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Hale felt anger rush through him. “What the hell?”
“It’s too soon. And this incestuous relationship you have going reminds me too much of your father and grandfather, hanging around Siren Song with their tongues out. It’s sick.”
“That’s not my relationship with Savvy.”
“Yet.” She picked up her bag, but Hale took it from her. Then he followed her back toward the dining room, where she threw a baleful look at Declan, who declared, “I don’t have a son, Janet!”
“Well, Mary had one about nine months after her affair with you. When I learned about her and Preston, I checked. If he wasn’t your son, are you saying he was Preston’s?”
“I’m not saying anything. Ack!”
“Maybe you don’t know,” she said tautly, heading for the front door. Before she twisted the knob, she said, “But I think you do.”
Herman Smythe was tickled pink that a young lady cop had come to see him, and he waved his guest to a chair in his meager room while he sat in a wheelchair. Savvy did as he bade her, though somewhat reluctantly. Her steps had slowed as soon as she was about to enter the building, because she’d wanted to turn around and jump in the car and race to see Hale and the baby. It was precisely her own eagerness to hurry to them, the two men in her life, that got her feet moving again. She was worried about how much it mattered. She needed to get a grip on her own emotions and fast.
And then she’d gotten the call from Detective Hamett, asking her to come in the next day and talk to them about Kristina and Hale St. Cloud.
That was what was preying on her mind now, while Herman was going on about his daughter, Dinah, who came to see him regularly.
“I’m dying, you know,” he said, snapping Savvy’s attention back to him. “One of those cancer things.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “First, it was this kind, and then it was that kind. Dinah has some herbal remedies, but when your number’s up, your number’s up. So, what did you come to see an old man about?”
“I recently read A Short History of the Colony, and I thought I’d like to meet the man who wrote it.”
“You investigating something that involves Siren Song?” he asked keenly, his bushy eyebrows lifting.
“Well, not really . . . I met with Catherine Rutledge, and it reminded me that I’d been meaning to read your book,” Savvy said, stumbling around.
“Ah, Catherine. You know about her sister, Mary, don’t you?” He
smiled in remembrance. “I should probably be ashamed of it. My ex-wife certainly thought I should, but I was one of Mary’s lovers. I think I shared that in the book.”
“You mentioned her sexuality,” Savannah said.
“Mary was something, all right.” He winked at her. “Dinah gets tired of me saying it, but I was quite a swordsman in my day.” While Savvy was wondering how to respond to that, he went on. “Mary got crazy, though. No doubt about it. It just got worse and worse.”
“You say in the book that many of Mary’s children never knew who their fathers were.”
“That’s right. I think maybe one or two of them’s mine, but Mary would never let anyone know. I could get a test now, I suppose, but Catherine keeps those girls locked up pretty tight, and, well, it’s just never happened.”
“Catherine told me that Mary put down Declan Bancroft as one of the possible fathers of a son that she named Declan.”
He frowned. “She adopted her sons out.”
“Yes. And one she named Declan.”
“No, I don’t remember that.... She did name one Silas, I thought.”
“Silas?”
“I don’t remember Declan,” he said, mulling that over. “Someone said that Declan Bancroft was spending a lot of time there for a while. That was after my time. Mary would suddenly be tired of whomever she was with and would just give one of us the boot.” He chuckled. “You always hoped it was some other guy getting kicked out, but it happened to us all eventually.”
“Did you ever interact with the children?”
“Nooo . . . Catherine would never have allowed that, and we didn’t want it, either. She finally burned that bunkhouse down, just to get rid of some of those guys who wouldn’t leave. Then she locked the gates.”
Savannah remembered the passage about the bunkhouse. “You’re sure that was Catherine? You didn’t say that in the book.”
“Catherine said, ‘You have to burn them out.’ If she didn’t do it, she had somebody who did. Not that it was a bad thing, I suppose. Mary was getting crazier, and Catherine wanted a better life for the girls.”
