Authors: Tom Dolby
T
hey decided on the bar at the Algonquin Hotel, which was a slightly shopworn, pretzels-and-peanuts kind of place with leather banquettes and sketches of Broadway shows on its wood-paneled walls. Nick said he had agreed to meet up with Phoebe after the reading of the will, and he texted her their location. The bar was open for lunch, and they pretended that they were there to eat, but neither Patch nor Nick expressed much interest in food. Nick ordered some fries for the table and three Cokes.
Phoebe arrived a moment later. She looked at Nick, then at Patch. “What’s going on here?”
“We’ll explain in a second,” Nick said.
“I might need something stronger,” Patch said, only half-joking as he motioned to his Coke. He was still in shock from the news and wasn’t really sure how to process it. “Can I get a dirty martini?” he mock called to the waitress.
“Hold on there,
Lost Weekend
, let’s keep our heads on, okay?” Nick said.
Nick explained to Phoebe, as quickly as he could, what had been revealed. Phoebe nodded in amazement.
“I should call Genie,” Patch said, interrupting Nick’s story. “I don’t know if I can reach her, though.” Genie was in the Catskills with a friend for a few days, at an old mountain retreat where she could curl up by the fireplace, play backgammon, and read paperback mysteries. She had decided she needed to get out of town after all the excitement of Palmer’s death and the necklace heist. The problem was that this made her annoyingly unreachable. “She never has her phone turned on, unless it’s in the charger,” Patch said. “It has somehow escaped her that the purpose of a cell phone is to keep it with you.”
He tried her, but it went directly to voice mail. She wouldn’t be returning home until the weekend.
Patch decided he would call the next best person who might be able to explain it to him. His mother’s number at the hospital was programmed into his phone, and he dialed it. It was a snap decision to call her, and as he heard the line ringing, he started to think better of it. What would he say to her? Was this really a conversation he wanted to have in front of Nick and Phoebe? A nurse answered the main line at the Stoney River Psychiatric Hospital in Ossining, and he asked for his mom. After a moment, the nurse said she was unavailable, but they would give her the message. He was almost relieved she hadn’t been there.
Nick and Phoebe looked at him plaintively. He felt like someone they had to feel sorry for.
“What’s up, you guys?” Patch asked.
“It’s so odd,” Nick said. “Like, I feel like we should be celebrating about the trust funds, but that doesn’t feel right. My grandfather could be an ass, but clearly he was looking out for you—for us—in some way.”
“Except that now he’s left us with an even bigger mystery to solve,” Phoebe said.
“God, where is my grandmother when we need her?” Patch said.
Nick took a sip of his Coke. “Okay, let’s figure this out. I’m going to speak openly here. Your mother and my father clearly had something going on. Our fathers were friends, so that can’t have sat well between them.”
“Unless my father—well, who I thought was my father—unless he didn’t know.”
“He had to have found out,” Phoebe said. “How could he not?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “It’s possible he never knew about it. What I don’t get is, if my grandfather—our grandfather—was going to include you in his will, why did he have such strong feelings about you being in the Society? Why were they so upset when you taped the Night of Rebirth?”
The three of them were silent for a moment. “I have an idea,” Phoebe said. “Just from what I know about your grandmother, Patch.”
“What’s that?” Nick said.
“Forgive me if I’m out of line here.” She stirred her soda with a straw.
“Go on,” Patch said.
“I think that if Palmer and Genie were once engaged, then Patch was a symbol of everything that he couldn’t have, of something forbidden. He couldn’t marry Genie because of family pressures to marry someone who approved of the Society. But Parker could have your mother in his life, Patch, at least by having an affair with her.”
“I’ve been pretty sure, since the fall, that both of my parents were Society members,” Patch said. “So how does that make my mother something forbidden?”
Phoebe spoke up. “What was forbidden about her was that she wasn’t his wife.” She looked sheepishly at the two boys.
“I think Phoebe’s right,” Patch said. “Palmer resented me because I reminded him of what his son had done.”
“But then he came around in the end,” Nick said, shaking his head in amazement. “Phoebe, do you remember what he told us in his hospital room? He said something about how he didn’t want us to live the life set up for us by our families. How destructive that could be.”
“So maybe this is your ticket out?” Phoebe asked. “Is this his own way of helping you out of the Society?”
“We’re not out yet,” Nick said. “But this certainly doesn’t hurt.”
“No, I’d say thirty million dollars doesn’t hurt,” Patch said sarcastically. “Except that we still have no idea what the real story is.” He still couldn’t wrap his head around the trust. It seemed imaginary, like Monopoly money.
“I think we should take it from the beginning,” Phoebe said. “Don’t you think that figuring out Palmer’s whole mystery, whatever he was trying to tell you in his room at the hospital, is the first step to all this?” She finished her Coke and nervously stabbed at the ice with a straw. “You’ve tried the key everywhere. But what about those numbers you mentioned? What were they again?”
“1603,” Nick said.
“And you’ve tried addresses already, right? Give me your phone for a sec.”
Nick handed over his iPhone, and Phoebe punched in the numbers. She scrolled through a few entries on Google and frowned.
“Have you ever thought it might be a year?” she asked.
Patch and Nick shrugged. “How would a year help us? Usually these things are an address. Like the chess tables last semester.”
“Right, but maybe it’s a year that leads us to an address.”
“What are you showing up?” Nick asked.
“Nothing significant. Except that 1603 is mentioned in several entries as the last year of the Tudor dynasty.”
“Oh, great, so we have to go to England,” Patch said. “I said no to Denmark, and I say no to England, too.”
“We don’t have to go to England,” Phoebe said. “We just have to go to a place that
looks
like England.”
P
hoebe had some crazy idea about where they should go in the quest to solve Palmer’s riddle, but Patch’s attention was diverted. He would be joining them on their journey the next day, which, thankfully, was a Saturday, but for now, he was more concerned with solving the mystery of his own parentage. Could he really be Parker Bell’s son? Or was it something else? And what did it mean to be someone’s biological son, anyway, especially when you had never been treated as that person’s child? Was your father the person whom your mother slept with to conceive you, or was your real father the man who raised you?
Even if that was a man who had disappeared from his life, had drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, when he was five years old.
For all the time that Patch had spent with the Bells—good, bad, indifferent—Parker Bell could very well be his father.
Except that fathers didn’t keep their sons hostage. Fathers didn’t execute nefarious plans to harm their sons.
But maybe Parker Bell didn’t know that Patch was his son until today? And how was Nick so sure that Parker really was Patch’s father? Nick hadn’t let on anything about it before. What if it were something that went back even further, to Palmer and Genie? What if Esmé was actually Palmer’s daughter, and Patch, Jr., really
was
his father? Was that even possible? It hadn’t even occurred to Nick and Phoebe, but how did they know it wasn’t true?
All these thoughts were spiraling around in his head like an insane kaleidoscope as Patch entered his building. As he waited for the elevator at the end of the lobby, he saw Parker Bell talking to the doorman.
He needed to know. He didn’t particularly want to talk to him, but he needed to know.
Patch strode right up to Mr. Bell and tapped him on the shoulder.
Mr. Bell turned around and looked at Patch, first with annoyance, then with something resembling tenderness. “Patch,” he said. “All this must be a surprise for you. Why don’t you come upstairs?”
Patch nodded. He followed Mr. Bell into the elevator, and for the first few floors, they were silent. Mr. Bell finally spoke.
“I never intended for you to find out this way. I thought the lawyers were going to set up a private meeting. But once you were there at Mr. Story’s invitation, I realized that you deserved to be there as much as anyone else.”
“I’m not exactly sure why, sir. I wish you’d tell me.”
Mr. Bell looked Patch up and down, his eyes lingering, Patch was sure, at his dirty sneakers and frayed khakis.
“Let’s go into my study.”
Patch followed Mr. Bell through the apartment that he knew so well, though he had spent little time there lately. Even though he and Nick had resumed their friendship, he still felt like he wasn’t welcome in the Bells’ inner sanctum. He also suspected that Gigi, Nick’s mother, didn’t like him very much, and so he had stayed away.
Mr. Bell’s study was wood-paneled, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and windows that faced Fifth Avenue. Two burgundy leather chesterfield sofas sat facing each other. Patch sat down on one and Mr. Bell on another.
“Well, I imagine you and Nick have figured out what this is all about,” Parker said.
“Not really.”
“I cared for your mother very much,” Parker said. “We had some very nice times together. It was a mistake, though.” He paused. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to suggest—”
“I understand,” Patch said.
“What I am trying to say is that I should have remained faithful to my wife. Your mother and your father—or at least, the man you knew as your father—were having trouble conceiving. And so when your mother became pregnant, she was happy. For Esmé, it seemed like the solution. We were a perfect foursome. Of course, only she and I knew about it.”
“My father never knew?” Patch found this hard to believe.
“No, that’s not entirely true. He found out, which was difficult, to say the least. And my wife, Nick’s mother, found out as well. It split up our little group. It was a sad, sad time. Particularly when your mother had her difficulty. I wanted you to be close, and so I arranged to help subsidize the apartment that you and your grandmother live in now, as Eugenia was having trouble paying the maintenance fees. Your grandmother, by the way, doesn’t know that; she believes that her fees were simply lowered on account of her age. My wife, needless to say, was not pleased about any of it.”
“So that’s why she’s disliked me all these years,” Patch said.
“I wouldn’t say that, Patch. She’s just worried about Nick.”
“Oh, you mean, she doesn’t like him hanging out with the kid from the wrong side of the tracks?”
“You’re hardly from the wrong side of the tracks!” Parker laughed. “You come from one of the most distinguished families in New York. George Madison and your grandmother made a fine pair. As did your mother and father—well, you know, Patch, Jr.—oh, dear, this is complicated. Anyway, you have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not
ashamed
of anything,” Patch said.
“That’s good.” He paused and pulled out a cigar. “Would you like one?”
Patch shook his head. Why was he trying to act like he could suddenly be his dad? Patch had seen how Parker treated Nick through the years, and he knew that the man could turn his charm on and off in an instant.
Parker cut the tip from his cigar and then lit it, blowing puffs of smoke into the air.
“How did it all happen?” Patch asked. “I mean, how did it go down?”
“I’m not sure I can get into all that,” Parker said. “Dendur was a complicated matter.”
“I’m sorry, ‘Dendur’?”
“We called it ‘Dendur,’ as Esmé and I believed that you were conceived on the last night we were together, the evening of the last Dendur Ball. After that, the lawyers all called it the ‘Dendur situation.’”
“What involvement did they have?”
“Helping your family out, making sure your grandmother could stay in the building even after your mother and father no longer had their apartment. And setting up the trust for you with your grandfather. I had promised all that to your mother. Palmer didn’t understand it at first, but once I explained it to him, he acquiesced. I think he was jealous. The Bells and the Evanses. We’ve always liked your family. You know about his feelings for your grandmother.”
“I’m so glad we could be a source of amusement to you,” Patch said. The cigar smoke was making him nauseous.
“Don’t be so flip,” Parker said. “You have always had something special, Patch.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you know what a caul bearer is?” Parker stood up and went to his copy of
Webster’s
, flipping it open. “You are a child who was born in the caul, which, not to mince words, is the amniotic sac. It is very rare, unlike anyone else in our family. Traditionally, it has marked a child for greatness. In ancient Egypt, it actually meant that a baby was fated for the cult of Isis, an order that some say still exists today.”
“Oh, let me guess,” Patch scoffed. “You’re the head of the cult of Isis, too?” He may have been sarcastic on the surface, but he had to admit that he was intrigued.
“Not exactly,” Parker said, laughing. “You’ll have to discover that one for yourself.”
“Okay, I guess I’ll add that to my to-do list,” Patch said.
“It is a shame that your greatness has not truly emerged yet,” Parker said. “Thus far, you have been nothing but a weak link in the Society, a link that has threatened to bring it all down. In December, when you were initiated, I thought we might begin to see some of that greatness from you. Instead of fulfilling that mission, you and your friends have been Infidels. I would expect more from my sons. Of course, in many ways, you have completed exactly the pattern we see in all our future leaders: you start out as rebels, and eventually you find yourselves in charge.”
Patch felt an anger welling up inside of him as he stood up. Almost out of nowhere, he found himself yelling at Parker. “For
seventeen
years you keep this secret from me, and now you want to call me your son? I don’t think so! You’re not my father, and I’m not your son. You don’t get that privilege automatically. It’s something that you have to
earn
. My father was the man who drowned twelve years ago. Don’t ever forget that.” Patch was shaking as he said these words, but he had never felt so strong in his convictions.
Parker looked as if Patch had upturned an ashtray in his face, but he did nothing as Patch left the room.
As Patch stormed through the Bell foyer and into the elevator, he thought about the greatness that Parker had mentioned. He wondered whether this greatness was really intended for him, or if he had merely been born in the wrong place, at the wrong time.