The Wishing Tide (32 page)

Lane suppressed a smile. If that surprised him, the rest was really going to knock him for a loop. “Evan Rourke is also a friend of mine.”

This time there was no thoughtful pause. Callahan’s response was immediate. “Perhaps we’d better set up a meeting. Would you be able to come to Raleigh tomorrow afternoon?”

“Tomorrow?” Lane glanced at Michael, who rolled his eyes helplessly over the rim of his coffee mug. “Yes, tomorrow’s fine. Say, around three?” After a quick forage in her purse, she located a pen and scribbled down Callahan’s address, then ended the call.

“Three o’clock,” she told Michael crisply. “At his home in Raleigh.”

Michael looked stricken. “That’s a five-hour drive.”

“Yes, it is. And at the end of it I might finally get some answers.”

Michael

M
ichael kept his eyes on the road, asking himself for the hundredth time why he’d agreed to go on this little junket, and why, for that matter, the meeting had to be in person. He could have spoken to the man on the phone and accomplished the same thing. Instead, he was traipsing halfway across the state to discuss things that had nothing to do with him, and a woman who wasn’t even part of his life.

Maybe it was guilt. Okay, not maybe. It was definitely guilt. It wasn’t fair to let Lane do all the heavy lifting. The least he could do before he skipped town was make sure Hannah had a roof over her head. If this Callahan knew something that would help save Hope House, he owed it to Lane to help her find out what it was.

But that’s all it was.

He wasn’t a fool. He’d seen the way Hannah looked at Lane, the way she’d looked at them both, with those old fairy-tale notions of hers. He knew what she wanted—and why she wanted it. It was a way to tie him to Starry Point, to snare him back into her life, using Lane as bait. Well, that wasn’t happening. She didn’t get a vote, in that part of his life or any other. Blood or no blood, Hannah Rourke had been
gone from his life longer than she’d been a part of it, gone so long he’d believed her dead.

But then, of course he’d believed she was dead. He’d been told so, point-blank. Had Katherine been mistaken, or had she simply lied? She’d always been squeamish about Hannah, jealous of a woman she’d never met. Was he wrong to wonder now if Hannah’s so-called demise had only been a convenient invention intended to stave off curiosity? He didn’t like to think so, but he’d be having that conversation soon, and it wasn’t likely to be a pleasant one. His father wouldn’t care one way or another that Hannah was alive and well, and back in his life. But he would have his hands full with his mother—with Katherine. Christ, he had no idea what to call anyone anymore.

“Michael, you need to turn just up ahead.”

Michael’s head swiveled in Lane’s direction. “Sorry?”

“You need to turn at the next light. Are you not paying attention to the GPS?”

Michael turned obediently, feeling his belly grind when he saw they were now on Callahan’s street. Odd, meeting the guy at his home instead of in an office somewhere, but then he didn’t plan to stay long. He surveyed the enormous two-story as he pulled up the drive: soaring white columns, manicured boxwoods, meticulous stone walk. Whoever the guy was, he’d done well for himself.

He stood with his hands in his pockets while Lane rang the bell, wondering if it was too late to get back in the car and hit I-95 north, to forget that in the last seventy-two hours his life had been completely upended and was probably about to get much worse.

Lane was reaching for the bell again when the door opened, revealing a gray-haired man in tan trousers and a navy cardigan. The man slid wire-rimmed glasses down a longish nose and peered over them at Michael.

“As tall as your father,” he said with a tight smile.

For an instant Michael could swear the ground had shifted. “Uncle R.B.?”

“Come in, young man.”

Michael was keenly aware of Lane’s gaze as they stepped into the foyer, could feel the string of questions simmering just beneath her polite veneer, but at the moment he was simply too baffled to explain, mostly because he wasn’t at all sure he could.

“This is Lane Kramer,” he said stiffly. “You spoke yesterday on the phone. She’s a friend of Hannah’s.”

“Ah yes, Ms. Kramer,” he acknowledged stiffly, as he took their coats and hung them on an ornate rack near the door. “If the two of you will follow me, we’ll discuss this in my study.”

Michael’s gut churned as they trailed Callahan down a dimly lit corridor and into the study. The room felt strangely familiar. The enormous desk and leather chairs, the floor-to-ceiling cases lined with books, the decades-old pall of tobacco, all might have been from his father’s study. But then that shouldn’t surprise him. Ronald Callahan and Samuel Rourke had been friends since their freshman year at Duke.

“Can I offer either of you a drink?” Callahan asked, hovering near a small bar in the corner.

Michael eyed the desk and saw that R.B. was already working on one himself. “No, thank you. I’d really just like to get this over with.”

Callahan frowned, then splashed a hefty draft of scotch into a glass. On his way across the room, he pressed it into Michael’s hand. “Have a drink, son.”

Everyone took a seat. Callahan settled behind his desk, steepling his long fingers beneath his chin. “You look like your father,” he said, smiling in earnest now. “Except for the chin; that’s Hannah’s chin.”

Michael felt Lane’s gaze again and knew it was time to explain. “Uncle R.B. was my father’s business partner and closest friend.”

Her brows pinched together. “But yesterday you told me you didn’t know him.”

“Because I didn’t. He was never Mr. Callahan to me. He was simply Uncle R.B., my father’s best friend, and the man who drove me to Boston to meet the Forresters.”

Callahan nodded, some of his smile slipping away. “It was a long time ago, Ms. Kramer.”

“Yes, it was,” Michael agreed curtly. “A lifetime, in fact. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to know what this is about. What is it we couldn’t discuss over the phone?”

“All business, I see,” Callahan observed. “Also like your father. Very well, then.”

Withdrawing a folder from the desk, he laid it on the blotter. “After your father’s accident there was a lot that needed to be handled, insurance and investments, so many loose ends, and Hannah was . . . well, she was overwrought. Then later, after the fire, there was even more to be dealt with. She wasn’t in any shape to handle things, legally or emotionally. And so, when approached, I agreed to . . . step in.”

“Approached?” Michael repeated warily. “Approached by whom?”

Callahan removed his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief he produced from his cardigan pocket, then perched them back on the end of his nose. “By your father.”

Michael stiffened. “My . . . father?”

“Please, Evan. Let me get it out.”

“Get what out? What are you saying?”

Callahan closed his eyes briefly and shook his head. “It was a hell of a storm, the kind that blow up out of nowhere on the banks. Days later, after your father . . . disappeared . . . pieces of the
Windseeker
started washing up along the jetty. The police, everyone, assumed Sam was dead.”

Assumed?

The word seemed to reach him from very far away, echoing
sickeningly against the walls of his skull. “Not everyone,” he said stonily. “Not Hannah.”

Callahan held up a hand to silence him. He was pale now, his expression pained. “Please. This isn’t an easy thing to tell, though I always knew I’d have to tell it one day.” From the file on the desk he withdrew a yellowed newspaper clipping and slid it forward.

Michael recognized the article that had run in the
Islander
Dispatch
the day after the accident.
MAYOR OF STARRY POINT P
RESUMED DROWNED
. He glanced at it but didn’t touch it. If he didn’t touch it maybe none of what he was about to hear would be true.

Lane picked up the scrap of newsprint, lingering briefly over the grainy photo, a jagged bit of stern bobbing against a stretch of rock. “It’s your father’s boat.”

He nodded grimly. “What’s left of it, yes. If you look closely you can make out the
W
on the hull.”

Callahan cleared his throat and pushed on. “What you don’t know—what no one knew—is that Samuel Rourke didn’t die that day. He was washed overboard, but he didn’t drown.”

Michael barely registered Lane’s hand on his arm as the blood rushed to his ears, hammered inside his skull.

It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a goddamn lie.

“It wasn’t planned, Evan,” Callahan continued. “Your father never set out to abandon you and your brother, or even Hannah. It just . . . happened. When he was finally picked up by a fishing boat, he was too ill to speak. By the time he recovered, everyone had already assumed the worst, and he began to see a way to escape the life he’d been so miserable in. When he called me I didn’t believe it was him. His voice was different after the accident, something to do with damage to his vocal cords from being dehydrated for so long. At any rate, I thought someone was playing a joke, and not a funny one. Then he asked me to take care of your mother and look after you boys.”

His voice trailed raggedly. He cleared his throat, gathering himself
to tell the rest. “Please try to understand. Your mother wasn’t well in those days. That made your father’s life . . . difficult. So he thought, if everyone believed he was dead, why not let it stand? The search had been called off, the memorial held. In the eyes of the world, Samuel Rourke was a dead man. They believed it, and he let them—because it was a way to finally be free.”

Michael set his untouched glass of scotch on the desk, his eyes frozen on Callahan’s face. “Where has he been, and where is he now?”

“He died eight months ago, complications from the renal disease that plagued him after the accident. He’d been living in Canada . . . with a woman named Margaret.”

Michael’s head was swimming. It couldn’t be true, and yet his mother’s assertions about another woman kept popping to the surface. “When did they meet—my father and this woman?”

Callahan looked away, all but squirming in his leather chair. “They knew each other . . . before. She died about four years ago, from bone cancer. He was as happy as he could be under the circumstances, but he never forgave himself for what he did—for leaving you and Peter.”

Michael shot to his feet, unwilling to listen to another word. “You think I give a good goddamn if the man was happy? Jesus . . . does my . . . does Hannah know?”

Callahan flinched, but managed to keep his voice even. “She has no idea. It never seemed to be the right time to tell her. Or a safe time, given everything she’d already been through. It would be a hard thing to take, I think.”

“To learn her husband faked his own death? Yeah, I think that would be a little unpleasant.”

Callahan sighed, clearly a man in the middle. “I don’t think you’ve quite grasped your father’s state of mind at the time. Living with your mother was killing him by inches. No one knew how to help her back then, though God knows the doctors tried everything they could think of—and some things they shouldn’t have. None of it worked,
ultimately. Your father was out of options. He simply didn’t have the capacity to deal with Hannah’s problems.”

“It’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?” Michael fired back sarcastically. “I mean, did the man never hear of divorce?”

Callahan lifted his watered-down scotch and swirled it thoughtfully. “Your father was Catholic. Divorce wasn’t an option.”

“But staging his own death was?”

Lane rose from her chair and came to stand beside him. “Mr. Callahan’s just trying to explain what was going on in your father’s mind. None of this was his doing.”

“He knew! All these years, he knew and he never told anyone.”

“Yes, I did know,” Callahan said quietly. “Your father was my friend, Evan. But he was also a client at that point, which entitled him to certain . . . protections. His wish was that you not know any of this until he’d been dead a full year. As his attorney I had no choice but to comply with those wishes.”

Sidestepping Lane, Michael planted both hands on the edge of the desk, leaning forward until he was eye-to-eye with Callahan. “Don’t shovel that attorney-client privilege crap at me. The man didn’t think twice about turning his back on a wife and two sons.”

“It was an act of desperation, and I can tell you with certainty that he deeply regretted hurting you and your brother.”

“And my mother—did he regret hurting her, too?”

“Of course he did. He cared for your mother in his own way, just not the way a man needs to care for a woman like Hannah. And he loved you boys with his whole heart and soul. Calling him to tell him about the fire—about Peter—was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I knew he would blame himself, and he did.”

Michael shook his head, thinking of his mother, of the events that had set her on the final path to self-destruction. “Not enough,” he ground through clenched teeth. “He could never have blamed himself enough.”

Callahan pretended not to hear. Setting aside his glass, he opened the folder on the desk, sifting through it until he found what he was looking for. “After the fire, Sam asked me to personally see to your adoption, to make certain you were placed with a good family, preferably one far from Starry Point. Then he asked me to establish a trust for Hannah. Every dime of your mother’s care, the doctors, the private facilities, all of it, was paid for with your father’s money. That goes for Hope House as well.”

Lane’s jaw dropped briefly before she found her voice. “Samuel Rourke is the man behind Hope House?”

“Was the man—yes.” Callahan shifted in his chair, addressing Lane now, clearly relieved to be moving away from his friend’s sins and onto his philanthropy. “By the time Hannah was ready to be . . . released, the house was in pretty bad shape. Not that anyone thought her moving back there was a good idea. But she was adamant about coming back to Starry Point.”

“She wanted to be near Peter,” Lane said softly.

Callahan nodded. “Yes. Her doctors weren’t crazy about the idea. They no longer felt Hannah required full-time supervision, but they weren’t convinced she was ready to live on her own. They suggested a halfway house to help her transition. And so Hope House was born, with no one the wiser. I’ve been overseeing the trust ever since.”

“Rourke and Callahan,” Lane said, as if a light had suddenly gone on in her head. “You’re R&C Limited.”

“Yes. And you’re the Ms. Kramer who wrote to me about Harold Landon. I’d like to thank you for that. I have some people doing a little checking, but I couldn’t respond to your letter without all of this coming out. Mostly, I was trying to protect Hannah. She has no idea I’ve been pulling the strings, let alone that I was pulling them for Sam.”