Blind Pursuit

60

In darkness, the buzz of an intercom.

Blinking awake, Erin leaned on one elbow and stared at her bedside clock.

12:03 A.M.

It’s happening again, she thought groggily. Oliver is back.

Crazy notion. Insane.

Even so, she was trembling as she threw off the covers and padded into the living room.

She thumbed the Talk button. “Yes?”

“Erin? It’s me.” The voice was Annie’s. “Sorry to come over so late, but… I need to talk.”

Need to talk. Even the same words as last time.

“Annie? Is that you? Is it really?”

“Of course it is… Oh, I get it. I–I didn’t think of that. Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped by, huh?”

Oh, hell. “You’re here, so come on up.”

Pressing Enter, she buzzed open the lobby door.

It would take Annie a minute or so to ride the elevator to the fourth floor. While waiting, Erin returned to her bedroom and put on her slippers and robe.

Which was exactly what she’d done that other night, she reflected grimly, then shook her head in self-disgust.

Stupid of her to entertain such a blatantly irrational fear-especially after Detective Walker had explained precisely how Annie’s voice had crackled over the intercom on the night of the kidnapping.

Nothing mystical about it. Oliver owned a tape recorder with an attachment that let him tape directly off his phone line. He called Annie’s number while she was out and recorded her answering machine’s outgoing message.

Hi, this is Annie. I’m not home right now, so if you’re a burglar, I’m in trouble. If you need to leave a message, please wait for the tone and then talk. Bye.

Then he edited the tape, leaving in only certain words. The spliced audiocassette was found during a thorough search of his apartment.

This is Annie… I’m in trouble… Please… Need to… talk.

The doorbell rang. Annie was here.

If it really was Annie, and not Oliver once again returned from the dead.

At the door Erin flipped the wall switch, illuminating the living room. Before retracting the dead bolt, she checked the peephole. The face in the fish-eye lens was her sister’s.

She opened the door. “Annie. You okay?”

“Okay?” Annie stepped inside, smiling blithely at the question. “I’m perfect. That’s what Lydia used to say about us, you remember? That we were perfect.”

Her words were strange, her smile oddly fixed. A worry flitted through Erin’s mind that her sister might be having some sort of breakdown.

Never should have told her, she reproached herself for the hundredth time.

Though she’d given the police most of the details of Oliver’s past, Erin had withheld one crucial part of the story-Maureen’s rape and pregnancy. That secret had been shared only with Annie.

It had seemed only proper. Her sister, after all, had every right to know. But Annie had taken the news hard, terribly hard.

And why not? Such an ugly word, redolent of ancient taboo: incest.

Erin felt it, too-that crawling sense of unfitness, of impurity. Had felt it ever since she grasped the truth about Oliver and his relationship with Maureen. In the two weeks since the fire at the ranch, she’d tried to rationalize the problem out of existence. When those efforts had failed, she found herself taking long baths and too many showers, hoping illogically to wash away the physical sensation of corruption.

No use. There were some things water couldn’t cleanse.

She was tainted; they both were. Contaminated.

Filth. She heard Oliver’s voice in her mind. And, deeper in memory, Albert Reilly raging: Abominations.

She pushed away those thoughts and gestured toward the sofa. “Why don’t we sit down?”

“Not there.” Annie was still smiling, smiling, an unnatural glitter in her eyes. “The dining table. Light’s better there.”

Though Erin had no idea why the light would matter, she complied, seating herself across the table from her sister.

“Sorry to drop by so late,” Annie said. “You were asleep, I guess.”

“It’s all right.” Erin kept her tone neutral.

“I couldn’t sleep, myself. Came back from a date with Michael around ten o’clock.”

“A date? How long has this been going on?”

“Oh, I don’t know. This was-let’s see-our third date. He’s a nice guy, as it turns out. But I mean, it’s not real serious.”

“Think it will be?”

“Too early to tell. Anyway, that’s not what kept me awake.” Annie fumbled open her purse, exposing a remarkable clutter of junk inside. “I was doing some research.”

“Research?”

“Going through the family records-the stuff Lydia inherited from Maureen. Found a few interesting items.” From the purse she removed a thin sheaf of folded papers, then unfolded one and gave it to Erin. “First thing… Maureen and Albert’s wedding license.”

Erin accepted the faded document with a frown, intellectual curiosity beginning to override her concern.

“September 2, 1965,” she said thoughtfully. “Seven months before we were born. Two months after Maureen’s visit to the Connor ranch.”

“And two and a half months after June 15. That was when they officially celebrated their anniversary.”

Erin had forgotten that. She nodded slowly. “Keeping up appearances. The whole family must have played along.”

“Sure. They all believed they were covering up some premarital indiscretion on the part of Albert and Maureen. Even Albert himself believed that. At least until 1968, only Maureen knew the truth.”

“Interesting.” She gave her sister an inquisitive look. “But not what you came here at midnight to discuss.”

“I found a couple of other things. Here’s one.”

Annie handed over a second sheet of paper, older than the first, the creases deeper, the corners badly dog-eared.

Erin smoothed it out. Maureen’s birth certificate, dated April 22, 1944.

Mystified, uncertain why this would matter, she looked expectantly at Annie.

“And last,” Annie said softly, with an odd note of triumph, “there’s this.”

She pushed a third folded document across the table. The oldest of all, yellow and brittle, specks of mold like liver spots dappling one corner.

Some intuitive presentiment of the document’s substance set Erin’s hands shaking as she unfolded it.

The paper was a certificate of adoption, dated August 30, 1931, for an infant girl born six weeks earlier, named Lydia Aileen O’Hara.

“Adopted,” Erin whispered. “Lydia was adopted.”

“You got it.”

“She was never related to Maureen by blood.”

“Nope.”

“So we… we aren’t…”

“Oliver was guilty of plenty, but not, as it turns out, of incest. He only thought he was. Maureen and Lydia thought so, too. Neither of them ever knew about the adoption.”

Erin stared at the certificate until the words before her blurred with a rush of tears. Then she lifted her head to see Annie’s broad grin-not a tight, strained smile any longer, but a laughing expression of release.

She knew her own face looked the same. She could feel the tension sighing out of her body, the dull ache of her burden lifting, leaving her weightless and free.

“But…” she began, then had to steady herself before continuing. “But Lydia had all these papers. Inherited them after the fire in ’73.”

“Had them, but never looked at them, any more than she looked at her photo albums. Just locked them away untouched. The past-any part of the past-was too painful for her to face.”

“She could have saved herself so much grief…”

Annie’s smile dimmed slightly. “I know. But she didn’t. And it’s too late now-for her. But not for us.”

“Not for us,” Erin agreed, her voice unexpectedly hoarse. She gazed down at the thin sheet of paper shivering in her hands. “Oh, God, Annie. It’s… it’s a miracle.”

“Maybe not the only one,” Annie said cryptically. “Actually, it shouldn’t have come as a total surprise. We always knew Maureen was an accident; she was born thirteen years after Lydia. The way I figure it. Rose and Joseph Morgan tried to conceive a child, but had no luck.”

“So they adopted Lydia secretly and raised her as their own. Then when Rose was thirty-nine…”

“Surprise.” Annie beamed. “Here comes baby Maureen, defying the odds. I’d say that’s one trait we inherited from her, wouldn’t you?”

Inherited. Erin’s mind seized on that word, the last of the pieces falling into place.

“Maureen never had seizures.” She was thinking aloud, putting it together as she spoke. “None of the Morgans did, or any of the Reillys, either. It was Lydia O’Hara who carried that gene. She passed it on to Oliver, and he passed it on to me.”

“You don’t have to keep convincing yourself, Erin.” Annie’s tone was gentle. “It’s for real.”

“I know it is, but…”

But it was almost too good to be true. Childishly she was afraid of saying so and perhaps jinxing their good luck somehow, voiding the miracle.

Miracle…

“Wait a minute.” Erin frowned. “What did you mean when you said this might not be the only miracle?”

“Oh. Well, there is one more thing.”

“More? More than this?”

“Yeah, but… I don’t know how to feel about it. You see, when you told me the truth about Harold-about Oliver, I mean-there were some things that didn’t make sense to me.”

“Like what?”

“Take the way he set the fire in 1973. He poured gasoline everywhere in the house… except our end of the hall. He left a clear path from our bedroom to the stairs.”

Erin shrugged. “An oversight.”

“Then he left us alone for twenty-three years. He killed other women, but never came near us, though he could have tracked us down at any time. And when he did come looking for us, what did he do? He got a job with me. He became my assistant.”

“And kidnapped me.”

“He went to a lot of trouble to prevent you from guessing his identity, as if he really intended to let you go. Even after you escaped, he didn’t kill you.”

“He wanted therapy. He needed my help.”

“But the truth is, he could have snatched any therapist. It would have been less risky to pick a total stranger. What he specifically wanted was to work with you — and, in a different way, with me. He wanted to be close to us.”

“Because he was obsessed with us. And when he realized what lay at the heart of his obsession, he wanted us dead.”

“Part of him did.”

“You’re saying there was a conflict?”

Annie reached into her purse again. “Look at this.”

She removed the key ring taken from Oliver’s apartment, the keys charred and melted now.

“The firefighters found it when they were sifting the rubble. Michael gave it to me tonight.” She handed the key ring to Erin. “And I remembered something.”

Erin ran her fingertips along the serrated edges of the two padlock keys, one of which had saved their lives. “The other miracle?” she asked quietly.

“Might be.”

Erin waited. When Annie spoke again, her voice was a whisper.

“I used those keys to open the door of the ranch house. They were still in my hand when you shouted from the cellar. I ran to my car. And somewhere along the way… I lost them. Dropped them on the gravel. Dropped them and never picked them up.”

A beat of silence in the room.

“Later, in the fire, when I grabbed for the keys, it was just reflex. They shouldn’t have been in my pocket. But they were.” Annie looked across the table, green eyes sparkling faintly. “You see what I’m saying?”

Erin sat very still. Only her hand moved, fingering the ring of keys like the beads of a rosary. “Yes. I see.”

“He put them there. He put the keys back in my pocket. He gave us a chance, just like in 1973. Not much of a chance, but enough. Both times-just enough.”

“I guess he did.”

“But what I don’t understand is why. He was a killer. He murdered Maureen and Albert, Lincoln Connor and the real Harold Gund, and those three women up north. So why not us? What was special about us?”

Erin gazed into the shadowed corners of the room. Slowly she smiled, a thin, sad smile of wisdom and pain.

“We were his daughters, Annie.”

Nothing more to say after that. They sat together, lost in private thoughts; and sometime in that long silence, Annie reached out slowly and took her sister’s hand.