Forever and Always

by Jude Deveraux

  “My parents lied to me?” he said in such shock that at first I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not. When he gave me that famous grin I almost smiled back.

  “Next,” he said, his eyes twinkling, proud of himself for having nearly made me smile.

  There was milk money stolen by some kid with a scar over his left eye.

  “I thought he was the one but I could never prove it.”

  A shirt stolen by a fellow actor, a watch that dropped off his wrist while rowboating. It was still at the bottom of a lake.

  The fifth item was serious and I could feel the man waiting for my answer. The paper fairly vibrated in my hand. “This has been destroyed. The…What is it? It’s a folder but it’s more than that. It’s leather with a lock on it. The papers in it and the folder were burned.”

  I looked at him hard because I realized that someone would have killed him to get those papers. In my mind’s eye, I saw him asleep and I saw a thin person dressed in black as he or she opened a safe and took the papers.

  “What was the combination to your safe?”

  He blinked a couple of times that I knew about the safe, but before he could say it out loud, I “heard” it.

  “Your Social Security number. Not very smart using that number, was it?”

  He didn’t answer, just sat there and stared at me. After a moment he picked up the big manila envelope he’d brought with him, but he didn’t hand it to me. “I read that book about you,” he said, “but it never hinted that you could…do things. It said you were more interested in candy bars than in finding Adam Montgomery’s sister.”

  I knew he was opening the way for me to tell him the truth behind what had happened in Connecticut, but I had no inclination to do so. The man was impressed that I could tell him about a ring he’d had when he was a kid. If he knew even ten percent about what I could do, he’d probably run for the door. “You have a child?” I asked him. I was sure that envelope he was clutching had photos and mementos, and I truly hoped I didn’t have to tell him his child was no longer living.

  “Oh yeah, sure,” he said, still staring at me in that way I hate, as though I were a freak.

  He handed me the envelope; I opened it and removed the papers, but I didn’t feel what he wanted me to.

  I could feel that the kid who’d made the photocopies was angry at his girlfriend—but, most of all, I could feel my mother.

  “My mother sent you these papers?”

  “Yes.”

  For a moment I closed my eyes. Jerlene Monroe and I didn’t socialize with each other. We never had, not even when I was a child. I’d never been to a movie or the circus or even to an ice cream parlor with her. But, as had been reported, she’d risked her life for me. I knew from the paper I held that she was well and enjoying her fame immensely.

  “No child,” I said. “I don’t feel any child in this.”

  “Look at the clippings in the back.”

  There were two newspaper clippings, but my mother’s touch was so strong on them that I had difficulty feeling anything else. I looked hard at the woman’s photo. The woman was youngish and simple. I couldn’t feel anything complicated in her mind or her life.

  “Simple,” I said. “Uncomplicated. She likes to make people feel good.”

  He was looking at me so eagerly, sitting on the edge of the sofa, that I couldn’t help but be affected. The truth is, when I’d done this before, it had always been with someone I loved present. As a child, anything “weird and strange” I could do, I kept to myself. My husband was the first person I’d openly talked to about my so-called “power.” When my father and Adam’s sister came into my life, I was fairly open with them. My father had spent a lot of time with me, trying to find out what I could do, but he was only interested in the big stuff. After all, he knew I’d used my mind to kill four people, so he wasn’t interested in my picking up a photo and telling about the person.

  But this beautiful actor was. I could feel his excitement, feel that he thought what I was doing was marvelous and magnificent. If he only knew…

  “No children,” I said. “This woman never had a child.”

  At that, he fell back against the sofa. “Yes she did. She had my child.”

  I could tell that he’d lost faith in me. “Maybe that’s why she was killed,” I said.

  He sat upright again. “Killed? As in murdered?”

  “Yes. Someone did something to the brakes. I think you’ll find that this tree is at the bottom of a curve on a steep hill. Her death was well planned.”

  “Why?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know. Someone wanted something from her death but I don’t know what.” I handed the folder full of papers back to him. I’d seen all I could. I wanted him to leave so I could go back to—To what? He and I were alone in the house. Since I’d known he was coming, I’d sent the housekeeper and the two gardeners home. I didn’t want them oohing and aahing over Lincoln Aimes.

  He didn’t take the hint so I started to use what I’d always called my True Persuasion to make him leave. But I stopped before I’d started. Okay, so I knew he was lying to me—or maybe he was just leaving out a lot—but, still, he seemed genuinely upset about this child who didn’t seem to exist.

  Instead of making him leave, I asked him to stay for dinner, only I didn’t use words. I sent the thought to him that he was very hungry and that he wanted to cook something in my kitchen. Heaven knew that I couldn’t cook and I certainly couldn’t leave the house. If those reporters out there saw me with Lincoln Aimes it’d be all over the papers tomorrow.

  When I heard his stomach growl, I allowed myself a little smile. I’m good, I thought, then I started putting it into his head that he wanted to tell me everything about this child from the beginning.

  An hour later, Linc, as he told me to call him, and I were sitting at the marble-topped counter in the kitchen eating huge bowls of spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad. Beside us strawberries and those little round shortcakes were thawing.

  “Every word,” I said as I twirled pasta around my fork. I hadn’t eaten much since Adam disappeared and as a result my spinal column was the biggest thing on my body.

  It took him nearly an hour to tell me all of it. He didn’t know it but I was working on him the whole time to make him tell me more and more.

  I must say that, all in all, it was an interesting story. The problem was that it had huge blanks in it, missing pieces.

  As a starving actor he’d been a sperm donor to a cryo bank and some woman who worked there had seen Lincoln Aimes in a movie so she’d—What? Stolen the sperm and performed a do-it-yourself job?

  Linc didn’t know the details. All he knew was what his agent had found out, that Lisa Henderson had given birth to Lincoln Aimes’s child and they’d spent seven years moving all over the country.

  “And now your agent’s dead?” I asked as I started on my second bowl of pasta. He’d eaten only one. Wimp.

  “And so is Lisa Henderson. I had papers that had lots of information about her and my son, such as which schools he went to, but all the papers were taken.”

  “Out of your safe in the night while you slept. Good thing you didn’t wake up because the thief would have killed you.” From the way he paused with his glass at his lips, I knew I’d shocked him. “Didn’t I tell you that part?”

  “Uh, no, you didn’t.” He narrowed his eyes at me.

  “What else didn’t you tell me?”

  “That your girlfriend—”

  “I do not want to hear that one!”

  I couldn’t help it but I actually smiled—and he smiled back.

  Getting up, he ladled half-frozen strawberries onto the cold little cakes. He wasn’t any better at cooking than I was. “Okay, so now what do I do? Forget about it all? Am I to think this woman did not have my child because now I don’t have any proof that a child lived with her? Besides, if a kid did live with her, I’m not sure it was mine. Or is mine. If he ever existed, that is.”
>
  “You don’t have anything that could be connected to the child?”

  “Just his picture.”

  At that I looked at him in astonishment. He had dark skin but I could see the flush rising up his face.

  In the next second he was running and I was on his heels. I knew he was going after his jacket that I’d hung in the hall closet. He didn’t know his way around my big, sprawling house. It had once been a farmhouse but had been added on to repeatedly so it was a maze of rooms. Sometimes the girls tricked the nanny into thinking—Oh well, best not think of them or I’d start crying again.

  I took a shortcut through a glassed-in porch and reached the entrance foyer before he did and had his wallet out of his jacket pocket in an instant. Wow! What I could feel from holding his wallet! I didn’t like his girlfriend at all. Wonder if he knew she was sleeping with another man—or was it two men? Linc liked his mother okay, but he’d like to drop an anvil on his father’s head. Figuratively, that is. Linc hated only one person, but I couldn’t quite see why.

  With a jolt that ran through my entire body, I saw that if I helped Linc, I’d come closer to finding my husband. I couldn’t see how yet, but as much as I’d ever known anything, I knew I needed to help Lincoln Aimes.

  But how could I? I thought. How could I leave this house and go out…there?

  “Do you mind?” he said coldly as he grabbed the wallet out of my hands.

  I smiled at him but he didn’t smile back. Obviously, he knew what I’d been doing. It wasn’t easy for me to keep from asking him who it was he hated and why, but when he handed me the photo of a woman and a child, I gave it my attention.

  “This isn’t the woman who was killed. This is a photo of the child’s mother and yes, you’re the child’s father, and both of them are alive.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  Here we go again, I thought. I threw up my hands and went back to the kitchen, Linc close behind me, talking all the way.

  “I’ve already seen you do psychic things so why can’t you tell me where they are? And why was this woman’s photo and obituary in the paper if she isn’t dead? Don’t you think those people would know who she was? They took up a collection for a tombstone because they liked her so much.”

  “You want some more strawberries?”

  “Why aren’t you answering me?”

  I turned on him. “It’s always more, isn’t it?” I said, anger coming to the surface. In the last year I’d run through the gamut of emotions and wallowed in all of them, but the one emotion I’d not allowed myself was anger. Truthfully, I was afraid that if I got really, really angry, I’d be like Stephen King’s Carrie and bring a few houses down.

  But now this man—this stranger—was angry at me! It was too much.

  I slammed the refrigerator door and advanced on him. “More! That’s all anyone wants from me! I told you all I know but you want me to tell you more! Don’t you think that if I had the power to pinpoint where missing children are that I’d be doing it? Wouldn’t I be sitting in a police station twenty-four-seven and going over pictures and saying, ‘This one was taken by his father,’ and ‘This one is at the bottom of a lake. His mother killed him’?”

  When Linc bent over, his hands to his temples, I knew he was in pain and that I was causing it, but I couldn’t stop myself. “My father was always pushing me to see more, do more. Boadicea expected me to be like that horrid mirror and see the future. Only my husband—oh God.”

  I said the last because a big drop of blood had fallen from Linc’s nose onto the tile floor. Instantly, my anger left me and I ran to get a tea towel and soak it in cold water.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, holding out the towel to him.

  He didn’t take it but sat down on a stool and put his head back. I wanted to put the towel to his nose, but when I couldn’t reach him, I grabbed one of the girls’ toy boxes, pushed it beside him, stood on it, then pressed the cold towel to his nose. “I’m so sorry,” I kept saying over and over. “I didn’t do it on purpose. Really, I didn’t. I try never to get angry, but sometimes I can’t help it.”

  Linc pulled the towel away enough to look at me with one eye. “If you hadn’t stopped I think my head would have exploded.”

  I think he meant to be funny but he conjured up some pretty horrible memories for me. A few years ago I was led into a room by four people and only one of us came out alive. I got down off the toy box and began to clean up the kitchen. As I worked, I used my mind to soothe Linc and to heal the ruptured veins in his nose. I knew he had a headache so I quieted that, too.

  After a while there wasn’t anything more to do to the kitchen so I looked at him. He was staring at me but it wasn’t as though he thought I was a freak. Nor did he look as though he wanted to go running to the reporters outside and tell them all about me.

  “I suggest we go to the living room, share a bottle of wine, and talk. I have a proposition for you,” he said. Quietly, I followed him.

  Linc

  Chapter Four

  OF COURSE PEOPLE LIKE HER DIDN’T EXIST. NOT OUTSIDE books and movies, that is. No one could actually make a person’s nose bleed—or head explode. Of course not!

  If they could…My mind whirled with the possibilities. She could home in on dictators and kill them. No need for wars. She could make millions as a hit man. She could take out Russell Crowe so I could get his roles.

  Well, anyway, I’m sure there were uses for the ability to kill people with your mind. Like maybe witches. As I walked behind her skinny little body into the living room, I saw a lot in a short time. All those ridiculous things she’d done while searching for a witch were because she knew and felt so much. She could make sexual advances to a man because she wasn’t worried about losing her virginity. Who needed some old mirror when you had a mind like hers?

  As for Jerlene and the others saving Darci’s life, I had a strong hunch who had killed that witch and her three followers. Fight evil with evil as the saying goes, or, in this case, witchcraft with witchcraft. The thought made me want to cross myself.

  But my hands were full of wine bottle and glasses so I couldn’t do anything until I put them on the coffee table—and then it might have seemed that I was crossing myself because I was in the presence of evil, so I didn’t.

  So now what do I do? I thought as I slowly poured the wine.

  Part of me wanted to run away, fast and far. I’d wondered why Jerlene had no photos of her daughter in her house or her dressing room. And I’d wondered why I’d never seen them together in person or in print. I guess Jerlene was afraid/squeamish/put off by a daughter who could…do what Darci was able to do.

  I handed Darci her glass of wine, took mine, and sat down across from her. I had no idea what to say. “Don’t hurt me no mo’!” came to mind.

  “So what can you do besides kill and maim?” I heard myself say, then tightened in preparation for another blast.

  Darci relaxed. “I’ve only done that…that nosebleed thing once before, when Adam made me angry. I never did it again and I can tell you that he and I had some major fights. But I never again used my mind against him. I wouldn’t have now but I’ve had so many awful things happen and…and…”

  She looked down at her wineglass and I was afraid she was going to cry. She didn’t have on eye makeup so she might. Alanna never cried if she was in makeup.

  “If you get mad again,” I said, “I know this guy I can call. You can blast him till his head explodes. You—”

  “The man you hate?”

  I knew where she’d found that out: my wallet. When I got there, she was caressing it like it was a sex object, sticking her fingers in and around the leather, all while her eyes were half closed, and she had a tiny smile on her face. She was either having an erotic experience or I’d been away from Alanna so long I was seeing what I thought about night and day.

  “Tell me something, Darci, if
you get closer to someone or something, can you see and feel more?”

  Instantly, I saw that she knew where I was headed. Okay, so I’m an actor, not a writer. If I’d had someone to write some subtle lines leading up to what I was thinking about I could have delivered them perfectly. Better than certain other actors do, I’m sure.

  “No,” she said, staring at me.

  As I looked into her eyes I had the weirdest feeling she was trying to put ideas into my head. That wasn’t possible. Was it? In case it was possible, I glared back at her and began to recite Othello’s lines. Memorizing the lines to plays I hoped to be in someday was a hobby of mine.

  After a while, Darci smiled at me and I felt I’d won a silent battle. I was still thinking about running away, but I was also thinking about something else.

  “I’ve got six weeks,” I began, and Darci said,“No!”

  “I don’t usually have free time but my girlfriend Alanna—”

  “No, no, and double no.”

  “You’ve seen her movies. Right now she has one with Denzel Washington and—”

  “So? My mother stars with Russell Crowe.”

  I nearly exploded. “What’s he got that—” Her little smile made me stop. Obviously she’d seen something, felt something inside me, not that Crowe and I—or that I thought Crowe—

  I decided to go a different route. “Okay, don’t help me. Someone stole papers from my safe that tell about my son. Someone burned up my agent along with the photocopies. Somebody killed a woman, then said she was the woman who is the mother of my son, but she wasn’t. And a bunch of church people and her coworkers paid for her tombstone and all of them said there were no surviving relatives.”

  I leaned across the coffee table toward her, feeling my anger rise. If she didn’t help me find my son I didn’t see anything else I could do. “I’ll just go there—by myself—and ask people on the street if they’ve seen some sandy-haired little kid. Of course I don’t know what he looks like, but then all white kids look alike to me so what does it matter?”