by B. J Daniels
“Should she get up—”
“I’ll let her know you’re available,” the elderly woman cut him off icily. “I’m sure she will appreciate knowing that.” She hung up, convincing Jesse that Eunice definitely hadn’t been the one who’d put the copy of the newspaper clipping under his door.
While he polished J.B.’s fancy fleet and waited for Dylan to call with news on the baby, Jesse found himself thinking about Gage Ferraro and wondering what Amanda saw in the man. Obviously, there was no accounting for taste, but it did make Jesse wonder. Why had J.B. taken his daughter’s dishonor so lightly? The J. B. Crowe Jesse had come to know would have had Gage swimming with the fish in cement shoes at the bottom of White Rock Lake.
Jesse wondered what J.B. would do if he found out that Amanda was consorting with the enemy again? If Gage and Amanda had kidnapped Susannah as some sort of scam, Jesse didn’t want to be around when J.B. found out.
Meanwhile, he wondered how Gage’s father, Mickie Ferraro, had taken losing his first grandchild. Especially considering that he and J.B. were rumored to be fighting for control inside the Organization. Mickie and J.B. had reportedly started with the mob as little more than kids.
Gage was a two-bit hoodlum who was trying to work his way up in the mob. If he really could find Susannah and bring down Kincaid, J.B. would owe him. But somehow Jesse didn’t believe that was Gage’s game.
Gage Ferraro was a wild card and one Jesse didn’t like seeing in the deck. And Amanda… It was just a matter of getting her in a compromising position. The thought had too much appeal—and was damn dangerous.
He just wished he could figure out how all the pieces fit together, especially how the newspaper clipping fit into the mix.
Dylan, true to his word, contacted him a little after two. “We should meet,” the cowboy said.
Jesse picked a meeting place nearby and called the main house a third time, only to be told that Ms. Crowe had finally gotten out of bed and planned to spend the day beside the pool. Mr. Crowe would be home soon. The two would be spending the rest of the afternoon and evening together. Jesse wouldn’t be needed.
Anxious to hear what Dylan had discovered, he left, confident Amanda couldn’t leave with her father expected home any minute.
* * *
THE SMALL Texas barbecue joint served cold beer and chipped pork sandwiches with hot sauce. Because of the time of day, the place wasn’t busy. He took a table at the back so he could watch the door.
Dylan joined him ten minutes later.
“So is the baby Susannah?” Jesse asked without preamble.
To Jesse’s disappointment, Dylan shook his head.
“The baby found beside the road was a boy, a newborn,” Dylan said.
Jesse frowned. “Then how could the clipping be connected to Susannah Crowe’s disappearance?”
“I don’t think it is,” Dylan said. “The baby boy left beside Woodland Lake Road just outside of Red River, Texas, had dark hair and dark eyes. He was only a few hours old, leading police to believe he was born on June 5.” He paused.
Jesse felt a jolt. The baby had been born on his birthday?
“June 5,” Dylan continued, “thirty years ago, 1971.”
Jesse’s heart took off at a sprint. He stared at the cowboy for a long moment. “June 5 is my birthday.”
Dylan nodded. “I had a feeling it was. That’s why I did some more checking. I couldn’t find out who adopted the baby. Texas adoption laws won’t allow that. So I went from the other direction.” Dylan seemed to hesitate. “I checked your birth certificate.”
Jesse was already shaking his head.
“I don’t know how to say this, Jesse. I checked with the hospital listed as your place of birth. You weren’t born in Dallas, at least not to Pete and Marie McCall.”
Jesse could barely find breath to ask, “What are you saying? That you think I’m that abandoned baby?” He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “I was the middle son, with two brothers and three younger sisters, the perfect family. I had this great childhood. If anything, I was my parents’ favorite—” He stopped and shook his head again, all the little things now making him doubt who he was and everything he’d once believed. “There is no way I was adopted. There has to be some sort of mistake. Of course I was born in Dallas, just like my brothers and sisters. Why would my parents lie about where I was born?”
The answer was obvious. If he was that abandoned baby, his parents would have lied to protect him from the truth. They wouldn’t want him to know that his birth mother had cared so little that she’d left him beside a dirt road in a cardboard box.
“I’m sorry, Jesse,” Dylan said.
He looked past Dylan to the bartender punching up numbers on the jukebox. A Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys song filled the air, Texas swing. He felt sick. And scared. “Who the hell am I, then?”
“You’re still Jesse McCall, the man you’ve always been,” Dylan said.
Jesse shook his head. He’d been Jesse Brock since he’d become Crowe’s chauffeur two weeks ago. And now he had a bad feeling he wasn’t even Jesse McCall, the person he thought he’d been for thirty years. “I have to know.”
Dylan nodded almost sadly but didn’t seem surprised. “You realize you’re probably not going to like what you uncover, if you’re even able to dig up anything after all these years.”
He nodded, trying to think of a good reason a mother would abandon her baby.
“Do you want me to keep digging?” Dylan asked. “I have another case that’s going to tie me up for a while but after that—”
Jesse nodded. He couldn’t leave the Crowe case, not now. And after thirty years, what was a few more days?
“Then you’re going to stay on the Crowe estate?” Dylan asked.
He nodded, his thoughts torn between this shocking news and Amanda Crowe. “The old man called me this morning and told me he wants me to drive her wherever Amanda wants to go. He thanked me for keeping an eye on her. And obviously someone on the Crowe estate thinks they know who I am or they wouldn’t have put the newspaper clipping under my door.”
Dylan looked uneasy and Jesse nodded in agreement.
“I know I’m walking a tightrope here,” Jesse acknowledged and told him about Gage Ferraro.
“Now everyone is looking for Susannah, including Gage, if he isn’t just stringing J.B. along. But I overheard him prodding her to make her move. I intend to be there when she does.”
Dylan studied him for a long moment and Jesse wondered if the cowboy realized just how involved Jesse had gotten in this case.
“She’s a beautiful woman,” Dylan said quietly.
Jesse laughed. “She’s also a Crowe and she’d cut your throat in a heartbeat.”
“Just don’t forget that. Jesse, I know this news about the newspaper clipping comes as a shock to you,” Dylan said.
“Yeah.” He loved his parents, his family and he’d always felt a part of them. This was more than a shock. He felt as if the earth under him was no longer solid. As if nothing was as it seemed.
“Take it slow, okay?” Dylan advised. “Give it a little time.”
Time. Right. Too bad that wasn’t his nature.
Jesse called the Crowe compound at a little after three. Mr. Crowe was with his daughter. Both had asked not to be disturbed. Nor had they changed their minds about needing Jesse’s services, Eunice assured him. They would be dining in tonight together.
After he left the compound, he called his boss at the Dallas P.D. and told him what he’d overheard J.B. Crowe say the night before about the governor’s daughter Diana. His boss said he’d handle it and hung up.
He had time. Enough time he could drive up to his parents’ house in Pilot Point and back. It wasn’t but a couple of hours. Amanda wouldn’t dare try to sneak out with her father home and dinner planned for the two of them. Would she?
* * *
MARIE MCCALL MET HIM at the door, excitedly kissed him on the cheek
then noticed something was wrong. “What is it, honey?”
His mother. She knew him as no one else did. Her hand went to his forehead, just as it had when he was a child.
“Are you feeling ill?” she enquired, regarding him with concern as she ushered him in.
“Stop fussing over him,” Pete McCall called jovially from the kitchen. “You’re just in time,” he said to Jesse. “How about a beer before dinner? We were getting ready to throw some steaks on the grill.”
“I made your favorite,” his mother said still eyeing him. “Strawberry-rhubarb pie for dessert. I must have known you’d stop by.”
“Thanks but I can’t stay for dinner.” Both his parents looked disappointed. “But I will take that cold beer.”
He followed them to the wide redwood deck that overlooked the lake. The air was scented with fresh-mown grass, lake water and glowing briquettes beneath the grill. His father opened a bottle of cold beer and handed it to him.
Now that he was here, he felt foolish. Everything was so normal, just as it had been growing up. These were his parents. How could he doubt that? He was the middle son, wedged in neatly between Alex and Charley, with three great sisters, and this was the perfect family with the split-level house, deck, basketball hoop, horseshoe pit, lake out the back door and parents who doted on him. This was home.
He felt guilty. They were so glad to see him and he realized he hadn’t been home for several months because of his undercover work. He hadn’t even thought about them.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, just wanting to get it out. Obviously there was some mistake. They would clear it up and he would feel foolish but they would forgive him.
They looked worried. “What is it, honey?” his mother asked, taking a seat on the arm of his father’s deck chair. Her hand went to the tiny gold heart she wore on a chain around her neck. She stroked the unusual-shaped heart with her thumb, just as she always did when she was worried or upset. He knew her so well. Just as she knew him.
Still standing he took a sip of the beer, almost talking himself out of even bringing up the subject. But he had to get this settled so he could get back to his undercover assignment, get his head back where it belonged.
“I know you’re going to think this is crazy…” Was it his imagination or did his father tense? “Is there any chance I might have been adopted?”
His mother froze, her eyes suddenly swimming with tears. His father said nothing as he put an arm around her.
Oh, God. Jesse sat down heavily in one of the deck chairs, the earth beneath him no longer stable and in that moment, he knew that nothing would ever be the same. “Was I the baby found outside of Red River?” he asked when he found his voice.
Neither answered but his mother began to cry. His father looked pale, his face drawn, older than Jesse had ever seen him.
Jesse closed his eyes for a moment. “How—” He heard the strangled emotion in the word, felt the panicked knocking of his heart and struggled for his next breath. “How did you get me?” He looked from his father to his mother.
She said nothing as she reached behind her to unclasp the gold chain. He’d never known her to take if off before and for a moment, he didn’t move.
She held it out to him. “I suppose it was wrong, but we never wanted you to know.”
As if in a trance, he lifted his hand to take it from her. The gold chain with the heart pooled in his palm, oddly cold and heavy. He wondered if taking it off had lifted a weight from off his mother’s shoulders. Or just the opposite after all these years of keeping this secret.
He looked down at the funny little heart, then at her.
“I found it in your baby blanket.” Her voice broke.
He didn’t know what to say. He stared down at what looked to him like a broken heart, so like his own. The memory came out of nowhere. He’d been no more than three or four when he’d asked his mother about the strange heart she wore. Her words came back to him, their meaning suddenly clear.
“I prize this heart because a special woman gave it to me,” his mother had said.
He gazed at his parents now. He had never thought he looked that much different from them, from his siblings or his other relatives. He’d always been a little darker, looked a little dissimilar, but because he’d had no reason to think otherwise, he’d always felt like one of them. Why hadn’t he noticed that he was different?
“Why did you adopt me?” he had to ask. “It wasn’t like you didn’t already have children.”
“Because you needed us and we loved you the moment we saw you,” his mother said a little too quickly as if she’d been rehearsing that line for thirty years.
He nodded, having never felt so alone, so absolutely desolate. He wondered what else they’d lied to him about. What else they were keeping from him. And who at the Crowe compound had known that he wasn’t the son of Marie and Pete McCall? More important, why did they want him to know? Anyway he looked at it, he knew he was in trouble. Someone at the compound knew he wasn’t who he was pretending to be. Someone knew more about him than even he knew about himself—and that scared him more than he wanted to admit.
CHAPTER FIVE
The hot Texas afternoon sun shimmered off the turquoise of the pool, but Amanda hardly noticed the sun or the water. She felt deathly cold inside and scared, more scared than she had ever been.
“Your father suggested you get some sun by the pool,” Eunice had told her when she’d gone downstairs. “He thought it would do you some good. Also he asked Consuela to make your favorite dinner tonight. He’ll be joining you.”
Amanda recoiled as if struck by a blow. She fought not to stagger.
“If you need anything, I will be here,” Eunice continued. “So will Consuela and Malcolm. The chauffeur has been dismissed for the day.”
She’d stared at the gray-haired woman, too shocked to speak. J.B. had never ordered her to stay on the estate before, let alone told the hired help to spy on her.
She felt sick. This was her father’s way of trying to scare her. And she was scared. Because she understood the threat perfectly. Her father either knew the truth. Or suspected it.
It took everything in her not to run. But she knew the guard at the gate would be expecting that. She was trapped. All the more so because she hadn’t finished what she had to do here.
So she’d spent the day beside the pool, just as her father had ordered her to do. She would play the dutiful daughter. One last time.
Eunice had come out to check on her periodically. Even Malcolm Hines, the gardener, had spent the day weeding a flower bed not far from the pool, his presence leaving little doubt that he, too, was keeping an eye on her. The only person she hadn’t seen was Jesse. She’d been surprised when she heard him leave just after lunch. And as far as she knew, he hadn’t returned.
Consuela, the family’s longtime cook, had brought her food and drinks. But while Amanda felt closer to the cook than to her own mother, who had been about the same age as Consuela, she knew she would find no allies on the estate. And certainly none in Olivia, her stepmother, who still had not returned from her New York shopping spree.
Like Olivia, the servants were loyal only to J.B. Amanda had never understood their devotion to him and wondered now what debts these servants owed that required them to indenture themselves to him for life. Whatever the debt, she suspected they would kill for him if he asked them.
She felt like a prisoner. But when her initial shock wore off, she realized she had always been a prisoner here—she just hadn’t realized it until now. Her father had manipulated her to get what he wanted: Her and then Susannah under his roof, under his thumb. She shivered, afraid what he would do if he knew about her plans.
Her only hope was to be as cold and heartless as he was should she get caught. The thought chilled her to the bone.
As the sun sank behind the oak trees, she heard the tinkle of ice. Consuela placed a tall glass on the table next to her.
“I tho
ught you might like some lemonade, it is so hot out.” The large, good-natured Mexican woman smiled warmly.
“Thank you, Consuela.”
“Have you heard anything about the baby?” the woman asked in a whisper as if the kidnapper might be listening.
“Still no word,” Amanda lied.
Consuela crossed herself and muttered something in Spanish that Amanda didn’t understand. Something about history repeating itself. Impulsively, the cook bent to hug her fiercely, and Amanda realized Consuela was referring to when someone had tried to kidnap Amanda when she was just a baby. That’s when her father had installed the security system.
“Your father will find her,” Consuela said, voicing exactly what Amanda feared most. “Mr. Crowe, he always take care of his own. Look how good he take care of you.”
After Consuela returned to the kitchen, Amanda heard her father’s car and wasn’t surprised that he’d returned early. She braced herself, determined to hide her fear of him—and the power he had over her.
* * *
IT WAS DARK and late when Jesse returned to the Crowe estate. He’d been driving aimlessly for hours, letting the wind and the dark rush past as wildly as his thoughts. He felt dazed and lost, haunted by his talk with his parents.
He’d grilled them, desperate for information about his birth parents. But both had insisted they knew little. He’d been found beside the road. They’d taken him in and later adopted him. They’d never known who his mother was. Or his birth father. They’d left Red River and never looked back. Their story never varied.
Why then did he sense they were keeping something from him? Something they couldn’t bear to tell him?
His head swam. He had so many unanswered questions. Why had his birth mother left him beside a dirt road in a cardboard box? And how was it he’d been miraculously found by Marie and Pete McCall?
He breezed up to the guard at the entrance, waited for the gate to swing open and followed the hot, melting rope of blacktop that wound through a thick-leafed arch of oaks, maples and crepe myrtles. A cool breeze seeped from the darkness under the trees.