I sighed—we were never going to agree on this.
Sunny tilted her head. “What are those pictures on the desk?”
“Nothing,” I said, cursing inwardly. I moved to hide them, but Sunny caught my arm. She stared at the photos.
“Where did you get these?” She gasped, horrified.
“My father had them in the box. Along with a bunch of other things he kept on various people.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “To blackmail or use against them, I presume.”
She looked around. “Is there a shredder?”
“No.”
She indicated the fireplace. “You need to burn them.”
I took the photos from her hand. “I’ll handle them.”
Her voice changed, becoming fraught with worry. “Linc, what are you thinking?”
“Leave it, Sunny.”
“No!” she gasped. “You can’t, Linc!”
“If she knows I won’t bend to her, she’ll back off.”
She held up a picture. “And by using these, Linc, you’ll become exactly what you keep saying you don’t want to be. You’ll become your father.”
“I’m not my father. I would do this to protect you.”
“Protect me, by threatening another person.”
“I would never really do anything with the pictures, Sunny. She just has to think I would. The health violations go away, Michael’s business is safe, and no one gets hurt.”
She shook her head. “Your soul gets hurt. The way I feel about you will change, Linc. Don’t you see that? You use these today, then something else in a few weeks. Then you’ll start hiding secrets and manipulating everyone to get what you want. Sound familiar?” She paced the room, facing me with her fists closed. “Maybe that was how your father started. There must have been some good in him at some point. Your mother loved him enough to marry him. But she couldn’t save him from himself—from his quest for power—and she lost him.”
“This isn’t for power,” I insisted.
“Really. I think you need to think long and hard about that, Linc. Be honest with yourself. Because you’re not being honest with me right now.”
“I can’t sit by and let you suffer because of me.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “If you do this, you lose me, Linc. Forever. Don’t you get it? I would rather have you than the bakery. My Linc. The boy I loved. Who loved me back. But not the man bent on revenge and holding the power. That’s not the Linc I know.
“That man is your father. For the first time ever, I’m seeing Lincoln Thomas in front of me. And the loss of the man I thought you were is going to wreck me for the rest of my life. You’re forgetting the one common factor here—Mrs. Tremont is a person. A fellow human being. You don’t know her story. You are threatening to hurt a person. Think about it. Think hard.”
Her parting words hit me in the chest, rendering me mute.
She shut the door behind her, the silence screaming in ferociousness.21LincI trolled the house for hours, unable to stay still. I walked through rooms I hadn’t been in for years, staring at walls, pictures, opening closets. I wondered if any of the items I saw were picked by my mother, or if my father had destroyed everything she touched and replaced them. It was an endless loop, and eventually I was able to discern a few items I could recall her touching fondly or watching her hang. I picked them up and found a box, then transferred them to the trunk of my car.
Most of the rooms on the upper floors were empty, my father long having cleared them out after he sent me away. The attic was a vast cavern of dust and emptiness. The basement produced an unexpected find of a case of rare scotch. My father never stinted when it came to his own pleasure. Business associates received a simple glass of decent scotch, while my father’s cut crystal glass held the finest of spirits. God forbid Franklin Thomas sip something from a liquor store shelf.
I dusted off the bottles, staring at the label. A memory stirred from the far recesses of my mind. My mother, holding out a glass of scotch to my father, a playful look on her face, refusing to give it to him until she got a kiss. His face, which I could usually see in my mind with a permanent scowl, had softened, and he kissed her with a gentleness I never associated with him. Then he snatched the glass and walked away, laughing.
I blinked as the memory took hold. It was the one time I had ever heard my father laugh. Or seen real intimacy between my parents. I would have been two or three at the time, and every other memory I had was of my mother. The ones including my father were filled with coldness on his part, sadness on my mother’s. Sunny’s words came back to me.
“Maybe that was how your father started. There must have been some good in him at some point. Your mother loved him enough to marry him.”