Until Dark (24 page)

“You think only poor kids run away, Kenny? Only poor kids from broken, neglectful homes?” He snickered. “You are just like her, aren’t you? You’ve grown up to
be
her. Just like they say, every woman, eventually, becomes her mother.”

“You’re not him.” She shook her head again. “I don’t know who you are, but you are not Ian.”

He grabbed her arm and looked deep into her eyes, as if waiting for some revelation. “Well, then, how to prove . . . I know.”

He snapped his fingers as if something had just occurred to him. “You can test me.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on. Ask me something. Anything.”

She stared at him, wondering how this could be.

“Kenny, this silence is not at all welcoming. Why, one might think that you’re not happy to see me. And you should be welcoming me with open arms. After all these years, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am.” He stared at her through soulless eyes. “You should be happy to see me. You should know me, Kenny.”

Kendra stared unblinking at the stranger who demanded recognition. She knew the face, all right. She’d sketched it over and over, several times over the past few weeks.

It couldn’t be her brother’s face. It just couldn’t.

“Where have you been?”

“Well, now, you know the answer to that. You know where I’ve been staying.”

“Before that. Before you went to Father Tim’s. If you’re really my brother, you would have come here.”

“I did want to come here . . . it’s my right to be here, same as yours. Smith House. It’s mine, too.” He stiffened slightly, then said, “But I wanted to be able to see you for a while first. To get to know you, so to speak.”

“You were spying on me? Watching me?”

“Every chance I got,” he admitted, the smirk still in his eyes, if not on his face. “I admit I found Father Tim’s by accident, but once I found out that you were one of the funders of the Mission, well, you have to see the irony of that.”

“No,” she told him. “No, I don’t.”

“All these years, I’ve supported myself. I come back to Smith’s Forge and immediately find the Smith money just waiting to take care of me.”

“How did you support yourself?” Heart pounding, she forced herself to appear calm.
Keep him talking
.

“Oh, there are lots of ways for a good-looking little boy to earn what he needs. You wouldn’t believe all the things I’ve learned to do for money. Then again, you probably wouldn’t want to know.”

“Is that what you’re here for? Money?”

“You know one thing I missed all these years?” He ignored her question and took a step toward her. “Remember when I was little and you used to make me pancakes in the afternoons when Mom was going to law school?”

Kendra shrunk back, her mind still muddled. As a youth, Ian had been troubled, yes, but had his defiance, his growing bouts of rebellion, concealed something deeper? He had been seeing a child psychiatrist that last year, but her mother had never discussed with Kendra the nature of his problems or what had caused them. There was an air about the young man who stood before her that was sinister, almost unholy. If the seed for such had lain dormant in her brother, could she have been blind to it?

This is a dream,
she told herself.
A really, really horrible dream.

“I never forgot how you used to do that for me.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and she flinched from his touch as he turned her around so that she was facing the kitchen door. If he noticed her revulsion, he did not acknowledge it. “I want you to make me pancakes, just like you used to do. That would be the perfect welcome home for me.”

He pushed her through the doorway, her feet leaden, her mind numb. “And coffee. I’d really like some coffee.”

Kendra stood at the counter, confused. How could she complete such a mundane task?

“Now, you cook, and we’ll chat, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” he promised. “We have a lot to catch up on. Of course, I’ve kept up with you. Big-time sketch artist, eh? I remember when you used to draw people. Remember you drew Mrs. Lentini, that mean-tempered lady who lived across the street, and you made her look so mean? Mom tried to pretend she was horrified but she laughed anyway.”

She searched the cupboards for the ingredients for pancakes, her head filled with a loud humming born of nerves and the sheer effort to maintain a composure she was close to losing.

Who was this man?

He seated himself at the kitchen table, facing her where she stood between the sink and the stove.

“You’re still skeptical, aren’t you. Hmmmm, shall I talk about the old house? The house we grew up in, in Princeton?” Without waiting for her response, his words tumbled out quickly. “It was brick. It had a small front porch with white pillars. Red patterned rugs in the front hallway and big, wide steps that went up to the second floor in a curve. There was a basket on the table near the front door for the mail. There were always flowers on that table, and a lamp with blue swirls on it.” He looked up and asked, “Isn’t that how you remember it?”

“That house was photographed several times for magazine articles. Anyone could have access to that information. You’ve proven nothing.” She was barely aware that her hands had begun to sweat.

“On to the sunroom, then,” he smiled. “Heavy wicker furniture. There was a big round table with a glass top, there were always books stacked on it. She—Mom—always read more than one book at a time. She carried them with her in a canvas bag that had an orchid painted on it. Dad had bought it for her. There was a round pottery ashtray. She smoked cigarettes but prided herself on the fact that she never smoked more than five a day.”

He paused, then asked, as if it mattered to him, “Did that change, once she became a senator? I mean, smoking’s become so politically incorrect, hasn’t it?”

He took a pack from his own pocket, lit one, then tossed the match toward the sink. He missed the mark and she bent down to pick it up. Her hands were trembling.

“You can give me something to use as an ashtray, or I can use the floor,” he told her without expression. “It’s all the same to me.”

She opened the cupboard and took out a saucer, handed it to him.

“Thanks. Now, back to the sunroom.” He inhaled deeply, letting the smoke out slowly as if suddenly deep in thought.

“We gave her one of those rock tumblers for Christmas one year. She picked up stones everywhere she went, then, when she had a bunch, she’d put them in the tumbler. It was a very slow process, it would take hours. She put them, those pretty polished stones, all over the house. There was a flat basket filled with them on the table next to her bed.”

Kendra’s head began to pound.

“The furniture was covered in blue-and-white-and-yellow swirly fabric. There were lots of pillows. The walls were blue, like your shirt.”

She closed her eyes and saw the sunny paisley seat cushions her mother had made for the old wicker furniture she’d bought from the estate of an elderly neighbor.

“These are antiques, Kendra,”
her mother had said.
“They don’t make them like this anymore. See how sturdy?”

“The dog, Elvis, he was a mix of dachshund and Cairn terrier, the result of an unfortunate coupling of the dogs who lived in the houses on either side of ours—chewed the legs of one of those wicker chairs and she, Mom, was just beside herself.” He continued smoothly, his voice a steady and unrelenting stream. “There was a gardener. His name was Mr. Jackson. Mom gave him some of Dad’s clothes after he died. He had a brown leather jacket of Dad’s that he wore for years. Elvis chewed that, too.”

He paused and looked up at her. “Not enough?”

She stared at him blankly.

“Mom almost didn’t let me go out west that summer, because I’d been in trouble all year long.”

“What kind of trouble had you been in?” she heard herself ask.

“I used to push open the screen in my bedroom window and climb out on the sunporch roof, then up into that big magnolia tree.” He grinned at her devilishly. “Want to know what I did then?”

She wasn’t sure she did.

“I used to climb up as high as I could go, and just sit there in the dark, waiting for Mrs. Flaherty, our next-door neighbor, to get undressed for bed.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“You were eleven years old.”

“I’d been watching her for two years.”

Kendra was speechless.

“Not enough yet? How ’bout this? Before I left to go out west that summer, you gave me money from your secret savings stash so I could buy something from an old Indian man who had stuff to sell.”

“Where was it? My secret stash.” Her voice had grown raspy.

“Under the floorboards in your closet,” he said without hesitation.

She sat down across from him at the table, the box of pancake mix still in her hands. He’d thrown so much at her, verbally, that she was having difficulty processing it all. Everything he’d said had been right on the money, hadn’t it? Still something nagged at her, begging her recall.

Kendra again studied his face, again tried to remember her brother’s features in detail. What might Ian look like today? The shape of the eyes, yes, the eyes were round, they could be right. The nose, tilted at the end, but as she’d once told Adam, a common enough trait.

If indeed Ian was alive, how might his features have matured?

Time and again, Kendra had aged photographs on paper to determine what someone gone missing for years might look like now, as an adult. But could she mentally age the face of a child whose features she could see only in her memory?

Kendra knew faces. Did she know this one?

“Are you going to make those pancakes for me?”

She rose without answering and continued on with the task he’d given her, all the while concentrating on his features, trying to sketch the child’s face within her mind.

“By the way, whatever happened to the Flahertys?” He leaned back with the air of one who was right at home.

“They got divorced.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” he nodded, “since she was screwing some other guy every time old Mr. Flaherty was out of town on business.”

She turned to look over her shoulder at him.

“I used to watch that, too.” His tongue licked at the side of his mouth. “She could sure put on a show, that Mrs. Flaherty. Who’d have thought that Melinda and Mike’s mom was such a hot ticket?”

Kendra turned back to the stove.

“And the Cronins, across the street?”

“They’re still there.”

“Really? Well, that was a pretty desirable neighborhood, from what I recall.”

“If you’re really Ian, you’d know what happened to Zach.” She turned to face him. Would he know about the body Adam said had been found in the cave? And if so, would he know how it came to be there?

“Now, there’s a name I haven’t heard in years.” His eyebrows raised, as if genuinely surprised that she’d asked.

“What happened to him?” Kendra repeated.

“Like anyone cares what happened to Zach.”

“I care.”

“Do you?” he scoffed. “Why?”

“He’s family.”

“As if,” he snorted. “Zach was a dumb shit who knew nothing about anything and was never going to be anything other than what he was. A colossally dumb shit.”

“How can you say that? I thought you were friends.”

“Friends? Me and Zach? I couldn’t stand him.”

“Then why was it so important to you to spend a month with him every year? Two weeks out here, two weeks out there. You always looked forward to his visits.”

“Well, if anything ever made me feel like a genius, it was having stupid Zach around,” he sneered. “He knew nothing. I mean,
nothing
. Didn’t you ever notice how he watched everything we did, before he did it? Or how carefully he listened, to see how things should be said?”

“No, frankly, I did not.”

“Yeah, dumb question on my part. You never noticed him at all.”

“Why would I? He was years younger than me and was always pretty quiet, as I remember. Frankly, I never gave much notice to any of your friends. You were all so much younger. I was in college that last summer.”

He smiled with satisfaction at her use of the word
you
, but did not comment on it.

“That wasn’t the reason. It wasn’t the age difference. Admit it. He just wasn’t . . .” he sighed, “well, let’s call a spade a spade. He just wasn’t a Smith.”

“What are you talking about, he wasn’t a Smith? His mother was as much a Smith as my father was.”

My
instead of
our
rankled, and he frowned, but chose to ignore it.

“His mother was a junkie, Kendra. A junkie whore who didn’t give a shit about him. She never did.”

“What?” Kendra’s jaw dropped.

“Never. Our dear Aunt Sierra shoved a great deal of her share of Grampa’s estate up her nose. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I spoke with her when she wasn’t stoned.”

Kendra sank into the nearest chair.

“When my mother agreed to send Ian out to Arizona, Sierra told us all that was behind her. That she’d been off drugs for a long time. Why didn’t we know this? Why didn’t you tell us? And if she wasn’t treating Zach well, why didn’t he say so? Why didn’t we see it?”

“Are you crazy? You think Mom would have let me get within a hundred miles of the ranch if she’d had a clue of what was going on?” He laughed. “I liked it, Kenny. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I could smoke more weed in the two weeks I was out there than I could get my hands on the other fifty weeks out of the year.”

“You were just a child. . . .”

“Right, and kids don’t do drugs?” He chuckled. “Please. Why do you think I went there, Kenny? To share quality family time with my beloved aunt and cousin? To keep the Smith family ties strong?”

Kendra stared at the stranger who sat across from her. She’d never suspected that her little brother had been involved with drugs. Had her mother known? Had that been one of the reasons Elisa had sent Ian for counseling that year?

“Sierra’s ranch was one happening place, let me tell you. No restriction, no rules. No one to answer to. We just did what we pleased, went where we pleased.”