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“I want information on something that happened a long time ago. Twenty-five years, in fact.” He leveled a serious stare at his friend. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked.
Steve nodded. “To the grave,” he vowed, repeating Cade’s earlier promise.
“Things seem to be getting serious,” Tyler muttered to Sara while dipping sushi in hot wasabi sauce.
She nodded in agreement. He’d called last night and asked her to meet him for lunch today after she’d told him about her dismissal and her accusation toward Cade and/or his father for it.
“Have you decided when you’re going to confront Walter Parks about yours and Conrad’s paternity?”
“Not yet. I want to find out more on his dealings with Jeremy. Ah, there’s Robert.”
Sara followed her brother’s line of sight and saw a man in a conservative suit speak to the hostess, then head their way. “Who is he?” she asked.
“Robert Jackson, from the D.A.’s office. He prosecuted the murder case I investigated back during the spring. I thought we should ask his advice and invited him to lunch if he had time.”
Before she could voice any opinion about this, the man arrived at their table. Tyler made the introductions and invited the attorney to be seated.
“Glad you could join us,” Tyler said. “Anything new on the Shrimpton case?”
The assistant D.A. shook his head. “The trial has been delayed for the third time while the defense is searching for a witness. They’ve hired Mark Banning to help. I think you know him, don’t you?”
“Sure, he’s my partner’s brother.”
While the men talked, Sara estimated the new-comer’s age to be in the mid-to-late thirties. He had a permanent crease across his forehead and a few strands of gray in his black hair. His manner was intensely serious. She found that reassuring, as if he meant business and would let nothing stand in his way while getting at the truth of a situation.
“What’s happening with you?” Robert asked after snagging the waiter and placing his order.
“We need your advice,” Tyler admitted, lowering his voice. “It’s about a paternity case, for one thing, and about murder, for another.”
“An interesting combination,” the assistant D.A. murmured. “Murder I can help you with. Paternity is a civil suit ordinarily. Unless it’s directly involved in the murder.”
While the trio ate, Sara and Tyler put forth all the information they had gleaned from their mother and added in the details of their research since moving to San Francisco.
“Mark and Nick Banning are helping us find this long-lost uncle,” Sara told the assistant D.A.
“Derek Ross, or Moss or whatever he calls himself, witnessed the crime,” Tyler finished the tale.
“You have to locate him, or else there’s no case,” Robert said, echoing their conclusions. “You need some kind of evidence to show a motive. Usually greed is a good one. What would Walter have gained by eliminating Jeremy?”
“The rare diamonds Jeremy had already invested most of his assets in?” Tyler suggested. “They were never recovered that we know of.”
“You have any kind of proof that these diamonds actually existed and that your father bought them?”
“No. We think Walter kept them and used them to start his jewelry stores,” Sara told the attorney. “That was why Jeremy’s business was in serious debt and went under when he died. Everything had to be sold to pay for merchandise that apparently never existed or was never found, at any rate.”
“A bum deal,” Robert said sympathetically.
“That’s what we think, too,” Tyler said, his expression grim and much older than his years.
Sara forced back the anger that threatened to erupt as she gazed at her brother. It had been a long time since she’d seen him carefree and happy as a young man his age should be. He should be thinking of falling in love and getting married and having a family, but because of Walter Parks, that life had been denied all of them.
She and Tyler had established themselves in San Francisco while riding high on a wave of righteous indignation, but life was so much more complex than one emotion, she’d discovered. She suspected her brother had found out the same thing.
While he’d had a rather serious relationship with one woman, they had broken up because of his vow never to marry and have children. Their mother’s unhappiness had touched all the Carlton children in various ways, none of them leading to a trusting relationship with another human.
She sighed quietly and gazed out the window while Tyler and the attorney discussed how to handle a paternity suit and whether to go ahead with it before finishing the murder investigation. Suddenly, down the street, she recognized a tall, lithe masculine form.
Cade and his companion were deep in serious discussion as they hurried along the sun-filled avenue.
Her heart lurched so hard, she put a hand to her chest to hold back the pain. Not for the first time, she was sorry she’d ever moved to this city. And sorry that she’d met Cade Parks and discovered the man of her dreams.
Yes. She regretted that most of all.
Later that afternoon, Sara sat at a computer in the local library. Noting the date that came up on the screen, she realized that tomorrow she would have been in San Francisco for three weeks.
Three weeks. So short, yet she felt she’d compressed a lifetime into those twenty-one days.
Forcing her attention to the job at hand, she typed in the names she wanted to review. The computer searched the archives of the local newspaper and came up with a surprisingly large list of selections.
She read of Walter Parks’s marriage to Anna Lindsay, daughter of a gem-mining, trade and exploration tycoon. Walter had been thirty, the bride, beautiful and glowing with happiness, only twenty.
Staring at the picture of Walter in his wedding tux, Sara’s heart tightened into a painful ball. Cade looked very much like his father.
That didn’t mean he was like his father in personality, some part of her argued.
She shut out the quarreling halves of her heart and concentrated on the articles. Arthur Lindsay had died two years after the marriage. By then the twins, Cade and Emily, had been born. Next had come Rowan, then Jessica, in quick succession. After the final birth announcement and a few charity functions, Anna Lindsay Parks apparently disappeared from the face of the earth.
Sara closed her eyes and replayed her mother’s dying accusations and agitated murmuring. Yes, Anna had been at the celebration party Walter had thrown aboard his yacht. Walter, Anna, Marla and Jeremy were present, along with Marla’s younger brother, Derek Ross, and a few other staff people involved in the diamond-trading business with Walter and Jeremy. Before the joint enterprise, Carlton’s company had been the biggest rival of Parks Mining and Exploration.
That was one way to get rid of the competition, Sara mused. Join forces, then make sure the other man faded from the scene. The ink had hardly dried on the contract of the joint endeavor when Jeremy conveniently drowned, leaving Walter in charge of everything.
The newspaper article stated that after the celebration party was over, Walter and Jeremy had stayed on board to drink a final toast to the success of their joint effort. Someone from a neighboring berth in the marina saw the yacht leave its moorings and head out for another cruise.
Later, in a statement to the police, Walter reported that he’d had too much to drink and had fallen asleep. When he awoke, the boat was drifting aimlessly at sea near the dangerous currents by the Golden Gate Bridge. Perplexed, he brought the yacht back into the harbor.
When he later discovered his new partner was missing, Walter could only surmise that Jeremy, equally intoxicated over their potential success, had taken the boat out, then fell overboard at some point during the night. There had been no one to dispute Walter’s word, so the tragedy had been marked up as an unfortunate accident.
Sara shook her head in anger and frustration. Derek had also been aboard the yacht when it went out the second time, according to her mother’s story. He’d gone to sleep in a cabin and was awakened by the quarrel between the two men. He heard Walter admit he was smuggling diamonds into the country. Opening the door to the main salon a crack, he saw Jeremy apparently pass out, then Walter had started up the yacht and headed out to sea.
Not sure what was going on, Derek had stayed in the dark cabin. When the engine slowed to an idle, he had witnessed Walter drag Jeremy onto the deck, then had heard a splash. Walter had returned to the salon, washed the used highball glasses, then returned to the wheel.
After they’d arrived at the marina and Derek was sure Walter had left, he sneaked out and went home. Later he told Marla what he’d seen. Marla had told him to keep his mouth shut if he didn’t want the same thing to happen to him.
Sara rested her forehead on her clasped hands as the bitterness surged and burned in her. Greed begat violence. Maybe her family had been better off without wealth.
“Are you all right?” a soft voice asked.
Raising her head, Sara stared at the young woman seated at the next computer. She managed a smile and nodded. “Just thinking,” she said.
“Well, that can be difficult,” the other woman admitted in a rueful tone.
Sara laughed with her, then quickly read all the other articles on Walter Parks and his family up to the present day. There wasn’t much information. The family had maintained a low profile with the press, it seemed, since that fatal incident. The yacht, according to Mark Banning, had been sold once the investigation had closed.
Interesting.
Sara closed the files and signed off. Any doubts that had lingered over her mother’s story were now laid to rest. Walter’s story didn’t hold water, one might say.
An hour later, Sara met Tai on the front walk to the school. “Hi,” the medical student said, looking embarrassed. “Uh, I came by to pick up Stace. My mom is doing fine, so I’m back on the job.”
“That’s good news,” Sara said warmly. “I’m no longer teaching here, but I’ve been picking up Stacy in the afternoons.”
“Yeah, Cade called and explained…sort of.” The student gave Sara a questioning glance.
The bell rang. Sara backed up a step. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said and hurried along the street, heading home before the youngster spied her and insisted she join her and Tai. Sara didn’t feel up to cheerful chatter.
At the house, she stayed inside with the doors closed, like a criminal hiding out after a robbery. It wasn’t until well after dark that she ventured onto the back deck, needing fresh air and freedom from her own company and the thoughts that went round and round in her head.
She stiffened when the door opened behind her. The lights had been off next door, so she’d assumed Cade was in bed. It was almost eleven o’clock. Huddling deeper in the afghan she draped over her shoulders, she hoped he wouldn’t notice her.
“Hello, Sara,” he said quietly. “Are you in hiding?”
“Yes.”
His chuckle wasn’t one of amusement. There was anger in it, and a cool detachment she hadn’t heard before.
He sat in one of the deck chairs. She sensed him gazing her way. Reluctantly she turned her face to him.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Nowhere, I guess.”
“No,” he said, disagreeing. “Things have gone too far for that. I talked to Mark Banning this afternoon.”
“Mark,” she repeated, trying to decide what this meant.
“I want him to check on certain things for me. It seems he’s already been doing that.”
Sara was pretty sure she knew what was coming, but she kept her mouth shut.
“He knew a lot about my family,” Cade concluded, still in that same quiet, coolly controlled tone.
His very air of calm made her nervous. He should have been openly furious or something. Instead he seemed remote and above it all. However, she’d grown up with her mother’s unpredictable moods, so she wasn’t sure.
“His brother works with mine,” she finally murmured after the silence lasted too long.
“So he said.”
“Then…you know everything.”
“I think so,” he admitted. “Like you, I think it’s time we laid these old ghosts to rest.”
She wasn’t taking anything for granted. “What do you mean?”
“I want to help you and Tyler with your investigation.”
She shook her head. In the dim glow of the city lights, she saw him nod affirmatively. “We don’t need help.”
“I think you do. Who would be better at researching family history than the family attorney?”
Clutching the afghan in shaking hands, she shook her head again. “Walter Parks is your father.”
The pause was brief. “I know.”
“I never wanted to hurt you.” She realized how lame that sounded. “I didn’t think about it like that,” she said, “in terms of pain and loss to others. Tyler and I wanted justice for our family. That was all.”
“Justice,” he echoed, a wealth of irony in the word. “I’ll help you find it. This shadow has been hanging over our lives for twenty-five years. I agree with you and your brother. It’s time we dispelled it.”
Questions raced through her mind, but she didn’t ask any of them. They sat there in tense silence. Traffic noises came to them at intervals as an occasional vehicle drove down the neighborhood street.
“Mark didn’t tell me much,” Cade continued. “He said it wasn’t his story to tell. Will you fill me in? I need to know what evidence you have or what you’re trying to find out, in order to help.”
“I can’t tell you, not without speaking to Tyler first. It’s his story even more than mine.” She couldn’t tell him why—that her half brother was also his half brother.
The tension became unbearable before Cade nodded. “I understand.”
“I don’t think so.” Her heart hurt, physically hurt, as she thought of him and his siblings and her own. He wouldn’t believe the duplicity of their parents—his father’s crime and her mother’s silence.
“Do you have a witness?”
She was so startled by the question, she could only stare at him. That action was enough to give her away.
“There was,” he concluded. “Or you think there was. Who was it?”
Sara’s heart pounded like a runaway train. She pressed her lips tightly together as if the answer might escape before she could stop it. She had her own questions about the past and its strange connections.
Why hadn’t Marla brought her brother forward all those years ago and had Walter convicted for his crime?
Even though Marla had expressed her fears of the man, obviously for good reason, her silence was something Sara would never understand. Of course, there had been the pregnancy and the twins that belonged to the murderer. That added to the tangle.
“You’re afraid to tell me. Do you think I’ll tell my father and that he’ll murder him, too?” Cade asked with more than a tinge of sardonic amusement in his voice.
“No,” she denied, but her voice quivered, betraying her doubts. “It’s so complicated, so unbelievably complicated,” she murmured, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms and the afghan over her legs as if to hold the tide of misery at bay. She sighed despondently.
He observed her huddled form before speaking. “We’ll sort one thread out at a time.”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll see.”
