Luck Be a Lady - Cathie Linz [53]
His startled look told her that hypothesis wasn’t accurate. “No. What makes you think that?”
“The secrecy. Was everythingyou told me about her a lie? Did you really meet her when you both reached for the same book at the library when you were in graduate school?”
“That’s the truth.”
“Is she really a mathematician?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“Believe that I love you and that I always will.”
“That might have been enough when I was a small child, but it’s not enough now. You’ve broken the trust. You were the one who did that, not me. And telling me that you did it to protect me without saying anything more than that . . . Is it your way of trying to turn me against my mother? By making her into this scary figure that I needed protecting from? Is she an evil person?”
“No.”
“If you had problems, the two of you, that’s okay. I get that. Marriages break up all the time. So do families. But what would make my mother walk away from me? It had to be a very large sum of money. And how could you do that to me? Deprive me of knowing my own mother by telling me she was dead? We even spread her ashes over Lake Michigan when I was eight years old. You said she loved to sail on the lake.”
“She did. And you seemed to need some kind of closure. We never had a memorial service or anything at the time. You wanted a funeral like you’d had for your goldfish. Those were your exact words. ‘Goldie had a funeral and so should Mommy.’ ”
Megan couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “So because my goldfish had a funeral you made up one for my mother?”
He nodded.
“The difference is that my goldfish really was dead and my mother wasn’t! What was in that urn? What did we spread over the lake?”
“Ashes from the fireplace,” he admitted.
“That’s sick!”
“I was desperate.”
“And I was just a kid. A kid without a mother.”
“I tried to make that up to you.”
“Instead of telling me the truth. That’s all you had to do.”
“It’s not that black-and-white.”
“Yeah it is, Dad. It really is. Until you’re ready to tell me the truth, all of it, I don’t think we have anything further to say. Call me when you’re ready to tell me everything. Until then, I’d rather be left alone.”
She left his office but her little-girl heart remained behind—bruised and battered. Her entire childhood had been based on a series of lies. She needed to go home, hug her cat and eat some pizza. A lotof pizza.
Later that evening, Megan was curled up on her couch wearing her favorite comfort lounging outfit—a red waffle-knit henley teamed with red-and-black flannel pants—while waiting for the pizza delivery guy to arrive. Smudge was waiting with her, doing her purring lap cat thing.
“Miss Megan, this is Danny Boone, your doorman, calling.”
Hearing her doorman’s gentle Southern voice on the phone always made Megan smile. Born and raised in Dolly Parton’s hometown of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, Danny retained his country drawl despite having lived in Chicago for three years. Obsessively polite and fiendishly organized, Danny did his job with Swiss-timepiece efficiency. Or Swedish efficiency, as Gram would say. Tall and lanky with warm brown eyes, Danny sounded more timid than he actually was.
“Yes, Danny?”
She expected him to tell her that the pizza guy was here and ask for permission to send him up. Instead Danny said, “There’s a police officer here to see you. He says his name is Detective Logan Doyle with the Chicago Police Department. His badge and ID confirms that. I wanted to alert you to his presence before I allowed him farther. He doesn’t have a warrant or anything like that, or I would have had to let him in without telling you.”
No wonder poor Danny sounded more timid and concerned than usual.
“Send him up, Danny. And send up the pizza guy when he comes, please.”
“Sure enough, Miss Megan.”
Danny only used “sure enough” when he was really flustered.
Megan could relate. She felt pretty flustered herself. What did Logan want?
She soon found out.
Logan did not look like a happy camper. But