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Payback. Jasmine Cresswell
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“Yes, I knew about that.” Kate nodded. “It was the need to find out what had happened to the missing money that brought Adam and Megan together in the first place, and then sent them chasing off to Mexico in pursuit of the missing millions. Adam and I have talked quite a bit about the way Dad double-crossed him, of course.”
The pursuit of the money, and the complicated reasons behind its disappearance, had interested Kate less than the fact that her mother’s youngest brother had ended up marrying Megan Raven. Adam was her second favorite relative in the world after her mother and she’d wondered many times in the past few weeks how her father would react to the news that the daughter of his first wife had married the younger brother of his bigamous second wife. Kate saw a definite hint of ironic retribution tucked away in the fact of Adam and Megan’s marriage.
Her mother turned around, her scrubbing brush dripping soapsuds. She spoke with careful lack of inflection. “Doesn’t it strike you as oddly symmetrical that both Ron’s so-called wives ended up three million dollars poorer than they might have expected? And in both cases because of loans that Ron took out using our homes as collateral?”
Kate felt a tiny shiver run down her spine. “Mom, you’re seeing patterns that don’t exist.”
“The pattern exists,” Avery said tartly, dumping her scrubbing brush into the pail of hot water with a decisive splash. “The only question for discussion is whether the pattern is a coincidence or deliberately planned.”
Kate’s heart started to thump uncomfortably fast. “The loan on the ranch in Wyoming was taken out a couple of years before Dad disappeared, not a couple of months.”
“I’m well aware of that. It makes you wonder how long your father was planning his disappearance, doesn’t it?”
Her mother’s sarcasm was unprecedented. Kate pressed her hands against her stomach and drew in a long, deep breath. “Mom, let’s get back to the earlier question. The important one. Forget the mortgages on the penthouse and the Wyoming ranch for a moment. Are you telling me that you think Luke might be right? That Dad really was eating dinner in a Washington, D.C., restaurant, and Luke saw him?”
Avery used a clean rag to mop up the soapy water pooled on the shelves. “All I can say is that Luke definitely believes he saw Ron. And Luke always struck me as a man with both feet planted firmly in the real world. You know him better than I do, of course. Does he strike you as a man given to fantasizing about dead people?”
“No.” It was a measure of her turmoil that Kate didn’t even think something rude about Luke, much less say it out loud. “If Luke is right, shouldn’t somebody notify the police about what he saw?”
“Luke tried calling the police in Miami and here in Chicago, too. That was before he contacted me. He said they had no interest in taking his report.”
Kate felt a surge of relief. “Well, Mom, doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Yes,” Avery said, the bite of uncharacteristic sarcasm still in her voice. “It tells me that police departments tend to be overworked and that since they have a suspect in Ron’s death who is a convicted felon, they have no interest whatsoever in spending a lot of time revising their theory of the case.”
Kate hesitated for a moment, but the question needed to be asked. “Okay, given that the police aren’t likely to do much, if anything, do you want to reopen the case, Mom?”
“I don’t know. I think so. I’m not sure.” Avery tried to smile at her own hopeless indecision. She couldn’t hold the smile. “What if Ron has lost his memory? What if he desperately wants to come home and doesn’t know how to find us?” She leaned against the damp bookshelves, her face whiter than the shelves behind her. The pallor was less shocking to Kate than the fact that Avery still hadn’t found a tissue and wiped the dust and dried tears from her cheeks. Even in the immediate aftermath of Ron’s disappearance, when Avery had been battered by the news that her husband was a bigamist and their twenty-eight-year marriage didn’t legally exist, she had never lost her composure this completely.
Her heart aching on her mother’s behalf, Kate forced herself to speak gently. “Didn’t you tell me the man in the restaurant ran away as soon as he saw Luke?”
Avery nodded. “Luke chased Ron…the man…into the parking lot, but he drove off before Luke could speak to him.” Her voice became wistful. “I wish Luke had managed to catch up with…whoever it was.”
From Kate’s perspective, it was hard to imagine any way that her mother’s happiness would be increased by tracking down the man who’d already seduced her, gotten her pregnant, deceived her through twenty-eight years of bigamous marriage, and now might be perpetrating the ultimate deception by pretending to be dead. A fresh surge of anger swept over her. Dammit, Luke shouldn’t have gone to her mother and presented her with this terrible news! Kate recognized that she was angry with Luke because that was a whole lot easier than being angry with her maybe-not-dead father, but that didn’t alter the facts. Luke should have come to her with his stupid theories instead of destroying her mother’s hard-won peace of mind.
Unfortunately, the genie was out of the bottle and there was no point trying to stuff him—or Ron—back inside again. She and her mother needed to decide what to do next. She saw only two viable choices: she could talk to Luke in the hope that he had sufficient information to enable a private detective to track down the man in the restaurant. Or they could ignore what they’d heard and carry on as if they’d never learned there was a possibility Ron Raven might be alive.
It wasn’t in the least difficult to decide which option she preferred. If her father was alive and hiding from his families, as far as Kate was concerned he could stay lost forever. And that was before she contemplated the horror of having to meet with Luke Savarini again, an activity that ranked right up there with the joys of having a limb amputated without benefit of anesthesia.
Sadly, Avery’s attitude made it clear that her choice would be to look for Ron and attempt to confirm whether her bigamous husband was alive or dead. It was a measure of just how much she loved her mother that Kate made the offer.
“Would you like me to talk to Luke and find out if there’s any information he has that might help us to track down the man he saw in the restaurant?”
“Would you?” Avery’s face lit up. “You wouldn’t mind?”
“Not at all.” She hoped her smile didn’t look as sickly as it felt.
“Thank you so much, Katie.” Avery sighed with visible relief. “I was so overwhelmed this morning that I really didn’t ask many sensible questions at all. It might be impossible to trace the man Luke saw, but it would be nice to know that for certain, wouldn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
This might be a time of emotional confusion for Avery, but she was a sensitive woman and she wasn’t self-absorbed enough to ignore Kate’s lack of enthusiasm. “I’m being silly,” she said quickly. “There’s no reason in the world for you to question Luke if meeting him again makes you uncomfortable. Good heavens, I’m more than capable of asking him if he has any other snippets of information that he didn’t share with me this morning.”
Avery sounded determinedly brave and cheerful and Kate castigated herself for being a mean, selfish daughter. She knew how excruciatingly hard her mother found it to discuss Ron’s multiple deceptions and criminal acts with anyone, much less someone she knew only as her daughter’s discarded boyfriend. For goodness’ sake, how tough could it be to have a brief, businesslike meeting with Luke?
“There’s no need for you to talk with him, Mom. I’ll track him down in one of his restaurants tonight and find out what other information he has, if anything.”