“Yes,” Dylan assured, touching her shoulder. “Don’t worry about that. It’ll take a while for the abrasions to heal and the bruises to fade, but it’s surface damage. No bones were broken, thank God. They don’t think there’ll be any serious scarring.” He stroked her. His warmth made one of the tears spill out of her eye. “I’m sorry for breaking it to you like that, but I thought you should understand.”
She nodded. It was very hard to contain her disappointment. “What are my kids being told about why I won’t be there for the trophy presentation?” she asked.
“I’ve briefed the Durand manager of human resources—Guy Morales, he’s just under Kehoe and will be taking over his duties for now—to hold a meeting with the managers, key camp employees, and the other counselors about the basic details of what happened up at the castle last night. Guy is going to determine which of the managers is most familiar to your kids, and have that person break the news to them. The media was informed that an arrest was made last night, and that there were two assaults and a break-in at the castle, but no names or specifics have been released yet. This should be the first your kids hear of it, and then a more generalized announcement will be made to the whole camp. Whoever tells your kids the news will assure them that you’re going to be fine.”
Alice sniffed. Dylan handed her a tissue wordlessly.
“Jessica Moder knows them best, but I don’t know if she’ll be up for it. She came down with the flu on Thursday night,” Alice said. “I’d rather Dave Epstein and Kuvi told them. And . . . and please have them make sure they keep an eye on Jill Sanchez. She’ll probably be more unsettled than any of the others. Can you put in a special request to have them ask Judith Arnold, the team leader, to especially look out for her? Although she probably will anyway.”
“I’ll tell all that to Guy. Alice, do you think you can talk to the police about what happened now?”
“You said the FBI, too. Earlier.”
He nodded. “That’s what I planned on telling you after we met last night. It seems Jim Sheridan did some digging on his own, and made the connection between Sissy and Avery Cunningham, which confirmed what he already suspected about you being Addie Durand. When he confronted me, I told him everything I knew. He contacted the FBI with the information last evening. Two agents arrived in Morgantown to interview us this morning, only to find that you were here at the hospital, and their dead case file had come back to life in the biggest way possible.” He grimaced. “They’ve already interviewed Thad and me. They’re very eager to speak with you.”
“I don’t want to talk to them.”
“I’m sorry, Alice. I really am. But I can’t put them off—”
“No . . . I just mean I don’t want to talk to them until I talk to you,” she said hastily. “About the things Kehoe said last night, when he attacked me.” The memory suddenly fresh in her brain, she winced and gagged.
“Alice?” Dylan said, standing and leaning over her. “Are you going to be sick?”
She shook her head, bringing her instinctive reaction under control as best she could. “I think . . . I think Kehoe might be my biological father,” she said quickly, before the nausea rose in her throat again.
“No,” Dylan said with abrupt harshness.
Misery overwhelmed her. She’d known Dylan would never want to believe that she wasn’t Alan Durand’s daughter, but she hadn’t thought he’d deny it so stringently. She had to tell him before she told the police and FBI, or worse yet, Kehoe confessed it and Dylan discovered the truth in some roundabout fashion. It’d been toward Alan that Dylan had felt so much loyalty. It’d been Alan’s grief at the loss of Addie for which Dylan had felt a lifelong guilt and experienced a personal mandate to set things right.
It was agony for her to tell him that all of his guilt and his mission to see her returned to her rightful place as Alan Durand’s daughter had been for nothing.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered shakily. “Kehoe said that he and Lynn Durand had had an affair. She wanted a baby so bad that she betrayed Alan because he couldn’t get her pregnant.”
“I know,” Dylan said calmly. “I know all about it.”
“What?” Alice asked, sure she’d heard him incorrectly.
“I found some of Lynn’s journals last evening. I started to wonder why Lynn would tell a three-or four-year-old child to hide alone in dark, scary places. It seemed completely out of character from what I knew about her. She doted on you, and rarely let you out of her sight. Then I remembered you saying that the hiding places were hers, too, and I don’t know . . . something clicked for me. I went back to the castle and inspected a couple of the secret compartments in the castle. In your old bedroom, I found four of Lynn’s journals in a secret room Deanna Shrevecraft had shown me once. I think Lynn placed them there on purpose because of their contents, to be found some day.”
“What did they say?” Alice asked, amazed.
“Special Agent Clayton and Agent Rogers have them right now. They’re holding them as evidence, but I think they’ll let you look at them whenever you’re ready. But I read them all, and know this right off the bat,” he said pointedly. “You are not the daughter of Sebastian Kehoe. Lynn broke things off with him months before she learned she was pregnant with you. In her journals, she mentioned that the time of her affair with Kehoe was close enough to her pregnancy to make her worry at first.”
“So, he still might be my father?”
Dylan shook his head resolutely. “No, the timing was off once she understood how early in the pregnancy she was. Unfortunately, the timing was close enough to make Kehoe question it. But she had more evidence he wasn’t the father. Despite her insistence to Kehoe that he wasn’t the father, Kehoe persisted in believing he was for years after she stopped seeing him. Lynn had told him during their affair that Alan had some medical issues, and the chance of their conceiving a child was so negligible as to be an impossibility. Maybe it all related to the fact that Alan later was diagnosed with testicular cancer.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I do know that Alan and Lynn always referred to you as a miracle. I sensed the amount of emotion behind it when they said it. If all this is true, then for them, it was true in the literal, not the figurative sense. Especially for Lynn, who would have given up all hope of having a baby after she’d broken things off with Kehoe and resolved never to be unfaithful to Alan again. But since Kehoe was armed with the knowledge of Alan’s supposed inability to have a child, he wouldn’t let go of the idea that he was the father.
“He harassed Lynn about it for years. He was obsessed with her, and wrecked by her breakup with him. Unfortunately for Lynn, Morgantown isn’t a huge city, and the Durand executive enclave is even smaller. She was thrown together with Kehoe on several occasions at business dinners and functions. The more she avoided him, the more Kehoe’s obsession with her grew. Lynn was terrified that he’d expose the truth of their affair to Alan. I think she lived in daily, maybe hourly fear, but did everything in her power to hide that fact from Alan and you.”
“Is that why she taught me to hide? From him?” Alice asked, shivers snaking under her skin. It was incredible to believe, but twenty-some years after the fact, that was precisely what had happened. Alice had been attacked by Kehoe, and hidden in one of the spots Lynn had taught her. It probably would have worked, too, if she hadn’t been so disoriented that she didn’t realize she was leaving bloody tracks that led Kehoe straight to her.
Dylan nodded. “Lynn grew terrified of Kehoe. The real proof that you weren’t Kehoe’s child was that given your blood type, Kehoe couldn’t have been your father. Several months before your fourth birthday, she finally showed Kehoe your medical records and some articles on ruling out paternity through blood type. She’d called Kehoe up to the castle for a private meeting while Alan was out of town on business. Kehoe became enraged when she presented him with the facts. There was no way he could continue to hold on to the delusion that he was the father of the love of his life’s child . . . or that she’d ever come back to him.”
“He hit her, didn’t he?” Alice asked numbly.
“Yes. Apparently, he clubbed her on the side of her head.” Instinctively, Alice touched the left side of her head. That’s where Kehoe had first struck her to disable her. It was the blow the doctor was most concerned about. To think that Lynn—her mother—had endured a similar injury
from the same man was another sad but firm bond between them. Dylan noticed her gesture and his expression went hard.