SARAH

 

I returned home after seeing Josh, and the moment I came in through the door with Lucy, Kay informed me that Dad wanted to see me in his study. These past two days my father had been very quiet around me and hadn’t uttered more than two words in my presence. I sensed that he wanted to say something but couldn't bring himself to. It was obvious that it all regarded Josh, but how and why I wasn't sure. He’d been like this before, around the time when I’d initially seen Josh after the crash. Afterward, when I’d informed him that I most probably wouldn't see Josh again, my father had appeared pleased, although he had attempted to conceal it.

I wheeled myself to his study with a seed of trepidation nestling itself in my heart. Having knocked, I immediately pushed the door open. This was common practice. The door was never locked and my father would never turn you away. However, the knock was a necessary courtesy.

Looking up from his desk, where he was going over some papers, my father said, “Sarah, give me a moment to finish signing these and I’ll be with you. Otherwise I shall forget where I am.”

Within a minute or two, he’d finished. He neatened the papers out before placing them in a drawer. Then he removed his glasses and looked straight into my eyes.

“You’ve been to see Josh today I presume?” he inquired with a sad look.

“You know this,” I replied. “It’s no secret.”

“How is he?”

“He’s getting better. I think, anyway.”

“Better from what, though?”

“From his addictions and from his behavior. He’s beginning to want to change his ways.”

“What are his ways?”

I looked at my father oddly then.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Do you find him cynical?” he inquired, ignoring my bewilderment. “Does he often talk of people being weak?”

“Yes, sometimes. Not lately, but that day in the garden when he upset me and the time I struck him.”

“That’s his father speaking,” my father informed me knowingly. “That’s Andrew Kelly.”

He went silent once more and appeared to be musing over something, kicking an idea through his head like an old tin can.

“I said before that I once knew Andrew Kelly,” he suddenly said.

“You played down how well you knew him, though,” I replied. “I remember him from childhood.”

“Yes, you would have been sure to have seen him. And it’s true, I have misled you about the fullness of our relationship.”

“You told me that he was merely a business associate.”

My father sighed and his whole body appeared to shrink in his chair. I could see in his eyes that he dreaded having to tell me this next part. He had known beforehand that he would have to explain it, but now that the time was here, he dreaded it with the whole of his heart.

“Andrew Kelly was once upon a time my best friend,” he announced in a somber tone. “We met each other at Harvard where he was doing his business degree and I my law degree. We were both from families of wealth and power and enjoyed ourselves as such. We partied hard, took drugs and slept around—heck, everything privileged males do when they’re young and full of a jilted idea of freedom.”

“Why would you hide from me that you were so close?” I wanted to know.

“Because Andrew Kelly and the time I spent with him is a part of me and my life that I am ashamed ever existed. When your mother died I was working a case where he was the client. It was a dilapidated apartment block, similar to the Miller building where Troy lives. Kelly had just bought it for peanuts and wanted to turf out the existing tenants—‘lowlifes’ we called them—so that his company could renovate the whole place into luxury condos. He was buying up land in the area that he wanted to gentrify. It was a hard case, but eventually, through bribery and corruption, we managed to get a court order to evict all eight hundred people from the premises, including some three hundred children.”

“Daddy!” I gasped softly.

“We were bad men, sweetie,” my father said with the embers of dejection glowing in his words. “The only right we knew was our own distorted view that it didn’t exist. For us, justice belonged to those who could afford it. So it had been since time immemorial, we thought. On a cold and wet autumn morning, Andrew, my partners and I were responsible for the police entering the building and forcefully removing the last of the tenants who’d stayed after the court order, which was most of them because the majority didn't have anywhere else to go. We loaded nearly seven hundred people onto buses like cattle for the slaughter and drove them to a makeshift temporary campsite on the edge of the city. We basically sent them to nothing.”

Tears welled in his desolate eyes and I saw a terrible anguish screw his face up into a ball. I could see such absolute shame working its way through his expression.

“But surely it wasn’t legal?” I inquired.

“We paid off a whole sub-division of the mayor’s office,” he replied in a vacant, trembling voice, “and a couple of people in the state governor’s office too. We had someone from the city go in there and condemn the structure of the building, which was actually sound. That way it looked like an emergency evacuation into temporary shelter, which was legally viable.”

“But where were the tenants going to go after that?”

My father looked sadly into space before answering:

“Nowhere. Some of the families were picked up by the state and rehoused. Those that weren’t had their children taken into care because the parents were homeless. The elderly were put into care either at some medical facility or another dilapidated project. The rest were scattered to the winds.”

“How could you?” I said in a whisper.

I knew my father wasn’t a good man before; he’d never been shy in informing us of that. But very rarely did he ever tell me the sordid details of his wrongdoings, and it shocked me to hear the things that he was once capable of.

“I was a different man back then,” he went on in a sad voice. “I was the same as Andrew Kelly. I even had a stake in the apartment block itself. In fact, I already had stakes in several of his ventures, all of them through alias companies that I had set up.”

“My word!”

“Anyway, it wasn’t long after that that your mother died and a break happened in my soul that made me see it all differently. Her passing caused me to have some kind of spiritual breakdown.”

“This was your great change?” I asked.

“This was a part of it. After that I did the rest. I walked away from the law firm, my business dealings, gave most of my money to the IRS when I confessed to hiding millions away in offshore accounts, for which I was spared jail time. And I walked away from Andrew Kelly.”

“I never knew you were in so deep,” I remarked to my father, who sat there with a sad look plastered all over his face.

“I was entangled in things that would turn your skin the palest shade of white.”

This last statement hung in the air of the room for a moment, the two of us facing each other, my father looking so much smaller, as though the great effort of it all had shrunk him, his face covered in perspiration.

“I understand your issues with Andrew Kelly, Daddy,” I began after a minute of silence had reigned between us, “but I get the impression that you’re trying to say something about Josh at the same time.”

“In a way, yes,” he stated. “I’m afraid that he may share too many of his father’s qualities.”

“In many ways, he does,” I admitted. “But he has something that Andrew Kelly doesn’t.”

“Oh! And what’s that?”

“He wants to change. Even though he fights it, he wants it so bad.”

“I heard something about him some years ago,” my father suddenly put to me.

“You mean Heather Todd.”

“He told you?”

“No. Karl hinted about it and I looked it up. She disappeared on an island. They found her clothes on the beach.”

My father was silent for a moment as he looked into my eyes and bit his lip.

“I heard that there may have been more to it,” my father suddenly said. “I heard whisperings.”

“What whisperings?” I felt desperate to know.

“Just that he may have been involved directly in her death. That there was a cover up.”
“A cover up of what?”

“I don't know. I never looked into it and only heard this through an old acquaintance who’s still in touch with Andrew Kelly. All I was told was that there was something odd about it all. That Andrew Kelly paid a considerable sum to the local police department in Mexico. To the Commissionaire himself.”

“It proves nothing.”

“No, it doesn’t. All I’m saying is be careful, Sarah. I’m not one to believe gossip, but there is something off about him. It runs in his family.”

“Even though he saved all those people? Does that not cure your prejudice against him?”

“Even though he saved all those people,” my father repeated back to me as a statement. “Just because a man is capable of noble acts doesn’t make him incapable of murder. This is one of the many dualities of man.”

We sat in silence for a while as I soaked up what he had said. It was clear that my relations with Josh had stirred something up inside my father and reminded him of his past. I felt that it was this that was the main reason for him to repeat Karl’s insinuations.

“Did he tell you about his mother?” my father asked, breaking the silence with an axe.

“Yes, that she was killed during a break-in when he was three. You’re not suggesting that Josh had anything to do with her death?” I added this last part sarcastically.

“Of course not. I’m just saying that she died in mysterious circumstances and that they never caught the man who killed her. Even though there were cameras all over the building and several security guards who didn’t find her body until the next morning.”

“You mean that Josh sat there the whole night with his dead mother?”

“Yes,” my father uttered in a grave tone. “It was very sad. I knew Julia Kelly personally. She was a friend of your mother’s. There were things surrounding her death that are suspicious. I always felt that there was more to it. But as Andrew was my friend, I buried it.”

“More insinuation,” I put to him.

“Yes,” he stated firmly. “But I’d known about problems in their marriage for years. He’d often confide in me about them. He told me that he suspected her of having an affair and of conspiring against him.”

“So you’re saying that Josh’s father killed his mother?”

“Not at all—Andrew Kelly was dining with me and some business partners in Paris that night. There’s no way he could have.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“That just because he didn’t beat her to death himself, doesn’t mean he didn’t have someone else do it for him.”