by R. K. Lilley
When I’d heard of her death, I’d been stunned. And crushed. I couldn’t get over how tragic it was for such a bright young person to lose their life so early.
I started out looking for pictures, because I had this strange, crazy suspicion, centered straight in the deepest pit of my stomach, that I badly wanted to shake, but I wound up reading news articles about the accident that had taken her life, because it had never added up to me.
She’d died in a car accident, in the middle of a storm that had washed away an entire bridge, right as her driver had been trying to cross an overflowing river.
Two people and the car went missing, but only the driver’s body and the car had been found. Based on that, she was presumed dead.
I delved deeper and found several reports from the fringe media, nothing mainstream, about possible foul play. It was all very out there—marks where the bridge had been that suggested explosives were the culprit, though the police statement vehemently denied anything of the kind.
Of course, the report then claimed that the police were in on it, or at the very least had been paid off.
It made me feel queasy. What had happened to that poor, sweet girl?
I had to move on from those crazy conspiracy theories, they got me too worked up, and so I moved back to my main purpose, which was finding a decent picture of Francis, though I couldn’t exactly put my finger on why I needed to see one.
At least, not at first.
When I found a close up picture of her young face, I wished I hadn’t.
Some strange memories started to flood my mind.
As though I’d blocked them over time and behind bitter grief.
Francis was a beautiful girl, with pin straight black hair and thick glasses that hid her clear, intelligent eyes.
My mind was suddenly a flurry of strange, forgotten memories.
Green eyes, I suddenly recalled, though not from the picture.
From memory, and not just years old memories.
My hands covered my mouth, nausea rising up, as I remembered another pertinent fact. I could recall some vague conversation I’d had with young Francis about her dying her hair black, a rebellious act, as her entire family, extended and otherwise, were blond from birth to death.
“I hate repeating myself,” a gravelly voice said from the doorway of my office.
I whirled.
Heath stood there, arms folded across his chest, looking dangerous and mean.
“But I’ll say it again. If you care about her, the first thing you’ll do, if that happens again, is contact me.”
“You’re the vice president’s grandson,” I breathed, every messy thing clicking right into place. “The criminal.”
All of the oxygen had been sucked out of the room, leaving the air too thin for me to catch my breath.
Because he didn’t deny it. My crazy theory was actually correct.
He smirked, still managing to turn it into an angry expression. “It’s been a bit more complicated than that. I started out as a criminal, got recruited as a spook, and now I’m working with the Feds, on account of my very personal interest in their current investigation.”
A sudden and unexpected fury had my voice shaking. “How was I supposed to trust you, when neither of you told me anything? If you had bothered to tell me that you were her brother, I might have listened to you!”
“It was too risky. She didn’t want you involved. More than anything, she wanted to keep you safe. She’s essentially been a prisoner, and I’m not a complete bastard, I try to let her have as much freedom as I can.”
“Well, you should have been more worried about keeping her safe!” I burst out.
His nostrils flared. “Don’t you dare lecture me about keeping her safe. She’d never even be risking herself, coming out of hiding like this, if it wasn’t for you. God, do you know how long she’s had a thing for you? For years. She was a child. It’s so messed up.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” I shouted, all of it coming to a head, and Heath being the closest target at hand. “I never said an inappropriate word to her, never had so much as a thought like that, back then.”
“It was all one-sided, I know,” Heath agreed. “Only makes it slightly less fucked up.
“I never would have touched her, when she approached me, if I had any inkling who she was!”
“It’s a bit late for that, and you’re underestimating her. She was very determined, and she’s a resourceful girl.” He nodded at my computer. “She’s been stalking you for a while, though she’d call it research.”
I followed his nod to my computer, then looked back at him. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Everything you’ve ever looked up on there, book research, entertainment. Every porn you’ve watched in the last, hell, who knows how many years, she’s hacked all of it. As soon as she found out you were divorced, she went to work on you. She researched everything that makes you tick, and tailor-made herself into your perfect temptation.”
I was shaking my head, over and over, in denial. This could not be happening, not to me.
Her age had been hard for me to accept before, but this, this was creepy.
And so sordid that I doubted I could ever come to terms with it.
Talk about a mind fuck.
Without another word, I rushed to the bathroom and lost my lunch, quite violently.
Heath was waiting when I came back out. He wasn’t finished with me, which was good.
I wasn’t finished with him either. “So who is it that’s made, what is it, now, two attempts on her life?”
His mouth tightened. “More than two, though only two have gotten close to succeeding. The bridge explosion in Virginia, and the shooting in L.A., a few months back. And the responsible party is our loving grandmother.”
That threw me. I just stared at him. Why on earth . . . ?
“Dear Grandma Diana has been a dirty politician before it was even a trend. She’s hid it well from the public, but it’s hard to hide a thing like that from your family, especially the ones that have a borderline genius IQ.”
“Iris is the witness that’s gathered evidence against her,” I said, right as it dawned on me.
He nodded. “Solid evidence, made much more solid if she survives long enough to actually testify on the stand. What could be more damaging to someone’s ambition to be president than a granddaughter willing to bear witness about dear Granny’s evil deeds? And the list of crimes is mind-boggling, let me tell you. High crimes and misdemeanors just won’t cover this one. Not with at least three murders in the mix.”
I thought back, counting. “Your parents?” I guessed.
He nodded. “Them first. We don’t know why. We can only assume that like us, they knew too much, and weren’t willing to be quiet about it. But we do know why she killed Lorna, and that one wasn’t even done with a hit man.”
I just stared. Lorna was the younger sister, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember the circumstances behind her death.
“She drowned in the backyard pool, shortly after overhearing a conversation our grandmother had where she admitted to having her own daughter killed. But before that, she told Iris what she’d heard.”
“Iris, being the brilliant, resourceful girl that she is, began to collect evidence, to build a case, in secret. She did this for years.”
He took a deep gasp of a breath, looking more agitated even than he usually did.
“I was long gone by then. I ditched out when I realized what kind of a monster our grandmother was. Unfortunately, I left a bit too early, before I realized that she was a monster actually capable of killing her own family.”
I could tell by the tremor in his voice what his abandonment of them did to him. He held himself responsible.
“But you came back in time to save Francis from the first attempt on her life.”
He shook his head, nostrils flared. “Not hardly. That girl saved herself, swam out of a deathtrap, hiked fiv
e miles to a farmer’s house, and called me. I was . . . involved in doing some interesting jobs for the government at the time, and luckily I had the connections to get her protection, though when someone that powerful wants you dead, safety becomes a rather tricky notion.”
“What sort of evidence does she have? Is it actually necessary for Iris to take the stand?”
“Enough,” he said abruptly. I could tell by his demeanor that this rare and liberal flow of information was being shut down. “I didn’t come here because I enjoy chitchatting with you. I came to give you enough answers so you’ll have a clue what you need to do if Iris endangers herself to see you again.”
“Francis,” I corrected quietly, feeling just sick about it.
“Iris,” he stressed. “She goes by Iris now. If ever anyone deserved a fresh start in life, it’s her.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Three days later, Iris showed up at my door, goodbye in her eyes.
She didn’t even try to touch me, in fact, she stayed several feet away at all times, and I found myself relieved by that.
“Hello, Francis,” I said stonily.
She flushed. “Please don’t call me that. I’m Iris now. Always.”
“I came to apologize, and to say my piece, now that it’s all out there.”
I watched her, arms folded across my chest, trying to reconcile all of the things I felt about her.
Guilt, longing, disgust, desire, shame, tenderness, anger, pity, animosity.
Love.
Yes, still that.
But what did that matter? How could a situation so screwed up possibly amount to anything?
“First off, do you have any questions?” Her voice was very small, as though she was all of a sudden intimidated by me.
I hated that, but saw the necessity of it. “What was real? I know you researched me, to shape yourself into what you thought I wanted. I want to know what was real.”
She took a very deep breath, and began to speak, “In every relationship, there’s someone that loves the other more, someone that would be crushed if it all ended. Between you and me, I am that someone. I’ve always known it would be like that.”
I studied her like I’d never seen her before, wondering what on earth to do with her.
“I’ve loved you for so long it’s become part of the patchwork that makes me who I am. You are the thing that drives me to go on, to stay safe in a world that lost its use for me years ago. You have no faith in me, which is fair, though it makes me sad, but my faith in you saved my life.”
Her fists were clenched, and she looked like she was about to cry.
It took everything I had not to take her in my arms, but the worst thing I could do was lead her on, and so I held myself back.
“That’s what was real, Dair,” she continued in a trembling voice. “My love for you is the realest thing I know. I’d like for you to remember that.”
We were both quiet for the longest time, just looking at each other, tears trailing down her cheeks in a steady flow.
“Goodbye,” she said finally, in a choked voice, and fled.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
She didn’t come back, and I’m ashamed to admit, for about the first six months, I was mostly relieved about that.
I was just so conflicted where she was concerned.
It was touted as the trial of the century, though Diana J. Baker wasn’t technically the vice president anymore when it all took place.
I didn’t get a front row seat for the proceedings. Hell, I didn’t get a seat at all.
I was left as in the dark as everyone else in the country, watching the coverage on television.
Diana had a wily team of attorneys who postponed and argued about every little detail, insisting until the very end that the entire case needed to be thrown out.
The evidence against her, however, was staggering. Countless incriminating papers with her signature, accurate accountings of exactly where and when specific crimes took place, recordings of her admitting to illegal acts, and shock of shockers, even videotape of the woman alluding to her part in some of the crimes.
When it became public that the mysterious witness who’d gathered the brunt of the evidence was the assumed dead granddaughter, well, needless to say, the press had a field day.
About a third of the evidence was ruled inadmissible, but the other two thirds were more than enough to do the trick.
She was found guilty for an impressive roster of crimes, including multiple counts of conspiracy, extortion, racketeering, money laundering, bribery, embezzling, voter fraud, felony counts of financial corruption, obstruction of justice.
The list went on and on. Diana had been playing a very dirty game for her entire political career, and it was finally all laid out there, for the world to see.
They even managed to get her for tax evasion.
They couldn’t make the murder charges stick, but the rest would keep her in jail for the remaining years of her life, and more importantly, completely destroyed her reputation and effectively ended her political career.
Her husband, Jonathan Mitchell Baker, was also dragged into the mess, facing many of the same charges. His lawyers sold him as the silent, innocent spouse, but he didn’t fare much better than his wife.
Iris, with her hair dyed black again, glasses on, looking solemn and achingly beautiful as she took the stand in the eleventh hour of the proceedings, became a national sensation overnight, particularly with the male half of the country. She started getting added to hottest and sexiest lists in various publications, and was considered, in general, to be something of a hero. People loved the idea of a gorgeous, brave, brilliant young thing taking on a crooked politician and coming out ahead.
I’d graduated from conflicted to just missing her by then.
Of course, no one that big ever went down alone, and as numerous dangerous figures became implicated in the crimes, the danger to Francis Baker, as she was known, was overwhelming.
It all came to a head just days after she finished testifying. The story went that, while in transit, at a stoplight, a van pulled up beside the car she was being transported in, and six men in ski masks jumped out of said van.
She was dragged from the car, and her driver and one of her bodyguards, who were both wounded in the attack, witnessed her being shot at point blank, in the temple. One of her bodyguards was also reportedly killed, a big blond man, they said, though no name was divulged.
I was devastated, though I didn’t believe, at first, that any of it was true.
It was just too convenient, her disappearing forever only after completing her mission.
It’s not like it would be the first time she’d faked her own death.
But weeks turned into months, months to years, with still no word from her, or even of her, and I began to believe.
EPILOGUE
TWO YEARS AFTER THE TRIAL
I was jogging through the park park, just outside my neighborhood. It was rare outside weather for Vegas. We got about one day of it a year, and I figured I should take advantage.
I was stopping to take a drink and tighten a shoelace when I felt something. An odd sensation across the back of my neck that had me looking up and then around, doing nearly a full circle before I spotted what it was that had disrupted my peace of mind.
It was Heath, the bastard, striding towards me, his hard eyes on me as though no time had passed.
It was a shock to see him, to say the least.
A shock and a joy, as he was connected to Iris, and anything connected to her, anything that could give me information, or even closure, was what I had most desired to see these two long, lost years.
But that wasn’t the thing that had a weight pressing in on my chest like concrete.
On his hip was a small child, a boy.
The boy was wrapped around him, head on his shoulder as though Heath was a normal human, instead of a Heath.
A human that the boy adored.
It w
as perturbing. All of it.
But one thing in particular was the most perturbing of all.
The boy did not look like him. It may have been his child, but he did not favor him.
The boy had messy brown hair, and as he drew closer, I saw his warm caramel eyes. In fact, every feature of his face, from his straight little nose, to his tiny clenched jaw, and his pursed little mouth was familiar to me.
My heart seized up in the most horrible, wonderful way. My teeth were clenched so hard my jaw ached.
It was indescribable, this feeling of absolute certainty and disbelief.
I could not take my eyes off that child, not from a distance and especially not when they got very close.
The boy could not take his eyes off me either.
His head straightened up from Heath’s shoulder as he studied me nearly as intently as I was studying him.
Heath ruffled the boy’s hair and kissed him on the forehead, like he’d done it a million times. They were obviously close.
That made my eyes swing to him and glare.
Heath glared right back, but when he tilted his head and looked down at the boy, his eyes softened to unrecognizable.
He adored this child.
“This ‘im, Unca Heaf?” the child asked.
“Yeah, sport, it sure is. Can’t you tell? You look just like him.”
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t form a coherent thought, my whole astonished self wrapped up in this little person I’d only just set eyes on, only discovered existed an endless minute ago.
I tried to clear my throat, to say something, because I had questions I needed answers to, but it all escaped me, powerful emotion moving through me like a Mack truck, all of it rushing up to clog my throat and bring moisture to my eyes.