March 21
L
ILLY LEARNED OF
Dana’s death as she watched FOX News, and in the next instant discovered she was “a person of interest” in her murder. Though it had been more than a month, the daily news reports kept it fresh in her mind, and she found it hard to keep her sense of futility at bay. CNN’s Nancy Grace held on to the case like a starved dog on a bone. It didn’t take Lilly long to figure out how Drake had framed her for her dearest friend’s murder. Considering Drake had had access to her townhome, he’d probably pilfered the set of keys Dana had entrusted to her. Somehow, he had found out the information that Dana had taken one of her guns, which was coated with Lilly’s fingerprints and registered in her name. Even if the police thought she was innocent, the evidence would pull them to a conviction.
Hopelessness drained Lilly’s spirit. Though she’d felt down at several points in her life, it was the first time she felt despair, as if she were sitting at the bottom of a drained well, the sides too slick with mud for her to get a foothold to climb out. In the aftermath of the rape, the depression and misuse of mind-altering substances were a bridge until she got her footing. She always felt there would be an end to these feelings, either by her own perseverance or formal therapy.
Now, there was no end.
Not only did she have to prove Drake’s guilt, she had to prove her innocence.
The weight of her circumstances and the tragedy that had befallen those who loved her kept her at the bottom of this pit. Lilly sat motionless on the bed in her dank hotel room for hours at a time; the only movement was the twins repositioning themselves within her, the remote control that rested on her belly jiggling as they moved.
Should I call Nathan and profess my innocence?
Should I call Kadin to make sure he’s ready for the babies?
Dana’s funeral had come and gone, and it was all Lilly could bear not to go. It would be impossible to disguise herself from Drake and the police, and the risk to the babies was something she wasn’t willing to chance. If she wanted to do justice for her friend, her absence was the only way to accomplish it.
Her room phone rang. There was only one person who would be calling her. Finding Drake’s ex-wife had proven difficult. The address from the neighbor had been a false start. Lilly had garnered the services of a private detective, paid in cash, to help her find this woman and Drake’s brother, as well. His information was short and to the point. He’d found Drake’s ex. She would only see her today. Now that someone had found her, she was going to disappear again. Lilly only hoped that the woman she was meeting with didn’t watch the news.
She neared the mobile home park that sat on the outskirts of Las Vegas city proper. The desert winds drudged up dirt from the compacted earth and put down further layers of grime against the metal siding. Few people were visible, and they were easily outnumbered by the cactus and tumbleweeds that blew through the development. The vehicle she drove blended well with the current occupants, and she didn’t worry about being singled out. Exiting her car, she pulled her scarf over her mouth and nose as she climbed three rickety steps to the small threshold. As she raised her fist to knock, the door opened a few inches, then wider as the woman’s shoulders eased in relief.
Lilly stepped into the trailer and pulled her coat off. The stale air was little improvement from the dusty gusts outside.
“You must be Lilly Reeves.” The woman held out a hand in greeting. It was limp in Lilly’s grip.
“Thank you for seeing me, Julie.”
Julie Stipman was short statured, but the way she clenched her arms tightly into herself and jumped at the slightest sounds made her seem physically smaller and mouse-like. As the minutes passed, she became more comfortable with Lilly and transformed more into weary prey.
They sat in two threadbare recliners that faced a black-and-white TV, its picture distorted by jagged horizontal lines. The home was stifling hot, and Lilly felt sweat pooling in all her new pregnancy crevices.
“I knew this day would come,” Julie said. “I just didn’t think it would take this long.”
Lilly rocked her chair slowly, hoping the movement would circulate the air. She hadn’t explained to Drake’s ex-wife the nature of her visit. Only that she desired to ask her about the death of her sons. After her private investigator swore to Julie that Lilly wasn’t a member of the press or an associate of Drake’s, the woman had agreed to see her.
“You thought someone would visit you about your boys?”
“No.” She pointed to Lilly’s belly. “I thought there would be a woman to come and ask me about Drake.”
“Do you mind talking about your boys?” Lilly asked.
The woman picked up a needlepoint project and placed several stitches before continuing on. Lilly noted two packed suitcases against the wall.
“I don’t mind. It’s just hard.”
Lilly felt they were each of the same emotional resolve. Both were too beaten down to shed a tear over their tragedies.
“I can’t imagine. I would love to hear about them.”
Julie pushed her fingers through her artificially colored coal-black hair; a skunk line of intermittent silver hairs showed at the roots. Her grief had aged her. Lilly guessed her to be barely thirty-five at this point in her life.
“They were amazing, but so different from each another. Austin was the oldest and the outgoing one. He loved baseball. Trevor was nine months younger and the soft-spoken introvert. The best thing about him was his huge heart. He had such empathy for other people. Just seeing someone else cry brought him to tears.”
“They weren’t that far apart in age. I’m sure you were busy.”
“At the time, I would whine about how crazy it was. Now I would give anything to have them back, even for one day.”
“I can’t imagine how you must feel.”
“It wasn’t my idea to have them so close together.” She clipped the thread and selected a new floss color. “Drake and I started dating when he started his freshman year in college. I was a sophomore in high school. We’d only been together a couple of weeks before the first time. Shortly after that, I hadn’t been feeling well and my mother dragged me to the doctor. A few days later, she gets a call with the wonderful news. Healthcare laws weren’t what they are now, and they disclosed the pregnancy to her.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t go over so well.”
“My mother was livid. I was scared. Meryl Stipman insisted Drake and I marry or she would cut him off financially. The proposition seemed like an easy solution for everyone. After Austin was born, Drake didn’t want to wait until I healed, and he refused to let me take birth control. I was pregnant at my six week check-up. I don’t know if you know, but Meryl Stipman is a very wealthy woman.”
“I’ve never met her.”
“You’re lucky. She puts the word
witch
with a
b
to shame. It was all so fast for me. Drake was the first man I ever dated, let alone slept with. Then I was a mother at sixteen with another baby on the way.”
“How long were you married?”
“Until the fire. Then we divorced.”
“How did you keep from getting pregnant again, considering his views on birth control?”
“Trevor was breech. I was taken for a C-section, and they couldn’t stop me from bleeding. They had to do a hysterectomy. At the time, I considered it a blessing in disguise because I didn’t know how to keep him off me.”
“Was he abusive to you?”
“Depends on who you ask. People have different definitions of that.”
“It only matters what you say.”
“He was mean and controlling. I didn’t have a car, so if I left the house, I would have to walk. With two small children, it was difficult to go anywhere too far. My money was limited, and I had to account for every penny. I was given a strict budget for groceries and clothing. Verbally, he would remind me every day of how worthless I was and that I was the worst mother around. That was the most terrible thing he ever said to me because in my heart I knew I was a very good mother.”
Julie pulled a locket from beneath her blouse and began rubbing it between her fingers.
“May I see the picture?” Lilly asked.
Julie unclasped the lock and leaned forward.
“They’re handsome boys.” Lilly let the locket fall from her fingertips.
“Look like their father, don’t they?”
Lilly nodded in agreement. “How did you survive those years?”
“Not every day was bad. When Drake finished med school and started his residency, he would moonlight different places to earn extra money. He wanted to show that he could be wealthy without his mother giving us handouts. We bought a bigger house. I got more allowances for clothing so me and the boys could wear brand-name designers.” Julie paused, finding a new place in her sampler to sew.
“We hosted dinner parties, and of course, every good doctor’s wife sits on some board and raises money for good causes. That became my life, and with Drake gone most of the time either working or away on any number of extracurricular activities, we really didn’t see each other that often. When he was home, I would try to stay out of his way. Even though he was still controlling, it’s hard to keep the reins tight when you’re absent. That was the calmest time until his cancer diagnosis.”
Lilly felt her heartbeat uptick. She tried to keep a calm exterior. It was better for Julie to volunteer this information than for Lilly to try to pull it from her.
“Tell me about that.”
“Drake had just started his private practice. He was tired, but it seemed more than just fatigue. He was bleeding from his gums, and his body bruised easily. For weeks, I begged him to go get checked, but he would never do anything at my suggestion. One night, he collapsed at work. The labor nurses took him to the ER, and before he came to, they’d sent off all this blood work to try to see what was wrong. That’s when they found out he had leukemia.”
“How did he react?”
“It was strange. He never did have an emotional response, though I’d never seen any type of feeling from him other than anger. Even when the boys were born, he didn’t seem very sentimental about it.”
“What happened after that?”
“It was the usual cancer regimen. They started chemotherapy. He responded well in the beginning and went into remission. Unfortunately, he relapsed, and they suggested a bone-marrow transplant.” Julie placed her project to the side. “That’s when the trouble started.”
“What do you mean?”
“We had to find a match. They gathered all of us up and took these cheek swabs and sent them to the lab. I felt okay testing Austin and Trevor. They were ten and eleven at the time. That’s when I got the shock of my life. The testing showed not only were they not a match, but also that they weren’t Drake’s children. There wasn’t any possible way for that to be true. I demanded the tests be redone.”
“What was their response?”
“They refused, insisting the testing was sound. Drake, for the first time ever, plays the protective father and says he doesn’t want them put through any more hell. He said he was going to leave me because of my unfaithfulness, and since the DNA tests proved they weren’t his children, he was going to leave me penniless.”
“But you hadn’t been unfaithful.”
“Absolutely not. Honestly, I couldn’t make sense out of what was happening. I knew in my heart what the truth was, but how could I go against these tests?”
“What did you do?”
“While I was serving on the ethics committee, I became close with several physicians. There was a geneticist that I was a good friend with, and we would get together all the time. Though she never told me why, she wasn’t a big fan of Drake’s, and I got the feeling he’d done something inappropriate with her.”
“Did you have these feelings often? That he’d been with other women?”
“All the time,” she said, punctuating each word with a tap of her knuckles to her leg. “There were constant rumors of him sleeping with the nurses. One even claimed pregnancy, but then she died in this horrible car accident and that was the end of that.”
Lilly shuddered. Drake’s crimes were like cancerous tentacles, and she wondered what the family thought happened to this woman. “Did your geneticist friend have any suggestions?”
“She said we needed to look at the DNA of Drake’s blood relatives. From those patterns, she would be able to determine that my sons’ DNA came from that family. It was my job to gather samples from all the relatives that were biologically linked to Drake.”
“How did you manage that?”
It was the first time a smile broached the corners of her lips. “It wasn’t as hard as you might think. We had a sample from Drew, who was a match for Drake’s bone-marrow transplant. I brought the boys to visit Meryl, and while I was at her place, I stole her hairbrush and toothbrush. Meryl has a brother who’s considered the black sheep of the family, but we’re kindred spirits so I always kept in touch with him. He let me take a swab from him. I brought them back to the geneticist, and she performed these tests on her own time at a private lab that her husband owned so that Drake wouldn’t catch wind of it.”
“And the results?” Lilly’s heart stalled in her chest.
“The tests showed that Drew, his twin brother, was the father. However, Drew was in prison when Trevor was conceived. That’s when she said Drake must be a chimera.” “A chimera?”
“I wouldn’t know how to explain it, but I presented the test results to Drake. I told him even if he left me, I was going to sue him for everything he had, and he would support those boys.”
“What was his reaction?”
“The fire.”
Lilly’s vision clouded, heat rose within her. Her head pounded. “You think he started it?”
“Yes, I just can’t prove it.”
“How do you think he did it?”
Julie’s hands began to shake. She clutched them together to still them.
“Another doctor covered for him. That happened all the time when he was sleeping around. His medical group was having trouble finding qualified doctors, and they didn’t want him to get fired.”
Julie stopped and pressed her lips together until her trembling eased.