All He Really Needs(58)

But Griffin didn’t let that moment of empathy stop him. He marched into the room and tossed the photos of the mystery nanny down on the bed between his parents.

They both looked up at him in surprise, barely glancing at Sydney where she stood in the doorway.

“What is the meaning of this?” Caro asked, her voice cool.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Griffin replied.

Hollister reached out a trembling hand and picked up the picture closest to him. He made a harumphing noise and then let the picture drop. “Is that the best—” his words were cut off by a series of hacking coughs “—you can do? A thirty-year-old picture?”

Griffin stood at the foot of his father’s bed, his hands propped on his hips, staring down at his parents. There was a slight tremble in Caro’s chin and she appeared to have lost all the cruel bravado that had carried her through lunch.

He felt only the slightest twinge of remorse. He didn’t want to do this, but he wasn’t the one who had started this, either.

“This thirty-year-old-picture is of the woman I believe wrote the letter. Dalton believed it, too. She worked here as a nanny when I was an infant. And I refuse to believe that neither of you remember anything about her. Especially since she appears to have stalked Hollister and stolen a family heirloom. Mother, if Sharlene is to be believed, before this girl—Vivian—disappeared forever, she had you so worked up, you demanded that Sharlene call the police and have her arrested. The idea that neither of you remember her at all is so preposterous as to be laughable.”

For a long moment no one spoke. Hollister was glaring at Griffin, and the enmity in his gaze was strong enough to abolish the illusion that he was a fragile man. Caro had gone as white as Hollister’s hospital-issued bed linens.

Finally, Griffin said, “I want some answers, and you should think very carefully before you give them. Because these may be the last words you speak to me.”

Hollister gave a snort of disbelief. Caro’s hands twitched nervously on the newspaper, causing it to rustle. Then she carefully folded the paper up and stood, placing it on the seat of the chair before crossing to look out the windows at the sprawling green lawns.

“This is all your father’s fault.”

“Of course it…is,” Hollister gasped out through his coughing. “You always bl-bla-blame me. For everything.”

Caro threw back her head and laughed. A desperate, maniacal laugh that seemed to echo through the room. “That’s because it is always your fault. But this time especially.” She spun to glare at her husband. “Why couldn’t you just let it go? Why couldn’t you just get the letter, feel the gut-wrenching sense of betrayal and just accept the fact that there’s someone out there you don’t have under your thumb? That’s what you were supposed to do, damn it!”

Hollister looked at his wife, blinking in surprise. For the first time—maybe in his entire life—his expression wasn’t arrogant and defiant. Instead, it was confused. “What do you mean?” He coughed again. “What I was supposed to do?”

And suddenly, Griffin got it. He understood what should have been glaringly obvious right from the very beginning. All the tension washed out of his body and he bent his neck, dropping his head forward and shaking it back and forth. “Mother, what did you do?”

“Caro?” Hollister asked, his voice sounding strangely hollow.

She turned back to the window, wrapping her arms tightly around her thin body, which suddenly looked frail, too. “I never meant for any of this to happen.” She sent a pleading look over her shoulder at Hollister. “I just wanted to punish you. To hurt you like you’d done me so many times. And I knew it would drive you crazy, not knowing more about your daughter.”

“So you sent the letter,” Griffin said flatly. He stared at his mother, but for a long moment, she said nothing at all. Finally, he closed his eyes and scrubbed a hand down his face. “For the love of God, can’t you be honest about at least this? Can’t you—”

“I did.” Her tone was as flat as his. “I never imagined what he would do. I never dreamed it would come to this.”

“But when it did, when he first called us all into this room, showed us the letter and lay out the challenge, why not just come clean then?”

She whirled back to face them, her expression desperate. “Because I’d lost everything! He had cut me out of his will already. All I had was the hope that you’d find the girl, get everything and take pity on me.”

“Mother, you—”