Chapter 6
six
It is several hours later before the truth is finally hashed out and the facts laid bare on the table. Disbelief and pain linger behind my father’s eyes. We both know what it means if the man at the gala is not Seamus McDonough.
I recall the fear in Sheila’s eyes that night when the man parading around as my grandfather approached us. She knows he isn’t who he says he is.
How long has she known?
Is she aware of his true identity?
I highly doubt she is involved willingly. The panic and horror she displayed that night were real.
So why was she playing along? What does he have over her?
One thing is for sure, if Sheila knows that man isn’t her husband, then there is very little doubt in my mind that he is dead. From the crestfallen look on Liam’s face, he makes the same conclusion.
“I don’t understand.” Tears shine in his emerald eyes, unshed, refusing to fall. “How many years has this been going on? Why? What purpose…”
“There might be someone who can answer that for you,” Aine tells us gently. “She’ll be able to tell you her story.”
Brow creasing, my gaze fixes on the woman who has been nearly silent the entire conversation.
“Who?”
Her eyes meet mine and without hesitation she says, “Your mother.”
I bark a laugh, the sound tainted with icy bitterness. “She’s dead,” I remind her.
“But the evidence left behind tells a story she can’t.” Aine gazes at me, her eyes soft and understanding. “We needed to be sure, though.”
“About?”
Her gaze turns to Liam. “That everyone would go in open to the truth,” she tells us sadly. “Because if I’m right—the truth might break one of you.”
“Show us,” Liam demands.
Aine doesn’t wait for anyone to argue. She turns and leads the way out, the weight of her words following us like a shadow.
Doors shut, engines turn over, and soon we’re moving, tires humming against asphalt as the city slips past in quiet blurs of streetlights and darkened storefronts. No one speaks. Whatever truth she’s carrying feels too fragile, too volatile, to name aloud before we reach it.
The streets surrounding me are oddly familiar. Flashes of my childhood stretch out before me but there is nothing concrete. I might have played on that playground. Is that where my mother took me for dinner one time?
Gradually, the memories that have faded over time resurface the closer and more familiar the neighborhood becomes. There isn’t much that has changed. Houses have been repainted. Streets were re-paved, but it feels as if everything is the same.
Including our house.
It doesn’t pass my notice that my childhood home is in O’Malley territory. I doubt it is a coincidence, either. My mother knew where we needed to go. Not that it did much good.
“I wasn’t the leader at the time,” Sully speaks as we exit the SUVs.
“My father was. When Aine mentioned your mother’s name, I immediately recognized it from a file my father had stashed away in his desk.
I thought it odd when I found it a few years after I took his place.
Not that there was a file, but that it had been hidden in a false bottom in a locked drawer I never found the key for.
“At the time, I paid little attention to it,” he admits.
“I had a rising mutiny on my hands, and the IRS and FBI were coming down hard on my transport business. But the file gnawed at me.” He stops to fetch a key from his pocket.
It is covered in worn butterflies and flowers; the coating nearly gone from the test of time.
“Then I came here.” He hands me the key.
With trembling hands, I take it from him.
The key that I used dozens of times after coming home from school.
The porch is worn, but maintained, with no sign of rot or disrepair.
It is like stepping back in time. The shadows of my past push in on me.
The cage around my heart squeezes tightly, my chest heaving as the memories of that fateful day resurface.
A tsunami of emotion sweeps up, bubbling to the surface, disturbing the calm waters of my soul.
“We laid out the evidence where they were found,” Aine whispers gently from beside me. “The crime scene photos weren’t tainted. Maybe something will help jog your memory.”
The muscles in my neck tighten as I grit my teeth against the painful sweep of despair flooding over me.
The walls I built over time are crumbling inside of me and grief threatens to overwhelm it.
I’ve thought about my mother’s death nearly every day for years, but I never expect to be back here, confronting my most painful memories in the house I was the happiest.
A warm hand on my shoulder centers me, dragging me up from the depths of despair. Tears paint my face. I turn the key, the lock disengaging easily, the door sliding open noisily.
The air is slightly musty, dust settled on every surface. Elias refused to allow me to bring any of my mother’s belongings when he took custody of me. Everything else was left behind, except the book I managed to hide beneath my faded, oversized hoodie.
I step inside, the cherry wood floor creaking slightly beneath my weight as I step inside.
Everything is exactly as it was the day I was taken away.
From the tipped over bookcase to the blood splattered walls.
My mother put up one hell of a fight that day.
Carefully, I tread through the house with ginger footsteps.
Afraid to disturb the past. As if I will somehow change it.
The kitchen has always been the center of this house. My mother often spent hours in here dreaming up new recipes and teaching me to bake. It was our favorite activity on nights when we both felt restless. She dreamed of opening up her own bakery one day. Dreamed of giving us a life of freedom.
It wasn’t until I discovered her past that I truly understood what she meant.
I run my hand along the cool marble of the island, my eyes drifting closed as I let the past overtake the carefully constructed barriers of my soul.
“Do you know the most important ingredient in making cookies?” My mother asks me as I stand on my little stool at one side of the island, flour dusting my face and hands as I work the gooey dough in my palms.
“Love,” my nose scrunches as I smile at her. She smiles back softly.
“Always love.”
“Who do you love, mommy?” I ask, placing one of my misshapen balls of dough on the stone cookie sheet.
“Do I have a daddy you love?” She reels back slightly as if the words I utter slap her.
Sadness is etched in every line of her face and her eyes swim with a pain so deep that it makes me want to cry.
“You do have a daddy I love,” her voice is hoarse, full of regret. “Very much.”
“Can I meet him?” The thought of meeting my daddy sends a thrill of excitement through me. Timmy and Mary have a daddy and a mommy who take them camping and tuck them in to bed. They both look happy. Maybe mommy will be happy if I have a daddy here.
“Maybe one day, moy a chroí.”
I preen under the Irish nickname. My heart. I have a daddy somewhere. Someone who mommy loves. Where is he?
Tears well in my father’s eyes as I walk him through the house.
Recounting memory after memory as best as I can.
Over time, Elias conditioned me to forget these memories.
They became tainted with the blow of a hand or the crack of a whip.
Even now, as I conjure them to the forefront of my mind, hoping to give my father a glimpse into our lives before her murder, the phantom pain sweeps over my skin.
“We had hidden areas all over the house,” I whisper as I open a small hidden hatch at the end of one of the cupboards. Just big enough to fit my eleven-year-old frame. “She never told me why, just that when the time came, she would utter our safe word, and I was to find the nearest one.”
“What was your safe word?” my father asks quietly.
“Mo réalta,” I murmur.
“My star.” It comes out choked, hoarse, and full of pain. “I used to call her that all the time. My beautiful star.”
“Where were you that night?” Sully asks, his voice soft as not to disturb the quiet contemplation that settled over the room. “We didn’t find any evidence of a child living here.”
My laugh is small and breathy. “You’d never find it if you didn’t know where to look.”
I lead them up the staircase at the front of the house, my fingers trailing up the dark wood of the railing, the steps creaking under my weight as I ascend to the last place I saw my mother alive.
“You cheated.” My eyes narrow at my mother, a pout forming on my lips. “You win every time.”
My mother smiles, it is soft and comforting, but there is a hint of mischief behind the bright green that causes the gold tint in her eyes to light up. They look otherworldly against her porcelain freckled skin and fiery red hair.
“You just are not patient enough, my love.” She winks at me as she settles the game back into its box. “You don’t take the time to consider your moves and the impact they might have later down the road. Think before you act.”
I screw up my face as I look at her. “You sound like a fortune cookie.” She laughs, melodic and low.
“Maybe life would be better if we all sounded a bit wiser.”
It is my turn to laugh. “I never said you sounded wise,” I tease her. “Just old.” She growls, low in her throat before launching herself at me, hands prepared to grab me. I squeal with laughter and take off like a shot.
“I’ll show you old.” She runs after me, barely missing me as I dart past her and scramble up the stairs.
There is no way out on the second landing, but plenty of hiding spots.
Her room alone has several places to hide.
One of my favorite places is beneath the pile of clean clothes in her overly large laundry basket.
Unfortunately, she would see that coming. I choose to hide beneath the mountain of pillows on her bed instead. Curling myself up against the headboard, rearranging everything over me as if it has never been moved.
Let her try to find me now.
Except—she never does.
“I heard her screaming at the top of her lungs,” I choke, refusing to look down at the pictures Aine has laid out on the floor on the landing.
The combination of them together, laid one on top of another, creates a life size portrait of my mother’s last moments.
“Heavy footsteps thud up the steps after her as she screamed the safe word again and again. We had one of the safe spots in her room.”
“The police report said there was no sign of forced entry,” Aine tells me softly. “She knew her killer, Ava, and she let them in.”
“Doesn’t narrow down a suspect pool,” Liam comments bitterly.
“Actually,” I tell him, leading them into the master bedroom. “It does.” He doesn’t need to ask what I mean. He knows. Seamus McDonough.
The man who masquerades as him, anyway.
Taking a calming breath, I search for the spot I hid in for hours before one of the officers finally found me. The house was crawling with people and any noise I made was lost to their heavy footsteps and loud voices.
Then, out of nowhere, the door opened and a saddened, but caring face appeared in the darkness. His name was Officer Finn, and he did everything he could to take care of me before social services whisked me away without warning.
“No one will hurt you, a chroí,” he uttered the safe word my mother drilled into me to accept.
“They will call you a chroí,” she told me. “Always trust that word, my star.”
“I remember staying with him and his family for almost a week before social services found us,” I tell Sully. “Finn…”
“Kelly.” Sully smiles at the name. “He was a good man. Good soldier.”
“He isn’t still alive?” I cock my head to the side concerned.
Sully shakes his head and says, “He was killed in October 2007 in a drive by.”
“That’s less than a month after I am taken,” I say. “Did your father think anything of it?”
“He wrote down a couple of theories.” Sully nods. “But nothing he could prove. Whoever did it was a ghost.”
I am getting tired of ghosts.
Bending down, I feel along the wooden floor near the edge of my mother’s old dresser and press down when I feel the wood change from rough to smooth. The wall to the right of the dresser slides open, revealing a dark, musky crawl space.
“Several of these were built into the house on my father’s orders,” Sully bends down to admire the craftsmanship.
“Why would your father protect her mother?” Vas wonders. “Was she paying him protection? Or—” Sully growls and stands, turning on Vas in a second.
“Be careful what you say next,” he snarls. “My father would never exploit a vulnerable woman like that.”
My sovietnik holds up his hands in a gesture of peace. “Okay. Okay.” He backs off. “But the question remains. Why would he protect her without anything in return?”
“What if she did pay him?” Liam wonders, not the least bit upset about the two men talking about my mother trading sex for protection. His eerie surface calm bugs the shit out of me and I want to ruffle the surface just to see what lays below. “With secrets.”
“That explains a lot, actually,” Sully agrees. “We saw a huge intake of drugs and guns that year. At least on paper. I wasn’t old enough to remember what was taken in.”
Liam smirks. “McDonough pulled out of Portland within a few months of putting a huge chunk of money into a ground transportation company. He said it was because there wasn’t any money to be made there and moved the transport company back into Washington.”
“But you think it was because of all the shipments my father and his men lifted.”
Liam grins. “Katherine was smart. A genius. Plus, she could hold a grudge like no other. She would find a way to screw him over.”
Realization hits. She hadn’t been trying to screw Elias—she had gone after her own father.
“She knew,” I murmur brokenly. “He’s the one who sold her.”