“Where else would he be?”
“Put him on.”
A weighted silence, then his father demanded, “What for?”
“Just put him on, Dad. Please.”
Caine made another of those thunderous sounds low in his throat—and then he raised the decibel level, as he always did when he suspected he was being crossed.
“You don’t need to talk to the damn nurse! You need to get the others together and get in here. On the double—while I’m feeling up to telling you what you need to hear.”
“Dad. Listen.” Cord kept his own tone carefully level.
“I’m not doing anything until I talk to Gunderson.”
There was another silence, a long one this time. It seemed to Cord that he could actually hear his father’s powerful will crackling in thwarted fury over the line.
At last, Caine muttered, “Fine.”
The next voice was Gunderson’s. “Hello, Mr. Stockwell.”
“What’s going on there?”
“Er, what exactly do you mean, sir?”
“Is my father as clearheaded as he sounds?”
“Yes, sir,” said the nurse. “Your father seems to be feeling just excellent today.”
“He’s…rational?”
“Yes, sir. Quite rational…at the moment.”
Caine must have grabbed the phone back, because it was his voice that Cord heard next. “You’ve talked to the damn nurse. And you know what I want you to do. Do it now.” The line went dead.
Audrey still waited, the soul of patience, in the doorway.
“Sorry,” Cord told her. “The dictation will have to wait.” She dipped her head in response and retreated, pulling the door silently shut behind her.
Cord got back on the phone and began tracking down his brothers and sister. Luckily, they were all in residence. Kate hadn’t left for her office yet, Rafe had got in late the night before—and Jack was down in the kitchen, eating a plate of ham and eggs, which the cook had just prepared for him. They each agreed to meet him in fifteen minutes—in the hall outside Caine’s rooms.
At 8:54, Cord, Rafe, Jack and Kate entered their father’s suite together.
Caine was sitting up in his hospital bed, gaunt and haggard as ever lately, but so alert it was almost scary. “About damn time,” he grumbled. He sent a dismissing glance at each of the two nurses. “Out.”
Gunderson and the redhead made themselves scarce.
Caine turned to his children, all four of whom waited, shoulder to shoulder, a few feet from the bed. Those rheumy blue eyes pinned each one in turn—Jack, Kate, Cord and then Rafe.
“I’ll be dead damn soon,” he muttered flatly.
Kate let out a small cry and took an involuntary step toward the bed.
Caine put up a hand. Kate froze. Caine asked, addressing no one in particular, “What is it with women? Soft-hearted—and softheaded, too?”
Jack muttered something under his breath. It was something about cold-blooded old men.
Kate turned and touched his hand—a touch Cord knew was intended to remind their older brother to keep his cool. It worked, for the moment anyway. Jack fell silent.
Kate drew back her shoulders. “Sorry, Daddy. I don’t know what got into me. For a split second there, I actually felt sorry for you.”
Caine grunted. “Well, don’t. Just stand there. Listen. That’s what I want from you now. It’s all I want. From any of you.” Caine turned those red-rimmed eyes on Jack, daring his oldest son to say more. Jack stared right back. But he did hold his tongue.
Finally Caine shrugged. “There’s something that’s been…eating away at me, right along with the cancer. It’s something I sure as hell never meant to admit to anyone, least of all to the four of you. But now…” He laughed, a dry cackle of sound, utterly devoid of any real humor. “Guess I’m more of a sap than I thought. Or maybe it’s just plain old everyday guilt. It won’t let an old man rest, not until he’s seen to it that what can be done will be done to take care of what matters—his family. And that means every last one of them, whatever they did. And wherever the hell they may be now.”
He paused, maddeningly, and looked down at his gnarled hands. Cord suspected the worst: that he was drifting back into the strange, twilight world he most often inhabited of late.
But when Caine looked up, his eyes were still reasonably clear. He coughed, a throat-clearing sound. His scrawny chest rattled. He drew himself a wheezing breath and then announced, “It’s about your mother.”
Cord stood utterly still. His brothers and his sister did the same. The room grew oppressively silent, as they waited there, under the old man’s bloodshot, knowing eyes. All the overbearing splendor of the place, the rich brocades and gilded woodwork, seemed to press in on them, thickening the air, making it hard to breathe.
Caine granted them all a ghastly grin. “I see I’ve got your attention now.”
The tension, already on a razor’s edge, increased. But no one said a word. They waited to hear more.
And Caine shrugged again. “Your mother never drowned in Stockwell Pond.”
Cord heard a gasp—Kate’s. His brothers stood utterly silent, as stunned as he was. They had all begun to doubt that there had ever been a drowning. But doubting was one thing. Hearing Caine admit the truth outright in a rational voice was something else altogether.
Caine said it again. “Madelyn didn’t drown. That was just a story I made up, so none of you would ever get any ideas that you needed to go off looking for her. She didn’t drown. And neither did Brandon. The two of them ran away together, twenty-nine years ago next month.”
Chapter Sixteen
The old man had more to say.
They were things he had said before.
But before, he’d been raving. Now, he said those things in a calm, clear voice, his eyes hard and bright. Cord found himself believing that they really might be true.
“Madelyn was pregnant when she left,” Caine told them. “Just a few months along. When I learned about the baby, I…well, I raised my hand to her, I admit it. Slapped her around pretty good. I accused her of having Brandon’s bastard in her belly. She cried and carried on and denied that the baby was my brother’s. But I knew she’d been sneaking around, meeting with him in secret.”
Kate had her hand over her mouth. Nonetheless, another gasp escaped her.
Caine pinned her with those cold eyes of his. “Spare me your shocked little noises, Miss Kate. I know you’ve heard all the old rumors. I believe I even mentioned them myself once or twice. Your mother went behind my back to meet her lover.”
He looked down at his hands again, and then muttered reluctantly, “In retrospect, I don’t even know that I blame her. When a man is dying, he has a lot of time to…reflect on what he did back when. All those years ago, I could have killed her with my bare hands for what I’d decided was her betrayal. But…” He chortled to himself some more, causing more coughing, which he had a little difficulty getting under control.
Finally he reached for the glass of water on the tray at his elbow. He drank, coughed once more. “I was hardly a model husband, as we all know. And she, well, she never did get over my sainted brother.”
He sipped again, this time in a thoughtful sort of way. “She was always transparent as a clear sheet of glass. Wore her feelings on those pretty, flowing sleeves of hers. Never did get a handle on how to hide what she felt.” He set the glass down. “You’d think she would have learned, wouldn’t you, living with me?”
Jack spoke up then. “I’d like a few specifics. What do you mean, she never really got over Uncle Brandon?”
Caine grunted. He looked at his least favorite son with the strangest expression—a crafty look, and a wary one, too. “She loved him. Before she married me. She would have married him instead of me. But I fixed that.”
“You fixed that how?”
Caine waved his hand, dismissing the question. “We don’t need to go into all that now.”
“You’re wrong.” Jack’s voice was hard as stone. “We do.”
Caine’s grizzled brows drew together. He made that thunderous sound in his throat. “I said no.”
Jack refused to back down. “And I said yes.”
The two glared at each other, Jack’s face revealing nothing, Caine’s contorting with rage. In the old days, Caine would have acted on his wrath. Jack would have taken a number of blows from Caine’s powerful arm.
But Caine’s body was wasted now, his arms little more than brittle sticks. Now, instead of striking out, he shouted, “You don’t run things around here, mister! And you never will. I’ll tell you what I want to tell you, and if you don’t back off, I won’t you tell a damn thing.” The shouting brought on a coughing fit.
Jack waited for the cough to subside a little before he said, “You heartless piece of—”
Cord was the one who intervened that time. “Jack.” He put a steadying hand on his older brother’s rock-hard shoulder. “Don’t. He’ll never tell us what he started to say.”
In response to that, Caine threw back his head and crowed at the crystal-and-gold chandelier overhead. “Cord’s got it right.” He had to pause, to cough some more. “Better listen to him. And listen to me. You get what I want to tell you, Jack, and that’s all you get.”
Jack stared at his father, a muscle working fiercely in his jaw. Kate, on his other side, put her hand on his arm. “Please, Jack…”
Jack swung his furious gaze on Kate. He looked at her for a long time. At last, he nodded. “All right. Let him talk.” He sent Cord a rueful glance. “You can let go, too. I won’t kill him. Not today, anyway.”
Caine was grinning again. On him, the expression reeked of pure malice. “I’ve missed the family drama, I must say I have.”
“Get on with it,” Cord commanded.
Miraculously, Caine did.
“All right. Where was I? Ah. I remember now. They ran off together, your mother and my holier-than-thou, back-stabbing twin brother, on Independence Day—and no, the irony does not escape me—twenty-nine years ago. You—at least you three—” he was looking at his sons “—wouldn’t shut up about that damn woman. Each of you, over and over, ‘Where is she?’ ‘I want my mother.’ ‘Where is my mother?’ Kate, blessedly, didn’t ask much at all, since she only knew a few words at the time. I got sick of the questions, so I made up the story of how sweet Madelyn and my brother had drowned in a rowboat out on the pond. I found it very…satisfying, to tell you. And to tell you again. And again. And again.
“I fired all the servants, hired a whole new staff, so I could be certain you’d never hear the truth from a maid or a gardener. And I made sure that my business associates, the ones who came to the house regularly, found it to be in their best interests to go along with the lie.
“It’s surprising how impressionable a young mind can be. At first, you wouldn’t believe me—especially you, Jackie boy. But I had the years on my side. I had…all the power on my side. By the time you all reached your teens, you were thoroughly indoctrinated. You never questioned the logic of any of it. You believed what I had told you: that your mother was long dead, that she had died in a boating accident—and that her body was never found.”
Jack asked the question that was screaming through all of their minds. “Where is she now?”
Caine blinked. And shook his head. Then he closed his eyes.
Cord swore. “He’s fading.”
“Dad?” prompted Rafe. “Dad? Where is Madelyn now?”
Caine opened his eyes. “Not finished. What? Oh. The thing is, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that the baby was mine. She had a…damn disgusting high moral sense, that mother of yours. She might have sneaked around behind my back, meeting with my brother, crying on his shoulder because I made her life such a misery, but I don’t think she was lifting her pretty skirts for him—not then, anyway.
“And though I didn’t come to her bed that often by then, I came enough. So it was mine, that baby. My baby. And no matter what the hell you say about me, I’m a Stockwell, and I take care of my own.
“I’ve sent money for that baby—and for Madelyn, too—every month of every year since she ran off. I’ve tried, damn it, to do the right thing. It’s not my fault that all the checks just came back.”
“Where is she?” Jack said again.
But Caine was groaning, now, tossing his head from side to side. “That’s all. That’s all. Now you know. She didn’t drown…”
“Answer me,” demanded Jack.
“Out. Out. All of you. ’Cept for Cord. I don’t want you others here. No more…get out…”
Jack stepped toward the bed, sheer fury burning in his eyes again. But Kate grabbed him back. “Please, Jack. Look at him. He’s not going to say anymore.”
“Out!” The lax tendons in Caine’s raddled neck leaped into taut relief as he threw back his gaunt head and bellowed. “All of you…out!” He coughed and beat his fist on the edge of the bed. “Cord. Here. Here to me…”
“Give me a few minutes with him,” Cord said, stepping forward with a weary wave. “Then send the nurses in.”
Rafe said, “Cord, you don’t have to—”
“It’s all right. I’ll take it from here.”
Caine’s wasted arm shot out. He grabbed Cord by the shoulder. “Cord. Here. Listen. Have to tell you…”
Cord peeled the bony fingers off his shirt. “Go. Please,” he said to the others.
They turned, reluctantly, and filed out.
“My son. My flesh…” the old man muttered. “Just like me. Remember that. Like me. We understand each other. Me and you. We’re the same…” He chortled to himself, stopped just short of a coughing fit. “No. Not quite the same. You’re smarter than your old man, aren’t you? Never let yourself get hooked up with one woman. You know that only leads to disaster, for a man like you, a man like me…”
Cord hated the way he felt right then: torn right down the middle—between revulsion and pity.
Caine raved some more. “You do what you have to do. Find Madelyn. And the child. But watch out for those others, now. Don’t let them convince you to give away what’s ours. I didn’t let Brandon do it. You hold firm, too. Hold firm, hold on. The land and the oil underneath it…Stockwell land now. Stockwell oil…”
Cord sat on the edge of the bed and let his father babble away. Soon enough, Gunderson appeared. He got the syringe ready. Cord left as soon as the narcotic took effect.
The others were waiting for him out in the hall.
“Well?” Rafe asked, as soon as Cord pulled the door closed behind him.
“He’s sleeping now, for a while, at least.”
“Did he say anything else?” Jack asked. “About Madelyn? Or Brandon? Or any of it?”
“He said…to do what I had to do to find Madelyn and the ‘baby,’ and he also made reference to the land deal, I think. He told me to ‘hold on.’ Not to let ‘those others’ talk me into giving up what’s ours.”
“Those others,” Kate said wryly. “That would be Jack, Rafe and me, I suppose?”
Cord shrugged. “’Fraid so. Our father has the impression that I’m every bit as unscrupulous as he is.”
Jack made a low, disgusted sound.
“We’re glad he’s wrong,” said Kate fondly. It felt good, to hear her confident reassurance that he was not the same man their father was.
Rafe swore. “All these years. We believed what he told us…at least I always did.”
Kate nodded. “I did, too. I never doubted. Did you, Jack?”
“I wondered. But eventually, I got to the point where I decided it was only wishful thinking.”
“We were children,” Cord reminded them. “And he said it himself. He had all the power.”
Rafe was shaking his head. “Still, we should have—”
“No,” Cord said. “There’s no point in beating ourselves up for what we might have done. Let’s concentrate on doing whatever
we can to straighten things out now.” He ran his fingers back through his hair, trying to remember if there was anything else of importance he needed to tell them.
It came to him. “Oh—and another thing. Just now, he also mentioned Uncle Brandon again. When he told me I wasn’t to let you talk me into giving away what was ours, he said that he hadn’t let Brandon do it. He’s mentioned that more than once now, that Brandon knew about the land deal. He said I was to ‘hold firm’ and ‘hold on’ to the land, and the oil underneath it—as he, Caine, had done. It was pretty disjointed, but he also babbled out something about how it was Stockwell land now and Stockwell oil, too.”
Rafe shook his head. “Damn. What a mess.”
“Yeah,” Cord agreed. “But we do have a little more than we had before. We have it straight from his own mouth—in reasonably lucid form for once—that Madelyn and our uncle didn’t die all those years ago. It appears that Madelyn was pregnant. Which means we may have another brother or sister somewhere in the world.”
Jack was nodding. “And he mentioned he’s been sending them money. Every month, he said, for the last twenty-nine years. We just might be able to trace a money trail.”
The four traded glances.
“I can check his personal accounts,” Cord said. “But I imagine it’s not going to be quite that simple. He would have made a real effort to hide the expenditures, so no one else would stumble on them by accident.”
“Okay,” Kate said. “So if the money hasn’t been coming out of his personal checkbook, then where do we look for it?”
Cord had a few ideas. “I’ve been working to get all the company records put on computer. Whatever’s in the system now, I would know about—or at least, I’d have easy access to. But until six months ago, Dad still ran a few things himself. And he never did bother to learn how to make a spreadsheet. So there are…loose ends. I keep meaning to get it all cleaned up and into the system, but I haven’t gone through everything he was up to as of yet.”
Jack asked, “Where is everything he was up to?”
“When I took over his office, I had all of his stuff stored in the basement. His office furniture is down there, along with several boxes full of papers and correspondence, as well as two four-drawer file cabinets.”
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