Ransomed Dreams (21 page)

“You. I meant, ‘Like it’s your fault.’” She wiped at her tears. “I don’t like that I owe you gratitude.”

“Sheridan, don’t think that. Don’t think that at all. You do not owe me a thing.”

“But—”

“Shh. I mean it. I was in the right place at the right time.”

“You really think you’re an angel, don’t you?”

He chuckled, gave her arms a quick squeeze, and let go. “What’s happening with your dad?”

“Nothing. There’s no change.”

Earlier, after listening to Helena’s bombshells, Sheridan and Calissa had been speechless. They drove off, admitting to each other they needed time to process the disturbing information. Sheridan voted for home and a hot bubble bath. Calissa insisted they stop at the hospital first. Since Calissa was the one behind the wheel and the bossy one, that was where they went.

Sheridan refused to go to his room with Calissa. Instead, she phoned Luke, the only one who could help her process.

She said to him, “Calissa said we had to visit Harrison.”

Luke gave her a curious look, of course deducing there was more. “Something happen at the museum? After the guy in the ugly blue car left?”

“You could say that.”

His jaw clenched, but he spoke evenly. “Have you had dinner?”

She shook her head.

“You need to eat.”

There he went, figuring out exactly what she needed.

And there she went, letting him do it.

* * *

Sheridan and Luke sat in a booth in an obscure little place, a quiet neighborhood restaurant-bar with lots of oak wood, muted ball games on television screens, and dim lights. They had invited Calissa, but she chose in her martyrlike attitude to remain at the hospital.

Sheridan savored a french fry, no ketchup, just enough salt, a hint of garlic. “I’ve missed these. They are the ultimate comfort food, in my opinion. Almost as good as ice cream. Any flavor.”

He smiled.

“Go ahead and ask.”

“Ask what?” he said, biting into a thick hamburger.

“Is eating high-carb, high-fat comfort foods one of my post-trauma coping mechanisms? Actually you don’t have to ask, because I am obviously twenty pounds heavier than the last time you saw me, so the answer is yes.”

“You were too thin before, and you lost weight that first month.”

“Whatever.” She felt a rush of well-being, no doubt thanks to blood-sugar levels getting a hit of food. “What did you and Bram do today?”

“Research. We’re going to have to travel before we can nail things down. We’ll start in D.C. I’ll most likely visit Caracas, too.”

Sheridan set her hamburger on the plate. Sometimes even gluttony didn’t help.

“Sher, you need to eat more. I mean,
Sheridan
.”

“What’s in Caracas?”

“The beginnings.” He sipped his soft drink. “So the blue was ugly, huh? As in garish?”

“Offensive.”

“Tacky?”

“Yucky.” She gave him a quick smile. “We got a phone number at the museum. You really don’t know where we went after?”

He shook his head.

And so she told him.

At some point in the retelling of Helena Van Auken’s story, she noticed that Luke quit eating. When she got to the part where Helena said that the happy ending lay in Ysabel’s daughters, she quit talking.

“And?” Luke prompted. “What about the papers?” He echoed her own question to Helena. “She’d seen them before?”

Sheridan twisted the linen napkin on her lap. “Mamá showed them to her.”

“Then your mother knew what your father was doing?”

“Oh, Luke. She worked as a prostitute at that bar. They would take compromising photographs and blackmail guys. It was a way to recruit unsuspecting foreigners and force them to smuggle contraband.”

“Photos wouldn’t necessarily be that big of a deal, even back then . . . unless the guy was a big deal.”

“They targeted diplomats and politicians.”

“Big deals. Like Harrison, a newbie congressman.”

She nodded. “But he was one conniving step ahead of them. He’d heard rumors and wanted in on things. He played them like they were the dupes. He pretended to be drunk and went off with my mother. They never got to the photo. He demanded to see her employers. They reached some sick agreement.”

“That took some nerve for him to go into a group like that and make demands.”

“Nerve or something. I’m really not impressed. Anyway, he became a smuggler. He recruited others. He got paid for it. And according to Helena, he fell in love with Ysabel Ortiz.”

Luke’s eyebrows rose slightly.

“I know. It doesn’t compute, does it?”

“I’ve seen her photograph. She was a beautiful woman.”

“Besides that, I’m sure he had ulterior motives. She was gentle. She would go along with whatever he coerced her into doing. She would look good next to him on the campaign trail. And most of all, she would provide reasons for him to visit Venezuela more often than his work might dictate. So why not marry her?”

“I’ve heard of odder arrangements. Ysabel’s Place, then, most likely referred to this bar, as we thought. Flashers were diamonds. Falling stars were rising stars, such as diplomats, who were compromised, brought down, and caught in a blackmail trap.”

“Catch a falling star.”

“Yep.” He paused, his eyes unfocused. “As of thirty-five years ago, according to those papers, diamonds were the thing. One question is, how widespread was it? One-time visitors got caught, carried a few million dollars’ worth of diamonds to their home country, handed them off. All for free. Others—perhaps those assigned to Venezuela and living there—may have been used differently. They may have literally smuggled or simply kept their mouths shut. Harrison and others like him—”

“Others like him?”

“Sheridan, you know he wasn’t the only crooked politician involved with this. It would have taken a team effort to keep such an operation going. He may have created it or simply joined a crew already in place. The main concern now is the possibility that such a team still exists or, at the least, their influence continues via a younger team.”

“That’s just way too much to think about.”

“You don’t have to. It’s not your job.” He paused. “You said that Helena saw the papers?”

“My mother showed them to her right after she photocopied them at the library. She told Helena that she had found them lying out on his desk at the house.”

“Seems odd that he’d be so carefree about such things.”

“I think he underestimated Mamá. She was uneducated but streetwise. She understood the gist of his notes, that he was still personally involved in Caracas. She wanted Helena to see the papers before she hid them in the attic and confronted him. She said it was the last straw. She was leaving him and taking me with her. Calissa was already away at college.”

“What exactly did the notes indicate to your mother?”

“Helena said they were convoluted, but one thing was evident.” Sheridan took a deep breath. “Through the years my mother was aware that Harrison influenced policy to favor the illegal diamond trade.”

“Ysabel actually said as much to Helena?”

“Yes. They couldn’t prove anything, though. They couldn’t do anything about it. My mother’s main concern was more personal. Harrison had promised her that he was no longer involved in the day-to-day business the way he was in the early years of their marriage. But these papers showed that he
was
. That he still helped those people who had . . .” Words failed her. Those people who had what? What verb described what they had done to young Ysabel Maria Ortiz and countless others in her situation? Persecuted, raped, imprisoned, coerced, controlled? The list seemed endless.

Luke reached across the table, gently drew her hand up from her lap, and took hold of it. “The notes showed that he was still involved with the likes of those men who had hurt your mother.”

“It was still going on! Girls were still being used. I can’t imagine how that must have devastated her.”

He nodded. “What happened when she confronted him?”

“Helena never talked to her again. Mamá died two days later.”

“I’m so sorry.” Compassion filled his expression. “How?”

“She was home alone and had an asthma attack. Until today, that was all I’d ever heard.” Sheridan gritted her teeth and tried to put order to jumbled thoughts.

“What did you hear today?” Luke asked softly.

“That either she committed suicide or he killed her.”

“Those are strong statements.”

“How do you kill yourself with an asthma attack? Her meds were right next to her on the nightstand.” Sheridan shook her head. “I’ve often wondered if she was allergic to him. Sometimes stress triggered her attacks, especially after they argued. If she confronted him as she told Helena she planned to do, she could have become that upset. He could have provoked her to the point of being ill and hidden her medication until he found her later that day.”

“Nothing provable, huh?”

“There . . . there was a note. Harrison showed it to Calissa after the funeral, and then he burned it. She believes it was Mamá’s handwriting but can’t swear to it. She only saw it for a moment before he held a match to it. It said she loved us but she couldn’t go on. I can’t buy it. She was gentle but strong-willed. She would have followed through on her decision to leave him.”

“Sheridan, no one wants to believe their loved one chose to leave them by suicide.”

“I know. It just doesn’t seem . . .” Sheridan felt resigned. Ysabel very well could have given up in the face of Harrison’s anger and, most likely, threats that she would never be free of him. She knew too much about him for him to allow her to go.

“Why didn’t Calissa ever tell you about this before?”

“He made her promise not to. In case you haven’t picked up on it, Calissa and Mamá didn’t relate very well. I think he used this as another way to show Liss what a poor mother she was.”

“Why didn’t he tell you? Because you were only thirteen?”

“I doubt my age mattered. I never really counted for much in my father’s eyes. I argued with him all the time. If I’d heard this wild tale about suicide, I probably would have caused him even more grief.”

“Why didn’t you two get along?”

“I often wished it were because I wasn’t really his daughter. But I have his ears and his chin. I also have no doubt that if I wasn’t, he would have disinherited me long ago and enjoyed telling me why.” She shook her head. “The thing he despised about me was that I was too much like my mother, whom he may have loved in a selfish way but certainly did not like. He despised her faith and her interest in volunteer work with the underprivileged, the two interests that I inherited as if such things were genetic. One of my earliest memories is telling him that Jesus loved him. I was four, and he slapped my face.”

Luke studied her. “Did he do that often?”

Often?
If her mother was not in the room and she said the words
God
,
Jesus
,
church
,
faith
,
cross
,
catechism
. . . She shrugged. “Depends on how you define
often
. I eventually figured out I could argue about anything, but I better not talk about God if he was within hearing. The last time I slipped up, I was seventeen.”

“What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. The more I know about him, the better the investigation goes.”

She noted his green eyes and the warmth of his hand around hers. The sting of his cold words about the investigation lessened. “Well, so long as you’re prying for impersonal reasons, I don’t mind introducing you to all my skeletons.”

He let go of her hand, glanced away, and pressed his lips together for a moment. “I apologize.”

For what?
she almost asked but didn’t need to. She understood
for what
as well as he did. For blurring the line between business and personal. For holding her hand longer than necessary. For being an unmitigated knight in shining armor with eyes that went green.

Now it was her turn to glance away and weigh her words. Perhaps the pang of loneliness stemmed from Eliot’s voice message or perhaps the emotional time with Helena. Whatever. She only knew that she welcomed Luke’s straying over the line into personal and wished he’d take her hand again.

She looked at him. “About a year or so after my mother died, Harrison began going on drinking binges once or twice a year. He seemed to time them around House sessions. One night, right after high school graduation, my boyfriend brought me home. We were on the front porch, kissing good night as teenagers do, and my father opened the door. He called me every name in the book, beginning with
slut
. He said I was exactly like my mother, the whore. I told him he was going to rot in hell. He smacked me.
Hell
was a religious word, you know, the thing that always pushed him over the edge.” Sheridan paused, shame hot in her chest, the sight of her black eye vivid in her memory. “The guy took me to my best friend’s house, whose mother was a jewel. They let me live with them until I moved into a dorm that fall.”

Luke clasped his hands in a tight fist atop the table. “Did he abuse Calissa or your mother?”

“He never touched Calissa. I don’t think he hit my mom, but if the sounds coming from their bedroom were any indication, he abused her physically in other ways.”

He exhaled an angry noise. “A real peach of a guy.”

“Yeah. His dark side remained hidden from the public. But for me, diamond smuggling and dishonest political dealings do not take much stretch of the imagination to believe.”

“You said you were like your mother, but it certainly doesn’t sound as if you had one ounce of her gentle nature.”

“No, I didn’t. And I’m sure my independent streak exacerbated the situation for him.”

“I’m sorry, Sheridan. I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks.”

They sat for a while, not speaking. She listened to the compassion in his silence, felt the strength in his presence.

Luke Traynor, aka Gabe the angel, carried her once again to a safe haven. There wasn’t a whole lot she could do about that except stay in it as long as possible.