The Santiago Sisters (37 page)

New York

‘
I
’ll tell you.’ The man choked against the knife blade, his eyes alight with wicked satisfaction: at last, a chance to assert his identity. ‘If you dare …’

Calida held the dagger to his throat, the tip tickling the thin skin covering his windpipe. He had a pronounced Adam’s apple. She asked herself if she could slice through it if she must and the answer was yes. Just as Diego had slaughtered the
guanaco
because it was right: to put a hopeless thing out of its misery.

Her wrist cramped with her refusal to budge. The man’s leg was hurt but otherwise he was strong. He hadn’t been drugged, like her. He hadn’t been starved, like her. But she had the weapon. She had to stay in control. ‘Talk.’

The man gulped. His throat bobbed moistly.

‘My name is Martin Gallagher,’ he said. There was a pause, as if this name should mean something, but it didn’t. ‘But that wasn’t the name I was born with.’

Calida waited. The knife-tip didn’t move.

‘My old name was David Geddes.’

That did mean something. She just wasn’t sure what.

‘My mother is called Simone,’ he said, and the bitterness in
his words frightened Calida more extremely than anything else he had done to her. ‘She gave me away. When I was a baby, she gave me away and left me for dead. She didn’t care what happened to me. She was a girl, then, and I know what excuses she would bring. Do you think those excuses mean anything to me? Do you think they make
any fucking difference
?’
He bared his teeth. ‘If anything, they make it worse.’

Calida’s mind raced.
You think I’m Tess.

That’s why.

This has nothing to do with Scarlet Schuhausen. It’s always been you.

Simone. Tess. You.

‘The people who took me were cruel and careless. They didn’t want me. Nobody wanted me. And it wasn’t enough that she gave me up. She helped herself to another child when it suited her. Never mind about me, or the fact I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to be born, wasn’t ready to live, but when
she
was ready—that was fine. So she adopted you.’ Hate infected his words. ‘She gave you everything. More than I would ever have asked for. All I needed was the love of my mother.
My mother.’

You think I’m Tess. You think we’re the same.

It was in Calida to blurt the truth—right there, waiting on the back of her tongue. But the words didn’t come. She couldn’t say them.

‘Simone didn’t love me enough to keep me,’ he spat, ‘but she was willing to love someone else. All that crap about giving a child a home,
had she given me one?
Had she given a second thought to the home
I
ended up in? I lived with brutal people. People who made me do things I didn’t want to do. I’ve never recovered from that.’

Calida’s grip was loosening on the knife. She felt pity, and
with pity came weakness. ‘How was I to know?’ she murmured. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

‘It never is, is it,
Teresa
?’
He sensed her waning and his eyes hardened. ‘That’s your real name—just a dirty, poor little girl who hit the jackpot. That was my jackpot. It was my prize. Simone was my mother—not yours.’

He moved like a snake, quick and lethal.

The knife fell from her hands.

S
imone stepped inside her Broadway apartment. There was an awful aroma.

What on earth …
?

It was so long since she’d been here. Hollywood friends occasionally used it, Lysander when he was in town and keeping a low profile—and it occurred to her that she should have taken better care of it. Installed it with a proper alarm, for starters.

I’ve been burgled.

Dread notes hit her one after the other—the open window, the trashed ornaments, the torn curtains and the bombsite of the living room.

Everything was wrecked. Chairs tipped over, drawers opened and emptied, shelves kicked in, picture frames smashed. Simone’s eyes flew from one assault to the next, appalled at the crime. Whoever did this didn’t just want her cash; they wanted to hurt her. They
hated
her. Terror washed over her, cold and prickling.

She heard a sound upstairs. A scuffle; a creak on a floorboard …

And a man’s voice, a boy’s voice; a voice she had never heard, and yet …

A voice she knew.

Calida was thrown on the floor, helpless as a ragdoll. She felt her grip desert her, and exhaustion take over.
How long have I been here?
A day, two, three? She was hungry. Thirsty. Spent. Her mouth was dry and her ears were ringing.

I need to sleep. Go to sleep now.

She could still taste the drugs, her insides raw, shutting down inch by inch.

I tried. I’m sorry. It’s over.

He would think he had got her. He would leave Teresita alone.

It’s over.

The man was laughing. He reclaimed the knife; glad at his confession and the effect it had wrought, mightier than ever now that the truth had spilled free.

Then, abruptly, he stopped.

His head snapped up, flat as the hood of a cobra. He could hear something.

Sounds from outside the room, all around, beneath, above, like angels.

A door clicking shut. The steady tread of footsteps.

The man turned, his attention caught.

It’s too late. I need to sleep.

Calida closed her eyes. The last thing she saw was the lost expression in his eyes. Like a child to its mother’s call, he turned and went towards the light.

A faint buzzing stirred her. It shouldn’t have happened; her cell should be as dead as she was. Calida reached for it. She could barely see, barely hear, barely breathe.

The screen was lit.
Mia.

Calida held it to her ear but couldn’t speak.

Instead, she listened.

So did the person on the other end.

Then, the person said:

‘Hello?’

‘Mother?’

As if in a dream, he stepped out to meet her.

Their eyes met across impossible gloom. He held a knife.

Simone knew without any doubt who the man was. How could that be, when so many years had passed, when she had last seen him as a baby?

But she did.

She reached for him, but not quick enough.

‘Mother … it’s you …’

‘It’s me,’ she choked.

‘Where have you been?’

Simone opened her mouth. No words emerged. The scene defied definition and her addled brain worked to slot it all together—the wrecked apartment, the weapon, Tess going missing—but she was terrified of the picture it made.

‘No,’ she pleaded, ‘what are you—?’

It was too late. As she reached him, he lifted the blade and plunged it between them, sinking through flesh. Two hearts, racing next to each other.

One of them pierced.

One of them stopped.

Simone choked, slumped forward, the wet spill of blood as it seeped inside out, silent and scarlet, and they seemed to catch each other, together at birth and together in death, it was only the part in between they had missed.

C
alida would know that voice anywhere. Any time, any place, across thousands of miles and thousands of ages, she would know it for all time in her soul and her dreams, the place she had come from and the place to which she was going.

‘
Teresita
,’ she whispered back.

There was a sob, solitary and deep: a sob not from the throat but the heart. Calida had never heard a heart do anything but beat and break. Hearts cried too.

‘Calida?’ The last part crumbled away. Then she heard crying, proper crying, the kind that only children do, uncontrolled and unembarrassed and without restraint. Disbelief ran to fear to ecstasy, and her sister sounded very far away, as if her voice, her weeping, was reaching her down a tunnel. As if Teresita was calling her across the Patagonian steppe, against the wind and dust. ‘Calida, is that you?’

‘It’s me.’

‘Say something,’ she cried, ‘Say anything, just talk to me—’

‘It’s me. It’s OK, Teresita … It’s me.’

Calida couldn’t make out the next bit. Something about if it was a joke, if it wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real because Calida was …

Dead
?

I’m not dead … Am
I
?

‘Remember Paco?’ Calida managed, her eyelids heavy as hot tears fell.
I’m sleeping. This is a dream.
But she wanted to dream it a while longer. ‘Remember Papa? Remember the lavender? Remember the stables, and the shadows on the wall?’

‘She told me you were dead.’

I am. Am I
?

‘I’m coming for you.’ Teresita’s voice was shrill, now, wet with tears but with that same determination she’d possessed since her birth. Calida pictured her crying and wanted to hold her, make the bad things go away. She always had; that would never change. ‘Tell me where you are, Calida. I’ll find you. Where are you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Calida was so tired, too tired … ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘Calida? Talk to me, you have to keep talking. Calida—’

‘I’m in trouble,’ she murmured.

‘I know. It should have been me. It was meant to be me.’

‘You said we weren’t sisters any more. You didn’t want me in your life.’

The line flickered, crackled; she thought it would cut out. ‘No! It wasn’t like that—after I left I never contacted you again. Because Simone told me you’d been killed.
She
wrote that letter, Calida. Not me. I don’t know what it said but I promise you I never saw it. Never. I thought you’d rejected me. I thought you’d sold me.’

Calida saw the two of them, two sisters, reunited on the ranch. A paradise plain of echoed laughter and whispering trees, of rolling earth and reaching skies.

‘I would never do that,’ she whispered.

Teresita was shouting now, hysterical, but her shouts
reached Calida’s ears as sighs, so far away, so far … ‘I’m tired,’ the phone slipped, ‘I have to sleep.’

‘No—’

‘Adios, pequeño … Te amo.’

That was the last thing she said. She was glad she had got to say it, the single truth that eclipsed all others, before unconsciousness stole her away.

January, 2015

S
imone was in mourning—but it was hard to know for whom.

A man she had met only twice: once, as a baby, then again, as the intruder who had stabbed himself on her stairwell days before.

The funeral took place in London. That was where he’d been born and where he should be laid to rest. Nobody except Lysander—and those present in the aftermath of the scene—knew the facts. To the rest of the world, he had been an associate, a distant acquaintance Simone had deigned to honour.

In a lifetime of courting the press, she had been spared this final intrusion. Imagine if they had caught wind of the truth … It was bad enough that she knew it.

In the Mortlake churchyard, Simone Geddes and Lysander Chilcott watched the coffin being lowered into the ground. She would have preferred him to have been cremated, gone for good, not lying under the soil, forever in this spot, so she would know he was there and be compelled to visit him.
David.
No, Martin. He wasn’t the child she had given away, with his sweet, round cheeks and bracelets of fat. He was a monster, drunk on vengeance, whose warped reality had led him to that point of no return.

A psychopath had replaced her infant, and, despite Simone’s countless imaginings of the person he might have become, none were anything close to this.

She had witnessed his destruction. Would never forget it, no matter how many Valium or sleeping pills or Prozac she rattled down her gasping throat.

The nights were the worst. That was when she was forced to think about that horrible final encounter, playing it on a loop until she was sick. She remembered it pace by pace, piece by piece, how she had entered the apartment, not quite normal, how she had watched him emerge and been unable to speak.

On the stairwell, they had locked in stunned silence. And then there it was, the opportunity to tell him everything she had yearned to tell him as a girl, about how sorry she was, how she would have chosen any outcome but that, how she’d had no choice. But no words came. The boy she wished to tell them to wasn’t him.

Martin had lifted the dagger, glinting pure silver, and …

Simone shivered, as the frozen sky cracked and gave way to a drift of sleet. Lysander reached for her hand and held it. Thank God for Lysander.

Their critics could rot. She didn’t care. The relationship had started as a short-term solution to a long-term boredom, but had grown into true and lasting affection. Into love … Together, they were plotting their retreat from the public eye. The old Simone would never have considered it. The new Simone was realising that celebrity wasn’t everything. When it came to it, fame didn’t matter. Family did.

She had learned the hard way.

‘
In sure and certain hope of the resurrection of eternal life …
’

The priest droned on as the coffin was lowered into the wet, cold earth. Simone had paid for the funeral trimmings. It was the least she could do; give her son a proper burial when she had given him an improper birth.

How sadly it had ended … but how much worse it might have been.

Martin Gallagher had meant to kill Tess. Beloved daughter. The thought filled Simone with stark horror, even though she knew that Tess was safe. She knew he hadn’t succeeded. Instead, he had unwittingly locked on to her twin.

Learning of Calida Santiago’s rise through the ranks was a sobering revelation indeed. The connection with Ryan Xiao was nothing short of inconceivable; it didn’t seem real. How could Simone have been so blind? She’d heard the name often enough but hadn’t joined the dots. Simply, her world and that child’s were utterly distinct: they could never overlap. But that child had become a giant. That unruly, wild-eyed girl on a windswept farm in Patagonia had grown into one of America’s biggest names. Simone had underestimated her. Seeing what Tess had had made her fight. How tragically it had ended … that her efforts should come to this.

Simone stood a little straighter, as the cracked ground made way for her son.

‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us …
’

She knew she was beyond forgiveness—but that maybe, one day, Tess would think differently, and find it, buried deep, in her heart. Simone would be there.

She would wait as long as it took.

All Simone had wished for in that cold attic, the morning her grandmother took her baby away and she had wept in a heap on the floor, was a family who loved her. That family
started with Lysander. She could only pray it reached out to Tess.

She wasn’t letting another child go.

On an LA film set, Emily Chilcott waltzed off her scene and straight into the glowing praise of her jubilant director. Steven Krakowski embraced her, his hot cheek pressing against hers and a load else pressing besides—but they had to be careful.

‘You were breathtaking,’ Steven groaned into her hair, snatching an opportunity while the first AD was out of sight. ‘Just like last night …’

Emily basked in his approval. She still couldn’t believe that Steven was hers—this great, coveted man whose career could send her own into the stratosphere!

Well, he wasn’t quite hers yet, because it had to stay under wraps. How could they confess to the blossoming relationship after what had happened to Tess?

They couldn’t. But still …

Emily’s mind reeled back to the night they had spent, the latest in a chain of illicit hook-ups. Sex with Steven took her to places she had never dared visit. He had opened up to her, confided his fetishes on the first occasion they had slept together. Emily would do anything to please him, and, while his preferences grossed her out, this was Hollywood and Hollywood was full of kinky shit, so what was the big deal?

Roll with it,
she instructed herself, as she cradled six feet plus of world-famous director wearing a cosy, cotton Babygro.
Slap on a smile and get to work,
as she nursed him and sang him lullabies, pinned his nappies, and filled his bottles.

‘Tess never understood,’ he whined, cuddling his blanket. ‘She was afraid …’

She just didn’t want it as much as me
! Emily decided, as she opened Steven’s bedtime story and allowed him to fondle her tits. Maybe at some point she would get tired of it, but she was savvy enough to grit her teeth until she got what she wanted.

Steven had promised her a starring role in Miller & Mount’s newest venture, which was tipped to be a smash. She would become a household name overnight.

Steven was the key to her future.

Emily Chilcott would do whatever, or whoever, it took to get there.

She was destined for the stars; she always had been.

Steven Krakowski enjoyed possessing a new plaything. It made it sweeter that Emily was Tess Geddes’ stepsister—maybe one day Tess would reflect on their union and see the gifts he could have bestowed on her, and regret having let him go.

That was wishful thinking, he knew, as he watched Emily Chilcott return to set amid a gaggle of stylists. Emily was pretty, and biddable, but she was nothing against Tess. Tess was a goddess. He regretted how things had ended between them. Steven had loved her, at one point, or as close to love as he was likely to get (the only woman he had ever adored wholeheartedly was the huge-breasted nanny who looked after him as a boy: whenever she’d chided him he had spent an hour in the bathroom, rubbing himself until he was raw). It wasn’t his fault Tess had turned round and stabbed him in the back. When she’d gone missing, he had half hoped that would be the end of her. While her death would have injured him, it would at least have marked the demise of a bargaining chip that was sure to haunt him to his dying day.

Instead, that freak stalker had targeted another girl, a fashion photographer who bore a remarkable resemblance to his ex-wife. It had been unfortunate for the girl, and, Steven thought, unfortunate for him. His blood ran cold at the idea that his perversions could ever be found out. Always, Tess would hold that secret against him, one she could employ at any point and however she saw fit. It was a troubling notion.

He had none of the same concerns with Emily. She was a kitten, and now they had got physical he was starting to see what she was really made of … just how far she was willing to go. The budding actress desired fame to an unreasonable degree.

What would she do to achieve it?

Steven would take great pleasure in finding out.

At her parents’ house in the heart of Paris, surrounded by home comforts and the reassuring company of her family, Mia Ferraris kissed her boyfriend.

Officially, they had been together for only a week—but already she had brought Gabriel back to France. Weeks like the week she’d just had only reinforced that every second was precious.

Béatrice and Anton adored him. Gabriel and Mia were absolutely right for each other. While most fledgling relationships pivoted on a string of nervous first dates and anxious second-guessing, theirs had been thrown in deep from day one.

In Barcelona, Gabriel had been privy to a drama that was so enormous and so scandalous that the rest of the planet could never know about it. He was a strong, ambitious, unflappable man—and, true to form, had stayed purposefully discreet on the matter. After Tess’s call to her sister, Gabriel had driven
them both to the airport. He had accompanied them to America and helped sort through the aftermath.

He loved Mia for all the ways that made her unique—and she loved him back.

But her newfound happiness didn’t stop her thinking about Tess. As the New Year passed and they all stepped carefully around the omission in the room, Mia couldn’t help but worry. What was Tess doing? How was she feeling? They had been in touch constantly after the event, but since then Tess had asked for space. Mia had to respect it, even if she spent every second fearing Tess was alone, or sad, or afraid.

‘Here,’ Anton said, refilling her coffee cup over the breakfast bar, ‘this’ll warm you up.’ Mia smiled at him. It took effort, and he sent her an enquiring look, to which she responded with a nod.

I’m OK. Bearing up.

Gabriel was helping with that, but even so the trauma would take time to work through. She recalled the stricken look on Tess’s face when she had made that call, unable to fathom the voice she had heard, her features collapsing by the second, then the searing tears, part horror, part joy. The return race to America, helpless in their jet, waiting for the hours to pass and knowing by the time they got there it could be too late. The victim had been Calida all along. Calida had disappeared. Calida had got into that van. With whom? Why? What did they want? So many questions.

Maximilian cleared the airport for their return. Tess and Mia had rushed to the hospital and to Calida’s bedside, where they heard that, in a final twist, Simone Geddes had been the one to find her—beaten black and blue by a psychotic fan, starved and drugged … and all along mistaken for Tess.

If only they had got there sooner.

Then things might have been different.

Some days Mia wished it had been Tess who’d found her—surely that would have been right? Others, she knew it would have been worse. At the end of their journey, the person who had stolen Tess from her home was the one to rediscover it.

Tess had gone into the hospital suite alone.

Mia would never forget her face when she came back out.

She bit back tears. Her best friend had been through so much—and then to have to go through this. She wished she could take some of the pain for her.

‘Hey, come here.’

Gabriel came to sit next to her, hooking an arm round her shoulders and pulling her in close. Thanks to him, she could start looking to the future. They would face today together, then tomorrow, then the year ahead.

She only hoped that Tess could do the same.

In a New York bar, Julia Santiago shoved the man off and demanded that if he wanted to molest her tits he would need to buy her another drink first. Like a kicked puppy, he obeyed, sliding a five-dollar bill across the bar and burping gently. ‘You wanna get out of here?’ he drawled, once the brandy had arrived and Julia had necked it in one.

She ignored him, eyes glued on the TV screen, though it was difficult to focus through a quart of liquor. ‘They’re my daughters, you know,’ she said.

The man followed her gaze. The bartender’s interest momentarily piqued before he snorted a laugh and turned his attention to a nearby waitress in a short skirt.

‘Oh yeah?’ the man sneered. Foggily, Julia turned to him
and noticed that his hair was balding, his skin was beige and sallow, and his eyes watered unattractively.

Is this what it’s come to
? Julia thought.
Is this it, the sum of my life
?

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m their mother.’

‘You’re wasted is what you are.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

The man ordered more brandy. Once again Julia chucked hers back, the liquid scalding her throat. ‘No offence, lady,’ he said, ‘but you don’t bear no similarities.’

Julia couldn’t deny that. In the bar mirror she saw a saggy, withered old drunk who had thrown away a fortune and a lot more besides.
Why won’t my girls give me a chance? Why won’t they take me back
? Calida was dead and gone; there was no way to reconcile with her. But Teresita would come round, wouldn’t she?

Wouldn’t she? Then these bastards would eat their words.

Julia Santiago would rise again—she didn’t care what the hell it took.

‘C’mon, let’s get out of here. Twenty bucks, right now, back seat of my car.’

Julia thought what twenty bucks could buy her. She followed him out.

At her new home in Stockholm, Scarlet Schuhausen put a hand to her growing stomach and smiled. It was a happy New Year indeed.

‘Everything all right?’ Henry Doric kissed her, tenderly and softly, not at all like the brusque, matter-of-fact kisses she had grown used to with her ex-husband.

Scarlet removed the last of the baubles from the Christmas
tree and returned it to its nest of white paper. It was strange how the universe worked.