Her Mother's Shadow (35 page)

T
hey made a decision to wait a few days before talking to Clay about their suspicions, so they would have a chance to think through what they would say. They also needed to find a time when neither Gina nor Mackenzie would be around. The best-laid plans, though, sometimes went awry. That same evening, Gina took Rani to visit Henry and Mackenzie was upstairs doing her homework when Clay came into the living room, flipped on the TV to a news station and sat down on the sofa.

He turned to Lacey and Bobby. “How are you two doing?” he asked, conversationally, and she and Bobby looked at each other. Lacey knew they were both wondering the same thing: should they seize the opportunity or not? Lacey made the decision for them both, and she hoped Bobby didn't mind.

“There's something we want to talk to you about,” she said.

Clay looked concerned by the serious tone in her voice. “Are you worried about Mackenzie working with the dogs during the school year?” he asked.

Lacey shook her head. “Heavier than that,” she said, and Clay used the remote control to click off the TV.

“Let's leave the TV on,” Bobby suggested, looking at Lacey for confirmation. “We could use the background noise.”

She understood. He was worried Mackenzie might be able to hear them.

Clay clicked on the set again. The newscaster was talking about the first day of school in North Carolina, using footage of weepy kindergartners in their new classrooms as they were being deserted by their mothers.

“So,” Clay said, “what's going on?”

Lacey would have liked Bobby to tell him, but she thought it would be better coming from her, so she jumped in quickly. “Bobby and I think there's a possibility that you're Mackenzie's father.”

She watched all color leave her brother's face, and she waited for him to protest, but he surprised her.

“I wondered,” he said quietly. “She has my eyes.”

Lacey felt torn between astonishment and relief. He already knew. She was not going to have to go into the details of Bobby seeing him leave the bedroom at that long-ago party.

Clay looked at Bobby. “You're the more logical candidate,” he said. “You were with Jessica all summer long. I was just with her once.”

“I'm the proud owner of extremely lethargic sperm,” Bobby said. “I've never been able to impregnate anyone even when I was trying to. I love Mackenzie, but I've had my doubts that she was mine from the start.”

The color was returning to Clay's face and now coins of hot pink were on his cheeks. He turned to Lacey. “Did Jessica ever tell you that we'd…hooked up?” he asked.

She shook her head. She wanted details. She wanted to know what had gotten into him that he would bed her fifteen-year-old friend. But what had happened twelve years ago didn't matter now. It truly didn't. What mattered at this moment was the probable result of that night: Mackenzie.

“No, she didn't,” she said, “but I'm pretty sure that's why she wanted to leave Mackenzie with me. It was as close as she could get to leaving her with you.”

Clay fiddled with the remote where it rested on the arm of the sofa, and Lacey noticed the faint tremor in his fingers.

“Mackenzie's a great kid,” he said. “I don't care if she's my daughter or Bobby's, she's part of our family.”

“I think we'd better have a DNA test done,” Bobby said, resting his elbows on his knees and looking from Clay to Lacey. “I know we both care about her, but I think we need to know one way or another for sure.”

Clay nodded. “And if it turns out to be me, what do we tell her?”

For the first time, Lacey understood why her father had waited until she was sixteen to tell her that Tom was her biological father. She could not have coped with that news at fourteen. “We tell her the truth,” Lacey said, “but not now. She's been through too much these past few months.” She turned her head against the back of the recliner so that she was looking squarely at Bobby. “That is, if you can handle playing the role of dad a while longer.”

“I could handle it till the day I die,” Bobby said.

“I
missed these cool summer evenings while I was in North Carolina,” Faye said. She and Jim were sitting in his hot tub across from one another, the bubbles warm around their shoulders and the heavy, dark coastal clouds so low in the sky they seemed to be suspended directly above Jim's house. “I'd forgotten how miserably hot it could be there.”

“Fred's cottage didn't have air-conditioning?” Jim asked.

Faye laughed. “I'm amazed his cottage had running water,” she said. “And the bugs! I'm still scratching mosquito bites.”

She'd stayed with Fred for five days. Good days, for the most part, as she got to know the stranger who was her son. In the day and a half since her return to San Diego, it seemed all she had talked about was Fred, analyzing her son and her visit, and Jim had not complained once. He knew she couldn't help herself. And she was still at it.

“It's so strange, Jim,” she said. “If I'd met Fred in Princeton, with his wonderful life, his excellent career, his law degree, his beautiful house, I would have been so awestruck
at how perfectly he'd turned out. Instead I met him in the middle of a lie. I saw him at his worst. I'm worried he may have inherited some of his father's psychological problems.”

“Did you talk to him about that?” Jim asked.

She shook her head. “I will at some point, but we just needed to get to know each other again first.”

Jim ran his foot up her shin beneath the bubbling water. “And now,
I'd
like to get to know you again,” he said.

“Later.” She smiled. “I promise.”

“You're on a roll, aren't you?” he said, giving up. “One thing that drew me to you was your tenacity, so I guess I can't complain about it now.”

“Thanks,” she said. “For not complaining. For listening to me go on and on.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “What else is on your mind?”

“You know how I told you that every young male patient who came into the pain program would make me think of Fred?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, we got a new patient today. An eighteen-year-old boy. Young man.”

“Ah,” Jim said. “And he reminded you of Fred.”

“That's the funny thing.” She ran her hands through the water. It felt soft against her fingers. “I didn't think of him at all. I think that spell must be broken now that I've seen Fred in the flesh again. Instead, I was thinking about that young woman, Lacey O'Neill.”

“What made you think of her?” Jim asked.

“The new patient was bitten on his shoulder by a dog a year ago. He's healed fairly well, but the bite left him with severe chronic pain. Isn't that ironic?” She raised her eyebrows to Jim. “I don't think I've had a single dog bite in the program and then, suddenly, he appears.”

Jim hummed the
Twilight Zone
music.

“So, it made me wonder how Lacey's doing with her recovery, from both the dog attack and from Fred's…misuse of her.” She thought of Lacey often, unable to forget the rage in her face the night she'd stormed out of Fred's cottage. Faye knew a lot about rage. Her program was filled with patients whose anger fed their pain. Anger at an illness. Anger at the driver of the other car who gave them their back injury. Anger at God for making them suffer. Anger that only served to prolong their pain. One of the parts of the program she'd designed—one facet most resented by her patients until they truly understood its purpose—was to learn to let go of that anger.

“I don't really know her,” Faye said about Lacey. “I may just be thinking about how I'd feel in her situation. But she was so furious when she left Fred's that day, that—”

“I don't blame her,” Jim interrupted.

“No, I certainly don't, either,” Faye said. “But she was ready to pour her anger into testifying about her mother's murder in order to keep Zach in prison forever. To write something truly scathing to the parole board. And then she was attacked by that dog, and—”

“What are you trying to say, honey?” Jim moved across the hot tub to sit next to her, his arm around her shoulders. “You think Zach should get out on parole?”

She shook her head. She wasn't speaking clearly, because her thoughts were not yet well formed.

“It's not that I want Zach to get out,” she said. “It's that I want Lacey to be
well.
She's suffered too much in too many ways at the hands of my family, and I can't believe my son added to that suffering the way he did. Her rage is well founded, just as it is in all the patients I work with, but it can only harm her in the end.”

“You know what I've figured out about you, Faye?” Jim asked.

“What's that?”

He touched her temple, making a little circular motion with his fingertip. “You're the sort of person who can't rest easy until you've taken action on whatever's spinning around in your brain,” he said.

He was right. That was why she'd been able to transform the chronic pain program from a simple idea into a reality. It was why she'd gone to see her son. And she knew right then that it was why she would call Lacey O'Neill.

“H
ow do you think it's going in there?” Bobby was sitting on Lacey's bed the night after their conversation with Clay, gently massaging vitamin E oil onto the developing scars on her legs. They knew that Clay was talking to Gina in their bedroom, telling her that Mackenzie might possibly be his daughter.

“I think Clay is lucky that Gina is madly in love with him, and they'll be okay,” she said, wincing at the pain he was causing her. She knew it was important to massage the scars to prevent adhesions from forming, but that knowledge didn't stop the procedure from hurting. She was lying on her back in her panties and T-shirt, well aware that her chewed-up legs looked anything but sexy these days. She suddenly chuckled. “This is so romantic, isn't it?” she said. “Having you massage my revolting legs?”

“I think it's very romantic, actually,” he said. “And it could be even more so if you'd let me massage the rest of you, too.” He shifted on the bed so he could lift the hem of her shirt up a few inches. He ran his slick hand over the skin of her stomach, from the bottom of her ribs to the top of her
panties, and it felt wonderful to have him stroke her there, one of the few places on her body where touch could give her pleasure instead of pain. Bobby had been so good to her since the attack, but he hadn't kissed her until tonight, as if fearing she was too fragile to be touched.

“Lacey!” he said suddenly, and her eyelids flew open at what sounded like alarm in his voice.

“What?”

“You devil!” he said. “You have a pierced belly button.”

She laughed, glancing down at the tiny tiger's eye protruding from the skin above her navel. “Surprise,” she said.

“And here you were giving me a hard time about my earring.”

She reached up and touched the gold hoop. “I love your earring,” she said.
And I love you,
she wanted to say, but she and Bobby were not quite there yet. Not quite ready for those words. One day they would be, though. She knew that, and she could wait.

Her phone rang, and Bobby lifted the receiver from the cradle and handed it to her.

“Hello,” she said, closing her eyes again as he continued to rub her stomach.

“Is this Lacey?” a woman asked.

“Yes.”

“Lacey, this is Faye Collier. Fred—Rick's—mother.”

Why was Rick's mother calling her? Her memory of the woman was vague with all that had happened since their meeting at the cottage. Her memory of Rick himself was growing vaguer by the day, and for that she was grateful. If anything good had come from the past two weeks, it was that she had learned which of the two men in her life was by far the best.

“Why are you calling?” Lacey asked, hoping she did not sound rude.

“I just wanted to see how you are,” Faye said. “I think about you every day and hope that you're healing well. Are you having much pain?”

“Define ‘much,'” Lacey said, annoyed by the question as well as by the call, but then she knew she truly
was
sounding rude. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I've just about gotten Rick out of my mind, and I'm not sure why you're calling me. And yes, I have a lot of pain.”

Bobby looked concerned. “Who is it?” he whispered, and she mouthed the words “Rick's mother.”

There was a long pause on Faye's end of the line. “I'm not calling to defend Rick,” Faye said. “What he did was inexcusable. I know you've suffered so much because of my family, and
that's
why I'm calling. Just to see how you are. I guess I need to know you're okay.”

It was Lacey's turn to hesitate. She found sharp, ugly responses coming into her head, but nothing that had happened to her was this woman's fault.

“I'm all right,” she said. “My doctor says I'm healing well. It's just going to take a long time.”

“What pain meds are you on?” Faye asked.

Lacey ran down the list of medications she was taking.

“Good,” Faye said. “I don't mean to be nosy, but I'm the head of a chronic pain program in a hospital in San Diego, so I know something about what works and what doesn't. How much are you taking of each of them?”

“I try to take as little as I can get away with,” Lacey said. “I don't like to be so dependent on drugs.”

“It's important to stay on top of the pain, Lacey,” Faye said. “Don't wait until it's got you in its grip. We used to tell people to tough it out—which I think is what you're trying to do—but that only makes it worse. That causes you to tense up and makes the pain harder to treat in the long run.”

Her own doctor had said the very same thing, and she'd ignored him, but maybe they both knew a bit more about this than she did. “All right,” she conceded. “I'll try to be better about it.”

“How are you doing with your anger?”

Now Lacey was really getting irritated, so much so that she had to put her hand over Bobby's because even his touch was starting to chafe.

“I don't know what you mean,” she said.

“When you left Fred's cottage, you were understandably furious. You said you'd write a scathing victim's statement, or whatever it's called. I was just wondering—”

“I haven't been able to write it,” she said. “I got sidetracked by a hundred-pound dog. But I will.”

Faye hesitated, then spoke again. “I don't know Zach anymore,” she said, sounding suddenly very tired. “I do know at one time he was a good man. I know he had some sort of terrible breakdown. I don't know if he should get out of prison or not. I don't have, or want to have, any say in that. But I think it's important that you don't base the statement that you write about Zachary on your anger toward Fred. Toward Rick. That's not fair.”

“Faye…” Lacey felt her anger mounting. “I frankly don't care about being fair to your ex-husband.”

“I'm not thinking about
him,
” Faye said. “I'm thinking about
you.
”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that that anger you're holding on to…that sense of revenge…it's like swallowing poison and expecting someone else to die. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“I understand it. I just don't get why you're saying it, though.”

“Because you're the one that poison will ultimately hurt,
Lacey. You need peace of mind to be able to heal, both physically and emotionally.”

“You sound like Rick,” Lacey said. “Forgive and forget.”

“No, never forget,” Faye said quickly. “Rick had an ulterior motive. You know that. You should never forget what happened.”

“Faye…I'm sorry, but I'm really tired,” Lacey said. “I'm going to hang up now.”

“Wait a second,” the woman said hurriedly. “I didn't see Zachary while I was there. I couldn't bring myself to do it, so I frankly have no idea if Fred's assessment of him as rehabilitated is accurate. But I think that may be a piece of information you need to have to be able to write your statement. Don't base your testimony on your anger, Lacey. Base it on reality. Whatever you write, make sure you're doing it for the right reasons.”

Lacey pled exhaustion once more, then handed the phone to Bobby, who rested it back in its cradle.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

Lacey looked at him. “Do you think it's possible for someone to truly be rehabilitated?” she asked.

Bobby grinned at her. “Hey, babe,” he said, “Just look at me.”

 

The following morning, Lacey walked into the kitchen to find herself alone with Gina and Rani. She searched her sister-in-law's face for some clue to her emotional state after learning that Clay might be Mackenzie's father, but Gina only smiled at her as she set a bowl of cereal on the tray of Rani's high chair.

“How are you this morning?” Gina asked her.

“Good,” Lacey said, taking a seat at the table. “Much better, actually.” For the first time, she did not feel as though
every molecule in her body had been shredded and pasted back together. Maybe she was just getting better, or maybe it was that she'd listened to Faye's advice and taken her medication both the night before and this morning instead of waiting for the pain to hit her first. Or maybe it was that Bobby had spent the entire night in her bed, lying next to her, just keeping her company with no demands or expectations of anything more.

“Clay's already left for work?” Lacey asked.

“Uh-huh.” Gina poured coffee into a mug and handed it to her. “And Bobby's driving Mackenzie to the bus stop.” And, Lacey knew, visiting Elise after he dropped Mackenzie off. Elise had fallen down on her promise to keep in touch with him, and he was worried about her.

“I go swimming today!” Rani said.

“You are?” Lacey said. “Are you getting to be a good swimmer?”

Rani nodded, plucking a piece of banana from the top of her cereal and stuffing it into her mouth.

“She's doing great,” Gina said. “You love the water, don't you, Rani?”

Rani nodded again, the banana making speech impossible.

“I guess the real question is, how are
you
this morning?” Lacey asked Gina.

Gina sat down next to Rani's high chair. She lowered her eyes to her own coffee mug, running the tip of her finger over the handle.

“I feel sorry for Clay,” she said, lifting her gaze to meet Lacey's. “All his mistakes are coming back to haunt him.”

Lacey nodded. She knew how upset with himself Clay was for bringing Wolf into their lives against Gina's wishes. And now he had to face his long-ago indiscretion with Jessica Dillard, as well.

“Were you shocked?” Lacey asked.

Gina smiled, and there was something secretive about it. It was a moment before she spoke.

“He'd already told me about Jessica,” she said. “When she died, he was more upset than he let on to you, because he knew her a little better than you thought he did. Not that they had any sort of real relationship, but I think…as an adult, he looked back and saw how he'd used her. So the night after she died, he told me what he'd done—that he'd slept with her at a party when he was seventeen, that she was a sweet kid who was screwed up, and that he took advantage of that fact. In other words, he let me know that he'd been a jerk, in case I couldn't figure it out on my own from what he was telling me.”

“I'm glad you two have that kind of relationship,” Lacey said, surprised that her brother had so openly confided in Gina.

“Me, too,” Gina said.

“Me, too!” Rani added, and Lacey and Gina laughed.

“Drink your juice, Rani,” Gina said, pushing the cup a little closer to the cereal bowl on Rani's tray. Gina looked at Lacey. “Do you know that Clay and your dad are meeting with the lawyer again today?” she asked. “They're going to go forward without a statement from you, so you don't need to have that hanging over your head anymore.”

“Oh,” Lacey said, wondering why she felt no relief at that news.

“It must give you some peace of mind,” Gina continued. “I know how that's been driving you crazy.”

“I think I figured something out,” Lacey said. She took a long drink of her coffee before continuing. “I haven't been able to write it because I've been focusing on my mother and my family, not on the killer,” she said. “My mother's already
gone. My family's healing. But Zachary Pointer's the one who'll stay in or out of prison based on what we say. He's the one the statement should really be about.”

Gina looked confused. “What are you saying, Lace?” she asked.

“That I still want to write my statement,” she said, standing up, the coffee mug in her hand, “but there's something else I have to do first.”