“You have kids. No son?”
“Yeah. I have a son.”
No more comment. Matt read bitter estrangement.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s the family mantra here, I guess. Keep in touch. Let me know when you’re in Chicago. We should … learn to know each other.”
Matt, surprised, hesitated. Then nodded. Maybe. Maybe not.
“Meanwhile, let’s hit your hotel. I could use a drink or three.”
How many bars in how many hotels the world over hosted lost relatives who sat and stared at each other over drinks they were reluctant to touch?
Matt supposed there must be at least eight.
He ran his fingers through his hair that the unaccustomed baseball cap had tamped down, like the wire ring of a kindergarten-play halo.
“You’re blonder than I remember your mother being.”
It was Matt’s turn to feel put on the spot. “You remember right. The … my radio station had some stylist do my hair for the latest publicity photos. I’m told it’ll wash out. Can’t be too soon for me.”
“Media.” Winslow laughed a little, for the first time. “Image. Reality is never enough, is it?”
“No. Not in this day and age.”
“So, you’ve been a priest.”
“Until eighteen months ago.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Better question would be ‘Why’d you enter?’ I was looking to become the perfect father I’d never had.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I did not know. I looked for your mother after I got back from my tour of duty and couldn’t find her. We only knew first names. I didn’t dare probe further. My family would have had my head if they’d known about … what happened. I had no ideathey already knew and had resorted to lawyers. I suppose they thought they were protecting me.”
“They were. From unwanted consequences. Me.”
“I’m sorry. I could say it a thousand times and it’d never change the past. You look … like you turned out fine.”
“It could have been worse,” Matt conceded, “although I could have done without the abusive stepfather.”
Winslow’s contrite expression was startled into shock. “My God! How did that happen?”
“She had no options. She was a pariah, an unwed mother in a deeply Catholic community. Oh, they ‘supported’ her but not without instilling this bone-deep sense of shame. She helped hurt herself, her upbringing helped. So strict. She took such a chance on you.”
“It didn’t feel like that. If felt like a miracle, like the inside of a snow globe when you shake it up and all the magical snow comes floating down on everything, making it … beautiful. What does she want now?”
“Not money. The two-flat kept us afloat. It was worth that much. But she’s figured out someone had a stake in buying us off. She’s gotten to be a lot tougher lady.” Matt smiled. “It’s been good for her, actually. She just wants to know who and why.”
“That’s a lot.”
“She has no idea you didn’t die. Neither did I, until today.”
“Big day for us both,” he noted, sipping from his scotch on the rocks, then setting the drink aside as if he was rejecting far more than an easy glow at a moment of truth. “I wouldn’t have abandoned either of you if they’d have let me know. I’m not a naive kid anymore. I promise you, there will be hell to pay.”
“I … we don’t want to hurt anyone else. Just tell me what to tell her now that I know the truth. The kind lie? I didn’t want to know this. I didn’t need to know you. I wanted to find some crooked lawyers protecting an insulated, snobby family. Maybe I wanted to see someone sweat if I’m deep-down honest about it. But I didn’t want to find you. I don’t need you now. She doesn’t need you now. You’re irrelevant. Maybe you can make whoever in your family did this pay a little. Maybe that’ll make me feel better for seeing my mother lied to and let down a second time.”
Winslow folded his cocktail napkin into accordion pleats. “The Winslows do go back to the Mayflower,” he noted wryly. “Not the Washington hotel, the ship.” His face sobered again. “It would have been my father. He’s dead now. No one can make him suffer. My mother’s in a nursing home. She probably was an accessory. She has Alzheimer’s.”
“Your father. Your mother.”
“Your grandparents.”
“They’re gone, then, both of them. What were they thinking?”
“What all parents do: don’t let my kids make any foolish life-altering choices.”
“I guess you didn’t, really, then.”
“I did. Because I’ve never forgotten her.”
“Is that what I tell her?”
He pulled the drink back over and took a long hard swallow.
“No. That’s what I tell her.”
Chapter 46
Closet Encounter
of the Third Kind
Since this place is crawling with camera operators and just plain operators, I sic Midnight Louise on tailing Crawford Buchanan. (They deserve each other, in my opinion.) I leave my Miss Temple poring over old newspaper clippings and preparing to take her rest on a pussycat pillowcase.
I decide to do what I do best: prowl by night. I have resolved to find and explore all the secret passages in the house.
One would assume that after my namesake hour, the house would quiet down. One can assume nothing when it comes to crime or hordes of teenage girls.
My midnight ramble will need some unwitting accessory work from someone human, and I am betting that enough humans are sneaking around unauthorized here to populate a small city.
Naturally, I am forced to head first to Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s chamber. Some crass folk, including Miss Midnight Louise, were she here to know my plans, might imply that I am more interested in brushing whiskers with the Ashleigh sisters than in exploring secret passages. Quite the contrary. The one entrance to a secret passage I know of at this point is in the Ashleigh suite.
A dude must start somewhere.
So I amble down the deserted hall, rehearsing my speech to induce the Ashleigh sisters to let me in, when my first unlawfully wandering human comes shuffling down the same corridor.
I flatten myself against a baseboard and hope the shadows will hide me.
Not to worry. The sleepwalker is a blonde in pink pajamas, closely followed by a … a blonde in pink pajamas.
The first blonde, Miss Silver by name, carries a sinister canister. It resembles a harmless can of shaving cream but those have been suspect since the foamygraffition-the-exercise-mats incident.
“Shhh!” Second Blonde urges First Blonde.
“Shhh, yourself. All we have to do is leave this in her bathroom and her hair will be history.”
“Are you sure that phony label will stick on?”
“I printed it out on my laptop on glossy adhesive paper. Looks like the real thing.”
Sure enough. I crane my neck up and can read the name of a popular brand of hairspray. Makes one wonder what is really in it. Of course I have to follow them, and that involves backtracking to … Miss Temple and Miss Mariah’s room!
The pair of evil blondes turn the knob about as slowly as they can think, which is very slowly indeed and quite impressive for sneak thieves. Only they are leaving something rather than taking it.
I tail them past the sleeping innocents. The kitty pillow is cast away on the floor, I am happy to say, both for my Miss Temple’s taste’s sake and because I will come in and squash it with my own body after my nightly rounds are made.
They sneak into the bathroom and leave the can on the sink ledge, among a skyline of similar products. It is called “Hair Today.”
Right. As soon as they sneak out again I drag in the massive pillow from the bedroom (no easy task, even for a muscular chap like myself), then position it under the sink.
Then I leap atop the sink rim, balancing precariously, and bat the suspect can off its perch.
What a stunt director dude I would have made! It lands, soft and soundless, on a particularly cloying image of a striped kitten dead center on the pillow.