I realized I’d been thinking of her as Tony Skouras’s daughter, not Adrian Skouras’s half sister, but clearly that was equally true.
She added, “I briefly considered taking his last name, but my family in Bodega Bay… they were my home. I’m part of them.”
“Tess of the D’Agostinos.”
“Are you commonly this acerbic, or is it your way of making yourself feel unscathed after everything that’s happened?”
She’d nailed me. I lowered my face to my steamed milk. Actually, I’d decided I didn’t like it, and had been scoping for a trash can in which to discreetly deposit it behind Tess’s back, but now it made a good diversion.
She went on: “I know it’ll be particularly hard for you to sympathize, given what you’ve been through at my father’s hand, but an inheritance like that… your very genetic material, the stuff of who you are, that’s a big gift, and hard to reject outright.” She reconsidered. “I mean, it’s hard to reject outright the person who gave it to you, no matter what you’ve learned about his private life.”
“After last night,” I said, “do you think you’re any closer?”
Her gaze went to my bandaged hand. She said, “When I walked into that room… Hailey, I never saw anything like that before.”
“You seemed very calm.”
“I was acting,” she said. “I didn’t feel it.”
“How did you know where we were, anyhow?”
“My father was lucid in the hospital, between the first and second heart attack,” Tess said. “He must have suspected he didn’t have much time, and he was unusually honest with me. About the baby, everything that was going on. I think he hoped I’d understand, that I’d see that this was about family, about our line continuing.”
That brought up an interesting point: “You’re his daughter, and you’re obviously young enough to have children. Why didn’t he hold out hope that you’d give him an heir?”
Tess smiled, a private, interior smile, and lifted a shoulder. “I’m thirty-two and never married,” she said. “I suppose he’d simply given up on that option.” She paused. “At any rate, I knew the overall situation because of my father, and then Mr. Costa was able to tell me where they’d taken you, because Joe Laska had been keeping him apprised.”
Babyface. Joseph Laska. I filed that name away for future reference. “Are you really thinking of taking over your father’s businesses?”
“I’m considering it.”
“Tough line.”
“I know,” she said.
“What about you, what are your plans?” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking. I’ll understand if you still don’t feel comfortable enough with me to have me know where you are.”
“Miss D’Agostino-”
“Tess,” she corrected again.
“I’ve learned something from all this,” I said. “I’m not the kind of person who can hide much of anywhere. I have a birthmark on my face and a nickname in Latin tattooed on my back, and now”-I held up my hand-“only nine fingers. Not to mention, my fingerprints are on record and my DNA is in the Pentagon’s battlefield registry. For good or bad, I’ve got to live my life out in the open.”
“The battlefield registry?” she echoed. “You’re a veteran? At your age?”
“I was at West Point.”
“And then what?”
“I left.”
“That’s obviously not the whole truth, Hailey. A West Point cadet represents a substantial financial investment by the U.S. government. They don’t just let you walk away from that.”
“No,” I told her. “They told me to walk away.”
“Why?” she asked. “Oh, I see it on your face already: It’s another story you’re not ready to tell me.”
“Don’t take it personally,” I said. “I don’t tell anyone.”
We had reached the Fairmont but stopped outside, as if the conversation was too important to carry inside among other people and their light and noise.
“I’m just trying to understand you,” she said. “I meant what I said earlier. When I walked into that theater, I’ve never seen anyone behaving the way you did before.”
“I wasn’t behaving any particular way. I was being held down on a table.”
“Don’t be flippant,” she said. “You went to great lengths, and let yourself be tortured, for the son of two dead strangers. You weren’t even saving the boy’s life; he was in no physical danger from my father. You nearly died to preserve his moral and spiritual welfare.”
“But I didn’t die,” I said. “Look, I don’t know if I can explain my behavior in a way you can understand. Have you read the Book of Jonah?”
“Jonah?” she repeated, her brown-gray gaze curious on my face.
“Yeah,” I said. “Even if you have, read it again. That’s the best I can do.”
epilogue
DECEMBER 26
Two days later, I was up on the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a bright morning, December cool. I wasn’t looking for jumpers. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be up on the bridge, looking for jumpers, again. Tomorrow I was going home.
If I’d cared to make a list of the things I’d lost in the past six months, suffice it to say it would be extensive. Every piece of paper that documented my identity-driver’s license, passport, even my birth certificate. Two guns, the Airweight and the SIG. Two cars, one of which I didn’t even own. And, of course, my finger.
What hurt most was the loss of the things I’d asked Shay to get for me, the Wheelock’s with my birth certificate and my only photo of my father tucked inside, my unworn red dress, my West Point class ring. On Christmas night, I’d gone back to get them, only to find the room bare except for the furniture it’d had when I moved in.
That had been too bad, really. Not just for me, but for Shay. If only I’d found the stuff I’d gone back there for, I could have let his betrayal slide. As it was, I’d had to pay him a visit.
Christmas night was a good time for a break-in: quiet and dark, half the houses on any given street standing empty, police patrols few and far between because of skeleton-crew staffing. I’d taken my time with a crowbar on Shay’s back door.
The crowbar had also helped Shay to be cooperative and forthcoming when he’d come in around eleven from wherever he’d had Christmas dinner. Conveniently, he’d been alone, or at least he’d thought he was alone until he flipped on the lights.
Nothing he had to say had surprised me much. They’d paid him fifteen thousand dollars to give me up. Shay insisted that Babyface had told him I’d walk away from the situation; that I’d owed a lot of money, and they were just going to slap me around some.
“Bullshit,” I’d said. “You cleaned out my room. You knew I was never coming back.”
I’d heard it before but never really believed it, that there were people like Shay in the world, who looked good and acted normal but had necrotic tissue where their conscience should have been. I understood Babyface and his crew; what they had done to me was their job, and I was nobody to them. Shay was different. He’d known me, even if we hadn’t been close, and I’d certainly done nothing to earn anything like animosity from him. Shay had simply wanted the money and he would have believed anything they’d told him to get it.
It wasn’t really a hell of a lot of money, not for a human life. “Frankly,” I’d told him last night, “I would have held out for more.”
I didn’t very often have an opportunity to give full rein, without remorse, to the rage that sometimes seized me. Last night had been a rare exception.