Naked Came The Phoenix (29 page)

"Let's sit down," the singer suggested. They sat, on two facing benches. His words, though spoken in a low voice, reverberated back from the mosaic tile scenes that lined the room, and as the blue water grew still again, the universe seemed to contract to where the five of them sat.

Caroline could not bear it. She seized the initiative and spoke first. "If you're here to tell me that Lauren Sullivan is my half sister, I already know it. And Lauren," she went on, forcing herself to meet that world-famous gaze, "I promise never to tell a soul that my mother had anything to do with you. I'd probably deny her myself, if I could. Is that all you wanted?"

"No," said the actress, her sultry voice ripe with some intense but unidentifiable emotion. "Dad, do you want to…?"

She was, Caroline saw in disbelief, speaking to King David, who stirred and reached into a pocket.

" 'Dad!' Did you call him-but… you told me you're, what? Forty-four?" Caroline objected, staring incredulously at the rock star. Even for someone as wild as King David, fathering a child at the age of, what? seven or eight? was a bit hard to believe.

He laughed, checked the two photographs he had taken from his pocket, and handed one of them to Caroline. "Detective Toscana found these on Hilda Finch when he arrested her."

Caroline dried her fingers on her robe and took the faded snapshot by its white-bordered corner. It showed a red-haired young man, in profile. She turned it over and read, in a girl's handwriting, "Tad Blake."

"Okay," she said, waiting for the explanation.

"Hold it up," the singer ordered, and when she had done so he got to his feet and turned his head to give her the side of his face.

"Christ!" exclaimed Douglas, who saw it at the same instant: The picture showed the baddest boy of heavy metal music as a clean-cut, all-American college kid, before tattoos, heroin, and decades of late nights in smoke-filled rooms.

The singer looked down at Caroline, the lightning bolts crinkling in amusement. "Yeah, that's me all right. I dropped out a couple months after that was taken, went to San Francisco to become, if you can dig it, a folk singer. Instead of that, I discovered drugs. I woke up five years later, cleaned up my act a little bit, and discovered hard rock. But can you imagine somebody called Tad Blake eating live bats on stage? The name would be fine for a folk singer, I guess, but it just didn't have the right ring for where I wanted to go. So I changed it, got the tattoos to change my looks and my image, traded my gold-rimmed glasses for contact lenses, lied about my age-remember, these were still the days when we didn't really trust anyone over thirty. I wrote 'King's Revenge' in 1972, it went platinum, and I haven't been off the charts since. And now everyone just assumes that I'm in such lousy shape for my age because of all the years of drugs and parties. I don't have to let on about the vegetarianism and health spas."

"Tad Blake?" Caroline said, looking at the red-haired youth in wonder. Douglas nudged her elbow; she looked up to see a second photo being held out to her. She took it and nearly fell backward off the bench: Tad again, this time looking straight at the camera, his arms around a small, trim girl: Hilda Finch.

Caroline gaped at the man across from her, then at Lauren. "Dad," indeed; Lauren's resemblance to the boy in the picture was unmistakable. She covered her mouth to stifle a laugh, a slightly hysterical sound that caused the other four to eye her with concern. "Sorry," she gasped. "I was just thinking what Douglas 's constituency would do if they found out that their congressman's wife was related, even secondhand, to King David."

"They wouldn't know whether to impeach me or ask for your autograph," Douglas replied, sounding rather uneasy at the prospect.

"You'd sure as hell dominate the heavy metal vote," the rock star reassured him, the sheepish grin on his middle-aged features eerily like that on the snapshot. "But hang on, it gets even weirder. You're right saying you're Lauren's half sister, but it's not through Hilda Finch that you're related."

"What? What are you talking about?" Caroline's mind seemed to slip gears a fraction, then spin wildly. Her voice climbed higher. "Of course we're related through Mother, who else is-"

She broke off as King David and Lauren Sullivan, after a quick exchange of glances, rose as one and came to sit on the bench next to her. Without a word, Lauren lifted her right hand into the air and held it out, the palm toward Emilio. On the other side of her, the singer did the same, his thumb brushing her little finger.

"Now you," Lauren told Caroline. "No, the right hand."

Three hands held up to the air, the precise way she'd done that afternoon with Douglas. Only, where that comparison had denied the similarity, these three hands clearly differed only in size and muscular development: long nail bed, strong nails, thumbs without a hint of backward curve, prominent knuckles, an oddly long index finger, and a slightly outward turn to the smallest finger. King David's hand was the biggest, of course, and Caroline's fingers reflected long hours working the bow of her cello, but…

"Ondine's were just the same," Lauren said sadly.

"Would you look at that." It was Douglas, speaking Caroline's wonder.

Now Emilio spoke up, for the first time. "When Hilda got to her thirtieth birthday and had never been pregnant again, she decided she needed a child. I gather by the notes in Claudia's safe that your father was tested and judged not to be the problem. Eventually it was determined to be the result of some long-ago infection, perhaps just after Lauren was born, blocking her tubes. Surgery might have helped, but instead she went looking for Claudia de Vries, thinking that if her old college roommate had been able to get rid of one child, surely she could lay hands on another."

"As it turned out, she was right. Claudia never forgot an old friend, never lost track of someone she'd once used. She was one of the few who knew what had become of Tad Blake. By this time she had a whole staff of snoopers, one of whom found out that King David, in those good old pre-AIDS days of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, wasn't always punctilious in his use of birth control. Your mother was a sound technician on his road gang. You were three months old when she agreed to give you up, and Claudia handed you over to Hilda. Who, so far as I have been able to determine, had no idea where you came from. Claudia may have been saving that bit of information for the future."

King David now reached across Lauren to claim Caroline's hand and to take possession of her attention with that magnetic gaze that she had mistaken for a man's desire, when all along it had been a father's yearning that gazed out at her, just as the mesmerizing touch of his hand had been blood calling to blood. The key that he told her he was searching for, she suddenly knew, was not just a slip of metal, but something more. The beloved lost possession that Claudia had dangled in front of his nose to get him to come here was in fact herself, Caroline. His daughter. "I knew as soon as I laid eyes on you," he was saying. "That's why I couldn't take my eyes off you, couldn't help touching you. You look just like your mother. She was a beautiful, talented, big-hearted woman. Catherine was her name, although she called herself Cat. She died nine years ago, I'm sorry to say, but I have pictures of her for you. She didn't want to give you up, but it would have meant losing what she had worked long and hard for-a rock band on the road isn't exactly the place for a baby. She made the decision that it would be best for you to go to a loving, two-parent, relatively wealthy, and stable home. She couldn't have known… And I should have taken responsibility, but it was the seventies, and we were touring nearly three hundred days a year, and frankly in those days I was just a hyped-up bastard. I'm sorry, I was barely aware of you. I have to admit, you and Lauren aren't the only ones."

Of course, he would say that Caroline's mother had been a paragon, even if he scarcely remembered her. But it was his last statement that snagged her attention:
more
siblings? A father-
this
father? And maybe, once she'd gotten used to the idea, a member of the band's road gang wouldn't be such a terrible mother figure. Lord, even an irresponsible, drugged-out groupie of a mother would be better than…

With that thought Caroline shook off her father's grip and turned to lay a tentative finger on the slim wrist of the woman between them. "Lauren? I am so sorry about Ondine."

Emilio answered. "Giving those people in the library the fact that Ondine was the daughter of Lauren Sullivan was Lauren's own idea. Obviously, someone in the group will sell the story to the papers before the ashes in that fireplace are cold. We'd thought of it before, but after Ondine died, we wanted Lauren to keep it quiet. She said no, and she's right. Doing it this way will distract the media, giving them a bone to chew so they don't keep digging and get the rest of the story. If they found out that the four of you are tied together, by blood and marriage, the feeding frenzy would never let up."

Douglas looked ill.

"At least Ondine's death was quick," the actress said, although none of them believed she found much consolation in the fact.

"That manager of hers would have killed her before much longer."

"Chris Lund?" Caroline was startled. "They seemed to get along so well."

Again Emilio's English tones gave the explanation. "Ondine had a huge life insurance policy, with Lund the benefactor. She was starving herself to death. Lund pretended he was against her dieting, pretended that he was on the brink of force-feeding her, but at the same time he was the one who had told her she needed to lose weight, and that was what she believed. Just before she died, they'd had word of a major contract cancellation, the second this year lost to younger models; they could both see the writing on the wall. He decided to, as they say, cash in his chips."

"But I thought you said that Mother-that…" If Hilda wasn't Mother, what was she?

Lauren answered her protest, in a bitter voice. "Hilda pushed over the shelf unit, but Chris Lund put my daughter there, vulnerable."

Emilio clarified. "We think Lund killed Karen McElroy either because she'd noticed the similarity between Ondine's hands and Lauren's when she did their manicures, or because she'd overheard him and Ondine arguing and was calling the police. We found a blood spatter on one of his shoes that I'm pretty sure will turn out to be Karen's. Ondine either saw him, or found the girl shortly afterward. And as I said earlier, fainted."

Again, Douglas said what was foremost on Caroline's mind. "And you don't think Lund's death was a little… convenient?"

"An accident," Emilio said blandly, although a bit too quickly.

Caroline glanced at King David-at her father!-and saw him studying his hands, those oddly elegant, larger versions of her own, as if reading their history in the skin and bone. Then Lauren reached her right hand over and wrapped her fingers through his, before doing the same with her left hand and Caroline's.

A family, joined together, with one daughter's husband and the father's lover looking on. A family, rising phoenixlike from the ashes.

Yes, thought Caroline. Lund's death was an accident.

Much better that way.

But-"Wait a minute," she objected. Everyone tensed, willing her not to say aloud that it could not have been, but Caroline had something else in mind. "There was a polka-dot bikini in Claudia's hand when we dragged her out of the mud bath. If… Hilda… killed Claudia, where did that come from? And you can't tell me that my mother was wearing that thing." She fixed the agent of law and order with a look of accusation and was astonished to see those finely chiseled features turn a furious shade of red, flushing down to the neck of his expensive wool suit, and beyond (just how far beyond was a speculation that crossed the minds of all four witnesses).

Emilio gave a short bark of uncomfortable laughter and with great dignity told them, "It was mine. I'm afraid that, among Claudia de Vries's other sins and wickednesses, she was also guilty of the most blatant form of what I would have to call, er, sexual harassment."

He looked up at their snorts of laughter, none of them stifled with much success, and protested. "Honestly, she wasn't a very nice woman!"