The Homecoming Baby (12 page)

He felt a little guilty now, realizing that he was
hoping to exploit that generosity. He wanted her to do something for him. He wanted her to tell him where Angelina was.

He was pretty sure she knew. When she'd met him for the first time, her reaction had been a frantic jumble of emotions. Shock, mostly. But with the shock had come other things. Recognition. Disbelief. Pain. Confusion.

And fear.

Why fear? If Angelina Linden were dead, as so many people in town liked to speculate, she couldn't be held accountable, legally or morally, for what she had done that night thirty years ago. The reappearance of her abandoned son couldn't hurt her anymore, couldn't embarrass her or reveal her shame to a new husband, new friends, new
children.

No, Angelina was still alive, and Trish knew it. Why else would a faint scent of fear seep from her whenever she was around Patrick?

She held out her hand and took the sweater. “Thanks. You didn't have to come all the way out here to deliver it, though. You could have given it to Celia.”

“It was no trouble.”

He looked around the empty waiting area, where the magazines were neatly stacked, toys tossed in the basket, clean mullioned windows twinkling as spring sunlight peeked in and out of pine shadows.

“Things seem calm for once,” he said. “Have you had lunch? I'd love to take you somewhere for a sandwich.”

“I've eaten. But thanks anyway.” She looked down at her appointment book. “I don't think this is one of the afternoons Celia sees patients here, but I'll double-check—”

He knew it wasn't. And he knew she knew. She was the ultraorganized type who probably knew the schedules of everyone at this clinic by heart. But he let her look anyway. It bought him a little time.

He came closer, casting a seemingly casual glance at her work station. People betrayed a lot about themselves by the trivial items they collected.

But her desk had nothing. It was uncluttered. No cutsie teddy bears with hearts on their tummies, no postcards taped to the computer monitor, no dried rose petals or ticket stubs or silly quotes. No snapshots of friends and family.

Just computer tower, keyboard, files, appointment book, small basket of pencils, telephone, telephone book, stapler, Scotch tape dispenser…

A small wave of frustration moved through him. This was like the desk of a robot secretary, not a real flesh-and-blood person. Didn't anything foolish or sentimental make it past her relentless common sense?

But then the sunshine shifted again, and something gleamed from the corner.

And he finally saw it. The one incongruous note. A small, silly glass snow globe. Nothing expensive or artistic. Just the kind of cheap, fun junk you could buy at any airport or souvenir stand.

Venice, Italy,
the lettering across the bottom read.
And inside the globe, tilted ridiculously in its clear bubble of water, lay a crude black gondola, like a shipwreck.

He picked up the globe and shook it. The gondola rocked as a blizzard of fake snow swirled around it.

Trish went subtly more rigid, though she didn't take her gaze from the appointment book.

He had to work to keep himself from revealing his wash of triumph. Why should his touching this make her tense? He shook it again, watching the snow drift into the little boat.

This snow globe was the place to start, then. This was the one frivolous thing she hadn't been willing to purge from her carefully arranged life. He wondered if it might be the clue that would eventually lead him to Angelina.

“I love Venice,” he said in an easy, conversational tone that held nothing of what he was really thinking. He set the globe down and looked at Trish with an open smile. “It's the most fascinating city in the world, don't you think?”

She hesitated a moment before answering.

“It certainly seems so in the pictures I've seen,” she said, turning her pencil around and around between her fingers. “But I've never been there. A friend sent that to me.”

“Oh, you should go,” he said with enthusiasm. “It's extraordinary. Very elegant and mysterious.”

She fidgeted with a file, pretending to straighten it. “I don't know.” She looked up, finally, and smiled. “I don't really travel much.”

“Still, someday you should go. Maybe you could stay with your friend. It might be worth it, just for a change of pace. It's about as different from the American Southwest as you can get.”

She stared at him a minute, then looked down at the snow globe. She touched its clear plastic dome.

“Yes,” she said. “I've always thought that, too. But maybe that's why I don't go. I suspect I belong here. And Venice—” She looked back up. “Venice has all those shadows, all that complicated beauty. All those secrets.”

For a split second he wondered if she were trying to tell him something. She sounded so sad, so haunted, so filled with inarticulate longing, that he had a strange impulse to reach out and give her a comforting hug.

He didn't, of course. He had no right—no relationship had been openly acknowledged between them. She might not even be certain he was her sister's child, though she clearly suspected something.

If Patrick, a near-stranger, grabbed her, she might well be downright alarmed.

Which suddenly was the last thing on earth he wanted to do.

But at that moment his antagonism toward Angelina deepened even further. Why should she be off in Venice—or Switzerland, or China, or wherever her search for excitement had led her—while in her wake decent people like Trish still suffered, missing her so keenly it etched premature lines into her face?

Maybe, when he found Angelina, he'd mention
that, too. Her careless abandonment of people who needed her may have begun with her baby, but it hadn't ended there. There was Tee. And she must have had parents. And obviously her sister grieved even now…

Hell, he didn't need to pump this nice woman for information. He could probably find Angelina Linden by following the trail of broken hearts.

P
ATRICK DIDN'T GO STRAIGHT
back to the Morning Light. He drove around Enchantment for a while, getting better acquainted, looking over some of the areas he hadn't seen yet. It seemed like a good way to clear his head.

He could have drawn a map of the entire town, border to border, from memory. But still he felt no sense of belonging, which was strangely disappointing.

Realistically, though, how could he? He didn't know where the Lindens had lived thirty years ago—or Tee Ellis, either, for that matter.

And the little town had so many faces. In the east, grassy ranchlands sprawled open and free. In the south, poverty gnawed holes in the sides of dilapidated trailer homes and pounded dents into rusty pickups. To the north, the landscape morphed into a moonscape of fantastic red rock shapes.

Then, as the sun began to go down, he turned west, drawn by the magnificent display of fiery red that spilled over the tips of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Switchback Road—he liked the name. If he felt
like being philosophical, he might say that was the name of the road his life was on right now. Abrupt, unforgiving about-faces and hairpin turns. Sometimes facing forward—then suddenly dragged back to the past. Never secure that you were still headed in the right direction.

The real Switchback Road cut a jagged path through thick pine forests, ever upward. Progress was slow. Every few yards the road would turn again, and the nose of his car would suddenly seem to be pointing over a void.

As it grew darker, he decided it would be sensible to turn around and head back to level ground. He'd seen enough.

Besides, he wanted to call Celia.

Celia.
She had been one of the things he'd meant to sort out. Her gentle voice, her lovely face and soft smile, her generosity and courage and laughter—they'd all begun to get under his skin.

And then, like a fool, he'd kissed her.

Now he had to get his head straight about what to do next. He could tell he really had only two choices. He could do nothing—or everything. She wasn't an in-between kind of woman.

But he descended the mountain as uncertain as he'd been when he began to climb it.

Damn this place. No easy answers anywhere.

Maybe he ought to go back to San Francisco, he thought wryly as he pulled into the small parking lot of his bed and breakfast. His track record had been much better there.

But his troubling day, which had begun with Ellyn Grainger, wasn't quite over yet.

When he entered the Morning Light lobby, he saw Lydia Kane standing at the check-in desk talking to Betty, the owner. Betty seemed to be in the middle of profusely thanking Lydia for a basket of homemade pastries.

“I was just thinking this morning that it had been months since we've had any of your wonderful almond muffins, Lydia. I guess things keep you pretty busy over at The Birth Place.”

“Yes, we've been swamped,” Lydia answered—but her voice sounded distracted. She obviously had just seen Patrick walk in, though she turned back to the other woman quickly and pretended to be fiddling with the basket. “If you put these in the refrigerator right now, they should still be fresh for breakfast in the morning.”

Patrick knew right then that this was no coincidence. Lydia hadn't decided to deliver muffins on this particular day purely by chance. She'd done it deliberately because she wanted to see him, and she didn't want to do it at The Birth Place.

He paused on the threshold, giving her time to pretend to be surprised at his appearance. But he had underestimated her. She might stoop to arranging a “casual” meeting, but she wouldn't stoop to pretending shock.

“Hello, Mr. Torrance,” she said.

Betty made her excuses and headed for the kitchen with the basket. Lydia Kane waited until she was out
of earshot, and then she gave Patrick a neutral smile. Minimal warmth, but no open hostility.

“I was hoping I'd run into you here,” she said.

Patrick raised his eyebrows. “And you did. How fortunate. Any particular reason?”

Lydia didn't shrink from the question. “Frankly, I wanted to get another look at you. I wanted to see if my first impression was accurate.”

He accepted her blatant, head-to-toe inspection. “And was it?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes. You do look very much like the man everyone believed to be your father. With all the advantages of wealth added in, of course. Tee Ellis never really had enough meat on his bones, and even when he stole watches or sneakers, he never got hold of anything as expensive as the things you're wearing.”

He had to admire her. She looked strong, all bones and angles and intelligent eyes—and obviously it wasn't just an act. She wasn't going to allow herself to hope that his arrival had been a coincidence. She was a woman who met life head-on.

“Maybe we should sit down?” He indicated the roomy flower-upholstered armchairs in the lobby, just a few feet to the side of the reception desk. “We might as well be comfortable while we talk.”

“All right.” She followed him to the sitting area, and when they both had taken their chairs she gave him a straight gaze from her piercing gray eyes.

“I don't see any point in wasting time dancing around the basic facts, Mr. Torrance. I know who you
are, and not just because you've got Tee Ellis's bad-boy smile. I know because I was the one who arranged your adoption.”

He smiled. “So I've been told.”

“Then may I ask you a few questions?”

“Sure.”

She took a minute to settle herself comfortably on the chair. She draped her long, gray braid across her shoulder, straightened the pink pendant she wore around her neck, and then, when she was ready, she spoke.

“When did you find out that you were adopted?”

“About a year ago. When my father died.”

“Your mother told you?”

“My mother died when I was six.”

“Oh.” Lydia absorbed that information with her first visible shift of expression. “I'm very sorry to hear that. She was a lovely woman, as I recall.”

Patrick shrugged. “I'm sure you remember her better than I do.”

“Who told you about the…unusual…circumstances of your birth?”

“A man named Don Frost, of Don Frost Investigations.” He crossed his legs comfortably. “I don't mean to be rude, Ms. Kane, but I don't really think these are the questions you came here to ask, are they?”

Her poker face was extraordinary. He'd negotiated life-and-death stock deals with billionaires who couldn't control their emotions as well as Lydia Kane.

“Not really,” she said, leaning back again in the
chair. “Actually, I'm not sure I came to ask any particular questions at all. I think I just came to get an idea of what kind of man you are.”

“And have you come to a conclusion?”

She took another moment to study his face. “Not really,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I think it's quite possible you haven't decided yet.”

He raised one brow. “Haven't decided what kind of man I am?”

“That's right.”

He chuckled. “That may be a little too deep for me, Ms. Kane. Or a little too disingenuous. I'll tell you what I think. I think you came to find out what I intend to do with the information, now that I know who I am. You're wondering if I'm planning to rake up the old scandal all over again.”

“All right, then.” She folded her hands in her lap. They were strong hands, with long, capable fingers. “Are you?”

He let the direct question go unanswered. “As I understand it, the Linden family never acknowledged that The Homecoming Baby had anything to do with them. And there wasn't any Ellis family, really. Just one old man who drank himself to death after his son disappeared. According to my sources, old Mr. Ellis was dead before Tee Ellis's body was found in that mineshaft.”

“Your sources are very good.”

“Yes,” he said. “I think they are. So here's a deal. I'll answer your question about why I'm here and
what my plans are, if you'll agree to answer two questions first.”

She shook her head. “I can't promise anything. I'd have to hear the questions before I agreed.”

“That's fine. This isn't a game, you know.” He smiled. “This is, though everyone seems to have forgotten it, my life.”

“I haven't forgotten,” she said with the first real emotion he'd heard from her yet. “You lived with me an entire month, Patrick. I fed you and bathed you and rocked you to sleep until I could find a good home to take you in. You won't remember that, of course. But I do.”

He ignored her use of his first name. He wasn't in the mood to get sentimental with the woman who had put him at Julian Torrance's mercy and then put him out of her thoughts.

“All right, then, here's my first question.” He could tell she was braced for it, both physically and mentally. “How long had I been lying on that bathroom floor before the anonymous phone call was made to The Birth Place?”

For the first time, she clearly wasn't sure what to say. He saw the temptation to lie flicker through her eyes. But then he saw her tighten the muscles around her mouth and force the truth through her lips.

“Three hours,” she said. “I can't be sure, but I'd estimate about three hours.”

That was longer than Don Frost had said. Three hours. A chill passed through him as he thought of how slowly each minute would have ticked away.

“Well, Patrick? You said two. Do you have another question?”

“Yes, I do.” He tightened his mouth, too. “Do you think that the exquisite Angelina Linden ever once considered the possibility that a newborn baby could die if left untended on a cold, dirty bathroom floor for three full hours?”

Lydia's hands were still folded in her lap, but the knuckles were white, and he could hear that her breathing had grown labored.

“I'm afraid I don't have an easy answer for that, Patrick,” she said. “There is no proof who your mother really was, and there's certainly no way to know exactly what went through her mind the night you were born.”

She took a deep breath that didn't seem to come easily.

“I can tell you this, though. The girl who gave birth to you was young and terrified, and in more pain than most high school girls have ever known. She was lost, and she was completely alone. I very seriously doubt that she was doing what you'd call ‘thinking' at all. I think she was probably just surviving. Perhaps, now and then, she prayed.”

He didn't speak. He merely looked at her. Her face seemed infused with a passion he wouldn't have suspected was in this iron lady.

They stared at each other for several tense seconds. Then, without another word, she stood.

“It's your turn, Lydia,” he said. “Didn't you have a question for me?”

She impaled him with that steel-gray gaze. Then she shook her head. “Not anymore,” she said. “You've already told me what I needed to know.”

 

C
ELIA HAD BEEN TRYING TO FIND
Patrick all afternoon, but no one knew where he was. By the time she'd finished dinner, she was pretty much going crazy. She tossed her annoying, useless, nonringing telephone onto the bedspread and snatched up her car keys.

He had to sleep sooner or later. She was driving to Morning Light, and she was going to wait there until he got back.

His rental SUV was in the parking lot. She had just registered that happy fact when she saw him emerge from the bed and breakfast and stride toward the parking lot.

He wasn't coming home, she realized with a stab of disappointment. He was going out.

She rolled down her window. “Patrick,” she called. “Hi!”

He glanced over, and for a moment his face was so stern and tense she hardly recognized him. He looked, in fact, more like Tee Ellis than he ever had—even that first day, at the ghost town.

“Hello,” he said with a clear note of surprise in his voice. He leaned down to peer at her through the open window. “What are you doing here?”

She squeezed the steering wheel. It would be pretty difficult to pretend she was just passing through the
bed and breakfast parking lot. It was a semicircle that went nowhere.

“I was hoping to find you. But I guess I've caught you at a bad time. Were you going out?”

He hesitated. Then he shrugged. “Yes, but I haven't got a clue where I was headed. It's been…” He took a long breath. “Quite a day.”

“Want to talk about it?” She smiled. “I've been told I'm a pretty good listener.”

He shook his head. “I think I'm all talked out.”

She felt like an idiot. He probably just wanted to be left alone, and here she was, practically stalking him. She toyed with her gearshift, moving it back into Drive so that she could get out of his way.

Next time she'd realize that when her phone didn't ring, that was a pretty clear message in itself.

“Sure, of course, I understand,” she said. “I'll just let you go on and—”

“How about coming with me?” His eyes were very bright in the parking lot lamplight. “I'd like that.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Take me somewhere. This is your world. Show me what you love about it.”

She laughed softly. “That's kind of open-ended. I love everything about it. Is there anything in particular you'd—”

“Anything peaceful,” he said. “Anywhere we can be alone and quiet. I'm tired. Every word I've uttered today has been dead wrong, and I'm sick of the taste of my own foot.”

She considered the possibilities. But the right one stood out like a spotlight. “I've got it,” she said. “How about Red Rock Bridge? No one to talk to out there but the man in the moon.”

“Sounds good. How far is it?”

She grinned. “It's only about ten miles north—but it feels as if you've gone halfway to heaven.”