The Fate of Mercy Alban (31 page)

It made perfect sense. If my mother had been pregnant the night Coleville died, it would explain why she and my father had married so quickly—a course of events that I had no answer for. My dad did love her his whole life, just as he told me he did, and when his best friend died, he stepped in and married the girl in trouble. But I wasn’t about to tell Harris Peters any of that. I needed a moment alone to sort this through and think about what to do next.

I shot Harris a look and pushed my chair back. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go.”

“But—” Harris began, hopping to his feet.

I held out my hands, palms toward him. “Listen, you’ve given me a lot to process here,” I said. “We can continue this conversation, but not right now. Can I call you in a day or so?”

He nodded and simply said: “Sure.”

I turned to go back up to my room, but then I looked over my shoulder at Harris. He had slumped back down into his seat and was running a hand through his hair, shaking his head slightly. He radiated exhaustion mixed with a hint of despair. I couldn’t imagine feeling much—if any—compassion for the man who had so arrogantly interrupted my mother’s funeral. But Harris looked so utterly defeated he touched me, just a little.

I sat back down.

“I don’t get it, Harris,” I said to him, reaching across the table to place my hand over his. “You seem completely wiped out by this. You, who has spent a good many years digging up dirt on my family to write a tell-all exposé. You, who crossed an ocean and bribed unknown numbers of people to bring my aunt here—on the day of my mother’s funeral, no less. It’s almost like you had a vendetta against us. I’d think you’d be gleeful, uncovering the scandal that an Alban had an illegitimate child—if, indeed, it’s true.”

Harris took another sip of his ale. “It’s funny. You’re right, I’ve spent years on this, all the while suspecting I was your father’s son. And now when I’ve found your aunt and maybe found a thread that leads me to the truth about who has been sending those payments to me my whole life, suddenly now all the drive, all the anger that has been propelling me through this has evaporated. It’s like finding the key to the biggest puzzle of my life has done nothing but take the wind out of my sails.”

I furrowed my brow. “How so?”

He looked up at me. “Your mother died on the very day I was going to ask her about all of this. And the aunt I unearthed very likely tried to kill someone today. Talk about the Alban curse. I had seen it from afar before, but now I’m caught up in it. More than that, it’s like I’m the catalyst for the curse this time around. I caused all this, in a way. It’s one hell of a feeling.”

And suddenly, I realized what he was saying was familiar to me. All too familiar. I shivered as I remembered being in the epicenter of the curse two decades ago.

“I had three deaths on my hands,” I said to Harris, my eyes filling with tears. “My brothers and my father. I felt then just like you do now, like I was the catalyst for it all. I had to leave town to break the spell.”

He and I gazed into each other’s eyes for a moment that felt like forever. Something passed between us, I’m still not quite sure what it was—an understanding? A spark of kinship? A whisper from beyond the grave?

“The good news is that now you have all you need for your tell-all exposé,” I said, managing a smile.

“Yeah.” Harris chuckled. “The only problem is, now I’m sort of afraid to write it.”

“Let me ask you a question, Harris. It’s time for honesty now. Did you break into Alban House? Were you the one who rifled through my mother’s papers and my room?”

Harris shook his head. “The police have already questioned me about that. Why would I break into Alban House? I had already found the aunt—she was the ‘bombshell’ I had been looking for for years. What possible reason would I have to break in?”

“So you’re not the one who went through my room?” I reiterated. “You have no idea what was stolen?”

“No,” he said.

I eyed him and sat back, crossing my legs. I had been sure he was our intruder, but now that I thought about it, what he was saying sounded right. What reason did he have to break in? Mercy couldn’t possibly have told him about Coleville’s letters because my mother didn’t live at Alban House when they were written. The letters were addressed to her at her parents’ home, so there’s no way Mercy could have known about them when she was on the airplane with Harris.

As I sat there, I was becoming more and more confused about what to do. Here was a man who was questioning his parentage, and rightly so. But he was the same man who intended to write a book about my family. He hadn’t renounced his intention to do that. If I told him what I suspected, the secret my mother had kept for fifty years might very well be exposed for all the world to know.

I nearly gathered my things, got up, and walked away from Harris in that moment, but I didn’t. I heard, or imagined, my mother’s voice, soft and low in my ear. “Exposing the secret is exactly what I intended to do the day I died.”

And then it hit me—Harris was the very man she was to have met that day. He was the one to whom she was going to tell her deepest secrets. Perhaps her own son. Did she know? And now I sat here with him, newly armed with the very information she was going to tell him that day. Was it a coincidence? Did I find the letters by chance or …

Oh, Mom, did you have a hand in all of this?

I needed a moment alone.

“Will you excuse me?” I said, as I stood up and headed toward the restroom. Looking over my shoulder, I said: “I have a story to tell you, Harris, and I have a feeling we’re going to be here awhile.”

In the ladies’ room, I fished my cell phone out of my purse and clicked on the Internet search engine, typing “David Coleville” into the search field. I found the photo I was looking for and an icy thread worked its way up my spine. It was true, then. That’s why he had looked so familiar to me. Harris Peters was a dead ringer for David Coleville, with a little of Jake and Jimmy thrown in for fun. He was, without a doubt, a mixture of Coleville and my mother.

Still, even though I saw the resemblance clearly, the gnawing in my stomach was telling me to keep Harris in the dark about this. The Alban silence was wrapping itself around me—keep scandals hidden! Close ranks! But, I told myself, despite what it might mean to the Alban family, this was a man’s parentage we were talking about. We could certainly do a DNA test, but this photo told me all I needed to know.

I had no idea how or why my mother would have put the child up for adoption—I couldn’t imagine any possible scenario in which she would have given one of her children away, especially the child of the man she loved and intended to marry—but there was Harris, with the truth written all over his face. I had no right to keep this information to myself.

And if Harris told the whole world, well, that’s what my mother had intended to do the day she died, anyway.

I took a deep breath and rejoined Harris at our table. “So,” I began, “are you familiar with the journalist David Coleville?”

And I told him the story of finding the letters, and how Coleville and my mother had fallen in love. I told him they had planned to marry the summer Coleville died.

“Highly interesting,” Harris said finally. “This is something the literary world needs to know. But—”

“But what’s it got to do with our topic of conversation?”

He smiled. “Well, that’s what I was thinking, yes.”

I took the cell phone out of my purse and showed him the photograph of Coleville. “You’re a dead ringer for him, Harris.”

He leaned forward and squinted at the small image. Then he looked up at me, his eyes wide.

“I knew it didn’t add up, your theory about my dad,” I said to him. “You’re right in that only someone very rich could’ve made those payments all these years. But my dad died twenty years ago and I knew he didn’t have you in his will. Your birthday, along with the payments, got me thinking.”

I reached across the table and took his hand before continuing. “My mother was planning to marry David Coleville the summer he died. She married my dad that fall. Ever since I learned about her love affair with Coleville, it struck me as odd that she and my dad would marry so quickly after Coleville’s death. I initially thought she must’ve been pregnant. But I’m the eldest child and I was born years after that summer. And now here you come …”

“Whoa,” Harris said, wiping his eyes on his napkin. “I don’t …”

“Listen, we can sort all of this out,” I said. “We’ve got time. We don’t know yet if this is true. I suspect it is, but we don’t know for sure. So, yes, we can get a DNA test, and in the meantime, I’ll run down a paper trail to see if my mother made those payments to you over the years. If it does turn out that you’re my mother’s son, you need to know right now that I’ll welcome you into this family with open arms.”

For a moment, Harris stared at me, openmouthed. “How can you be so impossibly kind to me?” he said finally. “After everything I’ve done?”

I smiled. “I’m only doing what generations of Albans have done before me, Harris. We close ranks. If you’re family, you’re in the fold.”

Back up in my room, I drew a bath and stared at my cell phone. I had to admit it: The only person I wanted to talk to at that moment was Matthew Parker.

As much as I had been fighting my attraction to him, I couldn’t stop myself from circling back into his orbit. We’re just friends, I said to myself. This is what friends do, we tell each other things. Satisfied with that, I dialed his number.

“This is Reverend Matthew Parker, minister of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church. Sorry to have missed you. Please leave your name and number, and I’ll call back as soon as possible. God bless you.”

I hung up without saying anything. Instead, I grabbed the paperback I had bought in the hotel gift shop and slipped into the tub, hoping to savor the escape into another world that reading always provided me. That night, however, it didn’t. The truth of my life at the moment was stranger, and more encompassing, than the fiction on the page. I closed the book and slid down farther into the bubbling water, thinking of my mother and David Coleville and Harris Peters, and what it all might mean to me and to Amity, to have a new member of the family. I wondered how Jane would take to it. Not well, I was imagining.

I was having trouble keeping my eyes open when the phone rang.

I turned off the tub’s jets, cleared my throat, and answered. “Hello?”

“Grace, it’s Matthew. I saw you called.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he said.

I sat up a little straighter in the tub and suddenly felt a little strange, being in the tub and talking to him. “I’m just getting out of the bath,” I said to him. “Can I call you back in two minutes?”

“I’ll be here.”

I hopped out of the tub, quickly dried off, and wrapped a fluffy white robe around me before padding to the bed, cell phone in hand. I dialed.

“Hi,” I said again.

“Hi,” he said again.

I was silent for a moment, not knowing quite what to say. “Harris Peters came to see me at the hotel,” I said finally.

“What did he want?”

“You’re not going to believe it,” I said.

“Is it a bombshell?”

“I think this qualifies as a bombshell, yes.”

“Do you know what I want to know?” he asked me, chuckling. “Why is it every time you call me, you drop a bomb?”

“It’s my way.” I smiled into the phone and leaned back against the pillows. “I like to keep people interested.”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about in that regard, Grace Alban. I’m interested. Despite what we said the other night, I think you know that.”

I hesitated, all of my fear—a minister, public scrutiny, responsibilities—curdling in my throat. “I’m interested, too,” I finally admitted, and could feel the weight of the words all throughout my body.

“I don’t suppose,” I continued, “that you’re free to talk about this supposed bombshell?”

“I’ll be right there.”

We might have met in the bar downstairs. But instead, I closed my eyes and jumped off the cliff I had been avoiding for days. “I’m in room 1201.”

Rain hit the window in bursts and thunder boomed, waking me from a most pleasant dream. I blinked and looked around, and for a sleepy moment I didn’t know where I was. As I drifted further back into consciousness, I remembered. I was in the Sheraton Hotel, with a man by my side.

As I listened to the rainstorm and watched Matthew’s chest rise and fall next to me in the slow rhythm of sleep, I wasn’t quite sure what to do—get up and order breakfast? Pretend to be asleep until he got up and headed for home? I didn’t have much experience handling these sorts of situations and tried to remember my scant dating life before I married Amity’s father. In the end, I snuggled back down and gazed at the sleeping face of the man I was sure I could love.

We hadn’t talked much the previous night, not at first, anyway. As soon as I opened the door to my room, he pulled me into a kiss that seemed to go on forever. Despite whatever horrors and sadness had befallen me in the past week, my journey back to Alban House had led me straight to him, and for that I let out a grateful sigh.