House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) (18 page)

A
FTER LUNCH
Ann got busy with the tile replacement in the front bathroom of the mansion. There was no time to consider possible hiding places for Aunt Addy’s journal. She would give it more thought later.

She decided that she had no right to force Paul to talk about his plans for the future. Maybe she should just take Marti’s advice and enjoy the moment.

She and Paul had another picnic on his porch that evening and were sharing an after-dinner apple when his cell phone rang.

“Giselle. Hi. Sorry, I know I should have called before this.” He looked at Ann, got up and walked through his room and into the hall beyond.

Why was he so secretive? He’d already said Giselle was the sister-cousin he got along with. Ann couldn’t bring herself to eavesdrop, but she wanted to. He talked for fifteen minutes, and several times when he raised his voice, she did understand the words. “I’m as confused as you are,” he said once.

“I think I may have figured this out wrong from the beginning,” he said.

Figured what out?

He came in and sat down beside her on the porch again after he’d hung up. “My sister Giselle. I told you about her. She’s annoyed because I haven’t been keeping in touch the way I promised.”

“Will she visit you when the house is finished?”

He looked startled. “I hadn’t given it any thought. I suppose under the right circumstances she might.”

Ann shivered. She’d borrowed one of Paul’s plaid shirts for warmth, but it only fell halfway down her thighs. The rest of her was getting colder by the second.

He pulled her up and into his arms.

“Come on, I’ll clean up this mess tomorrow morning before I head out to the airfield.”

“I thought you said you were through dusting?”

“For the moment. Now I’m working on the Cessna with Hack. It’s one hell of a job.” He thought for a minute. “Who around here can fly a plane?”

“I don’t know—some of the farmers, I guess. The airline pilots obviously can, maybe some of the doctors can, as well. Hack would know who has a private plane.”

“Only if they park them with him.” He nearly asked about Karen Lowrance, but she’d be too smart to sabotage his plane herself. She’d hire someone.

Later, as Ann lay in his arms in the rosy glow of their lovemaking, she asked drowsily, “Tell me about your mother.”

“My mother? Why?”

“Because I want to know everything about you.”

“She disappeared when I was very young. End of story.”

“No, it’s not. Don’t you have any keepsakes, any pictures?”

“Only one. I’ll show it to you sometime.” He sounded drowsy.

She sat up. “How about now?”

He groaned. “All right, but it’s just an old photo.” He dug around in his suitcase and came up with a framed
eight-by-ten, black-and-white photo of a woman holding a child in her arms.

“That’s you, isn’t it? Look at all those long curls. You wouldn’t last two minutes in a day-care center.” She took the picture from him. “You have her dark hair.” She returned the photo and waited for him to come back to bed so that she could spoon against his back. It wouldn’t have been politic to tell Paul that his mother looked as though she’d been rode hard and put away wet. She looked too thin to be carrying around a bruiser like her son. Still, there was something familiar about that photo…

She took Dante out and slipped home before dawn. Something about that photo nagged at her, but it wasn’t until she was standing under her own shower that it hit her.

She jumped out of the shower and ran into her workroom naked. The pictures they had taken from Uncle David’s studio were carefully stacked on one of her work counters. She pulled the Paris street scene aside. There she was—the girl with the wind in her hair. She looked young and joyful in this sketch, while the woman Paul had showed her looked desperately tired and much older. But bones didn’t lie. The girl in this sketch was Paul’s mother.

One by one she looked at the other sketches, and then the sketch of the girl naked and obviously sated with lovemaking.

She threw on clothes, tied a scarf over her damp hair, grabbed Dante’s leash and her keys and walked across the square to the mansion.

Paul’s car wasn’t in the parking area. He must have gone to the airport early. She ran home, jumped into her truck with Dante and peeled out just as her father pulled
up. As she passed him, he yelled out his window, “Slow down!”

She stabbed the brakes and kept to a sedate thirty miles an hour until she reached the highway. Then she floored it. If her father was checking on the house, he wasn’t aiming his radar gun down the highway.

By the time she bumped over the railroad tracks in front of the airfield and slid to a stop beside the hangar where Paul kept his plane, she was furious.

She saw him leaning into the engine compartment chatting to Hack. She stomped over to him.

“Hey, Ann, honey,” Hack said. Then his eyes widened. “Uh-oh.”

Paul came out from under the cowling and turned to her. “Ann? Hi. Something wrong at the house?”

“You’re damn right something’s wrong.”

He blinked. “Huh?”

“Get down from there. We have to talk.”

“Now?” He glanced at Hack.

“I could use a cup of coffee,” Hack said. He backed away and limped toward his trailer.

Paul wiped his oily hands on the towel hanging from his belt and reached for her.

She jumped back. “Don’t you touch me, whoever the hell you are.”

“I beg your pardon? Ann, what’s gotten into you?”

“Did you think that photo was so old and faded I wouldn’t make the connection? Did you think she’d changed that much?”

“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You damn well do. The girl in Uncle David’s sketches is your mother.” He started to respond, but she held up her hands, palms front. “Don’t bother to deny it.”

He hung his head. “No, I won’t.” He turned away.
“Damn! I was half-asleep when I showed you that picture. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Maybe other people wouldn’t have caught the resemblance, but I’m an art restorer! I spend my life dealing with faces.” She took a deep breath. “Who the hell have I been sleeping with?”

“I know I should have told you, but I still haven’t discovered what I came to find out. There didn’t seem to be any right time, and I didn’t want to drag you into my problem.”

“What problem?” Ann screamed. “Who
are
you?”

“Calm down, just calm down.” He realized that behind her Dante was standing at attention and the hair on his back had risen. “Tell Dante I’m not going to attack you.”

She turned. “It’s okay, Dante. Sit.”

The dog did as he was told, but he stayed alert.

“Now, can we go someplace where we can talk?”

“What’s wrong with this place?”

“It’s a long story.”

“There are a couple of folding chairs over there. I’m not going anywhere until I know who I’m going with.”

“Fine,” he snapped. He brought over the chairs.

She sank into one. He stood in front of her with his hands in his pockets and a defiant look on his face. Like some kid who’s been called to the principal’s office, she thought. But he was no kid.

He told her everything. His mother’s marriage, his birth, coming to America, her disappearance, his adoption, his lifelong certainty that his mother had been murdered by the man who’d abandoned her. He told her that he’d finally discovered evidence that led him to Rossiter and David Delaney. “The house’s being for sale was coincidence,” he said. “I only planned to come down here long enough to substantiate my suspicions, but then buying and
restoring the house seemed like the perfect cover. It gave me a reason not only to live here but to ask questions about the family.”

“Cover? That’s all it was? A cover? All that guff you handed my mother about Shiloh and Civil War battlefields was lies? You’re spending a quarter of a million dollars on a cover story?”

“Much more than that. I planned to throw the house—throw myself—into their faces. I wanted to destroy the Delaneys. I wanted the world to know that David Delaney was a bigamist and a murderer. I wanted them to admit that Trey was illegitimate. I wanted them to acknowledge me as David Delaney’s firstborn legitimate son. I even considered contesting the disposal of my father’s estate, but I decided against it. I could have, you know. I checked. The will leaves nearly everything to Paul David Delaney’s first legitimate male heir. That’s me, not Trey Delaney.”

Ann gaped at him.

He looked at her grimly. “Most of all, I wanted to find where your dear uncle David hid my mother’s body after he killed her. I wanted to give her a proper burial with a tombstone that reads, ‘Here Lies Michelle Bouvet Delaney, wife of Paul David Delaney, mother of Paul Antoine Bouvet Delaney.’”

“What did you plan to do with the house after you accomplished what you wanted to do? Burn it down and dance on the ashes?”

“I planned to sell it right out from under them.”

“You’re crazy, you know that? I’ve been sleeping with a crazy man.”

He dropped into the chair opposite. “Yeah. I’m beginning to think you’re right.” He dropped his head into his hands. I’m beginning to think I was wrong.”

“Uncle David really wasn’t your father?”

“Oh, he was my father all right. I’m just not sure he killed my mother.”

“How do you know he was your father, just tell me
that.
You said yourself it’s been over thirty years, and all of a sudden new evidence pops up? Give me a break.”

“Not new. Giselle and I simply didn’t know it existed.”

“This I gotta hear.”

“To understand, you had to have known Tante Helaine. She looked tough and she ran that family with an iron hand, but she was a French immigrant married to an American without money or connections. She had the French hatred of authority, bureaucracy and most of all the police. She’d lived through the war. She had plenty of reason to be afraid of the police.”

“Not American police.”

“Any police. She believed the only way to survive was to stay below the radar. She was terrified that she’d commit some infraction that would get her sent back to France and away from Uncle Charlie and us.

“My mother and I were living with Tante Helaine and Uncle Charlie, and my mother was working in Tante Helaine’s bakery. But Maman spent every free minute she had at the library, poring over old telephone books, newspapers—anything she thought might help her find my father. I was too young to know all this at the time, of course. Tante Helaine told me later. All Maman knew about this Paul David Delaney was that he was from a small town somewhere in the mid-South and that his people had money.”

“She wanted him to support you.”

“She wanted him
back.
She believed that his family
was preventing him from returning to her and that he still loved her. Once he knew he had a son…”

“Lord.”

“She wasn’t quite twenty-five years old.”

“My God. In that photograph she looks forty at least.”

“She was worn-out. I can’t remember ever seeing her smile. She was tired all the time. But she never stopped loving him. Times were different.”

“They certainly were.”

“One day she left a note for Tante Helaine saying that she thought she knew where my father was and that she was taking what money she had and going to him. She said she’d let Tante Helaine know more when she was certain, but that she had to catch a bus. She took one small suitcase and walked out the door.”

“Where were you?”

“All three of us, Giselle and her sister, Gabrielle, and I, were at the bakery with Tante Helaine. It was Maman’s day off—the day she usually spent in the library.” He raised his eyes. “That’s the last we ever heard from her.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“Uncle Charlie filed a missing-persons report over Tante Helaine’s objections. She said they’d ignore him. She was right. The police said Maman was over eighteen and had probably just deserted me and run away with a lover. They filed the report, but that was all.”

“But surely she would have written or called?”

“She’d have written. She wouldn’t pay for long-distance charges.” He sighed and stretched his legs out in front of him. “Anyway, Uncle Charlie petitioned for custody. Tante Helaine pitched a fit. Not that she didn’t want to keep me. She was afraid that if the authorities knew I existed, they’d drag me off to some foster home. At that point Child Services were so backed up they’d
probably have given custody to a dealer in international prostitution. Seven years later Uncle Charlie forced her to have Maman declared dead. They adopted me.”

“They loved you.”

“Tante Helaine couldn’t show love, but I think she did love me. They handled me in different ways. Uncle Charlie told me to get on with my life, forget about Maman because we’d never know. He said the best way to thumb my nose at my father was to be something really special so he’d be sorry he’d deserted me.”

“Good advice.”

“Tante Helaine drummed it into my head that my father was a monster, that he’d run away from Maman and hidden from her, and that when she did find him, he killed her. She was sure of it. As time went by, so was I. Until six months ago all I could do about it was swear revenge. Then Tante Helaine died, and I offered to help Giselle clean her things out of the apartment so that it could be sold. Uncle Charlie had died years earlier of lung cancer.

“In the very back of Tante Helaine’s closet, hidden behind a hundred pairs of old shoes, was my mother’s suitcase. It had been held for a year after she disappeared in the ‘left luggage’ area of the bus station in Memphis, then opened and sent to the person whose name they found inside—Helaine.”

“And your mother had left all the information she’d gathered inside?”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t that easy. All Maman’s papers were there—my birth certificate, her marriage certificate, immigration papers, certificates of dual citizenship for the son of one Paul David Delaney, American citizen, address unknown.

“But that wasn’t all. Giselle and I didn’t know it until we opened that suitcase, but after Maman disappeared Un
cle Charlie had hired a private detective to find her. Apparently Tante Helaine made him fire the guy when he’d barely gotten started. As far as she was concerned, it was stirring the waters and might bring unwanted attention from the authorities. She’d seen children taken away in the war. When I talked to the detective—”