Amanda (4 page)

“you’re bound to remember more now that you’re here,” Reece agreed.

Only Kate appeared impervious to the younger woman’s appeal, her enigmatic gaze moving among the others as if she were watching some performance staged to entertain.

Walker slid his hands into his pockets, forcing himself to remain silent. Christ, she was winning them over already, the men at least. That hesitant, pensive voice … He was torn between the professional urge to remind Jesse yet again that nothing had been proven and the increasingly personal urge to find
some way of penetrating Amanda’s smooth and deceptive mask of self-control to find what lay underneath. She was hiding plenty, he was sure. He could feel it. Every time she opened her mouth, all his instincts tingled a warning for him to beware of what she said.

Jesse was patting her hand with the slightly awkward touch of an undemonstrative man, and when she stirred and smiled at him, Walker could have sworn there was a flash of something calculating in the smoky depths of her eyes.

“I’m sure I’ll remember more eventually,” she said, as if reassuring herself more than them.

“Of course you will,” he said, giving her hand a last pat. “it’ll all come back to you.”

Maggie came into the room then, carrying a tray which she set down on the coffee table between the two sofas. She handed out tall glasses of iced tea, unsmiling, then took one for herself and sat down in a chair opposite the fireplace.

“Have I missed anything?” she asked.

In a colorless tone, Kate reported, “Amanda doesn’t remember the night Christine took her away.”

“Am I supposed to find that surprising?” Maggie slumped in her chair and propped sneaker-clad feet on the coffee table. She was wearing jeans and a crisp white man’s shirt, hardly the usual housekeeper attire but standard for her. “It was twenty years ago, for God’s sake, and she was a child.”

“Nobody expects her to remember everything,” Jesse said, reaching out to pat Amanda’s hand once more and giving her a smile. “We were just curious.” He hesitated, then said, “It must have been hard on you and your mother all those years.”

It wasn’t precisely a question, but she accepted it as one and nodded. “Yes. Mother held down two jobs
most of the time while I was in school, and even then there wasn’t much money.”

As if the question had long haunted him, Jesse said, “Why did she cut us off like that? I would have helped her even if she’d felt she couldn’t come back to Brian. And, later, after he was killed …”

Amanda was shaking her head as she leaned forward to set her glass on the coffee table. “I don’t know. She didn’t talk about any of you or about Glory, and all she ever said about—about my father was that she had loved him very much.”

“She changed her name, your name,” Jesse said, and it was an accusation of betrayal.

Again, Amanda shook her head. “I don’t know why she did that. I don’t know
how
she did it. Until she was killed last year and I found my birth certificate among her papers, I didn’t even remember being Amanda Daulton.”

“How could you forget your name?” Maggie asked, the question honestly curious.

Amanda looked at her for a moment, then gazed off at something only she could see. Her eyes were wide, almost blank, and her voice was oddly distant when she spoke. “How could I forget my name. It was … what my mother wanted. She insisted, over and over, that I was Amanda Grant. I had to forget the rest, that’s what she told me. I was Amanda Grant.”

“Did she hate us so much?” Jesse asked in a voice that ached.

With a blink, Amanda returned from that distant place and looked at him. Focused now, she said, “I don’t know. Try to understand … she didn’t want me to ask her questions, so I didn’t. It was like … she had a wound she couldn’t bear to have touched. Maybe we would have talked about it one day if she hadn’t been killed in that car accident, but I can’t
know that. It seems to me that for my mother, all of you and this place just stopped existing the night she left.”

There was a stricken expression in Jesse’s eyes. “She must have heard about it when Brian was killed. She must have
known.
Didn’t his death matter to her?”

Watching them, Walker thought that Amanda almost reached out to the old man, almost offered a comforting touch. But in the end, she clasped her fingers lightly together in her lap and merely looked at him gravely.

“That’s a question I’ve asked myself. Among her papers, I found a newspaper clipping about his death, but it happened so soon after we left here and that time is fuzzy in my mind. I don’t remember if she seemed different then, more upset than she had been. I just don’t remember.”

“She didn’t tell you he was dead?” Reece wondered in surprise.

Amanda frowned slightly. “I … don’t know. I have the feeling I knew, but I don’t remember her telling me. I know I wasn’t surprised when I found the clipping, except—”

“Except what?” Walker spoke for the first time, watching her intently.

She met his gaze, her face utterly without expression for a split second before she smiled sadly. “Nothing, really. I was just surprised he was so young, that was all.”

She turned her attention back to Jesse, and Walker didn’t say a word. She had just lied and he knew it. The question was, what did it mean?

“J
ESSE
—”

“Don’t say it, Walker.”

“I have to say it.” Walker watched as Jesse went to the compact wet bar tucked away in a corner of the big room and poured himself a scotch. He wasn’t supposed to drink, but that hardly mattered now. “Somebody has to say it. There’s not a shred of evidence to support her claim. No proof.”

“She has her birth certificate.”

Maggie had taken Amanda up to her room, with Reece going along to carry the luggage, so only Walker and a silent Kate were left with Jesse. And the old man’s features were set in a stubborn expression that would have been familiar to anyone who had ever known him.

“She has a photocopy of the birth certificate,”
Walker said, trying anyway. “Which anybody can get. And the notary dated that photocopy barely more than a year ago—shortly before Christine supposedly died.”

“Supposedly?”

“I haven’t been able to confirm it, I told you that. I checked in Boston and then the entire state, and found no record of any traffic fatality by the name of Christine Grant—or Daulton or her maiden name, for that matter.”

Quietly, Kate asked, “And what did Amanda say to that?”

“She was vague,” Walker replied. “Damned vague. She said her mother was cremated, the ashes scattered —okay, fine, I’ll buy that. But what about the accident itself? Various state and local officials like to keep track of things like that, and why couldn’t I find any record? It happened on a highway somewhere outside Boston, she said, and she’s not sure where the death would have been recorded. Rhode Island, maybe, or Connecticut. Or, hey, how about New Hampshire?”

“She didn’t put it that way,” Kate decided with a faint smile.

“No,” Walker agreed, “but almost.”

“For God’s sake,” Jesse said impatiently, “she was probably in shock when Christine was killed, and it’s been months since then. Maybe she just doesn’t remember where it happened.”

“Maybe,” Walker said. “But I can take you to the precise curve in the road where my parents were killed —and it’s been nearly ten years.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Kate said gently, “You travel that road almost every day. How could you ever forget?”

Walker offered her a slight smile but changed the
subject quickly, annoyed at himself for having dragged anything personal into this discussion.

“The point is, precious little this woman claims can be verified.” He stared at Jesse and added deliberately, “I don’t believe she’s Amanda Daulton.”

“She’s got the right coloring,” Jesse said.

“She doesn’t look like Brian or Christine.”

“Christine was delicate.”

“She was tall. She also had blue eyes.”

“Gray eyes are dominant in our family,” Jesse snapped.

“So is unusual height and heavy bones,” Walker reminded him evenly. “Genetically, the real Amanda is far more likely to be tall and imposing.”

Jesse frowned down at his glass. “Her blood’s AB positive, and that’s rare.”

“Three percent of the population. In a country with a quarter billion people, that’s quite a few possibilities. About seven and a half million if my calculations are correct.”

Jesse shrugged. “If you say so. But still rare, and what are the odds for someone claiming to be Amanda to just happen to have that type? Slight, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I don’t play odds,” Walker reminded him. “I’m interested in what I can prove. Her background’s full of holes, Jesse. Maybe Christine
did
somehow manage to get them new identities twenty years ago—by claiming that a hospital fire had destroyed records of Amanda’s birth and that her own birth certificate was somehow lost during the chaos of World War II, something like that. Stranger things have happened. But I can’t find elementary-school records for an Amanda Grant in Boston, where she supposedly grew up, and high-school records are incomplete and—
oddly enough—missing photographs of Amanda Grant.”

Impatient, Jesse said, “So maybe she’s camera-shy or just happened to miss school that day.”

“All four years? Eight years counting college, because she isn’t in those yearbooks, either. And here’s another odd thing; Amanda Grant minored in architecture, but when I casually asked the lady upstairs if she knew anything on the subject—she said no.”

“Probably misunderstood you,” Jesse decided.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I do!”

Walker sighed, but didn’t give up. “Okay, then what about medical records? She claims they didn’t have a family doctor, that there was a clinic in their neighborhood, but it was rather conveniently closed down a few years ago and I haven’t been able to find out where the paperwork went.”

“Who the hell cares about medical records? Do you think it matters when she got her vaccinations or how many times she had the flu?”

Walker held up a hand to stem the old man’s irascibility. “That’s not the point. The point is what’s normal. People leave a paper trail, Jesse, a trail of photographs and documented facts. But not her. In twenty years of living, even under a false name, she should have accumulated documents in different areas of her life. School records, medical records, bank records. But all hers are either remarkably incomplete or unavailable. She has a checking account less than a year old. She signed the lease on her apartment in Boston just six months ago. Before that, she’d ‘rather not say’ where she lived. No credit cards or accounts. She’s never owned a car, according to the DMV, and claims she’s misplaced her driver’s license.”

“Well, so what? Hell, Walker, I have no earthly idea where
my
license is.”

Walker didn’t bother to point out that since Jesse hadn’t driven himself in thirty years his license had long ago expired. “Look, all I’m saying is that her story looks suspicious as hell. There are too many questions. And whoever she is, I’m willing to bet she’s fabricated a background with just enough information to sketch in a life. She can’t prove she’s Amanda Daulton—but I can’t prove she isn’t. Maybe the DNA tests will be conclusive, but it’s doubtful since there’s nothing distinctive enough about the Daulton family —genetically speaking—to show up in the blood. And having to use your blood for comparison instead of the parent’s makes it even more difficult. At best, we may be told there’s an eighty percent probability that she is who she claims to be.”

“I’ll bet on eighty percent,” Jesse said flatly, his eyes fierce.

Walker didn’t have to have that explained to him. As the only child of Jesse’s only son, Amanda occupied a very special place in the old man’s heart. He had loved Brian so much that his two other children had been all but excluded from his affections, and Jesse was as ruthless in his paternal feelings as he was in everything else. He had seemed virtually unmoved when Adrian died with her husband, Daniel Lattimore, in a plane crash in 1970, leaving her two boys for Jesse to raise, and Kate might as well have been invisible for all the attention her father gave her.

But Brian had been different, and his daughter was all Jesse could have of that favored son.

If Jesse convinced himself the woman upstairs was indeed his granddaughter, he was entirely capable of leaving no more than a pittance to his daughter and grandsons and bestowing the bulk of his estate on
Amanda. Never mind that Reece worked hard as a junior VP of Daulton Industries, that Sully had done an excellent job raising and training the Thoroughbred hunters for which the Daulton family was justly famed, and that Kate had spent her entire life as the gracious hostess of Glory.

None of that mattered.

“Jesse—”

“it’s
her
, Walker, I know it. I knew it the minute she walked into the room.” Jesse’s eyes were still fierce. He downed his scotch in a gulp, grimaced briefly at the liquid fire settling into his belly, then nodded decidedly. “Amanda’s come home.”

“You can’t be sure, not so quickly.” Walker knew he wasn’t making much headway, but he had to try. “At least give it a little time, Jesse. Wait for the test results, and in the meantime talk to her, question her about her life, her background. Don’t jump the gun on this.”