He tried her, but it went directly to voice mail. She wouldn’t be returning home until the weekend.
Patch decided he would call the next best person who might be able to explain it to him. His mother’s number at the hospital was programmed into his phone, and he dialed it. It was a snap decision to call her, and as he heard the line ringing, he started to think better of it. What would he say to her? Was this really a conversation he wanted to have in front of Nick and Phoebe? A nurse answered the main line at the Stoney River Psychiatric Hospital in Ossining, and he asked for his mom. After a moment, the nurse said she was unavailable, but they would give her the message. He was almost relieved she hadn’t been there.
Nick and Phoebe looked at him plaintively. He felt like someone they had to feel sorry for.
“What’s up, you guys?” Patch asked.
“It’s so odd,” Nick said. “Like, I feel like we should be celebrating about the trust funds, but that doesn’t feel right. My grandfather could be an ass, but clearly he was looking out for you-for us-in some way.”
“Except that now he’s left us with an even bigger mystery to solve,” Phoebe said.
“God, where is my grandmother when we need her?” Patch said.
Nick took a sip of his Coke. “Okay, let’s figure this out. I’m going to speak openly here. Your mother and my father clearly had something going on. Our fathers were friends, so that can’t have sat well between them.”
“Unless my father-well, who I thought was my father-unless he didn’t know.”
“He had to have found out,” Phoebe said. “How could he not?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “It’s possible he never knew about it. What I don’t get is, if my grandfather-our grandfather-was going to include you in his will, why did he have such strong feelings about you being in the Society? Why were they so upset when you taped the Night of Rebirth?”
The three of them were silent for a moment. “I have an idea,” Phoebe said. “Just from what I know about your grandmother, Patch.”
“What’s that?” Nick said.
“Forgive me if I’m out of line here.” She stirred her soda with a straw.
“Go on,” Patch said.
“I think that if Palmer and Genie were once engaged, then Patch was a symbol of everything that he couldn’t have, of something forbidden. He couldn’t marry Genie because of family pressures to marry someone who approved of the Society. But Parker could have your mother in his life, Patch, at least by having an affair with her.”
“I’ve been pretty sure, since the fall, that both of my parents were Society members,” Patch said. “So how does that make my mother something forbidden?”
Phoebe spoke up. “What was forbidden about her was that she wasn’t his wife.” She looked sheepishly at the two boys.
“I think Phoebe’s right,” Patch said. “Palmer resented me because I reminded him of what his son had done.”
“But then he came around in the end,” Nick said, shaking his head in amazement. “Phoebe, do you remember what he told us in his hospital room? He said something about how he didn’t want us to live the life set up for us by our families. How destructive that could be.”
“So maybe this is your ticket out?” Phoebe asked. “Is this his own way of helping you out of the Society?”
“We’re not out yet,” Nick said. “But this certainly doesn’t hurt.”
“No, I’d say thirty million dollars doesn’t hurt,” Patch said sarcastically. “Except that we still have no idea what the real story is.” He still couldn’t wrap his head around the trust. It seemed imaginary, like Monopoly money.
“I think we should take it from the beginning,” Phoebe said. “Don’t you think that figuring out Palmer’s whole mystery, whatever he was trying to tell you in his room at the hospital, is the first step to all this?” She finished her Coke and nervously stabbed at the ice with a straw. “You’ve tried the key everywhere. But what about those numbers you mentioned? What were they again?”
“1603,” Nick said.
“And you’ve tried addresses already, right? Give me your phone for a sec.”
Nick handed over his iPhone, and Phoebe punched in the numbers. She scrolled through a few entries on Google and frowned.
“Have you ever thought it might be a year?” she asked.
Patch and Nick shrugged. “How would a year help us? Usually these things are an address. Like the chess tables last semester.”
“Right, but maybe it’s a year that leads us to an address.”
“What are you showing up?” Nick asked.
“Nothing significant. Except that 1603 is mentioned in several entries as the last year of the Tudor dynasty.”
“Oh, great, so we have to go to England,” Patch said. “I said no to Denmark, and I say no to England, too.”
“We don’t have to go to England,” Phoebe said. “We just have to go to a place that looks like England.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Phoebe had some crazy idea about where they should go in the quest to solve Palmer’s riddle, but Patch’s attention was diverted. He would be joining them on their journey the next day, which, thankfully, was a Saturday, but for now, he was more concerned with solving the mystery of his own parentage. Could he really be Parker Bell’s son? Or was it something else? And what did it mean to be someone’s biological son, anyway, especially when you had never been treated as that person’s child? Was your father the person whom your mother slept with to conceive you, or was your real father the man who raised you?
Even if that was a man who had disappeared from his life, had drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, when he was five years old.
For all the time that Patch had spent with the Bells-good, bad, indifferent-Parker Bell could very well be his father.
Except that fathers didn’t keep their sons hostage. Fathers didn’t execute nefarious plans to harm their sons.
But maybe Parker Bell didn’t know that Patch was his son until today? And how was Nick so sure that Parker really was Patch’s father? Nick hadn’t let on anything about it before. What if it were something that went back even further, to Palmer and Genie? What if Esme was actually Palmer’s daughter, and Patch, Jr., really was his father? Was that even possible? It hadn’t even occurred to Nick and Phoebe, but how did they know it wasn’t true?
All these thoughts were spiraling around in his head like an insane kaleidoscope as Patch entered his building. As he waited for the elevator at the end of the lobby, he saw Parker Bell talking to the doorman.
He needed to know. He didn’t particularly want to talk to him, but he needed to know.
Patch strode right up to Mr. Bell and tapped him on the shoulder.
Mr. Bell turned around and looked at Patch, first with annoyance, then with something resembling tenderness. “Patch,” he said. “All this must be a surprise for you. Why don’t you come upstairs?”
Patch nodded. He followed Mr. Bell into the elevator, and for the first few floors, they were silent. Mr. Bell finally spoke.
“I never intended for you to find out this way. I thought the lawyers were going to set up a private meeting. But once you were there at Mr. Story’s invitation, I realized that you deserved to be there as much as anyone else.”
“I’m not exactly sure why, sir. I wish you’d tell me.”
Mr. Bell looked Patch up and down, his eyes lingering, Patch was sure, at his dirty sneakers and frayed khakis.
“Let’s go into my study.”
Patch followed Mr. Bell through the apartment that he knew so well, though he had spent little time there lately. Even though he and Nick had resumed their friendship, he still felt like he wasn’t welcome in the Bells’ inner sanctum. He also suspected that Gigi, Nick’s mother, didn’t like him very much, and so he had stayed away.
Mr. Bell’s study was wood-paneled, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and windows that faced Fifth Avenue. Two burgundy leather chesterfield sofas sat facing each other. Patch sat down on one and Mr. Bell on another.