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Glass shattered in the distance. A large part of the A-frame in the front of the main house collapsed onto the porch. Embers flew over their heads.
“It must have been a shock to know you had two half-sisters,” Josie said. “In different parts of the country. Did you meet up right away?”
He glanced to the side, eyes following the smoke that rose into the sky. “I was the last one to do the DNA test. Nic and Tara had already met. Once my DNA went live on the site, they both contacted me. We met up a month later.”
“How did you know you were all Delilah Stowe’s children?”
A grim smile stretched across his face as he turned back to her. “Wow. You really dug deep. Damn. It took us years to figure this shit out and you did it in a week. We should have just hired you from the beginning.”
She was a police officer, not a private investigator, but she didn’t remind him of that, hoping to get more information out of him before again trying to get him to return to the rage room.
He went on, “The website tells you which side you’re related on—the father or the mother. We knew right away we all had the same mother. We didn’t know about Delilah but according to the site we used to process our DNA, I was related to someone who was like the fifth cousin twice removed of this fairly famous actor. He died a few years ago.”
“Dean Thurman,” Josie said.
“Holy shit. How did you—” He shook his head. “You know what, never mind. Yeah. Dean Thurman. Taryn told me I should follow that, like a lead, and I did. I was able to confirm that I was Dean Thurman’s illegitimate son. Unfortunately, that wasn’t very good news for me.”
“Because of the sexual assault scandals?” Josie asked.
“Yeah, and the fact that by the time I got a meeting with him, he was about to be sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his natural life! I was so disappointed. I spent a lifetime dreaming about meeting my birth father, and he was just this old perverted asshole who didn’t care about other people at all.”
“What did he tell you when you met with him?”
Brian laughed bitterly. “That he didn’t have any money left, if that’s what I was after. It wasn’t. I mean, I’m not going to lie, it would have been nice, but at that point, I just wanted information. He was the one who told me my mother was Delilah Stowe. Then he said some really disgusting things about her that, honestly, I wish I could unhear.”
His face turned beet-red at the memory.
“You didn’t take it very well,” Josie said. “That’s why he took out a restraining order against you?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes started to take on that faraway look again. Josie tried to keep him in the present. “Then you knew,” she said. “About Delilah.”
He blinked, focusing on her once more. “Yeah. We started researching her. We found out she had another daughter, one she kept.”
“Lola Stowe,” Josie filled in.
“You’re actually very impressive,” Brian said. “Yeah. She was our last link to our mother. We’d been so happy to find one another. It was really something. I felt like I had family for the first time in my life. But what we couldn’t understand, what we could not get over, was why our mother had kept Lola but given all of us up. We wanted answers.”
Sweat dripped down Josie’s face and she wiped it away with her coat sleeve. “How did you find Sandrine then?”
“Nic had a lead on her father’s side, too. There were still some people alive in New York who remembered him. Someone she got in touch with confirmed Delilah was her mother and remembered that Delilah had had another daughter, one who was older by the time Nic was born. He’d seen her on TV once. He said she was a ‘woo-woo head shrinker that burned incense and sang to crystals.’” Here he rolled his eyes. “So it took us a while to track down who he meant. It was Sandrine.”
The siding on the front of Sandrine’s cabin now looked like syrup, melting from the white heat of the main house next to it. Even where they were, it felt intensely hot. Josie wanted to claw all of her clothes off and roll around in the snow. She tried to maintain her composure. There were a lot of things she still wanted to know but she jumped right to the most pressing one. “Brian—Bradley—if you wanted answers, why didn’t you just call Sandrine or go to her office? Why are the three of you here on this retreat? Why lie?”
He pocketed the vape pen. “Why lie?”
Josie knew he was buying time to come up with another lie. She didn’t fill the silence. His hand wrapped over his wrist, where his burn scar lay beneath the sleeve of his coat. “We were afraid that she would reject us,” he said. “She has the perfect life. What if knowing she had siblings ruined it? As far as the retreat? It’s perfect if you think about it. We’re isolated, alone with her. She’s a captive audience. She’s forced to get to know us.”
Josie wiped more sweat from her face. It was getting more and more difficult to breathe. “You’ll have to do better than that,” she told him. “I know that’s not your only reason for being here.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Josie used the railing to pull herself up another step so that she was eye to eye with Brian. Down at the main house, the other side of the A-frame crashed down, destroying the porch. Flaming pieces of wood rolled onto the path and shot out across the snow. Soon, it was going to be even more difficult to get back to the rage room. Brian watched, his expression oddly blank.
“You all lied about your identities and flew from all over the country just to get to know Sandrine on this retreat? You expect me to believe that was all the three of you intended to do?”
“What else do you think we were planning?” he asked, eyes still on the debris flaming at the foot of the main house.
“I don’t know but Meg is dead and Taryn is gone.”
