Claim the Crown

by Carla Neggers

  She shoved the cab fare and a hundred-dollar bill at the driver and raced into the terminal, then down to the monorail, which she took to the terminal where Eastern flew. She was perspiring heavily when she picked up her ticket, and near tears when she ran to the gate and just barely made the last call for the flight.

  When the seat belt light went off and the flight attendants began serving drinks, Sarah made her way to the tiny bathroom and vomited into the stainless steel toilet.

  17

  Ashley arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, just before noon Central Time. She’d taken a flight out of Bradlee Field, near Hartford, where she’d called her brother, presenting him with a fait accompli. She warned him to be wary of Jeremy Carruthers. Then she banished Jeremy from her thoughts. Or at least she tried. Images of waking up with him that morning kept popping up. She remembered his solid body. His warmth. His reassuring presence. She had thought he was a dream, and he wasn’t.

  No, she thought, he’s a pernicious liar.

  She rarely gave liars second chances. She never gave them third chances.

  At the Nashville airport, she found a pay phone and called Evan Parrington. She was still in her hog-slopping clothes, which, she thought, weren’t as bad as they could have been: a deep red cotton jumpsuit and sneakers. On the plane she’d put up her hair and did her face with the cosmetics in her handbag. A little red lipstick made her look less haunted. She’d turned up the collar on her jumpsuit to hide the swelling at the back of her neck, and took some small comfort in knowing Barky had hit Mac Stevens harder than he’d hit her.

  Evan sounded relieved to hear from her. “I’ve been trying to call you, but it’s virtually impossible to get through.”

  People passed her in the busy airport; it was difficult to believe there were those who lived normal lives. “I’ve had the crazies after me,” she told Evan.

  “Are you all right?”

  She hesitated. Was she? “More or less.”

  “Your uncle was here Monday morning—and an attorney from San Diego. They wanted to discuss the jewels and the trust, but, of course, I couldn’t violate client confidentiality and provide them with any information. I’ve been concerned those photographs might stir up some trouble. Have they? Where are you now?”

  She pretended not to hear his questions. “Evan, I need you to arrange to get the rest of the jewels from Geneva. Use a bonded courier—and warn him the assignment could be more dangerous than last time. Tell him especially to watch for a blond apelike guy, about five eleven.”

  Evan inhaled. “Ashley, perhaps you should come to the office and we should go over this.”

  “Can’t, Evan. When the jewels get to New York, get an expert to have a look at them. Tell them they might be Hungarian. I’ll be in touch.”

  She rented a car, and in the heat of middle Tennessee, she began her self-imposed mission. After nearly thirty years, she was checking out the story Barky had told her and David of their roots.

  Bartholomew Wakefield and his younger brother, Richard, had been born in Warsaw, their mother Polish, their father English. When World War II was upon them, they moved to London, where they fought against the Germans. During the war, their father was killed in a bombing raid. Shortly after, their mother died of cancer. At the war’s end, the two brothers decided to emigrate to the United States.

  But Richard fell in love with a young English girl whose family, like millions of others throughout Europe, had been decimated during the war. Mary Winston joined the Wakefield brothers, and soon she and Richard were married.

  They ended up in Tennessee, where they found work on a dairy farm near Nashville. Richard and Mary lived in a cottage on the farm, and Bartholomew rented a room in a boarding house. They worked hard and pooled their savings to buy land.

  In 1957, after years of infertility problems, Mary Winston Wakefield bore twins, and she and Richard named them Ashley and David.

  Four months later, they were orphans. Richard’s tractor fell on him in a freak accident, and his wife ran out to help him...and she, too, was crushed while trying to extricate her husband. They died together, hours later, in a Nashville hospital. Bartholomew headed north with the infants and settled on a hundred and fifty acres in the fertile Connecticut River Valley of west central Massachusetts.

  Barky had never articulated to his niece and nephew his feelings that day, but they had whispered to themselves, usually at night when they couldn’t sleep, and had tried to imagine. They respected his courage and loyalty in taking on infant twins, and they knew he had made sacrifices. He worked tirelessly. He had never married. And he never, never asked for anyone’s pity or thanks, especially theirs.

  And, in turn, they had never questioned his version of the facts.

  Now Ashley traipsed from hospital to hospital, government records office to government records office, and the evidence—or the lack of evidence—became impossible to ignore, crystallized. She sifted through every level of state, county and city bureaucracy. She badgered the system. She pleaded for information, for answers that weren’t there.

  Intricate and fail proof though it might be, the medical and government bureaucracies of the state of Tennessee had never heard of the Wakefield family as Ashley knew it. As she had been told it existed.! There were no records of any Wakefields ever having lived, married, paid taxes, worked, owned property or given birth in the state.

  No records of Richard Wakefield.

  No records of Mary Winston Wakefield.

  No records of Bartholomew Wakefield.

  And no records of Ashley and David Wakefield, twins born on July 14, 1957, in Nashville, Tennessee. She told them she had birth certificates that had satisfied Piccard Cie, one of the oldest private banking houses in the world, but the anonymous bureaucrats shook their heads. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” they said everywhere, “there’s no record...”

  Her life was a lie.

  But Piccard Cie had their hand and footprints, their names—how? And all their lives, she and David had used the birth certificates the state of Tennessee now denied existed. Were they forged? How? Why?

  “Do I exist?” she asked herself aloud, hearing the panic in her tone as she climbed into the rented car.

  Of course you exist. You’re here.

  “But I’m not Ashley Wakefield.” She studied her face in the rearview mirror. Whose eyes were hers if not Mary or Richard Wakefield’s? Whose cheekbones? Whose dark hair?

  Think of something else, she told herself. There were worse fates than not existing.

  What would she do if this meant they would take away her money? She scowled ferociously. She would work. Just as she always had.

  She drove past a cemetery. Then—abruptly— stomped on the brake, did a three-point turn and swerved back to the cemetery entrance.

  Barky had never mentioned the name of the cemetery where her fictitious parents were buried. It didn’t matter. Now any cemetery would do.

  She parked in the shade and wandered in the heat among the gravestones, and she found herself wanting, and not wanting, to find two that said Mary Winston Wakefield and Richard Wakefield.

  Of course she didn’t.

  Of course she had to turn back.

  She pinched a daisy off a plot and tucked it in her hair. She sat in the shade of a spreading oak, on a cool stone bench, and she smelled the cedars and the freshly mown grass and felt the loneliness creeping up into her.

  And at last she cried, not for who she was, not even for who she wasn’t, but for the parents she had learned to know and love, and who had simply never been.

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, Sarah Balaton wandered around the new wing of the New England Oceanographic Institute, and she marveled at the exhibits, especially of the tiny sea creatures she’d never taken the time to notice. A plaque in front of the giant fish tank stated that there, because they were fed daily and didn’t have to hunt for food, prey swam safely among predator. She wondered if humans could learn somethin
g from that.

  Her interest in Ashley Wakefield as a person grew. But who was she? How had she come to have the tiara and choker Judith Land had worn the night she and Andrew Balaton had announced their engagement?

  At the gift shop, Sarah bought a T-shirt and asked the young man at the cash register how she could get to see Ashley Wakefield.

  “You won’t find her here,” he said. “Your best bet is to check at her offices down the road—Touchstone Communications. I might as well warn you, though: she isn’t going to see you without an appointment, especially this week.”

  “Because of the You thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I think she’ll see me.”

  Sarah got directions and walked over to Touchstone Communications. It was a cool afternoon, cloudy and windy on the waterfront. She didn’t know Boston well, thought it a cramped, dirty, snobby city, but she liked the fresh colors and warmth of the Touchstone offices. She asked the receptionist, a tiny woman with fire engine red nails, if she could speak with Ashley Wakefield.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Wakefield isn’t in today. If you’ll leave me your name and where you can be reached, I’ll see that she—”

  “It’s urgent I speak with her today. As soon as possible, in fact.”

  “That’s impossible. Perhaps our vice president—”

  “No, I must speak with Ashley Wakefield.” She controlled her breathing, forcing herself not to hyperventilate, not to plead, not to collapse with nervousness. Give me a company to run, she thought miserably; that I can handle—but not this. “I understand she must be in great demand this week, but I assure you this is of the utmost importance and simply can’t wait. Perhaps if you called her and told her I was here?”

  The young secretary shook her head. “I’m sorry. Even I don’t know where she is. I’d be happy to leave your name and number. Or perhaps you’d like to talk with our vice president, Caroline Kent?”

  Sarah shook her head. “The name’s Balaton. Sarah Balaton. And I’ll be calling her.”

  * * *

  Jeremy took a cab from the Nashville airport to the Greek Revival mansion in Belle Meade that was the residence of Oliver and Nelle Milligan. He was mildly surprised to see the traditional house and trim landscaping: this was old Southern money. One never knew who Ashley’s friends were.

  A girl about twelve answered his ring and gawked at him with her happy green eyes. “Hi,” she drawled, attempting coy already.

  “Is your mother home?”

  The girl straightened, calling on generations of breeding. “Yes, sir, I’ll be glad to get her for you. Would you care to wait in the foyer?”

  Jeremy smiled his thanks, and just managed not to laugh when the girl’s eyes glazed over. He’d never fancied himself as a heartthrob.

  He sat in a Windsor chair in the large, elegant foyer and glanced at his wristwatch. He’d give Ashley three minutes. If she didn’t come out of there, he was going in after her.

  18

  Ashley tucked her feet under her on the bright pink-and-yellow striped cushion of the wicker couch. She was on the sun porch drinking a tall glass of “sun” tea under Nelle Milligan’s watchful eye.

  Nelle was a slim woman in her late thirties with bouncy ash-blond curls and a mischievous glint in her emerald eyes. Her husband was from one of Tennessee’s oldest, proudest and richest families. Oliver Milligan, Jr., was widely rumored to be considering his first bid for state office—a rumor Nelle had already confirmed privately to Ashley. He was handsome, charming, industrious and he adored his wife—as long as she understood her role in his world.

  Ashley had met Nelle nearly three years ago, at a charity ball in New York. To Ashley’s delighted surprise, she discovered the Tennessee homemaker, mother of two and honors graduate of Vanderbilt University, had a secret passion for oceanography. “I’ve always fancied myself as a frustrated marine archaeologist,” she’d confided in her cultured drawl. “Perhaps that’s what I’ll be in my next life.”

  Ashley had promptly invited Nelle and her family up to the New England Oceanographic Institute for a tour and a “whale watch” trip. But Nelle had come alone. “Oliver thinks his constituents might not approve his patronizing a Yankee institution—especially when Tennessee is a landlocked state.”

  She spoke with a smile, but Ashley had wondered. Nelle Milligan was not a naive woman, but she faced the daily and often conflicting pressures of what people around her expected her to do and be. Husband, children, in-laws, constituents, friends, parents—they all had their expectations. And Nelle tried very hard to please them. But sometimes what Nelle thought was proper and expected behavior on her part and what they thought was proper and expected behavior on her part didn’t coordinate, and she slipped painfully, unwillingly, into the unacceptable.

  Such as when her visit to the institute had sparked more than just a passing interest. She’d thought she was promoting interstate and interregional goodwill, but Oliver insisted that the wife of a prospective Tennessee senator should focus her charity efforts on local institutions, or those few national institutions dealing with dreaded diseases and such that would improve his visibility and image at home.

  In short, Nelle Milligan had no business supporting anything to do with saltwater.

  If it had been her, Ashley would have told the SOB to go straight to hell. But Nelle dutifully dropped out of a month-long summer program for laypeople interested in oceanography that the institute was sponsoring on Cape Cod. Ashley assumed that would spell the end to their friendship, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. Dipping into her personal trust fund— willfully—Nelle Milligan sent hefty annual donations to the institute. She was a major funder of its marine archaeological research. In the annual report, she was listed as “anonymous.” Every year, just for a few days, she visited Ashley, telling her husband they were just going shopping. Instead they went on whale watches together and pored over charts of sunken ships, and once Nelle had joined a group of institute volunteers on a Maine beach during a stranding of pilot whales.

  Unlike Ashley, Nelle had known how to keep anyone from taking her picture against her will.

  Countless times, Nelle had invited Ashley down to Nashville. Ashley, in turn, had promised that one of these days she’d take her up on the invitation. It was one that, Nelle said, was always open.

  When Ashley had called from a pay phone near the cemetery, Nelle didn’t hesitate. “You come right on over here, hon.” She set Ashley up on the sun porch with iced tea and told her just to rest and collect herself. “Then we’ll talk.”

  Now Nelle had waited long enough. “All right, Ashley Wakefield. I want you this minute to tell me what’s wrong. I’ve never seen you like this. You’re just not acting like yourself. Now you’re going to sit here until you tell me.”

  “Oh, Nelle, I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Nelle scoffed. “I’ve got all the time in the world. You just go on and start at the beginning—or the middle or the end and we’ll just work our way around. Ashley, we’re friends. I’ve told you things, haven’t I? You can’t always keep everything locked up inside you.”

  Nelle wanted nothing more than a chance to prove her friendship, and Ashley knew it, but she didn’t know if the wife of a candidate for the Tennessee State Assembly would approve of harboring a nonexistent person. And she could just imagine what Oliver would say.

  Then Blythe Milligan slipped onto the porch and excused herself for interrupting. “Mother, there’s a man who wants to speak with you.”

  “Who?” Nelle asked impatiently.

  “Oh—” Her daughter blushed. “I forgot to get his name. Oh, but Mother, he’s just awesome!”

  “Ashley, don’t you ever have a twelve-year-old like mine,” Nelle said, laughing over her shoulder in such a way that both Blythe and Ashley knew Nelle wouldn’t trade her elder daughter—or her own mixed-up life—for anything in the world.

  Nelle was back in less than two minutes. “Ashle
y, you devil, you didn’t tell me a man was involved.”

  Ashley jumped up. “My brother—”

  “At a guess, uh-uh.”

  “But David’s the only one... The fink! Is this guy tall...”

  “Dark, pale-eyed, and, as my sweet little girl says, awesome. That’s the one. He’s also gloriously fit to be tied.” Nelle was clearly thrilled with this new development.

  “Hell’s bells. Carruthers.”

  Hattie, the housekeeper, was running through the adjoining den, screeching, “Sir! Sir! You can’t just go bargin’ in there! Sir!”

  Jeremy stormed onto the sun porch, and Ashley’s heart began to pound when she saw how furious and sexy and concerned he looked. Hattie scurried in after him. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Milligan, but he just wouldn’t pay me no mind.”

  “It’s all right, Hattie.” Nelle gave Jeremy a dazzling smile. “Well, I declare. If you two will excuse me a moment, I believe I’m needed in the kitchen.” Avoiding Ashley’s glare, Nelle followed Hattie out.

  “I ought to wring your neck,” Jeremy said.

  Ashley shrugged dismissively. “You can’t.”

  He made two fists. “The hell I can’t.”

  “My neck doesn’t exist. If you touch me, you’ll get nothing but thin air. I’m not real.”

  His brow furrowed, and he was instantly alert, on edge. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.” She wished she’d kept her mouth shut. “How’s David? Obviously you’ve seen him.”

  “He should be released in the morning. He’s worried about you.”

  “How nice.” She smiled bitterly. “And Mac Stevens? How’s he?”

  “I don’t know. He’s supposed to be in touch with my father in San Diego; so far he hasn’t.”