Chapter Eight
It was several hours later when the truth was finally hashed out and the facts were laid bare. Disbelief and pain lingered behind my father’s eyes. We both knew what it meant if the man at the gala hadn’t been Seamus McDonough.
I recalled the fear in Sheila’s eyes that night when the man parading around as my grandfather approached us. She knew he wasn’t who he said he was. How long had she known? Was she aware of his true identity? I highly doubted she was involved willingly. The panic and horror she displayed that night were real.
So why was she playing along? What did he have over her?
I knew one thing for sure. If Sheila knew that man wasn’t her husband, then there was very little doubt in my mind that he was dead. From the crestfallen look on Liam’s face, he’d made the same conclusion.
“I don’t understand.” Tears shone in his emerald eyes, 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 told us gently. “She’ll be able to tell you her story.”
Brow creasing, my gaze fixed on the woman who’d been nearly silent the entire conversation.
“Who?”
Her eyes met mine and without hesitation she said, “Your mother.”
I barked a laugh, the sound tainted with icy bitterness. “She’s dead,” I reminded her.
“But the evidence left behind tells a story she can’t.” Aine gazed at me, her eyes soft and understanding. “We needed to be sure, though.”
“About?”
Her gaze turned to Liam. “That everyone would go in open to the truth,” she told us sadly. “Because if I’m right—the truth might break one of you.”
“Show us,” Liam demanded.
* * *
The streets surrounding me were oddly familiar. Flashes of my childhood stretched out before me, but there was nothing concrete. I might have played on that playground. Is that where my mother took me for dinner one time?
Gradually, the memories that had faded over time resurfaced the closer and more familiar the neighborhood became. There wasn’t much that had changed. Houses were repainted. Streets were re-paved, but it seemed as if everything was the same.
Including our house.
It didn’t pass my notice that my childhood home was in O’Malley territory. I doubted it was a coincidence, either. My mother knew where we needed to go. Not that it had helped much.
“I wasn’t the leader at the time,” Sully said as we exited 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 of a locked drawer I never found the key for.
“At the time, I paid little attention to it,” he admitted. “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 stopped to fetch a key from his pocket. It was covered in worn butterflies and flowers, the coating nearly gone from the test of time. “Then I came here.” He handed me the key.
With trembling hands, I took it from him. They key that I once used dozens of times after coming home from school. The porch was worn but maintained, with no sign of rot or disrepair. It was like stepping back in time. The shadows of my past pushed in on me. The cage around my heart squeezed tightly, my chest heaving as the memories of that fateful day resurfaced. A tsunami of emotion swept up, bubbling to the surface, disturbing the calm waters of my soul.
“We laid out each piece of evidence where it was found,” Aine whispered gently from beside me. “The crime scene photos weren’t tainted. Maybe something will help jog your memory.”
The muscles in my neck tightened as I gritted my teeth against the painful sweep of despair flooding over me. The walls I’d built over time were crumbling, and grief threatened to overwhelm it. I thought about my mother’s death every day for years, but I never expected to be back here, confronting my most painful memories in the house where I was the happiest.
A warm hand on my shoulder centered me, dragging me up from the depths of despair. Tears painted my face. I turned the key, the lock disengaging easily, and the door slid open noisily.
The air was slightly musty, and 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 was left behind, except the book I managed to hide beneath my faded, oversized hoodie.
I stepped inside, the cherry wood floor creaking slightly beneath my weight. Everything was exactly as it had been 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 treaded through the house with ginger footsteps. Afraid to disturb the past. As if I would somehow change it.
The kitchen had 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 had dreamed of opening 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 had meant.
I ran 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 asked me as I stood on my little stool at one side of the island, flour dusting my face and hands as I worked the gooey dough into balls.
“Love.” My nose scrunched as I smiled at her. She smiled back softly.
“Always love.”
“Who do you love, Mommy?” I asked, placing one of my misshapen balls of dough on the stone cookie sheet. “Do I have a daddy you love?” She reeled back slightly, as if the words I uttered had slapped her. Sadness was etched in every line of her face, and her eyes swam with a pain so deep it made me want to cry.
“You do have a daddy I love.” Her voice was hoarse, full of regret. “Very much.”
“Can I meet him?” The thought of meeting my daddy sent a thrill of excitement through me. Timmy and Mary had a daddy and a mommy who took them camping and tucked them in to bed. They both looked happy. Maybe Mommy would be happy if I had a daddy here.
“Maybe one day, moy a chroí.”
I preened at the Irish nickname. My heart. I had a daddy somewhere. Someone Mommy loved. Where was he?
Tears welled in my father’s eyes as I walked him through the house, recounting memory after memory as best as I could. Over time, Elias had 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 conjured them to the forefront of my mind, hoping to give my father a glimpse into our lives before her murder, the phantom pain swept over my skin.
“We had hidden areas all over the house,” I whispered as I opened a small 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 asked quietly.
“Mo réalta,” I murmured.
“My star.” It came 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 asked, 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 was small and breathy. “You’d never find it if you didn’t know where to look.”
I led them up the staircase at the front of the house, my fingers trailing up the dark cherry wood of the railing, the steps creaking under my weight as I ascended to the last place I’d seen my mother alive.
“You cheated.” My eyes narrowed at my mother, a pout forming on my lips. “You win every time.”
My mother smiled. It was soft and comforting, but there was a hint of mischief behind the emerald green that caused the gold tint in her eyes to light up. They looked otherworldly against her porcelain freckled skin and fiery red hair.
“You’re just not patient enough, my love.” She winked at me as she settled 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 screwed up my face as I looked at her. “You sound like a fortune cookie.” She laughed, melodic and low.
“Maybe life would be better if we all sounded a bit wiser.”
It was my turn to laugh. “I never said you sounded wise,” I teased her. “Just old.” She growled low in her throat before launching herself at me, hands prepared to grab me. I squealed with laughter and took off like a shot.
“I’ll show you old.” She ran after me, barely missing me as I darted past her and scrambled up the stairs. There was no way out on the second landing, but plenty of hiding spots. Her room alone had several. One of my favorite places was beneath the pile of clean clothes in her overly large laundry basket.
Unfortunately, she would see that coming. I chose to hide beneath the mountain of pillows on her bed instead. Curling myself up against the headboard, rearranging everything over me as if it had never been moved.
Let her try to find me now.
Except—she never did.
“I heard her screaming at the top of her lungs,” I choked, refusing to look down at the pictures Aine had laid out on the floor on the landing. The combination of them together, laid one on top of another, created a life-size portrait of my mother’s last moments. “Heavy footsteps thudded up the steps after her as she screamed our safe word again and again. One of the safe spots was in her room.”
“The police report said there was no sign of forced entry,” Aine told me softly. “She knew her killer, Ava, and she let them in.”
“Doesn’t narrow down a suspect pool,” Liam commented bitterly.
“Actually,” I told him, leading them into the master bedroom. “It does.” He didn’t need to ask what I meant. He knew. Seamus McDonough. Well, the man who masqueraded as him, anyway.
Taking a calming breath, I searched for the spot I had hidden in for hours before one of the officers finally found me. The house had been 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’d done 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 had drilled into me to accept.
“They will call 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 told Sully. “Finn…”
“Kelly.” Sully smiled at the name. “He was a good man. Good soldier.”
“He isn’t still alive?” I cocked my head to the side, concerned.
Sully shook his head and said, “He was killed in October 2007 in a drive-by.”
“That was less than a month after I was taken,” I said. “Did your father think anything of it?”
“He wrote down a couple of theories.” Sully nodded. “But nothing he could prove. Whoever did it was a ghost.”
I was getting tired of ghosts.
Bending down, I felt along the wooden floor near the edge of my mother’s old dresser and pressed down when I felt the wood change from rough to smooth. The wall to the right of the dresser slid open, revealing a dark, musty crawl space.
“Several of these were built into the house on my father’s orders.” Sully bent down to admire the craftsmanship.
“Why would your father protect her mother?” Vas wondered. “Was she paying him for protection? Or—” Sully growled and stood, turning on Vas in a second.
“Be careful what you say next,” he snarled. “My father would never exploit a vulnerable woman like that.”
My Sovietnik held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “Okay. Okay,” he backed off. “But the question remains. Why would he protect her without anything in return?”
“What if she did pay him?” Liam wondered, not the least bit upset about the two men talking about my mother trading sex for protection. His eerie calm bugged the shit out of me, and I wanted to ruffle the surface just to see what lay below. “With secrets.”
“That explains a lot, actually,” Sully agreed. “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 smirked. “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 grinned. “Katherine was smart. A genius. And she could hold a grudge like no other. She would have found a way to screw him over.”
Realization hit. She hadn’t been trying to screw Elias—she had gone after her own father.
“She knew,” I murmured brokenly. “He’s the one who sold her.”