“Has anyone contacted his family?” I asked.
“He doesn’t seem to have any,” John said. “His father died while he was in college, and his mother died years ago. No siblings.”
Max and Helen had stood up together when he made the first part of this announcement. When they saw that quite a few others were already on their way, they stayed back long enough to talk to me for a few minutes. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” Max said, “and that the Yeagers are finally being made to pay for some of their sins. Maybe we’ll finally find out what happened to the baby.”
I looked at Helen and said, “I think I know.”
She met my gaze. “Do you?”
“Yes. But perhaps you’d like to be somewhere more private?”
“No,” she said with a smile. “I think I’ve been private long enough, don’t you? But for Max’s sake, let’s ask the nurse if there is somewhere we can talk.”
We were ushered into a small conference room.
“Max,” I said, “you’re the real Max Ducane.”
“I don’t know what the two of you were talking about just now, or what this is all about, but it’s okay, I’m really okay now knowing I’m not Max. DNA doesn’t lie.”
“No, it doesn’t. Which is why, if Helen’s blood were tested, you’d know you were sitting next to your maternal grandmother.”
“What?”
“Do you tell this, or do I?” I asked Helen.
“Allow me to at least technically keep my word to Lillian,” she said.
I nodded and went on. “Sometime around 1936, a rather adventurous young woman who had a job at a newspaper fell in love with Handsome Jack Corrigan. He settled down later, but at the time, she knew that it was hopeless to expect him to make much of a husband. He was probably seeing Lillian Vanderveer when the newspaperwoman learned she was pregnant with his child.”
“The newspaperwoman was not virtuous, I’m afraid,” Helen said.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s likely she would have given herself to anyone else. But at that time, in her situation, unmarried and pregnant, her alternatives weren’t many. She loved her career, in a way that perhaps only someone else who has ink in her veins can understand, but this pregnancy would mean she would lose her job. Abortion would have been an illegal and dangerous back-alley matter, and she was a Catholic girl as well.”
“Again, not a very good one.”
“She wanted the child to live, but what choices did she have? If she gave birth out of wedlock, she and the child would be subject to constant ridicule. There was no chance on earth that her conservative employer would allow her to continue to work for the newspaper. If she tried to support the child through any of the other few jobs that were available to women, she would be consigning both of them to a life of poverty.”
“She was willing to do that for herself, but it was such a hard thing to choose for the child.”
“I’m not so sure about this next part, because I only have the observations of another child to go on-an eight-or nine-year-old boy.”
“A great observer. Just didn’t know what he was seeing.”
“I’m much older than he was then, and although it was there before me, I didn’t see it either, not until we had our talk the other day.” I turned to Max. “Conn O’Connor was a nosy child, dedicated to Jack Corrigan, and not overly fond of Lillian-although he later became her friend. He spied on his hero one night and learned that he was going on a date with Lillian, a married woman. He probably didn’t know that Lillian was in the early stages of a pregnancy. There was a car accident-a horrible accident, one that left Jack partially lame the rest of his life. But what few others know-what O’Connor didn’t know until many years later himself-was that Lillian was injured in that same accident. She miscarried.”
“I’ll let you ask Lillian about her part of this story,” Helen said.
“Perhaps the injury was worse, because she never conceived another child. And there was the possibility, if her husband returned from Europe, that he would ask questions about when and how the pregnancy ended.”
“He was an ass,” was all that Helen would say on that subject.
“Helen liked Lillian, and perhaps she even wondered if Lillian’s child might have been a half brother or half sister of her own. Whatever the case, Helen and Lillian comforted each other, and somewhere in all this time of worry and woe, they came up with a solution. Helen would quit the paper, ostensibly to help Lillian with her new project. They would live in the mountains, away from the prying eyes of local society. Lillian’s name would be on the child’s birth certificate, and she would raise him or her in a life of privilege. She swore, in exchange for Helen’s secrecy-and her child-that she would never deny Helen access to the little girl who was born up in the mountains that winter.”
Max was staring at her, obviously having trouble taking it all in.
“You’d probably like to hate me,” Helen said to him. “Maybe you do. I won’t blame you at all. The promises I made to Lillian were the hardest I’ve ever had to keep. But they were promises.”
He shook his head, saying, “I don’t hate you, but…my God, Helen…”
She began to cry. I wanted to go to her, but Frank put a hand on my shoulder.
Max hesitated only briefly, then embraced her.
“You have questions, I’m sure,” she said, still crying. “I can’t answer all of them, but I’m sure I can get Lillian to see the wisdom of letting some part of these secrets out now.”
“Did Jack Corrigan ever know?” he asked.
“Yes. I think at first he suspected-well, I’ll leave that part of the story to Lillian. One day O’Connor announced that he was marrying a woman he’d only bedded once, because she was pregnant, and Jack was a horse’s ass about it. So I confronted him, and in turn he confronted me, and after calling Lillian and threatening her with all sorts of ridiculous things, he learned the truth from us.”
Max sat silently, then said, “Can we test to make sure, just so we know I’m the child who…”
“Of course.”
“And Lillian-do you think she’ll help me bring this out in public? Some of it, anyway?”
“We’ll work on that together. I think if she realizes that the Yeagers can finally be punished for what they did to Katy, and our lives, then…yes.” She smiled. “She really isn’t one tenth as selfish as she pretends to be.”
We left them to talk together. I went out to check on Ethan again. We arrived just in time to hear a doctor express cautious optimism about his survival. We learned that he was out of surgery and about to be moved to ICU. “No visitors for a while, please-except-is there someone named Irene here?” I came forward. “If you can keep it very brief, I think it would be good for him to see you’re alive.” He smiled. “He thinks we’re lying to him.”
Frank came with me. Ethan was pale, connected to a lot of machinery, obviously full of painkillers. He smiled at us and said, “Thought I’d lost you.”
“No. Rest and recover. We’ll get a room ready for you at home.”
He looked toward Frank. “You sure you want me there?”
“You saved her,” Frank said. “You’re family now, like it or not.”
“Family,” he said. “Sounds good.”
About The Author
JAN BURKE is the recipient of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award® for Best Novel, the Agatha Award, the Macavity Award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Award. She lives in Southern California with her husband, Tim, and her dogs, Cappy and Britches.
