16
‘How much does Dan know?’ Grace asked.
‘Nothing,’ Claudia said.
‘OK.’ Grace’s mind spun, trying to stay steady and, most of all, non-judgemental. ‘But you’re here.’
‘Because I’m a coward.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Grace said. ‘Or you never have been.’
‘It gets worse,’ Claudia said.
Grace waited.
‘I’m being blackmailed.’
‘My God.’ Now Grace was openly horrified.
Joshua was still in his playpen, occupied now with a soft ball. These past few disturbed nights aside, he was such a good, undemanding little boy, for whom Grace was as endlessly and passionately grateful as she was for Sam.
As she’d believed Claudia was for Daniel and their boys.
‘Someone saw us in the park,’ her sister went on, ‘and took photographs. Of me kissing Kevin.’
‘Who?’ Grace’s bewilderment was growing, because this kind of thing only happened to public figures or movie stars, not to suburban wives, and who would do such a thing to Claudia, or to Daniel, come to that?
‘Still worse to come,’ Claudia said, ‘depending on your outlook.’
Grace waited.
‘The blackmailer was Jerome Cooper.’
Grace stared, her mind floundering again. ‘Roxanne’s son?’
Claudia nodded, the flush in her cheeks darkening. ‘Our stepbrother.’
Grace felt suddenly as if her thinking processes had been caught up in an internal mud storm, as if this was one ingredient too many, and certainly too bizarre. She never thought of Jerome Cooper as her stepbrother – she never thought about him at all, in truth.
Jerome Cooper. Son of Roxanne Cooper, who’d married their father back in 2000, two years after their mother’s death.
She and Claudia had both felt relieved at the time not to receive invitations, had only found out about the marriage because someone (they’d never found out who, nor cared) had anonymously sent both sisters Xeroxes of the notice in the Melrose Park Journal, and of a wedding snap showing a middle-aged woman in a snug-fitting white suit – her only resemblance to their late mother her blonde hair, though that, Grace had felt uncharitably certain, looking at the photo, had come out of a bottle – standing between her new husband, Frank Lucca, and a grinning boy of about sixteen. After which there had been one combined Christmas and change of address card – the Luccas were still in Melrose Park, living in a street Grace thought was less than a mile from their old place – signed Roxy, Frank and Jerome, to which Claudia had reciprocated but Grace had not, and no communication since then.
More than seven years now since they’d seen Frank.
Grace, for one, had no regrets on that score.
‘How,’ she asked now, ‘could Jerome possibly know about you and this man?’
Since to the best of her knowledge, Frank Lucca’s stepson still lived just outside Chicago, over two thousand miles from Seattle.
‘He must have been following me.’ Claudia paused. ‘He’d come to Bainbridge Island before.’
‘He had?’
‘He showed up on our doorstep out of nowhere last fall, looking for a hand-out.’ Claudia shook her head, remembering. ‘“I’m Jerry,” he said, “Roxy’s boy.” He has this really insincere smile.’
‘You never said a word to me.’ Grace was stunned.
‘It was right after I’d come back from visiting with you guys.’ Claudia had flown down after Joshua’s birth and stayed on for a while to help. ‘You’d all been through so much, and I didn’t want to burden you.’
‘And later?’ Grace said. ‘Why not tell me then?’
She looked down into the playpen, experiencing a strong urge to pick up her son, but Joshua was perfectly content, and her sister’s need for her full attention was decidedly greater for the moment, so Grace remained on the sofa.
‘Because I knew it would make you mad,’ Claudia answered. ‘And I guess I wanted to put it out of my mind. Dan saw how upset I was, and said that if the guy was in a jam, we might as well give him five hundred dollars, since he was, in a sense, family, but he asked Jerome to sign a receipt, and he didn’t argue, said he was grateful and it’d be all he’d ever ask for.’
‘Why did he say he needed this money?’ Grace asked.
‘He said his mom and Frank were going through a bad time.’ Claudia paused. ‘He said he figured we owed him. You and I.’
‘How did he figure that?’ Grace asked, harshly.
‘The implication was, Daniel and I took it, that if we’d been better daughters and not run out on him and Mama, Papa might not have had to close down the store and sell the old house when he married Roxanne, and things would have been easier ever after.’
‘And we could have stayed home and sliced salami.’ The bitterness was still in her tone, and Grace had never known till now, nor cared, if the Lucca’s house move had been up or downscale. ‘We could have made it easier on our father because we owed him so much.’