"Drag her home by the hair, you mean?"
Ledger laughed. "No. The caveman approach is definitely pa.s.se."
"Then?"
"Tell her that she was right. That you really did need that time apart from her. Women love that more than anything, to be told that they"re right."
"But she"s not right. Not about this, anyway."
Ledger raised both hands, palms up. "Hey, what do you want from me, man? I can"t help you if you insist on approaching this rationally."
Jonas grunted. "Thanks for trying."
"Well and what the h.e.l.l is a friend for?" Ledger pushed the b.u.t.ton and his window slid up again. Jonas stepped back and the car rolled off down the drive.
Jonas woke Wednesday morning with something of a hangover. He reminded himself that he was going to have to give up trying to match Ledger drink for drink. He had a full day of meetings and important appointments. And now he would be handicapped by a headache and a queasy stomach caused by his own overindulgence.
He managed. He got through the day. It wasn"t pleasant or particularly easy. But he did it.
He was able to cancel his dinner meeting, which meant he was ready to go home at a little after six. He had the evening all planned. A long, hot shower, a couple of aspirin, a little time with Mandy and a nice, leisurely meal. A little CNN in bed, and he"d call it a night. By tomorrow, he"d be feeling fine again.
He got a call on his cell phone as he was riding home.
It was Dekker Smith.
Chapter 23.
"I"d like to meet with you," Dekker said. "Is that possible?"
Jonas gripped the phone a little tighter than he needed to. "Of course. When?"
"Now?"
"You"re here. In Los Angeles ?"
"As a matter of fact, I"m outside the gates to your house."
* * * Jonas had dinner with his brother, in the small dining room. After the meal, they retired to Jonas"s study, where Dekker pulled a wallet-sized book from the inside pocket of his leather bomber jacket. "Before she died, my mother gave this to me." He set the book on Jonas"s desk. It was pink.
Jonas read the words embossed in gold letters on the front. "Every Day Diary."
A sad smile curved Dekker"s mouth. "Yeah. Like something a teenaged girl would buy, isn"t it? To write down all her secrets in." The smile vanished. "I ... lost my wife, a few years ago. My mother died not long after. It was a rough period for me. You could say I wasn"t exactly on the ball. When she was so sick, right at the end, my mother gave me this book. She said she wanted me to read it but not until after she was gone. She said something about how wrong she"d been. And how much of a coward. But she wanted me to remember that I was the best and most important thing that had ever happened to her."
Jonas said, "You never did read this, right?"
Dekker shrugged. "I put it away in a box, with the rest of her treasures with the locks of my baby hair and my old report cards, her favorite red scarf and the amethyst earrings she used to wear when she got dressed up. I, well, I wasn"t up to dealing with it right then. The truth is, I had made a mess of my marriage, and the circ.u.mstances under which my wife died were... Let"s just say things weren"t going real well for me. And then my mother died. It was all too much. I just wanted to put it all out of my mind."
"But then, last week, I showed up at your door..."
"That"s right. And my knee-jerk reaction was to deny what you told me."
"But you couldn"t stop thinking about it."
"Right again." Dekker reached out, brushed his hand across the gold lettering on the front of the little pink book. "Yesterday, I dug this out of that box. And I read it." He looked up. "I took the first flight I could get out here, because I think that you should to read it, too."
"Right now?"
Dekker nodded. "It shouldn"t take you all that long. She didn"t fill the whole thing up, just wrote down what she wanted me to know. It"s really only one long letter. Once you"ve read it, we can talk I mean, if you think there"s anything that needs saying. It"s all pretty much explained, between the covers of this little book."
Dekker left him.
Jonas sat at his desk and began to read.
My dearest Dekker, What you need to know first is that I could not have children. Because of an infection when I was eighteen, both ovaries had to be removed. Until then, I hadn"t even really thought about having kids. It was just something I knew would happen for me someday, like it does for most of the women in the world.
Dekker , I grew up in Oxnard , in southern California . A nice, ordinary house on an ordinary street. My parents were divorced when I was ten, but my mother remarried and I liked my stepfather well enough. I had two sisters. They are probably still alive, my sisters. But I wouldn"t know.
From the time I learned I would have no babies, a baby was all that I wanted. I felt that I had been cheated, that what mattered most in life had been stolen away from me. I began to do the kinds of things I never would have done before that. Drugs. Sneaking out at night to be with the wrong kinds of boys. Wild things. Things that were bound to get me in trouble.
My mother got fed up with me. She ended up kicking me out of the house. I lived on the streets for a while. It was rough.
And then, when I was twenty, I met Blake Bravo. Well, he didn"t go by that name when I first met him. He went by a lot of names, he changed his names like he changed where he lived. All the time. He scared me, just looking in those crazy eyes of his would set me to trembling. I thought he might hurt me. He did hurt me. And deep down, that was fine with me. Getting hurt was what I wanted then. I wanted to destroy myself. And I was doing just that.
I had been with him for a few months when Blake told me his plan. He wanted revenge on his family. They were very rich, the Bravos, and they had cut him out of their lives and stolen his inheritance. He was going to get even and I was going to help him to do it. He had grown up in the mansion where they lived, so he knew how to get in there without being caught. He was going to kidnap a baby his brother"s baby. And I was going to take care of the baby while we waited for the huge ransom to be paid. It was all supposed to go like clockwork. And it did.
Except that his brother"s older child, your brother, came in on us while we were taking you. I thought Blake was going to kill that poor little boy. And G.o.d forgive me, I did not stop him. I had you in my arms. And I was already thinking that I was never going to let you go. Blake hit the child with the barrel of his gun and dropped his limp body on the floor. And we ran. No one stopped us. We got out and we went to our hiding place.
Blake got the ransom. In diamonds. He had never planned to return you to your family. That was part of his revenge, that his brother would never see his child again. I don"t know what he planned to do with you, at first. Maybe it"s better that we"ll never know. I told him I was going to keep you. And I meant it. He didn"t argue with me. He seemed to know you were the one thing I wouldn"t back down about. So I kept you.
We went on the move. I didn"t care, where we went, how many different names we lived under. What we did. As long as I had you in my arms, the baby I"d thought I would never have.
A year after we took you, I told Blake that I had to settle down. I wanted to make a life for you. We were in Oklahoma City by then, and he had something going with a woman who lived in Norman . He stayed with her more and more and left us alone a lot. I was glad. It was over between him and me. By then, all I wanted was to be a mother to you. And he ... well, I think he was looking for a way to get rid of us, too.
We struck a deal, Blake and me. He sold off a few of those precious diamonds of his. He bought me a house and a new ident.i.ty. And he got you a birth certificate. I think it must have been the birth certificate of a baby who died. But then again, how did he manage to get my real first name in the place for the mother? I don"t know. To this day I don"t know how he did any of that. But he was a very clever man when he wanted to be. And so you became Dekker Smith, the child of Lorraine and Dekker Smith, Sr.
I made up the story about your bad daddy, about how he"d ruined me for ever being with a man again. It was easy to make people believe that I"d really had a husband, an awful man who had abused me. I would just think of Blake whenever I spoke of Dekker, Sr., and everybody got the message real clear that I couldn"t bear to talk much about my past and I truly didn"t want a thing to do with men ever again.
Blake left us alone, after he set us up. I am sure he kept tabs on us. He was that way. He kept track of people, he wanted to know what they were up to. If he"s still alive, I"m sure he"s still that way.
But he never bothered us. The last news I had of him was a few months after he got you and me our house. He said he was getting married, to that woman from Norman . I never heard from him after that. I certainly didn"t go looking for him. And he left us to live our lives.
Dekker , I go to my grave a bad sinner. Sometimes I think of your real mother and father, of that little boy that Blake almost killed. I did read, in the paper, a few days after we took you, that the boy had survived what Blake did to him. But after that, I don"t know what happened to him. Blake told me that your father died, some time in that first year after we took you. And that your mother had been locked up in a mental hospital. He laughed over that, the death of his own brother, his brother"s wife going crazy. I tried not to listen to him. I did not want to know what had happened to your real family. More sins. Sins piled on top of sins. I am a sinner, through and through, my dearest Dekker. A cowardly sinner who never would face paying for the evil that she did.
And the most terrible sin, the worst sin of all, is that I would do it all over again. Steal you. From your real family. To have what you gave me. To see again your baby smile. To be there when you took your first step, to walk you to school that very first day, to feel your little hand holding so tight to mine.
Right now, I want only to burn this book. To destroy it, so that you will never know what I really was. But I will not destroy it. And someday soon, you will know the truth about me. Coward to the end, though, I will ask you not to read it until I am gone.
And I know that you will do what I ask. You had your h.e.l.l-raiser days, and I know that lately, things have been real tough for you. But to me, you have always been a good son. The best son. So much more than I ever deserved.
And please. Do not go looking for Blake. Only bad things happen where Blake Bravo is. Go to your real family. In Los Angeles . I think it will be easy to find them. They were rich, as I already mentioned, rich and well-known in southern California . Your father was Harry Bravo. Your mother was Blythe. Your brother, that little boy who almost died trying to save you, was Jonas. They lived in Bel Air. In a beautiful house on a hill. A house they called Angel"s Crest.
Go to them, Dekker. Show them this book. Tell them who you are. You are Russell Bravo, the one the newspapers called The Bravo Baby all those years ago.
Chapter 24.
D ekker remained in Los Angeles until Friday. Jonas rearranged his work schedule as much as possible in order to spend all the time he could with his brother. They stayed up late into the night both Wednesday and Thursday, trying their level best to fill each other in on the last thirty years.
Dekker met Mandy. And he asked where Emma was.
"Emma has decided that I need some time away from her."
"Why?""That was my question.""And?""It"s a very long story.""I"ve got the time if you"re willing to tell it."So Jonas told Dekker about Blythe"s will, about the marriage that had been undertaken, in the first place, for Mandy"s sake. "Emma was determined to make me a better man." "And did she?" "d.a.m.n right. She made me a better man and then decided I couldn"t possibly know my own mind when it came to our marriage." Dekker asked, "So what are you going to do?" "As of now, I"m in a holding pattern." "Waiting for...?" "I don"t know. Some new approach to come to me. So far, I can think of two. One entails force, the other calls for begging." "Not great options." "That"s why I"m in a holding pattern." Jonas heard all about the Tilly girls, how DeDe, the middle sister, had been a rebellious teenager, but had really settled down the past year or two. Now, she was in love and getting married that very Sat.u.r.day. He said that thirteen-year-old Niki had caused her share of trouble, too. And that Joleen, the oldest of the three, was the best friend a man could ever have, the solid, dependable sister who"d only made one mistake falling for a rich SOB who knocked her up and left her flat.
Jonas said, "I think I saw her little boy.""Sam?""That"s the name. Looks like a great kid.""He is. The best."Dekker wanted to hear about Blythe. Jonas told him. About her breakdown, her recovery, her big heart and her determination to save the world. "She sounds like a d.a.m.n saint," Dekker said. "Far from it though the tabloids sometimes called her the Angel of Angel"s Crest. Did I mention her pa.s.sion for decorating?" "No, you left that out." "She"d no sooner get one room completely redone than she"d start on another one. I think she changed everything in this house at least four times over before I was twenty. It drove me nuts. It seemed as if we spent our lives tripping over painters and paperhangers."
"But you miss her, now she"s gone."
"Yes. I do. More than I can tell you."
"I wish ... I had known her."
"And she would have given anything, to have found you before she died."
Thursday night, Dekker said he"d decided he would change his last name to Bravo. "What is "Smith" to me? It"s just a name on a forged or possibly stolen birth certificate. I"m keeping Dekker, though. I"m just plain too used to it, if you want to know the truth."
Friday afternoon, Jonas and Dekker paid a visit to McAllister, Quinn and a.s.sociates. Their meeting with Ambrose McAllister took three and a half hours. They turned over the diamonds, Blake"s trophy book and Lorraine "s diary. Ambrose would be contacting the authorities. As the family lawyer, it fell to him to explain how, after three decades, The Bravo Baby had come home at last.
There was also the little matter of Russell"s inheritance. Blythe had never let go of the hope that someday her younger son might be found. Arrangements had been made for him. Dekker Smith was now a multimillionaire.
"I think I need a beer," Dekker said when they got out to the street again and were ducking into the waiting car.
They went back to Angel"s Crest together and raised a couple of tall ones. After that, there was time for a meal, and then Dekker wanted to leave for the airport. He had to get back to Oklahoma City . He"d promised to be at DeDe"s wedding the next day. In fact, he"d agreed to give the bride away. Jonas had already tried to talk him into taking one of the Bravo jets. But Dekker insisted that a commercial flight would do just fine.
After they"d eaten, Jonas walked Dekker out to his rental car, which one of the drivers had brought around and parked in front.
"We still have a lot to talk about," Jonas advised. "Come back as soon as you can swing it."
Dekker said that he would.
"And give Marsh a call when you get a chance." Jonas had already provided his brother with their cousin"s address and phone number. "It would mean the world to him, to hear from you."
"I"ll do that," Dekker promised. "And listen. Tell that wife of yours that your brother says hi. That day at my office, she seemed more determined to get through to me than you were. So I want her to know that I came to my senses."
Jonas nodded, hoping that would be the end of that particular subject.
But Dekker had no intention of stopping there. "I think, as a matter of fact, that you ought to tell her right away."
"Oh, do you?""Yeah. I do.""Is that some kind of challenge?""You bet it is. Go get her, big brother.""I thought I explained-""Forget what you explained. You love the woman, right?"Jonas fell back a step, then shrugged. "Right.""And she loves you?""That"s what she says.""Do you believe that she loves you?" Dekker asked with great patience."Yes. All right. I believe that she loves me.""Then go get her, d.a.m.n it. Right now. Tonight. Give her my message. Make her understand that you know your own d.a.m.n mind and you are in love with her. Beg if you have to." He chuckled. "I"d skip using force, though." "Get in the car. You"ll be late for your flight." "Do it, big brother." "All right, d.a.m.n it. I will."
Chapter 25.
T wilight had spun out banners of purple across the darkening sky when Jonas reached Emma"s North Hollywood duplex. The Santa Anas had died down, though the acrid smell of fire lingered, faint, but recognizable, on the evening air.
Light bled through the bedroom window he strode past on the way to her door. He took that as a sign that she would be home. When he rang the bell, he heard the Yorkies barking. They were pacing around her ankles when she answered.
He glanced down at the dogs and saw that she was wearing polka-dot polish on her toes red with little dots of white. His gaze moved upward, over long naked legs, red shorts and about a half of a T-shirt the thing ended underneath her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, leaving a smooth expanse of stomach for him to admire.
"Jonas." His name on her lips was a plea.
He looked in her eyes, then. Saw it all. Right there. In her beautiful face. How much she had missed him. How bad it had been for her. And how d.a.m.n glad she was to find him at her door.
He said, "You were right about a lot things. But you were wrong about leaving me."
She caught her lower lip between her pretty white not-quite-perfect teeth. "Oh, Jonas. I just wanted ... I needed ... for you to be sure."
"I am sure. Let me in."
She gripped the edge of the door. "Well, I don"t know if-"
"Let me in, Emma. Let me in, now."
Her smooth throat moved as she swallowed. For one bleak and awful second, he thought she might refuse.
But then she stepped back. And he stepped forward. He pushed the door shut behind him.
"My brother said to tell you hi."
"You mean...?"
"Yes. He came to see me. He knows now that he"s a Bravo."