Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [120]
Fat tears began to roll down his face.
“Why couldn’t one of them have been mine?” The howl of pain was sharp and clear. “Why couldn’t she have been like that? Why was everything always so wrong for me, and everything always right for everyone else? It just wasn’t fair.”
The tears stopped as another wave of anger washed over him.
“I went to her. I thought maybe she’d be glad to see me again. But she hardly seemed to even care that I was alive. Like it didn’t matter. So I figured, okay, it doesn’t matter to me either. Just give me what’s mine and I’ll go away again. But then she told me about her will, how everything was already set up and she wasn’t going to change it, not even about the Smith trust being set up to support the ranch and her friends. She offered me a couple thousand dollars to go away again. A couple of thousand dollars!” The words fell from his mouth in a tumble. “It wasn’t fair, Kendra. All that money, the ranch . . . she wouldn’t put me—me, her only child!—back in her will. She met me in the hills the next morning and gave me the cash—five thousand dollars, can you believe that? Well, it just wasn’t right. She had to be punished for being so mean to me. So she took a tumble and I took her money and I left, figured I’d go back to San Francisco. What the hell, I’d lived all those years on the streets, I’d probably die on the streets.”
His focus wandered for a second or two. “I hitched back to California, got stranded overnight and got a room in a motel on Route Ten. Got some dinner, got a shower. Laid down on the bed to watch TV. Well, who do you think I saw on the TV that night? Can you guess?”
He jammed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels, enjoying the telling, building up to the moment.
“My beloved Aunt Elisa! Right there on ‘Larry King Live’! All those years I’d been away, she’d gone and gotten herself elected to the goddamned United States Senate! I thought, well, shit, Sierra cut me out as Zach, let’s see what I can get from Aunt Elisa as Ian. I mean, we had so many of the same features, who’s to say we wouldn’t have looked alike when we grew up?”
“You went to see my mother?” Kendra whispered, incredulous. Finally, something to truly shock, when she’d begun to believe that he had no secrets left to tell.
But her mother had never mentioned that she’d been contacted by Zach. Surely she’d have told Kendra if he had.
“Why not? Oh, you should have seen her face when I walked into the house. Let myself right in the back door. She was in the library, reading, and I stood in the doorway and said, ‘Hello, Mom.’ ”
Beneath the blanket, Kendra’s fists began to clench, her body quivering now from something other than the cold.
“I almost had her convinced, too.”
“You told her you were Ian? You let that woman think that, after all those years.” It was almost too terrible to speak the words. No one knew better than Kendra how her mother had suffered the loss of her son.
“Sure. I thought I could cash in with the happy reunion thing. But she wasn’t having any of it.” The sneer returned to his face. “After the shock of seeing me wore off, she knew I wasn’t Ian.”
“A mother would know her own child,” Kendra’s voice was still a whisper.
“Now, see, that’s just what she said. Exactly what she said,” he told her, the sneer turning into something uglier. He stubbed out his cigarette in the dirt. “Right before I put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
“You . . .” the words stuck in her throat. “You . . .”
“Well, damn, Kendra, I’d had about enough, you know? My mother turns me down, my aunt turns me down . . .”
She flew at him so fast, with such fury, that he barely saw her coming, had no time to even brace himself before she slammed into him and knocked him backwards. He fell over a fallen branch and slammed headfirst into the dirt. Her mind now as numb as her body had been, Kendra raced to the canoe and grabbed the paddle, but this time she chose not to flee. She came back at him, the paddle raised over her head, held in both hands, and she smashed it across his face even as he