Lucas’s words echoed so clearly in her head that she could almost see him standing in front of her, saying them.
“No,” she said aloud. “Don’t do this, Rachel.”
She couldn’t help picturing him surrounded by his family this evening. How was he getting along with everyone? Was he mingling? Smiling? Laughing, maybe? Sharing family memories, swapping old stories?
It was hard to imagine Lucas in the middle of a crowd when she always thought of him as such a loner.
Had he thought of her tonight?
You know where to find me. If you want to find me.
She shook her head, as though she could physically dislodge the disturbing memory of his deep voice.
She couldn’t sit here like this, moping over Lucas the way she had as a love-struck teenager. She had to do something to distract herself. So she concentrated, instead, on the improbable tale he’d told her during lunch.
She could hardly believe her brother had concocted such a wild story. Rachel herself had tried during the years to come up with a plausible explanation for their father’s abandonment, but murder had never been one of the scenarios she’d imagined.
Poor Roger. He’d always been so angry. So sullen. So unreliable. Twenty-one at the time of his death, he’d dropped out of college, had been fired from two different jobs because he’d refused to follow directions, and had lived on a diet of beer and bitterness. And he’d had an almost pathological dislike for the McBrides, blaming them for almost every perceived injustice in his life.
Rachel had tried a time or two to make him see reason. She’d pointed out that Nadine had been a McBride only by marriage, and that none of the others had anything to do with Al’s betrayal. She’d reminded him that Emily, especially, had been as deeply hurt as Rachel and Roger had been, and deserved their sympathy, not their antagonism.
But Roger would never listen to Rachel. The only member of his family who’d had any influence over Roger had been their father’s brother, Sam. Sam had made a halfhearted effort to be a mentor to his fatherless nephew, but Sam had been almost as irrational as Roger where the McBrides were concerned.
Rachel had heard whispers that there’d been a history of some sort between Sam and Nadine, that Nadine had been involved with Sam before dumping him unceremoniously to marry the much older widower, Josiah McBride, Jr. After her marriage, Nadine had taken up with Sam’s older brother, Al Jennings, engaging in an illicit affair that had finally led to a clandestine elopement.
Rachel wondered if Sam had ever found out about Roger’s ridiculous theory that Josiah had murdered Nadine and Al.
She hadn’t talked to her uncle since that scene in the café Tuesday. He’d been unreasonably furious with Rachel for being polite to Lucas and Emily, and she’d been annoyed with him for embarrassing her so publicly. They’d parted very coolly in the parking lot outside the café, making no plans to meet again.
The Jennings family had truly fallen apart, Rachel couldn’t help thinking, while the McBride clan seemed to be thriving. Roger would have hated that. Sam probably did, too.
On an impulse, Rachel climbed the stairs to her grandmother’s attic. She had been trying to organize some of her grandmother’s belongings during the past few days, separating items to be sold from those to be placed in storage for now. She’d found several boxes of Roger’s possessions, though she hadn’t gone through them. Now she found herself wondering about that “proof” Roger had supposedly found to verify his wild tale of jealousy and murder.
Distraught by her son’s death, Jane Jennings had dumped all his belongings into large cardboard boxes without taking time to go through them. She’d sealed the cartons with heavy packing tape and hidden them in this attic, where they’d remained undisturbed for fifteen years. Rachel broke two nails trying to open the first box before finally going downstairs for a knife.
She rummaged through her brother’s things with a heavy heart, wishing the
y’d had a better relationship. Emily had been separated from her brother for a long time, and still looked at him now as though the sun rose and set in him. Rachel had never felt that way about Roger.
She dug through clothing, shoes, toiletries, accessories. Jane had packed everything—half-empty containers of toothpaste and deodorant a used, disposable razor, a can of athlete’s-foot spray. Rachel sighed, shook her head and closed the box, having found nothing out of the ordinary.
A second carton held books. Paperback murder mysteries, mostly, along with a few worn sciencefiction novels. Roger had been an avid reader; Rachel couldn’t help wondering if he’d begun to lose his ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
The third box Rachel opened held the contents of the desk that had been in Roger’s room. His wallet, personal papers, bankbooks, tax forms. A sealed manila envelope held his high-school diploma and a certificate declaring him an honor graduate. Roger had been intelligent enough; he’d just never lived up to his potential.
At the very bottom of the box was another sealed manila envelope. It held something solid. Bulky. Rachel opened it almost absently, telling herself she was wasting her time. What had she expected to find, anyway?
A mud-caked leather wallet fell into her hand.
She stared at it blankly for a moment, thinking that it must have been Roger’s. He’d obviously ruined it at some point and had switched to another.
So why had he kept this one?
She opened the wallet slowly, her fingers trembling.
A photograph stared up at her from a yellowed, weathered driver’s license.
The wallet had belonged to Albert R. Jennings.