Blood Vines

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Thursday, March 11

7:40 P.M.

“Hello, Son.”

“Dad.” Reed looked past him, expecting to see his mother or his brothers. His father rarely visited without external prodding of some sort. Make that never. But today the porch behind him was empty.

He returned his gaze to his old man. “This is a surprise.”

“May I come in?”

Reed swung the door wider. “Sure. I was making dinner. Let me go take it off the stove.”

His dad stepped inside. He’d inherited the cottage from his maternal grandmother, a good thing because he’d never have been able to afford it on a cop’s salary. Not that it was large or lavish, but Sonoma County real estate trended toward outrageously pricey.

“You’ve got the place fixed up nice,” his father said, looking around the 1940s Arts and Crafts-style cottage with a scowl.

“A compliment? Wow, I didn’t think I’d live long enough.”

His father didn’t comment. Reed headed to the kitchen, turned off the burner and covered his soup. When he returned to the living room, he found his dad pacing. “Have a seat.”

“No, thanks. What I came to say, I can say standing.” He looked Reed dead in the eye. “I hear you’ve been hounding our friends. Interrupting business, stirring up bad memories.”

Apparently, he’d struck a nerve. Enough of one to send out the infantry, guns blazing. “Hounding, Dad? Funny, I call it doing my job.”

“You know how I feel about your career choice.”

“You’ve never made a secret of it. Though as we both know, how you feel about my job has zero to do with what I need to do.”

“All this over some silly tattoo.”

“That ‘silly tattoo,’ as you call it, is a link between two crimes.”

“I’m going to ask you to drop this.”

“Can’t do it.” Reed held his old man’s gaze. “What’s the significance of the vines and snake?”

“It’s nothing.”

“If it was nothing, you wouldn’t be here. We both know that.”

“I’m here because you’re making our friends uncomfortable.”

“Who called you?” Reed asked. “Treven? Clark? Carter? All the above?”

“I know what you have. This link between crimes, as you call it. Tom’s tattoo and Patsy’s ring.”

“You know about the ring?”

“I do. And I noticed her daughter wearing it.”

He put subtle, caustic emphasis on the word her, making his disdain for Patsy obvious. “What’s the significance, Dad?”

“Not what you think, I’ll tell you that. And certainly not a link to a murder.”

“What do I think?”

“Don’t play games with me, Danny.”

“You’re the one playing games, Pops. Not me. We may not have always agreed, but you’ve always been a straight shooter. Be straight with me now.”

For a long moment, his father stood frozen. Then, sighing heavily, he crossed to the couch and sank onto it. For a long moment he stared at his folded hands, then lifted his gaze. “The boys were all part of a secret club.”

Reed cocked an eyebrow. “A secret club?”

His dad averted his eyes. Reed frowned. His father was always the take-charge guy in the room. He handled every situation, was the one who made the power play.

Not today. Reed had never seen him look so uncomfortable. Reed took a seat across from him and waited.

“This is very difficult to talk about. Very difficult.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “At the time, I had no idea what was going on. When I learned… it was such a betrayal. I felt as if my heart had been ripped from my body.”

He balled his hands into fists. “Being a parent is about protecting and nurturing. You try to surround your child with all that’s good. And when evil touches-” His voice cracked.

Reed saw evil every day; he knew it existed. But coming from his dad, delivered in such high, dramatic form, he had to laugh. “Not Academy Award material, Dad, but from a guy like you, almost convincing. But frankly, I can do without it.”

“This is nothing to laugh about.”

“What kind of secret ‘evil’ club?”

“An initiation club.”

“Into what?”

“Sex,” he said, expression harsh.

“And Patsy-”

“Was the initiator. She fucked them. They each got the tattoo after. Some of them were as young as fifteen.”

Reed struggled to come to grips with what his father was telling him, and to jibe the Patsy Sommer he remembered with the sexual predator his father described. An adult having sexual relations with a minor was a crime. Didn’t matter if the minor was a male and willing participant.

“You didn’t go to the police?”

“No. I… we wanted to keep it out of the press. We felt exposing our boys to that notoriety would make it even worse.”

“Who was involved?”

“Which boys?” Reed nodded and he went on. “You know several already. Tom, of course. Carter. Clark. Joe. Terry Bianche. That other kid, they called him Spanky.”

“The one who committed suicide ten or fifteen years ago?” His dad nodded and Reed wondered aloud, “You’re saying my brother Joe was involved. He doesn’t have the tattoo.”

“What was going on came to light before he got his, thank God.”

“Mom knows?”

“No. We decided that the boys’ mothers be kept in the dark.”

“And Harlan?”

“He didn’t know and still doesn’t. We’d like it to stay that way.”

Reed stood and crossed to the pair of windows on the far wall. They looked out over an old vineyard, dark and overgrown. He’d always wondered why anyone would just let it go wild that way. The land was so valuable.

Reed looked over his shoulder at his father. “She had sex with them. That was it, the extent of the club?”

“Not quite. The initiated would watch the new initiates. Cheer them on. Then they’d all take turns with her.”

Reed dragged a hand through his hair, thinking of Alex, wondering how he would tell her. “How did you find out?”

“Joe. After Dylan disappeared, he was completely traumatized. Confessed it all.” His lips curled in distaste. “It still makes me sick to think of it.”

Reed held himself stiffly. He’d seen and heard much worse. And he’d long ago reconciled himself with the ugliness the human animal was capable of. But this sickness had touched his family. His sheltered little circle.

“And the ring?” he asked stiffly. “Was it a gift? Or did Patsy have it made-”

“For herself. Yes. Max Cragan created the design. Of course he knew nothing about the symbolism.”

Reed saw that his father’s forehead gleamed with sweat. “To think, all those times we socialized with them, treating her as one of us, one of our inner circle, she was… doing that.”

His father’s expression puckered with grief and guilt. “I should have seen it. Should have somehow-” He bit the words back. “She was a whore. She preyed on our sons. How could I not have known? Not have seen something? But none of us suspected a thing.”

“Do you know who Alexandra’s father is?”

He shook his head. “It could have been anyone.”

“And Dylan?”

His father looked up, surprised. “What about Dylan?”

“Who was his father?”

“Harlan was, of cour-” He bit the words back as if realizing for the first time that Dylan could have been fathered by someone other than Harlan. Considering what he and the other men had learned she was up to, Reed found that odd.

His father must have realized how odd it was as well, because he quickly backtracked. “We all assumed, never questioned his…”

He cleared his throat. “You have to understand, before this came to light, we were friends. The best of friends. They seemed like a loving couple. And I’m not even certain when her insanity began.”

Reed frowned. “Insanity, Dad?”

“What would you call it? Define it for me.” He launched to his feet, flushing. “Having sex with the sons of her friends, it was… craziness. Sick!”

“It was criminal,” Reed corrected. “You should have gone to the police.”

“We didn’t! Dammit, we did what we thought was best!” He brought his hands to his face, a gesture Reed had never seen from his father.

When he dropped his hands, his eyes were wet. “She didn’t leave on her own. We forced her to go. Dylan was gone. Alexandra wasn’t Harlan’s. God forgive us, we never wanted Harlan to know. When we confronted Patsy, she threatened to tell him. If we didn’t offer her a settlement. She would need a nest egg, she said. We gave it to her. She took Alex and left, with the promise to never darken Harlan’s door again.”

His father reached a hand out. “I’m here, Dan. Hat in hand. I need your help. Let this tattoo thing die. If you don’t, innocent people will be hurt. Think of Joe’s kids. My God, if it got out…”

He was too close to this situation, Reed acknowledged. This wasn’t some stranger asking for his help, it was his father. The unbending man who had accepted his decision not to be a part of the business with a terse “Go on, then. Who needs you?”

That man needed him now.

Some secrets were best left unearthed.

“I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t make any promises.”

His father looked relieved. “Thank you, Son. It’s the right thing to do, I promise you.”

“Be aware, if something emerges that strengthens the connection between-”

“It won’t. The ring and tattoo have nothing to do with Tom’s murder.”

For a long time after he left, Reed went over what his father had told him. He thought of Alex. Of his brother. Clark and the others. He thought of Patsy Sommer.

Who’d she been? Reed wondered. The woman he remembered: always kind, offering a smile, the picture-perfect mother and wife? The bipolar artist who had great talent but suffered fits of despair so deep they turned violent? Or the criminal temptress his father described, who seduced underage young men?

“The ring and tattoo have nothing to do with Tom’s murder.” Perhaps not, Reed thought. But could they have something to do with Dylan’s?

He experienced a prickle of excitement, an aha moment. If Patsy had been as promiscuous as his dad described, Dylan could have been someone else’s child, not Harlan’s. A fact which, if learned, could have rocked a number of people’s worlds. The actual father’s. Harlan’s. If the father was a minor, that minor’s family.

Some secrets were best left unearthed.

Son of a bitch, he thought. This changed everything.