Keepsake (40 page)

He felt her drop a quick kiss on the top of his head. “I don’t mean to criticize. He was going to throw that knife. You saved
our lives.”

Yeah, but at what price?
“It’s never easy to shoot someone,” he said.

She left, and he applied pressure to stop the bleeding in the creep’s chest. Didn’t look too bad, actually. The guy was probably
out from the shock. He might come round at any time.

He pulled the blanket off the bed and covered him, but not before a quick go-through of his pockets. Once the cops arrived,
the place would be sealed as a crime scene and they’d all be hauled in to spend the rest of the night answering questions.

He couldn’t find a gun. But the guy was carrying a fanny pack containing several lengths of rope—narrow and nasty. A cigarette
lighter, but no cigarettes. A second knife, three industrial strength sewing needles, an awl, a pair of blunt-nose pliers,
a roll of duct tape, a tightly folded clear-plastic raincoat, and a pair of surgical gloves.

Blackthorn’s usually strong stomach rose as he considered what the killer had intended to do with these items. The raincoat
and gloves, no doubt, were to protect him from the blood.

He thought of April as he’d found her—peacefully
stretched out in the bed. Jessie had died easily compared to what this asshole had had planned for April.

He stumbled to the entrance to the cottage and threw up into the bushes just outside the door.

He tried to think of Jessie, and how she had died… what she had said… how she had looked, but his mind was filled with April,
her red hair, her laughing eyes, her smiling face. He could have lost her. Dammit, he wasn’t going to lose her.

“I love you, April,” he said.

“It might be withholding evidence,” April said, “but after all this trouble I was not going to turn this diskette over to
the police without seeing what was on it myself!”

“I don’t blame you,” Blackthorn said.

“Now if we can just get to a computer.”

“No problem. I have a laptop in my car.”

She threw her arms around him and hugged him.

But a few minutes later, sitting in the hotel room to which they’d retreated after a long session with the local police, he
turned on the computer and hesitated before inserting the diskette into the disk drive. “Are you sure you want me to read
it with you?”

She nodded.

“Think,” he told her. “You still don’t know who hired Morrow. Suppose it turns out to be me, after all. Maybe I shot him so
he couldn’t expose me.”

She made a face. “Look, I’m sorry. I just—I didn’t know whom to trust.” She had told him about the newspaper
clipping that Christian had shown her, and how it had shaken her faith. He’d tried to explain to her how angry and bitter
he’d been after Jessie’s death. He’d written the letter to the editor, yes, he’d said. That had been a particularly bad time,
and he’d needed to find somebody—anybody—to blame. But later he and Rina had become friends.

“And trusting’s hard for you,” he said.

“It has been, yes.” She paused. “But sometimes you have to make a leap of faith.” She reached out and took his hand. “I trust
you, Rob.”

He kissed her gently on the mouth. “Since I’ve been with you, I’ve been alive again. And Jessie—well—I think I can finally
accept her death and begin to let her go. I love you.”

She could feel her heart open. “I love you, too.”

The files were there. They were organized into chapters—“mylife.1, mylife.2,” etc. But the first file on the diskette was
simply named “April.let.”

With Rob’s help, she called it up on the screen and together they began reading:

To my daughter:

April, I am writing this more as an exercise, I think, than as an actual letter. I hope that we will see each other again
and that I will be able to talk to you in person. I hope it will never be necessary for you to read this letter, or that if
you do, you will already have understood
…
and forgiven me for the great wrong I have done you.

It is so difficult to know what to say to you after so
many years. Ironically, the more time passes, the more difficult it becomes. I have wanted so many times over the years to
reach out to you. Yet at the same time I dread doing so because I am afraid you will respond to me in the only manner that
I deserve.

I know that there can be no excuse for the way I have treated you. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to explain.

Perhaps this explanation is more for myself than for you; perhaps I will never even share it with you. Perhaps I am the one
who must somehow learn to understand.

And to forgive.

Forgiving oneself is always the highest hurdle.

I have come to believe that we make our own destiny. We are free human spirits who make the choices that lead us either to
success or disaster. Or, in my case, both.

One thing I have learned is to be rigorously honest with myself. I confess that I was never a good mother. Worse, to my mind
—
and it is difficult to write these words
—
that I never loved you enough. This is not your fault. I can’t imagine a more lovable child than you were during the years
we were together. But I had not been brought up with love, and I certainly had no love or respect in those days for myself
Where there is fear, there can be no room for love, and my heart and mind have been darkened by fear for much of my life.

April, I never told you about our background
—
my original family, that is. It was not a past that I ever wanted to remember
—
a brutal drunken father who used to beat me on the slightest excuse, a sad-eyed mother who never came to my defense. I ran
away from home
—
a ramshackle farm in Kansas
—
when I was seventeen. I guess I was following my mother’s advice. She’d attempted to run off with another man when I was fifteen.
I still remember her saying to me, “It’s a man’s world, hon, and all a woman
can ever do is find herself a good man. If the one you got ain’t no good, use your wiles and get one better.”

She found herself a better man, but when she eloped with him, my father swore to track her down. This he did. There was a
fight between the two men, and in what they later claimed was an accident, my mother was killed.

All the brunt of my father’s anger and grief at her loss fell on my shoulders. The beatings and the verbal abuse escalated,
and my existence had become unbearable. I often used to fantasize about hanging myself from a rafter in the barn.

I’m not telling you this in order to try to extenuate my own behavior, but rather to emphasize something that I don’t think
you ever understood. You wanted a family
—
longed for one, in fact. And I knew no way of explaining to you that sometimes a family represents the most vicious kind of
intimacy. There is nothing sacred about the blood ties of a family. Our real families are the ones that we put together ourselves,
with love and caring for one another.

I know, also, that I never told you very much about your father. Let me tell you now that he was a gentle man, as different
from my own father as anybody could imagine, and that I loved him. He was, however, married. He and his wife had taken me
in when I arrived friendless in St. Louis after leaving home. She was an invalid, and I’m not proud of myself for trying to
steal him away from her. But I was bitter when he told me that he had vowed to stay with her for better or for worse.

I ran away again, and he never knew about you, April. If he’d known I’m sure he would have wanted to see you, espcially since
he and his wife had no children of their own. I was afraid, in fact, that if he saw you, he might try to take you away from
me, and that was a thought I couldn’t bear.

I was, of course, too young to be a mother

I didn’t know what to do, or how.

When you cried
—
which was all you seemed to do the first three months
—
it frightened me. Like all teenage mothers, I thought having a baby was like having a perfect, beautiful doll. I was unprepared
for nursing, colic, fevers, sleepless nights.

And I was always afraid those first few years that my father would somehow find me. In my dreams, he never ceased to pursue
me, so I was always on the run.

I was afraid that if he found me, I, too, would die.

April looked up from the computer screen. As she reached for the glass of water on the bedside table, she realized that her
hands were shaking. Whatever she had expected, it was not this stark recital of unpleasant facts.

“You okay?” Rob said gently.

“I never knew any of this.”

He squeezed her hand. “It’s pretty intense.”

She nodded. “Rina never told me anything of her personal history. My earliest memories were simply of moving from town to
town while my mother indulged in new love affairs, often with some sort of authority figure in the community—the chief of
police, the minister, the mayor. I never understood why this was happening; I took it as a matter of course. New curtains
in the house… a new lover in Rina’s bed.”

As she spoke she picked up the photograph of herself and Rina leaning against the trailer. She tried to look at her mother
objectively—the natural blonde hair, the perfect, classic features, the tiny waist, the full breasts. Rina’s physical assets
were the sort that were bound to attract the attention of red-blooded males everywhere, and she had exploited them relentlessly.

As to why she had done this, it was clearer now. She’d been brought up by a violent domineering father, and her mother had
contributed to the idea that a woman could not survive without a man. But if he wasn’t good enough—“Get one better.” If he
proved to be difficult or violent—run.

She looked back at the screen.

As for what happened the next few years, I’m sure you remember. We kept moving. I was afraid to settle down, and besides,
I kept thinking about how badly we’d been living all our lives. I wanted something better—for me, for both of us. It seems
I was always afraid of something
—
of not having enough money, of not being able to take care of you, of my father
—
or even your father
—
tracking us down.

You remember the Kennedy thing, I know you do. For me that was the most marvelous thing that ever happened. He was everything
I’d ever dreamed of in a man. I couldn’t believe it when he responded to my flirting. I thought I must be imagining things
until he made it clear that he actually wanted me in his bed.

I played it cool, of course. Always, always, always. I’d learned that young. Never let a man know what you’re really thinking,
really feeling.

Jack was the first man I’d ever met who knew more about the battle of the sexes than I did. And of course when he left the
Cape that summer, he never had the slightest intention of seeing me again. I moved us to Washington because I wasn’t about
to let some guy walk out on me, even if he was the President of the United States.

It didn’t do me much good as far as he was concerned
—he’d already lost interest by the time of that day in Dallas. But what it did was lift my imagination and my ambition to
new heights. I’d had a taste of what was possible if you really did mate with the top dog. And I wanted more.

Having been the president’s mistress, even for so short a time, increased my chances with other men. God, they were fascinated.
And he was good-natured enough to help the situation along by introducing me to some likelies. That was how I met my husband,
of course. Armand knew the Kennedys—you’ll remember how cozy Jacqueline was with anybody of French blood or ancestry.

Armand seemed like the answer to all my prayers. He was handsome, charming, and sophisticated. He was attentive and kind.
He was outrageously romantic. He made me feel like a princess born in a beautiful chateau in the Loire valley.

Of course I fell in love with him.

Of course I believed in him.

Of course I agreed to do anything he asked of me.

It took a long time before I saw through his facade.

In reality, April, my husband Armand is the most controlling man I have ever met. He is a master at assessing people’s weaknesses
and exploiting them. He always knows exactly which buttons to push,

I never would have expected that I, of all women, would ever be dominated and manipulated by a man. After all, I had vowed,
after running away from my father’s house, that no man would ever again possess that kind of power over me.

But I have also learned that we are ourselves controlled by the deep beliefs that we hold about ourselves, our limits and
our capabilities. And there must have been a part of me that believed that once you find the top dog and mate with
him, you must try to keep him happy, at least until he proves himself weak and worthless and you see it’s time to move on
to someone else. That, after all, is what my mother did.

Again April stopped reading. One phrase in particular was reverberating through her brain. “He is a master at assessing people’s
weaknesses and exploiting them.”

She looked up at Blackthorn. He was looking at her.

“Armand,” he said.

“It was he who called and frightened me out of your arms. He told me he’d found a computer diskette with a memo from Rina,
saying that she was going to fire you because she didn’t feel safe with you. He wanted me to leave you, come to his place
instead. My God, do you suppose…?”

He was nodding grimly. “Thank God you didn’t go.”

“You really think Armand’s behind this entire thing?”

“It fits. Your mother had her own apartment. She created her own business. In her lectures she stressed personal determination
and independence. She must have been trying to break free.”