by BETH KERY
“No, it’s okay,” she said after a pause. “If all these bruises and bandages make it more likely for Kehoe to get the most severe sentence possible, then it’ll be worth it.”
“I was hoping you’d see it that way.” Alice glanced up at him when he didn’t move away. “There’s something else. They want to videotape the interview.”
Alice’s mouth fell open. She wanted to do whatever she should to nail Kehoe for what he’d done to her . . . for what he’d done to Lynn and Alan. But she’d never felt more vulnerable.
Dylan’s mouth curled into a small snarl when he saw her reaction. “I’ll tell them if they want to tape the interview, they’ll have to do it another time.”
“No, it’s okay,” Alice said softly.
“Are you sure?” he asked quietly. “Because I can’t stay in here with you during it. I guess they don’t want to take the chance of me influencing your story.”
Alice strained to hide her disappointment at that.
“Of course. I’ll be fine,” she assured. She saw his hesitation. “Besides, you need to go home and shower and get some rest anyway,” she told him. Her gaze lowered significantly. “My blood isn’t the ideal accessory on you, you know.” He hadn’t left the hospital, even when she was being tested, so he still wore the bloodstained shirt.
“An accessory I’ll gladly never wear again.” Alice strained to hear his quieted voice. He straightened, glancing at the agents darkly. “She tires very easily,” he told Clayton. “Don’t push her.”
Clayton nodded. “Just tell us if you grow tired, Alice, and we can finish up in the morning.”
Dylan seemed partially mollified. He surprised her a little by turning back and kissing her mouth, ignoring the agents. Her heart jumped at the sensation of his warm, firm lips against her own. She joined his slow, delicious rhythm, kissing him back for a fleeting moment.
“Are you sure you’re okay to do this now?” he asked, his mouth brushing against hers.
She nodded. “I want to get it over with.”
“I’ll be back later tonight, then,” he assured her gruffly.
“Don’t you think you should get some rest at the castle and come back tomorrow?” she whispered.
“I’ll be back later tonight,” he repeated.
A feeling of uncertainty went through her. She’d read his lips to understand him. Was he talking that quietly? He straightened, giving the agents what Alice could only call a warning glance, and left the room.
Alice wasn’t sure what to make of that kiss in front of the agents. Were they now declaring their relationship to the world? She suspected maybe he was telling her not to be self-conscious about revealing their involvement. There hadn’t been much opportunity for them to discuss her statement to the agents. That kiss heartened her more than anything had since awakening and seeing him sitting next to her bed. It seemed to say, Just tell the truth. The time for secrets is done, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.
SHE was pretty tired by the time the agents packed up their equipment and left. It’d been difficult talking about Sissy and the Reeds, knowing that the agents were viewing them strictly in terms of potential collaborators to Addie’s kidnapping. While to Alice, they had been much more. They were a family she was horribly ashamed of, and despised at times . . . but they were family, nevertheless. Or at least she’d thought they’d been. She sent up a silent prayer that Uncle Al had left the trailer, like she’d asked him to. As for the others, it felt grimly inevitable and completely out of her control to do anything to stop the hand of fate or justice. It all seemed so much bigger than her.
It was even harder, at first, to talk about every detail of her encounter with Kehoe, but it got easier once she got a momentum going. When she got to the part about Kehoe planning to throw her over the bluff, the agent paused her. He asked her to recall exactly what Kehoe had said, as best as she could, toward the end. Wincing, Alice repeated what he’d said about Lynn, her suicide, and his threats against her—Alice.
Special Agent Clayton nodded when she’d finished. “That matches up well with what Schaefer overheard as he neared the bluff. Did you realize that Schaefer had been following you regularly, under Kehoe’s orders?”
“No. I mean, I knew Thad was following me sometimes, but I didn’t know it was under Kehoe’s directions. Are you saying that Thad followed me up to the castle last night because Kehoe told him to?” she asked, confused.
“No. Last night, he claims he did it because he was concerned about you. It seems he was no longer entirely convinced that Kehoe had good intentions toward you.”
“He uh . . . said he had a thing for me,” she admitted uncomfortably. “That’s why I thought he was following me, at first.”
“Did you ever reciprocate the interest?” Clayton asked.
“No. I made it clear from the beginning I just wanted to be friends.”
“It seems Kehoe had given Schaefer orders to keep an eye on you as much as possible, get close to you, report back to him about anything noteworthy. According to Schaefer, his father and Kehoe are old friends, so he had an implicit trust in him from the first. Plus, Kehoe was his top boss there at camp . . . the man he needed to impress to get hired as a Durand manager. He felt obligated when Kehoe asked him to get close to you, although he didn’t start to put together until more recently why Kehoe was so focused on you.”
“Do you think Thad just acted like he liked me so that he could follow me easier . . . give Kehoe more information about me?”
“Schaefer flatly denies that, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“But he saved me,” Alice said, frowning. “He fought Kehoe, and made it possible for me to escape out there by the bluff.”
“He was starting to not trust Kehoe. He started to feel pressured by him to do things he didn’t want to do, and thought that Kehoe seemed like he was losing control. Recently, he realized that his motives were not at all honorable when it came to you. Of course,” Clayton said wryly, “Schaefer was pretty dishonorable himself. On Kehoe’s orders, he intentionally set off Dylan Fall’s home alarm one night a week or so ago.”
“Thad did that?”
“Schaefer himself admitted to it,” Rogers replied.
“But why?”
“That was all Kehoe’s planning. Apparently, Kehoe was familiar with Fall’s security system. He’s been up to the castle a lot for business and social functions over the years, enough to notice details about the security system. The security company is called Home Guard, and the headquarters are right here in Morgantown. Kehoe managed to either ingratiate himself with an employee there, pay him off, or blackmail him; we’re still looking into that. The employee hasn’t been so forthcoming on that angle, so I’m guessing blackmail. At any rate, Kehoe somehow got this guy to do some of his dirty work.” Agent Rogers paused and checked his notebook. “A man by the name of Chester Greeson. The plan was for Schaefer to rattle doors and windows to set off the alarm. Kehoe would have him do it as many times as it took until Fall asked for the alarm to be serviced and checked by Home Guard for a glitch. It seems Fall was vigilant enough to call after the first occurrence. Greeson showed up to do the service check, and programmed an additional disabling code into the system.”
“Which he then passed on to Kehoe, giving him access,” Alice said.
“That’s right,” Clayton replied. “After Schaefer told us what he knew, we paid a visit to Greeson early this morning.”
“Will he admit what he did and point the finger at Kehoe?”
“He already has. That’s how we have the information,” Clayton said.
Alice was relieved by his air of confidence. “So Kehoe had already disabled the alarm when I showed up there because of that fake note?”
“He was inside, waiting for you to arrive. We’re not sure if he knew Fall was upstairs or not. He might have just waited until the cook left and disabled the alarm, then entered. At some point, he put in a call to the camp, though, claiming to be
Fall.”
Alice winced, picturing it. “Kehoe got lucky. Dylan had told me there was something important he wanted to discuss with me when he returned from Reno. When I saw the note, I thought it related to that. It was stupid of me to trust it, but Dylan’s earlier mention of something important in combination with the fact that in the note he seemed concerned about my walk up to the castle, telling me to take the safer route and have Rigo escort me . . . well, it sounded like something Dylan would say.
“What will happen to Thad?” she asked Clayton after a pause. She was pissed at Thad for colluding with Kehoe, but thankful he’d saved her. She didn’t trust Thad as much as she had at the beginning of their friendship, but it sickened her to think of him working for Kehoe. . . even if he had eventually seen through Kehoe’s sane act.
“The local sheriff has arrested Schaefer for trespassing after he admitted to setting off the alarm. Sheridan could have come up with a more severe charge, given all that Schaefer confessed. But Schaefer did cooperate fully, and he seems to have come to the realization that Kehoe wasn’t the respectable, high-powered executive his father would have him believe he was. Plus, when he first arrived and heard you screaming down by the bluff, he purposefully broke into the castle. His intent was to set off the alarm—”
“So the police would come,” Alice finished. “Then he confronted Kehoe, giving me time to get away.”
Clayton nodded. “Schaefer claimed he would have been there sooner. But you and Rigo took the road up to the house. He had to give both you and Rigo some distance, or risk being caught. The road up to the castle is a long, clear view. If you or Rigo turned, you would have seen him on it, so he had to stay back and wait until both of you were all the way to the top of the bluff. His account of what happened is probably our best account of how long it was between when Kehoe first knocked you unconscious and when he dragged you out to the drop-off. It sounds as if Schaefer almost didn’t make it in time to stop Kehoe.”
She thought of all the times Dylan had warned her about Thad. She shut her eyelids, suddenly feeling very tired.
THE agents left at about seven that night. Maybe it was her pain medication, but she found herself in the strangest state of mind. She wasn’t quite sure if she was half-asleep or awake, but her ruminations had a nightmarish quality. For half an hour, she just lay there, thinking . . . reworking the tapestry of her life.
The thread she worried and picked over the most was Dylan.
Was he feeling regretful that there was a chance she wasn’t Alan Durand’s biological daughter? And if that were true—if she in fact wasn’t Alan’s daughter, only Lynn’s—how did that affect the trust document and Dylan’s powers as CEO of Durand? It wasn’t that she thought he was only interested in her potential power or money. It wasn’t that at all. She loved Dylan. So much. It was just that Lynn’s journals and Kehoe’s confessions would drastically alter how he’d considered his life . . . his preoccupation with finding her. He must be struggling with some major re-envisioning of his past as well.
What if he was re-envisioning his relationship with her?
She felt cut wide open, vulnerable to anxiety and doubt. She thought repeatedly about Sidney Gate’s worries about Dylan’s preoccupation with finding Addie Durand, and how he’d sacrificed his own dreams to lessen the burden of his guilt.
When she heard a light knock at her door, her heart leapt with anxious anticipation.
“Come in,” she called, assuming Dylan had returned. She was eager to see him, despite her dark turn of mind. Or perhaps because of it. Dylan’s presence always had a way of scattering her doubts.
“Thad,” she said when he walked into the room. “I thought—”
“That I was arrested by Jim Sheridan? I was. But it wasn’t a serious charge. I’m out on bail.”
She stared at him, and he stared back. He had a black eye, a bandage on his left temple and a cut, swollen lip.
“Kehoe knocked me out down by the bluff in order to chase you,” he said, touching the bandage briefly.
It’d taken him a second or two to gather himself before he spoke. Alice knew he’d been put off by her appearance.
“That son of a bitch packs a wicked right hook,” Thad continued uneasily.
“Not news to me, unfortunately.” she murmured wryly. “You look horrible, but at least you look better than me.”
He shook his head, clearly speechless over her light handling of the situation of her condition.
“This is the part where you’re supposed to say, ‘You don’t look that bad, Alice.’ Don’t worry. Dylan gave me a mirror. I know I look like something out of The Walking Dead.”
Thad’s eyes shone with emotion. Alice felt a little regretful at her flippancy.
“Fall told me that the doctor thinks you’ll be fine. I just hadn’t expected,” Thad gestured helplessly at her face. “I’m so sorry, Alice.”
“For thinking Kehoe was so ace?” she wondered sarcastically.
“For everything. To think, he did this to you. To think . . . this is what he intended all along.”
“I don’t know if it was all along. When he first contracted your services,” she said with a frown, “he didn’t realize I had any connection to Addie Durand. He was just curious and suspicious because of Dylan’s interest in me. Once he did figure it out, he wanted to do worse than this,” she said, pointing at her face.
Thad sunk into the chair by her bed as if his legs had just given out on him. “I’m the one who ultimately confirmed it for him.”
“Confirmed what?”
“That you were Addie Durand,” Thad said. His stark regret was obvious. “That’s what Sheridan should have arrested me for. I mentioned it to Kehoe before I understood fully what it meant: what I overheard you saying in the hallway the night of the Alumni Dinner about Addie Durand,” he said, his manner that of a penitent man making a painful confession.
“For what it’s worth, Kehoe already suspected I was Addie by that time, anyway. Why else would he plan to get into the castle? When you told him what you heard at the Alumni Dinner, it was probably just a confirmation, and maybe not even the first one for him. Kehoe understood quite a few more things than you did when he started pushing you around his chess board.”
“As his pawn.” Alice didn’t disagree. “He understood how much I’d want to please my dad. So much so that I blindly helped a mad man almost kill the woman I—”
Alice realized she’d flinched, and that’s why he’d abruptly halted. For several seconds, they just stared at each other.
“I know that given everything, you must think I was lying about how I felt about you. But I wasn’t, Alice,” he said gruffly.
Alice nodded. She didn’t want to dissect it all with him. It wasn’t worth it, and it’d be too painful. She was never going to start a relationship with Thad. The grim, set expression that came over his face seemed to say he had accepted that reality, too.
“You set off the alarm so that the police would come to the castle that night,” she said quietly. “You fought Kehoe. I might be hurt that you colluded at all with that asshole, but at least you redeemed yourself. You were my friend, in the end.”
“I don’t deserve your forgiveness. Kehoe was right to call me a dumb-ass,” he said in a muffled voice.
“Fuck Kehoe. He’s a lunatic.”
“Sounds like good advice,” Thad said, attempting a small smile.
“I do forgive you, but I am still mad at you,” Alice clarified with a dark look. “I can’t believe you were willing to get involved in something so insane, all for the sake of getting the job your daddy wanted you to have.”
He flinched at her scorn. “Yeah. Well . . . I deserve that. And more.”
Her eyebrows arched when she saw his uncertainty as he stared at her.
“Come on, Thad. Do I look like a woman who feels up to kicking your ass?” she asked with disgusted amusement.
“I wouldn’t put anything past you.”
She laughed softly and his smile widened. Something occurred to her. She sat up slightly in bed. “Hey, how come you’re not at the castle? For the Team Championship trophy presentation?”
He shook his head, looking sober again. “I’m not going to be a Durand manager. I’m not a counselor anymore, either.”
“What? Did Dylan—”
“No, no one fired me. Although after the mistakes I’ve made in judgment for the past few weeks, I wouldn’t have been shocked if Fall did kick my ass all the way back to Greenwich. I quit. Just before I came back here to see you, in fact.”
“Why?” she asked, stunned.
He shook his head, clearly embarrassed. Worse than embarrassed. Ashamed. Despite her irritation at him, her heart went out to him.
“If anything could teach me the stupidity of blindly following my dad’s ideas about what’s best for me in life, it’s this. I couldn’t trust my own instincts before all this happened. I had to be told by authority figures what the right thing to do was.” He shrugged. “Look where that got me.”
“So . . . does that mean you’re going to listen to your own judgment now?” she asked hopefully. “And become a teacher?”
“It means I’m going to look in to finding out what I’d need to do to make that happen.”
“No, Thad. Just make it happen. You. No one else.”
He nodded once, and Alice had the distinct impression he was going to follow through.
“You always did have what it took to be a good executive,” he said after a pause. “A phenomenal leader. You’re so strong,” he said, his voice breaking at the last.
“You can be strong too, Thad. You were brilliant with the kids. Everyone says so. You just doubted yourself. But in the end, you saved my life. You and Dylan did.”
She saw his throat convulse as he swallowed, and knew he was choking back emotion.
“What are you going to do about Brooke?” she asked quietly after he’d brought himself under control. “Is there any kind of future with her?”
“Maybe. She sort of shocked me by not putting down the idea of becoming a teacher when I talked about it with her the other night.”