Autumn's Child

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  “Oh, Dad, please believe me,” she exclaimed. “This family is no threat to you. You’re still my dad. You’ll always be my dad.”

  “They are your blood, Colleen.”

  “Norton and Laura are yours, and they are horrible people. Of course I got things from my biological parents: my build, my facial features, my ability to learn languages. But my values, my morals, they are from you and Mom. Why do you think I am a good teacher?” She needed him to believe this. “It isn’t because of my genes. It is because of you, the way you listen to your patients and try to figure out what they are saying even when they don’t have the right words. You respect them even when they are putting Mountain Dew in a baby’s bottle. You’ve always said that they are not bad people for doing that. They just have terrible information.”

  “That is fortunately improving.”

  She was not going to let this conversation be about dental care even if he was more comfortable talking about that. “I don’t know how you got that way. Grannor was the complete opposite.”

  “I did learn from her, from both of them,” he said slowly. “The one thing I knew is that I didn’t want to be like my parents. That’s why I left Georgia as soon as I could. I wanted to be the opposite of them. Until I met your mother, that was my map, my only map, not being like them.”

  “My version of the map was a whole lot easier to follow. I never had to read it upside down like you did. That’s true of Sean and Finn too. You have been their role model, Dad, not the Bannings, but you and Mother.”

  “I’ve always given your mother the credit for how well you three turned out.”

  “Well, don’t,” she said bluntly. “Take some of it for yourself.”

  “That is very sweet of you.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’m not being sweet or nice. I am telling the truth, and Mother would agree. Ask Genevieve. She knows what was in Mother’s heart.”

  “Yes, she does…but, Colleen, you know what probably bothers me the most about your calling that other family? You needed help, and it was something I couldn’t do.”

  * * * *

  There were two more eggs in the nearly empty refrigerator. Colleen used them to make cookies for the security guards. She could feel her natural optimism returning. She didn’t know how this would end, but it would. By next January she would be back in the classroom. The heirlooms would have been shipped to wherever her cousins wanted them. The ownership of the lake house would be settled. Things would be normal. Maybe not pre-Ben normal, but everything else would be just fine.

  When she stepped out on to the patio to take some cookies to the guard on the dock, he frantically waved at her to get back inside.

  Waiting for normal might be tedious, but she was willing to humor the overprotective men in her life for a few more days. Her father loved her; the Healy family loved her in a different way. Ben might not love her in the way he used to, but he did wish her well. So she was going to accept her role as a fragile blossom because rationally she did know that there was a danger out there, and this seemed like the best way to handle it.

  In the middle of the afternoon Ben called. He was finally leaving the resort. Did she have anything to add to the grocery list? She told him to be sure and get eggs. Around five the phone rang again. She assumed that it was Ben calling to find out about salted or unsalted butter, large or extra-large eggs.

  “Ms. Ridge? Colleen?”

  It wasn’t Jonathan Forbes; the voice was similar, but the accent was more muted. It must be his brother Zachary.

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you for calling.”

  A quick, soft laugh came across the phone line. “Jonathan said that you’d know my voice, that you can do the things our sister can. She teaches French just like you.”

  “Really?” That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “But she doesn’t know Norwegian. At least she didn’t at Christmas. She probably could have learned it by now.”

  This was how the O’Connells, her mother’s family, talked about each other, lighthearted, teasing, and warm.

  “First,” he continued, “I have to apologize. Getting tied up with Gideon is not easy, but I think we’re on track to clearing things up for you and your friend.”

  “Just like that? That fast? You knew who the hackers were?” She couldn’t believe it.

  “We have a pretty good idea of who are the ringleaders among Gideon’s fans and who has this kind of skill. So we made a deal with them.”

  “A deal? What did they want? We haven’t been able to figure that out. They are going to be so disappointed in me. I’m really ordinary.”

  He laughed again. “They’re disappointed in all of us. They want us to be Gideon reincarnated or to at least spend our lives worshiping him.”

  He explained the deal the family had made. This particular cluster of fans had in their possession some writings of Gideon’s, rough drafts of a number of songs and two drug-fueled journals. Not only had the documents been stolen, but the family owned the copyright on them. “We have piles of injunctions to keep them from circulating or publishing anything. We are giving them permission to publish one of the rough drafts in a week if the hacking stops within the next twelve hours and another one in six months if there is no reoccurrence.”

  “But this was so fast. How did you do everything so fast?”

  “We have a number of different plans in place because we have always worried about the fans messing with the grandkids, and it sounds like you are the oldest of their generation.”

  The grandkids’ generation? Did she have even more cousins? “But you don’t know that,” Colleen protested. “I know I look like your mother and sisters, but people resemble each other sometimes.” The first candidate on Autumn’s TV show had been a woman who randomly resembled Autumn. “Why are you doing this for me before we have gotten any of the results?”

  “Whether or not you are related to Gideon, you are struggling because of him. Mom and Dad have been cleaning up after him since he was five, and now the rest of us do it. But I should warn you that if the DNA is a match, this is all just a start. Gideon’s normal fans are going to be interested in you, and then there are all of Autumn’s. You have to manage the publicity. We can help you through the worst of it, although I suppose Autumn has offered too.”

  “Yes, but my goal is to avoid publicity. That doesn’t seem to be hers.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be. But you’ve done a great job so far. The hackers think your name is Leah or Leia, something like that. Someone in the office has it written down.”

  “Leilah?”

  “Yes, that’s it. But they keep hitting a brick wall with her. They can’t even find anything associated with a Leilah who would be the right age, but they still seem to think it is her. Do you know who she is?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t have anything to do with this, and she is a lot older than me.”

  So Leilah had ended up doing Colleen a service, distracting the hackers in their search for Ariel.

  “Do you all have a way of figuring out if the hacking has stopped?” he asked.

  “I don’t, but I’m sure Ben—my friend—will know.”

  “As soon as you check, get back in touch so we can authorize the first release of the rough draft.” Then Zachary said that he had to leave for a meeting, but that the DNA results should come soon. There was a branch of the lab not too far from the Duke campus. Jonathan had driven over and given his sample in person.

  Colleen was still staring at the phone when she heard Grannor’s car come up the drive. Ben pulled around to the kitchen door. That’s what they did after going to the store.

  She hurried to open the kitchen door. She had so much good news to share. Ben got out of the car and came around to the rear. The cavernous trunk was full of grocery bags. “Good God, you got a lot.”

  “I had Nate’s cre
dit card. Why not let him buy us raspberries and prime rib?” Then he grew serious. “Did your headmistress call? Does she want you to take the leave of absence?”

  Had that call only been this morning? So much was happening. “Yes, but maybe I won’t have to now.” She didn’t want to start telling him until they had the groceries inside. She reached in the truck and picked up two of the bigger bags. Ben scooped up the handles of several bags at once and shoved those up over his arm so he could carry more. He followed her in the kitchen. Once she had set her bags down, she helped him untangle himself.

  “I have news. I called one of Gideon’s brothers, and—”

  “I thought that they didn’t want to hear from you.” Ben started to unload the groceries.

  “He did want to hang up on me, but once I could recite what he said in Portuguese, he was really wonderful.”

  “Portuguese?” Ben had been about to get the rest of the groceries, but he stopped, a little bewildered. “What does speaking in Portuguese have to do with anything?”

  “I never said I could speak Portuguese. That’s what I had going for me, that I couldn’t. Here’s the good part, he—actually, the other brother—thinks that they have stopped the hackers.”

  Ben drew back. “How? Between my guys from school and the team at the money managers, where did they find people better than that? And so fast?”

  “They aren’t doing anything fancy-schmancy technical. It’s plain, old-fashioned blackmail and bribery.” She explained the stolen papers and the deal the Forbeses had made with the hackers. “Do you have a way of checking to see if the hacking has stopped?”

  “I have an after-hours emergency number for the money people. But if the brother gave them twelve hours to stop, that won’t be until the middle of the night.”

  “Would you try now anyway?” She didn’t want to wait.

  “Okay, but we need to get the rest of the groceries. There’s ice cream in one of them.”

  She went outside for the other bags and listened to Ben’s conversation as she looked for the ice cream.

  He was shaking his head as he hung up. “I’ll be damned,” he said. Ever since the hacking started, there had been a steady stream of pea shooter attacks on his investment account. They weren’t creative or challenging, just annoying. “At 3:17 p.m. Eastern time, they suddenly stopped. The guy I talked to is worried that they could be gearing up for something more sophisticated.”

  “Or it could be over.” Why couldn’t he be a little more hopeful? “Will you call your hacker friend?”

  “Don’t call him a hacker. He isn’t anymore.” But he turned back to the phone.

  She quit working on the groceries to watch him. He was shaking his head again, but it was a good shaking, expressing disbelief, not disappointment or disapproval.

  “You know those four little charges they put on my credit card?” he said when he was done with the call. “They issued a refund. They added up the amount and credited the account even though the amount was insignificant.”

  “That was weirdly honorable of them. Or they’re trying to send a message to Gideon’s family, saying that they were laying down their guns. What about Autumn’s website?” She had forgotten to say anything to the Forbeses about that.

  “Autumn’s people have suspended her site from their end so it’s harder to know the status of that, whether or not they got rid of the porn link.”

  “Did you ask your friend about the other site, the Find Ariel one?”

  “The damage has been done. There’s no way to make that good without access to the actual computers. One of my friends crashed the site. It’s probably best to leave it to its eternal rest and hope that the administrators learned a lesson. I bought one of those rotisserie chickens. Can we have dinner now? I’m starving.”

  “Okay, but there is one other thing. The hackers thought that Leilah was Ariel.”

  “Leilah?” He was surprised. “Why would they think that? Oh, right, after she left, I did a pretty deep search for her. That would have looked suspicious, much more than the couple of calls I made to you. Do you know if they harassed her?”

  “They were looking for someone my age, so apparently not. Do you have any idea where she is?”

  He started to cut up the chicken. “No. She doesn’t want to be found. I am going to respect that. Now tell me about the Forbes family.”

  As they ate, Colleen told him everything she had learned.

  “They have a point about the publicity,” he said eventually. “This hacking may be over, but remember all those people outside the hotel, they are still going to think that they own you. I imagine that your school isn’t going to want you back until things die down.”

  She supposed he was right. If the DNA came back as a match, it was foolish to suppose she would be teaching the fall semester. “Zachary says that the people who manage Gideon’s affairs will help me.”

  “What about Autumn?”

  Colleen dropped her napkin across her plate. It had been such a relief to deal with the normal-seeming Forbes brothers that she hadn’t thought much about Autumn all day. But the start of all this had been a young girl who, however successful she had been, had been vulnerable enough to be seduced by an older man.

  “I don’t know, Ben. I feel so conflicted. Why can’t she and I meet like two normal people?”

  “Because she doesn’t have a normal life. She’s dangerous, Colleen. You need to be careful.”

  “Dangerous? You aren’t serious, are you? That’s so harsh.”

  “Remember what happened in DC.”

  Oh, Lord. He had lost control for ten minutes, and now he was never going to let go of it.

  But she had to admit that she had been scared that day. “I think a lot of that was all the mystery associated with not knowing who Ariel was.” As usual she was trying pretty hard to look on the bright side. “Once everything is out in the open, what is there to worry about?”

  “It will be a different kind of danger. She will try to turn you into her mini-me. She’s going to want you to go to appearances with her. Her stylists will do whatever stylists do, hair, makeup, designer gowns.”

  Colleen actually liked the sound of a makeup artist and a designer gown. That would be fun. “Why does that worry you?”

  “I wouldn’t want to see you taken over by that relationship. It wouldn’t make you happy to go to LA and live in her shadow.”

  This was annoying. Here they had had all this good news, and he was being Mr. Doom and Gloom. “Why are you so sure you know what will make me happy? What are you asking of me, Ben? To repudiate her? Not to give her a chance?”

  “Not to let her break your heart.”

  He was asking that? Hadn’t he been the first person to break her heart?

  “Don’t you trust me to make those decisions for myself?” She stopped, her hands suddenly dropping to the table. “That’s it, isn’t it? All this, and you still don’t trust me, do you?”

  Chapter 17

  They were back to the wearying politeness. Why couldn’t one of them be like Leilah and disappear?

  Because we’re better than that.

  She cared about him. No, she loved him. For all his stupid, pigheaded, testosterone-poisoned, worst-case-scenario blindness, she loved him. She also trusted him. As long as he thought that he could help her, he would never leave.

  But she wasn’t going to stand on her ear trying to prove herself to him. She wasn’t as desperate as she had been four years ago,

  Over the weekend he and his friends restored her access to what she had filed on the cloud; she got back all her lesson plans, her work on the grant, letters she had written to her grandmothers. Most of the data from her phone was also there. Apparently she had a setting that did back things up. That was a surprise to her. She was going to be more careful in the future.

 
She couldn’t restore access to her checking account online. Ben said she might be able to do it over the phone on Monday.

  “I’ll do it in person.” She had to go into Charlottesville anyway. She needed to check on her apartment and return her summer tenant’s security deposit.

  * * * *

  Her apartment was fine. The bank urged her to open a new credit card and sign up for more services. She kept saying no, and they finally restored everything to how it had been before.

  But it was strange to be in Charlottesville. The whole town was gearing up for the start of classes, the secondary schools and the university. The shops had washed their windows and were displaying new merchandise. The bars were offering coupons, hoping to lure in the students. Her friends were comparing course schedules and fussing about changes. Everyone else was busy; she had nothing to do. For the first time in her life, Colleen felt that she was someplace that she didn’t belong.

  On her way out of town she stopped at the university’s housing office and put her apartment on their Off-Grounds Housing list, offering it for fall semester. Her father hoped to settle her grandmother’s estate by the end of the year. By the start of second semester her cousins would have had to take possession of their heirlooms, whether they wanted them or not; the lake house would be emptied; she would know how much money she was going to have. Her life could go back to normal.

  Although it might be a different normal. She would be known as the biological offspring of Autumn Chase and Gideon Forbes.

  She still didn’t have actual confirmation yet. The website for the lab said that even with expedited service, processing for a DNA match would take three to five business days. Jonathan had given his sample on Thursday. So tomorrow, Tuesday, would be the absolute earliest the report would come back. But as it was August and people might be on vacation, next Friday was more likely.

  She stopped in the village for gas. As she was waiting for the tank to fill, she automatically took out her phone and checked her email.