His therapist told him that his guilt was a healthy sign. It was a sign that maybe all of those intensive therapy sessions might have finally shifted something in him. He had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, and he intellectually knew that this personality disorder, as with all personality disorders, was not generally amenable to therapy. He still tried therapy, constantly, because he really did want to get better.
His therapist informed him that true narcissists were unable to feel genuine guilt, so the fact that he was feeling guilty about how he treated his adoptive mother and father was a sign that he had hope. He might be able to become normal yet.
He had a long way to go. He knew that. But this was a step forward.
He knocked on the door, and his mother answered it. She looked almost the same as he remembered. Older, much older, and sadder. But she was still the mother that he remembered from his youth.
“Hello, Mom,” he said to the very startled Arlene.
She put her hand to her chest and her eyes got wide. “Silas?”
He nodded his head. “May I come in?”
“Of course, of course,” she said. “Come on in.” Then she turned her head. “Bob, come and see. Silas is here.”
“Who?”
“Silas. Our son.”
Silas stepped into the house and looked around. He smiled, because he knew that he had a big surprise in store for his parents. They were surprised enough that he was even there at all. But when they saw what else he had in store for them, they would really be shocked. In a good way, of course.
Shocked in the best way.
The three of them stood awkwardly in the doorway for a few minutes. Then his mother finally got it together. “Well, please sit down.” Then she went into the kitchen. “Gosh, I don’t have much in the house to feed you. I always like to offer food to guests, but I just haven’t gone shopping lately. Isn’t that funny, though, I mean I work at Walmart. But I just haven’t brought home groceries for awhile.”
She finally brought out some bologna on white bread. “Here,” she said. “I’m embarrassed that I don’t have something better.”
Silas politely took a bite of the sandwich and smiled. “It’s fine, Mom.”
“So, what brings you here, son?” his father asked him. “I have to say, I thought that we’d never see you again.”
“I know. I’m here because I want to re-establish a relationship with the two of you. And I wanted to make amends for my years of neglect.”
His mother nodded her head rapidly. “Oh, of course, of course. I always hoped and prayed to God that you would come back. I never gave up hope. I love you very much, Silas. You’re our son. You will always be our son.”
Silas smiled as his mother bent down to hug him. His father stood back for a few minutes, but then he, too, came over and hugged him.
“Your mother is right. You’re our son. You will always be our son. We want a relationship with you. That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”
Silas stood up. “Well, don’t just stand there. Let’s go and see what I have for the two of you. What I bought for the two of you.”
His mother shook her head. “You don’t owe us anything.”
“I do. You two saved me from foster care. You saved me, and look how I’ve treated you.” He motioned them outside. “Come on, get in the car. I’m going to take you to see something.”
Bob and Arlene unsurely followed Silas to his car and got in. “Where are you taking us?”
“You’ll see,” Silas said with a smile.
Once they were all in the car, his father asked him about his murder case. “I saw in the paper that you beat that murder case. Something about your wife sending in her identical twin to die in her place, and then framing you.” He shook his head. “What a nut. What happened to her, anyhow?”
“She pled guilty already and is on her way to prison for arson and second-degree murder. She’s serving 20 years to life, but I have a feeling that she’ll be out before she’s sixty.” A part of him felt sorry for the woman. She did all that to him because he was a crazy stalker. And he was a crazy stalker. He knew that he was. His bi-polar meds had helped him, though, and he no longer felt the obsessive tendencies that he had felt back when he stalked his wife after she left him all those years ago.
He drove to his neighborhood with his parents, where he had bought a new house for them. It was a fully furnished, three-bedroom home with sparkling hardwood floors, luxury bathrooms with sunken jacuzzi tubs, a garden out back, a fireplace in both the living room and the den, and walk-in closets that were bigger than his parents’ bedroom in that old dilapidated home.
The furniture that he bought for them consisted of a matching leather couch and love-seat, two brand-new recliners, a large black marble dining room table with six cushioned chairs and a brand-new bed and cherry-wood dresser in the master bedroom.
As they walked in, his parents smiled. “Is this your home? It’s beautiful,” his mother said. She immediately walked to the sliding-glass door that looked out into the backyard. “What a beautiful garden,” she said, “and bird-feeder.” She walked into the yard, looking at the flowers, the fountains and the trees with wonder.
Silas knew that his mother loved nature, and that she was going to spend an endless amount of time in that garden, cultivating the flowers and plants with care.
As for his father, he bought him a 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air. It needed a lot of work, and that was by design. It was always his father’s dream to restore a ’57 Chevy, so Silas made sure that the car he bought his father was one that his father could work hard in restoring.
He showed his father the car.
“Beautiful, son,” his father said with a whistle. “Just beautiful.”
His mother came into the garage. “Look at that car,” she said. “That’s the kind of car you love, Bob.”
“I know.”
At that, Silas smiled broadly. “All this is yours, mom and dad. This house, the garden, this car, the furniture. Everything. I’m also going to make sure that neither of you have to work another day in your life. You need to be able to retire, mom and dad. Really retire.”
His mother and father just stared at him in shock.
“I don’t know what to say,” his mother said.
“Just say that you forgive me and that you’ll let me be your son again. That’s all I want.”
His mother started to cry, and, to his surprise, his father cried, too. “You didn’t have to do this,” his father said.
“Oh, but I did. I did.”
Arlene and Bob went over and hugged Silas, and, as they all embraced, Silas felt something that he had never felt before in his life.
He felt a sense of peace.
Want to know what happens next? Pick up Until Proven Guilty, a Damien Harrington Legal Thriller right now for only .99 and FREE with a subscription to Kindle Unlimited! https://tinyurl.com/yxlllu7d
DESCRIPTION
Damien's back! And this time, the murder case hits way too close to home.
Damien's mother, Olivia, is being charged with murder. At first glance, Damien thinks that the murder charge is flimsy at best. Olivia's friend, Dr. Tracy Dunham, died at her home of an apparent drug overdose. Olivia insists that she was simply sitting in her home, minding her own business, when Dr. Dunham came over to crash on her couch. She found him dead the next day.
The prosecutor's office, however, charges Olivia with murder. Their accusation is that Olivia gave Dr. Dunham a deadly dose of pure heroin, which is what killed him.
As Damien gets further into the case, he finds that nothing is what it seems. Somebody apparently wanted Dr. Dunham dead - but who? And why? Damien discovers the shocking conspiracy that is truly behind the man's death, but he finds himself in a race against time to find the evidence to prove his mother's innocence. If he can't get to bottom of who wanted Dr. Dunham dead, then his mother will go to prison for the rest of her life.
True, he doesn't get a
long with his foul-mouthed, drunk mother, but she's still his mother.
In the meantime, he also has to deal with a son, Nate, who is on the brink. Nate is slipping away, and Damien feels helpless to stop his son's destruction. Can he save him in time?
With the twists, turns and loops that you've come to expect from a Rachel Sinclair legal thriller, Until Proven Guilty is a thriller that you won't put down until the last heart-stopping page!
CHAPTER ONE
“Now, what is it that you suggest I do with Nate?” I asked my therapist, whose name was Dr. Betty Jordan. I had managed to talk Nate’s school into letting him stay, even after he was caught with a gun in school, on the condition that I completed 40 hours of family therapy with him with an approved guidance counselor. Nate’s school selected Dr. Jordan as the proper counselor, and Nate and I had been seeing her twice a week every week for the past six weeks. Nate had opened up to her, when she saw him individually, about what his teacher had done to him. Mrs. Bowen, his fifth-grade teacher, had pled guilty to molesting Nate and was awaiting sentencing at the moment.
“You really need to spend more time with him. I’ve spoken at length with both you and Nate, over the past six weeks, and what I’m getting from Nate is that he is a very isolated and lonely child. He feels like he’s neglected. He feels like he doesn’t have any parents. Losing his mother has been very hard on him. But even more difficult for him is the thought that you don’t care about him either. That’s been very apparent to me.”
I nodded my head. “I know what you’re saying, but I just don’t know how realistic it is that I can spend as much time with him as what I need to. I’ve already cut back my hours at work to deal with this, and I’ve tried to show Nate in every way possible that he’s very important to me. I just don’t know what more I can do.”
Dr. Jordan just watched me. She had to have known what kind of predicament I was in. I was in a stressful position. A stressful profession. I had gone through the ringer myself in the past few years. Between having my wife running off on me, and having her tell my daughter that I was not her biological father, and the fact that I was on trial for my life after my biological father was found murdered and I was accused of it, I had been through it all in the past few years. All sorts of issues came up during my murder trial, including the fact that I had killed my stepfather when I was only 15 years old. I was never prosecuted for it, because he was going to kill either me or my mother or both of us, and he had promised this all the time. Even as a kid, I knew that it was his life or ours, and I chose his life.
The upshot was that the past few years had been beyond chaotic. My daughter Amelia had beaten cancer, but it was touch and go for a long time. There were years that I didn’t know if she would live to see her 10th birthday. The bone marrow transplant finally was the thing that put her into remission, but, even now, I felt like her condition was touch and go. I knew that her remission was precarious, as all remissions are, and I knew that she was not out of the woods. She was relatively healthy, thank God, but who knew how long that would last? Every time she got as much as a cold, I worried about her.
But the fact of the matter was that Amelia’s sickness was just one more thing on my plate, and I didn’t have the mental energy to really deal with my one healthy child. I was guilty of thinking that he was just going to be okay, because there was nothing obviously wrong with him. Of course, I was proved wrong, when he brought a gun into the school and aimed it at a kid who had been teasing him about being gay. He wasn’t gay, at least not that I knew, but that was beside the point. The point was that that kid thought that he was gay, and that was enough for him to bully Nate.
“You can take a leave of absence. Just until we manage to find the proper medication for your son, and his signs of depression are lessened.”
That was another thing that I was going to have to deal with. The doctor had decided that she wanted Nate to be on antidepressants. I was against it, as I was against all forms of medication, yet the doctor had been persistent that Nate needed some kind of antidepressants, and she told me that if I didn’t go along with her recommendations that she would not sign off to the school that I completed the requisite counseling. Which meant that Nate might still end up being expelled from school. In other words, I needed to dance to her tune, or Nate was going to suffer.
The doctor told me that giving anti-depressants to a child as young as Nate, a child who had just turned 11, was tricky, to say the very least. She reviewed all the side effects with me, including the fact that Nate might become suicidal, and I was dead set against it. I had to battle my own bouts of depression, over my life, and I always managed to get over it without drugs. I wanted Nate to do the same. Yet I gave in, just because of the threat that if I didn’t go along with the recommendations that Nate might end up being expelled from school. For a child in such a precarious and unstable position as Nate, being expelled from school would be the last straw for him. It would only be a matter of time before he went the way that I went, and ended up in prison. Staying in his school was his only hope of beating that scenario. I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that he stayed at Pembroke Hill, which was the private school that he attended.
Now the shrink wanted me to take a leave of absence. I could afford to take one, because I settled a personal injury case case years back that netted me $4 million. So financially, it wasn’t a problem to take a long break from work. I just didn’t want to leave Harper high and dry, as I had just become a partner in the law firm. She had a lot of cases on her plate, and she needed my help with them. The only other attorney in her office was named Tammy, and she was an estate attorney who never appeared in court.
“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “I guess I could take a small leave of absence. A sabbatical.” My plan at that time was to take a leave of absence long enough that I could be home with Nate, while he was going through the early stages of taking his antidepressants. The doctor had explained to me that it was going to take some tweaking to find the right formula for him, as it always took a lot of tweaking to find the right formula for anybody. Apparently, because everybody’s body chemistry was different, doctors always had to try different dosages and different drugs in different combinations to find out just the right combination and dosages of drugs to alleviate depression in any given person. Then they usually had to do some more tweaking later on, because meds tend to stop working after a certain period, so it would be back to the drawing board. Because Nate was so young, it was even trickier. There was a real chance that he could become suicidal because of the antidepressants. That was a known risk. I certainly could not take the chance and leave Nate to his own devices when he was first taking these drugs.
But, as I left Dr. Jordan’s office, I got a phone call that changed everything.
“Damien,” my mom’s voice was on the other end of the line. “I’m in the clink. The hoosegow. Gotta come down.”
I rolled my eyes. This was not the first time my mother had been in the jail, and I doubted that it was going to be the last. My mother was regularly being taken to jail for one reason or another. Unpaid parking tickets, unpaid moving violations, a DUI or two. Always minor things, never anything enormous, unless you consider drunk driving to be enormous. That was just a routine thing for her anymore. I was really in no mood to have to deal with her. Not at that moment, when I was coming out of the therapist’s office, with Nate strongly on my mind.
“I’ll get there when I get there.” That was a game that we played. She would go to jail for one reason or another, and I would take my own sweet time getting her out. That was my way of saying, in a very passive-aggressive way, that she needed to get her shit together. “What are you charged with this time? How many speeding tickets have you not paid, or maybe you got a DUI?”
“I wouldn’t be making so much fun if I were you,” she said. “I’m being charged with murder.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Come again? Mom, seriously, this isn’t
funny.”
“You think I’m being funny? I’ll show you funny. Unless you think that the cops coming into my house at 2 o’clock this morning and hauling my candied ass to jail, asking me all kinds of questions for the past 10 hours, if you think that’s my idea of a good time, you got another thing coming. Now get down here. I didn’t want to call you, but the person I usually call to get me out of these things is dead. Deader than a doornail. And the cops think that I’m the one who killed him.”
I took a deep breath. “Mom, you’re going to have to slow down. Who is it that they think that you killed, and what –”
“They think I killed my friend Tracy Dunham. He’s a guy that I screw around with once in a while, good guy. Ain’t never been more then a bed buddy, but we hang out too. Tracy, he was taking the drugs, which ain’t no concern of mine. I don’t do it. I don’t get into that crap, but to each his own. Anyhow, turns out he’s married. Or he was married, he ain’t married now to nobody. He was married, and his old lady threw him out of the house.
“Last July, he comes over to my house, higher than a kite. Tells me his bitch wife don’t want him no more, can he crash? I say yeah, sure, why not? So he comes over and sleeps on my couch. You know, he comes over and passes out, I go to bed, I wake up the next morning and he’s dead. You know, I try to do CPR and shit like that, I don’t even know it all that well, but I seen it on TV shows, I try doing what I saw on TV. But he was stiff and cold, there ain’t no bringing him back at that point. I didn’t know what to do, so I call up the hospital, 911, they send somebody out to come and pick him up. They send the ambulance over and some woman, she says her job is to comfort the people who wake up to find a stiff in their house. I tell her I didn’t need no comforting, I barely knew this guy, I wasn’t shedding no tears for him. The cops come next, they question me, they want to do a piss test. I tell them okay, sure, why not? I ain’t taking the drugs. They’re gonna find out I was drinking, but that ain’t illegal, and I was sitting in my home, so I’m allowed to drink. They do a piss test, but they’re not telling me the results.
Secrets and Lies Page 19