Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (58 page)

Ashley, do not even waste your time trying to tell him he didn’t murder the horse or his dad or Archduke Franz Ferdinand – he won’t hear you, and you know it. Instead, let’s just get him started on what happened next, and we’ll see where that story goes and how it intersects with the end of the world – hey, it has to be a step up from the whole ‘man and horse instantly transformed into a bone and jelly sandwich’ scenario, right?

Nope, not so much.

“So the aftermath must have been pretty crazy, I’m guessing?”

Devon shrugged. “I am told it was quite the mad scene, but I truly don’t remember that much of it. I recall the train of coincidences that led up to my father’s demise with crystal clarity, and as much as I would like to forget it, the moment of his death is seared into my brain … but afterwards? I fear my memories of the next hours and days and weeks are rather spotty – some moments remain laser-sharp in my mind, others are murky, and some are forever lost to me.”

“Well, emotional trauma will do that to anybody, big guy.”

“True enough, but wounds to my soul were not the only cause of my recollections turning into grey and shifting things, like spotlights cast upon a storm-tossed ocean – other varieties of trauma were also involved. Come, I’ll show you.”

He leaned back in his chair and waved for me to come around to his side of the table. Once I got over there, he canted his head to the right and pointed at a particular spot high up on his left temple, above his ear.

“While you have done a thorough and quite delightful job of exploring my body during our time together, I’m rather sure you haven’t noticed this particular point of interest – if you had, I imagine a certain Killane would now be in his grave instead of a jail cell, thanks to my fierce Ashley. Feel about in there, you’ll find it.”

He looked past me at a blank spot in the wall while I ran a hand over his hair, and then sank my fingers into it. What was I looking for? I had no idea, but I went at it anyway, sorting through the thick black mane that hadn’t felt a barber’s scissors in weeks.

“I don’t know, boss; you’re going all hippie on me here with this mop you’re growing on your head, so I might not be able to find whatever you’re talking –”

Then I found it. As I probed through to his scalp, my fingertips slid into … a dent. Over his ear and just below the crown of his head, there was an egg-shaped depression in his skull. It was solid beneath my touch, like a rocky little valley hiding in the forest of hair – or like a secret hiding below the surface of a story. Firm and not the least bit sensitive to being touched – judging by Devon’s lack of reaction to my prodding – this was plainly old news.

But news of what? Why was he sporting a crater in his head? What had happened to him?

What had been done to him?

“Devon, please tell me how that thing got there, and tell me now.”

He asked me a question instead.

“Ashley, who has not yet been mentioned in this account of my father’s end?”

I rolled my eyes. “Gee, I don’t know – Amelia Earhart? Ivan the Terrible? Tom Bombadil, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Humphrey Bogart? Devon, why the hell do you have a dent in your skull?”

I glanced around, snatched up one of the extra chairs, and pulled it up next to him. I planted myself in that chair, and I waited for an answer.

Devon brought his head level again, ran a hand over the patch of hair I’d mussed up, and then reached forward to retrieve his glass of orange juice. He drained the last dregs, sat back again, and he spoke like a man making an idle observation about a mildly interesting film he hadn’t seen in years.

“The Killanes were rather cross when they found out I’d killed my father.”

His voice flowed on, mild and routine and relaxed. “They didn’t come to the scene of his death. That stable area was filled with a storm of people in the minutes and hours after it happened, but I never saw a single Killane.

“An ambulance arrived within a few minutes, but the paramedics who jumped out of it slowed and stopped and stared as they saw that my father was beyond their help.

“Police came, taking statements and photographs. Men in suits fussed and questioned and hurried about – they might have been track management or detectives, I’m not certain – while the trainer spoke to the police, argued with various track officials, steered his people here and there, made an endless series of phone calls, and likely cursed the day he met Kevin Killane.

“A veterinarian came and gawked at the dead horse for some useless reason or other; after a few minutes he left, ashen and shaking. The grooms I’d befriended in the hours before my world exploded came to check on me, talking to me and reassuring me and saying a thousand kind, well-meaning things that did no good at all.

“Horses neighed from the backs of their stalls, confused and scared. Cats hissed, goats hustled passersby for treats and attention, and I remember one of the dogs wandering up and thrusting its head against me, quivering its tail as it tried to comfort me in its own way.

“I thank every force in the universe that Maria stayed with me through it all, holding me safe from the madness that swirled all around us – if she hadn’t been there, I think I might have bolted, or screamed my throat raw, or lost my mind entirely. Of course, if she hadn’t been there and I had run away in the confusion, who knows where I might be now?”

He sighed. “I did have one useful thought during all that insanity – Uncle Sheridan would know what to do.

“He would come and get me, he’d hide me at his home, and I’d be safe there while he fixed everything somehow. So I grabbed at the trainer as he rushed past, pleading with him to call my Uncle Sheridan – but the man shrugged me off and hurried away, intent on something or other he was doing to cope with the situation.

“Off he went, and he took my one hope of escape with him. If only this had happened a few years later, Maria could have pulled a cell phone from her pocket and my future might have gone in another direction altogether, but all phones were landlines back in those days.

“I asked her to take me to the nearest phone so I could make the call myself, but a police officer blocked our path and ordered us to stay put because we were material witnesses who had not been authorized to leave the scene, or some such nonsense. I begged the police officer to call my uncle, he said one of my uncles was already sending someone to pick me up, and that was that.

“I knew in my sinking heart that Uncle Sheridan wasn’t the uncle they’d called.

“I clung to Maria like the pathetic little animal I was, I cried, and she held me like a lioness defending her cub. She stroked my hair and asked if I had a mother I could go to – I howled that I didn’t know where Mama was, that they wouldn’t let me see her, that I loved Mama, and then I ran out of words and cried until I couldn’t breathe.”

I pushed my chair right up against Devon’s, I leaned over and wrapped my arms around him, and it was years too late, but I hugged him close. I hugged him, and I buried my face in his shoulder before I could start crying.

He kissed the top of my head, rested there for a moment, and then he sat up and soldiered on to what happened next.

“The coroner sent a black van. It was one of those bland, unmarked, anonymous vehicles that arrive when something nasty needs to disappear, and the men who climbed out of it did their best, I imagine – Maria wouldn’t let me watch their efforts.

“I suppose a body bag or a bucket, a number of spatulas, and stomachs of cast iron were their chosen tools, but regardless, they separated what was left of my father from the remains of the horse, somehow. The bits of him scattered over the trunk and leaves, on the grass, and in the dirt were cleaned away, and do you know what I saw the one time I squirmed around in Maria’s arms to steal a glance at what they were doing?”

“Do I want to know? Scratch that, of course I don’t want to know, but you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

“Of course. It was another one of those curious and irrelevant details that won’t release its hold on your memory, despite being such a trivial thing … when I looked around, they’d already loaded everything they could scrape together of him into the van, when one of the men performing that thankless job noticed one of my father’s shoes leaning against an exposed tree root.

“I followed his gaze, and I stared at that shoe. I was quite struck by how perfect and untouched it was by all that had happened – the imported Italian leather gleamed in the sunlight, the laces were still tied, and there wasn’t so much as a single spot of blood on it. It sat there just as it would have in my father’s closet that morning, empty and flawless, waiting.

“The man who’d spotted the shoe snatched it up and tossed it into the van. I watched that shoe spin end over end, I distinctly heard it thunk onto the floor of the van, and then Maria turned me back towards her again.

“That was the last I ever saw of my father.”

“But didn’t you go to the funeral?”

“No, I did not. A family spokesman informed the press that Kevin Killane’s heartbroken son was grieving and ‘in seclusion’ at an undisclosed location, but the truth of the matter was rather different – I spent the funeral locked in a Long Island hotel room with a guard stationed outside the door, as my uncles were under the odd impression that I might try to escape their justice. I was not, therefore, ‘in seclusion’ so much as I was a prisoner.”

“Devon, I doubt that the Killanes even have the word ‘justice’ in their dictionaries – it’s probably blacked out with a Sharpie, along with words like ‘sympathy,’ ‘humanity,’ and ‘decency.’ Besides, why the hell would they feel the need to impose their version of justice on you, anyway? You were a spectator at that particular train wreck, not the drunk engineer – how could they get away with locking you up for it?”

“They locked me up not as just punishment for my sins, but so that I could not run away from their just punishment, which came later.”

Before I could get started on how unjust the entire situation had been, Devon headed me off at the pass. “In time, my Ashley, all will be revealed – until then, I ask your patience.”

He ended his narration of that awful day in the same calm professor’s voice he’d used from the beginning. “Not long after the coroner’s van trundled away, a skip loader arrived to remove the horse’s carcass. A ring of grooms and exercise riders stood around the scene, watching as the unlovely remains of that lovely animal were scooped up to the accompaniment of groaning gears and creaking metal, and when it was done, they all drifted back to their endless work, never meeting each other’s eyes.

“Brave Maria stayed with me to the end. She promised she would not leave me until my family came for me, and so she did not. Others offered to sit with me, but she refused them all. The trainer happened by at one point, stood a cautious distance away, and suggested that perhaps she might get back to work; when she answered him with a fierce shake of her head and an icy stare, he had the good sense to move on.

“In time, the Killanes came for me. They always do.

“A deathly black limousine nosed around the corner of a barn and rolled toward me, thirty minutes or so after they took the horse away. It bumped over the dirt and lurched to a stop six feet away.

“I never saw the driver – he stayed in his seat, behind a tinted window, and kept the engine running. As he waited, two men stepped out of the back of the limousine – one was a stranger in an aggressively expensive suit, a stranger who I later learned was a lawyer in the pay of my uncles. The other man wore a reserved, inconspicuous suit that did little to hide the bulge of a holstered gun; I recognized him as a bodyguard who worked for my youngest uncle, Kinsale Killane.

“Maria glared at them both – she was the bravest little thing I’d ever seen, they were twice her size or more – and then she asked me if I was quite sure I wanted to go with these men. Hopeless thing that I was, I told her they came from my uncles and that I had to go with them. She hugged me one last time, told me I was welcome to come see her whenever I could get away, and together we’d feed the horses their portions of grain.

“Of course, I never saw Maria again.”

He said this with a frightening sort of calm – after all, didn’t terrified little kids lose their last hope of kindness and safety every day?

“I did try to locate her about ten years ago, after I’d spent an entire night walking off the remnants of another panic attack and was in desperate need of even the memory of comfort.

“My representatives discovered that some three years after my father died, she apparently ran afoul of one of this country’s mystifying immigration laws, and was deported back to El Salvador like so much unwanted baggage. I then sent several of my people down there to look for her, but it turns out that ‘Maria Hernández’ is as common and forgettable a name in El Salvador as ‘Mary Smith’ is here, and the trail ran cold.

“In any case, Kinsale Killane was the first of my uncles to arrive on Long Island and investigate whatever awful thing it was I’d done to their brother, and I spent the next week locked in his hotel room.

“The family spent that time sweeping the whole ugly business under the rug, hiding as many details as they could from the press and cremating my father as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, I tried to use the suite’s phone to call Uncle Sheridan, but I found the line was disconnected. I begged the bodyguards who always hovered nearby to call Uncle for me; but they were newly hired, did not know me, and were intent on keeping their jobs, so they refused.”

“Devon, there’s one thing I’m not tracking you on – well, a lot of things, but one of them seriously puzzles me: why did you immediately assume your family would blame you for what happened to your dad? I mean, every one of the eyewitnesses would have testified that it was in no conceivable way your fault, right?”

He raised a single eyebrow. “Ashley, these were Killanes – as you so often observe, they are assholes of the worst stripe. Is it so strange that they would blame the child they hated for their brother’s death?