Identity--A Tale of Murder, Mystery and Romance

by H. D. Thomson

  “Damn it!”

  Clumps of soil now mingled with the tea on his shirt and shorts. He wiped his face with a forearm, inhaled dirt and tea, and sneezed.

  His mood darkened to black. He’d woken up in a foul mood. Last night’s encounter with Skye still rankled. His morning ritual of tending to his indoor garden, which usually soothed, exasperated his already disjointed thoughts.

  Did he ever tell you where you got your powers from? Skye’s words shredded his already frayed composure.

  He hated the question.

  The two times he’d asked, his father had grown antagonistic and vague. David had dropped the subject that last time when he’d turned nineteen. He’d convinced himself the reasons didn’t matter.

  David’s power had given him a career, admiration, and envy from his fellow colleagues, a magnificent home and every material comfort imaginable. But now Skye threatened it all. If she exposed his telekinesis, his show would disintegrate into a lie, his fans would see him as a fraud. No one would regard him in the same light again.

  He frowned. Determination cut across his jaw, while he wiped at his palms to get rid of the dirt. Somehow he managed to rub the soil deeper into his skin. Unlike his skin, his life wasn’t going to be stained with controversy and disgrace. It would continue as usual. Uncomplicated and superficial.

  Yes. Damn it. He’d lived with the lie all his life and would continue to do so until he died. Nothing or no one was going to change anything. Particularly Skye. After all, she was only one woman. He was giving her far more power than she deserved.

  Grunting in disgust, David jerked to a stand. He strode across the room and went in search of a towel.

  When David stepped from the garden room, the murmur of the television drifted from the media room further down the hall. Earlier that morning, his father had shown up to watch the game an hour after Skye and her son had disappeared out the front door.

  Skye’s words came back to burrow into his brain. What about adoption papers? I bet you anything he won’t have them.

  David wondered if he really knew his father. He opened the linen cabinet several feet before the entrance to the media room and grabbed the top towel. Maybe the only knowledge David had garnered over the years was edited and fabricated to suit his father. Years of his father teaching ethics and morals might have been hypocritical lies.

  David snapped the linen door closed. He strangled the towel between his hands.

  “Holy crap! What’s wrong with your eyes, man? He was safe.” His father’s disgruntled voice carried into the hall.

  David’s grip on the towel loosened. His dad wasn’t some dark, sinister character. What the hell was he thinking? Skye was playing with his mind, and doing a damn good job at it.

  Shaking his head, he walked over to the room’s doorway and stopped in its threshold. Sunlight streamed through one of the windows and highlighted his father, predictable as always, sitting in his favorite, leather upholstered recliner. By the chair, both Dozer and Maggie lay sleeping on the tile. Neither stirred from the sounds of his father and the television.

  “Dad?” David leaned a shoulder and hip against the door frame and crossed a leg at the ankle. His father continued to glare at the screen. Ever since David had bought the seventy-five-inch television, he’d been unable to keep his dad away. “Dad!”

  His father jerked around and slapped a hand against his chest. “Would you stop sneaking up on me? You did it as a kid and you’re still doing it.”

  David twisted his mouth to keep a smile from forming on his lips. “I’ll be louder next time.” He uncrossed his ankles and pushed off the door frame. “Why don’t you just move in here? There’s plenty of room.”

  His father frowned. “I like my place just fine. I can do what I want when I want.”

  “You can do that at my place. And anyway, you’re here most of the time. So it wouldn’t be much of a change. You’d just spend less time driving back and forth.” David walked further into the room. “I know you get lonely.”

  “I don’t get lonely.” His father clutched the leather arms, the whites of his knuckles contrasting with the age spots dusting his hands. “I like my company. I like my condo. I like everything about it.”

  “If you like it so much, then why are you always here? You don’t sound too happy either.”

  Gordon muttered something under his breath. “I’m happy.” He gave David a smile that looked more like a pained grimace. “You just don’t know what happy looks like.”

  “Fine. I guess I don’t.” Doubts of his father’s past and sinister secrets scattered. Complicated wasn’t a word that would ever describe his father. What the hell had he been thinking? David shook his head and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Skye has this crazy idea that we’re somehow connected. Maybe from a foster home.”

  His father’s scowl deepened. “What type of nonsense is she talking about?”

  “She has these memories of a hospital and of me being there with her.” David tossed the towel on an end table. “She heard me screaming.”

  Leather creaked as his father sifted within the chair’s depths. He dug his fingers deeper into the arms. “The woman’s nuts.”

  “Is she? I wonder. You see...” David rubbed the back of his neck and hesitated. Once he spoke the words aloud to someone other than himself, they couldn’t be retracted. “It’s her name. Skye Hunter. The first time I heard it aloud, it was like being hit with a damn truck. I got this sick sensation. I—” He dropped his hand to the side. “There’s no other explanation than having met her sometime in my past.”

  “She’s feeding you a line of crap.” His father’s lips curled up at one corner in obvious disdain.

  “I’ve kept telling myself that too. But why? It doesn’t make sense.” David strode across the room to look out the window. Bougainvillea petals had dripped onto the ground by the grass border. Vibrant pinks now beige puddles with singed edges. He placed his right hand on the glass and stared at the brief flare of condensation that outlined his splayed fingers.

  His hand looked ordinary, like the rest of him, but inside nothing about him was normal. Even after living with it for as long as he could remember, the power at times humbled and amazed him

  “The time before you took me in, everything’s real hazy,” David murmured. “It might be from any number of reasons. An unhappy, early childhood. The passage of time. Still, I get this feeling I should be able to remember more.”

  From behind, his father grunted. “If you ask me, you need to keep away from her. She’s making you obsessed with your past.”

  “Obsessed?” David lifted his hand from the glass pane and turned on his heel to see the scowl hadn’t left his father’s face. “If I am, I think I have cause. She has the same powers. She levitates. Moves things. Do you have any idea the odds of having two people with telekinesis and the same background?”

  His father’s face emptied of expression.

  David ignored the look and cleared the frustration from his throat. “I need answers. I want to know how long I’ve had my telekinesis. Was I born with it? I can’t seem to remember.”

  “Crap, David. I can’t remember the time of day on most occasions, never mind my own childhood. That’s normal the older you get.”

  “You must know if I inherited these powers from my parents?”

  His father massaged his temple and brow with a thumb and forefinger. “I thought we went through this years ago. I know nothing of your biological parents. You were sent to a string of foster homes, but the majority of the time you spent it at the foster center. Simple as that.”

  “And the foster center? What was it called?”

  “This is ridiculous! You know that?” His father struggled from the lounge chair, punctuating how age and his battle with cancer had whittled the vitality from his body. He stepped around both dogs.

  David stopped himself from softening. “I’d like to know.”

 
“We’re talking years here, David. I don’t know the name. All I remember was that it was on the outside of Boston.”

  “What of my adoption papers? I don’t have them. You never gave them to me. You must have them somewhere.”

  His father opened his mouth and snapped it shut. “Of course.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  “Well... They’re...” His father crossed his arms against his stomach, avoiding David’s gaze to glance at the television screen. “They must be in my safe-deposit box.”

  David’s heart rate stumbled then raced to a wild tempo. The sound of the baseball fans roared in the background and grew as jarring as the disappointment that banded around his chest.

  His father was lying. David knew him too well to think otherwise. He wanted to pretend, to ignore the signs coming from his father, but they glared back at him.

  “That’s great,” David replied, pretending nothing had changed. He’d always believed he could trust his father above anyone else, but his father’s words had revealed the opposite. “The banks are open. We can get them now.”

  “For God’s sake, David. The last thing I want to do is go to the bank. I was enjoying a ball game until you waltzed in here with all your questions.”

  More lies hidden by a blanket of avoidance. “Sorry, Dad, but I really want to see those papers.”

  “What is with you today? It’s that woman. That Skye, isn’t it?” He took in a ragged breath, while a dull flush crept up his neck and into his face. Anger pulsed and radiated across the distance between them. “It’s the past, David. It doesn’t matter. This woman is playing games with your head. She’s pure drama. Just like your mother. They thrive on it.”

  David stiffened. “Teresa was never my mother. And unlike Teresa, Skye loves her son.”

  “I don’t care!”

  David turned and picked up the towel from the table as an excuse to avoid meeting the fury in his father’s eyes. Flecks of dirt fell from the towel like his doubts about Skye’s stories.

  Simple questions didn’t garner complicated reactions, which reinforced David’s belief—there were no adoption papers.

  “What are you hiding?” David asked, forcing his gaze back to his father and any telling reaction.

  The muscles of his father’s throat flexed in a swallow. “There’s no talking any sense to you right now.” He grabbed his iced tea glass from the end table by the chair he’d vacated. “I’ve got errands to do. I’ll see you later.”

  David stepped back to let his father pass. How typical. His dad always ran from conflict. This time, though, David wasn’t going to be brushed aside—

  The doorbell pealed through the house.

  His dad paused in the middle of the room. “Who’s at the door? It can’t be yard maintenance.”

  “It’s probably Skye. She knows the code to get into the neighborhood.” David rocked back on his heels. “She’s staying here with her son for a while.”

  His father’s lips dipped at the corners. “So that’s how it is.”

  David’s own mouth tightened. “That’s how it is.”

  Not waiting for another snide comment, David turned and strode to the front door. The click of claws against tile echoed behind him. The dogs sped past and reached the front door first.

  When he opened the door, both dogs converged on Skye and Tyler.

  “Dozer. Maggie. Down.”

  “They’re not bothering me.” Tyler dropped to his knees in the foyer and wrapped pale arms around Dozer’s neck. “He’s so soft.”

  Skye smiled down at her son and skimmed her fingers over the dark sheen of Tyler’s hair. She’d pulled her own hair back into a sleek ponytail. The style accentuated the long column of her neck, while sunlight filtering through the window by the door highlighted the porcelain texture of her skin.

  She was beyond beautiful. The black tank top and white shorts accented the slope of her hips and curve of her breast. A slender woman, but with enough flesh over muscle and bone to grasp in the heat of passion. The dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks gave her an otherworldly aura. Last night she’d also tasted and smelled beyond perfect.

  “I’ve always wanted a dog,” Tyler murmured against the Dozer’s coat. “But we were never able to have one.”

  Skye’s smile faded and a shadow—guilt David suspected—crossed her delicate features.

  She loved her son. To have had something like that with Teresa would have softened David’s edges, even made him think of a relationship with the opposite sex as a worthy goal. But David had dumped all hopes of marriage and falling in love by the time he’d hit thirteen with no sign of Teresa, no card and no phone call to acknowledge his birthday.

  He wasn’t about to open himself up to that abuse again, and Skye was no exception. He’d never trusted Teresa, and pretty much everyone else in his life, except for his dad. Until today, his father had been the one person he’d trusted.

  And now? Now, he didn’t know if he’d ever truly trust his dad again.

  Skye glanced over Tyler’s head and met his gaze. Her eyes sharpened. “What’s wrong?”

  “You were right,” David said in a cool, emotionless voice. “There are no adoption papers. I don’t think there ever were.”

  Her soft inhalation echoed in the foyer. “And the foster home? The place you came from? Do you have a name?”

  “No. But it’s somewhere outside of Boston.”

  Her lips curved into a radiant smile. “Finally something! I’d hoped, prayed for a lead. For too long I’ve wondered if I’ve been as paranoid as everyone else believes me to be. But now, I know I was right by going with my gut.”

  “Yes, well.” He tried to shake off the numbness etched inside his head. “Now you have a place to start.”

  “And starting right this minute is perfect.” She squeezed her son’s shoulder as the boy rose to his feet. “Do you have a computer?”

  “It’s in the den.”

  “I’m sure we can find the home on the internet. A quick search is bound to pull up something relevant.”

  “You’re not going to be able to do that now,” his father said from behind him.

  Chapter 12

  Skye turned to find Gordon standing in the foyer.

  Her hand slipped from her son’s shoulder. “Why?”

  Gordon shrugged. “There’s no way to get on the internet with David’s computer. He’s got a virus. I never finished cleaning the hard drive.”

  “You never told me that,” David murmured with a distinct edge to his voice.

  Gordon’s mouth tightened. “You never asked.”

  “We can go to the local library instead.” A downed computer wasn’t going to stop her from digging into this foster home. “I’m sure they have internet access. We should be able to find something.”

  An indefinable emotion flickered in Gordon’s eyes. “Well, if you ask me I think you’re chasing after a bunch of nonsense.”

  “Well, Dad, I’m not asking you.” David rubbed a palm over his severely cropped hair. “I think Skye’s got a good idea.”

  Grunting, Gordon stepped between Skye and David. “I’d like to come.”

  “Why?” David asked, a crease pulling at his brow.

  Gordon glanced at both of them. “It’ll be interesting to see what you find out.”

  The muscles in Skye’s shoulder, taut before, bunched painfully as she met Gordon’s bland expression. She wasn’t fooled. Animosity oozed from the man’s pores.

  The whisper of a headache across her brow intensified. Why the sudden change? It didn’t make sense. Unless... Gordon wanted to sabotage getting any information on the foster home?

  David moved toward the front door. “Come on, Tyler. You’ll be the first ever to sit in the back of my SUV. I’ve got a DVD player all hooked up too.”

  Interest flared in Tyler’s eyes. “Does your SUV go as fast as your Lexus?”

  With a gentle, almost indulgent smile, David looked down at Tyle
r as he opened the door. “I’m afraid not, but I promise, I’ll take you for a spin in the Lexus.”

  “Cool.”

  “I’ll meet everyone outside.” Skye brushed damp tendrils of hair from her temple. If she was going to be staring at documents and computer screens she needed a mild painkiller. “I just need some water. This heat’s a killer.”

  Skye hurried down the hall. In the kitchen, she swallowed two ibuprofen and chased them down with half a glass of water. When she returned to the foyer, she found Gordon blocking the front door.

  She paused. Disapproval deepened the lines of his face and pulled his gray brows into a frown.

  Fantastic. She was in no mood to deal with a confrontation.

  “Is there a problem?” Skye asked.

  Gordon’s lip curled. “You’re the problem.”

  Ouch. You couldn’t get more direct than that. She grabbed the strap of her purse with stiff fingers. She never once predicted Gordon’s outright hostility, which was a mistake. After all, the son had been downright rude to her on occasion. She shouldn’t expect anything less from the father. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll make it short.” Gordon straightened. “I don’t know what you’re saying to David, but I want you to stop. All of a sudden he’s interested in his adoptive parents and why he’s different.”

  “Are you talking about his telekinesis?”

  He snorted. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “Maybe you should lighten up when it comes to your son. It’s natural to want to know your history—what makes you who you are.”

  Gordon took an intimating step toward her and glared down at her. “How about you just leave well enough alone? None of it’s your business.”

  “You’re wrong.” Her grip tightened on the strap of her purse. She refused to be intimidated. “The part that relates to me is my business.”

  “This is different.” His voice turned harsh. “You need to keep David from digging into his past. It’s dead.”

  “I can’t do that. He’s a grown man. He’ll do what he wants, no matter what I tell him.”

  Gordon grunted. “You have no idea what the hell you’re getting yourself into.”