Outfox

“She abandoned you, too?”

“I don’t know if she did so without a second thought, or if Dad was unbending on keeping me with him. He cut me off from her. Completely.” He told her about the name change. “That’s why I wasn’t afraid to use my name with Jasper. I knew he wouldn’t recognize it.”

“Wasn’t that a rather spiteful thing for your dad to do?”

“No doubt spite was his motivation. He made it impossible for her to find us. But it was fortuitous, because it also prevented Weston from locating us after he’d disposed of her. We might have been two of those loose threads you referred to earlier.

“I knew none of this at the time, understand,” he said. “My first clear recollections are of living in Alaska, and it was always just Dad and me.”

“What you described to me, all the moving around, et cetera?”

“All true.”

“It must’ve been a lonely life for you.”

He admitted as much by giving her a rueful smile. “On the other hand, I didn’t know anything different. Not until I got older and saw that other dads actually talked over mealtimes. They laughed and joshed with their kids. They had male buddies they hung out with to drink beer and watch ball games. They had women they slept with. Our house was devoid of anything feminine. I began to notice the touches that my friends’ houses had that ours didn’t. It was the…the appealing something that a woman emanates.”

He fell silent for a moment, then said, “My mother’s desertion robbed Dad of all that enjoyment, of all joy. She stole his soul. Then Weston stole from her.”

“She had money?”

“What seemed like a lot at the time. It was modest by today’s standards. After her, Weston, with a new identity, set his sights much higher. But when she went missing, and investigators began digging into her life, it was discovered that all her assets, which she’d inherited from her parents, had miraculously disappeared along with her.”

“How did your father learn of it?”

“It made the newspapers. I didn’t know he’d saved them until later. But I remember when the change came over him. He’d never been a hard drinker, but he started drinking heavily at night, every night, long into the night. He became even more taciturn than normal. I didn’t ask him what the matter was, I think out of fear of what he would tell me. But even if I had asked, he wouldn’t have told me. She had been eradicated from my life.”

“But your dad still loved her. He was bereaved.”

“I see that now. I didn’t then. Years later, when I was old enough to read up on her disappearance, I matched the timing of it to that dark period when Dad really shut down.”

“And you were around ten years old? That must have been an awful time for you.”

“In one respect, it was beneficial. That’s when I learned to be sociable. I stayed over at friends’ houses a lot. Their parents must’ve felt sorry for me. They took me in, saw that I was well fed. Anyway, over time, Dad stopped drinking and went back to being more himself. Which was still a level of bereavement. He grieved for my mother, for everything about her, until the day he died.”

“When was that?”

“I was in my first year of college in Missoula. I was summoned home. He’d had a stroke, which didn’t kill him right away.”

“Did you make it home in time to be with him?”

“That’s when he shared the story of my mother. He’d secretly kept all the newspaper write-ups about her disappearance. He told me about Weston Graham, who was sought as the prime suspect but never captured. Her disappearance remains a cold case of the LAPD.”

He raised his right hand to within inches of her face. “See the scar?” A faint white line bisected his palm. “While my dad lay dying, I cut both our palms, pressed them together, and took a blood oath to get the bastard.” Wryly, he added, “It’s taken one hell of a long time. All my adult life. And I’m still working on it.”

With gruffness in his voice, he continued. “I wouldn’t trade for those last minutes with Dad, though. When I made that vow, he cried. It was the most naked emotion I’d ever seen from him. Ever. In my life. It was the closest he and I ever came to having a genuine father-son relationship. He died later that day.”

She took his hand and kissed the palm, openmouthed. “He loved you very much.”

He looked at her with doubt.

“Perhaps he took you away to spite or to wound your mother, but maybe he saw Weston for what he was and feared for you.”

“Maybe,” he said grudgingly. “That has occurred to me.”

“Drex, if he hadn’t loved you and wanted you with him, he could have dumped you anywhere along the way, and at any time. It couldn’t have been easy for a single man working on the pipeline to rear a child alone.”

“He felt an obligation to me, maybe. But he had lost the will to live.”