by BETH KERY
She nodded. It was very hard to contain her disappointment. “What are my kids being told about why I won’t be there for the trophy presentation?” she asked.
“I’ve briefed the Durand manager of human resources—Guy Morales, he’s just under Kehoe and will be taking over his duties for now—to hold a meeting with the managers, key camp employees, and the other counselors about the basic details of what happened up at the castle last night. Guy is going to determine which of the managers is most familiar to your kids, and have that person break the news to them. The media was informed that an arrest was made last night, and that there were two assaults and a break-in at the castle, but no names or specifics have been released yet. This should be the first your kids hear of it, and then a more generalized announcement will be made to the whole camp. Whoever tells your kids the news will assure them that you’re going to be fine.”
Alice sniffed. Dylan handed her a tissue wordlessly.
“Jessica Moder knows them best, but I don’t know if she’ll be up for it. She came down with the flu on Thursday night,” Alice said. “I’d rather Dave Epstein and Kuvi told them. And . . . and please have them make sure they keep an eye on Jill Sanchez. She’ll probably be more unsettled than any of the others. Can you put in a special request to have them ask Judith Arnold, the team leader, to especially look out for her? Although she probably will anyway.”
“I’ll tell all that to Guy. Alice, do you think you can talk to the police about what happened now?”
“You said the FBI, too. Earlier.”
He nodded. “That’s what I planned on telling you after we met last night. It seems Jim Sheridan did some digging on his own, and made the connection between Sissy and Avery Cunningham, which confirmed what he already suspected about you being Addie Durand. When he confronted me, I told him everything I knew. He contacted the FBI with the information last evening. Two agents arrived in Morgantown to interview us this morning, only to find that you were here at the hospital, and their dead case file had come back to life in the biggest way possible.” He grimaced. “They’ve already interviewed Thad and me. They’re very eager to speak with you.”
“I don’t want to talk to them.”
“I’m sorry, Alice. I really am. But I can’t put them off—”
“No . . . I just mean I don’t want to talk to them until I talk to you,” she said hastily. “About the things Kehoe said last night, when he attacked me.” The memory suddenly fresh in her brain, she winced and gagged.
“Alice?” Dylan said, standing and leaning over her. “Are you going to be sick?”
She shook her head, bringing her instinctive reaction under control as best she could. “I think . . . I think Kehoe might be my biological father,” she said quickly, before the nausea rose in her throat again.
“No,” Dylan said with abrupt harshness.
Misery overwhelmed her. She’d known Dylan would never want to believe that she wasn’t Alan Durand’s daughter, but she hadn’t thought he’d deny it so stringently. She had to tell him before she told the police and FBI, or worse yet, Kehoe confessed it and Dylan discovered the truth in some roundabout fashion. It’d been toward Alan that Dylan had felt so much loyalty. It’d been Alan’s grief at the loss of Addie for which Dylan had felt a lifelong guilt and experienced a personal mandate to set things right.
It was agony for her to tell him that all of his guilt and his mission to see her returned to her rightful place as Alan Durand’s daughter had been for nothing.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered shakily. “Kehoe said that he and Lynn Durand had had an affair. She wanted a baby so bad that she betrayed Alan because he couldn’t get her pregnant.”
“I know,” Dylan said calmly. “I know all about it.”
“What?” Alice asked, sure she’d heard him incorrectly.
“I found some of Lynn’s journals last evening. I started to wonder why Lynn would tell a three-or four-year-old child to hide alone in dark, scary places. It seemed completely out of character from what I knew about her. She doted on you, and rarely let you out of her sight. Then I remembered you saying that the hiding places were hers, too, and I don’t know . . . something clicked for me. I went back to the castle and inspected a couple of the secret compartments in the castle. In your old bedroom, I found four of Lynn’s journals in a secret room Deanna Shrevecraft had shown me once. I think Lynn placed them there on purpose because of their contents, to be found some day.”
“What did they say?” Alice asked, amazed.
“Special Agent Clayton and Agent Rogers have them right now. They’re holding them as evidence, but I think they’ll let you look at them whenever you’re ready. But I read them all, and know this right off the bat,” he said pointedly. “You are not the daughter of Sebastian Kehoe. Lynn broke things off with him months before she learned she was pregnant with you. In her journals, she mentioned that the time of her affair with Kehoe was close enough to her pregnancy to make her worry at first.”
“So, he still might be my father?”
Dylan shook his head resolutely. “No, the timing was off once she understood how early in the pregnancy she was. Unfortunately, the timing was close enough to make Kehoe question it. But she had more evidence he wasn’t the father. Despite her insistence to Kehoe that he wasn’t the father, Kehoe persisted in believing he was for years after she stopped seeing him. Lynn had told him during their affair that Alan had some medical issues, and the chance of their conceiving a child was so negligible as to be an impossibility. Maybe it all related to the fact that Alan later was diagnosed with testicular cancer.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I do know that Alan and Lynn always referred to you as a miracle. I sensed the amount of emotion behind it when they said it. If all this is true, then for them, it was true in the literal, not the figurative sense. Especially for Lynn, who would have given up all hope of having a baby after she’d broken things off with Kehoe and resolved never to be unfaithful to Alan again. But since Kehoe was armed with the knowledge of Alan’s supposed inability to have a child, he wouldn’t let go of the idea that he was the father.
“He harassed Lynn about it for years. He was obsessed with her, and wrecked by her breakup with him. Unfortunately for Lynn, Morgantown isn’t a huge city, and the Durand executive enclave is even smaller. She was thrown together with Kehoe on several occasions at business dinners and functions. The more she avoided him, the more Kehoe’s obsession with her grew. Lynn was terrified that he’d expose the truth of their affair to Alan. I think she lived in daily, maybe hourly fear, but did everything in her power to hide that fact from Alan and you.”
“Is that why she taught me to hide? From him?” Alice asked, shivers snaking under her skin. It was incredible to believe, but twenty-some years after the fact, that was precisely what had happened. Alice had been attacked by Kehoe, and hidden in one of the spots Lynn had taught her. It probably would have worked, too, if she hadn’t been so disoriented that she didn’t realize she was leaving bloody tracks that led Kehoe straight to her.
Dylan nodded. “Lynn grew terrified of Kehoe. The real proof that you weren’t Kehoe’s child was that given your blood type, Kehoe couldn’t have been your father. Several months before your fourth birthday, she finally showed Kehoe your medical records and some articles on ruling out paternity through blood type. She’d called Kehoe up to the castle for a private meeting while Alan was out of town on business. Kehoe became enraged when she presented him with the facts. There was no way he could continue to hold on to the delusion that he was the father of the love of his life’s child . . . or that she’d ever come back to him.”
“He hit her, didn’t he?” Alice asked numbly.
“Yes. Apparently, he clubbed her on the side of her head.” Instinctively, Alice touched the left side of her head. That’s where Kehoe had first struck her to disable her. It was the blow the doctor was most concerned about. To think that Lynn—her mother—had endured a similar injury
from the same man was another sad but firm bond between them. Dylan noticed her gesture and his expression went hard.
“Go on, please,” Alice insisted.
He inhaled. “You were with a babysitter, but you heard Lynn cry out when she was struck. You ran into the den. She was bleeding from her ear, and—”
“She was terrified to have me in the same room with him, and she told me to run and hide,” Alice finished.
“It was another true memory. Maybe the earliest one you’ve had,” Dylan said quietly. “I was wrong to tell you that it never happened.”
“Why didn’t she speak up?” Alice blurted out suddenly. “Why didn’t Lynn tell the police when I was kidnapped that Kehoe might be responsible? He was, by the way,” she added quickly. “Kehoe admitted to it out there by the bluff, that he hired Cunningham and Stout.”
Dylan froze. “He did?”
“Oh, he did all right. But why didn’t Lynn say anything after the kidnapping? Was she afraid of Alan finding out about her affair with Kehoe?”
“No. I don’t think anything would have stopped Lynn from exposing her infidelity if she thought it’d help in bringing you home to her.”
“Why, then? Why didn’t she say anything about Kehoe?” she asked, frustrated and angry with a woman of whom she only possessed the smallest glimpses, and yet with whom she shared the most elemental of bonds.
Dylan cupped her shoulder, grounding her swell of helpless fury. “He’d hit her in a fit of rage when she presented him with proof that you weren’t his child. Maybe he’d hit her before, and she was ashamed of it. I don’t know. She never specifically said that in her journals. I got the impression from her writing that their original relationship was sexually intense at its best, volatile at its worst. They argued a lot; Kehoe wanted her to leave Alan, and Lynn refused.
“But the main reason I think she didn’t say anything is that she didn’t believe Kehoe could be capable of kidnapping a child. Like it or not, she believed herself in love with him for a brief time in her life. She didn’t believe he’d make you the target of his fury at being rejected by her. She might have worried he’d hurt her if pushed, and that you might be harmed if you were in the vicinity. The two of you were together almost all the time. But I don’t think she ever believed he’d plan and plot exclusively against you, let alone try to kidnap and murder you. Her journals indicate that she never knew a side to his character that was that dark.”
Because Lynn had been unable to see it, Alice had been forced to. It was an uncharitable thought to have about a woman who had suffered so much . . . about a woman who was her biological mother. Alice knew this. She scrunched her eyelids tight. The action pulled on her facial abrasions. She immediately opened her burning eyes.
“Lynn knew the truth about him,” she said. “At the end, she did. Kehoe told me by the bluff that he couldn’t let it happen. He couldn’t watch while the rich king and the beautiful queen and the little princess lived out their idyllic dream in the castle. He actually said something like that,” she said in a hoarse voice, disgusted at the memory. She dabbed carefully at the corner of her eyes.
“He probably hated you enough for what you symbolized after he realized you weren’t his,” Dylan said after a pause, caressing her shoulder. “But beyond that, he knew that by depriving Alan and Lynn of you, he guaranteed their misery.”
She inhaled and shuddered, holding the tissue to the corner of her eye to stanch the flow of tears. They made her cuts burn. “Why didn’t you tell me she jumped off the bluff?”
“I’m sorry,” he said gruffly. “You never asked how she died. I was trying to follow Sidney’s advice and tell you things only when you seemed ready. I suspected you must know, deep down, that she’d died tragically, given the circumstances. I thought you’d even caught hints of it from that damn ghost story the kids tell. But even though I thought you might suspect, you never asked.” She looked up at him. He looked as miserable as she felt.
“He was there with her. Kehoe. When she fell.”
“What? Did he—”
“No, he didn’t push her. Or at least that’s what he said. But he did kill her.”
“What do you mean?”
Her lip curled at the memory. Things were starting to fall into place in her head. “What a fucking bastard,” she whispered. “He knew that rumors were flying around that I was probably dead at that point. You told me after Jim Stout confessed, that the police and FBI were convinced I was dead. That’s when he confronted Lynn out by the bluff, when she was so full of dread and grief, vulnerable because of what the FBI suspected.”
“She sunk into a severe depression after you were taken. She believed she was being punished for her infidelity. It was in her journals.”
“That’s when Kehoe told her everything, when she was at her weakest,” Alice said. She shut her burning eyelids. She wanted to weep full-out, but her body wasn’t providing her with enough energy to grieve so forcefully. “He told her that he knew for a fact that Addie was dead,” she paused, suppressing a sob, “because he’d been the one to hire and give the order to the kidnappers. And then he didn’t stop Lynn from going over the bluff once she’d heard that news.
“He was going to throw me over that bluff last night. He said he’d join me, and we’d be broken and bloody together. It was like it was happening all over again for him, what happened with Lynn. He said he wished he’d committed suicide with her, so that they could have been together. That’s how warped and twisted he was. He kept acting like he hated her more than anything, and in the next second, he talked about her like she was perfection itself. He planned to commit suicide after he killed me, I think. He knew you were suspicious of him, and that he might be under fire if the kidnapping investigation started full force again because I’d come back. He already was jealous and hateful of you because of your relationship with Alan,” she said, looking at Dylan.
“He despised the idea of you and me being together happily, controlling Durand Enterprises, especially after all he’d been through to cancel Lynn and Alan’s happiness. That’s why he told me the other night at the bonfire that he wasn’t going to let it happen again. He wouldn’t watch me ride off with you into the sunset.” She gave a bitter laugh and it mixed with a restrained sob. “Instead, he wanted to see me end up in the same place as Lynn, and you in the same place as Alan. He said something about dying satisfied of your misery when you saw me on those rocks. The fact that he was considering committing suicide last night must mean he’d given up on disguising his hatred and obsession . . . his sickness anymore.”
“Jesus.” Alice glanced up. Dylan’s rigid features broke briefly. He pressed his lips to her temple. She sensed his fierce misery. She reached with her bandaged hand and touched his shoulder, absorbing the shudder of emotion that went through his powerful body.
“Do you want me to talk to the FBI and police now?” she asked him weakly after a moment.
He straightened and shook his head.
“No?” she asked.
“Rest now,” he said, his gaze running over her face. She hated to think of what he saw when he looked at her. “You can barely keep your eyes open. I’ll fill them in on what you told me, so the officers and agents aren’t complete blank slates when they interview you. It should make it a little easier for you. If you feel up to it after you rest and your testing later, you can talk to them then.”
Alice nodded. He was averting his gaze from her, which bothered her deeply. She opened her mouth to question his preoccupation, but he halted her with a soft, firm kiss on her lips. Her heart sunk a little when he turned and left the room.
Deep down, was he worried that she wasn’t really Alan Durand’s daughter? Vague former worries returned to haunt her, now clarified and flashing like neon signs in her brain. Dylan wanted to believe she wasn’t Kehoe’s child, perhaps as much as Alice wished it. The idea of being that monster’s progeny turned her insides to ice. But because it made Dylan and her uncomfortable, th
ey couldn’t just assume that it wasn’t still a possibility. Even if she wasn’t Kehoe’s child, wasn’t it possible Lynn had slept with someone else? Wouldn’t that be a more likely scenario, than that Addie Durand was a miracle baby?
What would happen if the results of the genetic testing came back, and she learned she wasn’t Alan’s daughter? She’d be so disappointed, after hearing Alan’s voice in that dream, after feeling so much emotion associated with him. Daddy.
But Dylan would probably be devastated, too.
He’d been focused to the point of obsession for most of his life with the idea of finding her. Now that he knew the truth, would it change the way he felt about her?
ALICE gave her statement to the police and FBI that night after her early supper. When the agents first entered her room, carrying cases of what looked like electronic equipment, Dylan came with them.
“What’s all that stuff?” Alice asked uneasily after she’d been introduced to Special Agent Clayton and Agent Rogers. The older agent, Clayton, gave Dylan a pointed glance. Dylan stepped closer to her bed, and Alice had the uncomfortable feeling the agents had asked him to break some news to her.
“What is it?” she whispered, studying his lips closely for their hushed exchange.
“Alice, the agents need to photograph you.”
Alice blanched. “I look like hell,” she whispered. The last thing she wanted was to have strangers take her picture.
He grimaced. “Your injuries are evidence. If Kehoe pleads not guilty to your attack—”
“He’s going to plead not guilty?” she asked in a high-pitched voice.
“We don’t know yet. He’s still in the hospital, and he’s been out of it a lot. When he is awake, he’s not saying much. The point is, if this does go to trial,” Dylan continued quietly. “Your condition is important evidence. Even if it doesn’t go to trial, it’s valuable information for Kehoe’s sentencing. I’m sorry, honey. I can’t see any way around it.”
