Chapter 17 - The Boy with the Father’s Eyes
The rain had finally died by three in the morning
leaving Buckhead shrouded in a silver
ground-clinging fog that muffled the sound of the tires on the asphalt.
The estate was completely dark save for the amber sconces flanking the iron gate.
As the Sprinter cleared the outer perimeter
four replacement guards in slate-gray windbreakers stood at attention
their hands at their sides
their faces anonymous beneath baseball caps.
Marcus’s crew was gone.
The men Frank had hired from an executive protection firm in Virginia had taken over every station
every monitor
every deadbolt.
Inside the main house
the silence was different now.
It was no longer the heavy
tomb-like silence of an invalid nursing an old wound.
It was the charged
electric hush of a fortress between two waves of an assault.
Nancy waited in the great hall
a silver tray in her hands holding two cups of chamomile tea and a small bottle of children’s acetaminophen.
Her hair had slipped from its immaculate silver bun
strands falling across her temple
her eyes swollen from a night spent sitting on the stairs with an iron poker in her lap.
“The boy is asleep in the master suite
Mr. Mason,” Nancy whispered
her voice shaking slightly as she set the tray on the side table.
“I tried to move him to the nursery in the cottage
but he cried every time the door clicked.
He kept asking for the man with the silver wheels.”
Megan’s hands dropped from my jacket.
She looked at me
her hazel eyes dark with exhaustion
shadows carved deep beneath her lower lashes.
“He called you that?” she asked softly.
“He saw me in the hallway before the fever broke,” I replied
releasing the lock on my chair and rolling toward the private elevator that rose into the family wing.
“Children don’t forget machines.”
We rode to the third floor in absolute quiet.
The master bedroom was warm
the scent of burning hickory wood lingering from the hearth Nancy had stoked before midnight.
On the massive California king bed
beneath twenty pounds of down comforter and embroidered Egyptian cotton
Noah Foster looked like a dropped penny.
He had kicked the yellow blanket into a pile at his feet.
His right arm was thrown back over his forehead
his small chest rising and falling in rhythmic
perfect peace.
Directly above his right eye
the faint
crescent-shaped mark was pink against his pale skin.
I stopped my chair beside the mattress.
For twenty-two years
I had refused to look at photographs of Julian.
My father had burned most of them in the incinerator behind the carriage house
and the three I had hidden in my private safe were so painful to look at that the paper had yellowed inside their envelopes without being touched.
Yet sitting here
looking at this child’s brow
the high curve of his cheekbones
the stubborn line of his small chin
the phantom of my dead boy was so vivid it felt as if Julian were breathing in the room.
Megan walked around the bed
bent over the mattress
and carefully smoothed the comforter over Noah’s small shoulders.
Her movements were practiced
tender
instinctive.
She did not look like a woman who had pulled the trigger on a twelve-gauge three hours ago.
She looked like a mother who had carried a mountain on her back and finally found a flat place to set it down.
“He has Julian’s habit of sleeping with his fist closed,” she whispered without turning around.
“Julian always held a quarter in his palm when he slept.
He said if he woke up with the coin still there
it meant nobody had robbed him while he was dreaming.”
A cold ache settled behind my ribs.
“Arthur did that to him,” I said
my voice dropping to a harsh murmur.
“Arthur used to search his pockets every Friday night before dinner.
If Julian had more than five dollars
my father would take it and tell him that bastards didn't earn an allowance until they could prove whose name was on their skin.”
Megan sat down on the edge of the mattress
her fingers lightly stroking Noah’s cheek.
“Julian loved you
Dominic.”
The words struck me like a physical blow.
My hands tightened on the leather armrests of my chair.
“He had no reason to love me,” I rasped.
“I stayed silent.
I let him believe I was his older brother who couldn't be bothered to intervene when Arthur locked him in the wine cellar.
I was a coward
Megan.
I had all the money in Atlanta
and I was terrified of an old man who smelled of bourbon and dry cleaning.”
“He didn't think you were a coward,” Megan said
turning her head to look at me
her gaze unwavering
honest
and mercilessly clear.
“The last night in Savannah
when the morphine stopped working and the pain made him sweat through the sheets
he told me about the car accident on Interstate 20.
He said you were driving to Savannah that night.
You had three bags of clothes
Julian’s original birth certificate
and two hundred thousand dollars in cash in the trunk.
You were coming to take him to Canada.”
My vision blurred.
The room
the hearth
the boy on the bed
all dissolved into a smear of gold and shadow.
“How… how did he know that?” I asked
my voice breaking
the first crack in twenty-two years of armor.
“Because Frank called him from the payphone outside Piedmont Hospital while the surgeons were cutting your suit off your back,” Megan replied
her voice trembling with an old
sacred grief.
“Frank told him: your father was coming for you.
May you like
He broke his back trying to reach you.
Don't you ever let Raymond tell you that Dominic Mason abandoned his son.”
