d looked at similar candies hundreds of times.
She’d never seen them until now.
A shiver tore through her. “Oh my God,” she whispered, shuddering.
“What?”
“Sweet Adelaides. Alan Durand named them after his daughter.”
“Yes,” Dylan said with the air of someone confirming she did indeed have a cobra poised at the back of her neck. “I thought you realized it the day we told you about Addie. Sidney mentioned that Alan used to tease that his daughter was usually a Sweet Adelaide but could occasionally be a Sour Citrus—” He broke off when she just stared at him blankly. He leaned toward her. “Alice?” he asked tensely.
“It’s okay,” she mumbled. Why hadn’t she made that incredible charged connection until now? Yes, Sidney had made that statement, but it’d bounced right off her like many things had that fateful afternoon.
To a casual observer of the facts, the truth must have been obvious. But Alice was no casual witness. She was so deeply immersed in this situation, she was blinded. Defenseless. That truth now rang in her ears and pulsed in her blood. It was like two electrical circuits had abruptly joined, sizzling with power and lighting up her brain, fusing together a small part of her—Alice’s—childhood to Addie Durand’s.
All this, from the seemingly innocuous stimulus of a common drugstore candy.
Slowly, deliberately, she raised her hand to her mouth and placed a chocolate on her tongue. One. She didn’t toss all of them in there at once, chew, and reach for the next handful even before she swallowed, like she usually did. She closed her mouth and eyelids, letting the sweet flavor and velvety consistency of the chocolate fill her.
Her life didn’t flash before her eyes, like they said of drowning victims. That would be far too dramatic of a representation of what happened to her in that moment. But because she allowed it, because she squeezed every ounce of meaning out of that little piece of candy that she possibly could, threads from her life that she’d formally thought of as inconsequential background noise, suddenly knitted together with the Present-Day Alice.
She swallowed.
“Alice?” Dylan repeated.
She blinked, coming out of her trance. It finally hit her how anxious he looked.
“Uncle Al would bring me Sweet Adelaides and Jingdots every once in a rare while. I told you how Al was my favorite uncle,” she prompted, holding Dylan’s stare. He nodded. “It’d be like Christmas for me, every time he held out that plastic bag of candy. Sissy would start yowling at him, accusing him of spoiling me after I’d just mouthed off to her, or committing whatever sin I’d just committed. But Uncle Al would ignore her. And on a few occasio
ns when she screamed too loud, he’d blaze up at her and say, ‘She deserves that candy, Sis, that and a whole hell of a lot more! Are you forgetting that?’”
Alice shook her head. “I never got before why she’d shut up after that,” she said hoarsely. The nerves in her hands and feet tingled. She blinked and started back, like she’d just taken an invisible slap.
“They knew,” she whispered to herself. The candies she still held fell from her hand heedlessly to her knee, rolling to the carpet. Dylan reached out and grasped her upper arm. Alice appreciated his touch. It steadied her.
“Why?” she asked him. “Why did they keep me? Why did they keep it all a secret? Who knew? All of them? How much did they know?” The questions spilled out of her in a pressured rush even as more formed on her tongue. How could she not have wondered about the Reeds before? It was like a defensive dam had crashed and she was being pummeled by roaring, crashing anxiety. “Dylan?” she demanded desperately.
Dylan shook his head. “I’m not entirely certain which of your uncles knew or how much—obviously Al knew something, given what you just said. But Sissy knew from the beginning.” She started to ask another question, but he held up his free hand. “I don’t have all the answers, Alice, but I’m going to tell you everything I found out from Avery Cunningham. But take a deep breath for a moment. Slow down.”
Hearing her mother’s name paired with the name of one of Addie Durand’s kidnappers sent another small shock through her. Her mouth snapped shut. She breathed slowly through her nose. Dylan was right. She’d felt a little dizzy there for a moment.
“Are you all right?” Dylan asked.
“Yes. Absolutely. Please go on,” she said quickly, worried he’d change his mind about telling her what he knew.
He gave her that look that she now recognized as extreme caution. She’d learned that expression well over the past few days.
“I’m okay, Dylan. I want to know.”
He inhaled, and she had that sense again of him forcing himself into the deep well of memories that he detested.
“I told you how Cunningham planned to throw Addie Durand’s body in the creek, but as he was letting go he saw her eyes flicker open. But it was too late. She fell into the water. Realizing she was still alive, he ran down the creek bed and jumped in to save her. There had been a heavy rain that night after an extended dry spell. He said the water was moving fast and strong. According to him, he must have hit his head on something when he was struggling to get Addie from the current, because he was disoriented after he’d pulled her to shore. He claimed that contributed to what made him alter his plans in regard to Addie.”
“You didn’t believe him?” Alice asked, noticing the derisive tilt of his mouth.
Dylan shrugged. “Given Cunningham’s constant cat-and-mouse games, I tried to remain doubtful about almost everything he said. Which was hard, because I craved any morsel of information he’d dangle. I don’t know what actually happened that early morning twenty years ago. I never will. All I have is what he told me—and the fact that the information did finally lead me to Addie Durand. But Cunningham’s explanation about being disoriented didn’t add up, in my opinion.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cunningham claimed that the reason he didn’t take Addie back to Jim Stout and resume the plans for sending a ransom note to Alan Durand was that he was disoriented from a blow to the head. That, and he was somehow . . . moved by the fact that Addie was still alive.”
“Moved?”
Dylan met her stare. “Remember how I told you a few days ago that Cunningham kept talking about Addie’s eyes—the impact they had on him when he saw them open while he thought he was dumping her dead body? According to Cunningham, he was sort of—” He waved his hand impatiently. “Converted when that happened.”
“He saw the light?” she asked, stunned.
His gaze snapped to meet hers. “Avery Cunningham was a liar, a drug addict, and a murderer. He was the lowest common denominator of society. After he supposedly underwent this miraculous ‘conversion,’ he nearly tore a man apart with his bare hands while he was high on crystal meth. Cunningham’s supposed redemption didn’t help his victim a bit. He was playing me with that story, painting a picture of himself as he lay on his death bed, trying to convince himself as much as me that he had a sliver of humanity left in him.”
“What did he do with Addie after he pulled her from the creek?” Alice whispered, dread and curiosity waging battle in her brain.
“He made a phone call to an old friend.”
Goose bumps rose on her arms. Something Dylan had told her last week leapt into her brain to mingle with the new information. Cunningham was already in prison on a separate murder charge. He’d killed a man a few months before when he’d been whacked out on methamphetamines. That, and Dylan’s tight-lipped wariness at the moment told her what she dreaded.
“Cunningham knew Sissy, didn’t he?” She turned to him when he didn’t immediately respond. “She was his meth dealer?”
He nodded once.
Alice felt a little numb, but she wasn’t surprised by the news. Not really. Men and women of the caliber of Avery Cunningham regularly pulled up into the drive of their shabby, garbage-strewn double-wide in Little Paradise. It was voices like theirs—rough, guttural, and at times, savage—that Alice regularly heard vibrating through the walls of her bedroom. That was Alice’s life. She was a mouse cowering in a den of pythons, constantly trying to disguise her vulnerability, to make herself darker and tougher than she was.
“Apparently, Sissy and Cunningham went way back,” Dylan said. “They met in Cook County Juvenile Detention Center back in the eighties.”
Alice swallowed thickly, trying to absorb this strange reality. Jesus. Had she and Cunningham ever been in the trailer at the same time? Typical Sissy, to welcome her daughter’s kidnapper and would-be murderer into their home with open arms. Cunningham had been an old crime buddy and paying customer, after all.
“According to Cunningham, Addie was pretty banged up after he fished her out of the creek,” Dylan continued gruffly. “She was drifting in and out of consciousness when he put her back in the car. At some point, she must have come to, though. He said he fed her while they were on the road. I think it was at that point that Cunningham realized something miraculous had happened. Addie was amnesic not only in regard to the kidnapping and Cunningham’s attempted murder, but also to her own identity. Sidney assures me that given the physical trauma she endured, in addition to all the psychological stress and fear, amnesia is a very realistic coping mechanism, especially for such a small child. Sidney thinks it also could have just been the fall that caused the amnesia, the heavy sedatives she’d been given, the trauma, or maybe it was a combination of all those things. For Cunningham, it must have been like the slate had been wiped clean of all his sins toward her. He also must have realized that in the state she was in, Addie would be less likely to betray him if they got her medical care. She couldn’t even remember her own name.”
“They told her that her name was Alice, and she believed it,” she said dully.
“There’s no reason she wouldn’t,” Dylan said forcefully. “She was a traumatized, injured, tiny little girl who had been ripped from her parents and almost died at the hands of a ruthless criminal.”
Alice nodded, trying to disguise her unrest. “Go on.”
His nostrils flared slightly as he stared at her, obviously reluctant.
“Please, Dylan.”
He briefly shut his eyes and inhaled. “Cunningham put a call in to Sissy and they agreed to meet at a hotel in Michigan City, Indiana. Sissy helped him put a dark rinse on Addie’s hair. Addie’s hair was a remarkable color—a rose gold. They needed to hide that telltale characteristic.”
Alice shook her head slowly. “For as long as I can remember, Sissy put a rinse on my hair. When I got a little older, she told me she’d been abused as a girl. She said she didn’t want me to be obvious pr
ey, there in Little Paradise. She was the one who taught me to hide myself. Darken my hair, hide my body, make myself look tougher. It was actually one of the few useful things she’d ever told me,” Alice said with a rough bark of laughter. “And now, I find out she had an ulterior motive, even for that. She was trying to disguise my identity, not protect me.”
“I’m sorry,” Dylan said after a pause.
She pulled herself out of her thoughts and focused on him.
“Go on.”
“Addie’s amnesia didn’t remit, and Sissy ended up taking her to a local ER. Her lack of memory made things easier. Whatever they told her—”
“Became reality,” Alice filled in, anger entering her tone. “That’s my first memory—or at least it was before coming here—waking up in the hospital,” she said, staring into space as she relived that fuzzy memory, now through an unveiled mind’s eye. Shivers of dread crawled beneath her skin. That feeling of belonging to strangers, to people whom she had nothing remotely in common with had started there, in those moments when she’d awakened in that hospital bed.
“Alice?” Dylan asked uncertainly.
She blinked. She realized she was hugging herself as if for warmth. Steeling herself, she dropped her arms.
“And Cunningham just gave Addie”—me, she screamed silently in her head—“to Sissy to raise after that? Why?”
Dylan shook his head slowly. “All I have there is speculation. I told you what Cunningham claimed. He says he regretted kidnapping and hurting that little girl . . . almost killing her. He didn’t want to continue in his mission, but was too much of a coward to take her back and risk getting arrested. But I think he also needed a female accomplice, and thought of Sissy. As the only witness, I’d told the police and FBI about the two males I’d witnessed who took Addie. They wore masks and hats, but I was positive that they were both men. A woman claiming to be Addie’s mother in the emergency room would have been less suspicious.”
“But why then give Addie to Sissy to raise on a permanent basis? I know you don’t know exactly why he did it, but you must suspect something,” Alice implored, desperate to understand.
