The 19th Christmas

by James Patterson

  For the next twenty minutes the sky crackled with rockets and pyrotechnics, all reflected in the water below and capped off with a brilliant grand finale.

  My husband and I kissed in the New Year.

  I told him, “I love you, Joe. I love you so much.”

  “I’m so lucky, Blondie. Do I say it enough? I love you, too.”

  “You say it a lot.”

  He kissed me again.

  And then I cried. The feeling had been building, and it came out in full waterworks with heaving sobs. Joe held on to me until I was laughing again.

  My best and dearest friends were all around us, hugging one another, kissing their partners, and I noticed that I wasn’t the only one with wet cheeks. I’d never seen Brady cry.

  At Jacobi’s urging, we huddled, rugby-style, to wish one another the best of everything. We girlfriends pressed cheeks and ruffled one another’s hair before settling back into the arms of our men.

  This was it. The best New Year’s Eve of my life.

  I felt ready for whatever the New Year would bring.

  Epilogue

  January 2

  Chapter 94

  The New Year’s holiday had ended, and for Joe, January 2 began as a workday like any other.

  He had kissed Lindsay good-bye as she left for the station, walked Julie to the pre-K school bus, and settled her into her seat next to her favorite aide. Then he went back home, made a roast beef snack for Martha in exchange for a handshake, and sat down at his desk. At ten-something that morning, as he was paying bills in his home office, his desk phone rang.

  The caller ID said Drisco, a landmark hotel in Pacific Heights.

  He picked up the phone and said, “Joe Molinari.”

  All he heard was soft breathing, so he said, “Hello?” and was about to hang up when a young woman’s voice said, “Papa? Papa, it’s Francesca.”

  Joe felt the floor drop away beneath him. The receiver nearly slipped from his hand. He got a grip and said, “Franny? Is that you?”

  There was nervous laughter and then she said, “It’s me. All grown up and right here in San Francisco.”

  It felt crazy but he believed her.

  The last time he’d seen Franny, she was Julie’s age. Just about four. Talking. Asking questions. Why, why, why? He hadn’t been able to answer the important ones.

  He filled the lengthening silence by asking, “Okay to call you Franny?”

  “Of course. Okay to call you Papa?”

  “Of course.”

  They both laughed and then Joe asked, “How long will you be here? Who or what brings you?”

  The daughter he hadn’t spoken to in more than twenty years said, “You, Papa. I came to see you. I have to fly home in two days. To Rome.”

  Joe loved the sound of her voice, Standard American with a hint of Italian. He said, “Two days? When can I see you? What’s your schedule?”

  “I’m free until my flight on Friday.”

  The last time he’d seen Franny, she’d been wearing footie pajamas and sleeping under a mobile of the cow jumping over the moon in the small bedroom with baby-farm-animal wallpaper in the Washington, DC, apartment. The time before that, she was also asleep. And before that, also sleeping, ad infinitum.

  He tried to picture her as an adult. “Would you like to have lunch?”

  “Today?”

  “Yes. I can pick you up at your hotel at say—noon?”

  “Perfect,” said his daughter—his elder daughter.

  They ended the call and Joe spun his chair around and stared out the window at the blue sky. He remembered saying good-bye to her as she slept and then leaving their apartment, not knowing that Isabel was packed and ready to grab Franny and fly away.

  What was her last memory of him?

  Fighting with her mother, Isabel?

  He shook his head, remembering his fractious marriage to his college girlfriend that had shown cracks and fissures right away and had only gotten worse after Franny’s birth. His work, the lengthy assignments away from home—it wasn’t what Isabel had wanted or expected in marriage.

  One day in June he’d come home to find a note stating that she had taken their baby girl to Rome, where her parents lived. Next to that was her lawyer’s business card. After that, she’d cut off all contact.

  Neither one of them had pushed for divorce, she for religious reasons, he because he thought she would change her mind. Fifteen years later, when Isabel finally filed, he had signed the papers and had to accept that his ex-wife’s parents were kind and that Isabel would take good care of Franny.

  But had she?

  What kind of woman had Franny become?

  He swiveled back to face his desk and touched the phone, thinking now of other things he should have asked his all-grown-up daughter. One of them was “How will I know you?”

  He just would.

  Joe picked up the phone again and called Lindsay.

  “Linds? I have something to tell you.”

  Chapter 95

  Joe dressed in a blue shirt, blue pants, and a blue-striped tie.

  He brushed his teeth again, combed his hair again, ran a soft rag across his shoes. He wanted to look good for Francesca. He had never even said a proper good-bye to her. What if she hated him for some abandonment story Isabel had told her?

  He shook his head. Would Isabel have done that? Yes.

  Joe looked at the stiff staring back at him in the full-length mirror. He untucked his shirt, stripped off his tie, and pulled on his blue jacket. In the kitchen, Joe poured kibble into Martha’s bowl, locked up the apartment, and pressed the elevator call button.

  He thought about Lindsay. She had known about Isabel and Franny since their first date, but they rarely talked about his first marriage—or hers. He was imagining the first meeting between Lindsay and Francesca when Mrs. Rose came out of her apartment across the hall.

  “Wow, Joe, you look nice.”

  “Thanks, Gloria. My daughter Francesca. She just called me. I haven’t seen her in a long time, not since she was this big.” He held out his hand to show someone about three feet tall.

  “Oh. I didn’t know…how exciting,” she said, looking completely dumbfounded. “Have fun. Take pictures.”

  Joe patted his phone in his jacket pocket, waved, and, telling himself to calm the hell down, got into the elevator. Out on the street, he unlocked his car, got behind the wheel, and drove toward the tony section of town called Pacific Heights. Even with heavy traffic, he arrived at the Drisco at a quarter to twelve.

  To steady his nerves, Joe drove around the block twice, slowly, and finally parked in front of the hotel. He sat for a few minutes, awash with feelings—guilt, concern, excitement, more guilt. Should he have fought harder? Gone after Isabel with legal remedies? But he remembered how he’d felt at the time, that they’d put each other through enough stress and that being part of that had to be bad for Franny.

  Joe got out of his car, took the short flight of steps to the hotel entrance, went to the front desk, and waited for a woman with four bags and several special requests to get checked in. When the clerk was finally free, Joe said, “I’m here to see Ms. Molinari.”

  The clerk picked up the desk phone and listened, then said to Joe, “No answer. She must be on her way down.”

  Joe walked over to the small seating area, two chairs with a round marble coffee table in between and a newspaper lying open on top of it. Joe sat down and began his habitual pattern of close observation, looking around the lobby at the flower arrangements, the gilt mirrors, the pattern of the carpet, the couple speaking to the clerk, and a man on his phone just coming in.

  Five long minutes passed. Joe couldn’t relax while waiting for Francesca, so he stood up, went outside into the noontime glare, and stood next to his car, where he had a view of the lobby through the doors.

  Only a minute later, a tall young woman approached the front desk. Her long hair was dark, wavy. She wore a slim-cut leather coat, a whi
te turtleneck, a pencil skirt.

  That was her. That was his daughter.

  The clerk spoke with her and then pointed though the glass door.

  She walked through the doorway, paused at the top of the steps, saw him, and offered a sweet two-part smile—first tentative, then a grin. She waved and came down the steps.

  Joe waved back as images of Franny as a little girl flashed in front of his eyes. The slim young woman stopped an arm’s length in front of him and said, “Papa?”

  “Franny.”

  Joe opened his arms to her, and she went to him. He felt her shaking as he enveloped her in a hug.

  He wanted to blurt out to her that he was sorry for everything, that what he regretted the most in his life, his biggest heartbreak, was that he couldn’t be close to her. He wanted to spill it all right then, explain that he had no choice but to go along with her mother’s unilateral decision, her refusal to let him be part of Franny’s life.

  Instead, he put his hands on her shoulders and held her away from him. Her eyes were blue eyes, like his. She had Isabel’s nose and mouth, his hair.

  “You’re beautiful, Franny. I’d know you anywhere.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and he kissed hers, but he wasn’t expecting her to kiss his other cheek in the European manner.

  “I’m a mess,” he sputtered. “I can’t quite believe this is happening. That you’re here.”

  “Let’s go to lunch,” she said, smiling and taking his arm. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Chapter 96

  Franny sat across the table from Joe in Spruce, a neighborhood restaurant that catered to business clientele.

  The main room was soothing, softly lit, the walls lined with mohair the color of café au lait, hung with black-and-white drawings of Paris street scenes. It had seemed to Joe to be the right place to bring her—low-key, near her hotel, great food—but Franny looked uncomfortable.

  He asked, “Everything okay?”

  She said, “I’ve never been to a place like this.” She waved her hand around, indicating the whole of the upscale space.

  He understood. She was all grown up, but she was still a kid. He said, “I should have thought more of what you’d want, Franny. I have client lunches here. It’s close to home.”

  “The room is beautiful,” she said. “I love it.”

  They ordered drinks, wine for Joe, a glass of tea for Franny, and as they waited for their entrées, Franny told Joe more about what had brought her to San Francisco.

  “When Mama found out that she had cancer, it was too late to do anything about it. Ovarian cancer. It’s fast and deadly.”

  “Franny, that must have been terrible.”

  “We went over everything during her…last weeks. The loads of photos she’d taken since she graduated from Fordham. Letters from my grandparents. Baby pictures. Some pictures of you.”

  Joe said, “I have so few things like that to show you, Franny. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

  “How could I know what you were going to say?”

  “I would have said, ‘I’ll pick you up at the airport.’”

  “I know that now, Papa, but a week ago, I wasn’t sure if I would come here or even if I would call you. Mama gave me a key to a safe-deposit box in a bank in DC and said she’d left some things there for me. I went to the bank and then, while I was at the airport, I decided to postpone my flight to Rome and come to San Francisco. Spur of the moment.”

  “I’m so glad you did it. Over-the-moon glad.”

  “I’m jumping all around. I’m sorry, Papa. Listen, I’m my mother’s messenger. She was very sorry, too. About keeping you away. She told me that several times over the last years. She said, ‘I screwed up. I was so young. I didn’t understand about marriage.’ She said if she could do it over again, she would have behaved differently, but it took her about ten years to figure it out. By then, it was too late. This is what she told me. I was a teenager. I had friends. I was growing up Italian. I hope this doesn’t hurt, Papa, but she got married again.”

  “I didn’t know. But it’s okay. Was he good to you?”

  “Giovanni. Yes. He is temperamental, I think you’d say. But a good man. He’s a tailor. He made my coat,” she said, smiling.

  “Giovanni. That’s Joe,” he said.

  She nodded.

  He said, “I want you to know that I missed you like crazy. I thought about you every single day. I asked myself a million times what I had done to you by giving in to your mother. Wondering if I’d done the right thing. Your mother was…I don’t know the word.”

  He knew lots of words for her—spoiled, selfish, uncompromising, willful—but none of them were appropriate at the moment.

  The waiter brought their salads, unfurled their napkins, and placed them on their laps. He asked if they wanted anything else. They said, in unison, “No, thanks.”

  Franny said, “She told me everything. That she’d left you a note, taken me away, and made sure you couldn’t find us.”

  “I was with the CIA. Of course I found you.”

  Franny laughed. “Well, there’s that.”

  Joe said, “I wrote. I called. I couldn’t even get her to talk to me. In the end, all I could do was trust her. I couldn’t offer you much without Isabel.”

  Franny poked at her salad.

  “Since you’re an intelligence man, I think I’d better tell you the truth, Papa.”

  “Yes, you should. We intelligence men have our methods of extracting it.”

  She laughed. And then she said, “Here’s what was in the safe-deposit box.”

  She reached into her purse, pulled out a little black satin bag, and removed two items from it. One of them was a small velvet box. Franny opened the box, and Joe recognized the small but good diamond engagement ring he’d given to Isabel.

  Franny showed Joe the other item, a leather-bound book with a lock and key. She said, “This is her diary.

  “She tells her diary all about falling in love with you.”

  “I’m…I’m glad you showed me. I don’t know what to say, except that I’m proud of you.”

  “She said it. She loved you.”

  Joe felt his throat closing. He nodded. “I loved her, too. Love isn’t always enough.”

  Franny’s face was flushed.

  “Thank you for showing me your mother’s things,” Joe said.

  “I had an ulterior motive, Papa, for my spur-of-the-moment decision to show up unannounced.”

  “You have my full attention.”

  “I grew up as an only child. I was afraid to ask you this in case you said no.”

  Joe put down his fork.

  “I want to meet my sister,” Franny said. “I want to meet Julie.”

  Chapter 97

  Joe called me from the car.

  He told me that he was taking Francesca for a ride around San Francisco, showing her the landmarks—the Golden Gate Bridge, Union Square.

  My husband sounded elated. I could hardly hear him. Not because of the traffic sounds, although there was a lot of that, but because I was trying to take in this earthquake that had come without warning.

  Joe asked me questions. When would I be home from work? Would it be okay to bring Franny home for dinner? What would be the easiest for me? We could go out, but he thought it would be best to have a home visit. Because Franny wanted to meet her sister.

  I thought about Julie getting this sudden news. She was a well-balanced and secure little girl, but still, she was three and a half. And very attached to her dad. Daddy’s baby girl.

  I could see her stamping her foot and saying ,“No, no, no.”

  I said, “Can you do the cooking, Joe? Stuff always happens just when I’m leaving work. You know.”

  “Can I do the cooking? You couldn’t stop me. I have a few authentic Italian recipes I’d like to try out.”

  “I’ll pick up dessert.”

  “Great,” he said. “Lo
ve you, Linds.”

  “Okay. Me love you too. Wait, Joe—what is she like? Do you like her?”

  “She’s great.”

  “Good. Good. What kind of work does she do?”

  He laughed.

  “What, Joe? Doctor? Lawyer? Schoolteacher? Nun?”

  “Believe it or not, Blondie, Francesca is a cop.”

  I tried to leave work early, but Brady called an impromptu squad meeting to start off the New Year. Naturally enough, I was required to attend. And make a report on staffing.

  “Homicide is bracing for a busy year ahead,” I said, and I left it at that.

  As soon as escape was possible, I bolted from the Hall and drove to our neighborhood pastry shop, where I picked up a box of cannoli and an assortment of cookies. Then, at just under the speed limit, I drove home.

  Joe’s car was parked in front of our apartment building. The engine was cold. I checked.

  I took the elevator, opened our front door, and called out, “Helloooo. I’m home.”

  But no one answered. No one was there, not even Martha. I looked around for any kind of clue—Joe’s shoes under the coatrack, a woman’s jacket on the hook—but there was nothing.

  I took the white string-tied boxes to the kitchen counter and smelled marinara sauce, saw covered pots on the stove. Then I saw a folded sheet of notepaper addressed to me.

  What now?

  I read, Linds, we’ve gone for a walk. Be back in a few.

  Joe had noted the time. I checked. It was ten minutes ago.

  I took the opportunity to jump into the shower, rinse off, and cool down. Then I thought about what to wear to meet my husband’s daughter. I was under the spray, reviewing my scant clothing options, when I heard the sound of footsteps on hardwood and voices in the living room.

  I turned off the water and heard Joe and a woman talking, and Julie was piping up, too. I wrapped myself in a towel and was reaching for the doorknob when the door opened. I hadn’t locked it. I suppose I gasped.

  “Mommy.”