Tainted (25 page)

“My father was a psychopath.”

“Brilliant man,” she corrects. “You have an hour.”

“You should save yourself the disappointment of waiting that long for a ‘no’.”

“Then you should go run to Daddy for help. You’re good at that.”

“My father is dead.”

“Mm-hm. Tell Paul I said hello, will you?” Then she disconnects the call.

What?

I press the icon to redial. Instead of her voice, I get a goddamn busy tone. Hailey’s probably ignoring the call so she wouldn’t have to deal with me asking her what the hell she meant by that. She knows I’ve relied on Paul a lot since my dad died. Why would she allude to him being my father? Paul’s been single all his life. My parents had been married all of mine. Dad had taken blood tests for genetic testing and had a paternity test run at the time. I am a Franks by blood.

What is Hailey playing at?

“You know me, Alex,” she’d said. “When have I ever pretended to be, or done anything, stupid?”

Never. There’s a purpose behind everything she does.

What’s her purpose now? Yes, he’s stepped in to monitor the estate and the business. That doesn’t make Paul my father. Yes, he was in love with my mother. Anyone with any sense can see it. That must be what she means. Maybe she thinks she has something on Paul because he hasn’t admitted it.

Damn my instinct to run to him. Instead of holding the phone, I push the Bluetooth button and command, “Call Paul.”

He answers on the second ring. “Hey, kid. Did something happen? How’s Emma?’”

“Em’s fine. But I think we need to talk.”

“Sure, sure,” he says. “Come to the lab.”

“No,” I deny that impulse, and him. I know the one place I might be able to weasel the truth from him. “Can you meet me at Mom’s grave?”

“Alex…” he draws in a deep breath. I don’t respond. Paul sighs, a resigned sound, before saying “OK, son. I’ll see you in a little while.”

Memorial Gardens Cemetery, in the middle of a snow storm, is both terrifying and beautiful. White blurs the edges, making it deceptively soft in appearance. The truths this graveyard has revealed are too sharp to be any comfort.

Standing, freezing by my mother’s grave, watching Paul’s beat-up old Chevy Blazer approach, I doubt anything he says will be gentle.

I stoop and wipe snow from her headstone.

“I miss you, Mom,” I say. “I’ve been so lost, had so much go wrong since you’ve been gone. I never wanted to believe your epitaph. Y’know what? Life
is
a lie, or one big string of them. I wish I could find happiness in dreams, but I can’t trust they’re mine anymore.”

“Hopefully,” Paul says trudging up the path, “someday that will change.”

Is the comfort I feel around him a lie, too? It’s definitely shaken, but did I put my trust in the wrong man? It feels natural; Paul’s been in my life for years. And he loved my mom, even if he won’t admit it.

What does Hailey want me to find by confronting him? Does she want to erode my trust in him, tear me down further until I go crawling back to her?

“You said we needed to talk?” Paul suggests.

I don’t lift my gaze from the Romanian lullaby on Mom’s headstone. The words fall out before I can think to arrange them nicely. “Did you and my mom have an affair?”

Wind buffets his hair, coats his glasses white and hides his eyes. Nothing can disguise the pain in his expression.

“I loved her so much,” his voice cracks when he finally admits it. Paul fidgets, tamping down the snow beneath his loafers. “We didn’t plan it. God knows we both knew it was wrong, but we couldn’t fight it. We were going to take you away, Alex, start a new life. And then–”

“And then Mom got sick,” I finish for him.

“And then your father killed her.”

Shock steals my breath. The world rocks, kicked off its axis, pivoting on my mother’s grave. Dad would never… He broke every law possible to resurrect me. He wouldn’t kill my mom.

“That’s not possible,” I argue. Something inside me doesn’t want to hear any more of this story. Unconsciously, I find myself moving between him and Mom’s grave. My foot betrays me and I stumble forward. Paul catches my arm, steadies me, and I push him away. Hurt flashes over his face.

“It’s true.” Paul meets my eyes for the first time. No deceit hidden there, just a pain that never healed. “Your father didn’t tolerate disobedience. Your mother asked for a divorce – the ultimate disobedience – and days later she was in the hospital. That’s why he never came here to see her grave, Alex.”

“Because he did it.” Cold, bitter truth settles into my gut. Paul’s right – my father didn’t tolerate failure, he demanded perfection, he hated disobedience. Because anything less looked bad on him. If Mom had an affair and wanted to leave, it would undermine everything he wanted the world to believe of him. The two pictures in Paul’s office flash behind my eyes: cold, clinical distance, perfect poses, no smiles, versus the warmth, happiness and natural ease.

Mom’s headstone talks of dreams – I’m trapped in a living nightmare.

If my father murdered my mom, it was Paul’s fault for loving her. I turn on Paul, my fists clenched, blood pumping. “He did it because of you!”

“Yes.” Hair swishes in the wind when he hangs his head. “I will understand if you hate me, too. If your father couldn’t have Elle, no one could. He punished her with death rather than letting her go.”

“Why didn’t he kill you too?” The venom surprises even me.

And what about me? They left me motherless.

“Death wasn’t good enough for me.” Paul sounds defeated, broken. He stuffs his hands deep into his pockets, dislodging snow already settled on his shoulders. “Your father wanted to hurt me and leave me to suffer. That’s why he poisoned your mother. That’s why he did what he did…”

Is there anything worse than killing the woman Paul loved? What could be worse than taking my mom’s life? How many horrors has this man kept from me?

“What,” I ask, “was left?”

“My son.”

My father killed a number of guys my age trying to find the right donor to revive me. No evidence tied him to the crimes.
If
Paul had a son, he could’ve murdered him without remorse, or punishment.

“But you’ve never mentioned a son…” I argue.

He looks at me, eyes pleading. “It was right out of community college. I was young and naïve. Sarah used me to get pregnant, and then married Nathan Hughes. She swore me to secrecy, begged me not to ruin her married life.”

Those names. Hughes. I’ve heard it before… A brittle something stirs deep in me, poking, stabbing as it goes. My heart aches with a sudden bittersweet pain. Parts of my brain that weren’t mine at birth recall images of people I never knew: grandparents at a birthday party, a mother in a rocking chair, a father pushing a bicycle.

No! The denial isn’t mine, it belongs to the ghost left inside. Daniel, so long quiet, rages in me. A wave of grief so palpable floods me, fractured memories ride the tide in my head, batter me from inside. I press my hands to the sides of my skull to contain it. His parents were
his
parents. His Dad was his father. Daniel’s essence refuses Paul, doesn’t want to believe the truth I see in his eyes.

Holding my head doesn’t help. I wrap my arms tight around myself instead. I’m torn. I’m torn and it just keeps ripping.

“No,” I croak, but it’s Daniel’s word. The snow hurries to embrace me when I sink to my knees. I strike out when Paul reaches for me. “Don’t touch me!”

“Yes, son.” Eighteen years of loss weigh down his words. “Daniel was mine.”

“No!” Mom’s headstone lurches in my vision, I rock back and land on my butt to avoid his grasping hands.

“OK.” He holds his hands up. Then removes his glasses, wipes snow from the lenses, and tucks them in his jacket. “OK. Take your time. But eventually you have to get past this and accept the truth.”

Past it? How do you get past a gulf ripped through you?

Paul hunches down, his snow-wet hair falling in loose dark curls around his hazel eyes.

Oh God. So familiar. So unlike the father in those broken memories. Just like the pictures Emma showed me of her and Daniel before his fall. He was obviously Paul’s son. I missed the similarity, because I never thought to look for it.

“Come on, kid.” He extends a hand. “For Emma’s sake.”

The one thing that united Daniel and I in the first place acts like a balm on the wounds cutting us raw. Her face flashes in my mind: the last day of the fade, tired, shadows smudged under her eyes, torn jeans. My heart kicks back into a regular rhythm. I take his hand and pull up from the snow covering my mother’s grave. She’s my mother. In some odd way, she’s Daniel’s mother now, too.

What does that make his parents to me?

What is Paul? I can’t call him “Father” – even if at one time I entertained the fantasy. The look on his face… and I can’t call him a liar, or guilty, either. Love and loss that deep can’t be faked, neither can the honesty when he begs, “Please trust me.”

I nod, because I deep down, I think I always have.

“Why,” I ask, “didn’t you tell me about Mom, or Daniel?”

“I never wanted to put you through this.” His voice sounds thick, strangled maybe. He swallows hard. “It would’ve been better for you. But I swore if you asked, I would be honest.”

Every Friday, to be reminded of what happened to his son and not say anything? He’s a saint, or a martyr. And my father was the most sadistic son of a bitch to live. “How could you go on, knowing who I was?”

“Because.” A smile so sad and desperate lights his face that it hurts to see. “Every time you visit, I get to see my son.”

I didn’t think my father could continue to hurt people after he died. His hateful acts are still bearing fruit, manipulating me, hurting Paul.

“I don’t know how to even think about this.” I cast a look at my mom’s grave. Where do we go from here? How can I ever look at him the same?

“That’s fine.” With a slight nod, he dusts more snow from creases of his jacket. “I can’t imagine all this is easy to take. I’m sure you have the file from your father’s house. Look close. Read it again. Then, when you’re ready, come to the lab. We need to work more on Emma’s blackouts.”

It all comes back to Emma. She’s the one thing making sense in my world, even if I ruined her. “I will.”

The pat on my shoulder is at once familiar and foreign when Paul rests a hand on me before leaving. So much of my life has already been twisted beyond normal. Things don’t really have to change between us. I’m not sure I can handle it if they do. Glittering white settles and drifts around me standing, looking at Mom’s headstone, reading the words over and over as they blur. I don’t let the tears fall until the Chevy pulls away.

Everything I believed about the past few years just took a serious kick in the teeth. My mother didn’t get sick, she was murdered by my father. Dad might’ve taken random boys until Daniel, but his death was a double-edged sword, saving me and hurting Paul in a way I can’t fathom. I’ve been alive again for months, at the price of his son’s life. Every time he sees me must hurt like hell.

If Hailey intended on destroying me by telling me to run to Daddy, she’s off to a damn good start. She also succeeded in making me forget to ask Paul –
Daniel’s father
– about the lack of Katrina’s video confession in the news.

Well played, Hailey. Well played.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Weak red light flashes across the dashboard of my car, thrown from the message indicator light on my phone. Outside I’m freezing, inside I’m numb, gutted by what I learned tonight. I crash to the driver’s seat, close the door and stare into the alien landscape Memorial Gardens has become.

Sitting is easy. Numb is easy.

I need it right now. If I were home, I would give in to my ridiculous urge to bury my face in Renfield’s fur. The cat’s dependably surly. He’s a constant. Nothing else is.

Knuckles crack when I stretch my hands in front of the heater vents blasting warm air. Someone’s been blowing up my phone – six calls since I plugged it in and closed the door. I’m not going to be able to respond to any message until I can flex my fingers again. Too bad the warmth can’t trickle up my veins, fill the hollowed-out feeling inside.

How am I going to face my grandparents knowing my mother was murdered? How am I going to face Paul? The expression in his eyes was so open and raw. He lives every day knowing his love was killed because of him, that his son was killed, and yet somehow still lives on in me.

Thoughts muddled, heart aching, I sit and watch the light blink at me. I should check it, I know I should. It could be Hailey again, or Emma. Checking demands thought, and acting on it – my brain is trapped in a barbed coil of Mom and Paul and Daniel. Paul told me to read the file I took from home. I’ve read it all. There must be something I’m missing.

The phone rings, shoving me into action. Despite my body’s resistance to cold, my hands are stiff from prolonged exposure and I fumble the phone. By the time I get it righted, the call is rerouted to voicemail. A second call comes in. I flick the icon and put it on speaker.

“Hello?”

“Dude!” Jason’s voice has a frazzled edge. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to call for almost an hour.”

“Sorry.” I talk over him in a rush to explain. He’s my best friend. If he can share his secrets with me, I can tell him what I learned. “Listen, I talked Paul, you’ll never believe this–”

“No time for that now,” he cuts in. “Emma’s gone.”

“What?” I tip the phone and look at the messages. All from Jason. “How? What happened?”

“Your psycho ex-girlfriend called Em’s cell. She said she wanted to apologize for the fight at Mugz-n-Chugz.” He muffles the phone, grumps to his mother about something, then says, “The bitch showed up at Bree’s and Bree wasn’t very friendly. So Hailey asked if they could go somewhere and talk. That was over an hour ago. Now Em’s not answering her phone.”

“Dammit. OK. Let me think a minute…”

I struggle to keep my stomach from plummeting. I’m already emotionally compromised and need to put it aside, rely on my analytical side to process this. Hailey has a purpose behind everything she does. She wanted to accomplish something more than my enlightenment by sending me to confront Paul. Hailey doesn’t give a damn about Daniel’s parentage, or my mother’s murder. She didn’t intend to destroy me, she intended to
distract me
. And she succeeded.