Chapter 31
W hen things had blown up between Quinn and his family over his inheritance, he’d sworn he wouldn’t be the one to come running back, asking for forgiveness.
If they ever came to him and denounced their Neanderthal closed-minded ways, well, he could be the bigger man and they could talk.
But here he was, going back home without even a hint that anyone might want to see him. Without even a whisper that anyone might want to reconcile.
Well, it was one thing to stand on principle. But when one of your own was sick or God forbid dying, you at least needed to have a conversation with each other.
Quinn didn’t have Alex’s address—not since he’d lost the house—so he started at his mother’s place.
Barbara and Carl, Quinn’s stepfather, lived in a one-story wood frame ranch-style house on an acre of land off Route 180, north of town.
The siding was starting to peel and the place needed a coat of paint, but Quinn’s mother had kept the garden perfectly tended, as usual. The shrubs lining the driveway had recently been trimmed, and the flowerbeds were tidy and sparse, awaiting the spring.
Quinn felt a tightness in his chest as he went up the front walk, stepped onto the porch, and knocked on the door.
Carl answered the door, blinking twice with his jaw slack as he saw his stepson standing there.
“Hi, Carl.”
The older man was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of khakis that were past their prime. The pants were a little baggy, and he had them cinched at the waist with a leather belt.
If Quinn had thought he might be welcomed home with warmth and enthusiasm, he’d miscalculated. Carl didn’t open the screen door that separated them.
“Can I come in?” It rankled that he had to ask, and he wondered if it had been a mistake to come here.
Carl pushed the screen open, yelled into the house, “Barb? Quinn’s here.” Then he walked away, leaving Quinn standing on the doormat.
“Quinn? Well, my goodness.” Barbara emerged from somewhere in the back of the house looking vaguely stunned, as though she’d just emerged from total darkness into bright daylight.
Quinn, having given up on the idea that anyone might invite him into the house, stepped inside. “Hi, Mom.”
His mother had never cut off communication with Quinn the way his brothers had. Her approach, instead, had been to nag him relentlessly, urging him to mend his relationship with herself and his brothers by giving them what they wanted. She’d taken sides, but she hadn’t shut him out. He’d been the one to distance himself from her when she’d repeatedly refused to back off about Nate’s money.
Now, she stepped toward him as though she might hug him, but she didn’t. Instead, she stopped a few paces away and clasped her hands at her waist.
“Honey, it’s good to see you.” She looked frail, and he wondered if she’d lost weight. “Come on into the kitchen. I just put some coffee on.” She bustled off into the rear of the house with Quinn following.
Barbara’s Christmas decorations were still up—she never took them down until after January first—though the tree was starting to lose its needles. In the kitchen, the bulletin board next to the refrigerator was covered in Christmas cards affixed with push pins. A tiny ceramic nativity scene was arranged on the kitchen counter amid a garland of plastic pine boughs.
Barbara took mugs out of the cupboard and arranged them on the counter with a sugar bowl and a small carton of cream.
“Let me just take this to Carl.” She poured a cup, added sugar and cream in the exact measurements Quinn’s stepfather liked, then hurried off to the living room to give it to him.
When she came back, she put on a smile Quinn recognized as false. It was the smile she used for neighbors she didn’t particularly like but who nonetheless had to be treated with courtesy for fear they might talk unkindly about her otherwise.
“You should have called and let us know you were coming. The house is a mess, and I haven’t done the marketing yet.”
“The house is fine.”
She poured Quinn a cup and handed it to him.
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me about Alex’s heart attack?”
Her smile faltered, and she avoided looking at him as she fussed with her own mug, her own cream and sugar.
“Well, he asked me not to, and I figured it was his to tell, Quinn.”
That was crap, obviously. Barbara had never kept a confidence in her life, and it made no sense that she would start now.
“You should have called me.”
Her shoulders fell and her lips pursed, causing fine lines to fan out around her mouth. “I didn’t call you because if you’d come out here, you and your brothers would have fought, and with Alex’s heart …” She shook her head. “He needed rest. He needed calm. I was afraid if he got too upset, it might kill him.” Her eyes were red and wet, and Quinn knew this—not the part about Alex’s privacy—had been the truth.
“Well …” Quinn ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not stupid, Mom. I wouldn’t have started anything with him while he was in his damned hospital bed.”
“But he’d have started something with you as soon as he was able, and you wouldn’t have backed down. You never have been able to walk away from a fight.”
That part was true, too, he guessed.
“Yeah, okay. But still … I want to know if somebody’s sick or hurt or maybe dying, Mom. I want to know. Even if you tell me not to come. Even if you tell me to stay away to avoid making things worse. I still want to know.”
Since when had Quinn’s very presence been so upsetting, so traumatizing, that it might threaten someone’s life? Just because he hadn’t given his family shares of money that didn’t belong to them? Just because he’d honored his uncle’s dying wish?
“How is he now?” Quinn asked.
Barbara nodded, on surer footing now. “He’s doing all right, I think. He’s finally quit with the cigarettes, so that’s something. Cheryl’s been trying to get him to change his diet, and that’s been hard. He doesn’t want to give up his red meat.”
Cheryl—Alex’s wife—had certainly been part of the decision to keep Quinn out of the loop. He supposed he couldn’t blame her. The whole thing had to have been hard for her. Probably still was.
“And the house?” Quinn said.
Barbara’s face changed—it almost collapsed in on itself, deepening the lines between her brows—as she sank into a kitchen chair. “Oh, honey. The insurance didn’t cover all of his medical costs. Not even close. And you know they were stretching to make the mortgage on that big place to begin with. Alex couldn’t work, of course, while he was recovering.” She shook her head. “Cheryl took a second job, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Mom.” Quinn sat, too, so he could be at eye level with her. “The woman I’m seeing—her ex-husband is saying things about me. He’s saying I’m unfit to be around her kids because I let Alex lose his house while I sat on some big inheritance. I didn’t even know. How was I supposed to help him when I didn’t even know?”
“Quinn …”
“And I’m not sitting on some big inheritance, anyway. I spent it. I used it as a down payment on my house. You know that. You all know that. And yet you talked to the investigator anyway. You made me out to be some uncaring monster.”
“Sweetheart, I didn’t say those things. And neither did your brothers.”
And then it became clear. “Cheryl did.”
Barbara nodded, looking at the tabletop instead of at her son.
“She said that, even though nobody had told me what was happening? Is she so angry that she’d lie about me?”
“Don’t be too hard on her, Quinn. She’s been through a lot.”
Now that it was all coming out, it made sense. Alex’s wife had never liked Quinn, and some of that might have been Quinn’s fault. Not all of it, but some of it. And, yeah, she was going through a lot.
That probably meant she wasn’t going to welcome him when he showed up there. But he was going anyway.
“Where do they live now, Mom? I need the address.”
When Miles had said he was going to “look into” Delilah’s potential custody case, she hadn’t thought too deeply about what that might mean. She’d assumed he was going to look into international custody law in general, the statutes on the books, the precedents. That sort of thing.
What he actually did was employ the same kind of tactics Mitch had.
He called her on December 30—just as Delilah was packing up Otter Bluff—to give her some news.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a custody case, Delilah,” Miles said, his face looking smug on the video feed. “I think we can make this thing go away.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“I had someone take a look at Mitch’s new live-in girlfriend. This Celine Mercier. What we found is something Mitch won’t want getting out.”
Delilah was speechless for a moment, then she gathered herself. “You sent a private detective after them? Like Mitch did to us?”
“Nothing that dramatic. I just had my researcher do a little Internet search. It didn’t take much. Celine Mercier is a call girl.”
Delilah was so surprised that she flinched. “She’s what ?”
“Well, she probably isn’t anymore, now that she and Mitch are together. She was advertising her services—using an alias, of course—on a dark web site dedicated to such things, but she took down the ad around the time Mitch moved to Paris. Which either means that she’s no longer in that line of work, or that she’s only got the one client—if you get my meaning.”
Delilah was stunned, processing all of the various repercussions of what Miles had told her. Yes, it probably meant Mitch’s threat would go away, and that was good. But she felt vaguely sick at the idea of dragging another woman’s name through the mud—even one who’d stolen her husband.
“I didn’t ask you to do that. I didn’t ask you to … to dig up dirt on Mitch’s girlfriend.”
“You didn’t have to ask. I was doing the job you paid me to do. Now, if you’d like me to give him a call, make it clear to him what will be discussed in court if he pursues this …”
“No.”
“Excuse me. No?”
“No,” Delilah repeated. “I’ll handle it.”
“Are you sure? It might be best if I speak to him rather than you. Tempers can get heated, and we don’t want—”
“I said I’ll talk to him.”
She ended the call feeling dirty, as though she’d sold herself just as much as Celine had.