by R. G. Belsky
But there are moments—especially late at night when I’m sitting in my apartment, alone, thinking about pushing forty and unsure about my professional and my personal future—that I start having the anxiety attacks again. I feel that same sense of panic: I get short of breath, and the panic and the stress seem so bad that I fear I may die from it. I do have a doctor I can go to and I have medicine that the doctor gave me that I could take. But I don’t do any of these things. Instead, I just wait for the anxiety attack to go away, which, sooner or later, it does. I don’t want to go to the damn doctor or take the medicine. I just want another big story. That’s what I really need. Like I always say, a big story always makes everything better for me.
There was still one unanswered question left about the Keegan story.
Who was Christine Keegan’s real father?
Was it Nicholas Faron? Or Thomas Gallagher?
Christine said they had told her she could take a DNA test to determine the answer. Her DNA would be matched with a DNA sample from Faron’s body. But she said she was pretty sure she already knew the answer.
“I believe my biological father was Thomas Gallagher,” she said.
She told me she had thought a lot about what she now knew to have happened on that long-ago night when she was the only survivor of the massacre inside the Gallagher house.
“Just imagine what it must have been like for my mother,” Christine said. “She’s already had to watch helplessly while Nicholas Faron killed two of her children. Now Faron’s headed down the hall to finish me off in my crib, too. So she does the only thing she can do. The only thing that can save me.
“She tells him I’m his baby. She never said that to him before, so why now? She knew it was the only thing that could stop him from killing me. She’d already lost two daughters. She was desperate. My mother’s last act was to lie and save my life before he killed her. Faron said that after she told him about me, she stopped resisting. He said she seemed to accept her fate calmly. She wasn’t crying or screaming anymore. It was as if she’d made peace with the idea that she was going to die, he said.
“I don’t think that was it at all. I think she was serene because she’d accomplished what she wanted to do before she died. She’d saved at least one member of her family. She’d saved me.”
Christine told me her father was a different man now.
“He used to be Jack Keegan, the crime-fighting district attorney. Now he’s just my father. I’m getting to know him all over again. We’ve talked—I mean really talked—about my being gay. He finally understands. He’s also been very supportive of my work at the art gallery, even asking me questions about the paintings here and what they mean to me. I’ve learned a lot about him in the past few weeks. Most of all, I’ve learned to love him again the way Dani and I did when we were little girls.”
At some point, the front door to the art gallery opened, and Jack Keegan himself walked in.
He had a package under his arm. After greeting me, he unwrapped it and showed it to Christine. It was a picture of her and Dani. He said he’d had it specially commissioned from a picture of the two of them that had been taken when they were growing up as young girls together. I looked at Christine and Dani in the painting. So alike and yet so different too.
“Just so you know, I’m not going to take that DNA test we talked about,” Christine said to me.
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Don’t you want to know who your real father was?”
She looked at the painting of her and Dani, then at Jack Keegan. She reached over and gave him a big hug.
“I already have a father,” she said.
Enjoy more Gil Malloy mysteries
Gil Malloy finds out there's more to the long-ago murder of movie starlet Laura Marlowe.
Shooting for the Stars
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Gil Malloy breaks the story of the link between seemingly unconnected murders—a Kennedy half dollar coin found at each of the crime scenes.
The Kennedy Connection
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About the Author
Photograph by John Makely
R. G. Belsky, a journalist and author based in New York City, is the former managing editor of news for NBCNews.com. Prior to joining NBC in 2008, he was the managing editor for the New York Daily News, the news editor for Star Magazine, and the metropolitan editor of the New York Post. He is the author of the Gil Malloy mystery series, which began with The Kennedy Connection.
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ALSO BY R. G. BELSKY
The Kennedy Connection: A Gil Malloy Novel
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by R. G. Belsky
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First Atria Books ebook edition February 2015
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ISBN 978-1-4767-6235-7