Starting Over (Treading Water Trilogy) (39 page)

Aidan squeezed his brother’s arm. “That’s not going to happen.” He turned to Alan. “What’s the story with that PI who was working for Daphne and Brandon? Is there anything he can do?”

“He’s already on it,” Alan replied.

“Can we get him some help? Whatever it costs, I’ll pay. And I want to offer a half-million-dollar reward for any tips that lead to their safe return.”

Alan nodded. “I’ll make some calls.”

“What about the media?” Aidan asked. “Let’s get this on TV and name some names. It might make Monroe mad, but he’s not going to do anything to them if the whole world is watching.”

“Someone needs to tell Mum and Da before we do that,” Colin said.

“I’ll go over there,” Dec offered.

“Don’t let her come here.” Brandon had no doubt his mother would be hysterical. “I can’t deal with that right now.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Dec said. “Don’t worry.”

“I have a college friend who’s a TV reporter in Boston,” Meredith said.

“Call her,” Aidan said.

“Thank you,” Brandon whispered to his brother.

“We won’t rest until we find them,” Aidan said. “I promise you that.”

By noon, every media outlet in the country was reporting that vice presidential candidate Harrison Monroe’s estranged daughter-in-law and granddaughter were missing, and a Massachusetts man was accusing Monroe of abducting them.

“I had absolutely nothing to do with this,” a clearly rattled Monroe declared when reporters surrounded him after a campaign stop in Houston. “Mr. O’Malley is hysterical and looking for someone to blame for the disappearance of his fiancée and her daughter. Perhaps the police should be focusing their attention on him rather than me. Eleanor and I are praying for the safety of our daughter-in-law and granddaughter, and that’s all I’m going to say.”

“
You son of bitch!
” Brandon screamed at the television. “
You know exactly where they are!
Screw this.” He grabbed his cell phone. “I’ve got to get out of here.” He flew out the front door and through the crush of reporters gathered on the front lawn. Mike’s bicycle, still leaning against the garage door, stopped him in his tracks, reminding him of her birthday, of chasing her down the street as she learned to ride without training wheels and picking her up when she crashed on the neighbor’s lawn. Oblivious to the photographers capturing his every emotion, he stared at the bike with tears running down his face.

“Come on, Brandon.” Aidan led him away from the bike and urged him into the cab of his truck as reporters yelled at them for a statement. With reporters chasing them down the street, Aidan floored the accelerator and got them out of there. They drove around for a while and eventually ended up on Main Street.

“Can we go to the Light?” Brandon asked.

“Wherever you want.”

At Chatham Light, Brandon got out of the truck and sat on the guardrail facing the beach and ocean. “Mike loves it here. We flew a kite on the beach just last weekend.”

“You can bring her again when she gets home,” Aidan said, sitting next to his brother.

“I didn’t really understand until just now when we drove through town what you meant when you said you couldn’t come back here after Sarah died,” Brandon said. “I couldn’t live here anymore without them. Everywhere I look, I see something that reminds me of them.”

“I know it’s really hard, but try not to think the worst. Monroe might be a control freak and a crooked politician, but he’s not a murderer.”

“This is what it was like for you when Sarah refused treatment, wasn’t it?”

Aidan nodded. “There’s nothing worse than feeling completely helpless.”

“And you’d been with her for almost twenty years by then. I’ve had five months with them. I can’t imagine what you must’ve gone through when she was sick.”

“If someone you love is in danger and you can’t help them, the feeling is exactly the same whether you’ve loved them for five months or twenty years.”

“Only one thing could keep Daphne from calling me for this long.” Brandon looked out at the endless ocean. “She must be dead.”

“Brandon, don’t…”

“She’s pregnant.”

Aidan gasped. “Oh, God.”

“No one knows, not even Mike,” he said as new tears fell from eyes already raw from crying and lack of sleep.

Aidan put his arm around his brother. “You have to stay positive for them. They need you to keep it together.”

“Thank you for all you’re doing to help, Aid. For posting the reward and everything.”

“It would’ve broken Sarah’s heart to know how you felt about her and to think she’d been cavalier with your feelings. I have no doubt she’d approve of me using her money to help you.”

Overcome, Brandon could only nod.

Chapter 35, Day 171

Brandon passed most of the second long night lying on Mike’s bed with the summer of fun photo album. He flipped through it over and over again and stopped each time to study the photo taken on Nantucket of Josh and Mike with their arms around each other. They were like two blond angels with dark tans and big smiles. They’d gotten used to seeing each other almost every day, and Erin was struggling with what to tell Josh about where his best buddy had gone.

The next three pages were from Declan’s wedding. Brandon’s favorite among them was one Daphne took of him and Mike, their faces alight with color from the Fourth of July fireworks. Included was a shot of the O’Malley family, which had grown from thirteen to eighteen this year—twenty-one if they counted Clare’s daughters, who were included in the family picture taken at Aidan and Clare’s wedding. He paused to study a great shot of Aidan and his best man, Colin, sharing a laugh before the ceremony.

Brandon ran a finger over the photo of a beaming Aidan surrounded by the women who made up his new family—Clare and Jill to his left, Kate and Maggie, still wearing a cast on one of her arms, to his right.

On the next page was a picture of Aidan at the piano, serenading Clare with the song “Beautiful in My Eyes.” Everyone in the room had been in tears by the time Aidan, accompanied by Declan and Kate singing backup, had played the last notes of the song. His family hadn’t heard Aidan play since before Sarah got sick, and it was an unforgettable moment for all of them.

A star-struck Mike had taken several photos of Clare’s daughter Kate, who showed them why her song “I Thought I Knew” was number one on the country charts when she sang it for her mother and new stepfather. The following week, Brandon heard Mike telling someone at the beach that her Uncle Aidan was Kate Harrington’s stepfather, and Kate was going to be a
big
star.

Brandon flipped to the photo of Clare surrounded by the O’Malley brothers. She had acted like nothing ever happened between her and Brandon when she put her arm around him for the photo. On the facing page was a shot of him with Daphne on Aidan’s deck. They’d been captured in an unguarded moment with Mount Mansfield in the background. Anyone could see how deeply in love they were just by looking at that photo.

He choked on a sob. “I miss you, Daph.” Rolling his face into Mike’s pillow, he breathed in the scent of her baby shampoo.

It settled in on him during another long night that Daphne might really be dead. “If you’re gone, baby,” he whispered, “I swear to God I’ll spend every ounce of energy I have getting our girl back from them. I’ll raise her myself if I have to, but they aren’t going to.”

In all the chaos of the last few days, Brandon hadn’t spent much time thinking about how Monroe found them. However, once he took the time to ponder the question, it didn’t take long to figure out how it happened.

With a sick feeling in his stomach, he got up and went into their bedroom, touched the space bar on Daphne’s computer, and waited for it to boot up. He opened the browser and typed “Brandon O’Malley” into the search engine.

The list of results was long, but the item at the top was all it had taken.

Swallowing hard he clicked on the link to the company Web site. The caption under his photo said, “Brandon O’Malley, Professional Engineer and Principal, O’Malley & Sons Construction, Inc. Headquartered in scenic Chatham, Massachusetts, O’Malley & Sons is one of Cape Cod’s largest family-owned and operated businesses.”

“Oh, God,” he whispered. In trying to rid them of the
Monroes
, he’d led them right to Mike and Daphne.

His mind raced.
Daphne was right. I should’ve just left it alone. Instead, I stirred things up, and now they’re gone
. He’d been so confident that the photos would scare off Monroe, especially in the midst of the campaign. Clearly, Brandon had underestimated the senator’s obsession with his granddaughter. As he sat on the bed, he yearned for something to dull the awful ache that had been with him every minute since he came home to find them gone—the ache that sharpened into unbearable pain when he realized he had only himself to blame for leading Monroe right to their doorstep.

Thinking back to when he was drinking, he tried to recall all the places he’d hidden booze in the house. Surely there was one bottle left that no one had found. And then he remembered—the garage, in the cabinet over the basement stairs. Walking quietly through the living room where his brothers were sleeping, he went out to the garage through the kitchen door.

Using a step stool, he reached for the cabinet where Valerie had kept the Christmas decorations, opened the door, and found not one but two bottles of Jack Daniels. He reached for the unopened bottle and brought it down from the cabinet.

He sat on the garage floor and leaned against the wall, cradling the bottle. Tears rolled down his face as he worked up the nerve to toss away one hundred and seventy-one days of sobriety. He’d honestly thought he would never drink again. But nothing could’ve prepared him for how it would feel to discover he had endangered the two people he loved the most.

The cap resisted his fumbling attempts to break it open, almost like it knew what was at stake.

When he finally managed to open the bottle, the smell hit him first, promising the sweet relief he couldn’t get anywhere else.

Blinded by tears, he held the open bottle up to his nose.

“What’re you doing?”

Colin’s voice startled him.

“Go away, Col.” The disappointment he saw on his brother’s face was excruciating.

“Where did you get that?” Colin asked, grabbing for the bottle.

Brandon held it out of his reach. “
Get the fuck out of here!”

“You don’t want to do this, Brand. It won’t help anything.”

“What the hell do you know about it?”

“You’ve worked so hard for almost
six
months
. Come on, give it to me.”

“Leave me alone, Colin. I mean it.”

“Don’t you want them to be proud of you?” Colin pleaded, squatting so he was at eye level with Brandon. “Think about Daphne and Mike coming home to find you drunk. Don’t let them down like this. They’re counting on you.”

Deep, gulping sobs seized Brandon. He didn’t resist when Colin took the bottle from him, set it aside, and dropped to his knees to console him. Brandon fell against his brother’s chest and cried until there was nothing left. “It’s all my fault, Col.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I confronted Monroe, I gave him my name. I’m all over the Internet because of the company. That’s how Monroe found them.”

“They’ve found them before without any help from you, and they would’ve found them again. They weren’t going to give up. You can’t do this to yourself. We all thought those pictures of him with his mistress would put an end to this whole thing.”

Brandon wiped his face. “How will I ever live without them if we don’t get them back?”

“You won’t have to.”

The open bottle of whiskey sitting on the garage floor was a stark reminder of what Brandon’s life without them might be like.

At Colin’s urging, Brandon finally went to bed and slept until ten the next morning. While he knew he needed the sleep, waking up and remembering they were gone was agonizing, as was realizing how close he’d come to chucking his hard-earned sobriety. He was amazed by how easily he’d tossed aside all the resolve he’d built up over the last six months. Of course, he knew alcoholism was a lifelong disease, but he’d thought he had it beat. The events of the previous night had shown him otherwise.

He could also no longer ignore the fact that he was starving. The smell of bacon got him up and into the shower where he stood under the pulsing water without feeling a thing. Everything he did was by rote and out of necessity—wash, shave, comb, brush, dress.

In the kitchen, his mother stood guard over the bacon. She turned and held out her arms to him.

As he stepped into her embrace, Brandon could see that she’d been crying.

“I couldn’t stay away any longer.”

“I’m sorry, I just knew you’d be disappointed…”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I promised I’d keep them safe.”

“You couldn’t be with them every minute of the day. You did everything you could, Brand.”