A Dark and Twisting Path Page 16

  Sam and I burst out laughing, and finally Belinda laughed, too. “Okay, stop making fun of me.”

  I pointed at the remaining file. “Fine. What do you have in there?”

  She looked at Sam. “First, I will tell you that you don’t need to hear this. I can take it away and you can remain in happy ignorance if you’d like. But I did find out something about your parents that you most likely did not know. And it—well, it potentially affects your life.”

  Sam studied her for a moment. “If it were you, and this information were out there—would you want to know it?”

  “I would,” she said without hesitation.

  He folded his hands on the table. “My mother and father told me once, just before the plane crash, that they had news for me. We were going to talk about it, and then my family was killed. Is there any chance that this could relate—to that? I know that’s a vague question.”

  “So I’ll give a vague answer—it’s possible.”

  We sat for a moment. It was not tense, but companionable. Belinda seemed content to wait, probably reliving her recent romantic encounter with Doug, and Sam seemed willing to contemplate his options without having to make a rushed decision.

  I got up to retrieve the coffeepot and topped off everyone’s cup.

  Then I sat down. Sam said, “What do you think, Lena?”

  I thought about it. “I think that, whatever it is, it won’t change how much you loved your family. But who knows? It might offer you insights into your parents—back when they were young—that you never had before. It might make you love them more.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  Belinda opened the file. “I found an article that I think actually chronicles the way your parents met. This is an article about your dad, David West, when he was an officer in Upstate New York. A young woman had been accosted by a purse-snatcher, and he saved the day. Helped the woman to her feet, apprehended the perpetrator, arrested him, then returned to check on the woman. The woman was your mother.”

  Sam hadn’t looked at the article yet. “Why would they put an article about a purse-snatching in the paper?”

  “Human interest, of course. Your mother was young and pretty, and the officer was young and handsome. But it was mostly about where the attack occurred that captured the public interest. It was just outside an obstetrics office.” She turned the article toward Sam so that he could see the picture. “And your mother was nine months pregnant.”

  Sam said, “What?” and pulled the article toward him. He stared intently, and Belinda turned to me.

  “I seem to always be informing people about pregnant women,” she said lightly, referring to the time, months earlier, when she had learned through her research that the missing Victoria had been pregnant.

  I gave her a half smile, then turned my attention to Sam, who was clearly struggling with various emotions. “This was 1979,” he said. “Right around the time she got divorced, or whatever. She had a baby.”

  Belinda’s voice was encouraging. “Your dad was called a hero for coming to the aid of a pregnant woman. Apparently he continued to check in on her, and they started dating. I found a follow-up article.”

  She pulled it out; it was dated August of 1980. The headline read “Hero Cop Proposes to Woman He Saved.” In this picture Sam’s parents posed once again, but she was clearly not pregnant.

  “Does the article mention what became of her baby?” I asked.

  Belinda shook her head. “No. And I can’t find any records about an adoption. If it was a closed adoption, then there might be no way to access those files.”

  Sam leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “You’re telling me my mother had another child. That I was not her first child. And that she never told me I had a sibling other than Wendy somewhere in this world.”

  Calmly, Belinda pushed the second article toward Sam. “Many, many people didn’t tell their children these things. Often the women were made to feel ashamed about their pregnancies. We don’t know what your mother’s circumstances were, or what sort of input this divorced husband would have offered. I’m guessing none. Perhaps the marriage occurred because of the pregnancy, but that sort of thing doesn’t often work, especially with people who are essentially kids.”

  Sam shook his head. “My mom loved babies. She was wild about them. She wouldn’t have wanted to give hers up.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t her choice,” I said. “Parents can be very persuasive. They can assert pressure, as can social groups. Think about your mom’s parents. Would they have wanted her to keep the child?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said.

  “Are they still alive?” I asked suddenly. “We could just ask them!”

  He shook his head. “My grandfather died five years ago. My grandmother is in an Alzheimer’s facility. My dad’s parents are dead, too.”

  We sat and thought about that. Then Sam sat up suddenly and touched the file in Belinda’s hand. “Can you find out for me? Can you find this baby?”

  “I can try,” she said.

  “What if the letter my mom received was from this long-lost child?” Sam asked. “My father said that it was good news, but something that the whole family had to discuss. He said that my mother had received a letter. And it was a big enough deal that they wanted to talk to me about it personally.”

  He turned to me, suddenly eager. “Lena, do you think she might have received a letter from this lost child? Do you think she was going to make contact with him or her?”

  My favorite Camilla Graham novel came to my mind; it was called The Lost Child. Indirectly, that book had brought me to Blue Lake, and to Sam. And now here was Sam, saying the words “lost child” and making me feel that my life had folded in on itself. “It could be, Sam. This is certainly something big, something you didn’t know. It’s a secret your mother had, and now you share it with her.”

  He looked sad. “I wonder if she answered the letter before she died. If she said anything to that child. Otherwise, I wasn’t the only one who suffered when that plane went down.”

  This was a sobering idea, yet I also found it invigorating. If Sam were right, it meant that in the time of his worst grief, someone else, somewhere in the world, had been grieving with him.

  It meant that Sam had family.

  13

  When they finally found Phanessa, the woman who locals said was psychic, she faced them with a grim expression. “The past is a dormant volcano,” she said with quiet solemnity. “It will inevitably erupt and endanger everything built upon it.”

  —From Death at Delphi

  BELINDA READIED FOR departure, promising to pursue her research. “You can come by the library on Monday,” she said. “I’ll probably have something by then.”

  We thanked her and I walked her to the door. “Sam will need some time to think about this,” I said. “But he’ll also want some answers. If need be he can probably get his private detective to work on it.”

  Belinda stiffened and I realized that she was actually quite competitive. “Give me a chance. I think I can do it,” she said. “It will involve a lot of file searching.”

  “We’ll check in Monday, then,” I said. “Thanks, Belinda.”

  She waved and walked to her car. I went back in and found Sam staring out the window. “A lot to think about,” I said.

  “Yes.” He didn’t seem ready to talk.

  “Sam? You need time to process this, and Camilla texted me and said we should both try writing in our new locations—she thinks maybe they’ll inspire us to new ideas. But I thought I might cross the road and sit on that bench that overlooks the bluff. Would that be okay?”

  He shook his head. “Not with that weirdo on the loose. I’ll go with you.”

  I was about to protest, but he held up a hand. “I won’t get in your way. I’ll brin
g some work, too, and stay behind you. You can have the lake view and your solitude, but you won’t have to worry about some criminal grabbing you.”

  This was wise. “Okay. Thank you. It just seems so beautiful and warm today, and there aren’t many bugs yet.”

  “It’s a good idea. I know you want to write.” He touched my hair. “I’m in love with a writer. That sounds glamorous.”

  I pointed at the jean shorts and T-shirt that I was wearing. “Not so much. But I like the ‘in love’ part.”

  He bent to kiss me, his lips lingering and warm on mine, and then I collected my laptop and my sunglasses, and Sam picked up a file folder that he’d been going over that morning. “Okay. Let’s go look at the lake,” he said.

  Camilla, it turned out, was right again. I had seen the little bench tucked into the trees, halfway between her house and Sam’s, but I’d never sat on it or studied Blue Lake from that particular vantage point. Ideas were already bubbling to the surface of my thoughts, starting with some images of setting. I could imagine that I was looking at the Ionian Sea. The lake was calm today, with waves that appeared like froth on its deep blue surface, and the sky, pale and speckled with clouds, spoke of eternity with its vast and sunlit expanse. How strange that I tended to think of the sky in a limited sense: the Blue Lake sky, the Chicago sky. This same sky hung over Delphi, over the whole world.

  I opened my computer and tried to capture some of these philosophical thoughts and shape them into the narrative of our heroine, Lucy Banner. My hands flew over the keys, but my eyes stayed on the lake, the sky, the elusive, amorphous clouds . . .

  A shadow fell across my screen. “Lena?”

  I started and looked up, shading my eyes. Victoria West stood next to me, clad in a pale yellow spring sweater and a pair of faded jeans. She looked ridiculously elegant.

  “Oh, uh—Victoria. Hello—uh,” I stammered. She was the very last person I had expected to see. “You’ll want Sam. He’s back there in the trees, trying to be unobtrusive while he guards me. I had a—an incident yesterday.”

  “Yes, Sam just told me. Smart of him to keep an eye on you. He’s chatting with Timothy right now—that’s my bodyguard.”

  To my horror, she sat down on the bench next to me and stretched out her long legs. “It’s actually you I want to speak with, Lena.”

  “Me? What—how can I help you?” I closed my computer and set it on the ground. I hoped that I didn’t sound as uncomfortable as I felt.

  “I just thought it would be good if we talked. We never really have. And I’ve heard such nice things about you.” I ventured a look at her face and was treated to a disarming smile—a smile so genuine it made me feel a bit more at ease.

  “No, we never really have. And I never got to say that—I’m sorry for all you went through, Victoria. Even before Athena—it sounds like it was difficult.”

  She sighed and looked at the lake. “Well, thank you for that. Truly it was nothing compared to what poor Sam had to endure. I’ve been looking back at the headlines, watching news videos on YouTube . . . that was quite a witch hunt. Poor Sam. And I’d treated him abominably before I even got on that damned yacht. I wasn’t a good person, Lena. I was selfish and indulged, and I was experimenting with drugs and alcohol like a teenager.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  “I suppose I still live the privileged life. But I like to think I grew up—finally—during this experience. Only took me thirty years, right? And that’s probably because it was difficult. I was forced into adulthood by the reality of my circumstances.” She looked at the sky and brooded about this. “Toward the end,” she continued, “when I realized who Nikon really was—then it was hard, very hard. Especially when Athena was born, and I wanted nothing more than to show her the world. I would spend long days with her, trying to plan escapes that I knew, deep down, could never happen. You saved my life, Lena. And Athena’s life.”

  “Not really. I just—I tend to be very curious. And I find Google to be a very helpful tool.”

  She laughed and pushed some hair out of her face with a graceful hand. “Sam and I talked about what we went through, and we agreed that there must have been some sort of divine plan of suffering and redemption. Because as a result of my fateful meeting with Nikon Lazos, I got my beautiful child. And Sam got you.”

  She turned her green eyes on me. “You’re young, but you have a wise face,” she said. “You have healed Sam, or almost healed him. Without you he would not have come out of this as well.”

  “I hate to contemplate that.”

  “So do I.”

  We sat for a moment, looking at the lake and thinking our thoughts. I said, “I tried to imagine what your voice would sound like, back when we were looking for you. Now that I’ve seen you and heard you—it’s actually quite close to what I imagined.”

  “Is it?” She looked amused. “And how does my voice sound? Spoiled?”

  “No. Cultured, elegant, but also fun-loving. It’s a nice voice.”

  She turned toward me on the bench. “You’re very generous, aren’t you? You helped to find me, and now here I am, making demands on your boyfriend, monopolizing him sometimes, and you’re telling me I have a nice voice.”

  I shrugged. “I understand why you need to talk to Sam. You two have a long history.”

  She laughed. “How very careful you are at choosing your words. You are far too polite, Lena.” She sighed and tucked one of her legs under her on the bench. “I want you to know there’s nothing to worry about. I have no designs on Sam. And even if I did, it’s clear that he is far too in love with you to ever consider someone else.”

  “I would like to think so. I certainly do love him.”

  Victoria West touched my hand. “If I could pick a wife for my ex-husband—someone to make up for all of my own matrimonial failings—I could not find a better candidate than you.”

  “Thank you.” I smiled at her.

  Her eyes were back on the lake. “The truth is, Lena, I’ve only fallen in love once in my life. And until that moment, I didn’t know what love was.”

  “Do you mean—with Nikon?”

  Her lovely mouth curved into a frown. “Nikon! Ugh. A passionate lover who turned my head for quite some time, yes. When I think of how stupid I was, falling for him because he was foreign and mysterious, and older, more experienced. And so very, very rich. He made such a big deal of our boarding the yacht—our big adventure, our secret future together.” She shook her head. “I’ll confess it never once dawned on me to tell Sam or Taylor or my family where I was going. I would contact them later, once the excitement was over. But looking back, he was selfish even then, because his people knew all about it. His brother and sister were there to see us off—the only two of his clan I ever met—and he was always surrounded by his friends and advisors. Several of them crewed the yacht. But I—had no one.” Her face turned hard for a moment. “No, I realized soon enough that I had never really loved Nikon.”

  Her gaze dropped to her lap. “I was talking about my baby.”

  “Oh!”

  “Lena. I didn’t even know if I would love her, do you know that? I didn’t know much about children, and I had planned never to have a child, but Nikon swayed me with all his rhetoric about family and children and how they are the best parts of ourselves. He said things about planting roots, and the strength of the family vine. Well, anyway, I was pregnant before I knew it, and he made such a big deal out of it that I enjoyed my pregnancy, for the most part—never letting myself think of what life would be like after she was born. What it would be like to have a child, to raise a child.”

  She wiped at her eyes. “I wanted to give birth on the mainland, but of course Nikon insisted we had to have the utmost privacy. He set up his own little hospital on the yacht and brought in some doctor—well, you know the story. But you don’t know how lonely it felt.
I was in this white room, surrounded by medical staff who were strangers. I wanted my mother and father. I wanted my sister. I wanted Taylor. I even wanted Sam, because he had always been kind to me.

  “And I knew that beyond the walls of that boat was an even lonelier view—a foreign country, people speaking a language I didn’t know, and a sea that kept me away from the world I had once known. Nikon would wander in and out, and I fixated on this ring he always wore, a silver ring with an inlaid jade snake. I just kept thinking snake, snake.”

  Her voice was so sad that I took her hand and held it. She looked surprised, then gratified. She put her other hand over mine. “Then I had Athena, after nine hours of labor. She was tiny, with smooth pink skin and tons of black hair. Her eyes looked black, too, but I think they’ll be green. Like mine.”

  “She’s beautiful. I saw her—that day that you brought her to Sam’s. She looked right at me, Victoria.”

  She nodded, happy to be talking about her daughter. “She is magical. They say it takes weeks and weeks for a baby to smile, but my Athena saw my sadness, and she smiled at me almost right away. Just looked into my eyes and smiled.”

  To my distress, Victoria burst into tears. She lifted her hands to cover her face and I, at a loss, slid closer on the bench and gave her a half hug.

  She threw herself at me, wrapping her arms around me and crying on my shoulder. Her grief was so palpable it brought tears to my own eyes. “We’ll find her, Victoria. I know we’ll find her,” I said, patting her back.

  “My baby,” she said. “I miss my baby girl!”

  Sam approached; perhaps he had heard her crying. “Vic,” he said. “Do you need anything?”

  She pulled away from me, trying to compose herself, wiping at her wet face. “Oh God. I just cried all over Lena.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I know how hard it must be.”

  Sam handed Victoria a tissue and she blew her nose. “Oh, I’m a mess, aren’t I?” She stood up. “Well, Lena, I’ll leave you to your writing. I read your book, I meant to tell you. Sam lent it to me, but I’ll have to buy my own and have you and Camilla sign it. It was terrific—a wonderful distraction. I may have to read them all.”