Captured Lies (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Donna Saunders

Born January 5, 1952

Deceased April 21, 2012

Bailey read the information one
more time, wondering when life would again make sense. She looked up from the
pamphlet clutched in her hand. “What do you mean, it’s all paid for?”

“Look, Miss Saunders, I know this
is a trying time for you.” Mr. Summervold, the funeral director, patted her
hand. “I am sorry for your loss.”

Annoyed at his patronizing tone,
Bailey sat back in her chair, effectively removing her hand and herself from
any contact with him. It was either that or lean forward and punch him. She
definitely had the urge to hit something.

She eyed him critically. His
narrow jaw would crumple and his sleek nose would either lie over on his cheek
or flatten like squished potatoes. She dropped her head into her open palms,
allowing exhaustion to drag her toward the dark hole of sleep. The sound of a
chair rolling on the hardwood floor yanked her back to reality. Her head jerked
up and she thrust out her hand like a traffic cop. “I’m fine. Just give me some
answers.”

Long and lean, Mr. Sommervold
awkwardly paused in his position of being half way standing up, before he sat
back down. “The funeral is paid in full. You don’t have to worry about any of
that. The ceremony will take place here at the gravesite tomorrow, Thursday,
April 23. Everything is arranged. It’s all in there.” He waved a languid hand
at the paper in her lap.

Bailey’s hand shook as she looked
at the picture of her mom, whose dyed red hair stood out like a beacon. Her
ruby red lipstick was in complete contrast to the dye job. Her face was pale
and her aqua eyes pinched, as though full of pain. It’s not the picture she
would have chosen of her mom but then there weren’t many to choose from. Her
mom refused to let others take her picture. For Bailey’s graduation, she’d made
an exception. Her present had been a picture of her mom in the backyard. She’d
been happy, one of those rare moments. That’s the picture Bailey would have
chosen.

“Everything really has been taken
care of.”

“Where did this photo come from?”

“You really should talk to Mr.
Lund, your mom’s lawyer. He made all the arrangements.”

Mr. Sommervold stood, his
immaculate charcoal grey suit crisp as though he’d just put it on. But she knew
he’d been in it for several hours already. The lady who’d met Bailey at the
door had stated Mr. Sommervold started at 6:00 a.m. and was there most days
until 6:00 p.m. Funeral directors didn’t get a day off. Death was always at their
door.

“But how?” Bailey got to her
feet, stared at her clothes and brushed her hands down her wrinkled
emerald-green dress.
When did I put this on?
She rubbed her finger over
the faux silk material. Her mom had bought it for her four or five years before.
I choose to wear it for the first time when you can’t see it?
She rubbed
her forehead, squeezing hard to push away the headache pounding her skull.

Everything that hadn’t been right
between them came rushing to the surface. Stopping the flow of memories took
some effort. The tears that filled her eyes took her by surprise. Where had
they come from? She’d cried enough over the last two days to fill a dam. She
pinched the bridge of her nose.
Not now. Not now. Not now. Just let me get
through this.

“Are you all right?”

Stupid question, if I laugh,
will he think I’ve cracked up?
She felt like she was. The 2:00 a.m. phone
call she’d received about forty-eight hours before hadn’t been what she’d
expected. Her mom saying their fight had gone far enough and Bailey should grow
up and let it go...yes. She was all right with that. Being told her mom was
dead…no. She’d caught the first flight out of Victoria and landed in Calgary,
rented a car and headed to Foothills Hospital where she’d learned her mom’s
heart had given out. The doctors had done everything they could but couldn’t
explain how that could happen to a woman at age sixty. It just sometimes did.
That she’d had heart problems for several months hadn’t helped.

Bailey wasn’t sure what had hit
her harder—her mom being dead, or her mom having health problems and not
sharing that with her.

Straightening, she squared her
shoulders. “Just tell me who put out the money to pay for my mom’s funeral. Who
organized it? It doesn’t make any sense.” The problem was that her mom had no
friends, just Bailey.

Mr. Sommervold pushed up his
round wire-rimmed glasses. She’d already noticed that they had a tendency to
slide down his nose.

“I’m not leaving without
answers.”

The door opened, his assistant, a
stunning auburn-haired woman, poked her head in. “Mr. Sommervold, the Greenings
are here. They have a few things they’d like to discuss with you before the
funeral this afternoon.”

Solemn-faced, he nodded then
turned to face Bailey. “I don’t know who paid for it. Mr. Lund sent me a letter
requesting all that she wanted for a funeral. He also provided a second
letter.” He opened the folder in front of him, pulled out an envelope, closed
the file and dropped it into the bottom drawer of his desk. After a short
hesitation, he slid the envelope across to Bailey.

She stared at him for a full
minute before reaching out and picking it up. Her name was scrawled across it
in her mother’s handwriting. She pressed it between her palms.

“I’m sure this will answer some
of your questions. For any others you have, you’ll need to talk to Mr. Lund.
Here’s his business card.”

Bailey stared at the envelope.
Would it give her the answers she needed?

“Now if you’ll excuse me. I have
other clients I need to see.”

She jerked up her head. Mr.
Sommervold was standing in the open doorway, obviously waiting for her to
leave. A bit dazed, she stood and walked past him to the main foyer, where she
stopped.

Everything seemed surreal. Even
the rich, immaculate oak entranceway was too perfect, too daunting. Soft hymn
music drifted through the building. Quiet voices, whispered, reverent tones
heard only at solemn times, drifted to her. They made everything more unreal.

She felt like a character in
dream. A bad one. An unexpected shiver shook her out of her reverie.

She strode out of the building to
her rented Hyundai. Once inside she stared at the paper clenched in her left
hand. There were designs and pictures all over the back of the envelope. Many
would dismiss them as doodles but Bailey knew better. She just wasn’t prepared
to decipher what her mom couldn’t tell her straight out. Tracing her finger
absently over the heart that had three stick figures within it made her pause,
for it looked like a family.

Are you saying you’d wished
Dad had been in my life? Whoever he was.

Realizing that she wasn’t in any
space to deal with what that could mean, she shook off those thoughts. Sliding
her finger under the edge she worked her way across the top, ripping it open.
She pulled out the slim, folded piece of paper inside.

Bailey, I know you have a lot
of questions. That’s just the way you are. You deserve the answers but I can
only give you some. I planned my own funeral so that it would be one less worry
for you. Just go back to the life you had. Keep helping the poor families. I am
very proud of you, Bailey. I’m sorry for all the misunderstandings between us.
They’re all my fault. Not yours. You’re a good girl, one any family would be
proud of. It’s a miracle that you came into my life. I love you… although I
don’t really have the right.

Mom

Bailey crumpled the paper in one
hand as her tears obscured her vision. Why had she never cleared up that lie
about her career?

CHAPTER THREE

“I found her.”

“Oh?”

Guy fought back a smile and
wondered how one person could convey so much information in such a short word -
doubt... disdain... disbelief.

“Yes Gramama, I did.” He allowed
himself a full grin, mostly because his not-even-related-grandmother wasn’t
with him to see it and give him hell. He was the only person who could get away
with calling Dorothea Lindell that affectionate name. He’d never understood why
she’d opened her arms to him anyway, given his dubious heritage.

“Wipe that smirk off your face.
I’m not too old to still take a round out of you.” Her indrawn breath sounded
like a shop vacuum sucking up a pool of water.

Oooh, I’m scared, Grams.
He waited her out.

“How do you know it’s her?”

“Well, Gramama, I know because
I’m good at looking at a picture and seeing similar details in someone else’s
face. That’s why you hired me to find her. Of course my charm and good looks
had to have played a part in that.”

She snorted in mock disgust while
Guy continued to smile. He loved his relationship with her. He was very
fortunate to have it or any acknowledged connection with her. She was a lot
softer than people knew but he didn’t plan to share that bit of news.

“Just a moment.”

He could hear his grandmother’s
muffled voice along with a man’s. Uncle Geoffrey or at least that was what his
step-grandmother had hoped Guy would come to know him as, was angry as usual.
Guy flinched, an automatic response. They’d never gotten along. Geoffrey had
hated Guy from the moment they’d met.

“What the hell do you mean to
bring that brat into this family?”

“Watch your mouth, Geoffrey.
He is my grandson and will be treated as such.”

“He’s no blood relative of
mine.”

“No he’s not but he’s
important to me. If nothing else, you owe me the respect I deserve and you need
to trust me. I’m asking you to accept this boy.”

“You want me to accept the
grandchild of a maid, whose daughter swears she was raped here, on our
property? Hasn’t she brought enough embarrassment to this family? You want to
raise that brat as one of us?”

“You ever talk like that to me
again and you’re out.”

Geoffrey had backed down immediately
but he’d seemed angry enough to strike her. And he’d never accepted Guy,
treating him the same way he treated chewing gum clinging to the bottom of his
five-hundred-dollar shoes, doing whatever he had to do to get rid of it.

Many years later, Guy realized
that his grandma held the reins at Caspian Winery. She’d given them to Geoffrey
when someone had leaked to the media that her husband, Joseph, was his father.
Guy would have loved that. The real reason she’d given up the reigns for a
while was because Joseph had cancer. He’d been fighting for his life and she’d
been right there beside him. Once he’d pulled through all the chemotherapy and
radiation and seemed to be on the mend, she’d taken back the CEO position but
Geoff remained her right-hand person and had continued to act as though he
owned the place.

And nothing had changed. Guy had
learned to stay out of Geoffrey’s way.

“Guy, we’ve got a problem,” his
grandmother said.

Guy shook off that horrid memory
of meeting Geoff. What else was new? Geoffrey always had something crawling up
his butt. Guy just hoped his grandmother hadn’t shared with him what he was
really doing. “What do you mean a problem?”

“Geoffrey just came to tell me
that we’re having some issues with our new acquisition in Southern California.
They want more money. Since I’ve been bragging about your skills as a
negotiator, he seems to think I should hire you to run our south shore winery.
Well, at least the one that will be ours if he doesn’t screw up the deal. You’d
be very good, at least when I got done with you, anyway.” She huffed.

“Thanks but I don’t–”

“Of course you don’t have time
right now. I need you to keep working on this case.”

Guy shuddered as he wished he had
the nerve to tell her outright there was no way he would be going into the
family business. Ever. Definitely not while her brother, Geoff was there.

After a short silence, she said,
“Send me a report and tell me all that you’ve found out already. And no, don’t
email it to me. And yes, I do know how to use it. I just don’t trust it. You
can tell me all the firewalls and antiviruses that keep it safe but I believe
that if someone wants the information they’ll find a way to hack in. Fax it to
me. Make sure it’s her, Guy. Make sure.”

He tapped his index finger on his
chin, a quirk he’d involuntarily picked up from his grandfather. He chuckled,
remembering he’d always done that whenever his grandmother challenged him.
“It’s her, Gramama. If you could see her, you’d know it too. Don’t worry, I
know what I need to do. I’ll keep this quiet as long as I can. You need to
prepare Gina and Daniel, though. They need to hear this from you.”

She huffed again. “Don’t tell me
how to handle my daughter. I’ll let them know when I’m good and ready. And when
I am as convinced as you are that she is the one. I won’t have her hurt this
family again. When I meet her I’ll decide what’s right.”

He shook his head. He understood
her anger but she couldn’t blame it on a kidnapped baby, the only innocent
party in the mess.

“Take care of yourself,” she said
as she rang off.

He wished she hadn’t said that.
She wasn’t sentimental, so a strong sense of foreboding hit him like a smack in
the face with a newly caught fish. Uneasy, he stared at the phone as he tapped
the end button on his Blackberry, and then searched for his business partner’s
number.

He watched the woman known as
Bailey Saunders walk out of the funeral home, looking dazed and confused. He
had to add to her burdens and regret struck him, along with sheer fatigue. He
almost wished he’d taken that vacation he’d been putting off. And off. And off.
But as soon as this was done he was going to go far away and lie on a beach.

Despite the hard work, he loved
being a computer geek. Although he’d only been at it for a little more than a
year with his partner, Graham Knight, Guy had excelled. Knights Associates had
been tough slugging for a while to get clients. And when they had business, the
hours were long and grueling.

Their other cases tended to
involve cheating spouses but the work was impersonal. The private investigators
who hired them wanted any online traces of emails and pictures that would
support their theory of infidelity. He and Graham didn’t care for those jobs
but they had paid the bills in the beginning. Some interesting cases had come
along from the police department, wanting them to check out fraudulent activity
in a few companies. Then Guy’s grandma had approached him with finding the lost
baby. This task was way outside of their normal work, which was hunting the
internet for people who were breaking or had broken the law. Searching for and
finding someone who was stolen almost thirty years before wasn’t their usual
assignment and although it fascinated him, he hadn’t wanted to take it. In fact
he’d begged Graham to do it. Graham had just smiled that knowing smile and had
shaken his head.

The tears that had filled his
grandmother’s eyes when she’d asked had really been his undoing. He’d never
seen her shed a tear or even come close. And she’d had plenty of reasons to
over the years, especially when he’d been brought into the fold—an offspring
from an ugly situation and no relation to her at all. But she hadn’t turned him
away and had insisted that he call her grandmother. She hadn’t turned him away
when his mother had died in a car accident, nor when the scandal of rape had
hit the newspapers, for a second time. Nor when his grandfather, her husband,
her friend, had died suddenly.

She’d taken it all in stride. Her
one goal had been to protect him at all costs. She’d known he was innocent and
would not let the media nor his money-grabbing grandmother use him to smear the
Lindell name and gain fortune.

He tapped his fingers on the
steering wheel. He would do anything for Dorothea. She’d been the one to save
him from a life of hell in foster homes, for that alone, he'd have helped her.

Hitting the number two on his
speed dial, he waited for it to be answered.

“Are you calling because you need
advice, you miss me or your grandma is giving you a hard time?” Graham asked.

Guy smiled. “Kiss mine.”

“Ah but then one would presume
that I wanted to and after catching Mr. Simon doing that exact deed with Mr.
Traemont, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to get that vision out of my
head. I think the only thing worse was telling Mr. Simon’s wife, ‘yes, he was
cheating but no, it wasn’t a younger woman but a younger man.’ Eecccchhhh.”

Guy burst out laughing. Graham
had worked as a private investigator for a large company for a few years. He’d
been hired on to do computer work for them but he’d soon found that they’d
really needed an extra body to do legwork and he’d been it. Investigations had
never been something he’d wanted to do but he loved to share the stories of the
stakeouts he’d been on.

“How’s it going? Any luck?”

“Well, after covertly entering
the plane and flying all the way across country, I landed in the airport. After
several hours of sleuthing–”

“Don’t tell me you got some dumb
luck and found her right away?”

“You won’t believe it. This case
might be over before it starts.”

“What happened?”

“I get off the airplane at
Victoria Airport, walk into the terminal and guess what? There she is in line
getting on a plane. So I get in line, buy a ticket and now I’m in Calgary.”

“Alberta? What in the world are
you doing there? Are you sure you didn’t just decide to take that vacation you
keep saying you will and are actually calling me from Cancun after one too many
rum punches?”

He tapped his finger on his chin
as he took a deep breath. Things were good. “I seriously am doing that once
this case is over. In fact I should get Sherry to book me a trip for next
week.”

“You think it’ll be over that
fast?”

He’d thought a lot about it. His
role was to find her and tell her who she really was, which made him
uncomfortable. How would she feel? Then he’d hand her over to his step-grandmother
who would decide how to handle the rest. He’d already done half the job. “Yeah,
it’s looking like it.”

“So what’s in Calgary?”

“Her mother. And unfortunately
her mother’s funeral.”

“Shit. Sorry to hear that. It’ll
make it tough telling her she’s not who she thinks she is.”

You have no idea.
“I’ve
got to go. Tell Sherry to check out some prices for me. Hmm… Hawaii, I think.”

“Good choice, ol’ boy. Ta ta for
now.”

Guy chuckled as he ended the
conversation. Graham’s snobby British accent was bad but it sure lifted Guy’s
spirits.

Glancing out his window, he noted
that Bailey was finally on the move. He started his SUV and pulled into traffic
four cars behind her. His gut clenched, twisting his insides. This case wasn’t
going to have the quick finish he wanted.