“Remember that new book I’ve been working on?” Colleen asked.
I had just taken a gigantic swallow from the glass of water Mr. Handsome/Dylan/my stepson handed me, so all I could do was nod. Now I knew who owned the silver-blue hatchback that had been parked near the house for the past few days.
“New book?” I squeaked, having trouble following her.
“Yes, Teddy. The book I’m writing. You do know what a book is, don’t you?”
Dumbly, I nodded my head.
“Well, in the book there’s a subplot about a girl who finds out through DNA testing that she’s adopted, and she causes a family crisis when she decides to find her birth parents. You know how much I love research, so I decided to see what the testing entailed, and I…”
With the water safely down my gullet, I interjected, “You had your own DNA tested.”
She waved her hand at Dylan, who had taken a seat across from us. “And got a wonderful surprise.”
Dylan finally spoke up. “I’d done the test myself a couple of months earlier, just after my eighteenth birthday. When Kinship.com matched us, I emailed her, she emailed me back, and I told her about Mom and Jon…”
“Who’s Jon?” I asked.
“My stepfather. Mom’s—her name’s Lauren—been married to him since I was ten. Great guy, in case you’re wondering.”
I hadn’t been, having other fish to fry. “Did your mother ever live in San Sebastian?” I asked, impressed at how calm I sounded.
He nodded. “Sure. She’s always talked about it a lot, how pretty it was with all the farmland and trees and flowers and stuff. Not like where we live now in LA, with high-rises and freeways everywhere you look, but at least the neighborhood around our house is quiet ’cause it’s on the edge of Griffith Park and all those hiking and riding trails. Some people even have horses in their backyards. Jon’s been working for the same insurance company since I can remember, so he’s doing pretty well. Mom, too. She did some acting when she was younger, then did a stint teaching drama at Hollywood High School.”
High school. That must have been where… “Did your mother attend San Sebastian High?”
“Yep, just like my biological father did.” A hint of defiance there.
Colleen leaned forward. “Dylan arrived three days ago, Teddy. He left a note for his mother, but I made him call home to let her know exactly where he is. Because we’d been emailing back and forth, he already knows Joe is the county sheriff, and all about Tonio and Bridey. And about you, of course.”
Dylan smiled at me, his defiance vanishing.
I was still having trouble believing all this. “Colleen, are you sure you didn’t know anything about this before Dylan contacted you?”
“Of course I didn’t. And I can’t believe Joe did, either.” She crossed her arms across her ample bosom. “He’d never be able to keep a secret like this from me.”
She was probably right. You’d think a man like Joe, who’d been in law enforcement for more than a decade, would be expert at hiding things, but I’d found that had never been the case. If Joe had a bad day at the office, it showed. If he was worried about one of the kids, it showed. The love on his face when we made love, it showed.
Come to think of it, why hadn’t I known about Dylan? I’d known Joe since I was a child, had gone to grade school with him, and even part of high school. He’d been the love of my young life, and I would have known if…
On second thought, no, I wouldn’t. My own mother, correctly guessing about my feelings for Joe, and not wanting to have the grandson of a Hispanic migrant worker for a son-in-law, had shipped me off to a finishing school in Virginia for the remainder of my high school years. When I’d returned home two years later, he was engaged to Sonia. Afterward, I’d soothed my broken heart in college, where I’d met Michael and moved to San Francisco. But after only two years of marriage, Michael left me for another woman, and my only partially healed heart had broken all over again. That time, though, I’d returned to my original home at Gunn Landing and found the Merilee waiting for me.
And Joe.
“Who’s going to be the one to tell Joe?” I asked Colleen. “You? Dylan? My God, all he has to do is walk into our house and say, ‘Hi, Dad,’ and the resemblance alone…”
Colleen didn’t let me finish. “You could do it. This evening, after Joe gets home from work.”
The breath whooshed out of my lungs. As soon as I could speak, I said, “Me? You’re kidding, right?”
“At the very least you could act as a go-between.” She’d read my face and knew her first suggestion was a no-go.
“Okay, I’ll try to make a few inroads, but since you’re the one who started this, you should be the one to tell him.” Then to Dylan, “Let your grandmother do all the talking, okay?”
He nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
Now that the shock had begun to wear off, I stood up and gave the kid a big hug. “Welcome to the family, Dylan.”
* * *
During lunchtime, Joe called to tell me that KGNN was retracting yesterday’s story about Gordon “Gordo” Walken being a suspect in the Cliff Flaherty homicide. Apparently, Gordo and his roommate, Ansel “Bird” Yates, had been surfing twenty miles down the coast at the time Flaherty died, afterward joining a beach party of surfers who drank until dawn and then did whatever surfers usually did. My concerns now lay closer to home. As long as Joe was on the phone, I decided to ask the question that had had my mind awhirl all morning.
“Joe, how many different girlfriends did you have back in high school? Besides me. And Sonia, the kids’ mother, of course.”
“Huh?”
Remembering Dylan’s earnest face, I soldiered on. “The high school years can be pretty hectic, what with all the stresses, you know, raging hormones, algebra tests, and…”
“Is there going to be a tie-in to something in there? I mean, first we’re talking about how happy you are that Gordo’s been released, and now you want to discuss raging hormones?”
Time for a little white lie. “Oh, while I was scrolling through the TV looking for Animal Planet, I accidentally landed on a Jerry Springer Show, and he was doing that who’s-your-daddy thing and…”
Joe’s laughter on the other end of the line sounded reassuring. “Teddy, you never cease to amaze me. Didn’t Springer go into politics? Run for mayor or something?”
“Yeah, of Chicago.”
“Good for him, maybe not so good for Chicago.” He vented another laugh. “Well, here’s the real reason I called. Surprise, surprise, I’ll actually be home in time for dinner tonight.”
I managed a smile even though he couldn’t see it. His on-time-for-dinner arrival wouldn’t be the only surprise around Casa Rejas today.
Neither Tonio nor Bridey liked the sandwiches I’d made. Their elementary school was playing host to a two-day teachers’ conference, and they were bored.
“I hate peanut butter!” Bridey wailed.
“But peanut butter and jelly is all you would eat last week,” I pointed out.
“I changed my mind! I want pizza!”
“Me, too,” Tonio said. “I’m sick of peanut butter.”
Giving up—someday I’ll grow a spine, but not today—I called Matteo’s Magnifico Mangia and ordered a large half-vegetarian, half-pepperoni-mushroom-and-ham pizza, plus a double order of stuffed cheesy bread. If the little kids didn’t eat them, I would take them over to the big kid hiding out in the granny cottage.
“Where’s Grandma?” Tonio asked twenty minutes later, after taking his first bite of the steaming pizza. “She usually eats with us. And she really, really likes pizza.”
“She’s busy,” I told him.
“Busy doing what?”
“Housework and stuff.” Not quite a lie, since hiding your eighteen-year-old grandson could fall under the heading of “housework” as long as you hid him in the house.
“Soon as I finish my pizza, I’m gonna go see her,” Bridey piped up.
“Oh, ah, I was thinking about going over to the…the…” I thought hard, trying to come up with something that the two children would both like. “Going to the Merilee to do a little work on her. Maybe you’d like to help out?”
You’ve never seen children chow down pizza so fast, and within minutes, the only leftovers included two slices of vegetarian, and one half-loaf of cheesy bread. Excusing myself for a minute, I walked the leftovers over to the granny cottage, where Colleen and Dylan were engaged in a game of Monopoly on Colleen’s ancient board. Things looked fraught for Dylan’s top hat game piece, since Colleen’s battleship ruled most of the board. I’d forgotten to warn him about her.
“I’m taking the kids to the Merilee,” I announced, as Dylan’s dice roll landed his tiny hat on Boardwalk, which boasted one of Colleen’s many hotels. For the first time I noticed his knuckles were scabbed over.
“Your boat’s been cleared?” Colleen asked.
“Yes, I…”
Perhaps to avoid surveying the carnage on the board, Dylan looked up. “What do you mean, ‘cleared’?”
“A dead man was found floating next to my boat a couple days ago,” I answered.
Dylan’s beautiful complexion suddenly looked much less bronze. “Dead man?”
“A guy named Flaherty,” Colleen clarified. He’s, well, was the writer on a local TV show, Tippy-Toe & Tinker. The authorities—” I noticed she didn’t say your father—“thought they had someone, but now they admit they don’t.”
My cue. “By the way, I just got a call from Joe. He said the news story about Gordo Walken being arrested was overblown. The detectives merely wanted to question him, and they found his answers satisfactory enough to let him go. Apparently, he was at some surfer party when it happened.” To Dylan, I said, “We’re talking about the puppeteer who handles Tippy-Toe, the T. rex on the local kiddie show. You know, where they use string-controlled marionettes instead of hand puppets.”
Dylan hadn’t said anything for a while, but when I glanced at him, I saw that his face had gone white. “Are you talking about Cliff Flaherty?”
As rocky as I’d felt all morning, there was no missing Dylan’s usage of Flaherty’s first name. Colleen and I both stared at him.
“You knew Cliff Flaherty?” Colleen asked, the worry lines on her forehead prominent.
Dylan looked back down at the Monopoly board. “Um, those hotels’ll cost me two thousand each, which I don’t have, so it looks like you won, Grandma. Again.” He snatched up the top hat and began collecting the bank’s play money. “Three games in a row. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you cheated.”
Colleen frowned at Dylan, and I doubted it was because she’d almost been called a cheat. As for me, my feelings had plunged from mere rockiness to dread. “You did know him, didn’t you?”
Without looking up, he muttered, “Say, you know what? I’m getting superstitious about this stupid hat, so I think I’ll exchange it.” He rattled the pieces around where they’d been left in the box, and pulled out the little metal dog. “We had a Scottie once, so maybe he’ll bring me luck.”
Slick deflection, but it didn’t fool me. “Dylan, when and where did you meet Cliff Flaherty?” And did you hate him as much as everyone else did?
Dylan returned the metal dog to the box. “Actually, giving in to superstition is a sign of weakness, isn’t it? So I’ll just stay with the top hat.”
“Answer me, Dylan.”
When he looked up, his blue eyes were fierce. “What is this? The third degree? Look, Teddy, you may be my stepmom and you may be married to my biological dad, but I don’t need to tell you who I know and why I know them. Okay?”
With that he overturned the Monopoly board, sending dice and deeds flying, then stalked out.
Into the backyard.
“Oh, hell!” Colleen yelped, rushing after him. “The kids will see him!”
Too late. Tonio was already out the door racing toward Dylan, with Bridey right behind.
“Who’re you?” Bridey piped. Her innocent face grew solemn as she stared at him in confusion.
Dylan froze.
Tonio was staring at him, too. “What were you doing in my Grandma’s house?” He clenched his small fists and started toward Dylan.
Colleen, who usually had something to say about everything, remained silent, so the job of defending my new stepson fell to me. I clapped my hands and pasted a big smile on my face, hoping it didn’t look too phony.
“Hey, kids! Let’s all go into Grandma’s house for a little talk!”