Shadow Lover (21 page)
And he'd left. Stalked from the house, he remembered that much. He'd walked for hours, until all the lights in the old house had dimmed and then he'd gone back in looking for money.
His memory got vaguer at that point. He knew he'd ripped off
Constanza
, and he'd also known that Sally would immediately replace anything he took. He must have emptied Patsy's purse, then gone to Carolyn's room to see what she'd left lying around.
He could still see her face, watching him as he pocketed all of her treasures. She'd grown in the past year, and he'd been uncomfortably aware of her as female, rather than victim, for months now.
So he'd kissed her. He remembered that as well, the sweet shock of her young mouth, the incredible temptation of her body still warm from bed. It had haunted him over the years, and he never could figure out why. Maybe because that was the last thing he could remember.
He'd gone down to
Valmers
' boat was moored there, and he'd have no trouble hot-wiring it and taking it to the mainland, disappearing from the only family he'd ever known.
Someone had been waiting for him down at the beach, and he hadn't the faintest idea who the hell it had been. In eighteen years that wide, gaping space in his memory hadn't filled in. Nothing had come back to him, and whether he pushed it or let it be made no difference. A big section was simply gone from his life, including his attempted murder.
One moment he was kissing Carolyn Smith and thinking he was a pervert and that she was jailbait.
The next, he was lying on a narrow bed in a house outside of
Boston
, looking at the man who'd once been married to Sally
MacDowell
. He'd had a hole in his back from a bullet, one that had been roughly extracted and bandaged, and no memory of how he'd gotten there. According to John
Kinkaid
, he'd just showed up at his doorstep the night before, looking half-dead, and
Kinkaid
had let him in.
Later he'd been able to piece some of it together. The trawler filled with fishermen who weren't really interested in fish had hauled him out of the dark ocean and patched him up before dropping him off on the
Kinkaid's
address on it, and he could only assume he'd come across it when he'd been rifling his mother's purse. Either way, he was there.
He hadn't been expecting a touching, heartfelt reunion—he'd never been a sentimental kid—but the reality of it fell far short, anyway. He'd never seen pictures of his father, but it came as no surprise that
Kinkaid
was a good-looking man, even in his mid-fifties. No
MacDowell
would have settled for less than physical perfection.
He was tall, lanky, with a long face and brown eyes. Alex couldn't blame himself for not recognizing the significance of those brown eyes—at some point he'd hit his head and had a minor concussion to complicate matters. With a bullet-hole in his back he had no intention of going to a hospital emergency room or a doctor and
have
to answer questions. They'd just send him back to Edgartown.
Kinkaid
fed him soup and ginger ale, even woke him hourly to make sure he was okay. By the second day he was giving Alex sweet black coffee, which he'd always had to sneak from
Constanza's
kitchen.
"Sally's worried about you," he'd said, sitting down opposite the bed.
Alex had proceeded to slop hot coffee on his jeans. "You told her where I was?"
"Relax, kid. She hasn't got the faintest idea. I'm not about to snitch on you."
"But she'll probably try to get in touch with you. She's smart—she'll figure out I might try to find my father."
An odd expression crossed
Kinkaid's
face. "We haven't been in touch in over seventeen years," he said. "I doubt she'll even think of me as a possibility. It's been too damned long."
"Since I was born," Alex said.
"Yes." The single word left no room for questions. "She could find you. If she wanted to, she could find anyone," Alex said bitterly.
"If you think that, then why did you bother to run away? Or do you want her to bring you back?"
"I'll go back," he said. "When I'm good and ready. When I find the answers to a few questions."
"What kind of questions?"
Alex had snorted with adolescent contempt. "I wanted to meet my father, is that so crazy? That side of my life is a blank. Sally never talks about you; I've never even seen a picture of you. All I know is you walked out on us when I was born."
"And you want to know why?"
Kinkaid
lit a couple of cigarettes, passing one to Alex. He'd died of lung cancer ten years later, and Alex had given up smoking.
"I think I have a right to know," Alex said. "I have a right to know my father."
Kinkaid
sighed. "Sorry, kid, but I can't help you with that one. I'm not your father."
It should have come as a shock, but it didn't.
"Is that why you left her? Because she had an affair and got pregnant by another man?"
"Nope. The only time Sally got pregnant, I was the father. I have no doubt of that."
His head had been pounding for days—at
Kinkaid's
words the pain suddenly went into overdrive. "What are you saying?"
"That you aren't Sally's kid, either. Our baby was stillborn, and Sally never was a woman who took no for an answer. I don't even know where the hell she found you, though she must have paid through the nose for you. She brought you home and presented you as her newborn son, and if anyone had any doubts they were smart enough to keep their mouths shut."
"But not you?"
"Oh, I kept my mouth shut, all right. I just left. Our marriage had been a shambles for a long time, but I stuck around because of the kid. Once the baby died there was no need for me to get caught in Sally's lies."
"No, I guess not."
"Don't look at me like that,"
Kinkaid
said with rough kindness. "It's nothing personal. I'm sure Sally loved you just as much as she would have loved a kid she gave birth to."
"I don't know if that's saying much."
Kinkaid
shrugged. "As for me, it wasn't like I'd lost a puppy and could be happy with a new one. Once Sally lost our kid there was no reason for me to stay. You were her new toy, and she didn't need me around anyway." He sighed. "It was hard turning my back on all that money, though. Still, I don't regret it. I married someone
else,
we had a couple of kids, then went our separate ways. I see my daughters on weekends, and that's enough fathering for me."
Alex had stubbed out his cigarette. "I better get going," he said.
"
Naaah
, stay put,"
Kinkaid
said, pushing him back on the bed. "In a way I feel like you're some kind of kin to me. Like a stepson or something. After all, you're my ex-wife's kid."
"No, I'm not."
"Listen, I'm sure Sally loved you like crazy. Just because she bent a few laws to get you doesn't make it any different."
"Am I even legally her son?"
"Hell, I don't know. I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, kid. She was willing to do anything to get you—she's not about to come out with the truth at this late date. She never liked admitting when she did something wrong."
"Do you think she did something wrong?"
"It's none of my business. She always used her money to get what she wanted. It just wasn't what I wanted."
"Yeah," said Alex, reaching for another cigarette from the pack lying on the table. "So that makes two of us."
"Two?"
"Me and Carolyn. She brought another kid home a few years later, a little girl. She just didn't try to pass her off as her own. She didn't bother to adopt her, either. She always said single women couldn't adopt, but I didn't believe her. Sally could do anything she set her mind to."
"If she spent enough money,"
Kinkaid
said. "By the way, kid, what's your name?"
"Alex. Alexander
MacDowell
."
Kinkaid
made a rueful face. "We were going to call our kid Samuel. Samuel
Kinkaid
."
"It's a good name," Alex said.
"Yeah."
And five weeks later, when Alex finally left, his name was Sam
Kinkaid
.
It had been surprisingly easy to disappear. John
Kinkaid
had drifted a long ways from the insulated propriety of the
MacDowells
, and he helped him get all the paperwork he'd need to start his new life. He passed no judgments, simply gave Sam a carton of cigarettes and a hundred bucks when he left, and the promise to be there if he needed him.
He hadn't. He'd never seen him again, but it hadn't mattered. He had his new life now. For the first time he was free.
He'd had a dose of reality quickly enough, with no one to bail him out of trouble, no money cushioning his every move. And he'd reveled in it, bumming around
Europe
, drifting, trying his hand at a variety of things. In the last eighteen years he'd been a car thief, a college student, a stockbroker, a ski bum, a gigolo, and a carpenter. He was strong and resilient, with his own admittedly twisted sense of honor, and he needed nothing and nobody.
Until he heard that Sally
MacDowell
was dying.
It was funny how the news came to him. He wasn't a fanciful man, but he couldn't keep from feeling that it was fate.
The
MacDowells
, for all their money, kept a low profile. And Alex had deliberately kept himself from checking on them. That was his past life, over and done. He didn't care anymore.
Whenever he had spare money, free time, or any excuse at all, he found himself in
Italy
.
He even owned a small, tumbled-down house up in the hills there. Not quite a villa, grander than a farmhouse, it was little more than a ruin, barely livable, surrounded by overgrown gardens where the air always smelled of roses, no matter what was currently blooming.
His friend Paolo had been helping him repair the roof, and when he'd gone home after lunch he'd left the wrappings from his sandwich behind. An elderly edition of the international
Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper was old and faded, discolored from the sun. Why he should have chosen to read American financial news that was two months out of date still amazed him. But then, he was someone who always needed to be reading in his spare time—in the bathroom, while watching TV, when he was eating. He came across the news about the reorganization of
MacDowell
Industries when he was in the midst of a dish of cold pasta.
The article didn't say she was dying. It didn't need to—Alex could read through the journalistic lines easily enough. And he knew it was time to go home and find the answers to all the questions that had haunted him.
He couldn't exactly remember when the plan had hit him. At first he'd simply intended to go home and present himself to his loving family.
Warren
was the logical one to approach first—he didn't want to kill Sally from the shock of her prodigal almost-son returning.
But it hadn't been that easy.
Warren
was insulated from the hoi-polloi, and several layers of secretaries and receptionists protected him from phone calls. His apartment in
Finally, in annoyance, he'd left a terse message that Alex
MacDowell
wanted to speak to his uncle. He should have expected the swift response he got.
The
MacDowells
retained a large firm of lawyers. The return phone call from one of the junior partners was brief and to the point. Sally
MacDowell's
son was dead, and con men would be dealt with severely.
And that's when the idea had hit him. A little insurance, a little fail-safe. Years ago, someone had tried to kill him. One of the mighty
MacDowells
, probably. If they wanted him dead back then, they certainly wouldn't welcome him back now, when they'd gotten used to thinking all that lovely money was theirs. He had no idea what Sally's will contained, but he had little doubt that once he returned a large portion of her substantial wealth would devolve onto him. And Warren and Patsy
MacDowell
wouldn't like that.
