He was going through what was just crap, mindlessly pitching copies ofMotor Trend from the eighties into the trash box, when he ran into the photograph.
He sat up slowly, holding the thing with care.
Black-and-white. Three by five. Torn at the corner.
He and Billy and Mac were all under the age of twelve and standing at rigid attention in ill-fitting suits. They were smiling awkwardly, the pained expressions worn with the same graceless forbearance as their Sunday clothes.
His mother had taken the picture and her handwriting, her beautiful cursive handwriting, was on the back: the date, the place and his and his brothers’ names.
Staring at the old ink, it dawned on him that in all the packing he’d done he hadn’t found any photographs of her. In fact, there was nothing of hers in the apartment at all. Sure, his father hadn’t been sentimental in the slightest, but wouldn’t something have survived?
He turned the picture back over and tried to remember what his mother had looked like on the other side of the camera.
When he couldn’t call an image to mind, he thought of Lizzie.
He wanted pictures of her. Lots of them. He wanted one at his penthouse by his bed. And one on his desk at his office. And one in his briefcase. And one stored digitally in his BlackBerry.
As if having all that would ensure she didn’t disappear when she wasn’t with him.
Sean put the shot of him and his brothers facedown on the top of the desk and vowed to go out and buy a camera. Like, tomorrow.
The piles of envelopes got his attention and he figured it was time to find out what kind of mess his father’s estate was in. God, he hoped the man’s will was in this morass somewhere, but chances were good Eddie had died intestate.
Sean started with the bank statements and got no further.
The first one he went through was from June and there were a number of checks…most of which were written to Lizzie Bond.
In her own hand.
Sean’s skin shrank around his skeleton, just tightened up on his body as if he’d been put under a heat lamp and was drying out. As his breath froze in his lungs, he let the hand holding the pale green slips of paper fall to his thigh.
When he could stand it, he looked at the checks again. His father’s signature was on the bottom of each one, a messy scrawl that just about screamed feeble and old and coercible.
Except maybe she’d just been writing them out at his request.
Sean quickly ripped open the other statement envelopes. Checks she’d filled out went all the way back for a year and the amounts varied from a hundred to five hundred dollars. There were four that were over a thousand.
When he was finished adding it all up, the total amount was well into the tens of thousands.
With a curse, he tossed a handful of checks onto the desk. As they scattered all around, he reached over to keep them from hitting the floor and caught sight of an envelope postmarked six weeks ago. In the left-hand corner, there was the return address of a local law firm.
As he slipped his finger under the flap, he got a paper cut that bled and he sucked off the sting while unfolding what turned out to be his father’s last will and testament.
That left everything to one Miss Elizabeth Bond.
Well…well…well.
What do you know.
Turned out he and his father had something in common after all. Because like Eddie, Sean had been suckered into supporting Lizzie, too.
Man, she was smooth. He hadn’t seen this coming.
Sean refolded the will and put it back in the envelope. Rage tickled the edge of his consciousness, making his head buzz, but he wasn’t mad at her. He was mad at himself.
He’d been taken for a fool by a woman again and it was his own damned fault.
***
Chapter Fifteen
Even though it had been a tragically busy night in the emergency department, Lizzie was smiling as she got out of her car and skipped up the front steps to the duplex’s porch. When she opened the door, she heard sounds from upstairs so she jogged upward.
One look at Mr. O’Banyon’s living room and she stopped dead.
Stacks of U-Haul boxes were as high as her shoulders, each marked with the name of the local Catholic church. The rug that had been under the couch was rolled up and taped. The TV was unplugged and by the door. The few pictures that had hung on the walls were down and so too were the faded lace curtains.
“Good Lord, Sean,” she called out. “You’ve worked yourself to the bone.”
As she heard him coming from the back, she smiled.
Until he walked in and she saw his face.
The man who had sent her off this morning with a lingering kiss was gone. The man who had poured her cereal and watched her eat and cleaned up her dishes was nowhere to be seen. The lover she had taken into her body and slept beside had been replaced by a hard, cynical stranger.