Next of Kin

by David Hosp

  ‘I mean the DNA tests – were they your idea, or were they the police’s idea?’

  She shook her head. ‘It was their idea. At the time, I didn’t even know they thought we might have the same father. All I knew was that my father was mixed up in something bad, and he was hurting my mother.’ Her face darkened at the memory. ‘I hated him,’ she said. ‘I think I always hated him. I wanted to do whatever I could to help the police.’

  ‘So when they suggested the DNA test might help, you jumped at the chance?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘How did they gather the DNA?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ She demanded. Finn could tell the questions were unsettling her, but he pressed on.

  ‘Just tell me, please.’

  ‘They took my blood,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘And you saw them put it in a vial, mark it with your name?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I was curious about the process – I asked them how it was done and how long it would take. What has this got to do with anything?’

  Finn ignored the question, ‘I assume your father didn’t know you were going to the police?’

  ‘God, no. He would have killed me, I think.’

  ‘Did you tell your mother?’

  She shook her head. ‘She couldn’t seem to let go of my father, no matter what he did to her, no matter how awful things were. She would have tried to stop me. She might have even told my father.’

  ‘Did you tell either of your parents what you’d done when you got back from the police station?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘I told my mother.’ Worry was beginning to break over her face. ‘I wanted to show her that we could take a stand against him – against my father.’

  ‘Did you tell her about the DNA test?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was white now.

  ‘How did she react?’

  ‘Badly.’ Brooke looked so confused and scared, Finn felt sorry for her, but he couldn’t stop now. ‘Why does it matter? Why are you asking me these questions?’

  ‘Because I’m still trying to figure out what really happened to my mother. What did your mother say when you told her about the DNA test they were going to run?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘She screamed at me. She told me that I was going to destroy the family. That I was going to ruin everything.’

  ‘Did you understand what she meant by that?’

  ‘Of course I did.’ She fidgeted, leaned down on the granite island, the tears flowing freely. ‘Look at what’s happened since then.’

  Finn reached out and put a hand on her back. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I just needed to know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Brooke asked. Her voice was raised, almost desperate. ‘What did I tell you that could possibly change anything? What did you come here to get from me?’

  Finn started to answer, but someone else spoke before he could open his mouth. The voice came from across the room, from the entrance to the kitchen. ‘Yes, Mr Finn, what did you come here to get from us?’

  Finn and Brooke spun around to see Catherine Buchanan standing at the door. She was calm, composed, perhaps a little weary. The bruises were still evident on her face and neck; she no longer covered them. Finn supposed that was understandable. ‘I came here to try to make sense of it all.’

  ‘And have you done that now? Does it all make sense to you now?’

  He nodded. ‘I think it does.’

  Catherine looked at her daughter. ‘Sweetheart, I need to talk to Mr Finn alone.’

  Brooke shook her head. ‘No,’ she was weeping openly. ‘I don’t understand, I’m not leaving.’

  ‘Please, dearest,’ her mother said. ‘Everything is fine. I will explain it all to you later, but for the moment, I need to talk to him by myself.’ She lifted up her daughter’s face, kissed her cheek. ‘I’ll be up in a little while, and we can talk.’

  Brooke shook her head, but moved toward the door that led to the stairway. She looked back, and her mother gave a wave that one might give to a kindergartener on her way in to her first day of school. ‘Everything will be fine,’ her mother repeated.

  Once Brooke had left the room, Catherine looked at Finn. ‘I’m guessing you have some questions for me, haven’t you?’

  She led Finn into her room – the sun room splashed with yellow florals. It was dark out, but it was still the most cheerful room in the house. As she walked through the other rooms, she’d said, ‘We’ll have to sell the house, of course.’ There was an air of resignation about her. ‘It’s not financial; my husband had more money then anyone could imagine.’ She paused in realization. ‘I suppose that means that I now have more money than anyone can imagine.’ The thought seemed to surprise her, but she didn’t pursue it. ‘In any event, I can’t imagine staying here now. Not with all the terrible memories.’

  ‘Like the memory of your husband being killed here?’ Finn asked.

  She looked at him with a tired expression. ‘Among many others.’ She sat in a low chair with bamboo arms and overstuffed pillows with hand-painted pictures of orchids on them. In another setting, Finn would have found them overdone, but they fit the room, and came off as subtler than they might have. She invited Finn to sit across from her. ‘How much do you know, Mr Finn?’

  Finn leaned forward. ‘I know that your husband was not my father,’ he said.

  She took the news without any visible reaction. ‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

  ‘He came to visit me two days ago. He asked me to leave all of this alone.’ Finn gave an ironic laugh. ‘Maybe we would all have been better off if I’d listened to him. He told me that I was not his son.’

  ‘Well,’ Catherine Buchanan said, ‘that’s what you would expect him to say, isn’t it?’

  Finn nodded. ‘It was, and I didn’t believe him.’ He stood, paced as he spoke. ‘I had his DNA tested against mine.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Did you? How did you accomplish that?’

  ‘When your husband came to my office, he drank a glass of water. That leaves a residue of saliva on the glass that contains cells from the inside of the mouth. Testing the DNA of those cells is actually a simple process.’

  ‘You’re very resourceful,’ she said. There was no sarcasm in her voice.

  ‘I almost didn’t bother to run the tests. The police told me they were running the DNA tests between me and Brooke; normally that would have seemed like enough.’

  ‘Not in this case, though.’

  ‘No. Not in this case. I didn’t trust the police,’ Finn said. ‘I thought they might try to protect your husband. Cover for him. He’s a very powerful man with plenty of connections. I figured they might just tell me there was no match without even running the tests, if only to get me to back off.’

  ‘They ran the tests, though,’ Catherine Buchanan said.

  ‘They did,’ Finn agreed. ‘They told me the test came back positive. Which was why I was so surprised this morning when the lab that I used to test your husband’s DNA called me up to tell me there was no match. There is no chance that James Buchanan was my father.’

  ‘So,’ Catherine Buchanan said pensively. ‘What do you think? Did the police falsify their tests? Were they trying to frame my husband?’

  Finn shook his head. ‘The test that the police ran was to match my DNA with Brooke’s. They wanted to prove that your husband was my father by showing that Brooke and I were siblings. When the test came back positive, voilà, they thought they had what they needed. No one considered any other possibility. But Brooke and I don’t have the same father.’ He looked hard at her. ‘We have the same mother.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Catherine Buchanan looked at him for a very long time. She didn’t try to avoid his eyes; she stared straight at him, saying nothing. At last, very quietly and without conviction, she said, ‘You don’t know that.’

  Finn nodded at her. ‘Yes, I do.’ He reached into his briefcase and pulled out two files. They were government blue,
worn and faded. At the sight of them, tears appeared in Catherine Buchanan’s eyes.

  ‘What are those?’ she asked.

  ‘You know what these are,’ Finn said. ‘You’ve seen them before. A long, long time ago. Two files. Two sets of records for two boys born on the same day at the same hospital to young mothers. One died in childbirth; the other survived.’ He put one down on the table in front of her. ‘This file contains my birth records. See here,’ he pointed. ‘It lists my name as the one I was given when I was first placed with a family that was supposed to take care of me.’ She followed along with him. ‘And here,’ he pointed again, ‘it lists Elizabeth Connor as my mother.’

  She frowned. ‘So if this lists Elizabeth Connor, what makes you think that I am really your mother?’

  ‘Because it’s a lie. The records were switched. Look at the blood types. Elizabeth Conner had a blood type of AB positive. I have a blood type of O negative. That’s a biological impossibility. She couldn’t have been my mother.’ He held up the second file. ‘This is a file that contains the birth records of the second child, the one who died in childbirth. His blood type is listed as AB negative. The mother’s blood type is listed as O negative. Again, it’s not possible.’ He lay the folder down on the table. ‘Do you see the name listed as the mother? It says Catherine Howard St. James.’

  She turned her head. ‘That doesn’t prove anything. Not conclusively.’

  ‘Maybe not on its own. It could have just been a record-keeping error. But the police DNA test proves that Brooke and I are siblings, and the tests I had run prove that James Buchanan was not my father. That leaves only one possibility.’

  Catherine Buchanan closed her eyes.

  ‘We could run a DNA test between you and me to confirm it,’ Finn said. ‘But we don’t need to, do we?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, we don’t.’ She opened her eyes, looking down.

  ‘I want to hear it from you,’ Finn said.

  She could not look him in the face anymore. It took her several moments to speak. ‘You have to understand, I was very young,’ she said at last. ‘Too young. My family was one of the most prominent families in Boston. My father was the chairman of the largest financial institution in the city, and my mother was on the boards of most of the major charitable institutions. They couldn’t accept that their fifteen-year-old daughter could have done this to them; that I could have gotten pregnant. If anyone had discovered it at the time, it would have been a scandal that could have destroyed the family.’

  ‘So you gave me up,’ Finn said. ‘You left me.’

  ‘I didn’t want to,’ Catherine Buchanan sobbed. ‘I was fifteen, what choice did I have? They sent me away. I didn’t see anyone in my family for months, and when it was over they took you away. They never even let me see you. I screamed and screamed for days, but they ignored me.’

  ‘You never tried to find me,’ Finn said. ‘Even after you grew up. With all your money; with all your resources, you never tried to find out what happened to me.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Catherine Buchanan said. She stood up and went to Finn, reached out to him. He pulled away. ‘By then I was married to James. They married me off to the most eligible man in the city, one of the first families of Massachusetts. They told me to put it behind me. They told me I had to forget.’

  ‘So you forgot all about me. It was like I had never been born.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never forgot. I just buried it. It was always there, I just couldn’t deal with it, so I pretended it never happened. It was the only way I could survive.’

  ‘Until Elizabeth Connor surfaced,’ Finn pointed out.

  She turned away from him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Elizabeth Connor brought it all back in the most degrading way.’

  ‘Blackmail?’

  Catherine Buchanan nodded. ‘She and I shared that room for nearly two months. We never knew each others’ names; that was the way it worked. I was called Lizzie, she was called Jane. She was an awful person, even back then. Rooming with her was one of the worst parts of the whole experience. Her child died, and later my parents paid someone to switch the records – to erase my name so that you would never find me, even if you tried.’

  ‘That’s why my letter was sent to her,’ Finn said. ‘The records listed her as my mother. She must have realized that there was a mistake at the time. She must have suspected that I was your child, not hers. Why would she wait to blackmail you? I sent that letter almost twenty years ago.’

  She sat back down again, all the energy drained from her. ‘She had no idea who I was,’ she said. ‘I never told anyone at the home anything about myself. That was drilled into me. No one must find out who you are. I don’t know how many times my parents told me that before they sent me away. So she wouldn’t have known that I was someone who could be blackmailed – who had the money to be blackmailed. Even if she had known, she wouldn’t have been able to find me.’

  ‘So why now?’ Finn asked. The answer came to him before she needed to answer. ‘The election,’ he said. ‘She saw you because you were at campaign events.’

  Catherine nodded once more. ‘She recognized me from my picture in the papers, standing next to James, smiling like every good campaign wife should. The first time Jim stood for office, Brooke and I stayed far more in the background. This time, though, the race was much closer, and he said he needed us to help present the look of the perfect family. She knew who I was instantly, and she called me. She started out slowly, saying she remembered me from our time in New Hampshire when we were young. I thought that was clever, at least. Anyone else overhearing us would have had no idea that there was anything ominous or threatening. She said she wanted to get together for coffee. She hadn’t finished her first cup before she demanded money.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I paid her, of course. It wasn’t cheap, but she said that was it. One payment and she would walk away. It was a lie, obviously. I suppose I knew it was a lie, even then, but I wanted to believe that there was some way out. I wanted to think she would go away. She didn’t go away, though. She contacted me again. And again and again. She became brazen, started calling the house. I think she hated me for my life.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? If she only knew how unhappy my life has really been. But all she saw was the money. She thought it was unfair that we had been in the same place all those years ago, and I had lived my life in big houses with fancy cars, and she was scraping by. I realized that last night that she was never going to go away. No amount of money was ever going to be enough.’

  ‘You killed her,’ Finn said.

  ‘Yes, I killed her.’ She looked relieved to have said the words. ‘I don’t even remember it, but it happened. I went to her apartment to make one final payment; to try to convince her it was over. She was having none of it. She said that it was never going to be over. She started to paint a picture of what it would be like if she went public. How my husband would react. How all my fancy friends would react. I told her I didn’t care anymore. I told her she could go public, and then I would have her prosecuted for extortion. I thought I had a trump card there, but I didn’t. She had the trump card.’

  ‘What did she threaten you with?’

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘She told me that she knew who you were; she knew how to find you. She said, “I wonder how he will feel about the fact that you abandoned him? I wonder if your daughter will ever be able to look you in the face again once she realizes what you did to your son?”’ She closed her eyes. ‘I don’t remember much after that. I flew into a rage. I grabbed the first thing I could find and started hitting her. I hit her and hit her. And yet somehow, it didn’t even feel like I was hitting her. It felt like I was hitting myself. All this rage and self-loathing that had built over forty-five years came out all at once. And I kept hitting and hitting until it was out. Then I was alone. Standing in this dreadful, dreary little apartment in a terrible neighborhood over the body of a woman I once k
new, who had tormented me. I didn’t know what to do, so I ran.’

  ‘How did McDougal get involved in covering it up?’ Finn asked.

  ‘That was just chance,’ she replied. ‘Or mischance, I suppose. It depends on the way you look at it. Elizabeth Connor worked for him, as you already know, and she owed him money. He went by her apartment later that night to collect from her and found her the way she was. She had told him a little about what she was up to, but he thought she was blackmailing my husband – he thought James was your father and that was what she had on him. When he saw her body, he assumed James had killed her. Because he and James were doing business together and she worked for him, he was worried that her murder could cause him a significant amount of trouble, so he called in an expert to make it look like a break-in.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Finn said. He sat there for a while, digesting everything she had told him. He’d suspected it all already, but there is a significant difference between wrestling with suspicions and dealing with reality. She didn’t say anything; he supposed she understood at some level what he was going through, and guessed she had a fair amount to adjust to as well. Finally he said, ‘I have one more question.’ He was almost afraid to ask it.

  She looked at him. ‘Go ahead.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘The man with the scar – he could have killed me. He should have killed me, but he didn’t. Why not? Who was he?’

  She smiled sadly. ‘He was someone I knew a long time ago. His name was Billy Gannon. His father was my family’s chauffeur when I was growing up. Such a wonderful, hardworking man. He used to tell the children stories out in the garage. The most marvelous, imaginative stories. And Billy was the sweetest, most beautiful boy you could ever imagine.’

  ‘He was a killer,’ Finn said.

  She shook her head vehemently. ‘Not when I knew him. When I knew him he was perfect. Others made him into what he became. He had a tragic story – his father was fired and killed himself. Billy was thrown out with nothing. He disappeared, and we never heard from him again.’