Blackberry Winter: A Novel (34 page)

Warren lived in an older high-rise downtown. He’d purchased the penthouse suite with his late wife years ago. It was a grand place—or at least, it once was. The private rooftop deck, above the living room, used to be my favorite hideaway in Seattle. On warm nights, Ethan and I would join Warren for wine there, counting the stars overhead, taking in a panoramic view only birds were fortunate enough to have—from the Space Needle to Alki Beach. No one went up there anymore, though. The spiral staircase had become too difficult for Warren’s weak knees, and Ethan had become too busy for wine and stargazing. I’d been on the roof a final time in the spring only to discover that it had become a nesting ground for a family of very messy pigeons.

Warren had let the housekeeper go just after Christmas. “I don’t care if there’s dust on my coffee table!” he had exclaimed to Glenda on a visit months ago as she eyed the stacks of disheveled magazines and books and dust-caked windowsills. Warren was the only Kensington who seemed to care less about keeping up with appearances, and I’d always loved him more for it. Still, there was no denying that he hadn’t been himself of late. I’d blamed his illness, but I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something more. I took a deep breath and buzzed his apartment number.

“Yes?”

“Warren, it’s me, Claire.”

“Yes,” he said. “Come on up.”

I took the elevator to the twenty-third floor, imagining what he’d say when I got there. He’d tell me I couldn’t print the story because it would disgrace the family. He’d say that it would incriminate Josephine, rest her soul. He’d make me promise not to utter a word of it.

I knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he called out from inside. “The door’s open.”

I walked inside, where Warren sat at the table eating a sandwich.

“I was expecting you,” he said, dabbing a spot of mustard from the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “You’re a sharp reporter, Claire.” He indicated the pages in front of him.

I walked closer and recognized the headline. My article.

“You’re even better than my private investigators.”

The house was eerily quiet. The tick of the clock on the wall grated.

He clasped his hands together. “To think that military-trained investigators couldn’t find the files at the Sharpe house, but you could.” He shook his head at me in amazement. “Now
that’s
skill.”

My heart beat faster.
My God.
He knew of the break-in at Lillian’s home. Worse, he seemed to be responsible for it.

I shook my head. “Warren, I don’t understand.”

“Come, sit down,” he said, pointing to the chair beside him. “I’ve been trying to solve this mystery for many years,” he continued. “It took me a great deal of time to find out what happened to Vera Ray. The case files were mysteriously lost in a fire at the police station. Too convenient, don’t you think? Then I—”

My hand trembled.
What is he telling me? What does this all mean?
“Warren,” I said, shaking my head, “I don’t understand.”

His smile put me at ease. “At first I thought it was because I wanted to protect my family, to seal away the truth in all of its ugliness. But it’s more than that. It’s a very personal story for me.”

I covered my mouth, the wheels in my mind spinning so quickly I could hardly keep up. “Warren, are you telling me that you think you are…?”

He nodded. “Yes. I killed the story because it needed a new ending. Thomas Kensington was not Daniel.” His smile said everything. “I am. I wanted to tell you myself.”

I gasped. “How did you find out? You were only a boy when—”

“Yes, the past is a blur, of course,” he said. “I was only three when I was taken.”

Taken.

I shook my head, processing the weight of the revelation.
I’m looking right at Daniel Ray. He’s been here all along.

“But a boy can sense things, even from a young age,” he said. “Mother looked at me differently than the others.”

“You mean Elaine?”

“Yes,” he said. “At first I thought I must have been less lovable than my sister. But as I got older, I came to wonder if there was
something else. One night after a party when Mother and Father had drunk too much wine, I heard them arguing in the parlor. Mother mentioned her name.
Vera.
She said it was all her fault that I was performing poorly in school. She blamed my grades on Vera’s ‘weak genes.’ Of course, I didn’t know what she was talking about or who Vera was. I didn’t think about it again until Aunt Josephine had a stroke in the 1980s. The family gathered around her bed at the hospital. Father hadn’t seen his sister in more than fifty years. He refused to speak to her after a falling-out they had when I was a boy. So when he showed up—when we all showed up—she was hysterical, trying to tell me how sorry she was for ruining my life, for taking me as a child, for taking me away from Vera. Mother and Father said it was only the illness speaking, that her mind wasn’t right, but I knew that wasn’t the case. What she said had to be rooted in truth, and when I began to look into my past, I learned they were protecting me from something very terrible. From what I have pieced together, Vera and my father were madly in love, but she was poor, and the family disapproved of her, but no one more than his sister, Josephine. Vera’s mother worked as her nanny years before. Aunt Josie didn’t like the woman, so she took her anger out on her daughter, Vera. She hated the thought of me, a Kensington, being raised by a commoner, so she took matters into her own hands.”

“Did your father, Charles, know about this?”

“As far as I know, he, tragically, learned the truth from Josephine after Vera’s death,” he said. “I suspect that Josephine worried that being the good man that he was, he’d make sure I was reunited with my mother if she were still living. In her mind, she had to wait until Vera was out of the picture entirely.”

I shuddered. “So what did your father say when you landed on his doorstep?”

“Josephine orchestrated it with the precision of a marionette,” he said. “From what I can piece together from her mutterings at the hospital years ago, she didn’t tell him who I really was, not at first. My father had a good heart. He was a man of charity. She said I needed a home, and my father took me in. Then, shortly after Thomas died, Josephine confessed her crime to Father—perhaps her own terrible loss made her realize just what she had taken from Vera and prompted her to come clean. She maintained that she did it only for my well-being, said that a Kensington should never be raised in poverty. He didn’t speak to Josephine again after that, not for a long time to come.”

“So he and his wife adopted you, and kept the secret all those years?”

“Yes,” he said. “No one spoke about the past. It was all carefully shrouded, until it forced itself free. That’s the thing about secrets—they always do find their way. Even if it takes a lifetime.”

“Vera, your mother, died in a boat on the lake that night,” I said. “Do you think she died at Josephine’s hands?”

Warren sighed. “I think she had something to do with it. I think she may have directed Vera to that leaky boat, knowing she couldn’t swim.”

I nodded. “The thing that I don’t quite understand is why the police didn’t push the case harder, and why they were so quick to charge Ivanoff with Vera’s murder.”

“That’s why I wanted to get my hands on those case files,” he said. “I suspect Josephine, and others in the family, had something to do with that fire at the station. In any case, my family is well connected. If Josephine or anyone else needed a favor from the police, it happened. Ivanoff was the easy target. By going after him, they took the spotlight off of the family, and what really happened.” He
turned back to the draft of my article before him. “I couldn’t have written it better myself.”

“When you realized all of this, why didn’t you go to the police? Why didn’t you do something?”

“Do what? Report my family to the police? Have them arrest a dying woman?”

I saw his point.

“No,” he continued. “What happened is in the past. Nothing I do can bring my mother back.”

“You’re right.”

He paused, as if trying to remember something. “I was going through some of my father’s old papers last year, and I found the ledger where his accountant kept records of his finances. I discovered something interesting inside.”

“What?”

“You know the women’s shelter on First Avenue?”

I nodded. “Hope House, right? I did a feature on the program last year. It’s a wonderful place. They take in homeless mothers and pregnant women.”

Warren looked out the window at the Seattle skyline. “My father founded it,” he said.

I smiled with satisfaction. “Charles.”

Warren’s eyes filled with pride. “Mother could never understand why Father spent so much time on his charity work. I think poor people frightened her, but not Father.”

“It all makes sense,” I said. “He built Hope House in memory of Vera. Oh, Warren, you are your father’s son. Now I know where your big heart comes from, your sense of humanity.”

“I only wish I could have talked to him about this years ago,” he said.

I pointed to the article in his hands. “And now that you have the whole story, do you feel peace?”

“Yes, in some ways,” he said. “But still, there’s something missing, something I’m hoping you can help me with.”

I nodded. “Yes, anything.”

“My old home,” he said wistfully. “The apartment I shared with Vera. You’ve been there, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

He sighed. “It’s the one piece of the puzzle I wasn’t able to solve. It’s funny, I can remember the strangest details, like the way the lamppost flickered outside the window, and the grating sound of the women doing the wash in basins in the alley. But for the life of me, I can’t remember the location of the apartment. I used to go out walking late at night, hoping I’d recall the address, wishing some storefront or old building would call to me, but all these years, the place has eluded me.” His eyes, pleading and misty, stared into mine. “Can you take me there, Claire?”

“I would love nothing more,” I said. “How about tomorrow afternoon?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them with new strength. “Thank you, dear.”

I leaned in to kiss his cheek. “Is it weird that I want to call you Daniel now? It must sound so strange to hear the name.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t. It’s the name that’s always been in my heart.”

T
he next morning, I sat up in bed and stretched my arms. Ethan was gone, yes, leaving a vacant spot in my heart, but I tried not to think about it. I put a bowl of instant oatmeal in the microwave and watched out the window as a ferry streamed into the bay. Ethan and I used to love to sit and watch the ferries come in and out. We had pet names for them. Edgar. Duncan. Maude. I smiled, recalling the day he’d named one Horace.

The phone rang from the kitchen, and I ran to pick it up. “Hello?”

“Claire, it’s Eva.”

“Hi,” I said. “It’s good to hear from you again.” I couldn’t wait to tell her about Warren.

“I was wondering if you might be able to stop by today,” she said. “There’s something that occurred to me and…well, we can talk when you get here. Are you free?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of my afternoon plans with Warren. We could stop by Eva’s place first. I could reunite two old friends. “Would noon be all right?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Oh, and Eva, I’ll be bringing along a friend. Someone I’d like you to meet.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “The more the merrier.”