“Let’s not lie to each other anymore.”
I hesitated, then said, voice low, “I need to find Leo. At the station, I’d be useless, and if something happened to him while I was off somewhere sipping coffee from a cardboard cup . . .” I paused, studying him. “Is that what this is?”
“This?”
I gestured in a circular motion near his face. “This. You won’t meet my eyes, you look like crap. You shouldn’t feel guilty about Leo—”
“Of course I should, and I do, but this isn’t about that.”
I’d heard once that you can feel a person’s negative energy from several feet away. The waves coming off my father could’ve been felt on the next block.
“Whatever it is, tell me.”
Our eyes locked, and, finally, he said, “I wish I’d been able to save Audrey’s life. I understand why you were so angry. Why you still are.”
At his words, I reached for the grudge I’d carried for six years like some parasitic twin. I had blamed it for Audrey’s illness, even though she had long since recovered, and trotted it out whenever I needed an excuse for why the world sucked, or for my own parental shortcomings.
Sure, Sam, I may have missed Leo’s game or been late to Audrey’s party, but my father wouldn’t get tested and couldn’t help Audrey, and isn’t that so much worse?
With my fresher grief, the past seemed more insignificant than it had before, and my reliance on old grudges petty and potentially dangerous for my son. I had failed my own children too many times, but this wouldn’t be one of those.
“I’m sorry too,” I said.
Red’s eyes misted at my olive branch, which he accepted with a nod, but his mouth remained set in a grim line. It was clear the conversation wasn’t over.
“The day you called to tell me Audrey was sick, my first impulse was to help.” His voice cracked. “I’ve always wanted nothing more than to take care of you. From that first night.”
Eyes overbright now, shoulders squared, Red squeezed my hand. His palm was slick, mine cold.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said.
Red told his story in a rush.
He started doing work on Dee’s house in 1980, the spring Natalie Robinson turned sixteen.
Long before it became a private residence, Dee’s home in the Napa Valley had been a winery. Built late in the nineteenth century, it was one of hundreds of wineries operating in the state in 1920. Then Prohibition came, and the Depression, and everything changed.
The production of sacramental wines, exempt from the Eighteenth Amendment, saved some wineries, while others changed crops, but most shuttered. Only a few dozen managed to survive.
Over the ensuing decades, some of the abandoned sites, known as ghost wineries, found new life as restaurants, shops, or even, once again, wine-producing facilities.
More than Prohibition, a tiny sap-sucking pest had doomed the winery that would become Dee’s house. To supplement income lost to the phylloxera, a creamery had been built, but bad business decisions had doomed that too.
So it became just a home for an eccentric woman and her two daughters.
Though renovations had made the main house livable, its stone walls had started to crumble, mold had crept into its cellar, and wood beams shed splinters the size of toothpicks.
Dee recruited Red to restore the house to its historic glory.
The day Red met Dee’s daughter Natalie, he made note of the boxy sweater, worn despite the heat, and immediately guessed the teen was pregnant. He also learned, just as quickly, that such matters weren’t discussed in Dee’s house.
Outside the house, however, he heard rumors: Dee hadn’t been able to bring pregnancies to term since Natalie’s birth—scar tissue, one person said; emergency hysterectomy, claimed another. Yet earlier that year, Dee had suddenly shown up in town with a baby in tow.
The baby’s name was Megan.
Red had never been much for kids, but Natalie’s little sister was the most beautiful baby he had ever seen. Her eyes glowed with an intelligence she would no doubt grow into, and despite her scratched skin and too-thin arms, Megan was quick to smile. Usually. Sometimes Red saw hints of a developing anger.
Because of the rumors, Red risked asking if Megan was adopted. Dee snapped, She’s mine, which ended that conversation.
At least with Dee. When Red asked the same question of Natalie a couple of days later, the teen told him how earlier that year, her mom had spotted an infant Megan in a Fresno grocery store. Wouldn’t it be nice to have another little girl? Dee had asked. As if they had been car shopping and she had been deciding whether to upgrade to leather.
According to Natalie, Dee had stalked the baby through the store, pretending to study jars of olives and tubs of yogurt, but really watching the girl whose mother called her Megan and who was only loosely strapped into the shopping cart. When Megan’s mom had knelt down to retrieve a can of stewed tomatoes, it had slipped from her hands and rolled away from her. Away from her baby. Three strides and Dee had snatched the baby from the cart. Five more and she had cleared the aisle, the infant silent in her arms even as her mom began screaming. The sound had drawn the lone security guard away from his post near the exit.
Natalie insisted on Red’s silence, and he gave it to her. Too easily, in retrospect, especially since he had weeks before noticed bruises on Natalie’s arm, and scratches even deeper than the ones on Megan.
He blamed cowardice. He knew what he would risk by taking Natalie and her sister from the house without Dee’s consent. Such a move would get his photo on every newscast and in every newspaper: the creepy contractor who abducted two girls, one a beautiful, very pregnant teen.
But Red couldn’t stop running the angles. To make it work, he wouldn’t be able to go home. Not until the police could be convinced the children were someone else’s victims and that he only meant to save them.
Maybe he could go to the police before he took the girls? Tell them about Megan, have them check their records for missing babies.
But what if the police didn’t believe him or Natalie had lied about her sister’s name? What if the parents were looking for a Sara or an Angela instead? There would be an investigation, and Red wasn’t certain the children would survive that.
There was also the possibility that Natalie had lied.
Still, there was no explaining those bruises on Megan and Natalie. That wasn’t to say Red didn’t try. An accident. Sports injury. A self-inflicted cry for attention.
Twenty-four hours later, Red stopped making excuses and made a decision: he would take Natalie and Megan from the house and work through the details later.
That night, Red noticed the sweat tracing Natalie’s hairline, the intensity with which she gripped the edge of the dining room table, the way she pulled the oversized sweater around her like a blanket, and he knew. Natalie was in labor.
Dee didn’t, so Red faked a distraction in the kitchen—the clatter of dropped tiles, followed by a lie that he had ordered the wrong size cabinets. Even from the kitchen, he heard the squeak of the front door he had been meaning to fix.
While Dee didn’t hear the squeak, the silence pricked her ears. Red marked the moment she felt Natalie’s absence by the darkening of her expression.
Outside on the porch, Dee screamed for her daughter. Then, spotting her, yelled: What have you done? Her eyes blazed, twin strobes of crazy.