Prodigal Son Read online

  Once again he checked the street, the sky, the surrounding rooftops.

  He knocked again, a touch louder.

  The yapping of a pair of little dogs, the scrabble of paws on hard surfaces, and Veronica’s voice from within. “Okay, okay. I’m coming!”

  Another twenty seconds passed, and then the towering architectural door yawned inward, a slit in a castle wall. Veronica wore a light gray shift dress—not revealing but not modest either—a champagne flute in one hand. The dogs, who looked to be some sort of Chihuahua-Pomeranian mix, vibrated around her ankles, emitting earsplitting barks.

  She took a moment to admire him. “Evan.” She downed the rest of her mimosa, set the glass aside, and spread her arms for an embrace.

  He offered a hand.

  A flicker of hurt crossed her face, quickly gone beneath a smile. Her hand was cool and dry. “Would you like a drink?”

  A tang of champagne on her breath.

  “No thank you,” he said.

  “So polite. You were brought up right.” She seemed to realize her poor choice of words, her eyebrows pinching in with dismay, but she quickly dismissed any discomfort—his or hers—with a wave of her manicured hand as she headed into the interior.

  The dogs scurried alongside her, glancing nervously back at Evan, pink triangle tongues hanging out from all the excitement.

  At second glance Evan realized the foyer was a dark-tiled pool, wide concrete blocks serving as stepping-stones zigzagging across still water. The dogs bounced from one to the next with practiced agility. Shaved hindquarters, scrawny legs, a poofy mane rimming beady features and sharp snouts.

  “Barry’s obsessed with animals,” Veronica called over her shoulder, “but I have to say, these dogs look like they were put together by committee.”

  They threaded through a kitchen and then down several wide steps to a sunken living room, complete with a fully stocked bar and a flat-screen television the size of a billboard. A stainless-steel bucket held a tilted magnum of Perrier-Jouët, the belle epoque bottle wrapped with painted flowers. Beside it a glass pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  Veronica filled another flute and then flopped down on an endless curved couch that formed a parenthesis across the savanna-tan carpet. He took a seat opposite her at the edge of a silver-gray chaise longue.

  She gestured with her glass. “You’ll have to forgive the nouveau riche mishmash of … can we call it ‘styles’? Barry’s a movie producer. He’s on location now. It’s just me and his staff and these awful little dogs.”

  At the mention the dogs sat and gazed up at her needily, panting.

  A majordomo floated into sight in the vast doorway, wearing a black button-up with an Asian collar. His shiny bald head reflected the muted light of the kitchen. “Girls, come now,” he said, in some kind of a Slavic accent. He patted the thigh of his dark linen pants, and the dogs padded out after him, the trio vanishing.

  For a moment Evan wondered if the man had been an illusion.

  Veronica tucked her legs beneath her, folding them to one side, and ran a fingertip absentmindedly around the rim of the champagne flute. “I assume by now you’ve done some digging on me.”

  Evan had indeed spent a few hours in the Vault prying into Veronica LeGrande. What she’d told him had checked out, and he’d unearthed a bit more. An only child, she’d grown up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Veronica’s father, the grandiosely named Bernard LeGrande, had been a structural-steel fabrication magnate. Her homemaker mother, Maryelizabeth, had spent years in and out of psychiatric hospitals for crippling phobia disorders before early-onset dementia had taken her out in her late forties.

  Veronica had lived a privileged life, spending her high-school years at Linden Hall—the oldest all-girls boarding school in the country, established a full three decades before the nation’s birth. Three years of college at Vassar before dropping out and then patchwork records showing a gypsy lifestyle. Her father’s profligate spending had drained much of the family money before his death. Veronica had run through the rest rather quickly, it seemed, leaving her to rely on the kindness of strangers. Lots of passport activity, no mortgages, decent credit rating.

  No children on record.

  “Not really,” Evan said.

  “I have a long history with not much to show for it.” She knocked back the rest of her drink and stretched her arms overhead. Firm neckline, smooth skin, youthful hazel eyes.

  “Are you really sixty-two?” he asked.

  She smirked. “Parts of me.” She brushed a lock of chestnut hair from her eyes. “Were you really trained to kill people?”

  “I was.”

  “I didn’t call you to do that.”

  “You called me to help Andre.”

  “Andre? I thought it was Andrew.” She rose to refill her glass. “I want you to help him. Not do whatever horrible things you’ve done in your past.”

  He hadn’t considered wanting her approval, and yet her words twisted something inside him, something with jagged edges. “People are trying to kill him.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that. He just needs a hand to get himself out of trouble. Got tangled up in the wrong situation. Maybe he owes some money. Needs some legal counsel.”

  “You don’t understand anything about me,” Evan said. “What I do, what I don’t do.”

  She kept her back turned, her hands resting at the bar, but he could see her shoulder blades tense. She paused a moment. Poured champagne without the OJ this time and downed it. When she turned around, she’d collected herself.

  She replenished her glass once more, glided across the thick carpet, and set herself down on the cushions again a bit more heavily.

  “How do you know Andre?” Evan asked.

  Her eyes stayed low, on the rim of the flute. Hint of lilac in the air, the faintest trace of her perfume.

  “Veronica. This is where you give me some answers.”

  He could see a flutter to the side of her throat, her heartbeat making itself known. She looked into her glass as if the bubbles might tell her something.

  “I went to an elite high school,” she said. “But we did have a few underprivileged students. There was a Puerto Rican girl I was friendly with. My father gave a lot, scholarship funds, that kind of thing, so there was some overlap. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we were friendly. And we stayed in touch vaguely after graduation, a letter now and again, a card at the holidays. She wound up studying at Union a hundred miles or so up the Hudson from me.” She pursed her lips. “I was in my junior year at college when she showed up at my dorm room. I supposed she had nowhere else to go. No one she trusted. She’d been…”

  “What?”

  Veronica shook her head, an etchwork of lines surrounding her tense mouth showing her age at last. “She had bruises around her wrists where they’d been held down.” Her own hands rose and mimed gripping someone. “And she was still wearing the shirt, torn at the collar where it had been…” Her lips trembled, though barely. “Broken fingernails from trying to fight back. A clump of hair missing where it had been yanked out. It was brutal. Savage.”

  Evan swallowed. Kept perfectly still.

  “And she was worried that … that she could be expecting. And she stayed with me, and she took those damn tests every day, like playing a lottery you don’t want to win. But sure enough she won. And even though this was a child born of violence, it was still a child. People don’t always understand that these days. It’s not some political statement, but it’s different when it happens to you, I suppose. And she decided she wanted to bring this child to term.”

  Evan remembered Andre’s skipping out every chance he could to search for his birth parents. And how he’d returned empty-handed time and again. A kid seeking a truth that would wreck him if he ever found it.

  Evan said, “Jesus.”

  “Well, she didn’t have much money. And there was school debt, too. And when the baby came…” Veronica cleared her throat, strai
ghtened up. “When Andrew came, she didn’t have the resources to support him. And I told her that sometimes, sometimes with children, your desire to care for them can ruin them.”

  The words came before Evan could stop them. “How would you know that?”

  The depth of feeling beneath the words caught him off guard.

  She shook her head. “You’re right. Bear in mind I was a twenty-two-year-old kid myself. But she didn’t follow my advice, not initially. She tried to raise this baby who’d done nothing wrong, who deserved so much more. But she found she didn’t have the strength to look in that child’s face every day. I remember her telling me that she could see in his features the face of the man who’d attacked her. Imagine living with that.”

  “So she put him up for adoption.”

  “Not at first. She fought herself for a year. And gave this child care. But she also detested him. And it was tearing her apart. I’ve never seen a person so conflicted. So yes. But by then he was a toddler, and the problem with that is—”

  “The older a kid is, the less anyone wants him.” Again Evan’s words came sharper than he’d intended.

  She blinked at him a few times, her eyes glassy from the alcohol. “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?” he said. “At the Recoleta Cemetery?”

  “It was more than I could get out,” she said. “With the police closing in and all. And I was worried you wouldn’t help. That you wouldn’t want to go back to that time.”

  “So you thought you’d manipulate me instead.”

  “I suppose if you frame it that way…”

  “Does Andre know this story? About the rape?”

  She shook her head excessively, like a little girl. “It would destroy him.”

  “Where’s his mother now?”

  “Two years after she parted with him, she took a ferry from Essex one night and slipped overboard with stones in her pockets. Very Kate Chopin.”

  Despite the crack, Evan could see the pain in her eyes. A small burst of blood vessels colored her cheek just in front of her left ear, a spiderlike pattern where her concealer had faded. He could sense her years more now than he had in the Buenos Aires night when she’d seemed to glow in the haze of their shared anticipation.

  Veronica said, “Her last correspondence to me was to look after him if he ever needed anything. A dying wish. Very dramatic. But impossible to ignore.”

  He tugged at his mouth, felt the fleshy pinch of his lower lip. “How did Andre know to get in touch with you?”

  “I was the one who dropped him off at the first foster home. After all the legal steps, the paperwork. She couldn’t bear to. And after she was … gone, when he needed to be placed in a facility for older boys, I made sure he was moved to Pride House. That’s how I knew about it.…”

  “To pull strings and move me there later.” He caught himself before he could add, After you dumped me off with an incapable couple.

  She nodded. “When he came searching for his mother years later, I was the only name he could find. I suppose I’m the only connection to family he ever found.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That his mother had passed away of cancer. He’s contacted me sporadically over the years. When he wanted advice. When he needed bail money. When he was in trouble.”

  “All these years you knew I was there. And you knew about him. But you kept us both in the dark.”

  “I bore that burden.”

  “Did you? Or did we?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. It’s one of the awful secrets to getting older. You don’t ever get the answers. Every time I consider myself an adult, I think back five years to when I also thought of myself as an adult. And I’m aghast at how staggeringly blind I was. Maybe what I hold to be true right now will seem just as ignorant when I reflect back on it years from now.” She arched an eyebrow. “If I’m around.” She examined the flute once more. “Maybe that’s all growing up is. Knowing in real time that you don’t know anything.”

  “So you think we’d have been worse off if we were told the truth?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Evan looked down at the union of his hands. Fingers linked, pressure at the knuckles, like he was holding on to nothing too tightly. He considered her question for a very long time.

  She watched him think. “It’s a lost art.” Her voice carried a blend of admiration and approval.

  “What’s that?”

  “Entertaining an idea before rejecting it.”

  “I don’t know the answer,” he said. “Whether I’d have been better off. My background was tough in most ways. I was diminished by it. And strengthened by it. I don’t think you get to have one without the other.”

  She nodded several times too many. “What would you have preferred? Growing up riding horses and sailing? The finest schools? Like the boys I grew up with, my friends’ children and now grandchildren? I can see right into them. They’re as solid as a plank of birch and just as deep. Ninety percent deadwood. Catch a spark and they go up in flame. No. You had challenge. Purpose. Honed by hardship.”

  “I did.”

  “And yet.” Her eyes, abruptly, were moist. “I wish I could have given you so much more.” She blinked rapidly, reached for her glass on the acrylic side table, but saw that it was empty.

  He said, “Why…”

  … didn’t you want me?

  He caught himself.

  “Why did you decide to give up the baby?”

  She blinked a few more times, confused, and he realized he’d left out the possessive. “What baby?”

  One syllable, but it was hard to choke out. “Me.”

  She’d regained her composure, her words smooth and breezy. “My circumstances weren’t suited to it.”

  “It?”

  “Being a mother. Having a child.”

  “I see.”

  “I suppose you want to know about your father.”

  Jack sitting across the dining table from twelve-year-old Evan in the low light of the farmhouse, twirling his pasta around his fork: The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human. That square, rugged face. Blue flannel and classical music.

  “My father is the man who rescued me from the foster home,” Evan said. “My father is the man who raised me.”

  “It’s just as well,” she said. “I don’t know much about your birth father anyway.”

  “One-night stand?” Evan said.

  “No.” Her eyes twinkled. “A whole lost weekend.”

  “Sounds classy. Let me guess, outlaw biker.”

  “Rodeo cowboy. Bronc rider.”

  “You’re not as funny as you think you are.”

  “Well,” she said, “sometimes I am.” She tilted her glass at him. “Would you be a dear and freshen this up for me?”

  He could tell that if she stood, she’d be unsteady on her feet from the alcohol. And she didn’t want him to see.

  He rose and plucked the glass from her hand. The Perrier-Jouët bottle was frigid to the touch, and it lifted from the bucket trailing ice water. It was mostly empty. He poured.

  Behind the bar a few pill bottles rested beside Veronica’s clutch purse. Vitamin K. Calcium. And a prescription written under her name for rifaximin, an antibiotic used to soothe stomach problems from traveling. Veronica presented such a resilient and polished façade that he hadn’t considered the human fragility beneath.

  The plush carpet muted his steps as he returned the glass to her. She took it with a nod of thanks, a flush sitting high on her cheeks and her throat. She patted the cushion at her side. He took a seat but left a good amount of space between their hips.

  She said, “Okay.” She sipped. Sipped again.

  The ARES dug into his ribs. He shifted the holster anchoring on the belt to make sure it wasn’t pointing at his femoral artery or more sensitive anatomy yet.

  He watched Veronica looking at him and had trouble reading her expression.
Intrigue? Wariness? My son, the assassin.

  He mustered his nerve. The words felt like pulling barbed wire through a closed fist. “You said I had a middle name. It wasn’t on any of the paperwork. What was it?”

  She said, “Bartholomew.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” Her lips pursed, a not-quite smile.

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t … it wasn’t on the paperwork because I didn’t want to name you. I thought if I named you, I couldn’t bear to part with you. I called you baby boy. For the week I had you, I called you baby boy.”

  The words came into him as such, unattached to the greater meaning they dragged beneath the surface. He could register them consciously, but the emotional impact felt numbed, dull, like sound traveling underwater.

  She’d had him a week. She’d been terrified of bonding with him or parting with him. She’d called him baby boy.

  She continued, “But when I left you with the Krausses, the paperwork, I needed to put down something, a name. And I realized I’d already named you even though I didn’t know it. Evan.”

  “What … what was I like?”

  “You barely cried. The doctor thought something was wrong with you. But I knew there wasn’t. I could see how sensitive you were, how much you were taking in, that you were overcome by it. And to survive you had to shut off parts of yourself, what you felt, what you reacted to. God, what do I know? Maybe it was all projection. My own broken heart mapped onto a newborn.”

  His RoamZone chimed in his pocket, and he fished it out. A text from Joey listing five Chinese restaurants in El Sereno that fit the search parameters.

  He stood. “I need to go find Andre.”

  Her face was lowered, flushed with alcohol. She lifted a hand clumsily for him to take. He stared at it, slender fingers, soft pale skin, manicured nails. Her eyes, imploring.

  He nodded at her and walked out.

  30

  From Nothing to Something