Chapter Thirty-One

 

 

 

This time there was no prelude. There were no chattering teeth, no words of reassurance that everything would be all right. It never would be, ever again. He knew that. All around him there was nothing but deadly silence and cold. He couldn’t even hear the howl of the wind anymore. Perhaps the snow had completely buried them, muffling all sound. He would die with her in this place, slowly suffocating. He might have wept had he been able to do anything more than fight for the next breath from beneath the terrible weight, the terrible, terrible weight that grew colder with each passing moment. It would crush him soon. Dear God, let it be soon. Let it happen and be over with and end this nightmare for good.

“You weren’t supposed to be here. You weren’t supposed to be here. You weren’t supposed to be here.” He always just assumed he was hearing his own thoughts. His mother wasn’t supposed to have picked him up. They weren’t supposed to go over Mount Hood to the Bend house. It was a special treat, she said. They would go skiing on Mount Bachelor, maybe eat out at the Pine Tavern afterward or maybe Chang’s. “You weren’t supposed to be here. You weren’t supposed to be here. You weren’t supposed to be here.”

“She could have killed you,” the voice said. “The bitch could have killed you.”

His mother never said that. His mother was dead and now he was suffocating under the cold, heavy weight… His mother was dead! He’d already known that when they told him in the hospital so many weeks later. He’d known that because he’d felt her die. He’d felt the warmth go out of her body.

“Jesus, no! God, no! Not like this! Not like this, please, not like this!”

“Lex. Lex wake up!” From somewhere far away, he heard someone call to him, then he was lying back in the car beneath the weight again. Beneath the weight of his mother. Feeling the warmth leave her body and go to his until there was nothing left but the cold weight of her, and he couldn’t move. He was trapped. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t move!

From somewhere just beyond the panic, he heard the scrape of metal, felt a rush of snow and cold air on his face, and he was blinded by a bright light. Maybe he was dying at last. Didn’t they say people who died went toward the light?

“You weren’t supposed to be here, you weren’t supposed to be here, you weren’t supposed to be here,” came the chant, and the burn along his ribs made him cry out at a sharp tug of his body.

In his limited vision, he could see a boot, a winter hiking boot. It came down on her shoulder and shoved her off him, and he was propelled into the icy cold to land on a bank of snow. Then a shadow knelt over him and between a hood and a scarf he could see only eyes, and the muffled voice of a man said, “It’ll be all right now. Someone will come soon. It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right, someone will come.”

Then, the man walked away! He just left him there where he lay, and all he could do was follow him with his eyes, always following him so far with his eyes, out into the woods, out into the snow before he lost him, before he could go no farther and was forced back to his body, his broken, dying body. The sky was clear above him now. He could see it through the mist of his breath. The world turned beneath the pole star and there was now no weight at all. He was weightless, following the man back along Highway 26, back through Sandy, back to Mountain View.

“It’ll be all right,” the man kept saying in a voice that Lex should have recognized. “It’ll be all right. They’ll find you and bring you home because you weren’t supposed to be there. You weren’t supposed to go with her. You were supposed to come back home with the chauffeur. You were supposed to come back home where you belong.”

Then someone was pounding on his chest and shining a bright light into his face. There were lots of lights, lots of people talking, yelling, clustered about him, then something came down over his mouth and nose, and he gave one last desperate gasp before everything went black.

“Lex! Lex! Lex!” It was a hard shaking of his shoulders that brought him up sharp and gasping from the dream world. He woke trembling and covered in sweat, shoving his way out of the sleeping bag.

“Oh God, Kelly!” He lost his footing and fell back hard on the floor of the cave, bruising his bare ass as he went down. “It was him. He was there! He was the one.”

“Lex? Who? What are you talking about?”

“My father! Kelly, he’s the one who pulled me out of the wreck, out from under my mother. I wasn’t supposed to be there. My mother was leaving him. I understand it all now. She was leaving him and she was taking me with her. I wasn’t supposed to be in the car that night. I don’t know what he actually did, but the press was right about the sabotage. It wasn’t just idle gossip. I wasn’t thrown clear of the car, he pulled me out and left me, knowing someone, someone he’d obviously paid off, would find me. I wasn’t supposed to be there, and my mother was supposed to die alone on Mount Hood that night. That was the only way he could be sure of hanging on to the Valentine fortune, and he’d certainly lose it if I died.”

“Christ, Lex! And he never suspected that you knew?”

“He had no reason to. All these years, I didn’t know that I knew. Then when I woke up and was…the way I am, well, even if I did suspect, who would believe a boy who was clearly mentally unstable?”

“Jesus, bro! Cover it up already!” Dillon stuck his head into the cave, then disappeared again. “Myrna, you might want to wait outside until my man can get himself decent.” Then he peeked in again. “Morning, Kelly? You okay?”

“A bit bruised and battered, but I’ll do,” she said.

Lex had barely gotten his trousers on when Myrna burst into the cave and enveloped Kelly in a bear hug that made her gasp and cry out in pain, but she returned the hug nonetheless. The EMTs were right behind.

 

* * * *

 

Lex wheeled Kelly into the house, with her protesting loudly that she didn’t need a damned wheelchair, which she didn’t, but he was taking no chances. Detective Harrison was already waiting in the kitchen, having coffee with V and enjoying one of Cookie’s homemade cinnamon rolls. Myrna and her brood and her ex were already out on the patio also partaking of Cookie’s largesse and laughing at Dillon’s stories of some of their camping exploits as boys. He was pleased to see Dillon’s father was there too, along with his lawyer.

“Are we having a party?” Kelly said. “If I’d known, I’d have put on my party frock before we left the hospital.”

“Oh, there’ll be a party, all right,” he said, bending down to nuzzle her neck, “but first we have some business to attend to. I’d hoped we’d have a little time to ourselves before the crowd descended. Still, it’s probably best we get it over with. After that, I figure we’ll party into the wee hours, but don’t worry, you won’t be needing a frock for what I have in mind.” Before she could manage more than a wicked chuckle, the twins erupted from the patio and mauled her, and Cookie shoved a cinnamon roll in her hand, speaking in rapid-fire Mandarin, and wiping tears on the edge of her apron.

Detective Harrison and V came to join them. Without thinking, the detective extended his hand, to a collective intake of breath, which was quickly repeated when Lex took it and gave it a hearty shake, the sight of which had Cookie crossing herself and whispering something in what sounded like Dutch.

Duncan took Lane and Lana down to the raspberry canes with a couple of small baskets and a thermos of hot chocolate. Everyone else settled into the drawing room that opened onto the patio, and Cookie gave all cups one last top-off before Lex addressed the gathering. He got right to the point. “I’m certain now that my father did kill my mother. He was there the night of the accident. He pulled me out of the car after my mother was dead. I remember now.”

No one seemed particularly surprised at his news. Terry gave Myrna’s hand a hard squeeze, Dillon looked like his jaw was set in concrete and Cookie whispered something, no doubt seriously obscene, probably in some obscure dialect of some obscure language, to which V nodded agreement. Other than that, the room was silent.

At last Detective Harrison shifted in his seat. “Certainly your father’s been the top suspect all along. Sadly, I have nothing to add that you don’t already know, Mr. Valentine, the same information we’ve known all along. That you were an eyewitness unfortunately comes about twenty-five years too late. The detective who handled the investigation is dead, as you know. I’ve spoken to the few retired officers involved in the case who are still around. Apparently the general consensus was always that someone was paid off, but no one knows who, if anyone ever knew. As I’ve also told you, there are ways to rig brakes so that it looks accidental, and with the black ice on the roads that night, no one would have questioned a car spinning out of control. Under the circumstances, there was no real reason for anyone to question. Had your mother been anyone other than Ellen Valentine Vance, no one would have. But, even so, as far as I could tell from the evidence and the newspaper articles, your parents kept their private life private, leaving little fodder for the press.”

“They may have done,” Zack Matthews spoke up, “but those of us who knew the family pretty well knew that the marriage wasn’t a happy one. Alden Vance was a philandering bastard right from the beginning. But he had a good head for business, a good pedigree, good genes.” He spoke the words as though they left a bad taste in his mouth. “He was just what Ellen Valentine thought she needed. She wanted someone who could take control of Valentine Industries and leave her free to do her charity work. She also wanted a child, a legitimate heir for the Valentine Fortune. It was a marriage of convenience. She knew what Vance was like before she married him. Vance had the name, but no money and no heir, so the arrangement suited them both. What she wanted—what they both wanted—was never any real secret among their inner circle. There was a prenup, and there was an agreement that the two of them would make a good public show of the marriage, but that what was done in private was no one’s business as long as they were discreet.”

“I know about the prenup,” Lex said. “At least I learned about it much later. If my father breached the contract in any way, if she divorced him for whatever reason, he could continue on to run Valentine Industries, but on a salary comparable to any other CEO in that position. It was a huge amount, mind you. But my father got used to the Valentine open checkbook.” He waved a dismissive hand. “I might have been ten when it all happened, but I remember well hearing them argue about some of the extravagant expenses he’d racked up without telling my mother. In particular, I remember a yacht in the South of France. It was damn near the size of the Queen Mary.”

“I remember that,” Zack said. “She made him sell it right away. Turned a tidy profit, as I recall, but he was furious.”

“They tried to keep their arguments from me,” Lex said. “Funny how parents think their kids are stupid just because they’re young. Sometimes when they had an argument over his new toys, he got drunk, then he didn’t much care who heard.”

“Jesus,” Kelly whispered, giving his hand a reassuring squeeze.

“Maybe in his way he loved her, I don’t know,” Zack said, with a conciliatory glance at Lex. “What I do know is that it was a horrible situation for a young boy to grow up in, and Lex was way too perceptive not to know that they were living a lie.”

“Mr. Valentine.” It was his lawyer, Jack Fenton, who spoke now. “There’s nothing that can be done at this point, at least not that I can see. Any evidence that might have proven Alden Vance’s guilt is long gone, and I don’t see how the memories of a ten-year-old boy, especially one who has had the mental history you’ve had, would be an acceptable argument in a court of law, even if the man weren’t already dead.”

“I know that,” Lex said. He realized that he was probably squeezing Kelly’s hand way too hard, and his heart skipped a beat at the fact he was holding her hand at all.

“Surely you don’t want to go to the press with this,” the lawyer said.

“I don’t honestly know what I want. It’s just that I wanted all of you, those of you who have stood by me, to know the truth. My mother kept me alive with her own body heat. I felt it go out of her as she died. But I probably would have died anyway if my father hadn’t come for me. My…my injuries were such that I couldn’t… I couldn’t get out from under the weight of her. I couldn’t… I couldn’t move. He pulled me out, and it hurt. I remember it hurt really badly because of the burns. I might have passed out for a few seconds, and when I came to, the storm had cleared and I was looking up at the sky, and he was kneeling next to me, telling me it would be all right, that someone would be there any minute. He kept saying I shouldn’t have been there. Then…” Lex heard Kelly’s knuckles pop under the pressure of his hand, but she squeezed back just as tightly. “Then he left me there. I dreamed… I dreamed about following him into the woods, about grabbing him and asking him why, why he’d left me there. It never entered my mind then that he was responsible for my mother’s death, or that if he hadn’t discovered I was there, I would have died with her. Of course, I never knew who it was who pulled me out, until the dream in the cave with Kelly.”

“I can’t see how acknowledging the situation publically will change anything now,” the lawyer said, then he added quickly, “Though if it’s something you feel compelled to do, I’ll do my best to cover all the legal bases. I don’t believe your father had any living relatives other you, did he?”

Lex shook his head. “He was the last of the Vances and my mother was the last of the Valentines until I was born.”

The lawyer nodded. “In that case, there would be no repercussions from family wanting to sue if you do go to the press. Though Ms. Beasley might make an attempt. The timing of your mother’s death could implicate her.”

“I won’t be doing anything for a while,” Lex said. “Maybe never, I just wanted all of you to know. It doesn’t matter so much if anyone believes me or not, as you can see.” He pulled Kelly’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “I believe it to be the truth, and I think it was what the psychologists and doctors were trying to help me uncover all these years. Who knows, maybe I would have never been able to remember if Kelly’s situation hadn’t mirrored my mother’s enough to force the issue. I just don’t know.”

The lawyer spoke again. “Perhaps you should…seek out someone to talk to again. It can’t be an easy thing to discover that your father murdered your mother.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fenton. I’ll take that into consideration. My father and I were never close. We didn’t get along before the accident, much less afterward. I must have put him in a terribly difficult situation, his only child and his only link to the Valentine fortune, knowing he murdered his wife, but not remembering.” He shrugged. “It must have actually been quite a relief to him that I came back from the hospital such a mess. Even if I had accused him, it wasn’t likely that anyone would have believed me.”

V huffed out an irritated breath. “Stupid people. There was never anything wrong with your mental acuity, Alexander, and all anyone ever had to do was be around you for a few minutes to know that.”

“That’s quite possibly part of the reason he kept you isolated,” Zack Matthews added.

“I can do my best to pursue the case further if you want, Mr. Valentine,” Detective Harrison said, “but I’m not hopeful.”

Lex shook his head. “I know the truth now, and all of you know the truth. That’s what matters at the moment. The healing that has come from the knowing, the closure, that’s recompense enough right now.” He shivered as he recalled the nightmares, the pain, the isolation. Then he pulled Kelly’s hand to his lips again, needing the reassurance that it was really over, that he could actually touch the woman he loved, that he could finally touch all the people he cared about, that, at last, he could rejoin the human race.