CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

There was no light seeping from under my apartment door. I unlocked it and pushed the door open. "Zoey?" I called very softly. "You asleep?"

Once we were in the main room, I could see a light coming from the bedroom beyond. Either Zoey was sleeping with the light on, or she was up. "I'm going to check on her," I whispered to the guys. "You stay here."

Jamie didn't argue, which surprised me.

Zoey was sitting up in my bed. She had her enormous wedding planner notebook open on her lap. She'd obviously been turning the pages, indulging in nostalgia for her fantasy wedding. Whatever she thought was happening tomorrow, it wouldn't be the magical wedding contained in those pages.

"Julia, at last. Do you think the storm is slowing down? If it stops soon, everything will be fine by the time the guests get here, don't you think? The sun will dry the grass."

"I do think the storm is passing." I sat next to her on the bed. "Honey, Jamie and Tom are here. Tom has more questions about the man."

I expected a fight, but Zoey put the notebook to the side and pulled her knees toward her, ready to climb out of the bed. "Let's get this over with. I want this—" she groped for the right word. I thought of several, none of them worth suggesting—disaster, tragedy, unreal, unexpected outrage. "Thing," she finally labeled it, "over and done with before tomorrow morning."

I went to my closet and handed her my worn flannel robe to put over the pink bride pajamas.

"Thanks." She ran her fingers through her curly brown hair, wilder now than it was in the daytime. A hairdresser was arriving on the first run of the Boston Whaler in the morning. Darn. Another thing I'd have to cancel.

Jamie and Tom had turned on the lights and were seated at my kitchen table. Zoey went over, gave Jamie a kiss on his forehead and sat down. I sat, too. Jamie took Zoey's hand.

Tom began. "Zoey, we need to ask you some more questions about the dead man and your meeting with him."

Her eyes opened wider. They were still a bit swollen. "Has something else happened?"

Tom spread his hands out on the table, as if placing his cards face up. "Yes and no. I need you to take me back through your meeting with him on Tuesday."

"I told you everything I could. The man came by the studio just as we were closing."

"What time was that?"

"Four o'clock."

Tom nodded for Zoey to go on.

"He said his name was Kendall Clarkson. He wanted to pitch a business deal. I told him to come back Wednesday morning when I knew Julia would be in the office. End of story."

She paused and looked at each of us in turn. Tom was stone-faced. Jamie's lips formed a tight, straight line. He closed his fists on the white tabletop, ready to defend anything Zoey might say. It must have been my face that gave it away.

"Oh," Zoey said. "You know."

Tom replaced his emotionless expression with one of openness and kindness. "We don't know, Zoey. But Derek Quinn told us he came to see you around five on Tuesday. He saw Clarkson leaving your studio, and he saw you crying when the man left. A discussion of a business deal, quickly deflected, doesn't take an hour. It doesn't elicit the level of emotion Quinn saw, either."

"Claims he saw," Jamie corrected.

"Claims he saw," Tom confirmed.

Zoey didn't say anything for a long time. Then she looked at Jamie. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes, making tracks down her cheeks and landing on my ratty bathrobe. "He came to the studio on Tuesday with no warning. I had never seen him before in my life. He's my father."

* * *

She put her head down on the table, cradled it in her arms, and sobbed as if her heart were broken.

For a moment, Tom, Jamie, and I were absolutely still, stunned into inaction. Jamie recovered first. He leaned over and pulled Zoey onto his lap. She buried her face in his shirt and went on crying.

I looked at Tom. Could we stop asking questions? It seemed cruel to go on, but also wrong to leave, having caused so much upheaval. Maybe Zoey would want to talk once she calmed down.

I wondered how life could be so unfair. Zoey's mother had been murdered when she was a teenager. Was it possible her father had been murdered too, twenty years later and on the other side of the country? It seemed so improbable.

I went to fetch a box of tissues. By the time I came back, Zoey had stopped crying and was making little hiccupping noises. At last, she pulled her head off Jamie's shoulder. He still held onto her like he couldn't let her go.

"Zoey—" I started.

"I know," she said. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. I pulled the kitchen trash bucket out and offered it up to her. She spiked the tissue hard. She was angry as well as sad. Of course, she was.

"Can you take us back through that afternoon?" Tom asked softly.

She could have said no, but she didn't. "Okay." She got off Jamie's lap and moved back to her chair so she could look at all of us as she spoke. "I'm ready."

We were looking at her, wondering what she would say.

"My mother told me nothing about my father. The man. His name isn't on my birth certificate. Whenever I asked, she told me my father was in prison, where I wouldn't be able to visit.

"But even though Mom wouldn't talk about who he was, she did tell me their story. She wanted me to know ‘I came from love.' My mother was a romantic. And she had an unfortunate attraction to terrible men. I knew both of these things about her from an early age. I didn't have a fantasy that my dad was a great guy who would reenter my life and rescue me. But I did want to know about him. I wanted to know if my nose came from him, or my body type, so different from my mother's. I loved her stories and encouraged her to tell them as often as possible."

Tom shifted in his seat, eager to get on to the part about the stranger in the billiards room downstairs but too experienced to rush her. Jamie was still apparently content to wait. I was dying to hear it all.

"They met at a concert, an outdoor concert. Sometimes she said it was the Dead, but I think that was to make it sound cooler. Whatever it was, Mom was sitting with a friend on a blanket, and this man, this very handsome man, swaggered by and stepped on the blanket."

Kendall Clarkson had been a handsome man. He'd cut a fine figure as he'd moved through the crowd at the cocktail party with his thick, white hair, white mustache, and warm brown eyes. Did I see any of him in Zoey? My imagination couldn't bridge the differences in age and gender.

"Mom called the man out about stepping on the blanket," Zoey was saying. "He apologized. A conversation started. Mom always said it was love at first sight. She was in art school; he was an artist, too. At the end of the concert, she brought him back to the apartment where she lived with a roommate. He said on that very first day that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever known and that he was hopelessly in love with her.

"They spent the summer together, going out to hear music, staying in and painting each other. He painted my mother in the nude. I remember the picture. It hung in our various apartments for many years, until my mother's last boyfriend—" Zoey's voice wavered. Her mother's last boyfriend had killed her. "He didn't like the painting, or that a former lover had painted it. My mother took it down and put it in a closet. When I went into foster care, it was lost."

A terrible loss. An image of her mother, created by her father.

"I'm sorry," Tom said, his voice low and encouraging. "But the man downstairs—"

"He came to my studio, like I told you. I took him out front into the retail space and showed him our work. He was impressed. Then he said it straight out. ‘Zoey, I believe I am your father.' I was shocked, of course, after all this time. I had given up expecting him when I was a teenager. And for him to show up the week of my wedding."

Neither of the men said anything, so I felt I had to. "Honey, you're a huge success. There have been all kinds of stories about you in lifestyle magazines and sites on the internet. Anyone could have seen them, done a little research, and found the articles about your mother." I had done the same research, belatedly, the summer before, when Zoey was suspected of murder.

"I'm not a fool." Zoey's eyes blazed, and not only from the tears. "We agreed to do DNA tests. But he knew the stories! He knew about the concert. He knew about the paintings. He knew my mother's roommate's name. He was in prison, just like my mother told me he was."

She said this more triumphantly than is usually the case when announcing one's parent is incarcerated.

"Did he say where he was imprisoned, or what for?" Tom asked.

"Yes. Um. California. Fraud. He said it was a business deal that went wrong, the sale of a piece of art, and he was the fall guy."

I thought art fraud might get you a few years in prison, but not your child's entire thirty-seven-year lifetime. "Where has he been, did he say? Why didn't he find you sooner?"

"He knew Mom was murdered, and he had no idea where to find me. Then he saw an article about me on the Web. One of the ones you placed, Julia. Thank you. He kept searching and later found my wedding announcement. He thought that, with me getting married, and the possibility of children, it was time to finally connect."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Jamie struggled to keep the hurt from his voice, but I knew him so well I could hear it. Zoey could, too.

"It was so new. I've never had a father. I wanted to keep it to myself for a while." She paused. "Also, I didn't just believe everything he said. I wanted to wait for the DNA results to come back. Then I was going to tell you." She put her hand over Jamie's on the tabletop.

"You were going through so much by yourself." This time Jamie's voice didn't betray hurt, exactly. More like helplessness. And a realization that Zoey had been on her own for so long, the habits of her solitary life weren't completely gone. I was her best friend and her business partner. She hadn't told me, either.

"There was a painting my mother had done of my father," Zoey said. "It was in my room when I was little. Then it, too, was put away, and I never saw it again. I've tried to remember, to see if the figure was anything like the man who came to the studio. I couldn't tell. The painting was impressionistic, a blurry oil on canvas. My father was young in it, with dark hair. He carried more muscle on him. But all these years later, he would have changed. Could Kendall Clarkson have been my father? I wanted him to be. I have no blood relatives. I wanted him at my wedding. My only wedding." She smiled at Jamie. "This was my one chance."

"Did you actually take DNA tests?" Tom asked.

"No. We agreed we'd do that after I got back from my honeymoon."

"He planned to stay in town until you returned?" Tom sounded skeptical.

Zoey hesitated. "I think so. We didn't discuss it. He said he'd write away for the tests while I was gone, and we'd do them when I got back. I assumed that meant he'd stay. I didn't offer my apartment or anything. I was trying to be cautious, not to get carried away." The tears came again. "And now look what's happened."

"Did he say if he ever married or had a family?" Tom asked.

Zoey shook her head. "He said my mother was the love of his life."