Daddy's Gone a Hunting (39 page)

M
ark called in to the office on Friday morning at nine o’clock to say that he hoped to be there by noon, but he would certainly be in time for the one o’clock client meeting. He had never told his new employer about Tracey. Now he explained, as briefly as he could, to the senior partner at his law firm that the Tracey Sloane who had been in the television news yesterday and in the headlines of today’s papers was his sister.

As quickly as he could without being rude, he managed to cut off the outpouring of condolences he was hearing from his boss. “It’s going to be much easier for my mother and for me to know that Tracey’s remains will be in the family grave with my father,” he said. Then, once again, he declined the sympathetic offer to take the day off and insisted that he would attend the meeting.

He had made the call as he was sitting at the breakfast table with his mother. She had arrived last night on what was supposed to be a five o’clock flight from Chicago but because of the snowy weather there, the flight was delayed. The hour’s difference in time between New York and Chicago meant that it was past ten o’clock when she arrived at LaGuardia Airport, and it was almost eleven by the time they had collected her bags and taken a cab to the apartment.

When they arrived, it was to find the table already set and the food Jessie had ordered waiting for them. A few minutes later they
were sharing the platter of assorted sandwiches and the sliced pineapple and strawberries, and then choosing from the selection of petite dessert tarts Jessie had prepared. He had told her that the first thing his mother ever did when she returned home, after she had been out, was to make a cup of tea. Last night Mark had found that the kettle had already been filled, and the teapot with teabags in it was on the stove.

Now Martha Sloane, a robe over her long cotton nightgown, said, “I can’t believe I slept this late, and I can’t believe I slept at all. When I got here last night, I was so afraid that I’d just lie awake thinking and thinking. I didn’t even realize how hungry I was. I hadn’t had anything yesterday except a piece of toast at breakfast. But after that lovely supper, and then finding the bed all turned down and ready for me, I guess I just relaxed and oh, how I needed to do that.”

“You sure did, Mom. You looked exhausted.”

Mark was already dressed to go to the office, except that his collar was open and he had not yet put on a tie. He had earlier told his mother about going to Hannah Connelly’s apartment before he had phoned her on Wednesday evening to tell her about Tracey, and that one of Hannah’s friends, Jessica Carlson, had come down with him while he made the call.

“I guess you know that I was pretty upset, Mom. I hope I didn’t make it harder for you,” he said now.

“No, and I’m glad that you weren’t alone when you called me. It’s good that you had a friend with you.”

“I had just met Jess a few minutes earlier,” he explained. “No, that’s not quite true. I met her and Hannah Connelly the night I moved in here last week. We rode up in the elevator together. Do you realize how impossible it would have been to imagine that we, who were perfect strangers, would meet and then find out that Hannah’s family owns the property where Tracey’s body was found?”

When he spoke of Tracey, he was deliberately using the
word
body
. He did not want his mother dwelling on the image of what had been found in the sinkhole. A skeleton with a cheap necklace still clasped around its throat.

They sat quietly for a moment, then Martha said, “It does seem impossible, Mark. Do you remember that quote from Byron, ‘stranger than fiction’?”

“Yes, of course.”

“
’Tis strange—but true, for truth is always strange. Stranger than fiction.”

“That certainly applies in this case,” Mark said, fervently. He sipped his second cup of coffee. He knew that now they were both preparing themselves for what was going to happen. After his mother got dressed, they were going to the medical examiner’s office to arrange for Tracey’s remains to be shipped to the funeral director in Kewanee. Next week there would be a funeral mass, and Tracey would be buried with their father in the cemetery only a few miles from the house. Tracey would finally be home.

Putting off the moment when he would once again suggest that he go alone to the medical examiner’s office, he said, “Mom, Jess is a lawyer. She’s very smart and she’s very kind.”

Martha Sloane’s maternal instinct told her that her son liked this lady very much. “I’d love to meet her at some point, Mark. Tell me about her.”

“She’s about thirty. She’s tall, slender, with lovely red hair down to her shoulders.” He did not tell his mother that when he had finished speaking with her the other night, after he hung up the phone, he had burst out sobbing and buried his face in his arms at the table. Jessie had leaned over, put her arms around him, and said, “Let it out, Mark. You need to cry.”

Later, when Jessie knew he hadn’t had dinner, she had scrambled eggs for both of them. Then yesterday, she had phoned to see how he was doing, and when she learned his mother was coming in
fairly late, she asked if it would be okay to leave something light to eat in his apartment. “I’m sure she won’t want a heavy dinner,” she had said, “so if you drop off your key in Hannah’s mailbox, I’ll get something in for you both. There’s a gourmet deli in your neighborhood that you probably don’t know about yet. I’ll pick up something there. Anyhow, Hannah and I will be going out to dinner nearby, so it’s simply no trouble.”

Martha Sloane pushed back her chair. “Now, Mark, before you start suggesting again that I wait for you here while you go to make Tracey’s arrangements, I’m going to shower and get dressed. We will do this together.”

Mark knew better than to argue. He cleared the table and loaded the few breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, then walked into the living room to wait for his mother. He sensed that there was something different about the room. He looked around and then realized what it was. The pictures he had laid on the floor in anticipation of hanging them over the weekend were already on the wall in the exact spots he had marked for them.

Obviously, Jessie had done that, too. I’ll invite her to have dinner with Mom and me tonight, Mark thought. I know Mom wants to meet her and thank her for being so thoughtful. And so do I. I’ll call her right now.

When he walked into his bedroom to make the call and to get his tie and jacket, Mark had a spring to his step that had not been there since before Tracey left home. Since the time when she used to pitch to him in the backyard or take him to the movies and buy him candy or popcorn. Or both.

88

N
ick Greco did not realize when he began his research into the Connelly family on Thursday afternoon that he would find reams of material on Dennis Francis Connelly, the brilliant, powerful, and eccentric grandfather of Kate and Hannah Connelly.

Dozens of articles had been written about him. Many of them began by chronicling his humble beginnings in Dublin, where Dennis had been a street urchin who was arrested several times for stealing. Then, after finally staying in school long enough to finish the eighth grade at age sixteen, he completed high school in only two years, won a scholarship to Trinity College, and graduated summa cum laude in less than three years.

The pictures of him as a teenager and in his early twenties captured a thin, somewhat tall figure, unsmiling, and with eyes that seemed to look at the world with angry resentment.

And if he felt resentment, he had a right to feel it, Greco thought as he read that Connelly’s father and uncle, who were twins, had died when they were only twenty-six years old, burned to death when they were trapped in a raging fire that swept through the dismal factory where they both worked seven days a week.

The twenty-four-year-old mother of Dennis had been six months pregnant when his father died. Three months later she gave birth to twin boys, so small and already malnourished that they survived only
a few days. Then, at age seven, Dennis had begun to try to support his fragile and heartbroken mother with a combination of begging and working odd jobs. And sometimes by stealing.

When he was ten, a kindly old woman, who could not live alone, had hired his mother as a housekeeper. Giving both of them a home, she soon recognized how smart he was and persuaded Dennis to go back to school.

He was an angry and proud man, Greco thought as he skimmed through the rest of the articles about the early life of the founder of the Connelly complex.

He quickly read through the accounts of Dennis sailing to the United States, getting a job on Wall Street, and beginning to amass his fortune.

At that point in his research, Nick turned off his computer and took his regular train home. On Friday morning he was back at his desk by eight o’clock and resumed his Internet research.

His interest deepened when he read that Connelly had finally married at age fifty-five because, as he had put it, “a man wants to know that his descendants will enjoy the fruits of his labor.”

Not the best or most romantic reason to marry, Greco thought as he studied the formal wedding picture of Dennis Connelly and his timid-looking, thirty-five-year-old bride, Bridget O’Connor.

According to the
New York Times
birth announcement, their son Douglas was born on December 31st of that year. A year later, their son Connor’s first birthday was celebrated in January at their Manhattan townhouse.

What’s that about? Nick asked himself. A year later Douglas would have had a first birthday, too. Was Connor adopted? The answer came when Nick read an article in a small religious magazine in which Dennis Connelly had bared his soul to a sympathetic priest. He had shared with him that his sons were really identical
twins, one born on December 31, the other four minutes later, on January 1 of the following year.

He related that he had lived in constant fear of what he regarded to be the family curse, as he put it, that had begun when his father and his father’s twin had perished in a factory fire, and then his own twin brothers had died at birth. “My mother never had enough to eat when she was pregnant with them,” Dennis Connelly had told the priest.

Then he admitted that because his twin sons were actually born in two different years, he had hoped to avoid the curse that had befallen his father, his uncle, and his siblings. He explained that he never referred to them as twins, nor had he allowed anyone else to do so. “They never wore matching outfits. We never celebrated their birthdays together. And they always went to different schools.”

It was clear to Nick Greco from everything he had read about the life of Dennis Connelly that his early traumatic losses had profoundly affected the way he raised his sons. He wanted them to be competitive on every level. He wanted them to be strong. He wanted them to play football on varsity teams at separate colleges. If they were injured, they were expected to play through the pain and recover quickly. Even when they were small children, he had no sympathy if they complained of any ailment. If they fell off their bikes, he made them get right back on.

In an interview when Dennis’s son Douglas was twenty-one years old and had just graduated from Brown University with both academic and athletic honors, Douglas had been asked, “Do you feel that you have had a privileged life?”

“Yes and no,” he had answered. “I know that by almost any standard, I would be considered privileged. On the other hand, I remember reading that the son of President Calvin Coolidge had a miserable job one summer and his friend asked him why he would
take it when his father was president of the United States. His answer was, ‘If your father was my father, you’d have taken that job, too. My father thinks the same way. He has never cut us any slack.’”

Greco leaned back in his chair for a long minute, struck with the realization that he had broken through.
The background is the answer,
he thought.
The background has always been the answer.

To verify what he now believed he knew, Greco returned to his computer search to see if he could find any coverage of the funeral of Connor and Susan Connelly.

89