Chapter 3

A carI didn’t recognize was parked in front of my house when we pulled up. Since it was a basic blue Honda Accord, it could have been a rental or new to someone I did know, but as we pulled into the drive, a woman stepped out.

Thirtyish. Five foot six. Trim build. Good muscle tone. But the worried look on her face reduced the threat factor. This woman had something serious on her mind.

I glanced at Gertie and Ida Belle, who both shook their heads. Interesting. She’d obviously come to find me, knew where I lived, and yet wasn’t from Sinful or related to anyone who was.

“You think she has something to do with the military investigation?” Gertie asked.

“She doesn’t walk like she’s military,” I said.

“Or an attorney,” Ida Belle said. “Besides, Alexander would have told you if he’d hired help, and the others aren’t allowed to talk to you.”

“Well then, let’s go see what this is about,” I said, and climbed out of Ida Belle’s SUV.

The woman approached as we exited the vehicle.

“Fortune Redding?” she asked and extended her hand. “My name is Kelsey Spalding. I’m sorry for accosting you this way at your home, but I got your name from Jenny Babin. I’d like to hire you.”

“Jenny?” I said, a bit surprised.

Jenny Babin had been caught up in our last investigation, although it was technically an unofficial one, and she had come dangerously close to being arrested for murder. She’d ultimately been cleared but had left Sinful as soon as she was released and hadn’t so much as glanced back.

“Yes,” Kelsey said. “I work with her at the hotel. I’m the head chef. Jenny found me crying one day and my situation just spilled out. She told me a little about what had happened to her and how you’d unraveled it all. She said if anyone could sort out the truth, it was you.”

I shuffled a little, feeling a tiny bit guilty since it was my investigation that had gotten Jenny almost arrested in the first place, but she didn’t know that. And since I’d ultimately cleared her as well, I supposed it had all worked out just fine.

“Okay,” I said. “Why don’t you come inside. These are my assistants, Ida Belle and Gertie. I assume you’re okay with them listening as well?”

“Of course. Jenny said you had fierce local support. I think you’re going to need all the help you can get. I’m afraid my situation is as hopeless as I am desperate.”

“Then let’s go see what we can do.”

We headed inside to the kitchen and Gertie poured us all up some tea. Kelsey seemed nervous, and I noticed her hands shook as she lifted the glass. She barely glanced around the room, instead alternating staring out the window or picking at her cuticles. I noticed so much skin was missing on some of the fingers that they’d been bleeding. This woman was definitely stressed.

“Where do I start?” she finally asked.

“Wherever you want,” I said. “I need the whole story, either way, so tell it how it will be easiest to understand. There’s no time limit. Our afternoon has just cleared up.”

Her shoulders relaxed a tiny bit, and she nodded. “Okay. Then I guess I should start at the beginning. That’s all the way back to high school just about.”

“I’ve got underwear older than you,” Ida Belle said. “You’ll be fine.”

Gertie grimaced. “You really should get some new underwear. Elastic can’t last that long.”

“It does if you don’t gain weight and stretch it out.”

Gertie gave her the finger and Kelsey relaxed a bit more, Ida Belle and Gertie’s banter having the intended effect.

I gave her an encouraging smile. “Since you’re not drawing Social Security yet, and Ida Belle’s volunteered her underwear information, I’m sure your story will be fine no matter how far back you have to go.”

She took a deep breath and slowly blew it out. “Okay, here goes… I met my husband the summer after high school. I was waiting tables in one of the restaurants his family’s firm holds as an investment. He was home from college until fall—he was a junior at Harvard.”

“Law?” Ida Belle asked.

“No. Finance. His family was grooming him to take over their investment firm so they could retire early. They’re big travelers and never liked staying in one place much. Anyway, we started dating and I figured it would all end when he headed back to college, but it didn’t. He went back in the fall, I started culinary school, and we kept the relationship going long distance.”

“A hard thing to do, especially at that age,” Gertie said.

Kelsey nodded. “I think it worked because we were both so busy with our education. We didn’t have a lot of time for hanging out with friends and meeting other people, so the temptation to try someone new wasn’t really there. When he graduated the next year, he came home, and we took up full force. And to be honest, that’s when things got harder.”

Ida Belle raised one eyebrow. “The rose-colored glasses were gone after summer but having been separated all that time, you still didn’t really know each other.”

“Exactly,” Kelsey agreed. “Brett is a good man in many ways, but he’s also very rigid. Mostly because he never thinks he’s wrong.”

“We got that part when you said he was a man,” Gertie said.

She laughed. “I suppose there might be some truth to that, as my son is often the same.”

“How old is he?”

She sobered and her expression shifted to sad and serious. “Ten, and he might not make it to eleven.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He has a birth defect that causes kidney issues. He needs an organ transplant, or I should say another organ transplant. He had one transplant already, but it failed, and the odds of him getting pushed up the list a second time are next to none.”

“And you and your husband aren’t a match?” I asked.

She shook her head. “We were both tested before he went on the list. I’m not a match. And Brett’s not his father.”

A flush crept up her face, and she stared down at the table.

“I take it Brett didn’t know?” I asked.

“No. Neither did I. Benjamin—Ben—looks so much like Brett. I just didn’t think…”

“But obviously, it was a possibility.”

She nodded. “We had broken up. Brett wanted to get married, but I wanted to finish culinary school first and get established in a full-time position as a chef before I even thought about planning a wedding or being a wife. But he was older than me, done with school, and his career was already planned. He was far ahead of me in life and either couldn’t or didn’t want to see things from my perspective.”

“Which was?” I asked.

She thought for a moment, then blew out a breath. “Brett didn’t have any real climbing up the work ladder to do since he was being presented with his family’s company on a silver platter. He didn’t want to accept that getting that foot in the door is the biggest challenge for most young people establishing a career, and it would be for me as well, because I wasn’t interested in being handed a job. I wanted to earn my title and position.”

“And your wanting to delay marriage until you finished your education and secured a job on your own caused him to break up with you?” Ida Belle asked.

“It was more of a split because of a fight—one of many, but I was tired of them, and he was tired of not getting his way. He’d been getting more and more antsy about it all, especially since I refused to live with him, too.”

“That’s very old-fashioned of you in such a throw-caution-to-the wind society,” Gertie said.

She smiled. “Obviously, it wasn’t about saving myself for marriage or even for appearances. I just didn’t want the distraction, and I knew he would be one. Given the business and its clients, Brett spent several nights a week at some party or event. There was no way I could handle that kind of schedule and finish school, and he would have wanted me to attend.”

Ida Belle shook her head. “I guess he was more concerned with what he wanted than what you did. Spoiled? Controlling? Entitled?”

“Those all play a role, for sure,” she agreed. “Added to that, he was getting pressure from his parents. I’m certain they never liked me—probably thought I wasn’t good enough since I didn’t come from money or a society family. I think he believed getting married would shut them down.”

“But as long as he was still single, they’d keep trying to push off someone they thought was better suited,” Gertie said.

“That’s it exactly,” Kelsey said. “I also knew he didn’t want me to work, and we certainly didn’t need the additional salary. He would have preferred I spend my time catering to him. And even if I insisted that I needed to work for me, his viewpoint was that his family’s firm owned several restaurants. It’s not like I had to finish at the top of my class and then go begging for a chance like all the other culinary graduates with no connections. But I didn’t want to work at a restaurant his family firm controlled. I wanted to do it myself, and I didn’t want to deal with the resentment that would come from being shoved into a job because of my relationship with Brett.”

“Smart,” Ida Belle said. “Because that’s exactly how it would have gone.”

“Anyway, we kept arguing over it and he finally said that if I wasn’t going to marry him then there was no point in us continuing. I just wanted to be left alone to finish school, so I agreed, and we went our separate ways.”

“Still couldn’t have been easy,” Gertie said, “even though it was the right decision.”

“It wasn’t. By that time, we’d been dating for almost three years—two in person and one with him away. I understood his position, but I didn’t feel like he’d ever made the effort to understand mine. I was completely down about the whole thing, of course, so my roommate and a couple other friends insisted on taking me out for a night on the town. We popped in and out of a bunch of bars in the French Quarter and finally ended up at the casino. By the time midnight had come and gone, we’d all had way too much to drink and two of them had headed home already. My roommate tried to get me to leave, but I didn’t feel like going home and staring at the ceiling like I had every night before. So I promised her that I’d take a cab home and took a seat at the bar counter. That’s where I met Ryan.”

“And Ryan is Ben’s father?” I asked.

“Definitely. I’ve never been the kind of person to sleep around. For three years, I’d only been with Brett, and after Ryan, it was only Brett again, so there are no other options.”

“Was he another customer?” Gertie asked.

“No. He was the bartender. He was about my age, cute, and clued right into my confused and depressed state. He asked me what I wanted to drink, then asked me what was wrong. I dumped everything on him. He was a really good listener. Turned out, he’d been having relationship problems as well. He and his longtime girlfriend had recently separated, and he’d moved out. I stayed at the bar, talking to him, until the bar closed. We were the only two people in there by then.”

“And you went home with him?” Ida Belle asked.

“No. But it was a one-night stand. God, I feel so embarrassed admitting that. When we left the bar, he asked me if I was hungry and said we could grab something to eat and keep talking. I didn’t want to leave either. It had been so long since a man listened to me—really listened—so I took a chance and kissed him. I figured if he wasn’t interested, he’d push me off and we’d both go our separate ways, but he didn’t. He got big discounts on rooms when the hotel wasn’t busy, so he got a room and we headed up.”

She shook her head and frowned. “When I woke up the next morning, I almost screamed. I didn’t know where I was or who the strange man in bed with me was. Then it all came flooding back in, and I was so humiliated. I grabbed my clothes and dressed on the way to the door. I left and never saw him again. That day was my birthday, and Brett came to see me and apologized. We talked everything out, found some middle ground, and got back together. A month later, I found out I was pregnant.”

“And you never worried that Ben might not be Brett’s?” Gertie asked.

“The thought definitely flickered through my mind while I was pregnant, but when Ben was born, Brett was so excited to be a father and actually invested, you know? And Ben looked like Brett’s baby pictures. Brett’s mother was always going on about it, so I let it go, figuring the possibility was so slim that it wasn’t worth considering.”

“So I take it Brett and Ryan look a lot alike?” I asked.

“Yeah. They do,” she admitted. “I guess I have a type. Anyway, Brett and I got married. His parents made him president of the firm and started traveling most of the year, handling what little business they still personally oversaw from other countries. I managed to finish culinary school and graduated right before Ben was born. I stayed home with him the first year and then started working part time after that—still not for a restaurant connected to Brett. I found a chef who was willing to work with me part time until Ben was in school and I could start working full time.”

She raised her chin a little. “I’m a really good chef. As soon as I went full time, I moved up quickly and was a head chef at a top-tier restaurant within two years.”

“That’s impressive,” Ida Belle said. “We’ve eaten at the hotel recently, and the food was excellent.”

“Thank you. The owner is a great boss. Of course, I’m completely biased in saying that as he’s the first person I’ve worked for who let me have complete creative control.”

“Seems like a smart move on his part,” Gertie said.

She nodded, then frowned. “So fast-forward some years and both of us are clicking along just fine in our careers and Ben is doing great. He’s such a wonderful kid. I know every parent says that, but in Ben’s case, it’s really true. As ill as he is, he’s never once complained, never cried, never raged against God. I’ve done all that and more.”

“And your marriage?” I asked. “Now that certain things have been revealed?”

She sighed. “To be honest, it wasn’t exactly a storybook romance before Ben got sick, either. My kid is perfect, but my husband is far from it. We’ve been drifting apart for years, and that’s assuming we were ever solid to begin with. Brett is a great father but not a good husband. Unless being controlled is your thing, and it never was for me. But I allowed too much of it because of the pregnancy and then once Ben was born, I wanted to be able to stay with him without having to rush off to work right away. But I never intended for that to be my sole existence.”

“I take it Brett would have preferred you not go back to work?” Gertie asked.

“That’s putting it mildly. It’s been a source of contention between us ever since I walked out the door in a chef’s coat. Don’t get me wrong—I get it on some level. His parents are…uninvolved, I guess is the politest way to put it. They almost seem like they don’t even like him very much. They returned to the United States for only two days after Ben was born and have only seen him a handful of times since then.”

“Sounds like Brett wants the perfect family so badly that he’s destroying any chance of having it by trying to control everyone,” Gertie said. “That’s sad for all of you.”

Kelsey nodded. “He stopped the digs and snide comments a long time ago, but I have no doubt his feelings are the same. I often wondered what would happen when Ben was old enough to start becoming his own person, separate from Brett’s will.”

She choked and had to take a drink of water as her eyes filled with tears. “Now I don’t even know if he’ll ever get old enough to start that battle.”

My heart clenched and I prayed I could help her.

“I take it you need me to find Ryan?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I already found him. I didn’t know his last name, but I went back to the casino, praying that a longtime employee would remember him. I got lucky. The housekeeping manager had just started part time back then, and she remembered him because he always walked her to her car when she got off and he was coming on.”

I frowned. I hoped Kelsey didn’t want me to try to convince Ryan to give up a kidney. That was a job better suited for a therapist or maybe a priest. “So you know his full name and where he lives? Then what’s the problem?”

“His current residence is Angola prison.”