She didn’t want to feel anything but contempt for him. Yet her skin still tingled where his fingers had held her. It was too alarming. Anticipation was not what she wanted to feel. The intensity of Jason’s stare delved into her very soul. She couldn’t help but back away from him as the mocking ghost of her desire flashed in his eyes.
* * * *
Jason insisted on driving her back to London the following morning. That meant accepting his offer to sleep in a guest room for the remainder of the night.
She collapsed onto the luxurious queen-sized bed. She was mentally exhausted and physically drained and yet she couldn’t sleep. How could she? Knowing her father and brother had been murdered. And that she’d agreed to marry the son of the man responsible.
Just a few hours earlier her life had seemed so simple. She’d been Jessica Addison, divorced mother of one and certain of her identity. Now she was anything but sure. Jason McCormack had torn down the house of cards which proved to be her life.
She tossed and turned on the large bed.
How was she going to explain Jason to her mother without telling her everything else? Did her mother already know about the land at High Rock, and not tell her? So many questions floated around her head and none she had any answers to.
Jess balled a hand against her heart and felt the gentle stab of the child’s ring prick her palm. She raised the ring to her lips and scanned the darkness with tear-filled eyes. There was a time when Sean had been as innocent as Jake.
She let her thoughts drift to the morning Sean had almost choked on the ring. He’d put it in his mouth just to be annoying, but it lodged in his throat. She’d reacted out of instinct or fear—one of the two—and slapped him hard on the back until it was free. When he’d wanted to return it later, she’d joked that he should keep it.
As a reminder that you owe me your life.
He’d laughed back, his brown eyes sparkling.
Sure, a life for a life. One day I may just save yours.
No one was going to cry for Sean. He didn’t deserve anyone’s tears since he’d been the cause of so many himself. Yet she couldn’t hold back her own rolling in hot tracks into her hair. After all was said and done, he was still her brother.
Sleep eluded her as she knew it would and, finally sick and tired of trying, she ventured from the room she’d been given next to Jason’s. She managed to find the kitchen in the vast house but gasped in surprise to find Jason already sitting there with a mug of coffee in his hand. Although it didn’t look as if he’d slept any better than she had. She declined his offer of breakfast but accepted a cup of strong, black coffee instead. He found her warmer, more comfortable clothes and an hour later they were back on the road.
In the long drive to London he tried to engage her several times in conversation, but Jess wasn’t in the mood for talking. Her replies were either terse or impassive or she would look out the car window at the passing scenery and pretend to be asleep. Or turn up the volume on the radio just to drown out her thoughts.
The car had barely stopped in front of her mother’s house before she jumped from it and ran inside, slamming the front door shut. She froze, and waited and listened to the silence. The deafening sound grated along her already taut nerves and she jumped as the clock on the living room mantle chimed through the stillness. Five o’clock. She gently pulled back the white mesh curtain hanging at the small window next to the door and peeked outside. Jason’s black car was gone. She breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
For Jake’s sake she needed to close the Pandora’s box threatening her world, although she had no idea where to start. She needed closure and space. Space to breathe her last few days of freedom before she became yet another man’s wife, for every reason except the right one. And she needed answers. If Sean was dead then she had to believe everything else Jason had told her too. She quickly exchanged her sandals for a battered pair of boots and left the house, disregarding Jason’s parting words to remain indoors and out of sight.
Jess hesitated as she entered the small police station on Churchill Street. She blinked a few times and adjusted her eyes to the noiseless but erratic flicker of the overhead lamp. If it hadn’t been for the familiar sound of fingers ticking with furious speed across a computer keyboard she would’ve thought the place deserted. The incessant ticking stopped.
“Is there something I can do for you?”
The desk sergeant looked up from behind the charge desk and peered over the rim of his glasses. His eyes flicked over her face and her clothes. Jess pulled a nervous hand through her hair. She was conscious of her appearance. She knew she looked a mess.
“I’d like some information about someone,” she said. “My brother.”
The sergeant’s face tensed with an obvious assumption she’d seen before. “Has he been arrested?”
Jess shook her head slowly.
“When did you last see him?”
“I think—” Her voice wavered and she drew a deep breath in. “I think he’s dead.”
The sergeant cleared his throat. He glanced at her, but gone were the silent condemnations and prejudgment.
“What makes you think that?” he said.
Her eyes looked past his shoulder and she scanned the gallery of posters lining the wall behind the charge desk. Posters of missing persons. Posters appealing for information. Posters for this, posters against that. But there was one picture at the back of the rogue’s gallery that caught her attention. She took a step closer and narrowed her gaze. She read the words printed in large bold italics. Do you know this man?
His skin was the same color as hers—dusky bronze. And although his eyes were closed Jess instinctively knew they would have the same dark hue as her own.
“His hair,” she murmured.
Sean’s hair had been long and thick and silky to touch. He’d been so proud of his hair. But this man, who lay with bruised lips and swollen eyes, was shaven. Jess moved behind the charge desk.
“His beautiful hair.”
The sergeant stood next to her. “Is that him? Is that your brother?” he asked.
Without saying a word she pivoted on her heel and made for the door. She ignored the sergeant’s shout as his voice followed her out into the cold street. Her heart thumped in her chest. The dead man had been Sean. Jason wasn’t lying.
It was close to nine o’clock when she finally returned to her mother’s house. She’d walked for hours and sat in the park just thinking. She closed the door and leaned her head against it. Her mother appeared in the doorway adjacent to the hall and gave a startled gasp.
“Jess,” she exclaimed.
Jess turned to look at her mother. “Sorry, if I frightened you.”
“It’s just…I thought you were staying with Claire for the entire weekend.”
“Something came up.” She would call Claire later.
Jess watched her mother’s eyes widen in a mixture of comprehension and surprise.
“Are you wearing men’s clothes?” she asked. Her mother’s stunned gaze flicked upward to Jess’ face. “Is that where you were? With a man?”
Jess pushed herself upright from the door and walked toward the kitchen. Jason had loaned her his oversized sweats and Aran sweater, although not for the reason her mother supposed. Sex with Jason McCormack was the furthest thing from her mind.
“Not now, Mum.”
She filled the old kettle with water, placed it on the stove and lit the gas. Her mother hovered in the doorway.
“Jake played a wonderful game today,” she said. “He almost scored. Twice.”
“Yeah. That’s great. Thanks for looking after him, Mum.”
“Of course. He’s a good boy.”
Jess paused. Part of her didn’t want to do this now, but part of her needed something to help her understand. And then maybe she could finally get some sleep. She concentrated a moment longer on the quivering blue flame. Watched as it strengthened on the higher setting and then fan steadily outward unde
r the kettle’s metal base. She held her hands against its heat and warmed her fingers.
Theirs had been a strained relationship, but in the last few years, especially since Jake’s birth, she and her mother had come to a kind of non-verbal understanding. Things said and done in the past were never discussed and never alluded to. There was a truce between them and now she risked shattering their fragile peace. But she risked losing Jake too and that was something she couldn’t allow, at least not without a fight. And for that she needed the truth. Jess took a decisive breath.
“Who is John Thomas?”
* * * *
Norma Wright stiffened at the flood of unwanted memories impacting her brain. The hairs on her skin rose painfully on end and she drew an involuntary breath. She leaned against the doorframe and struggled to control the emotions his name still managed to evoke even after so many years.
“I said, who—”
“I heard you, Jess.”
She opened her eyes into her daughter’s troubled gaze and smiled wistfully. “Where did you hear that name?”
Jess shrugged and turned to watch the water boil. “Does it really matter?”
“No, I suppose not.”
Norma entered the kitchen and walked as calmly as she could past her daughter. Her mind spun with questions and explanation. It’d been years since John Thomas consumed her thoughts like this and without warning she was being confronted with a past she’d firmly left behind in the Bahamas eons ago. She swallowed her pain. She just needed a moment to adjust, a moment to prepare her case before she faced her daughter.
God, how on earth did Jess find out?
Her hands shook. Her senses were all too aware of her daughter leaning against the kitchen counter watching her and daring her to lie. But there would be no use in lying anymore or postponing the inevitable fallout from her admission. She was only thankful Graham wasn’t alive to witness it.
“John Thomas is your father,” she said.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me? Why didn’t I ever know that?”
“There seemed no reason to upset our lives over someone who never cared for either one of us, Jess. Besides, I was happy with Graham and you were happy too. Graham was the only father you knew. The only father you needed.”
“But he wasn’t my real father, Mum.”
Norma closed her eyes briefly at the harsh and hurtful denial. “Yes, he was,” she said. She glared at her daughter. “Don’t you ever again say he wasn’t. He adopted you. Gave you his name—”
Jess pushed herself forward from the counter and folded her arms defensively across her chest.
“I have the right to be a-angry, Mum, not you. You lied to me. My whole life has been a lie.”
“Says who?”
Jess paced about the kitchen. Norma released a weary sigh and sat down at the small table at the near wall.
“Come on, Jess. I’m sorry. Sit down. Sit down, Jess. You’re not a child anymore. We can talk about this and be civil, can’t we?”
Jess stopped her pacing. She glanced at her mother, her face taut and her eyes glittering in their resentment. For a brief moment Norma thought her daughter would storm from the house, but Jess crossed the room and sat down opposite her at the table. Norma smoothed a hand lightly across the red and white-checkered tablecloth, a ghost of memory playing about her lips.
“I was eighteen years old when I first met John Thomas,” she began hesitantly. “I’d just graduated from high school with four of my best friends. Lydia, Rose, Susan and Jessica.”
Jess raised her head at the mention of her namesake. Norma met her daughter’s gaze and continued. “We were all expected to succeed and I would’ve gone on to study medicine, become a surgeon, if I hadn’t met John but…I fell in love.”
She placed her elbows on the table and laced her fingers beneath her chin. “He was thirteen years my senior, which made it all the more exciting I suppose. But then I became pregnant with you, almost straightaway. In those days the rules were much stricter and less forgiving than now. An unmarried, Catholic mother was not to be praised, but despised and shunned. When the nuns at Xavier College discovered my condition I was told in no uncertain terms to leave.” Norma glanced at her daughter. “I tried to hide you as long as I could—”
“Didn’t he want to marry you? Didn’t John want to marry you?”
Norma lowered her hands back to the table and clasped them tightly together in front of her. “As a matter of fact John did propose. It was his sister, Carolyn, who strongly objected.”
“Why?”
“Intolerance exists even among our own, Jess. John was from one of the outer islands. Their skins are much lighter than mine.” Norma angled her head. “For a long time I couldn’t forgive John his weakness. You look like him,” she said at length.
“Is that why you hated me, Mum? Because I reminded you of my father?”
Norma rose calmly and followed her daughter to the other side of the kitchen. She cupped Jess’ face between her hands, forcing Jess to look at her.
“I never hated you, Jess. I loved you as much as I loved Sean. You just reminded me of what I gave up…what I didn’t have. I loved John too and I guess a part of me never stopped loving him. It was hard seeing you every day knowing John didn’t fight for us.”
Jess took her mother’s wrists within her own hands and gently, but firmly, pulled back from her embrace.
“Did my father ever contact you about me?” she asked quietly. “Didn’t he ever want to know about me, know how I was doing or…anything?”
“No. John never wrote or phoned, or sought any kind of contact with you.”
“Are you sure, Mum?”
“Am I sure? Of course, I’m sure.” She leveled her gaze on her daughter. “What is the matter, Jess? What’s going on here? Who told you about John?”
She wanted to understand Jess’ sudden interest in a man she couldn’t possibly know, but not even the troubled expression on her daughter’s face could prepare her for the cool delivery of Jess’ next question.
“Did you love Graham, Mum?”
The intense look in Jess’ eyes halted Norma’s feeling of irritation. Something she didn’t understand was happening here, but she was intuitively aware that right here, at this moment, the truth and only the truth would do. She took the time to find the right words.
“Not in the way I loved John,” she said. “But I never let Graham know it.”
“Did you trust Graham to be honest with you, Mum?”
“Of course. He was a decent man. A good man.”
“What if John Thomas did write to you? Would Graham have shown you the letter?”
“Yes, of course. Graham knew about John.”
“But what if he thought by not showing you the letter he’d be protecting me.”
“Jess, I really have no idea of what you’re talking about. There are no letters. You’re casting doubt on Graham without proof or reason. I thought you loved him.”
“I loved him, Mum, but he doesn’t make me who I am, and right now I need to know wh-who I am. I just need t-to know—”
“Now, you’re frightening me. You’re asking questions, but giving no answers. What is it? What is going on? Talk to me, Jess, because I don’t understand this. You leave to go to a reunion. You bail out on Claire then return dressed in men’s clothes of all the preposterous things. And now you’re questioning your life and my love for Graham—everything.”
“I know, M-Mum. I’m sorry. I just need to know, that’s all.”
“That part I understand, but you act as if your life depends on having answers now—at this very moment. What happened at the reunion, Jess? You haven’t stuttered since you were fifteen.”
Jess fidgeted a moment longer with her fingers. “Jason McCormack happened, Mum.”
“Jason McCormack? Who’s he? Are these his clothes you’re wearing?” Norma closed the gap between them.
“You honestly don’t know, do you?”
“Know what? What’s going on, Jess? And who in hell is Jason McCormack.”
“The man I’m about to marry.”
Norma watched in astonishment as her daughter turned on her heels and rushed from the kitchen.
Chapter Four
Across London in the ultra-modern, refrigerated room of the city morgue, Detective Inspector Drew Mahon released a long-held breath. He leaned heavily against the doorjamb and watched Dr. Adrienne Purdy stride with brisk authority across the mortuary to the large cold chamber situated on its far side.
“I thought you might want to take a look at this,” Dr. Purdy called over her shoulder. “John Doe.”
Her cool voice snapped his senses back to the antiseptic cleanliness of his surroundings. Direct, succinct and all business. That’s what he liked about Dr. Purdy.
She opened one of the chamber’s stainless steel doors and pulled out a refrigerated body rack covered with a white sheet. She pivoted toward him.
“Coming?” she queried.
He’d not slept well for three days. Sean Wright’s death still plagued his mind. But he tilted the corner of his mouth into an easy smile.
“Sure. It’s not like I’ve got tons of work to do or anything.”
Adrienne produced a sound somewhere between a dry laugh and a dismissive snort. “You’ll like this. I promise.”
She lowered her eyes to the body lying between them and began peeling back the sheet.
“Brace yourself, Drew,” she warned. “He’s been here longer than a week. Male Caucasian, approximately eighty-five years old,” Adrienne said. “Road accident. Death would’ve been instantaneous.”
Her latex gloved fingers skimmed the dead man’s face. “We know nothing else about him other than, considering the skin’s coarseness, its tone and his facial features, he may have come from Eastern Europe.”
“Didn’t he have any—?”
Drew raised his hand in quick defense, catching the clear plastic bag Adrienne effortlessly conjured out of thin air to throw in his direction. “Belongings?” he added, flicking his gaze to her amused one.
Blood of His Fathers (Sinners and Saints) Page 4