Prayers for Rain (Kenzie & Gennaro 5)

“It’s been ten years.”

“My son ,” he said. “There’s barely a resemblance. Maybe in the chin, perhaps, but that’s all.”

I threw up my hands, walked back to the screen, watched the great house’s reflection undulate in the swimming pool.

“How long has he been blackmailing you?”

“For five years.”

“But he’s been gone for ten.”

He nodded. “The first five years, he drew off a trust. When that ran out, he contacted me.”

“How?”

“He called.”

“Did you recognize his voice?”

He shrugged. “He whispered. But he spoke of things-childhood memories-only Wesley would know. He instructed me to send ten thousand in cash every two weeks by regular mail. The addresses I sent it to changed frequently-sometimes post office boxes, other times hotels, occasionally street addresses. Different cities, different towns, different states.”

“Was there any sort of consistency?” I asked.

“The amount of money. For four years, ten thousand every two weeks, and the mailboxes where I was instructed to drop the money were always somewhere in Back Bay. Beyond that, no.”

“You said it was consistent for four years,” Angie said. “What happened within the last year?”

He spoke in a hoarse voice. “He decided he wanted half.”

“Half your fortune?”

He nodded.

“How much would that be, Doctor?”

“I don’t feel the need to divulge the size of my family fortune to you, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Doctor, I have hospital intake records that show pretty conclusively that the girl who drowned in your pond was not the girl your wife gave birth to. You’ll tell me anything I want to know.”

He sighed. “Six-point-seven million, roughly. A sum whose foundation was laid ninety-six years ago by my grandfather when he came to these shores and-”

I waved him off. I didn’t give a shit about his family history, his sense of legend.

“Is that figure exclusive of real estate?”

He nodded. “Six-point-seven in stocks, bonds, negotiable securities, T-bills, and cash reserves.”

“And Wesley-or Wesley’s impersonator, go-between, whoever the hell he is-demanded half.”

“Yes. Said he’d never bother us again.”

“Did you believe him?”

“No. As he saw it, however, I had no choice but to comply. Unfortunately, as it turned out, I didn’t agree. I thought I had one simple option.” He sighed. “ We felt we had an option. My wife and I. We called Wesley’s bluff, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. We decided not to pay him anything, not one more dime. If he chose to go to the police, he could, and he’d get nothing still. Either way, we were tired of hiding and tired of paying.”

“How did Wesley respond?” Angie asked.

“He laughed,” Christopher Dawe said. “He said, and I quote, ‘Money’s not the only commodity I can strip you of.’” He shook his head. “I thought he was talking about this house or the vacation house, some classic antiques and art we own. But he wasn’t.”

“Karen,” Angie said.

Christopher Dawe nodded wearily. “Karen,” he whispered. “We didn’t so much as suspect until near the very, very end. She’d always been…” He raised his hand, grasped for the word.

“Weak?” I said.

“Weak,” he agreed. “And then her life took a bad turn. What happened to David was an accident, and we believed she simply wasn’t strong enough to bear up. I hated her failure. Despised it. The more she slipped downward, the more scorn I felt.”

“When she came to you for help, though?”

“She was on drugs. She acted like a whore. She-” He raised his hands to his head. “How were we to know it was Wesley behind it? How could one begin to assume a person would consciously set out to drive another person mad? His sister? How? How were we to know?”

He pulled his hands down from his head, covered his face with them, stared at me from between the fingers again.

“Naomi,” Angie said. “Switched at birth.”

A nod.

“Why?”

He dropped his hands. “She had a heart condition known as Truncus Arteriosis. Not something anyone picked up on in the delivery room, but she was my child, I did my own exams. I discovered a murmur and ran a few more tests. In those days, Truncus Arteriosis was thought to be inoperable. Even now, it’s often fatal.”

“So you traded your child in,” Angie said, “for a better model?”

“It was hardly a snap decision,” he said, eyes wide. “I agonized. I did. But once the idea took hold, I…You don’t have children. I can tell. You have no idea what it takes to raise a healthy one, never mind a terminally sick one. The mother, the birth mother of the child I switched, had hemmorhaged in labor. She’d died in childbirth in the ambulance. The child had no relatives. It all seemed as if God were telling me-no, directing me-to do it. So I did.”

“How?” I asked.

He gave me a shaky smile. “You’d be saddened to realize how easy it was. I’m a renowned cardiologist, Mr. Kenzie, with an international reputation. No nurse or intern is going to question my presence in a maternity ward, especially when my wife has just given birth.” He shrugged. “I switched the charts.”

“And the computer files,” I said.

He nodded. “But I forgot about the intake form.”

“And,” Angie paused, shaking slightly, tremors of outrage coursing under her skin as she clenched a fist on her knee, “when your real child was adopted, how were her parents supposed to feel when she died?”

“She lived,” he said quietly as tears fell silently from under his hand and down his face. “She was adopted by a Brookline family. Her name is,” he choked on it, “Alexandra. She’s thirteen, and I understand she sees a heart specialist at Beth Israel who seems to have done amazing things, because Alexandra swims, she plays volleyball, she runs, she rides a bicycle.” The tears came in torrents now, but still silently, like rain from a summer cloud. “She didn’t fall through a frozen pond and drown. You see? She didn’t. She lives.”

He tilted his chin up and smiled brightly as the tears leaked into his mouth. “That’s irony, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. That’s titanic irony, don’t you think?”