Chapter Twenty One
JED SAT up, ignoring an unpleasant wave of nausea, and glanced at the window, perturbed he hadn’t heard Kim let herself in. “What time is it?”
Satisfied he was awake, Kim took a step back. “Six.”
“Where are the kids?”
“Asleep in their beds. I left Mrs. Dagastino knitting in the lounge. She’ll be all right for a while. You and I need to talk.”
Jed tried to picture the Coopers’ elderly neighbor while he eyed the time bomb Kim clutched in her hands. “What do you want to talk about?”
Kim narrowed her eyes. “Really, Jed? Are you bloody kidding me?” She dropped the passport and photos on the coffee table and walked to the window, though she didn’t turn and look out over the water. Jed thought about following her, but didn’t. Kim ran a hand through her inky hair. “This is my fault. He never wanted this. He never wanted to run… you have to believe me.”
Jed took a breath, but Kim cut him off. “Jed. I know my brother, and I know there’s something between you. Just, before you let this tear you apart, let me explain. Please?”
The shock of being called out on his feelings twice in as many days left Jed dizzy. For a moment, he didn’t trust himself to speak. Instead, he beckoned Kim forward and gestured for her to take a seat next to him on the couch. “Go on, then. Explain.”
Kim sat down. Jed appraised her through the haze of whatever was screwing with his sense of balance. She seemed apprehensive but determined, a trait he’d seen in Max many times.
“It’s such a mess. I don’t know where to start.”
“Try the beginning.” Jed gritted his teeth and reached for the passport. “Start with this.”
Kim touched the gold harp on the battered, deep-red leather. “Max was born in Dublin. The only time in his life he’s ever been early. He wasn’t due for another three weeks, but my dad was pleased. Dublin was his father’s hometown.”
“Your father was Irish?”
“Galway, born and bred.”
Jed turned it over in his mind. An Irish father and a Congolese mother. It was a hell of a mix. “Where did he meet Makemba?”
If Kim was surprised he knew her mother’s name, she hid it well. Max had never told Jed, but Jed had seen it scribbled on the box that held Max’s favorite recipes—the recipes he said were his mother’s.
“My dad was a lawyer by trade, but he worked as a diplomat for the Irish government. He met my mother when he passed through Kisangani in the seventies. They got married at the Irish embassy in Ethiopia.”
“Where were you born?”
“Singapore. I’d been all over the world by the time I was a few months old.”
Jed thought of the giant atlas on his bedroom wall. Thought of Max’s collection of pins. “When did you move to London?”
Kim shook her head. “Never. My dad quit politics when Max was a toddler and went back to being a lawyer. He took a job in central London, and we settled in a commuter town about fifty miles north of the city. We grew up in a town a lot like this one.”
Jed absorbed her words, analyzed them, and looked further, searching for the seed that would lead to whatever bombshell she was trying to drop. The conversation had begun with her father, but Max had never mentioned him. Not once. “Who did your father work for?”
Kim faltered. Jackpot. He’d found it… found the source of the pain and heartache that lurked behind Max’s bright smile.
Jed grasped Kim’s shoulders, leaving her no way out. “Who did he work for?”
“Who didn’t he work for? That was the problem. My dad was principled. He believed in right and wrong, whatever side you came from. He worked human-rights cases… prominent ones from the troubles in Northern Ireland, and he didn’t care which side of the boundary they fell.”
“Risky game for an Irish lawyer in London.”
Kim sighed. “Exactly. I used to hear my parents arguing about it. My mum thought he should pick a side and be done with it, but it wasn’t that easy. He said people were suffering on both sides, and it was his duty as a human being to help them.”
“So that’s where Max got his conscience, huh?”
“Without a doubt. He didn’t always agree with my dad, but he has his stubborn, self-righteous nature.”
Jed plucked the passport from Kim’s hands. They were getting there, slowly, but he needed more. “So how did you go from a sleepy commuter town in the UK to Max becoming someone else? What happened to your parents?”
Kim let out a shaky breath, but Jed resisted the urge to comfort her. He got the feeling that if he distracted her now, she’d lose her nerve.
“You have to promise me that I can trust you, Jed. I shouldn’t be telling you anything… I should let you and Max part ways, let you pack up and move on like you did before.”
“Why don’t you?”
Kim met his gaze properly for the first time since she’d begun to talk. “Because I know you love him.”
Jed had no answer to that. Instead he took her hand and said, “Go on.”
Kim pulled a photo the size of a passport from her back pocket. “This was taken a few months before they died. It’s the only picture I have. Max doesn’t have any. He won’t let me reprint this for him.”
Jed scrutinized the faded picture of a tall, fair-skinned white man, his African wife, and their children. “Max had dreadlocks?”
“For a long time. I don’t think he cut his hair at all after he turned seven.”
Jed smiled in spite of himself. He loved the feel of Max’s fine buzz of hair under his chin, but there was something captivating about a dreadlocked, teenaged Max. He got a hold of himself and handed the picture back. Recently, it seemed his heart was ruled by the power of faded old photographs. “What happened?”
“My dad took a case defending Loyalist prisoners against the British government. It brought a lot of flak from both sides. The Loyalists didn’t want a Catholic defending their own, and the Republicans saw it as treason. Put together with their shared disapproval of his African wife….”
Jed got the picture. “Was he threatened?”
“So many times I think he stopped taking it seriously.”
Jed closed his eyes and asked again, one more time, “What happened?”
“They came for him,” Kim said flatly. “I was away at college in New York, but Max was home. Some men attacked my father with an ax, and when he was dead, they killed my mother too. Max tried to protect her, but they bludgeoned him with a poker from the fireplace. There were three of them, and he was only sixteen. He didn’t stand a chance.”
For a long time, the only sound in the quiet cabin was the gentle tick of Max’s homemade clock. Jed felt shattered. He’d seen more death and carnage than any man should have to see, but he’d never once imagined Max’s past harbored a secret so devastating. He steeled himself as a conversation from a few months back flashed into his mind. “Max told me he was seizure-free as a teenager. Did this bring them back?”
Kim nodded and wiped her eyes. “Yes. He suffered a serious head injury… bleeding on the brain. I nearly lost him too.”
Jed’s chest hurt. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t bear to imagine a world without Max. “What happened next? Did you leave right away?”
“As soon as Max was well enough to travel. The security services couldn’t guarantee our safety—they didn’t even know which side had ordered the hit. I panicked, Jed. I was so scared. Nick was the only person at college I could turn to. We shared an art-history class before Nick changed his major to business. He wired me some money so I could fly us back to America. We stayed in New York until we could buy new identities, then we came here.”
Ashton was about as far from New York as you could get on US soil, but one thing didn’t make any sense. “If Nick was your boyfriend, surely it wouldn’t be that hard to find you?”
Kim smiled, wistful and wry. “No one knew we were together. Nick didn’t have any friends even then, and I was a little embarrassed to be dating such a….”
“Dweeb?”
“Don’t tell him I said that.”
“I won’t,” Jed promised absently.
“Come on, Jed. I know there’s a lot of bad blood between you, but he was there for me, for both of us, when we had no one else.”
“What about the rest of your family? You must’ve had other relatives.”
“Not really. My mum’s family are scattered around the Congo, so we’ve never known them, and my dad didn’t have much family left. The authorities implied it might be safer to let them think Max had died of his injuries. They arranged everything, then put us on a plane to NYC. Nick suggested we come back here, and it all seemed to make sense. I never stopped to think about what might happen ten years later.”
Jed could relate to that. The circumstances were radically different, but he’d spent more than a decade hiding from himself in the military machine, burying himself in war to avoid admitting how much he missed the kid brother who’d once been his shadow. “So if anyone really is looking, chances are they’re only looking for you?”
Kim shrugged. “I guess, but—”
Jed held up his hand. “I get it. You were scared, and you ran before you really knew the score. What was your father’s name?”
“Daniel.”
Daniel Moore. Irish lawyer, murdered by dissidents. Right now, it didn’t much matter, but when the fog cleared Jed knew he had some reaching out to do. “What about you? I’m guessing your name isn’t Kim.”
Kim let out a watery laugh. “Not quite. My name was Kibibi. It means….”
“Little lady,” Jed finished for her. “Swahili, right?”
“You don’t seem very surprised.”
“I’ve heard Max call you Bibi. I’ve heard the name before.”
“Small world, eh? Max was ‘Mumba’ to me, but I’ve never slipped. To me, he’s dead. Everything we ever knew is dead.”
Jed didn’t answer. Kim’s story was huge, filled with uncertainty and unanswered questions, but his mind was already filing it away to think over later. For now, Kim had some more explaining to do. He pointed to the military photographs scattered on the coffee table. “Where the hell did you get those?”
Kim pulled the coffee table closer. “Nick spent all the money you sent him and more on moving us across the country, and then your father got sick. To make extra cash, I started taking commissioned work, creating paintings from old photographs. These were sent to me by an aid charity when I was pregnant with Belle. They wanted to highlight the role foreign troops played in distributing humanitarian aid. I forget which one it was now, but I’d seen the photos before. They were in the newspapers.”
Jed felt a little high. “What did you do with them?”
“Nothing. I didn’t complete the piece. Babies are a full time job, and I didn’t have the time. They got put in a box with everything else I didn’t have a time for.”
“A box in Max’s boat shed.” Jed felt so tired he wanted to cry. He leaned forward and tapped his finger on the man clinging, machine gun in hand, to the right-hand side of the first Apache helicopter. “That’s me, Kim. The dude on that chopper is me.”