“Yes,” she whispered. “I understand what it feels like to lose everyone.”
“It’s better not to talk about the next few years of my life. I was not a pleasant person. I don’t know what I would have become if this hadn’t happened.” He put his hands on the controls of the wheelchair. “I was in a car accident two years later, and my spinal cord was severed.”
Comfortingly Samantha put her hand over his.
“I’ve done things in my life that I’m not proud of, but I think I would have been a different man if that night hadn’t happened. I used to think about it a great deal, what would have happened if Maxie hadn’t stayed to sing that night. If she’d left with me before Scalpini’s men showed up, we probably would have been married before we heard the news of what had happened. If she’d left with me, Joe would have gone with us and he wouldn’t have died either.”
He looked off into the distance. “If Maxie hadn’t wanted to stay and sing, everything would have been different.” Reaching out, he touched Samantha’s cheek. “Maybe if I’d married her and waked up to hear of the bloodbath at the club, maybe it would have scared me into going straight. Maybe…” His eyes grew misty. “Maybe now you would be my granddaughter, not just my biological granddaughter, but living here with me.” He smiled. “Perhaps not here. Perhaps I’d be living in a house in suburbia somewhere, a retired insurance salesman.” He touched her blonde hair. “Like Midas, I’d trade all my gold for the warmth of a child.”
13
“I wonder what happened to her?” Samantha asked.
She and Mike were sitting in the backyard at the picnic table, eating from several white paper cartons of Chinese food that they’d had delivered.
“Happened to who?” Mike asked, although he knew very well who she was talking about.
“If my grandmother didn’t leave my granddad Cal to go to Mr. Barrett, where did she go?”
“That’s what your father wanted to know,” Mike mumbled, looking down at his plate. Something was bothering him, and he wasn’t exactly sure what it was. They had left Barrett’s house immediately after the old man had finished his long, sad story. All the way into Manhattan Samantha had been very quiet, looking out the window with a slight smile on her face, as though something had pleased her very much. Now she wasn’t eating but making little piles of her food on the paper plate.
“Do you think he lives alone in that huge house?”
“Probably. He seems to have killed most every person he’s known over the years.”
Samantha gave him a look of fury. “Why do you have to say so many bad things about him? I thought that writers were supposed to like the people they’re writing about.”
“Oh? How about the writers who do studies on serial killers? I don’t like Barrett and I never will, but the man fascinates me. No one has ever tried to document what he’s done in his life. No one actually knows what the man is capable of doing.”
Samantha took a moment before she spoke. “He seemed like a nice man to me,” she said softly.
Mike had to swallow before he could speak; he had to take a breath before he could say a word. “What is it about women and their love of a sob story? Some man you’ve never met hands you a tearjerker about true love lost and you fall for it. I especially loved the Midas part. I wonder if he rehearsed his little speech before he told it to you?”
Standing up, she glared down at him. “And I am sick of your jealousy! From the moment I first saw you, you have acted as though you own me. You have invaded my privacy; you have followed me and humiliated me and, in general, made my life miserable. And I don’t even know you. You are nothing to me.”
“I’m more to you than Barrett is,” Mike said, standing up and leaning across the table toward her.
“No you’re not,” she said quietly. “He’s my grandfather, my last living relative on earth.”
Mike drew his breath in sharply. Now he knew what had been bothering him about the expression on her face when they had been riding back from Barrett’s place. She had been smiling in contentment, smiling as though she’d found something that had been lost. “Sam,” he said, putting his hand out to touch her.
But she drew away from him, not wanting to hear what he had to say. He could afford to be a know-it-all about her having found a living relative be
cause he had what appeared to be thousands of relatives all over America. Someone like him couldn’t possibly understand what it meant to be completely and absolutely alone in the world. He wouldn’t understand the concept of Thanksgiving dinner with no one to invite or Christmas with no one to buy presents for. Someone who had so much family that he could afford to be cynical about them, could happily say mean things about them, couldn’t understand. Maybe this man Barrett had done some awful things in his youth; maybe everything that Mike knew about him was true, but now he was an old, man and he was alone—and Samantha was alone as well.
Turning away from this man who was a stranger to her, she started back into the house.
Stepping in front of her, Mike put his hands on her shoulders. “Sam, where are you going?”
“Upstairs. I do believe I am free enough to be allowed to do that, aren’t I?”
Mike didn’t release his hold on her. “I want to know what’s in your head. I don’t like the look in your eyes.”
“I don’t like the look in your eyes most of the time,” she snapped. “Please let me go. I have to pack.”
“I’m not going to release you until you tell me where you plan to go after you leave this house.”
“As I’ve told you a thousand times, what I do in my life and what I have done are none of your business. I’ll go where I want to go.”