Home Free - Fern Michaels [107]
My Dearest Son,
If you’re reading this letter, you must know that your father and I are no longer of this earth. There is something I have wanted to tell you since you were a little boy, but the time was never right. Then as you got older I thought it would be a disservice not to tell you, yet I could never find the right time. If you hate me or your father after reading this, know that I will understand and love you in spite of it. The first time I laid eyes on your father, I fell madly in love . . .
Chapter 1
The 1,203 residents of Mango Key never knew what to call it or how to refer to it. For the most part, in the beginning, they called it a castle, then they switched and called it a fortress. As it neared completion, they became puzzled at the high brick wall and the massive iron gates that sparked if they were touched and simply referred to it as that place at the end of the island.
The residents didn’t know who lived in that place, but they speculated that maybe it was some aging film star who didn’t want anyone to see his or her lost looks. Or perhaps, since the only activity seen or heard came late at night, it was some drug lord trying to hide out from the law.
The residents of Mango Key were simple folks and earned their living selling their mangoes, oranges, and grapefruit to the boats that came into the Key once a week, and they didn’t really care about the phantom people who maybe lived or maybe didn’t live in that place. They had never seen a soul in the light of day since that place had been completed five years ago. For the most part, they forgot that it was even there because it didn’t affect them in any way.
In truth, there were 1,204 residents of Mango Key, but the additional resident wasn’t a native, so the residents more or less ignored Patrick Kelly the same way they ignored that place. But that hadn’t been the case when he had first arrived on Mango Key.
Even Patrick Kelly, known to old friends as Tick, although those friends were long gone, ignored the place, which was three miles down the beach from where he lived.
The reason he’d ignored the construction was because he had been in a drunken stupor for the two years it had taken to build it, and the third year, he was just more or less coming out of his stupor. And the least of his worries was someone building a house, a castle, a fortress, or that place. It simply held no interest for him; it was all he could do to get through one day so that he could go to sleep, wake, and struggle through the next. Today, seven years after the fact, he still had no interest in what he considered an abandoned structure he happened to see when he walked the beach, swam, or fished.
It was a beautiful August day on Mango Key. But then most days were beautiful except during hurricane season, and those exceptions usually lasted only a day or so. The sun was startlingly bright, warming Tick’s body as he walked out of the ocean. He had his dinner in a net—a fish he couldn’t name. Nor did he care if it had a name. He called all fish dinner. A few wild radishes, some equally wild onions, a few mangoes and maybe an orange, and dinner was ready. A great diet. He’d dropped twenty-five pounds since arriving at Mango Key. He weighed 170 pounds, the same weight he’d carried when he was twenty-eight and in top form. Now pushing the big four-oh, at six foot two inches, he still carried the weight easily. He was brown as a nut, living in cutoffs and sandals. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn a shirt. Maybe hurricane season last year, when the temperature dropped to sixty-five degrees.
Patrick Kelly, hobo, derelict, beach bum, drunk, former homicide detective, ex-father, widower, rich best-selling author, and recovering alcoholic.
Tick stopped two hundred feet from the place he’d called home for almost seven years. His abode, that was how he thought of it, had been little more than a lean-to with iffy rusty plumbing and an even rustier generator when he arrived. It had stayed that way for close to three