Forever... by Jude Deveraux
Darci then spent ten minutes on the phone with her aunt as she wrote the names of the men down. The second the list was complete, Thelma said, “I know she’s your mother, Darci, honey, but you tell me what you think of a woman who’d—”
“Thank you so much, Aunt Thelma,” Darci said.”This is just what I needed.” Then she hung up.
So now it was nearly midnight, and both Adam and Darci were tired, but, still, they kept feeding names into a couple of search services on the Internet. But it was difficult to get information because they had nothing but the names of sixteen men. They had no numbers of any sort. They didn’t have so much as a state where the men could have come from. It was a long, tedious, frustrating search as one search engine after another threw the names out for “insufficient data.”
At one point, Adam said, “Your mother didn’t . . . you know . . . with all these men, did she? I mean, not in one summer.”
“I doubt it. Aunt Thelma probably wrote down the name of every man my mother spoke to that summer, and she probably accused my mother of bedding them all. And my mother loves to antagonize her sister by agreeing that, yes, she did the dirty with each man.”
In an attempt to find the men, they’d had to individually try every state and every possible spelling of the names. And it took a long time for the data banks to look through the records.
“How many more?” Adam asked.
“Just one,” Darci answered, yawning, wanting to go to bed. Maybe Adam was a night owl, but she wasn’t. She looked at the list that was beginning to blur before her tired eyes. “Taylor Rayburn,” she said, then yawned again. “Taylor is my—”
“Go to bed if you want to,” Adam said, taking the computer from her. “I can do this alone. Holy sh—” he began but cut himself off from cursing.
Darci had typed in the name, spelling it “Rayburn,” but the request had been redirected to “Raeburne.” There were 821 sites for “Taylor Raeburne.”
“Couldn’t be the same guy,” Adam mumbled as he clicked on the first site. “What would a superachiever like this guy obviously is be doing in Putnam? Ow! That’s my foot you’re on.”
“Is it?” Darci asked. “And what did you say about Putnam?”
“Man, boy, or town?” Adam asked, his eyes intent on the screen; then, suddenly, he drew back and turned the computer around for her to see. He had pulled up a beautiful Web site with “Taylor Raeburne” in big blue letters that moved across the screen. On the left was a list of choices that were contained within the Web site.”Taylor Raeburne, author of forty-two books on the occult,” the screen read.
“You don’t think....”Darci began.
“That he’s a warlock and into evil?” Adam finished for her.
“Are you reading my mind again?” she asked, trying to inject some humor into the situation.
“No. That was from my own mind.” He scrolled down the list, looking for a bio on the author. When he saw the word biography at the bottom of the list, he put the cursor on it, then looked at Darci. “Ready?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not? As you said, what would a man like him be doing in Putnam? I’m sure that all he did was stop at the filling station and my aunt put his name on the list. I can assure you that my mother isn’t one to like men who write books. She likes— Oh, my goodness,” Darci said.
On the screen had come up a large photo of a man. And even to Darci, her resemblance to him was clear. It was her face, older and quite masculine, but it was, indeed, Darci’s face.
She fell back against the couch, her eyes wide in shock, unable to speak. All she could do was stare at the picture on the screen.
“I think we found him,” Adam said, and there was elation in his voice. “You’re a dead ringer for him. You know that old saying that the first child always looks like the father. In this case—” When he looked at Darci, he stopped talking. “Are you all right?”
She didn’t answer but just kept staring at the photo on the screen, so Adam clicked on exit, shut down the system, and closed the computer. “I think this is enough for one night,” he said, but when Darci still didn’t react, he did what instinct told him to: He pulled her into his arms and held her, her face buried against his shoulder.
“A shock, huh?” he asked softly.
She nodded against him.
“You’ve had a lifetime with one really bad parent, and—” She started to lift her head at that, but he held her down until she calmed. “Yes, one really bad, absent parent, and now you find that, all along, you’ve had a second parent.”
Pulling back, he turned her head so she could look at him, putting his fingertips under her chin. “You’re not going to chicken out on me now, are you?” he asked. “We’re going to contact him, aren’t we?”
“He might not like me,” Darci said in a tiny voice.
At that Adam smiled. “Not like you?!” he said. “How could he not like you? You’re smart, something you obviously inherited from him; you have such a great sense of humor that you can make even an old stick-in-the-mud like me laugh, and you’re frugal to the point of. . . . Well, anyway, you make people like you. You make friends with everyone everywhere and— Stop looking at me like that!” he said, then dropped his hand from her face and got up off the couch. “I told you that you were not allowed to use your power against me. No kissing thoughts!”
“I wasn’t using any power!” Darci said. “I was merely wishing very, very hard, that’s all. And why not? I thought you liked me. You were saying wonderful things about me.”
For a moment Adam turned away from her, then he looked back at her, and when he spoke, his voice was calm. “You’re lovely. I didn’t think so at first, but— Please stop looking at me like that. I’m trying to be honest. You are a wonderful person. I’ve never before met anyone like you. I’ve bummed around the world, and never have I met anyone with your ...your enthusiasm for life. The truth is that I like you more than . . . well, more than I should.” Suddenly, he stopped talking. “Actually, I think we’d better talk about this another time.”
“Are you blushing again?” Darci asked, eyes wide.
“No, of course not. Men don’t blush. Let’s go to bed,” he said, annoyed.
“Oooooohhh, yes,” Darci purred.
Adam laughed. “Get up and go put your pajamas on. And put on those big ones, not that little black thing you bought, but the big ones, got it? And behave yourself!”
Smiling, Darci got off the couch and went into the bedroom. The bedroom they shared, she thought. As she was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, she decided that it was better to keep her mind on Adam than on the news that she’d just found her father. A father was not something that Darci could comprehend. In school in Putnam the other kids had often taunted her by saying that any man in Kentucky could be her father. Darci had held her head high and True Persuaded the kids to go away. Now, as she snuggled down into the bed next to Adam’s, she remembered that one time she’d done such a great job of True Persuading a boy into being quiet that he’d not been able to speak for three whole days. When he could speak again, he told everyone that Darci had done it to him. But, thankfully, no one believed him. People couldn’t do things like that, could they? they’d said. But still, ever after that, people in Putnam seemed to sense that Darci was “different.” They didn’t know how she was different, but they knew she was.
And it was this difference that had made Putnam want her.
In spite of all the turmoil in her mind, Darci was asleep almost before she closed her eyes.
When Darci awoke at five A.M. the next morning, there was a light coming in through the half-open bedroom door. Was Adam already awake? she wondered. Turning, she looked at his bed and saw that it had never been slept in.
Rolling out of bed, she went into the living room, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. The curtains were still drawn, and Adam was still bent over his laptop computer, studying the screen.
“Did you know that it’s morning?” she
Adam didn’t answer, but nodded toward a pile of papers on the coffee table. There was now a small printer on the coffee table, and it was attached to Adam’s laptop by a heavy cable.
“Where’d you get that?” she asked.
“Borrowed from 3B,” he said without looking up. “Read the papers.”
Yawning again, Darci picked them up.
At first she didn’t know what she was looking at, as there were just lists of names and addresses. At the top of the first page was the name Taylor Raeburne, and at the bottom was the name of a company with the word spy in it. The title page was followed by sheets and sheets of information about people.
It was when she realized what she was seeing that she sat upright and began to read with interest. Adam had done a search on Taylor Raeburne, using the data from the Web site, and Darci was shocked to see how much information had been obtained. Mr. Raeburne’s places of residence for the last twenty years were on the papers. His neighbors were listed, giving their addresses, their telephone numbers, and their occupations. There were three pages of people who “might possibly be related to or involved with Taylor Raeburne.”
After the pages of addresses, her mouth dropped open further to see pages about the financial status of Taylor Raeburne.
Appalled, Darci put the papers back on the coffee table, leaving the last several pages unread. “That is an invasion of privacy,” she said.
“There is no longer any privacy in the U.S.,” Adam said, still not looking up from the screen. “All I had to do was give them my credit card number, wait six hours, and all that was e-mailed to me.”
“I don’t like that,” Darci said tightly. “A person’s business should be his own.”
“You didn’t seem to mind looking into my private affairs,” Adam said. “So do you want to know about your father or not?”
“My . . ?” Darci said, not yet awake enough to have thought of this new idea.
“Yes, your—” Adam broke off because he had finally turned to look at her. “I told you not to wear that black thing. I told you—”
She had on a very pretty black silk nightgown that she’d bought when she purchased the other clothes. It was a perfectly respectable nightgown and tiny robe, merely a spaghetti-strapped sliplike garment with a sheer lace jacket that covered her arms. It wasn’t short or too revealing or—
Raising his arm, Adam pointed toward the doorway. “Go. Get clothes on. Do something with your hair. Go get me some food. Do it now!”
Smiling and very pleased with herself, Darci obeyed him. Forty-five minutes later, she’d been to the grocery and back—Adam beside her every minute, never ceasing to read his printouts—and had arranged a beautiful breakfast on the bar countertop in the kitchen. She prepared a plate of fruit, warm croissants, and coffee, and handed it to him; then she sat on the floor on the other side of the coffee table with her plate of food.
Now that Darci was decent, he was in a better humor. “So what do you want to know first?” he asked.
“Anything, everything,” she answered, her mouth full.
“He writes books on psychic research, but he’s not a flake. I mean, he doesn’t write popular books about haunted places where the waitress saw gray smoke in a corner of a room and she was sure it was a ghost, that kind of thing. No, this man has three Ph.D.s, one of them in philosophy, and he’s well respected in the academic world. What I can’t figure out is what he was doing in Putnam, Kentucky, and why was he ...?”With a quick look at Darci, he trailed off.
“Having a tumble with my mother?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t put it that way, but, well....”
Darci held up her hand for a moment while she finished chewing; then she got up, went to her handbag, opened her wallet, pulled out a photo, and handed it to Adam.
Curious, Adam took the photo and looked at it. It was a picture of an incredibly beautiful woman in a white swimsuit, her long, honey-blonde hair caressing her perfect shoulders. Truthfully, she wasn’t just beautiful but drop-dead gorgeous. She was tall and slim but curvy, with legs that seemed to go on for miles. As for her face, she was a cross between Grace Kelly and Angelina Jolie. She had a look of raw sex, but also the look of a pure and innocent wife left behind by a World War II soldier.
Adam was sure he—or the rest of the world—had never seen anything like her.
Adam gave a low whistle, then looked up at Darci.”Your mother?”
“That’s Mom.”
“How old is this photo?”
“About three weeks.”
“Your mother looks like this now?”
“You’re too old for her,” Darci said instantly, and without a trace of humor in her voice.
Adam ran his hand through his hair. “Maybe I could cover the gray, lose a couple of pounds, and. . . .” He’d meant to make Darci laugh, but she was looking at him without humor.
“I’m sure you could try. Since she now considers herself old and ugly compared to what she looked like when she had me, you might have a chance.”
Adam looked back at the photo. “Old and ugly, huh? So now I see why a man like your father was attracted to her. I wonder how they met?”
“At the filling station, probably,” Darci said.
“Your mother hung out at a filling station when she was, what, nineteen or twenty?” He was incredulous. This woman should have been immortalized on the screen. In photographs. In—
“She was seventeen when she had me, sixteen when she got pregnant,” Darci said flatly. “She worked after school and on weekends in her father’s filling station, which was at the junction of the off ramp to the interstate that runs past Putnam.”
“Pumping gas?” he said, still unable to believe it.
“Yes. She wore pink overalls that Aunt Thelma said were so tight you could see the outline of her belly button. And Aunt Thelma said Mom used to wet the suit down twice a day so it would cling to her even more.”
Once again, Adam had his eyebrows high under his hair. “To meet men? I guess that’s what she wanted.”
“What my mother wanted was to get out of Putnam,” Darci said fiercely. “She said that the only way she was going to meet a man who didn’t live in Putnam was to go where they were, which, to her, meant the cars that were traveling along the highway.”
Adam shook his head, not understanding. “Why didn’t she just get a job in another town and move?”
Darci shrugged. “It wasn’t what was done, I guess. Her mother had told her that the most important thing in life was getting a husband, so that’s what my mother was trying to do. But she got me instead, and she’s never married anyone.”
“I see,” Adam said, then regretted it. But he spoke before Darci could again tell him that he sounded like Abraham Lincoln. Judging from the look on Darci’s face and from the way her hands were now clenched into fists, he thought maybe it was better to stop talking about Jerlene Monroe. “I have your father’s telephone number. Shall we call him? He teaches at a university in Virginia, and he may have classes all day, so now, in the early morning, might be a good time to catch him.”
“Maybe we should wait until later,” Darci said quickly. But Adam was already reaching for the telephone, and when the call connected and the other phone started ringing, he pushed the speaker button so Darci could hear what was said.
“Yes?” said a gruff voice that obviously didn’t want to be bothered.
“Are you Taylor Raeburne?” Adam asked and was surprised to hear the nervousness in his voice. It dawned on him that no matter what he found out about his own parents, he wanted to help Darci find her father.
“Is that whom you were calling?” the man shot back. “Look, I don’t have time for this question-and-answer routine. I’m supposed to be in class in ten minutes. If this is about—”
“It’s about Jerlene Monroe and Putnam, Kentucky, and the summer of....”He looked at Darci in question.
“Nineteen s
“And 1978,” Adam said into the phone.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never heard of Putnam, Kentucky, or Jenny Monroe. I have to go. You can phone my office and talk to my secretary. She—” “Jerlene Monroe worked in a gas station off a highway that runs past Putnam. She used to wear a pink jumpsuit that her sister said was so tight that you could see her belly button. She has blonde hair, natural. . . .” He looked atDarci for verification, and she nodded. “A natural blonde. I don’t think you’d forget this woman even though it may be over twenty-three years since you’ve seen her.”
There was silence on the end of the line for so long that Adam thought the man might have hung up. “Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here,” he said softly, this time in no rush. “And, yes, I did once meet such a woman. But then every young man does things that—”
“I think that a daughter might have been produced from that union,” Adam said quickly, then saw Darci draw in her breath and hold it.
“If this is an attempt to extort money from me I—” Taylor Raeburne began.
“She has seven little black moles on the palm of her left hand, and—”
“Where are you?” the man asked quickly.
“Camwell, Connecticut.”
Taylor gasped. “Good lord, do you know that that town is full of—”
“Witches?” Adam asked. “I most certainly do. The problem is that these people seem to want your daughter for something, but we don’t know what—not all of it, anyway. They’ve already killed four young women who resemble her and removed their left hands. I’m worried that your daughter is targeted to be next. I want her to leave this place, but now that they know who she is, I’m afraid that there might not be any place on earth where she can hide.”