You Don't Want To Know (36 page)

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Authors: Lisa Jackson

BOOK: You Don't Want To Know
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“Anyone find the wig on the premises?” Lyons asked, sipping her tea while her gaze stayed fastened to the screen.
“Let's see . . .” More clicks and he found a list of the contents of the area around the crime scene. “Nope, don't see it.”
“Halloween was just a few weeks ago.”
“Only if the picture was from this year. It could have been taken a decade ago.”
She shook her head. “The cats in the picture? All the same as she has now. A couple of them are young, recent additions if the neighbor is right, so it's from this year.”
“So where the hell is the wig?”
Lyons smiled and it was one of those slow, I've-got-a-secret smiles he found attractive. “With the killer.” She was dunking her tea bag as she nodded, happy with herself.
“Or in the bay.”
“With Lester Reece?” As she squeezed the tea bag between her fingers and tossed it into the trash, she added, “There could be a chance that when his remains finally float to the surface, his skeleton will be dressed in drag, like a sexy, if emaciated, kitty cat.”
“Huh,” he grunted. The truth was that the black hair found at the scene was damned near a dead end. Trouble was, it was the only clue they had.
Bam!
The boat slammed hard against the wake of a speedboat flying in the opposite direction.
“Shit!” Wyatt stood at the helm, steering into the darkness, the few lights of Monroe visible ahead. “Idiot! I should report that guy!”
Ava barely heard, nor was she aware of the icy wind that blew against her cheeks and tangled her hair. Even her shopping bags were forgotten as the boat shimmied a little and she was thrown back in time to another trip across the water, to the late afternoon when Kelvin had died. This was a memory she didn't want to review again, but she seemed destined to replay it over and over.
Her flesh actually pimpled at the thought of the approaching twilight and the raw fear of those moments. In her mind's eye, she saw the tragedy unfold all over again.
The wind had been fierce, the waves wild at the sudden squall. Ava remembered the sheer terror of the outing, how she'd prayed they'd make it safely back to shore, how her fears had centered on the baby . . .
Pregnant, Ava was almost at term and . . . No. She frowned. That wasn't right. Noah had come early and . . .
Something pricked at the edges of her brain, something cruel and sharp, the edge of a lie. Her gut twisted almost painfully as she tried to recall what it was, but like a moray eel lying deep among the rocks of the ocean, it poked its head out only to retract again, teasing but not coming clear.
“What is it?” she asked, thinking so hard a headache formed. It was something to do with the baby, the pregnancy, and . . . and . . . an idea formed and she discarded it quickly. No, that couldn't be right.
And yet.
She thought back to the first trimester. No morning sickness.
And the second. When had she learned she was carrying a boy? Why couldn't she remember visiting the gynecologist, having the ultrasound, seeing Noah as he grew inside her . . . ?
“Oh God.” A cold certainty began to envelope her and she started hyperventilating.
Why didn't she remember much about the hospital and his birth? Why were there no pictures of the delivery?
Because it was traumatic. Taken after the wreck. Kelvin had already been pronounced dead, the doctors were working on Jewel-Anne, so your impending labor was cause for concern. No time for cameras or flowers or balloons or . . . anything.
She swallowed hard and her lungs could hardly take a breath as the wind screamed past, seeming to mock her and her inability to face the truth that now came screaming back at her. Images of that night flashed like a harsh kaleidoscope behind her eyes. Bits and pieces, shattered into odd shapes—the wreckage, the rescue, the hospital, the news of Kelvin's death, the fear that Jewel-Anne might not make it. And the baby. In the hospital, he'd been screaming and squalling, a red little bundle without much hair, his little fists raised . . .
“He needs to be fed,” she'd said, her voice echoing through her mind. “Please . . . he needs to be fed.”
“We'll take care of him,” the nurse had said, and her heart had ached as they took him from her.
Why? Did they take him away to clean him off?
To measure and weigh him?
To check his vital signs . . .
More images surfaced and they fought with the truth as she knew it.
Wyatt slowed the engine and, using the remote, raised the seaward door of the boathouse. An interior light switched on, and Ava, struck to her very soul, counted her heartbeats. Wyatt docked the boat, tied it up, and helped her onto the skirt around the boat slip.
No!
she thought wildly.
No, no, no!
She had to be wrong!
“I'll get these for you,” he offered as if from somewhere far away, and she didn't launch the tiniest of protests as he carried the shopping bags up the walkway and into the house.
She was too stunned with her revelation, lost in her own world, trying desperately to discount what she was remembering as she followed him up the stairs.
“Are you okay?” he asked as they reached her room. He deposited her shopping bags onto the floor near the closet. “You've gotten quiet.”
“J-just tired,” she lied.
His eyebrows beetled in concern. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”
“It's been a long day. That's all.” Hearing how short she sounded, she added, “I just need some downtime.”
“Okay.” This time he didn't bother pressing a kiss to her cheek.
As he closed the door, she kicked off her boots as quickly as possible, then tore off her clothes, tossing her jacket, long sweater, and leggings into a pile on her bed. Next her bra and panties before she flew into the bathroom to stand in front of the full-length mirror, her body completely naked, her soul now stripped bare. Her skin was in good shape, and though she was thin, her muscles were smooth and strong, a few ribs more pronounced than they should be. Her breasts were still firm and high, the nipples dark, and her hips were as slim and tight as they had been when she'd run in college.
So where were the stretch marks on her breasts or stomach? She turned and looked over her shoulder, checking the tightness of her buttocks.
Nothing in her build suggested “mother.” But she could be just one of those lucky women who hadn't gained a lot of weight in pregnancy and whose skin had enough elasticity to avoid stretch marks. She didn't remember nursing, so her breasts could have maintained their shape.
Or not.
The body in the mirror's reflection did not look like the body of a woman who had carried a baby to term.
With a sick feeling, she stormed into her bedroom, threw on an old pair of pajamas, and hurried downstairs to the den where Wyatt, still in his business suit, had already settled behind the desk.
“I thought you were tired,” he said, looking up from his computer screen.
“I was. Am. But . . . oh . . .” There was no easy way around this. “Where are the pictures of my pregnancy?” she demanded, distantly hearing the sound of the elevator clunking as it stopped.
“What?” He actually looked surprised. “The pictures?”
“I want to see them.”
“Why now?” he asked as the hum of Jewel-Anne's wheelchair grew louder.
“I need to see what I looked like,” Ava said, her heart nearly breaking, the truth causing her damned voice to crack. “I need to prove to myself that I really was pregnant.”
CHAPTER 35
W
yatt jumped up and started around the desk. “Of course you were pregnant!”
“Then show me,” Ava said. “Prove it!”
“Oh, for the love of God—”
“I'm not kidding, Wyatt. They should be here on the computer, shots that were never printed and framed. We had a digital camera then. There have to be dozens of pictures that were uploaded.”
“I don't think you wanted to be photographed much. Because of all the miscarriages, you were kind of superstitious about it.”
“But there has to be something,” she insisted. “During the holidays or at a family barbecue, a group shot where I'm trying to either hide or display my baby bump.”
“I don't think so.”
“Let me see.” Rounding the desk, she stubbed her toe, swore under her breath, and swung the computer monitor toward her as she worked the keyboard. “Most of our pictures are in here, except for those we printed out, right?” She looked up at the bookcase where family portraits were posted, and sure enough, there she was with Kelvin, a few weeks before the accident. The picture was taken at the marina, sailboat masts rising above them, and only showed them from the chest up. They were laughing and she, at least facially, didn't have an ounce of extra fat on her.
“Wait a second,” Wyatt said just as Jewel-Anne rolled into the room.
“Let her look,” Jewel-Anne said, and there was something in her tone that was a warning.
“Okay. Four years ago . . . ,” Ava murmured. Wyatt had reluctantly given up his chair and she sat down, taking over the keyboard, pulling up the family picture files. She sifted through dozens of shots of various family members, and in any picture that showed her, her back was turned or it was a head shot. There were none that showed her pregnancy.
Wyatt asked, “Why are you obsessing about this now?”
Ava didn't answer, just kept looking. Her fingers flew over the keys, and she scrolled through file after file, finding nothing until . . .
Noah!
All at once, pictures of her son dominated the files. Hundreds of shots documenting him returning from the hospital, sitting up for the first time, then crawling and walking. There were videos as well; she'd watched them hundreds of times in the past two years, keeping his image alive. Her insides turned to jelly. Something here was wrong . . . very wrong. But Noah was real. The pictures and videos proved what her memory insisted. She sank deeper into the chair.
“I don't think I . . .” She swallowed hard, then forged on. “Did we adopt Noah?” Her brain was thundering. “Is that what happened?”
He didn't answer. Looked away. And that was an answer in itself.
The silence in the room stretched to the breaking point. She heard the pounding of her own heartbeat in her ears and wished she could take the words back. Dear God, was it true? Was she not Noah's mother?
“Tell her,” Jewel-Anne urged, and Ava whipped around, her gaze zeroing in on her cousin. There was just the hint of malice in her eyes.
Ava's world seemed to collapse. “
You
knew?” she charged. Then to Wyatt, “Tell me what?” Bracing herself on the desk, she tried to keep the pounding in her head at bay. Now, after wanting to know the truth for so damned long, she was afraid of it. Her gaze strayed to the computer where hundreds of pictures of Noah were saved.
Her
baby.
Her
son.
Jewel-Anne couldn't stand it. “Of course you're not his mother!”
“Shut up!” Wyatt snarled.
Rather than pin Jewel-Anne with her gaze, Ava turned accusing eyes on her husband. “What is this, Wyatt?”
He seemed to struggle with some inner battle, then gave it up. “You
are
Noah's mother, of course you are. But . . .” His jaw worked. “You didn't give birth to him. It was a private adoption.”
Ava didn't move. Couldn't breathe. Her heart was drumming, denial burning through her veins, though she sensed she was finally hearing the truth, or at least part of it. “You were five or six months along and had surprisingly barely begun to show. Then you lost the baby..”
Her heart cracked . . . pain swept through her.
“It wasn't the first miscarriage, of course, but this one, a boy, was the closest to term,” he said quietly, his eyes dark. “You took it so hard. You just lost reality. Adoption seemed like the right choice. I knew of a pregnant teenager. She was looking for a private adoption through our firm,” he said quietly. “The timing was perfect. She gave birth right after the boating accident. You were still recovering and we decided not to tell anyone that the baby was adopted.”
“And no one questioned it?” Ava was shaking her head. Though bits and pieces of his story struck a chord, the pieces were disjointed, not connecting in her brain, like flotsam and jetsam strung out in dark, shadowy water. “The staff . . .”
“Were all paid well.”
“And no one broke their silence?” No, that couldn't be. Pointing a finger at Jewel-Anne, Ava said in disbelief, “
She
knew and didn't tell anyone?”
“I can keep a secret if I have to,” Jewel-Anne shot back, tossing her head primly.
“Why would you
have
to?”
“Because it was the best for everyone. Especially
you
,” Jewel-Anne snapped. Absently she stroked the head of her doll, and Ava couldn't help but remember the effigy she'd dug up in its tiny little casket. Jewel-Anne had to have been behind that somehow.
“I don't think you'd do anything for my benefit,” she said slowly.
“But then you don't really know me at all, do you?” her cousin tossed out, a smirk twisting the corners of her mouth again.
Wyatt said, “No one has said anything. Yes, Jewel-Anne knew, and so did Khloe and her mother. Virginia's loyal and Khloe is one of your best friends. She and Simon were split at the time. I doubt that he even knows. As for Demetria, she was hired later, after Jewel-Anne came back to the island. Graciela wasn't on staff at the time, though she had been earlier, and the ranch hand who was working then knew how to keep his mouth shut.”
“But everyone else . . . ,” Ava whispered.
“None of the rest of the family knows. Not even Ian. They weren't here then and have never questioned that Noah was our son, our own flesh and blood.”
“I don't believe this,” Ava whispered, though part of it rang true. She sensed, deep in her heart, that Noah hadn't been born from her body, that there was another woman who had given him life . . . a faceless woman who had given up her son. “You shouldn't have lied to me,” she told her husband in a shaking voice.
“Ava, you were so messed up.” Wyatt walked to the bookshelf, looked at a picture of the three of them taken when Noah was barely one. The happy little family—all of it a damned lie.
He touched the picture frame, then said, “You made yourself believe that Noah was our flesh and blood, and any other suggestion would throw you into a frenzy, a panic attack. I talked to you in the hospital, but at the mere mention of the word
adoption
, you freaked out.”
She remembered so little of her stay at St. Brendan's. “So the staff there, at the hospital—they know?” There had to be some way to check out this story.
“Just Dr. McPherson and that's patient–doctor privilege.”
“Who is the mother?”
“It doesn't matter.”
“Of course it does!” she said, jumping up from the desk chair. “She's the one! Don't you see? The birth mother, she's the one who stole our baby!”
“Don't be irrational!”
“Irrational? I just discovered the baby I thought I'd borne was adopted and you're calling me irrational?” Her mind was scrambled, images of the past burning through it, each and every one at odds with the truth. “What about the baby's father? I mean, the biological father?”
“Out of the picture.”
She was shaking her head, trying desperately to sort everything out. “He signed off his parental rights?”
“Never even knew he had a kid.”
“Then he could be behind it!” Frantic, Ava looked from Wyatt to Jewel-Anne. Her cousin's smirk had fallen away. Now she appeared as shell-shocked as Ava. “Have you tried to track these people down? Do the police know?” she demanded. “We should call Snyder right now!” She was already reaching for the house phone on the desk, but Wyatt grabbed her wrist.
“Don't, Ava,” he warned.
“Why not?”
“It won't do any good.”
The receiver still grasped in her hand, she felt a sudden premonition. “You know what happened to our son,” she charged, breathing hard, staring Wyatt down. His face was only inches from hers, his features hard and set, the darkness in his soul reflected in his eyes.
“The birth mother and father of our son are dead.”
She shrank away from him. “Dead?” This was too much to take in all at once. “How?”
“Motorcycle accident.”
“Both of them? Together? And he didn't know about the baby?”
“They'd split up for a while.” He released her hand, and she put the phone back in its cradle. “Then got back together. I don't know if she ever told him about Noah; if so, nothing came of it before they were killed, riding the bike down the Oregon coast. As I understand it, he was driving and tried to pass one of those motor homes hauling a car and didn't see the oncoming car. He skidded out trying to avoid it.”
She felt sick to her stomach. “Oh my God.”
Don't take this at face value. It could all be a convenient lie! He's lied to you for years.
Jewel-Anne was silent. She seemed subdued, maybe nonplussed, and the joy she'd gotten from taunting Ava had totally seeped away as one hand idly touched the shiny dark hair of her doll.
“What are their names?” Ava asked.
“Ava, don't do this. Let it go,” Wyatt said.
“I want the names of my child's birth mother and father,” she insisted, anger flaring that he'd kept this secret so long. “Who were they? Who were they, Wyatt? Who were the birth parents of
our
son?”
He glared at her for a full five seconds and time seemed to stretch forever. Only after the clock in the hallway chimed the half hour did he say, “Tracey. Tracey Johnson and Charles Yates.”
Jewel-Anne drew a breath. Obviously this was new information to her as well.
Something inside of Ava cracked. Hearing the names made the faceless people who had created her son so much more real. “Clients of yours?”
“An associate's.”
“You should have told me, Wyatt.” She skirted around him and headed out the door, squeezing past Jewel-Anne and her wheelchair. “You should have had enough faith in me to tell me the truth about our son!”
“Ava!” he yelled.
She ran. Instead of footsteps following her, she heard a frustrated, “Son of a bitch,” that chased her as she flew up the stairs, her dull head swarming with questions, her heart twisting with the pain of her new discoveries. It was as if she lived in a House of Horrors where nothing was what it seemed.
Everything Wyatt had told her about Noah and the fact that he was adopted swirled around in her head. Tracey Johnson? Charles Yates? Had she ever heard the names before?
Wait, Ava. Don't fall for this! Wyatt lies!!
In her room, she yanked her computer from its case, and even though her husband probably had some tracking device attached to it so he could see every Web site she visited, she Googled the names he'd given her along with the words
motorcycle accident
and
Oregon
.
It took some sifting, as she wasn't an expert surfing the Internet, at least not as quick as she'd once been, but eventually she found a few hits. Sure enough, there had been a horrendous motorcycle accident three years earlier, about the time Noah had been one. Both Charles Yates, twenty-six, and his twenty-one-year-old fiancée, Tracey Johnson, had died as the result of their severe injuries.
“No,” she whispered, but she searched for their obituaries and finally found them. The obits listed their hometown, where they'd graduated from high school, that Tracey was a student at a community college and hoped to become a nurse. Yates worked for a small trucking company.
Real people.
With next of kin who were listed as well.
Her hands were shaking over the keys. She had to see these people. She had to try and discern any resemblance to her son.
It took a while, but she was able to locate pictures of the victims. Staring at the flat images, she wondered if Noah had Tracey's pointed chin or Charles's curly hair. Possible? Yes. Proof? No.

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