“There’s no brother listed on your records, Mr. Pauley.”
“No. I had him taken off. It cost me a lot of money, and it’s illegal, I guess, but I needed to do it. I needed it before I could ask Mimi to marry me.”
“He’s a bad man. A very bad man. Vinnie’s nothing like him, Officer.”
“Lieutenant. Dallas. How is he a bad man?” Eve asked.
“He does what he wants, takes what he wants, hurts who he wants,” Vinnie told her. “He always did, even when we were kids. He took off when we were sixteen.”
“We were?” Roarke repeated. “You’re twins then?”
“Fraternal, not identical.” The distinction seemed an important point for Vinnie. “But we look a lot alike.”
“I’d never mistake them. There’s something scary in his eyes.” Mimi shivered. “Something mean, just not right in them. And I’m sorry, Vinnie, it’s in that boy’s eyes, too. No matter how sweet he smiles or how polite he talks, it’s in his eyes.”
“Maybe it is. Anyway, they weren’t here long. They wanted to stay a few days. God knows why, or what they’d done they needed to put up here. I said Darrin could stay, but Vance had to go. He wouldn’t stay without Vance. I asked him about his mother, why wasn’t his mother with him. He’s the one who said she was dead. He said she’d been dead for years. Murdered he said.”
“How?”
“He didn’t tell me. I was shocked, and I asked him, how, when, who? All he said was he knew who was responsible. And he had plans. Mimi’s right. Something not right in his eyes, when he said that I could see it. He had plans. I wanted them both away from my family.”
Vinnie glanced toward the stairs. “I wanted them away from Mimi and Jennie. Even if he’s mine, I didn’t want him near my girls. That’s the hard part, you know? Even if he’s mine.”
“We’re yours,” Mimi whispered. “That’s what matters.”
Vinnie nodded, took a long drink from the frosty glass. “I wasn’t twenty when Inga . . . she was beautiful. Sorry, sweetie.”
“That’s all right.” Mimi took his hand, gave it a hard squeeze. “So am I.”
He brought their joined hands to his lips, pressed them hard to her knuckles. “You sure are. You sure are.”
“Go on and tell them about it,” Mimi prompted. “Stop worrying yourself and tell them.”
“All right. I fell for her, for Inga. For who I thought she was. I don’t know if she’d run away from my brother, or if they planned it all together, to dupe me, to use me so she’d have somewhere safe to stay while she was nesting. It was hard not knowing. Not so much anymore, but back then, when it happened, it was hard. And so I paid to have Vance’s name taken off my data.”
“Nobody’s going to give you grief over that, Mr. Pauley,” Eve assured him.
He nodded. “Well, that’s good to know. Anyways, Inga left when Darrin was a couple months old. Took whatever wasn’t nailed down in my place, my car, cleaned out the savings I had, even the little account I started for the boy before he was even born. All there was was this video cube from my brother, laughing, telling me thanks for filling in for him. I found out he’d been arrested near to a year before. For some kind of fraud or something. I guess maybe he sent Inga to me, so I’d . . . fill in. And when he got out, he took them. Just like that.
“I never saw her again, never saw Vance or the boy again until that day Mimi called me home. I hired a private investigator to try to find them, but I couldn’t afford him for very long. Never came to nothing, but I wanted to try. I don’t know if he was mine, the boy, but back then, he felt like mine.?
??
“You did the best you could.”
He smiled at Mimi, but his eyes were damp. “It felt like giving up. I guess it was. I was mad a long time, and then, well, I met Mimi. I put it behind me, until they showed up here a few years back. And I don’t know where they went from here. We got an e-mail from Darrin about three years ago. He said he was in college, in Chicago. How he was making something of himself, studying hard. He sounded . . .”
“Sincere,” Mimi put in.
“I guess he did,” Vinnie said with a sigh. “He asked if we could maybe help him out a little. Money. Knowing Vance, I checked it out. And he was registered at the college like he said. So I sent him a thousand dollars.”
“And never heard a word back,” Mimi finished. “But right after that? Somebody accessed our bank account. That was just our emergency account, thank the Lord, where Vinnie got the money he sent Darrin. It only had another five thousand in it. He took four of it. He did it, Vinnie,” she said when her husband looked ready to protest.
He sighed, nodded. “Yeah, I expect he did.”
“Vinnie wouldn’t report it to the police.”
“If he’s mine, he’s entitled to something. And I could be finished there. It’s all he’s entitled to. I tried to contact him through the college, but they said he wasn’t registered. They had no record of him. I argued, because they damn well had two weeks before. But I didn’t get anywhere.”