“Well, he did.”
“I really don’t think—”
She got up. “Anyway, I hope I answered your questions. I’m goin’ to turn in now.”
* * *
Even with all that was going on with his property improvements, Lee found himself constantly thinking about CJ. Following DeRam’s inopportune confession to Wayne, CJ had accepted Lee’s offer to meet with an attorney in Rockford to discuss DeRam’s paternity rights. While DeRam hadn’t made any parental demands, at least CJ was now informed of his rights in case he did.
Lee and CJ had become close friends, but he still struggled with how much he should be involved in her life. She had called him for help this last time, but with CJ, it had to be on her terms, so he knew he had to be cautious.
He felt completely inept when it came to relationships, with men and women. He recalled CJ’s comment about there being nothing going on between them. It took that comment to confirm for him that was indeed the case, because he honestly didn’t know. He made a mental note to have this discussion with Bennett the next time they had a brother-to-brother talk, which he hoped would become a regular occurrence.
* * *
A couple of days following his puzzling discussion with Shaneta about Dr. Rad, Lee was sitting on the front deck drinking a cup of coffee, when he saw Dr. Rad walking down the dirt road from his lab, thermos bottle in hand, clothes rumpled, with little beads of sweat glistening on his brow. As he neared Lee, he held the thermos out in front of him.
“Here, I wouldn’t want her to think I was going to keep this.” Expressionless, he set the thermos down on the deck floor. “Tell her the coffee wasn’t half-bad, but I prefer tea,” he mumbled.
Without another word, he turned and started back down the road.
“Hey, wait a minute, Dr. Rad. Can I give you a lift back?”
Dr. Rad shook his head and kept on walking, throwing up his hands every few feet as if having a lively conversation with himself.
Shaneta came out of the house. “What did he want?”
Lee held up the thermos.
“A likely excuse to come see me.”
Lee had spoken to a variety of psychologists over the years about his difficulties developing relationships. Now, sitting on the other side of the therapist’s desk, he realized understanding them wasn’t any less of a challenge.
* * *
Three weeks after Dr. Rad had moved in, he presented Lee with a fifteen-page handwritten proposal on what he needed to restart his research, complete with crude aerial drawings for the various growing fields. In the back of the greenhouses, he proposed two three-acre, two two-acre, and five one-acre fields, each one for a separate fruit or vegetable. The entire front fifteen acres was designated for red clover. After leafing through the proposal, Lee turned to the last page where Dr. Rad estimated the start-up cost. If Stonebugger didn’t approve it through the trust account, he would have to sell off a few more coins in order to fund it, something he was prepared to do.
Figuring interest from Johns Hopkins and Penn State was enough ratification for him, Lee accepted his proposal and asked Dr. Rad if there was anything he could do to help him at this time.
“You can help by getting Miss Shaneta some sort of transportation to and from my lab.”
“What? Why?”
“She’s complaining about the long walk. You know how she is...complains about everything.”
“The long walk for what?”
“She insists on bringing me things—coffee, sweets, and occasionally leftovers from dinner.”
“Really.”
“I don’t ask for it, I assure you...” His face flushed. “She just...”
“She just what?”
“I’ll be going now,” he said halfway across the room. “Thank you, my good friend. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
Coffee, sweets, and dinner? Lee had thought Shaneta couldn’t stand Dr. Rad. And he had assumed the feeling was mutual.
Forget it. I’d need a degree in psychology to figure this out.
The opportunity to consider transportation for Shaneta to get around the property came the following week.
“Mista Lee, if I was able to get mi hands on a car, could you teach me how to drive?”
“I didn’t realize you didn’t know how to drive.”
“Never learned. Didn’t need to in Jamaica, and I always relied on others to drive me around here. But now...well, now I think if I’m goin’ to start bein’ more independent, I need to know how to drive.”
Lee waited for the next sunny day to give Shaneta her first driving lesson in his Datsun. It didn’t go well.
First, Shaneta wanted to jump in behind the wheel and start driving before having received any preliminary instructions. Then, as Lee painstakingly walked her through what all the levers, pedals, and knobs were, she seemed more interested in turning on the radio. When he finally allowed her to sit behind the wheel, instead of using the gear shift to put it in drive, she pulled down so hard on the windshield wiper lever, he thought it was going to break off.
After Lee went through the drill for the third time, Shaneta threw the car in Drive and stepped on the gas...hard.
“Stop! Put your foot on the brake!” he yelled at her.
“I’m drivin’, Mista Lee. Look at me, I’m drivin’.”
“Brake! Put your foot on the brake! The one on the left!” He reached for the wheel, but Shaneta had a tight grip on it. “Let me steer! Take your foot off the gas!”
By the time Shaneta found the wherewithal to take her foot off the gas, they were twenty feet into the knee-high grasses that lined the driveway. Then she stomped on the brake so hard, it caused Lee to fly into the dashboard and hit his head on the windshield.
“Put the gear in Park,” he croaked.
“Would that be P then?”
“Yes, that would be P.”
Shaneta got out of the car and proceeded to walk toward the house. “It’s obvious you’re not the right person to teach me how to drive,” she said loud enough for him to hear.
You got that right.
The subject of teaching Shaneta how to drive never resurfaced, and her now-daily walks to Dr. Rad’s lab made Lee feel guilty. Because Dr. Rad had told him he appreciated the meals and other things she brought him, he wanted to accommodate her in some way. Thinking there had to be a solution to her transportation issue that didn’t involve driving a one-and-a-half-ton potentially lethal weapon, he made a visit to his family’s golf club in Lake Geneva and purchased a golf cart whose top speed was fifteen miles per hour. The driving lesson on this vehicle proceeded significantly better. Key in ignition. Turn key. Two pedals. Two gears. Done.
* * *
“Looks awfully barren right now,” Shaneta said. “I miss the pretty wild onions.”
It was a balmy day in mid-October, and she and Lee were drinking their morning coffee on the front deck. Preparation for the red clover fields had begun a few weeks earlier—the land had been cleared and tilled.
“Just wait. Come late spring, the red clover will be blooming with so much color it will take your breath away.”
After hundreds of trays of the clover seeds had been soaked in liquid nitrogen fertilizer, Lee had hired a commercial farmer out of Rockford to plant them with an industrial-size seed drill.
Lee stood up and gestured toward the field. “Fifteen acres of solid red blossoms, two feet tall or so, no two alike. Individually, they’re not much to look at, but in a field this big, they’ll form a continuous blanket of blooms, and in the morning when they’re wet with dew, the sun will glisten off of them like nothing you’ve ever seen before. And when there’s a gentle breeze, they’ll all sway in synchrony, creating silent ripples across the field. Their smell is so sweet, Shaneta...sweet, like honey.”
“Mmm...sounds beautiful, peaceful.”
“It is. You’ll see.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their coffee.
“Look…over there
…peeking through the tall grasses,” Shaneta said, pointing to a spot across the road. “I see that cat almost every day, but he won’t come any closer than that.”
“I saw that same cat the first time I set foot on this property. Must be a stray.”
“Black cat. Bad luck.”
Lee smiled. “Nope. Not this one.”
“You know, I asked Raddie if he would carve out a tiny area for mi own little plot of clover. I don’t need much.”
Lee focused on Shaneta’s profile for a long moment before she turned her head.
“What?” she asked.
“Raddie?”
“It’s just a little nickname. What can I say, it just slipped out one day when we were...well, this is no business of yours, young man.”
Lee kept his eyes on her while she rambled on.
“Stop lookin’ at me.”
“And just what are you going to use the clover for?”
“You don’t know ‘bout red clover? Hmmm. You use it for many things. You can dry the flowers for tea, put fresh ones in oil and use it to soften your skin, or use them in a salad. I have even dropped blossoms in the ice cube trays to brighten up drinks. You can put it in soup, and for coughin’? Well, there’s nothin’ like a little red clover tincture. I swear, for someone with such a high IQ, you don’t know much, neither you nor Dr. Rad.”
“Raddie.”
“Shut up ‘bout that man...please.”
* * *
As soon as the back fifteen acres had been cleared, Dr. Rad told Lee the soil was unusually high in nitrogen, which he hadn’t expected.
“So what do you think would cause just this one section to be like that?” Lee asked him.
“There’s also lignite in the soil. I didn’t expect to find that either.”
“Lignite...as in coal?”
“Yes.”
“What is lignite typically used for?”
“It’s not very efficient to burn as fuel, and I’m not sure what plant life would even thrive in carbon- and ash-laden soil.”
Lee thought back to when he had first set foot in that section of his property and found the strange thin grayish root strands.
“Wait a minute. There was something planted there at one time.” He described the roots to Dr. Rad.
“Do you still have it?”
“Probably still in the trunk of my car, but...”
“Let’s have a look.”
Lee led the way to his car, which was parked in front of the lab next to the golf cart. He looked at the cart and then at Dr. Rad.
“Don’t ask,” Dr. Rad said.
“I won’t.”
Lee opened his trunk and pulled out the shriveled-up tangle of brittle roots.
Dr. Rad took it in his hands, fondled it, sniffed it.
“You know what this is?” he asked Lee.
“No. Do you?”
“It’s ganja.”
25 | Alone
So someone had been cultivating marijuana on the property before Lee had inherited it. That explained the strangely placed gate in the northeast corner—an access point for working the field. It appeared to Lee that someone had taken full advantage of the property’s having been untended, and the evidence pointed to DeRam as that someone.
It explained why DeRam had dragged him into his office the first day Lee had visited the property—he hadn’t wanted Lee to discover the plants. When DeRam realized Lee was the new owner and was going to develop the property, he must have removed the plants, which explained the fresh cut marks on their stems and the time he saw that car and trailer leave his property. Maybe it had been DeRam. Maybe it had been DeRam hauling away all the evidence. It also explained Dennis Freborg’s dog, the former K-9 member on the Chicago police force, going berserk in that section of the property.
Then DeRam tried to pin the crop on Lee in an effort to land Lee in jail. If he had succeeded with that, Lee would be out of the picture, and he could pursue CJ without his interference, and who knows, maybe plant another crop of marijuana. And then the plot had thickened when DeRam still felt threatened by Lee’s involvement with CJ, so he had dragged her son into it by telling him he was his father, thinking that would strengthen his relationship with CJ and force Lee out of the picture. And the joint Lee found in DeRam’s back pocket further supporting his suspicions.
It all made sense...almost. There was still the issue of the tire tracks he’d found shortly after discovering the harvested plants. If DeRam had acted alone, there would be no reason for him to return to the field after it had been cut down. So either he had an accomplice and was checking on his work, or maybe the arrogant sheriff had come back to admire his own work.
Lee had never considered himself a vengeful person, but the more he stewed over DeRam’s conduct, the more tempting the thought of revenge became.
* * *
“I don’t think they know you know,” Bennett said as they were downing some beers in Lee’s living room. “And for that reason, I don’t think they feel any differently about you than they did before. My guess is that they expect you for Thanksgiving.”
Lee hadn’t spoken to any of his family members for almost two months, except for Bennett, who now came to visit him regularly, prompting the two brothers to become close.
“I don’t think I want to be there.” Lee was getting comfortable with the fact that he wasn’t biologically related to any of them.
“And maybe I don’t blame you, but I think it’s pretty much expected.”
“You know I invited everyone to come see my new house, and Mother declined.”
“I know.”
“So I think I’ll decline for Thanksgiving as well. What’s good for—”
“Think about it—you could go and suffer through the visit, or you could not go, in which case you’d piss off Dad and hurt Mother.”
“Well, when you put it that way...”
“Take the high road, Lee. That’s my advice for what it’s worth.”
Lee weighed his words for a moment. He didn’t remember ever having been capable of taking the high road before.
“I guess I should. Will Daphne and the children be there?”
“The children will. Per court order, I get them every other major holiday. Daphne is going to fly out here with them and stay at a friend’s while they spend Thanksgiving with me.”
“That’s got to be rough.”
“Tell me about it. I can only imagine what nonsense about me she’s been instilling in their brains.”
“You know what...I will be there, but just for you...and your kids.”
“Thanks, little brother.”
Lee appreciated the familial implication, ambiguous as it was.
* * *
Lee decided he would spend Thanksgiving night at his parents’ house, and if the conditions were right, he would confront them the following day about his real ancestry. It was time. He called his mother and told her of his intention to stay overnight.
“Well, dear, that may not be the best idea. You see...well, there may be others here. Yes, I think Bennett and the children may be staying overnight, and then there’s—”
“That’s fine then,” he said, not wanting to hear the rest of the excuses. “I’ll just be there for Thanksgiving then.”
“Um...we thought maybe you had other plans...like with your new friends up there.”
What?
“What are you saying? That you’d rather I didn’t come at all?”
“Lee, dear, your father hasn’t quite gotten over…I think it’s just a matter of time though, and when—”
“Mother, I know.” He couldn’t stop himself from blurting it out.
“What, dear?”
“I know. I know all about Uncle Nelson. I know he’s my real father.”
She gasped.
Lee waited several seconds for her to say something, and when she didn’t, he asked, “Are you there?”
She still didn’t respond.
“Mot
her, say something.”
“Who told you?”
He didn’t feel good about lying. “No one had to tell me. I figured it out on my own.”
“How long have you known?”
“It doesn’t matter. I should have been told this a long time ago.”
“I know, dear. I know. But you realize why we couldn’t tell you, don’t you?”
“Not really.”
“His name would have been ruined, his reputation. And our name as well. Henry had businesses to protect. And I had my charities and—”
“Hold on a minute. So it didn’t matter what all this did to me, just so it didn’t affect any of you? And what are you talking about anyway? Why would you and Father have anything to lose? And why did you take me in in the first place if you were so worried about yourselves?” He realized he had gone too far, but he couldn’t help reacting to her incredibly insensitive comment.
“You’re my child. I couldn’t have given you up.”
He couldn’t breathe. What was she saying? That she had relations with her own uncle? He knew he couldn’t have heard right.
“Lee?”
“I didn’t know that part of it.”
“What part of it?”
“That you’re my real mother.”
“Well, whom did you think was your real mother?”
“Just someone Uncle Nelson had an affair with.”
Silence.
“Mother?”
“Lee, Uncle Nelson is not really my uncle.”
“What? Who is he, then?”
Her sigh included a sob. “His real name is Nelson Sambourg, not Sedgewick.”
A chill went down his back. “I have to sit down, Mother. This is way more confusing than I originally thought. So you’re telling me you had an affair with this man, got pregnant, had me... Wait a minute. How did you explain the pregnancy?”
“I stayed in the New York apartment that summer. Henry didn’t know I was pregnant. No one did.”
“What? Mother, this is making no sense.”
“It’s a rather complicated story.”
“Well, how about giving me the short version. Start with how he found out.”
“I assume you mean Henry. He came to New York on a surprise visit.”
“And found you there...pregnant.”
Red Clover Page 21
