Beautiful Lies (28 page)

Matthew found that he wasn't too tired to smile.

San Francisco

“Y
ou didn't know any of this?” Cullen combed his fingers through his hair. He had been silent all the way back to Liana's apartment, but he'd begun questioning her the moment they dismissed the security associate who had been manning the silent telephone.

“I knew Aunt Mei and my father were estranged. But until I was thirteen, I didn't even know she existed.” Liana strode through the hallway to the bar between the living and dining rooms. Ordinarily a glass or two of wine with dinner was her limit. But tonight she needed something that would get right to the root of her pain and dull it quickly.

She threw open a cabinet door, pulled out the first bottle she came to, an aged, unblended Scotch, and poured herself a generous shot. Then, wordlessly, she offered the bottle to Cullen.

He shook his head.

“Since when did you refuse a drink?” She tossed down
half the contents of her tumbler and marveled that the liquor found its way past the lump in her throat.

“So you never knew Mei was the one who stole the pearl from my family?”

“Well, by rights it didn't belong to your family, did it?”

He leaned over the bar. “That's hardly my point.”

She finished her drink before she answered. “You already know some of this story.”

“Don't leave anything out.”

She poured another drink, but she didn't gulp this one, because it had to be her last. She took it into the living room and lowered herself to a corner of the sofa. The portrait of their son loomed in front of them as Cullen joined her.

“When I was thirteen, my class went on a field trip to Chinatown. We were probably doing one of those rah-rah ‘We Are the World' units in social studies. But while we were there, I noticed an old woman watching me. We were standing on the sidewalk on Grant Avenue, and our teacher was lecturing. As we moved away, the woman came over and gave me a piece of paper. She said, ‘Call me.'”

“The woman was Mei.”

Liana nodded. “It wasn't a coincidence, of course. She'd known about me since I'd come to live with my father, and I think she'd been watching me, or had me watched. Maybe she knew I was a rebellious teenager and miserable living with my father and stepmother. Maybe Mei guessed I would call just because I was hungry to be recognized by somebody….”

“She's a sharp old girl.”

“Until we met, I didn't know my grandmother had been born in China and that I didn't get my black hair from some roguish Irishman in the Robeson past. Once, when I was a child, I was walking with my father, and an old Chinese
man spoke to us in Chinese, as if he expected us to understand. My father was furious. But how unusual was that? He was always furious about something.”

Cullen was silent. Liana stared at her son's portrait. “When I called Aunt Mei, she asked me to meet her at a restaurant in Chinatown. I didn't know why she wanted to see me, but I knew my father wouldn't like it, so, of course, I went. I remember she ate with a fork. I ate with chop-sticks. I guess I'd learned that in social studies, too.”

Liana glanced at Cullen. She had forgotten how intently he could concentrate, how thoroughly he could immerse himself in something if it interested him. She felt an unexpected stab of longing. Once she had interested him the way her story did now. She had been the focus of everything he was and did. She had tried to forget the way that felt, too.

“What did Mei tell you that day?” he said.

“Well, she didn't say why she wanted to see me. At least, not right away. The waiter came over to take our order. He chatted and laughed with her, and I could see they were talking about me. When he left, I asked what they'd said. Aunt Mei said, ‘He wanted to know if you were my granddaughter.' I laughed, because that seemed funny to me. Then she said, ‘I told him no, of course not. You are my niece.'”

“And you were completely surprised?”

“I thought she was crazy. Then she told me that she and my father were twins who had been raised apart and that later, when they found each other again, there had been a terrible fight. Since that day they had never spoken. She wouldn't tell me what they fought about—she never told me until tonight. But she did say that if I asked my father, he would deny her story because he didn't want anyone to know he was Chinese.”

“Was she trying to get back at him, do you suppose, by telling his secret?”

“Maybe. But I thought, even then, that she wanted to see if I was like my father. I think she hoped there might be more to me than Robeson pretensions. In some strange way, I think she thought she had to help me, that her mother would have expected her to. Despite everything Thomas had done to her.”

“And she's never, by word or deed, indicated that she harbors any ill feelings toward you?”

For a moment Liana couldn't imagine what he meant. Then she realized he was talking about Matthew's disappearance. “Cullen, you think she's involved in this somehow?”

“Do you understand why she told us that story tonight?”

“No. Do you?”

He shook his head.

“After our lunch, I knew better than to go back to my father and tell him what I'd learned. Aunt Mei suggested I do a little digging on my own if I wanted to be sure of the truth. So I did. I told one of my teachers I was going to write a paper about my family tree, and I asked her to help me get a copy of an Australian birth certificate. Two months later, I discovered that without a doubt a woman named Lian Sing was my grandmother.”

“Lian?”

“Yes. Willow's Chinese name was Lian. When I saw that, I realized something even more startling. My own mother had named
me
Liana, after my grandmother. Somehow she had discovered my father's secret, and she had named me Liana either to spite him or just as a silent salute to another woman who had suffered at his hands. Another woman Thomas had tried to render invisible.”

“Your mother never told you that you had Chinese heritage?”

Liana's mother was another story entirely. “Remember, my mother left my father before I was born. He didn't even know she was pregnant. So she had a huge investment in keeping everything about him a secret. And I was only eight when she died. I didn't know I
had
a father until the social services agency where we were living traced him.”

“And from all this, you determined Mei was telling the truth, and that she really was your aunt?”

“Aunt Mei had her own birth certificate. Of course everything matched.”

“So from that point on, she took you into her family?”

“From that point on, she took me under her wing. Despite what they must have known about the pearl, her sons and their families were always kind to me. Frank, Mei's grandson by her youngest son John, even works for me now that Thomas is dead. Hiring him was something I could do for Mei.”

“Your father never suspected you knew her?”

“Not for years. By the time he did, he realized it was too late to deny who she was, but he gave me an ultimatum. It was simple, really. The Fongs, or Thomas and everything that went with him, like Pacific International, the Robeson personal fortune, everything right down to my good name and identity as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It wasn't a hard choice. I was young and idealistic, and I was nursing a boatload of resentment. I had money from my mother's estate, so I took off.”

She looked up at him. “Along the way, of course, I met and married you.”

His gaze was warm. “Yeah, I remember that part.”

Liana felt her cheeks flush. She looked away and tried
to think what might be important about all of this. Was Mei's story just an old woman's ramblings? Had she seen an opportunity to tell Cullen the truth about her relationship with Bryce Llewellyn as a sort of “deathbed” confession?

Or did this story have something to do with Matthew's disappearance? Did Mei know something more, something she hadn't told them?

“Lee, what are you thinking?”

“Right after she arrived in America, Mei married a man named Wo Fong. Think about it, Cullen. She was only twenty. She had journeyed across the world to bring my father the pearl. She had given up the man she loved, only to have her own brother cast her out empty-handed. She was alone in America. No family. No friends. No job. She only had one thing in her favor. Most Chinese men had been forced by law to leave their families in China. So an unattached Chinese woman was a rare commodity. Mei must have had her pick of suitors. She told me once that she chose Wo Fong because he was a kind man, a hard worker with good business prospects. But she didn't marry for love.”

“So she married a stranger and raised a family. While my grandfather wondered for the rest of his days why she left him.”

“What was your grandfather like, Cullen? Tell me what you know about him.”

“I don't know what bloody difference it makes, Lee.”

She shared his frustration. It seemed only natural to put her hand on his. She did so before she realized it, then looked down with something akin to horror.

If Cullen felt anything of the sort, he didn't indicate it, but he didn't try to stop her when she pulled away. “I hardly remember my grandfather. I was barely four when
he died. I don't remember him paying attention to me. He was a quiet man. Stern. Remote. He married my grandmother because their lands were connected, and she was as determined to make a go of her place as he was of Jimiramira. She was one of those Australian women bred to live in the back of beyond. Strong as a man and better with a horse. My father was an only child because she needed one son to leave the place to when she died and she didn't want to be bothered with more.”

“Neither of them married for love, then. Not Mei and not Bryce.”

“I don't know that my grandfather was unhappy. But I don't think my father ever had much of a family life. His parents were always off at one end of the station or the other, rarely together. He was raised by couples who came in to take care of the homestead. Some were good and some weren't.”

During their marriage Cullen had talked as little as possible about his father, Roman. Liana knew they had been estranged for many years, and nothing Matthew had told her indicated that the estrangement had ended since the divorce. “From what Aunt Mei told us, I'd guess Bryce never had an opportunity to learn how to be a good father,” she coached.

“Well, he passed that much on to my dad. Dad tried, I think. He wanted to be a good father. But he didn't know how, either. I was only ten when my mother died, and from that time on, he just got worse and worse.” Cullen took a deep breath. “I've wondered all these years if I've done the same poor job of it with Matthew.”

Liana had been so immersed in her own unhappiness that she had given little thought to Cullen's. Some small part of her had been glad that for once Cullen was finding
out that parenting was more than a month of camping trips and baseball games.

Some terrible, hurtful part of her.

Cullen was suffering as much as she was, and she had done nothing to help him, as if by pushing him further away she could bring Matthew closer.

“Matthew adores you,” she said softly. “And sometimes I've gotten so angry about that, Cullen. Because I'm the one who sits by his bed when he's sick, and you're the one he worships.” She paused. “But I'm sorry. I wish he were here right now, worshiping at your feet.”

“I'd give up my month each year with him just to have him here with us.”

They stared at each other in mute misery. She felt tears slide down her cheeks. Until then, she hadn't been aware she was crying. He put his arm around her and pulled her to rest against his shoulder. She resisted, but not long enough. She was tired and frightened, and Cullen was the only person who could understand exactly what she was feeling.

He stroked her hair, pushing it behind her ear and smoothing it with his fingertips. “I've been angry, too, Lee. Because I want to be the one sitting by his bed. You're the one he can count on, and if he worships me, he has to do it from afar.”

She believed him. For the first time since his arrival, she believed what he was saying without examining every little part of it. In the years since they had been apart, Cullen had turned into the father she had wanted for her son.

“How did it all go so wrong, Cullen? Where's our boy?”

“I think I know what Mei was trying to tell us. We haven't listened to Matthew. Not the way we should have. No one ever listened to Bryce. No one understood his feelings.
He tried to protect his parents from each other….” His voice trailed off. “The way Matthew tried to protect each of us.”

“And you think that's why he left?”

He laid his cheek against her hair, and she felt a shudder pass, lightning-quick, through his body. “I don't know. It's not like Matthew to frighten us. Even if he ran away, he'd be sure to let us know he's all right.”

She wanted to believe otherwise. “Maybe he's just afraid to call. Maybe he knows we'd put a trace on the line.” She took a deep, ragged breath and willed the tears to stop.

“There hasn't been a letter, either.”

“Maybe he was worried about postmarks. Or maybe it hasn't arrived.”

Cullen sat up straighter, pulling her with him. “The devil.” He didn't push her away as much as he positioned her to face him. “Lee, is Matthew's computer still on?”

She was choking back sobs. “I'm sure it is.”

“Come on.” He stood and held out his hand. She let him help her up; then she followed him to Matthew's room. He sat down at the computer. “I've got to E-mail Sarah.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“She's not my girlfriend, Lee.”

“Then what's the point?”

“I haven't told Sarah about Matthew. I need to, because someone in Broome needs to know what's taking place here. But that's not all. If I give her my password, she can access my E-mail. Don't you see? She can check to see if Matthew has sent me anything.”