by Karen Harper
She tried to throw off the déjà vu feeling of unease that clung to her like a wet, cold sheet. She was relieved that Claire had been happy to stay at her friend Charlee’s house after school and that Charlee’s mom, Heather, had been such a good friend. Nick had phoned Tara before his business lunch, but not since. If he got home before her, he could read the note she’d left on Beamer’s collar and go get Claire. All that planning felt as if they were parents trying to keep up with their child’s schedule. She was going to feel doubly devastated when he took Claire and left.
She finally convinced herself to approach Jim’s house. After all, he’d been kind and considerate when she was recovering at the clinic. He’d made certain that nearby snowy paths were cleared for her first forays outside on a walker and then a cane; he’d given her little nature talks to get her brain cells working again. And there were the early purple columbines that had appeared at her cabin door from time to time. Jim was about sixty, but had a boyish face. A childhood accident of some sort had given him a permanent limp, but he got around on a golf cart to oversee the planting, weeding, raking and cutting in the woodsy atmosphere of the clinic. He’d never married—he was married to his work of taming the wilds, Veronica had once said.
Claire hoped he was home. She recalled he went to work at the clinic at first light. Just after lunch he usually went home to tend his own yard, then returned to work until sunset. She hoped she was hitting his schedule about right. As she walked to his driveway, then up toward the small stone house, she saw his truck was there.
His small yard took her breath away, for it was planted with mountain wildflowers of every kind: bluebonnets and lupine, Aspen daisies, and an array of others she couldn’t name. The place reminded her that Veronica once said Jim created paintings like those by Claude Monet, but alive and “fraught with fragrance.”
Tara didn’t even have to knock. As she lifted her fist, the door opened as if by magic.
“Ms. Kinsale, what a surprise!” Jim extended his hand for a hearty shake. His leathery face crinkled into a web of lines as he smiled, showing uneven teeth. “Do you have something for me to take Mrs. Lohan? She’s back at the clinic and restricted,” he added, lowering his voice as if someone would hear.
“Actually, I wanted to ask you something else. I heard she’s been readmitted. Have you seen her?”
“No, ma’am, but then, I didn’t see hide nor hair of you either, for months. If you want me to landscape something, the Lohans got me pretty booked up. Been loyal to them for years, and they treat me great. Now, where’s my manners? Come on inside. Got a few minutes till I head back. You know me, set in my ways.”
Tara stepped inside a tiny, flagstone foyer. The living-dining area was filled with old furniture and flowers, crocks of them. She could see, through a double sliding glass door, that the backyard fell steeply away.
“Want to look out back?” he asked her and led the way.
His back deck was on tall stilts above rock gardens and a profusion of flowers running riot in what she’d call an English garden. It was so late in the growing season that most of them looked leggy. He walked her down the stairs. Bright bushes with flame-red leaves grew under and around the deck.
“They get good morning sun here,” he told her.
“It’s beautiful, Jim, all of it. You certainly have the touch. How kind you were to me when I was recovering. That moved me deeply.”
“You had a hard time of it, in more ways than one,” he said, not looking at her but off into the distance, down the steep spill of flowers to the road below. “Glad to help. Glad to help any Lohan.”
“Which I’m not any longer, but you could help me now. I’m going to level with you about why I’m here. Can I ask you first if you actually saw me anytime during my coma, from late May of 2004 through April of 2005?”
“Saw you?” he said, shifting from one foot to the other. “Naw, I’m not medical staff.”
“I realize that, but you’re everywhere on the clinic grounds. A glimpse through a window, an overheard conversation…Jim, I know this might sound a bit off the wall, but a doctor has informed me I was pregnant when I began my coma—that I must have had a baby while I was comatose. Did you hear or see anything that might make you think that could be true?”
Wide-eyed, he looked at her before his gaze darted away again. He wiped his palms on his jeans. “Word of that would have gotten out for sure,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t be.”
“So you never even caught a glimpse of me?”
“Only that night late in February in all the snow, when you got out.”
“I got out? Out to where? It was early April before I really woke up from the coma. Are you sure it was February?”
“You must have come to for a while, ’cause I found you in at least four feet of snow just outside the chapel. See, Mrs. Lohan was inside playing the organ real loud. She came out with Elin Johansen. The three of us got you back to your cabin, but mostly I carried you.”
“And I—I wasn’t extremely pregnant, because you would have known.”
“I may be a lifelong bachelor, ma’am, but I would have known that. You were in just a nightgown and a robe, not even shoes. You left some bloody tracks in the snow. Your feet and legs were scratched and cut from walking through bushes or thorns, but it could have been much worse. You could have lost some toes to frostbite or froze to death.”
Tara shuddered, reaching in the dark for those memories. Icy cold—she felt icy cold right now. She stared at the flame bushes all around them, seeing instead her crimson blood in the snow. “Did I say anything?”
“I think you said you were lost. Mumbling, not making much sense. It was a while ago, but I think you said something about looking for the hiding place.”
“Hiding place? They never told me I’d been out like that,” she whispered, leaning back against the tall post that held up the deck. Her legs were still shaking. She was trying so hard to remember that her head hurt. “And I have no memory of that, even if I was walking and talking. No wonder they sedated me and weaned me off meds slowly after that. Jim, is there anything else you can tell me about any of this? Maybe an exact date?”
“Not rightly sure,” he muttered, looking down the hill. “Only that it was in the dead of winter.”
When Nick called Tara about his job offer, that further upset her, because he said they were really pushing him to accept. Tara phoned Claire, who was happily watching CDs with Charlee at her house, and told her she was going to stop to see an old friend, though that was a bit of a lie. Her former sister-in-law, Thane Lohan’s wife, Susanne, had never been much of a friend. The woman had seen her as competition for the affection and fortune of Jordan and Veronica Lohan. If the family knew that she had been pregnant and lost the child, wouldn’t Susanne want to rub it in?
Just as Tara and Laird used to, Thane’s family lived only a few blocks from the senior Lohans. Tara had called Susanne to ask if she could pop by to see the children, whom she and Thane were always willing to show off, their winning cards in the game of Lohan dynasty poker. At first, Susanne declined Tara’s offer to visit, saying that the children were at lessons of various kinds after school. She acquiesced when Tara said she’d like to come over anyway. Maybe she was testing Tara or wanted to surprise her, because Tara was certain she’d heard kids’ voices in the background. Maybe Susanne had meant they were going to their lessons, but, as Tara remembered it, mother hen Susanne always took great pride in personally delivering the children to their various destinations, including plenty of grandparent visits.
Thane Lohan’s house was only slightly larger than the house Tara had once shared with Laird. Of timber and stone, it boasted a huge rec room, a gourmet kitchen overlooking a great room and dining hall and an indoor pool pavilion. As she got out of her truck, she recalled the driveway had a snow-melt system.
Looking as striking as ever in beige linen cropped pants and a jade silk shirt, Susanne greeted her at the door with an
air kiss and something approaching an air hug. “It’s so good to see you, Tara! Isn’t it sad about Mother?”
“I can’t believe she got back on anything like that after her first struggle. Was it alcohol or sedatives?”
“Big, bad Vicodin again. Thane couldn’t believe it. Come on in, then. Sorry the children aren’t here.”
As ever, walking in, they passed the two-story wall of numerous, ornately framed color photos of Lawrence, Lacey and Lindsey, all under ten years of age, formally posed, nothing casual or natural looking. Tara noted that one big picture had been taken off the wall. Its hook had been removed, but the slight discoloration on the woven wallpaper around it suggested where it had hung. Tara recalled that spot had always held the annual Lohan three-generation photo. She wondered if it had been taken down so she didn’t have to see Laird in it without her. No, that would be too thoughtful for Susanne. She’d be more likely to have it on the front door.
“Sit and have some coffee,” she said, indicating a tray she had already laid out on the glass coffee table, which was surrounded by an oversize, horseshoe-shaped, ivory leather sofa. “I know you would have loved to have seen the children. I’m going to have them make get-well, we-miss-you cards for their grandmother the moment they get back. So, why have you graced me with a visit after all this time? Oh, I know it works both ways, but three children and a husband and social duties—well, you remember some of that, don’t you? I often wonder what you can recall.”
“Too much sometimes and not enough other times,” Tara said.
Susanne shifted in her seat as if she were poised on something hot or sharp. “It’s so lovely,” Susanne said, pouring two cups of coffee from a sterling silver carafe, “that you have a daughter of sorts now.”
Why, Tara scolded herself, did everything Susanne Lohan say annoy her? Even when she was playing the perfect hostess, smiling and chatting, it was as if a chilly mountain breeze blew from her.
“It’s been a wonderful experience to have Claire, especially after my personal loss,” she told Susanne.
“You mean losing Laird.”
As she took a sip of coffee, Tara leveled a long look at Susanne over her coffee cup. The woman couldn’t sit still. Which meant nothing too dire, of course. Lowering her cup on her knees, Tara said, “I mean Laird and the other.”
“The other? Oh, little Claire’s mother.” Susanne so obviously heaved a sigh that Tara almost reached out to shake her. Why had she seemed relieved to come up with that? Was there something else she didn’t want to reveal?
“Claire’s mother, yes, but my other loss, too,” Tara said as the awkward silence stretched out between them.
“Whatever are you talking about?” Susanne’s cup rattled in its saucer and she put it down. “Tara, I hope you didn’t come here so we could play Twenty Questions. Are you fishing for answers about how Laird’s doing?”
“Knowing Laird, he’s doing just fine. Hale, hearty, happy and hellishly self-centered.” The words burst from her. She’d realized she was hurt and upset and angry, but she hadn’t come here to unload on Susanne, for all that. Tara put her cup down, too, and rose to leave. She couldn’t stay another minute. This was a bad idea, all around.
“You know, don’t you?” Susanne asked.
Rather than ask what she meant, Tara decided to take a risk. “Yes, Susanne. I know.”
“It just happened. You can’t blame them,” she blurted, her hands fluttering in her lap. “You didn’t really want to devote yourself to Laird anyway—I could never understand that, and neither could she. I know you feel betrayed, but don’t take it out on me! So how did you find out about him and Jennifer?”
“Is he bankrolling her now? He tried to buy her off, didn’t he?” she demanded, before the real import of the words sank in.
“What?” Susanne cried, clasping her hands around her neck as if she’d choke herself. “I thought you meant you learned that Laird married Jennifer DeMar, your doctor—that’s all.”
Tara sank back onto the sofa. “That’s all?” she heard herself echo. For a moment, all the fight drained out of her. She felt like a fool. Betrayed but stupid. Laird had bought Jen off, all right. He’d done more than bankroll her to keep her silence about a dead baby—he’d rolled her in the hay!
She’d called Jen more than once since she’d been out of the coma, and the witch hadn’t let on. Everything fell together now, how Jen had politely tried to distance herself…even the man’s voice in the background on the phone. And no one had told her. Or had Veronica tried to? Jim’s not lost, Angel? Jen’s not lost? No, not lost at all, but with Laird, whom she’d always had her eye on and now had her claws in.
“Tara, I’m sorry to spring it on you like that, but I thought you meant you’d figured out that Jen’s not in Los Angeles, but Seattle.”
Jen’s not lost, Angel…Jen’s not in Los Angeles?
Tara had always felt a certain sense of triumph in putting puzzles together, but this one had turned tragic. She stood up and walked toward the front door with Susanne scurrying behind her. Tara was so shocked, so hurt, she wanted to strike out. The Lohans might claim they were trying to protect her fragile feelings about a lost child, about her health, but it was all to cover for Laird and his new wife. If the first wife couldn’t deliver a live child, maybe the second one would.
“I hope you won’t lose Lohan points for having told me about Laird and Jen,” Tara clipped out. “You’d better hope she doesn’t have a boatload of sons to split your and your children’s cut of the Lohan fortune. My good fortune is that I’m out of here, in more ways than one.”
Before Susanne could get to the door, Tara opened it, then slammed it. But she knew what she’d just said wasn’t true. One way or the other, she still had Lohan doors to kick open and not just about Jen and Laird.
12
It seemed so natural for Tara to hug not only Claire but Nick when she got home. She was still shaking.
“What’s the matter?” he whispered.
“Later.”
“No, now. Claire will be okay with Beamer for a sec.” He turned around and raised his voice, “Honey, will you play with Beamer since he’s been alone all day? I need to talk to Aunt Tara for a minute.”
“Oh, sure,” Claire said with a little smile. “Can we go outside?”
“Not right now. Stay in here, and we’ll be right back.”
They went into Tara’s office and closed the door. Her phone message light was blinking, but that was not unusual. She ignored it.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Just a surprise—a shock. My former sister-in-law let spill that my former husband ran off to Seattle with Jen DeMar, my ob-gyn and once-upon-a-time friend. They’re married. I’m assuming that’s what Veronica was trying to tell me—Jen’s not in Los Angeles. She probably thought if she told me that indirectly, her husband couldn’t blame her and I could track her down.”
“They ran off together while you were comatose?” he asked as he put his hands on her shoulders as if to prop her up. “Hell, it sounds like they deserve each other. Did the caretaker say anything about that?”
“No, but he said that sometime in February, when I was supposedly in the depths of the coma, he found me wandering the clinic grounds in the snow. And that I told him I was looking for a hiding place.”
“It’s not much, compared to keeping the lid on a secret pregnancy, but maybe the clinic’s trying to cover up that you got out when you were under their care, or that you were not actually comatose as long as they claimed.”
Her head snapped up. “They did use sedatives freely there. They said it was to delay my coming out of the coma too soon to recover well. I’ve always accepted that, but does that make sense? Maybe it was to protect Laird and his lover, give them time to clear Colorado—or time for me to recover from a miscarriage or bad birth outcome.”
“Did your sister-in-law say anything about your having been pregnant?”
“No, but I did
n’t ask her directly. I was going to, but when she blurted out about Laird and Jen, I lost it and walked out.”
“I can imagine.”
“Besides, maybe she didn’t know everything. Maybe I was lucky to have stumbled on that much. By their acts of omission—not telling me about delivering a child—the Lohans could all be lying. Nick, I just don’t know what to think. Maybe after my baby died, Laird hated me even more, so he turned to Jen…oh, I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”
She burst into tears. He pulled her to him. “Sorry,” she murmured against his shoulder, trying to get control. “I—if you and Claire leave soon, I don’t know what I’ll do. Except,” she said as she pulled away from him and got a tissue from the drawer, “I’m not letting up on the Lohans until I get more answers. I’m going to get in to see Veronica. I don’t care if they have that place locked up as tight as Fort Knox. If that doesn’t get me answers, I’ll go to Jordan and to Laird. If I bore a child, I have every right to know all about it—whatever pain it causes Laird or me. I have every right to visit my child’s grave over the years!”
“Of course you do. If they’ve kept something like that from you, it’s wrong—warped.”
“Somehow that sounds just like them.”
After dinner, when Claire had been put to bed and Nick was walking Beamer outside, Tara finally got some time in her office. She checked her e-mail and was relieved to see she had no return messages from Marv Seymour. Good, she thought. He must literally have gotten the message. But had he been their lurker?
She also checked online to try to trace Dietmar Getz’s movements. His Web site stated that he’d come in fourth in the race where they’d confronted him. His next race listed was in Utah next weekend. That could be to throw her off, of course, because he was still the front-runner for her stalker. And that left him time to still be hanging around here. She typed up a quick list of why she felt Getz was more likely than Seymour to be after her. She was going to leave keeping an eye on RickWhetstone to Nick.