A Family Affair: Winter: Truth in Lies, Book 1 (6 page)

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you think he meant nothing to me.”

Harry merely lifted his glass and sipped his scotch.

“I loved him.” She pushed the emphasis into the words. “I loved him.”

“Of course, you did.”

“Don’t patronize me. You’ve never loved anyone in your life, other than yourself.”

She was wrong there. He loved Christine, and that’s why he’d never revealed the truth about Gloria, a truth that would destroy the family. It was because of Christine that he’d been silent.

And it was because of her he would remain that way.

Christine rolled over, reached in the direction of the urgent ringing until she located her cell phone. “Hello.”

“Christine? Are you okay?”

“Connor.”

“Jesus, are you all right? You sound terrible.”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, you don’t sound fine.” He paused, and she pictured him rifling a hand through his thick hair, once, twice, a nervous habit he employed when he found himself in a situation he couldn’t control.

“I was sleeping,” she said, pushing herself up on her elbows.

“It’s five o’clock in the afternoon.”

She heard the recrimination in his voice; five o’clock was work time; business deals got made at five o’clock, even on vacation.

“I just fell asleep.” Should she tell him the real reason?
 
I just found out I have a half sister?
 No, the Pendletons were very particular about bloodlines and heritage. They would not take kindly to learning about an illegitimacy. It didn’t matter; she wasn’t telling anyone about Lily Desantro.

“You must be really bored,” Connor said, chuckling into the phone. “Didn’t you bring your laptop? At least you could stay connected to the real world while you’re out there in the boondocks.”

“It’s here,” she said, surprised she hadn’t opened it yet, not even to check the Dow. “I’ve just been busy.”

“Oh?” He sounded intrigued. “Doing what?”

Driving seventy-eight miles to track down my half sister... confronting my father’s mistress... and her son.
 “Well, for one, trying to figure out how to operate a tub with a rubber plug.” She tried for humor, anything to avoid the real question. Connor only wanted to know when she’d be on her way back to Chicago.

His next words proved this. “So, when are you coming back? I’m still hoping you’ll come to New York with me.”

“So I can work the deal with Glen Systems for you?”

“No, of course not.”

But she knew the truth, heard it in the split-second hesitation. He might want her there because he cared about her, but he also wanted her friendly personality seated right beside Niles Furband when he tried to land the deal. This should have upset her, and the mere fact that it didn’t worried her most.

“Will you come? It’s the twenty-sixth.”

“I don’t know.” She still didn’t know what she was going to do about the situation here. Should she just leave? Tell Thurman Jacobs to disburse the funds and be done with it? But what about the girl? Could she let her walk around without ever seeing her, without knowing if they shared the same color hair, the same cowlick on the right side of their forehead, the same blue eyes, Blacksworth eyes?

“I could meet you in New York on the twenty-sixth if you’d like.” Connor wanted his deal; he didn’t care what she was doing in the middle of nowhere that kept her so busy.

If Mr. Saro from Japan had called and spoken to him in Japanese about financial issues, Connor would have dragged in a translator, maybe two, to interpret the words in English, then he’d have analyzed them, dissected meaning and inflection, spent hours, perhaps a whole day, trying to understand.

But this, something as mundane and uneventful as a girlfriend in her dead father’s cabin in the Catskills—it smacked of emotion and angst and Connor was careful about avoiding both.

“I’m not sure when I’m leaving.” She was suddenly tired of talking. “I might stay on another day or so, or it could be longer. I’ll let you know, okay?”

“Do you want me to come up there?” He wanted to make a trip to the Catskills about as much as she wanted to throw herself naked into a pile of snow.

“No. I want to be by myself right now.” There, she’d give him his out because it would ease his conscience, and because it was true.

“Okay, then.” He sighed into the
phone, a long breath that she supposed was intended to make her feel a tinge of guilt for remaining undecided about the New York trip. “Let me know as soon as you can.”

“Sure.”

And then, this last bit, perhaps to boost her spirits. “The Dow was up two hundred points today. You should check it out.”

“Thanks. Maybe I will.”

Click. He was gone.

She placed the cell phone on the nightstand and fell back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It was dark outside, a cocoon of blackness but for the tiniest sliver of moon sifting through the window, settling in a faint arc above her.

It was then, as she stared at the arc, followed its faint shimmering trail, that she realized the truth about her relationship with Connor Pendleton.

He’d made certain he told her about the Dow but
had never once said, 
I love you.

And neither had she.

***

Christine spent the next two days at the cabin, pondering the dilemma of Lily and following the NASDAQ. Jumping into the market was the best way to get back in control. She called her assistant, Moira, returned phone calls to clients, made recommendations, took orders.

No one needed to know she was conducting business from a card table in the Catskills, surrounded by snow and evergreens, or that she was dressed in gray sweats and a red fleece top and two pairs of Thinsulate socks.

On the third day, she decided to pay a visit to the machine shop her father had bailed out.
 
Stay busy, just stay busy.
 She’d meet the owner and reassure him she planned to honor the agreement. She was also curious about the type of man, a relative stranger, she guessed, her father would sign a note for, guaranteeing payment. But maybe the man wasn’t a stranger; maybe he was a friend. Fourteen years was a long time to cultivate a friendship and the fact that she didn’t know upset her as much as it depressed her.

For days, she’d asked the question: who was Lily Desantro? But the real question was who
was Charles Blacksworth?

She had to get away from the cabin—now, before her mind drove her crazy with its incessant ranting. She pulled on her boots, stuffed her arms into a down jacket, and fought her way to the car. It took almost an hour to dig a path to the road and another thirty minutes to clear the car and heat it up. She could get stuck out here and no one would ever find her until spring when the thaw came through.

Christine drove the back road into Magdalena, fingers gripping the wheel, gravitating toward the middle when there weren’t any other cars around. The snow fell, full and fat on the windshield. Her father must have driven roads like these for years, narrowed from snow piling up along the edges, slick with ice, dark; country roads, fighting change, fighting progress, just like the people who lived in the towns where the roads led: Tristan, Ennert, Magdalena.

ND Manufacturing was located about five miles from Magdalena. It was a longish-shaped brick building, weathered to a faded orange, with a flat roof supporting several metal vents and two small windows at the front entrance. There were a handful of buildings similar to this one running up and down the road like brick rectangles. A parking lot stood to the left smattered with pick-up trucks and older model cars, Fords and Chevys mostly, with bumper stickers that read,
 
Mail Pouch
 and 
Union Works
.

She parked her car next to a blue Ford F150 with a dented right fender and headed for the entrance. The contact person was Jack Finnegan, but he wasn’t the owner, only the “man in charge of the paperwork,” her father had told her. He hadn’t given her the owner’s name, telling her there’d be time enough for everything she needed to know later. But there hadn’t been enough time; there hadn’t been any time.

A gray-haired woman with tight curls and cat’s-eye glasses perched behind a glass partition in the lobby. She looked up when Christine entered. “May I help you?”

“I’m looking for Mr. Finnegan. Is he available?”

The older woman let out a chuckle. “Sure is. Your name?”

Christine hesitated,
then said, “Christine Blacksworth.”

“You’re Christine?”
The woman’s blue eyes widened behind the cat’s-eye glasses. “Charlie’s daughter?”

“I am.”

“Oh, my word. Oh, my goodness. Oh my.” The words rushed out in a string of breathlessness as the woman fanned herself with her hand, said again, “Oh my.”

“You knew my father?” It was a ridiculous question because judging by the woman’s reaction, she had indeed known him.

“Yes, oh my yes.” The woman stood and thrust her hand through the open portion of the sliding window. Even standing she barely reached Christine’s shoulder. “Betty Rafferty. I’m the receptionist here.” She paused, let out a small laugh, “And the chief cook and bottle washer. I do a little bit of everything in this place: answering phones, filing, typing, checking time cards—” She stopped herself mid-sentence. “My Lord, but we are so sorry about Charlie.” She shook her head but the curls didn’t move. “So very sorry.”

“Thank you.” Did everyone know him, know about him? Know about Miriam and Lily, too?

“He was a wonderful man,” Betty Rafferty went on, “wonderful. There wasn’t a kinder person than Charlie Blacksworth. He helped us all out at one time or another and I mean 
all
 of us, no matter who we were, he didn’t care. Me, when my mother died and the lawyer tried to tie up her estate and charge a ton of legal fees, Charlie made a few phone calls and it was done—” she snapped her bony fingers “—just like that.”

“And then, when Ned Glezinski’s landlord was gonna kick him out for not making his rent payments, Charlie stepped in.” She lowered her voice. “We all thought he loaned Ned money but nobody ever said, least of all Charlie. Anyways, he showed Ned how to do a budget, how to put a little aside in savings for a rainy day, and I’ll be darned if Ned didn’t buy a two-bedroom house down on Edgar Street last year.”

Christine didn’t want to hear that any good had come of her father’s stay here, didn’t want to even consider the possibility that he was missed by this town as much as he was missed by his friends and associates in Chicago. This place wasn’t his home. These people had no right to Charles Blacksworth. They were nothing but pirates, bootlegging his name and his identity.

“And then there were Freda and Arthur Peorelli and their son, Giovanni,” she went on, stopped. “I think”—she scratched her pointy chin—“I should stop before the boss comes in.” She lowered her voice, leaned forward. “He and Charlie didn’t quite see eye to eye.”

“No?”

Betty shook her head again. “No, ma’am, they sure didn’t, but then you must know that.”

“Actually, I—”

“Betty!”

Christine turned and spotted the scruffy old man standing behind her, clad in jeans and a red flannel shirt rolled up to his forearms. He was wiry and small with shocks of thick, white hair sticking out from under a John Deere ball cap, cocked back on his forehead. Gray white stubble peppered his cheeks, a stark contrast to the weather-beaten tan on the rest of his face. But it was his eyes that held her. They were a brilliant blue, and they were trained on her.

“Christine.”

She managed to nod.

The man shot a glance toward the receptionist area. “Been flappin’ your gums again, Betty?” he asked, lifting a bushy white brow.

“Just making Christine feel welcome, Jack, that’s all.”

“I’ll take over from here.” He thrust out a work-worn hand.
“Jack Finnegan, otherwise known as ‘Old Man Jack.’”

“Mr. Finnegan.” She reached for his outstretched hand and felt the calluses. “You’re just the person I came to see.”

“Don’t think so, not if you came to see Mr. Finnegan. Like I said, I’m Jack or Old Man Jack, plain and simple.” He threw back his head and laughed, revealing random spots of silver and a row of bridgework.

“Jack then.”

“Let’s go into my office,” he said, winking at her. “And, Betty, not a word of this to the boss, you got it?”

Betty lifted a blue-veined hand, pinched a thumb and forefinger together and ran it along her lips. “I’m zipped, Jack.”

“Good. Keep it that way. No slip-ups.”

“Aye-aye.”
Then, “Nice to meet you, Christine. Your father was a true saint.”

“Come on, before she starts praying the rosary.”

Christine followed Jack Finnegan down a narrow hallway. There were offices on both sides, four altogether, small squares filled with carpet, computer, an occasional metal filing cabinet and a desk. Jack moved past the first three, stepped into the last one, which had a copy machine where a desk would be, and six filing cabinets along the back wall. There was only one chair in the tiny room, a gray swivel with black plastic arms. “Sit,” he said, closing the door behind her. He kicked a box of copy paper a few feet from her and plopped down, feet spread, arms crossed over his chest.

“What can I do you for?”

“I guess first you can tell me what you make here.”

“That’s easy enough. Parts for farm equipment, you
know, gadgets that fit on tractors, combines, bailers and such.”

“Oh, I see.”