Fortune's Deadly Descent (22 page)

The alarm continues.

I approach the front door and peek through a small kitchen window. A tabby lounges on the wooden countertop, flicking its tail. It glances at me as if unfazed by a stranger peering in—so precious, it seems, is his opportunity to lounge in a forbidden space when clearly no one is home.

I turn my ear toward the noise. It seems to be coming from the back of the house. The gun wobbles in my jittery hand as I crouch along a small fence made of crooked, sun-bleached posts. I duck near the back door and wait. In the center of the yard sits an ironwork bistro table for two, shaded beneath an arbor woven with grape leaves. A neat row of sunflowers lines the property at the back, and beyond that, a giant field of tall dried grass—as golden and bulky as wheat never harvested. The alarm is much
louder here. Through the back-door window, I see no movement, no shadows, nothing but jackets and a straw hat on coat hooks. I turn my head back and forth between the window and the field and realize the alarm’s not coming from the house.

I bolt into the grass. The signal climbs in pitch the faster I run. I no longer hear my heavy breath, or the pounding in my ears. Please god. Don’t let Benny be here. For the first time since he went missing, I pray that I
don’t
find him—not like this.

I run until my chest burns. I start to make out a river through the grass. The alarm is incredibly piercing now, at the threshold of pain—how can it make such noise? I must be almost on top of the thing. I send the signal to shut it off, and silence bursts open around me, the sky seems to expand infinitely, and for a few moments, all I am is a tinny dying reverberation.

I can’t help myself, I kick through the grass, calling, “Benny! It’s Mutti!”

Straw rustles in the breeze. I push ahead. Then something blue. Cloth. Nausea grips me. I have the urge to run back to the car, escape before I witness something I will never be able to forget, never erase from my eyes or dreams. But I don’t run. I can’t. Instead, I fold back the grass with the tip of my shoe.

A backpack.
My
backpack, slightly discolored from the rain and sun. The soil around it reeks of compost. And there, tucked safely beneath it, is my computer bag.

My knees give like busted sticks and I go to the ground screaming Benny’s name. I crawl and scour through stiff reeds, clawing at the muck for clues I know I won’t find. However long I tear at the earth, it’s never going to return me to the life I once had, never give me back Benny in the kitchen laughing on his stool, that little-boy laughter that brings a crystal-clear joy like nothing else, nothing else.

The sun has dipped lower in the sky. Grasshoppers bound over my arms and legs, a dragonfly above my chest hovers and darts away. I should get up and do something, but I have no idea what. I’m afraid to move, afraid to leave the quiet of the field, only to receive news that Benicio is gone. And Benny.

I don’t know how much time has gone by. I guess I’ve been crying—my face feels tight, though that may be from the sun.

The ground vibrates. The phone buzzing near my leg. It’s only now that I realize it’s been going off for some time. I start to move but my body resists. Blood goes to my head in stages, like the
tick, tick, tick
of a tiny pickax against my skull when I pull myself to sit. My hands are filthy, my fingernails blackened. My knuckles are stiff and painful when I try to hold the phone.

Oliver.

“Sweetheart,” I say, my voice wispy and strange to me, my cheeks tight when I speak. I lick my sunbaked lips and taste the salt of tears.

“Where have you been?” Oliver asks. “I’ve been trying to call!”

“Is he dead? Benicio.”

“No.”

“But he’s going to die, isn’t he?”

“It doesn’t help for you to talk like that.”

“Your father will be the last one standing.”

“Stop this, Mom. Where are you?”

“And Benny?”

“There’s been no news. Isak said three days. It’s only been one.”

“No, that can’t be right. What day is this?”

“Mom?”

“We aren’t getting him back, are we?”

“You can’t think that way. Let me come and get you, and you can wait with Seraphina and me. I don’t think Moreau has any intention of pressing charges. If you give the gun back.”

“No, no. That’s fine. I’m fine.”

How many times have I had to say that in the past week? How many times has it been a shameless lie? I shift positions again and a different pain shoots up my arm. Suddenly I’m an old woman.

I realize Oliver’s been trying to get my attention again. “I need to tell you what I found out,” he says. “Can you
hear
me?”

“I’m here.”

“I signed up on this genealogy site. They have birth and census records going back hundreds of years. I found Pieter Donders’s grandfather—
Johan’s
father—in just a couple of clicks. He was born Alexander Siefert.”

Siefert? The name is another hard thump to my head. My maternal family’s name. My great-grandmother Annaliese’s name. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.

“Not at all. It stops there, though. I couldn’t find out who his birth parents were. But remember the letter Annaliese wrote to her daughter, your grandmother Sonja?”

“Of course.”

“Remember what she said happened to her when she was young?”

He’s referring to the rape. I don’t blame him for not wanting to say it. “Yes,” I say.

“What if she wasn’t honest about it? What if she lied about it? I mean, she said a child never came of it. But what if one
did
?”

My thoughts are a jumble. “You mean what if Sonja was actually the result of the rape?”

“No. No. Not Sonja. Someone else.”

“Oh.”

“The timing fits with Alexander Donders’s birth. He was given up for adoption. Or rather put into an orphanage in a neighboring village. The problem is, he was never adopted. He lived his whole childhood there.” The orphanage changed his name to Donders.

“People must have known who he was,” I say.

“Which is likely the reason no one wanted him.”

I feel a thunk behind my eyes when I rise to my knees. “What happened to him as an adult?”

“That’s where it gets even more interesting. Or awful, I should say. He married, and had a son named Johan. But not long after Johan was born, Alexander was convicted and hung for the murder of his wife.”

“Good god.”

“And Johan was taken in by the same orphanage his father grew up in. You can only imagine how
he
was probably treated.”

I sit back on my heels.

“It’s awful,” Oliver says.

For a moment, I’m lost in the groggy imaginings of loving and hating one’s own child, of wanting him while not being able to stand the sight of him. Then giving him away and hating oneself for doing it. Did Johan know his grandmother was living in the next town over? Was he punished for the sins of his father, grandfather, grandmother? An orphaned son of a murderer and
bastard child, the grandson of a rapist? Misery begetting misery, trickling down to us, to me, to this moment, battered and stunned, lost in a field, my own child ripped away from me.

“You have to wonder if Johan ever tried to contact her,” Oliver says.

“I can’t believe I had no idea about Johan. Our lawyers took care of everything. I didn’t know any of this, Oliver. I never saw his claim. His case was thrown out like all the rest before it even got off the ground.”

“Apparently, he was a laborer his whole life. He died of a heart attack while laying cobbles in a driveway not long after his case against you was dismissed.”

“He should have been taken seriously. He was a closer relative to Annaliese than I am,” I say.

“I called Klarissa.”

“Oliver, you didn’t.”

“I had to. The shooting has been running on the cable news networks for hours now. It’s not like I could hide it. Besides, I needed legal advice.”

I rub my forehead, feeling the numb burn of sun. I can only imagine Klarissa’s horrified reaction at Oliver’s news. “What did she say?”

“What could she say? She wants you to call her immediately. She’s been trying to reach you on Benicio’s phone. As for the Donders family, the court documents are public, and Helena Donders’s name is on every single one. Her signature tended to be at the top. In Klarissa’s opinion, the person who signs first is generally the one driving the case.”

“You mean she was pushing Johan into filing?”

“Just a guess. It’s odd that she would be on there at all. How did you make this connection in the first place?”

I glance down and realize I’m standing, gathering my things from the grass.

“It doesn’t matter, Oliver. I think she has Benny. The gardenia perfume in the bathroom was hers. I don’t know exactly how she did it but I’m pretty sure that she took him.”

“The perfume. It was in the report the whole time.” He groans.

“It’s their son, Pieter,” I say but have to stop and swallow, my throat a sticky web of dry skin. “He’s the one I worry about most.”

“I know. Three years in the same prison as Dad.”

I heave the gun from the ground. It feels heavier now. “But the man from the train,” I say. “Is he Pieter? Who is
he
?”

“Could be. He’s got to be someone who works with them,” Oliver says.

“If we find him, we’ll find Benny.”

The gun dangles in my face as I shade my eyes. I have to coax each leg forward into walking.

“I went to Moreau with this too,” Oliver says. “I had to.”

My muscles are heavy, cramping as I fumble through the grass. I need water, badly.

“I have to go, Oliver.”

“Mom?”

“I can’t talk anymore.”

“This gives Moreau something to go on,” he says. “Some idea of how and why Benny was taken.”

“But not the where,” I say.

“Let me come get you, Mom. You shouldn’t be alone.”

“
Where is he?
”

“We’ll find him. We will. We still have time.”

I hang up, pocket the phone, and stumble out of the field with my ruined bags in one hand and Moreau’s gun in the other.

If I don’t eat, I will die. A simple truth, a fact, and yet when I touch my lips with a spoonful of onion soup from room service, I cannot make it go in. The smell, which I’ve always loved, is now bitter, nauseating. I drop the spoon into the bowl, and the clang hurts my skin.

“Sugar shorts from the Sea of Cortes,” Benicio sometimes calls me for laughs. He calls me “lunch money” and “button Betty,” too. If I’m dressed up to go out to dinner, he likes to mock that old glam-rock song by singing, “Hot mama, whatcha doing after the show?” Once, across the table, he stopped in the middle of a sentence, took my hand, and said, “You are
such
a snack biscuit, bunny babe.”

I almost laugh at the memory. Almost.

Who gets to live like this?
he’d once asked.

We did, sweetheart. And we honored it, didn’t we? We knew we were happy at the time of our happiness. Not many people can say that. We’ll never need hindsight to show us what we already know.

How the hell did we get so lucky?

“We’re so far from lucky, babe,” I say to the glittery ceiling. “I think they call this
fucked
.”

He’d be upset with me, feeling sorry for myself this way. I can practically hear his voice in my ear—“I’m not dead
yet
, so quit making plans.” With his voice in my head, I smudge Brie onto a cracker and manage to force it down my throat.

Seraphina gets updates from the hospital every few hours and relays them to Oliver who relays them to me. There’s been no change in Benicio’s condition. He should be improving by now.
Something
should have changed. But he remains suspended in the murky nowhere, retrieved from the dead but not quite back among the living.

He couldn’t have sent Benny’s photograph to Jonathon. For one thing, taking the whole frame off the wall doesn’t make sense. Why not choose a loose photo from a drawer? Someone in a hurry took it, frame and all. It had to have been a stranger, acting fast. It’s always the handyman on the evening news. But we haven’t had anyone like that working for us in years.

Or have we?

I scramble onto the computer and pull up the article on the Donders case against me. What does Helena do for a living? Of course. Why should I be surprised? There it is—Johan, sixty-eight, laborer, his wife, Helena Donders, sixty-five, housecleaner.

I dial my cousin Claudia. She sounds stressed the minute she answers the phone. She’s been watching the news. I calm her down enough to talk, and she tells me about the audit. I ask if she’s ever hired a woman named Helena Donders to work for her. More specifically, if Helena Donders ever cleaned my house.

“Funny you should ask me that. That is exactly what the auditors wanted to know this morning.”

“Tell me everything they said.”

“I can’t. They told me I’m not allowed to discuss it with anyone but a lawyer. I don’t understand. My business is legitimate. I
don’t know where this is coming from. Does it have anything to do with Benicio getting shot?”

“I need you to tell me what you told them about Helena Donders.”

“I never met the woman. Renata does the hiring. As far as I can tell, she’s done work for us on and off for years as an extra hand. We’ve never had a problem with her.”

“Has she ever cleaned my house?”

“I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I would say yes, on occasion, she must have. We do background checks on everyone, Celia. What is this about?”

Bloodline.
This
is where Benny heard the word!
Johan’s
bloodline,
Benny’s
bloodline, the truth of where each came from, the legacy of their birthright. The children stolen by Roma. Benny stolen from Isabel and Jonathon, Alexander and Johan stolen from Annaliese. Helena
spoke
to Benny. Of course she did. And then he
recognized
her on the train. My god. He went with her because he
knew
her. She was in our house. She took the photograph from the wall and, most certainly, saw the train tickets tacked to the front of the refrigerator.