Patricia Potter (37 page)

He leaned against a dune, as still as marble, his blue eyes fathomless as he stared out to sea. She remembered what Sanders had said about him once, that he had never seen a man who seemed so alone. He was that now. A solitary, untouchable figure. She closed her eyes and heart against any feeling except rage, against a sudden urge to reach out to him again.

In self-defense she struck out again. “Tell me, damn it,” she demanded. “Tell me.”

He turned to her, expression rigidly controlled. “I know you can’t believe it, Meara, but I loved you. I fell in love with you that first day on the launch. You’re not saying anything to me I haven’t lived with every day of my life. I could only hope that…Sanders could give you the love I wanted to, but couldn’t. I wanted you happy, Meara. I wanted that more than anything in the world.” His voice was low, even faltering. So unlike the confidence and strength she remembered.

She wasn’t going to succumb. Not this time. Her voice hardened. “Then why did you come back? Why couldn’t you leave things alone? Why couldn’t you stay buried?”

“You may be in danger,” he replied slowly.

“You said that before. Who am I in danger from? And how would you know? Why would you even care? You didn’t twenty years ago.”

“I wasn’t going to let anything happen to you,” he said. “If you don’t believe anything else, believe that.”

“I was there, remember,” she said. “I heard everything. I killed your…friend. You didn’t.”

“But you couldn’t kill me,” he said softly, searchingly. The reminder was a mistake.

“I still couldn’t believe it then,” she said. “Not Michael. Not the gentle Michael who’d held me so lovingly. My Michael couldn’t be a spy. I didn’t fully realize then that my Michael was also Germany’s Michael.”

They were off track again, and Chris knew it. Whenever he started to explain the danger now, the past interfered, interjecting itself into the present. Any moment, she would get up and leave. He felt it. He saw apprehension in her eyes, and he suspected she wondered if he knew about Lisa, that their daughter was why he was here. At least that was one gift he could give her. She would never know that he knew.

“Listen to me, Meara. Please.”

She looked at him obstinately, a look he remembered well.

Shock, he thought, was the only way to get through to her. “Your visitor today—he’s the son of the man you killed that night.”

The words struck through the haze of Meara’s mind like a knife. “His son?”

“The man who…died that night was Hans Weimer. Kurt Weimer is his son.”

Meara stared at him. “I don’t believe you.”

“Believe me, Meara.” There was a convincing evenness in his voice that made her listen.

“But what…why…?”

“He’s been checking into your life, just as I have,” Michael said. Or was it Michael. But he would always be Michael to her. Good or bad. Love and hate. He was Michael. “That’s how I knew,” he continued. “My detective…accidentally discovered someone else had been making inquiries.”

Meara looked up at him with confused eyes. “I don’t understand. He’s with the German government.”

He wanted to touch, God, how he wanted to touch her, to wipe the sick bewilderment from her face.

“He’s a very distinguished member of the German government,” Michael corrected. “But my sources say he’s a member of Odessa.”

“Odessa?”

“An organization of ex-Nazis, mostly former SS officers, who still believe in the German Reich.”

“But he’s too young to have been in the war.”

“Too young for the SS, but he wasn’t too young to fight in the war or to be thoroughly indoctrinated in Nazi principles. Hans Weimer, his father, was SS.”

“You…?” The expression was pure horror.

“No. I told you I was Navy. I was just unlucky enough to be wounded and have Canadian connections—everything they needed. Hans was borrowed from the SS. I was borrowed from the German Navy.”

“Why doesn’t our government know about…this man?”

“Listen to me, Meara. I know I’m throwing a lot at you, but concentrate.” The command in his voice struck through her confusion. “No one knew the name of the man sent here with me. American officials only knew he had been hired as a gardener. I doubt there’s even a surviving record in Germany. It was a highly secret mission. The man who directed it, Canaris, head of German Intelligence, was later implicated in the Hitler assassination plot and killed. There can’t be too many others who know.”

“Then how does Kurt Weimer know?”

“I don’t know. A letter…one of the planning staff. I simply don’t know. The only reason I know his real name is that I was introduced to Hans Weimer when he was still a member of the SS, before he assumed his other name.”

Disbelief flickered over her face. “How do you know there’re no official records?”

“I’m a wealthy man, Meara. I won’t explain how and why now, but I have resources. I had the records checked for my name, and Weimer’s name. There was nothing. Just by luck, my investigator found Kurt Weimer, and the more he checked, the more I worried. There’s damn little negative about him, only very quiet rumors in very discreet groups. But he too has the influence and money to discover what he wants to know.

“Where did your money come from?” Meara mocked.

“Do you really want to know?” His eyes were shadowed, and strain showed at the edges of his mouth.

“Yes,” she said flatly.

He was handing her the weapon she needed for revenge. He knew it. But he didn’t care anymore. He cared only about convincing her of the danger…and accepting his help, no matter how resented it was.

“I didn’t steal it,” he said tightly, knowing that was what she was implying.

“Then tell me.”

He stifled a sigh. “I’m owner and president of Northwest Lumber, one of the largest privately owned lumber firms in the northwest.”

He waited for her bitter comment, and it came. “A present from a grateful German government?”

“No. I was a lumberjack for years, then foreman and superintendent. I was able to work my way up.”

“Like a cat, you land on your feet.”

He shrugged. She would never believe the hell of those years. He was lucky she was listening at all.

“And if I told the authorities?”

“I could go to jail, certainly be deported.”

“But there’re no records. You just said so.”

He stared at her. “A thorough check would show that Christopher Chandler died in Illinois almost fifty years ago. And I wouldn’t lie. Not any more.”

“Noble of you,” she observed astringently.

“No, I’m just damned tired of lies,” he admitted wearily.

“If you believe this man is a threat, then why don’t you go to the police? Or the FBI? Why come to me? Unless you’re worried about your own hide?”

To the heart of the matter. Well, she had always been very good at that.

“Several reasons,” he said. “I didn’t know how much the FBI knew. I gathered from the newspaper reports that local authorities were kept completely ignorant of the German factor. And there is no evidence that Kurt Weimer is anything but what he seems.”

“Perhaps he is exactly what he seems,” Meara said hopefully.

“How much do you believe in coincidence? I wasn’t sure myself until I saw him at your house. How did that happen?”

“My daughter met him at the Cloister last night where she and her boyfriend went to dinner. She’d dropped her purse, and he came today to return a compact.” Meara almost choked on the word “daughter,” but if he’d checked on her, he would know she had one. Hopefully, he would believe she was Sanders’s.

“She’s very pretty,” Michael said objectively, and Meara felt a surge of hope. He didn’t know. She didn’t think she could ever cope with Lisa learning the truth. It would destroy her daughter if she knew that rather than the father she adored, she was fathered by a German spy who duped her mother.

“She loved her father very much. She’s still hurting badly.”

“And she’s emotionally vulnerable at the moment?” But it wasn’t really a question.

Meara stared at him, at the strong, handsome face that had stolen her heart. “Like mother, like daughter,” she exclaimed bitterly. “Is that what you mean? You think he’ll use her to get to me, like you used me to get to the Connors.” She felt herself trembling, and she hated herself for it.

“No,” he said softly. “After that first meeting with them, I didn’t need you. I just damn well couldn’t stay away from you. And no, they don’t teach things like that in spy school, or I would have been better prepared and left you alone. Perhaps then we might have succeeded. You stopped the kidnapping, you know. You and you alone. I hope Evans understood that. I hope you do.”

Meara wanted to believe. But she couldn’t. She’d lived twenty-one years believing the worst. Hate had helped her survive in some ways.

Now he was telling her that those events in the spring of 1942 were threatening her daughter.

“She’s really in danger?” Meara’s voice was shaking.

“I think both of you are.”

“But why Lisa? Why not just me?”

“You have to understand the SS mentality,” he said, “and their means of exacting punishment. They always took and killed hostages when one of their own was killed. They knew that pain was worse when inflicted on a loved one rather than the person directly responsible.” For the first time, his voice was bitter, and she remembered him saying something about a mother and brother. Truth or lie. She no longer knew, and she was too emotionally tired and confused to know the difference.

“You still haven’t said why you, or I, can’t go to the police if we really are in danger.”

“First, I don’t know if they’ll believe you…me…us,” he said. “And if they did, the whole affair would be reopened. I didn’t know if you’d want that.”

He allowed her to consider what he’d said, then added quietly. “I’ll do whatever you wish. I’ll go to the FBI and tell them everything if you want. Or I’ll stay here and try to find out what Weimer wants. I have people who can protect you.”

The whole affair reopened? Meara’s heart stopped. Dear Mother in heaven, Lisa knew nothing of what had happened. Nothing. Not even the fact that her mother was once involved in a kidnapping. Both Meara and Sanders had carefully kept it from her, afraid that one piece of information might lead to another, that Lisa might connect certain dates.

Sanders had once broached the possibility of telling Lisa the truth. But again, what could be told? The whole affair had been labeled top secret and everyone warned never to say anything. And what could she tell Lisa about her real father? Meara stared at him now, seeing pieces of him in Lisa. The blond hair. The blue eyes. Thank God, Lisa’s weren’t quite as blue, for if they had been, Michael would know in a second that Lisa was his. Even now, there was that danger.

She had no place to turn.

Except to him.

The man who had lied to her, betrayed her. As he might be lying now.

She hadn’t known the dead man’s name. She didn’t know of any connection between him and the seemingly personable German economist she’d met today. Perhaps it was all a lie to ingratiate himself in hers and Lisa’s lives.

But Meara remembered the slight chill she had in Kurt Weimer’s presence, that fragmentary sense of familiarity. She looked up at Michael’s face and saw the worry there, worry and something deeper.

And she knew. She knew he wasn’t lying.

In that second, she knew he saw acceptance in her face.

He started to reach for her hand, and she jerked it away as if branded.

“Don’t ever touch me again,” she said, repeating what she had told him earlier. She knew if she relented, she would be lost. One caress, one touch, and she’d be lost again. She could still feel her soul burning from the contact minutes ago. “I’ll accept your help because there’s nothing else. But don’t touch me. Do, and I’ll report you to the FBI and happily see you in prison. Do you understand me?”

His mouth twisted into the self-mocking wry smile she had once loved. “You’ve always had a way with words, Meara.”

“I’m going to walk back alone. I have to think.”

He nodded, his eyes hooded.

She started to get up, and fell back, her legs stiff from the awkward position. She saw him start to reach for her, then withdraw his hands, and she felt triumphant…and infinitely sad.

On the second try, Meara made it to her feet through sheer determination. “Where can I find you?”

He gave her the address of the cottage and telephone number.

She didn’t look at him again. “Come on, Andy,” she said to the dog who was ambling to his feet. She walked down the beach, only vaguely aware of the darkeness, of the sky now inky blue and decorated by a million stars.

It was no longer romantic. Only menacing. And lonely. Very, very lonely.

Not until she arrived back at the house and found it empty did she remember she hadn’t told Michael that Lisa had a dinner date with Kurt Weimer that night.

She went into sudden panic and thought about running back to Michael. He would still be there. She sensed it. Then she stopped. He had thrown too much at her. Her mind wasn’t functioning logically in any way. Michael alive. Here. Nazis. Odessa. Revenge. Danger for her daughter. In the comfort of the house, where she could hear the soft sound of the surf, it seemed impossible, crazy. But then the thought of a German raid on Jekyll twenty-one years ago had been just as bizarre.