Bloodlines

69

E THAN HAD ALREADY BEEN AIRLIFTED TO ST. ANNE’S, THE TRAUMA CENTER nearest the cemetery, by the time my hands were cut free of duct tape and I had been helped up onto the grass. I had been taken to St. Anne’s, too, but mostly just to get cleaned up a bit and loaded up with antibiotics. Something about soaking cuts and scrapes in bacteria-filled water that smelled of decomposition tended to alarm medical people. I had my face stitched from the encounter with the bit of angel wing. I was bruised.

That was nothing. The real ache wasn’t physical.

Frank’s presence eased some of that. He hadn’t let me out of his sight from the moment I had been hauled up out of the grave. Since I reeked of blood and dead bodies at that point, that was brave of him. Lydia had brought a change of clothes for me and I had showered, but I could swear I still smelled the cemetery. I tried not to take that as an omen.

The police had questions. They had to wait a little while to get answers. I saw Zeke Brennan for the second time in twenty-four hours, but this time, he was working for Ethan and me. Zeke didn’t prevent me from being fully cooperative. My patience nearly did-I couldn’t concentrate well, given my anxiety over Ethan. As a favor to Frank, one of the officers who had accompanied us to the hospital continually checked on Ethan’s progress and let us know when there was any news. There wasn’t much other than, “Still in surgery.”

Mitch and his nephews had been taken to Las Piernas General. I suppose someone was afraid that the entire staff of the Express, which seemed to be at St. Anne’s, might attack them if they were brought to the same facility.

Frank told me that Max Ducane was waiting to see me, to verify for himself that I was all right. He told me that Max had called him earlier that evening-officially yesterday evening, now-to tell him that the people who had been tailing Eric and Ian for him had lost them. “I was already worried about you, and had just tried your cell phone. Max said the Yeagers had parked on Maple, gone into a building, and never come back to their car. After a while, they realized the Yeagers had ditched them by walking through an alley to Chestnut or Polson.”

When he heard that they were near where I was, Frank had found Ethan’s address in the phone book and called to ask for a unit to go by the apartment. They found the door unlatched and my purse still in the living room. “So we had the Jeep’s LoJack traced, and brought out the cavalry.”

“Thank you isn’t enough, but-thank you.”

“As long as you’re okay, and Ethan’s okay, we’re good.”

Frank had warned me that the waiting room was crowded. I keep forgetting that he has a master’s degree in understatement.

I halted in the hospital hallway. Frank stopped beside me. “Too much for you right now?” he asked.

“No, I won’t be able to sleep if we go home. But it bothers me a little, because-”

“Because you can’t help but wonder if they’re here out of guilt. Who cares? They’re here. They could be feeling just as guilty in comfort at home.”

“You’re right,” I said.

Max spotted me. He was with Helen and my aunt Mary. I caught a glimpse of Barbara and Kenny just before the newspaper staff noticed my presence. There was a near riot while I was surrounded by them. I was alive, I could talk. They asked if I was all right. They winced at the sight of the bandages and bruises. They asked if I knew anything about Ethan’s condition.

But then the crowd moved a little, and my sister was saying that there was someone here who was anxious to see me, and on a night I had lain in a grave, I suddenly saw a ghost.

O’Connor. O’Connor was here. I must have called his name aloud.

When he turned toward me and smiled, I felt faint. Frank put an arm around me, and whether anyone else was aware of it or not, that was all that kept me on my feet.

The ghost spoke. “Yes, I’m O’Connor-and you must be Irene,” he said, in O’Connor’s voice, but sweetened with a gorgeous Irish accent. “Conn was forever talking of you to me. I’m his brother Dermot.”

He extended a hand. I took it in mine and promptly burst into tears.

“There now,” he said, “it’s all right. It’s all right now.” Somehow we were maneuvered to some chairs, and I managed to regain some semblance of composure.

“It’s the devil’s own day you’ve had, isn’t it?”he said. “But I’m told you and this fellow they’re operating on have caught the one who murdered poor Maureen, all those years ago?”

“Yes.”

“Well done, child. Well done. That would please Conn so, and please him more to know you had done it. And if you need a good cry, you go right ahead and cry.”

We talked for a time, and I said, “You’re here for the DNA tests?”

“Yes, but I’m thinkin’ it will be a waste of good money by Kenny, here.”

“Oh.” I felt let down. Poor Kenny…

“He’s the image of my mother’s eldest brother, you see.”

“What?”

“Me and Conn, we had the look of the O’Connors. Kenny here favors the O’Haras, my mother’s family.” He paused and said, “I’m still glad I came, for many reasons. It’s good to know your family and friends, isn’t it? You’ll have to tell me all about your life, since I haven’t had a report in years now. Frank, don’t be jealous, but Conn always thought she’d end up with a policeman from Bakersfield.”

We explained that Conn was right. We made Dermot promise he’d come to dinner soon, so we could tell him the whole tale.

John Walters interrupted with an announcement that Ethan’s blood type was type O, and he invited anyone else who was type O to join him in donating blood. “Or any other type,” he said. “Because what Ethan can’t use, someone else will.”

“Has anyone contacted his family?” I asked.

“He doesn’t seem to have any,” John said. “His father died while he was in college, and his mother died years ago. No siblings.”

Max and Helen had stood up together when he made the first part of this announcement. When they saw that quite a few others were already on their way, they stayed back long enough to talk to me for a few minutes. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” Max said, “and that the Yeagers are finally being made to pay for some of their sins. Maybe we’ll finally find out what happened to the baby.”

I looked at Helen and said, “I think I know.”

She met my gaze. “Do you?”

“Yes. But perhaps you’d like to be somewhere more private?”

“No,” she said with a smile. “I think I’ve been private long enough, don’t you? But for Max’s sake, let’s ask the nurse if there is somewhere we can talk.”

We were ushered into a small conference room.

“Max,” I said, “you’re the real Max Ducane.”

“I don’t know what the two of you were talking about just now, or what this is all about, but it’s okay, I’m really okay now knowing I’m not Max. DNA doesn’t lie.”

“No, it doesn’t. Which is why, if Helen’s blood were tested, you’d know you were sitting next to your maternal grandmother.”

“What?”

“Do you tell this, or do I?” I asked Helen.

“Allow me to at least technically keep my word to Lillian,” she said.

I nodded and went on. “Sometime around 1936, a rather adventurous young woman who had a job at a newspaper fell in love with Handsome Jack Corrigan. He settled down later, but at the time, she knew that it was hopeless to expect him to make much of a husband. He was probably seeing Lillian Vanderveer when the newspaperwoman learned she was pregnant with his child.”

“The newspaperwoman was not virtuous, I’m afraid,” Helen said.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s likely she would have given herself to anyone else. But at that time, in her situation, unmarried and pregnant, her alternatives weren’t many. She loved her career, in a way that perhaps only someone else who has ink in her veins can understand, but this pregnancy would mean she would lose her job. Abortion would have been an illegal and dangerous back-alley matter, and she was a Catholic girl as well.”

“Again, not a very good one.”

“She wanted the child to live, but what choices did she have? If she gave birth out of wedlock, she and the child would be subject to constant ridicule. There was no chance on earth that her conservative employer would allow her to continue to work for the newspaper. If she tried to support the child through any of the other few jobs that were available to women, she would be consigning both of them to a life of poverty.”

“She was willing to do that for herself, but it was such a hard thing to choose for the child.”

“I’m not so sure about this next part, because I only have the observations of another child to go on-an eight-or nine-year-old boy.”

“A great observer. Just didn’t know what he was seeing.”

“I’m much older than he was then, and although it was there before me, I didn’t see it either, not until we had our talk the other day.” I turned to Max. “Conn O’Connor was a nosy child, dedicated to Jack Corrigan, and not overly fond of Lillian-although he later became her friend. He spied on his hero one night and learned that he was going on a date with Lillian, a married woman. He probably didn’t know that Lillian was in the early stages of a pregnancy. There was a car accident-a horrible accident, one that left Jack partially lame the rest of his life. But what few others know-what O’Connor didn’t know until many years later himself-was that Lillian was injured in that same accident. She miscarried.”

“I’ll let you ask Lillian about her part of this story,” Helen said.

“Perhaps the injury was worse, because she never conceived another child. And there was the possibility, if her husband returned from Europe, that he would ask questions about when and how the pregnancy ended.”

“He was an ass,” was all that Helen would say on that subject.

“Helen liked Lillian, and perhaps she even wondered if Lillian’s child might have been a half brother or half sister of her own. Whatever the case, Helen and Lillian comforted each other, and somewhere in all this time of worry and woe, they came up with a solution. Helen would quit the paper, ostensibly to help Lillian with her new project. They would live in the mountains, away from the prying eyes of local society. Lillian’s name would be on the child’s birth certificate, and she would raise him or her in a life of privilege. She swore, in exchange for Helen’s secrecy-and her child-that she would never deny Helen access to the little girl who was born up in the mountains that winter.”

Max was staring at her, obviously having trouble taking it all in.

“You’d probably like to hate me,” Helen said to him. “Maybe you do. I won’t blame you at all. The promises I made to Lillian were the hardest I’ve ever had to keep. But they were promises.”

He shook his head, saying, “I don’t hate you, but…my God, Helen…”

She began to cry. I wanted to go to her, but Frank put a hand on my shoulder.

Max hesitated only briefly, then embraced her.

“You have questions, I’m sure,” she said, still crying. “I can’t answer all of them, but I’m sure I can get Lillian to see the wisdom of letting some part of these secrets out now.”

“Did Jack Corrigan ever know?” he asked.

“Yes. I think at first he suspected-well, I’ll leave that part of the story to Lillian. One day O’Connor announced that he was marrying a woman he’d only bedded once, because she was pregnant, and Jack was a horse’s ass about it. So I confronted him, and in turn he confronted me, and after calling Lillian and threatening her with all sorts of ridiculous things, he learned the truth from us.”

Max sat silently, then said, “Can we test to make sure, just so we know I’m the child who…”

“Of course.”

“And Lillian-do you think she’ll help me bring this out in public? Some of it, anyway?”

“We’ll work on that together. I think if she realizes that the Yeagers can finally be punished for what they did to Katy, and our lives, then…yes.” She smiled. “She really isn’t one tenth as selfish as she pretends to be.”

We left them to talk together. I went out to check on Ethan again. We arrived just in time to hear a doctor express cautious optimism about his survival. We learned that he was out of surgery and about to be moved to ICU. “No visitors for a while, please-except-is there someone named Irene here?” I came forward. “If you can keep it very brief, I think it would be good for him to see you’re alive.” He smiled. “He thinks we’re lying to him.”

Frank came with me. Ethan was pale, connected to a lot of machinery, obviously full of painkillers. He smiled at us and said, “Thought I’d lost you.”

“No. Rest and recover. We’ll get a room ready for you at home.”

He looked toward Frank. “You sure you want me there?”

“You saved her,” Frank said. “You’re family now, like it or not.”

“Family,” he said. “Sounds good.”