Blood Relations (3 page)

My parents hadn't divorced until I was twelve. She was only five years younger than I was. The betrayal was like a bitter pill, too big for me to swallow. I felt as if a knife had been shoved in my heart.

“You can call him and ask him,” she said.

Call him and ask him?
Then that would mean that he knew about her. The fact that he would know about her and not ever have told me hurt me even more. How could he keep this from me for thirty years? Knowing how I felt about family, knowing I hated being an only child. When I was a kid, I would ask Santa for a sibling. Every single year. Wasn't it just like him to keep something to himself that I had always wanted? It was as if somebody had just twisted the imaginary blade that had penetrated my flesh moments ago. Just call him and ask him. That simple. With one phone call, shatter my whole world.

“I don't think so,” I said.

Call him and ask him.
Did she know his phone number?

“But…” she began, unsure of what to say. “I…”

“You what? What do you want exactly?” I asked, trying hard not to be too angry.

“I want a relationship with my sister.” She shrugged.

“Right,” I said, pushing my chair away from my desk and then standing. “Well … I'm not your sister.”

Before I could ask her to leave my office, Elmer Kolbe came bursting through the door. He's our fire chief, way past retirement age, and all-around good guy. “Torie, you gotta come see this.”

“See what?”

“You know how the river's been down so low?”

“Yeah?”

“You can see the wreck.”

“The wreck.”

“The Phantom,”
he said. “The steamboat that sank back in 1919.”

“You're kidding,” I said. But I found myself at odds with how I wanted to feel. Any other time, I would have jumped over my desk and taken off to the river like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. The legend of
The Phantom
is something told on every bar stool of every pub and diner in New Kassel. I'd grown up with the legend. I'd grown up, like everybody else, wondering if there would ever be a time that Old Man River would be low enough that we could actually view the wreckage. And it had finally happened. But now, with Ms. Connelly standing there with her news so fresh in the air, I was just sort of numb.

I was happy for Elmer's interruption, I decided. Because it saved me from any further discussion with Ms. Connelly. It saved me from having to kick her out of my office.

“Come on,” he said, waving a hand at me. “Come and look.”

Three

Ms. Connelly excused herself, and I followed Elmer outside and down to the river. I tried to shake her from my mind. I tried to shake her and her words. But they just kept echoing over and over as I walked along the sidewalk.

I am Dwight's daughter.

You can call him and ask him.

On one hand, the whole thing seemed so preposterous that I felt I could just dismiss her and everything that she'd said. How could my father have known of her existence for thirty years and not told me? Or my mother? And I knew he hadn't told my mother, or she would have told me. She wouldn't have kept something like that from me. It was such a ridiculous notion that by the time I'd reached River Point Road, I had myself half-convinced that Ms. Connelly had been lying.

But why would she lie? What reason would she have had to make up something like that? And then confront me with it? Maybe she didn't have a father and she'd just fixated on me for some reason and wanted to be a part of my family. Yeah, right. I was beginning to sound like the scriptwriter for a soap opera. She had no reason to lie. But she could be mistaken. Maybe there was a different Dwight Keith. Maybe her mother didn't know who her father was and so just gave her the name of an old boyfriend or something.

My father certainly would have been capable of having an affair. I knew of at least two that he'd had, in fact. He was a musician, and, well, all that drinking and playing music to the lovely women who would sell their souls to be with a musician might have been a little overwhelming for somebody not so happy with his own marriage. Or somebody without a conscience. At least that was how my mother had explained it to me. She was allowed to be a little bitter over that one. So having an affair was something I could believe of him. Fathering a child and keeping it from me was an entirely different matter.

And what was it about musicians, anyway? I mean, if Mick Jagger had been a shoe salesman, do you really think he would have had all the women, all the
beautiful
women, he's had?

So, maybe Ms. Connelly's mother had had an affair with my father. Maybe she'd had many affairs and just didn't know which man was the father of her child.

But then I remembered Ms. Connelly's eyes.

Not possible, I told myself, and concentrated on the things around me.

I have always loved my town, by the way. Most of the buildings on River Point Road are old, having been built prior to 1910 at least. Many are white clapboard with wraparound porches, some red brick with dark shutters and roofs. River Point Road is the center of commerce. This part of town, where all of our shops and restaurants are, attracts tourists from all around, who come to eat and sample the wares. Living in a historic tourist town can have its problems. Tourists park in our driveway because they can't find a better place to park. And then there is always the threat of things like the riverboat-gambling issue, which we've managed to beat—so far. But the mayor won't stop. He'll bring back the issue of riverboat gambling again. But for the most part, I love everything about New Kassel life.

As I came over the hill, I could see the Mississippi River in the distance. The Mississippi is everything. It allows the barges passage for supplies. For eons, it has provided food and water to the area. And when Mother Nature unleashes her fury, the river can wipe out everything in its valley. There was only one time in history that something else controlled the river, and that had been during the New Madrid earthquake in 1811. The earthquake had made such large waves upon the river that it looked as if the water were moving backward.

But this year, there had been a drought. Not just a drought here but out west and up north, too, so that the tributaries that feed the river before it gets to St. Louis had nearly dried up as well. There are dunes in various places on the river now. Illinois seemed closer to us than usual. And on more than one occasion this winter, the river had actually been bumper-to-bumper with barges and tugboats. Because of the drought, the vessels had been forced to stay in the deepest part of the river, which had been reduced to an area half the size they were used to.

In fact, the river and the surrounding area looked as if it had been the location of a recent battle. The sky was that dirty cotton-ball color that happens sometimes before a snow. Along the Illinois side of the river, the leaves had died long ago and fallen, so that the riverbank resembled a forest of tall switches. The grass was brown, the river gray and filled with more sludge than usual. It was as if the land had been stripped of life by some superior being who took its nourishment and then moved on to its next feast.

Just as I made it to where the old Yates house used to stand, I could see a crowd of people pointing off to the right. I stepped through the tittering crowd and down over the railroad tracks, until I was standing on the bank of the river. Sheriff Colin Brooke, who also happens to be married to my mother, was standing almost in the water, his hands on his hips.

“Oh my gosh,” I said as I saw the pilothouse of the steamboat sticking up out of the water. “It really is
The Phantom.
”

“I know,” Sheriff Brooke said. A large, strapping man, he always has to look down at me, even if we are both sitting. “Pretty amazing, huh?”

Elmer Kolbe finally stopped short behind me and gouged me in the arm. “Told ya,” he said. “Wish my dad had lived to see this.”

I couldn't help thinking that my father might not live to see it, if Ms. Connelly was telling the truth. “Do you think there are bodies in there?” I asked.

The sheriff gave me a sideways glance.

“Nah,” Elmer said. “Fish food a long time ago.”

“You are both morbid,” Sheriff Brooke said.

“Well,” I said. “It's a natural thing to wonder about. You know, twenty-four people died in that wreck. And seventeen bodies were never recovered.”

“I know,” the sheriff said. “But I thought it was twenty-two who died.”

“Twenty-four,” I insisted.

“Don't argue with her,” Elmer said. “You know she's always right about these kinds of things.”

“Oh, yeah, if it involves a body count, Torie's the expert.”

“Shut up,” I said.

A sound came from the hill behind us. When I looked back, I saw a television crew pulling up and hauling its equipment out of a white van that had
THE NEWS TO WATCH. CHANNEL
6
NEWS
written on the side of it.

“That didn't take long,” Sheriff Brooke said as we looked back out at the ancient wreckage. The water lapped up on the side of what had been the pilothouse.

“Never does,” Elmer said.

“I wonder if anybody called that guy at the college,” I said.

“What guy?” the sheriff asked.

“A man came by a few years ago and asked to be called if the wreckage was ever exposed enough that somebody could get to it without too much trouble. Can't remember his name. Jacob something.”

“I don't know,” Sheriff Brooke answered.

“You know what I'm thinking,” a voice behind us said.

We turned around to see Chuck Velasco standing there with his Doc Martens covered in river sludge and the edges of his jeans damp from the water. His parka was open enough to reveal the gold-and-black flannel shirt that he always seems to wear. He must have bought every one that Wal-Mart had and really wears a different one each day. It makes me feel better to think that way anyway, because he owns the pizza parlor in town. I love to eat there. The idea of him wearing the same shirt every day is not very appealing.

“What's that?” Sheriff Brooke asked.

Chuck looked around and picked up a stick from the ground, then went about dislodging great globs of sludge from the bottom of his boots. “I'm wondering if we can get to the diamonds.”

“You don't really believe that there were diamonds on board,” the sheriff said, watching Chuck as he threw the stick down and smeared his boot on a rock. “Hey, you haven't been down there already, have you? Chuck, you can't go down there. It's too dangerous.”

Chuck shrugged. “I just took a peek.”

“What did you see?” I asked him.

“Down, Torie,” Sheriff Brooke said. “Chuck, don't go back down there. It's the same as an abandoned building. It's not secure, and the wreckage could shift. I mean it.”

“All right,” Chuck said, holding up his hands.

Sheriff Brooke picked up the radio attached to his shoulder and called into the office, an expression of worry on his face. “Newsome, this is Brooke. Over.”

“Newsome here,” a voice over the radio said.

“I need you to come down to the river here in New Kassel. Bring some crime-scene tape. I want you to rope something off,” he said.

“Sure thing. There been a crime?”

“No,” he said. “I just don't want people meddling in this wreckage.”

“Be right there. Over.”

The sheriff then lowered his gaze to me. “And that especially means you.”

I just rolled my eyes at him. He was like this before he became my stepfather. I hugged myself in the cold and turned to Chuck. “So you really think the diamonds are down there?”

“Why not? That's what the legend says, doesn't it?”

“Yeah, but legends aren't always right, you know. They are usually
based
on real events, but inevitably the one thing you want to be true in the fairy tale is usually the part that isn't,” I said.

About that time, the Channel 6 news crew made it over the railroad tracks and down to where we were standing. I had seen the anchorman before but couldn't place his name. He was a spiffily dressed black man, and he was not liking the looks of what he'd just stepped in.

“That's far enough,” the sheriff said. “Nobody goes any farther than this.”

Before the sheriff could even blink, the camera light came on, and he had a large round microphone stuck under his nose. “Deputy—”

“That's
Sheriff
Brooke,” he said.

“I'm sorry, sir. Sheriff, is this the wreckage of
The Phantom?
” the anchorman asked.

Sheriff Brooke looked irritated to say the least, but he was a good sport and went about answering the question. “We can't say for certain,” he said. “I will say that it does appear to be a steamer, the same type of ship that wrecked here over eighty years ago. But we won't know for sure until we get a team in here to look at it.”

“So, you are planning to have it investigated?”

“Well, no. I'm not sure at this time. We may just leave it be and let the water reclaim it in the spring,” he said. “I'm just saying that there's no way to know for sure what ship it is until it's been investigated.”

“I see,” the anchorman said. “But to the best of your knowledge, it is most likely
The Phantom?
”

“It probably is.”

“Sheriff, what do you know about
The Phantom?
”

“Not a whole lot,” the sheriff said. “In fact, this young woman right here behind you should be able to answer all your questions for you. Mrs. O'Shea…”

You know, there are times when I could just kill him, even if he is married to my mother. I glared at him as the camera swung toward me. I wore the most faded pair of jeans I owned. I also had on a T-shirt that said
PRINCESS
on the front, and a flimsy little sweater, which I now pulled tightly across my chest because I had run out of my office without my coat. My hair was flying all around and I was wearing absolutely no makeup. Great. Nothing like putting your best face forward for the camera.