Baked Alaska (16 page)

Sadie nodded. His response seemed perfectly reasonable.

“When she realized what was happening, she apologized about the money and for losing her cool. Then she told me she’d been sick for a really long time and that sometimes it made her moody and stuff. I still wanted some space, and while she respected that at first, after a week she was calling me four times a day and sending me all these e-mails asking me to call her. A few weeks later, she left a voice mail asking me to come to a doctor’s appointment with her—in Tennessee—and said she would explain everything.

“I’d stopped calling her back by then—the conversations were just too frustrating—so I e-mailed her and told her I couldn’t miss school for her doctor’s appointment and to please back off. I said I would contact her when I was ready to talk. She got all ticked again, saying how I didn’t care about her. She started leaving these long messages on my voice mail. It was so weird.”

Sadie agreed with him completely; it was very strange behavior.

“I mean, I
was
worried about her, but... . I don’t know, I just needed some space to think about things, ya know? Even a week without her bombarding me would have helped, but she wouldn’t stop. By April, I was ignoring her completely, and then a couple of weeks after the whole doctor thing, she e-mails me to tell me I have a sister, even though she’d told me back in October that I didn’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“You think she lied about Maggie?” Sadie asked.

Shawn shrugged. “It felt like she was just pulling one thing after another to hook me in or something. I felt manipulated by the whole thing, and so I told her, again, that I needed some time to figure things out and I needed her to back off and stop contacting me for a while. In the next e-mail, she drops this bombshell about needing a liver transplant.”

Sadie startled. She hadn’t seen that coming.

“A liver transplant?” Pete repeated, leaning in and glancing at Sadie—apparently he didn’t know this part either. “From you?”

Had Shawn really said a liver transplant or had both Sadie and Pete heard it wrong? Maybe he’d said
river houseplant
?

“She said I needed to be tested as a possible donor, that she hadn’t told me sooner because she thought I would think that’s why she found me and stuff—it was all so crazy.”

“You can’t just give someone your liver,” Sadie said.

“You can give them part of it,” Pete said. “It’s called a living donor liver transplant. Is that what she called it, Shawn?”

Shawn nodded. “Yeah, I read up on it, and it’s a legit procedure. They take part of the donor’s liver, which grows back eventually, and put that piece into the recipient. It eventually grows into a whole liver for the recipient too. They’re getting more and more common, but she has a really rare blood type and none of her family was a good match.”

Shawn’s blood type was AB negative. Very rare. Did Lorraina have the same type?

Shawn rubbed his hand over his forehead, looking tired. “But after everything had happened, I couldn’t help doubting her. I mean, as soon as I start pulling away, she tells me she’s sick, and when
that
doesn’t work, I suddenly have a birth sister, and when I
still
want my space, she needs me to give her part of my liver?” He shook his head. “I thought she was messing with me,” he said, his voice soft. He looked at Sadie. “I didn’t know what to think, Mom. I wanted to talk to you about all of it on this cruise and then decide what to do when I got back...and then Lorraina was here and sent me into this panic and then she went on a drinking binge last night.”

“No one is blaming you for anything,” Sadie said, reaching out and giving his arm a squeeze.

“I want to make sure I understand what you are telling us,” Pete cut in. “If
you were tested and found to be a match, she wanted you to donate part of your liver to her?”

Sadie felt like she was in
The Twilight Zone.
The whole transplant thing was ridiculous, like those stories of people waking up in their hotel bathtub without a kidney.

“She never came right out and said that, but why else have me tested?”

“When did she first tell you about the transplant, again?” He’d told them, but Sadie wanted to be sure.

“About three weeks ago.”

“And you didn’t get the test done because you didn’t believe her?” Pete asked.

“From what I’d read about liver transplants, they were rarely something that happened quickly—not like a heart transplant or something like that. She said she’d been in liver failure for a couple of years, and I figured I had at least a few weeks to get things worked out with you and stuff.” He groaned slightly and shook his head. “I wish I could find the words to help you guys understand that what I felt was just so... . so out there, ya know? So weird, and not what I was expecting when I put up those profiles. It was like I hadn’t even caught up with wanting to find her before I found her, and I hadn’t gotten used to having her before she started bombarding me with these expectations I couldn’t understand.” He took a breath and scrubbed a hand across his forehead. “I just didn’t know what to think or what to believe or what to do.”

“Of course,” Sadie said, smiling at him and rubbing his arm again. “You did the best you could do under the circumstances.”

“So where does Maggie fit in?” Pete asked without allowing the tenderness to draw out too long. He was all business. Sadie appreciated his ability to keep Shawn talking.

“I never even met her before this morning,” Shawn said. “And I can’t help but wonder if she is part of this game Lorraina seems to be playing with me. That’s why I didn’t want to meet her in the first place. I mean, Lorraina’s family says she doesn’t have a daughter, did you know that?”

Sadie did, but wanted to hear Shawn’s information so she just nodded rather than get off track.

Shawn shook his head. “I met some of Lorraina’s family when I went back at Christmas. They had a picture of me and everything, plus pictures of Lorraina for a few years after I was born and before Lorraina got all messed up with alcohol. I don’t know how Maggie could have been born during that time without them knowing about it; Maggie’s only two years younger than me. Lorraina would have only been eighteen years old back then, and she still lived with her sister. I don’t see how it’s possible.”

“I think
Maggie
thinks she’s Lorraina’s daughter,” Sadie said. “Or at least she thought she was. You said Lorraina had told you back in October that you didn’t have any natural siblings. How did she explain the fact that, come April, you did?”

“She said she wanted to wait until she and I knew each other better. She said she hadn’t wanted to get my hopes up, so she didn’t tell me until after she found Maggie.”

“So,” Pete said, “it looks like we have three possibilities. One, Maggie
is
your sister and Lorraina was telling the truth and somehow hid Maggie’s existence from her family. Two, she
isn’t
your sister but was tricked by Lorraina into thinking she is. Or three, she isn’t your sister, knows it, and was going along with Lorraina’s story for some reason. Does that sound like it covers the possibilities in regard to Maggie?”

Shawn and Sadie both pondered for a few seconds, then nodded.

“Do you have any kind of verification about Lorraina’s liver disease?” Pete asked.

“The doctor at the hospital tonight confirmed it. There was a big name for what she has and I can’t remember what it was, but it’s real and it’s really serious. They said there’s more testing they’ll need to do in Anchorage, but there’s a chance she’ll need a new liver in order to recover from this—assuming she’s strong enough for the operation.” Shawn hesitated, then said, “They took some blood from me at the hospital to see if I’m a match.”

Both Sadie and Pete lifted their eyebrows. Shawn pulled up the sleeve of his sweatshirt, revealing a purple bandage wrapped around his elbow, holding a cotton ball in place. He looked at Sadie as he pulled the sleeve down again. “I don’t know what will come of it. Maybe I’m not a match, but knowing that she really is sick...well, it changes things I guess. Some things, anyway.”

“So, she
was
telling the truth about the liver disease,” Pete said. “Does that make you think she could be telling the truth about Maggie, too? Maybe there is an explanation for why no one knows about Maggie.”

“I honestly don’t see how,” Shawn said, looking at Pete. “I’ve got my notes at home, but after I learned about Maggie I found a couple of things that prove my point—like Lorraina being in jail when she would have been six months pregnant. And her second arrest was within like a week of Maggie’s birth date. It just doesn’t seem possible. I told Lorraina that when I discovered it. She just kept saying that I had a sister, and asking why I wasn’t happy about that, and why we couldn’t be a family. It was all just so weird.”

Pete sighed. “Maybe we can go back and verify that information while we’re in port tomorrow. In the meantime, while Maggie’s reaction to the possibility of Lorraina not being her birth mother seems sincere, we’d be well-advised to not be too trusting until we have more answers. We don’t know her, and we need to be careful and double-check the facts as quickly as we can.”

Shawn nodded his understanding and Sadie reluctantly accepted that Pete was right. She’d had a similar thought earlier, about not knowing Maggie well enough to know whether or not she was trustworthy, but it felt different now that there was the possibility that Maggie might have been tricked all along. Then she remembered the information Maggie had given her about Lorraina not coming back to the room last night and how it hadn’t made sense. Perhaps Pete’s caution was more warranted than even he thought.

She took a few moments to fill Shawn and Pete in on those details from her conversation with Maggie, then finished, “And since Maggie was alone in her stateroom, supposedly waiting for Lorraina’s return, no one can corroborate her story.”

Pete and Shawn’s expressions matched Sadie’s thoughts perfectly. What had been going on with Lorraina? She could only hope that their search for information in Skagway tomorrow would give them the answers they all needed.

“Are we all in agreement not to share our concerns with Maggie at this point?” Pete asked. Sadie and Shawn both nodded. “I think it’s in everyone’s best interest—Maggie’s included—to see what we can learn one way or another before we make a big deal out of this to her.”

Shawn and Sadie nodded again.

“Good, then as I see it, we now have a double investigation going: Is Lorraina Maggie’s birth mother? And what happened yesterday in the time between her argument with Maggie, Sadie seeing her at the photo gallery, and us finding her on deck—basically, how did she get the wine, why did she drink it, and why is she now in a coma?” He looked between them as they agreed to the goals he had outlined. He was really good at this.

“I’m glad we’re on the same page. The other thing we need to consider is that the abnormal tox screen is going to change things.”

“What abnormal tox screen?” Shawn asked.

“They didn’t tell you at the hospital?” Sadie asked.

Pete relayed what he’d learned from his contact on the ship. “It’s not a medication she was taking or something common that is tested for automatically. The doctors are running additional tests now to determine what it is, but something is showing up that absolutely should not be there.”

Shawn stared at the tabletop but said nothing, so Pete continued. “Up until now this has been treated as a binge on Lorraina’s part, but now that there’s something unusual, the police might open an investigation and your conflicts with Lorraina will be something they are going to scrutinize. Ship security has already requested that Sadie come in to tell them about the gift tag on the bottle of wine—no one else saw it, including me—and that makes me think more than ever that they are going to investigate this. Because of that, we need to know if there is anything”—Pete leaned forward slightly while jabbing his finger onto the top of the table—“
anything
at all that might strengthen an investigator’s reason for thinking you could have had anything to do with what’s happened to Lorraina.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Sadie said, incensed by the suggestion. She looked to Shawn for confirmation of his protest, but Shawn didn’t look shocked; he looked decidedly worried. “Shawn? Isn’t it ridiculous?”

Chapter 18

Well, yeah. I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her.” He still had that look on his face that could stop a mother’s heart, though. That look that clearly said there was still something else Sadie didn’t know.

Sadie glanced at Pete and could tell he saw the same thing she did in Shawn’s face.

Pete held Shawn’s eyes as he continued. “Is there anything that someone who doesn’t know you might not understand? Anything that would make you look suspicious?”

As soon as Pete asked the question, Sadie remembered something Maggie had said. “Did you send Lorraina some e-mails? Mean ones?”

Shawn’s eyebrows went up. “You know about those?”