Forever and Always Read online

  “Wonder where she is now?” I asked aloud as I sipped my bourbon.

  The last page nearly made my heart stop. It was a newspaper clipping. There was a photo of a car that had smashed into a tree and a picture of my son’s mother. She was pretty in a bland way, with long, straight blonde hair and big blue eyes.

  Picking the clipping up, I looked at the photo and thought she should have had better lighting.

  I knew I was putting off reading the article. I took a deep drink of the bourbon, then read. Weeks ago, Lisa Henderson’s car had run into a tree, and she’d been killed instantly.

  Stapled to the article was a second clipping, this one about funeral services, so I read it, too.

  Between the two articles, there was quite a bit about Lisa Henderson—at least about her life at the time of her death. I was surprised to see that she’d been an active member of a church and had served on several committees. Since she left no money behind, her funeral had been paid for by the church and her coworkers. “She will be missed,” was to be carved on her tombstone.

  Okay, so what about my son? What was to happen to him? And why had I missed the mention of him? I reread both articles. The obituary said Lisa had left behind “no known relatives.”

  I read the clippings another time, then I went back and read every word on every page. Nowhere in any of it was a mention of my son. Puzzled, I went to the safe in my bedroom to remove the file my agent had sent me years ago.

  Nearly eight years ago, Lisa Henderson had been working in a cryo clinic in Los Angeles. I’d been a starving actor and, well, I’d earned some money by “donating,” well, sperm. My name was anonymous to the people who used it, but those of us who gave had to agree that if a kid resulted, at eighteen he/she could have our names.

  I loved this idea; it appealed to my sense of drama. By the time the kid was eighteen I planned to be a bigger star than Mel Gibson. I loved to imagine the thrill the kid would get when he was told who his father was.

  When my name was becoming known, one day, laughing, I’d told my agent Barney that someday some kid was going to get the surprise of his life, then I’d explained why. Barney hadn’t laughed; he’d gone ballistic. He started calling people who called people. The result was that all my frozen semen was destroyed and number 28176 was taken off the books.

  However, Barney told me that one of the women who worked at the clinic had seen me in a bit part in a movie and recognized my name. “She had your kid!” Barney bellowed at me.

  I was kind of pleased and wondered what the child looked like, but Barney ranted on and on about lawsuits and what she could someday demand and how this could someday hurt me bad. “Real bad.” He said some unpleasant things about why couldn’t I have taken up sheep rather than paper cups, but I didn’t listen to him.

  A month later Barney sent me a file about Lisa Henderson and every year since then he’d added a page or two. I’d put every paper in the safe I’d built into each house I’d owned in the last six years.

  But now, when I reached for the file, it wasn’t there. I knew I hadn’t removed that file. The last time Barney’d sent me new pages I’d barely glanced at them before shoving them inside the leather folder I kept all those papers in. The folder even had a lock on it.

  I emptied everything out of the safe. There were some deeds, last year’s tax returns, the engagement ring I’d planned to give Alanna in Scotland, but no file on Lisa Henderson and my son.

  I sat down on the bed, trying to figure this out. Did someone break into my safe and take the papers? No, of course not. What kind of thief would take papers and leave a $25,000 ring?

  Wait a minute, I thought. Barney probably had copies. The man was terrified someone was going to cheat him out of a penny so he made sure he had a copy of everything.

  As I picked up the phone by my bed, my cell rang. It was Alanna.

  “Change your mind about Scotland?” I said. I didn’t want her knowing I was still upset about the canceled trip. Plus, she had no idea about my having a child and I didn’t want her to know.

  “You haven’t heard,” she said flatly.

  Neither have you, I wanted to say, but I played it cool.

  “About what?”

  “Barney’s dead. His office caught fire and he went up with it. Sorry. I’ll call you later.”

  I was left with a dead phone in my hand. As I said, sympathy was not one of Alanna’s strong points. After she read the book about Darci Montgomery, when she’d said, “That poor kid,” she’d meant it was a shame that Darci had been caught.

  I didn’t think about what I was doing when I pushed the button to call Jerlene. She answered on the second ring. I was respectful. I didn’t ask how a scatterbrained, maybe-killer like her daughter could help find someone. I just said, “How do I go about getting your daughter’s help?”

  After I put down the phone, I went to the gym. Maybe a long, hard workout would calm the jitters I felt. I knew, as well as I’d ever known anything in my life, that Barney had been murdered and all his files burned because of me and my illegitimate son. And I knew that Lisa Henderson had been killed for the same reason.

  Three hours later I felt better. I checked the messages on my cell. Jerlene’s lovely voice gave me an address in Virginia and said I was to go there tomorrow at three, that her daughter would meet me. Again she said that her daughter would find my son.

  I didn’t want to think anymore. I just called my personal assistant, told her to look after things until I got back, then I booked a flight to Virginia. I did it myself because I didn’t want anyone to know where I was going. I tossed some clothes into a bag, then I went to a hotel. My own home didn’t feel safe anymore.

  The next day I was ushered into a very pretty living room and I met Darci Montgomery for the first time. I still wasn’t sure why I was there or what I wanted from her, but I did know I needed to be cautious. I planned to tell her as little as possible and to gloss over the bad parts.

  After all, what could the woman do? Read minds?

  Darci

  Chapter Three

  LINCOLN AIMES’S MIND WAS HARDER TO PERSUADE THAN most people’s were, but then since that book came out, people put up barriers against me. They’d made up their minds about me and I knew that nothing I could say—or do—would sway them.

  Few people knew the truth of what had happened in that tunnel full of witches in Camwell, Connecticut, and I knew it was better that they thought what they did. It was better for people to think that my husband and his cousins had been the ones to kill the witch and her cohorts. People thinking my mother had rescued me certainly hadn’t hurt her career any.

  Yes, it was better for people to think what they did than to know the truth of my involvement in those deaths. If they knew the truth, I wouldn’t just be laughed at or spit on as happened to me the last time I left the grounds, they’d probably light torches and drag me out of the house and—I didn’t want to think about that.

  However horrible destroying the witches had been, the best part of my life had come out of it. I’d found my father and he’d married Boadicea, the sister of the man who was to become my husband. Bo and I’d had babies at nearly the same time.

  For a while my life had been wonderful because we were a family. Perhaps we were a little strange, since my father was a world-renowned expert on psychics, my sister-in-law had been raised in captivity, my husband had gone through unspeakable horror as a child, my daughter and niece had the power to make things fly around, and I—I was the strangest of them all.

  We weren’t unusual to each other, though, and we had great love among us. They had protected me from the outside world, loved me, and they’d known the truth about what happened in Connecticut. That had made everything all right.

  But they weren’t here now. Over a year ago, my husband had come to me and I could feel he was very excited about something, but I was, yet again, between nannies so I was taking care of the girls by myself. I’d volunteered for this after I
found Bo showing the three-year-olds how to shoot a crossbow. Being raised by a truly evil woman had caused Bo to have some gaps in her mothering skills. We’d had to give up fairy tales in our house because Boadicea knew the true stories. (She told the girls the sister of the witch from Hansel and Gretel was alive and living on East 23rd Street in NYC. And, yes, she too ate children.)

  Anyway, that day Adam was very excited and I was distracted because my daughter and my niece were making their stuffed toys dance on the ceiling. I just said,“See you later,” when he said he had to go somewhere. I didn’t know until hours later that Boadicea had gone with him.

  That night, alone in my bed, I awoke suddenly and knew that something was wrong. You see, I have the ability to talk to my husband in my head. He can hear me and in return I can sense him. This used to annoy him because I always knew where he was and, for the most part, what he was doing. It was the ultimate invasion of privacy. And my husband had always been a very private man.

  When the connection between Adam and me became…not broken, but strained, I awoke in fear and ran to my father’s bedroom. His bed was empty, and hadn’t been slept in.

  I knew that he was, as always, in his study, locked away with that blasted Mirror of Nostradamus, his “souvenir” from the witch. He was always studying it and writing about what he saw. I figured Boadicea was with him, as she often was, asleep on the couch.

  I gave a quick knock on the study door, but when there was no answer, I got the key from inside the vase on the hall table and opened the door. As soon as I saw my father slumped at the big, carved desk, I knew that something was wrong. When I saw that Boadicea wasn’t in the room, I knew that she was with my husband—wherever he was.

  I woke my father and minutes later the house was ablaze with light and policemen. A few hours later, Montgomerys and Taggerts, my husband’s family, started arriving from all over the country in planes, helicopters, cars and boats.

  Somewhere in the confusion, my father pulled me into the study and leaned against the door. “The mirror is gone.”

  That hit me so hard I had to sit down. If both Adam and his sister were gone and the Mirror of Nostradamus as well, then there was evil involved. True evil, not just some kidnapper who wanted ransom money. I could have handled a kidnapper.

  When I started shaking, my father held me. After a while, Michael Taggert came into the room. He was my husband’s cousin and one of the few people who knew the truth of what had happened in Connecticut—and knew the truth about me. He knew what I could do with my mind and what I had done—all that I allowed anyone to know, that is.

  Michael held my hands, looked into my eyes, and asked me to tell him what I felt. I loved Mike for that. With most people, if they find out I can intuit things about them, they’re scared to death. They have nasty little secrets they don’t want anyone to see. But not Mike. He didn’t care what I saw; he had nothing he was ashamed for people to know about him.

  I told him I felt that Adam and Bo were alive, but they were trapped in some way, and I couldn’t figure out how. Underwater? In a cave? In an evil-protected place?

  A search was launched, millions spent, but Adam and Boadicea’s plane was never found.

  During the first months, I hardly slept. Adam’s cousins took care of the girls. Adam, Dad, Bo and I had worked hard to hide from people, including relatives, what the girls could do. But we’d underestimated the Montgomery-Taggert clan. They laughed at the girls’ antics and shielded them from the public.

  I concentrated day and night on trying to find where Adam and Boadicea were, but I knew someone was hiding them—and hiding them in a magical way that made it impossible for me to find them.

  After they’d been missing for three months, I awoke at two A.M. and knew that something had happened. My heart was racing, the blood pounded in my ears, but at first I couldn’t figure out what I was feeling. I had to force myself to be calm and concentrate.

  After a while I realized it was the mirror. The mirror was no longer with Adam and Boadicea. It had become separated from them and it was…it was traveling. I could almost see it. Desert. Sand. Camels. Trucks.

  I ran to wake my father, but he was at his computer in his study. He missed his wife so much that he rarely slept. Quickly, I told him what I’d felt.

  “If we find the mirror it could lead us to them,” he said, then had me go over everything I’d seen in my vision. By late that afternoon he was on a plane to the Middle East to begin his search for the mirror.

  It was after he left and I was alone in the house with two children and a couple of employees—search headquarters for Adam and Boadicea had been moved to the family home in Colorado—that I first heard how I was being accused of having done something to the plane. It was said that I wanted to get rid of my rich husband and my sister-in-law so I could have the money I so dearly loved.

  Once again, Michael Taggert came to my rescue. He fired the people who worked for me because they’d made sure I saw the tabloids, and he begged me to go to Colorado with him. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave the place where I felt close to Adam. I told Mike I wanted to stay in Virginia and raise the girls and do what I could to find Adam and Bo. I said that my father and I were in daily contact, and I promised that if he found anything I’d call in the reinforcements of all the Montgomerys and Taggerts.

  I meant every word I said, but I soon found out how impossible it was to do. The first time I took the girls to see a movie, a woman spit on me. I had to grab my daughter in one arm and my niece in the other for fear they’d try—and succeed—in turning the woman upside down and shaking her.

  For a few months after that one of the Montgomery cousins lived with us and took the children back and forth to their nursery school, but after there were “accidents” in the classroom that I knew the girls had caused, I removed them from the school.

  Finally, Susan Montgomery, the woman who’d raised my husband after his parents disappeared, flew to Virginia to talk to me. She suggested the children go to Colorado, and until the girls learned to “control themselves”—she was so polite—they’d be homeschooled.

  I protested that I could arrange that in Virginia.

  All Susan did was look at me and I saw myself through her eyes. I was a mess. When I wasn’t putting myself in a trance as I tried to locate Adam and Bo, I was crying. I’d had a lonely childhood, then I’d found a man who loved me, a father who loved me, and a sister-in-law who needed masses of love. Added to this were two little girls who were love personified.

  Yet in one day I’d lost it all.

  I sent my niece and daughter to Colorado to be with their relatives. The children needed some laughter in their lives. Since their father’s disappearance, there’d been nothing but tears in our house.

  That had been months ago. I’d flown—privately, on the Montgomery jet—to Colorado several times and had spent a lot of time with the girls, but I’d always returned to Virginia to continue trying to use my mind to locate Adam and Boadicea.

  I talked to my father every day that he could get to a phone. He’d been tracking the mirror for months now. It had been close to him several times but it had always eluded him.

  As for me, I’d stopped crying every minute I wasn’t in a trance and was now at the stage where I just plain missed my husband. I didn’t go out, was never seen in public, because I couldn’t bear what was thought of me. Reporters still camped at the end of the driveway and now and then the alarm system would go off because someone had come over the wall.

  Now, after all these months, my mother had written me that I owed her and she wanted me to help some actor. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t leave my search for Adam, but I’d come to realize that whoever—whatever—was holding him was in control. All my concentrating of the last months hadn’t made a dent in the field around them. I was beginning to think that Adam and Bo were asleep. If Bo were here, she’d probably tell me the truth behind the Sleeping Beauty story. No doubt Ms. Beauty’s descendants
were now living in Minnesota.

  The thought of Bo made tears come to my eyes, so I looked away from Lincoln Aimes. “I don’t think I can help you,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” he said as he stood up. “If you could find people you’d find your husband, wouldn’t you? Unless—”

  When he broke off, I looked back at him to see what he’d meant by that. I knew he’d just been stating facts as he knew them, but his embarrassment filled the room.

  “I didn’t mean…” he began. “I just meant that, how could you help? With the Montgomery money? But then—”

  When he realized he was making things worse, he shut up. What interested me was that my mother had not told this man anything about me. I’d never told anyone, not even Adam, the details of what had happened inside that room with the witch and her henchmen, but my mother had been there and she’d seen the results, and she could have told a lot. But she hadn’t.

  Lincoln Aimes was standing; I was sitting. He was over six feet and over two hundred pounds, while I am five-two and under a hundred pounds. I guess he should have been intimidating, but he wasn’t. I could sense that he was a good guy. He’d missed out on some love in his life but I didn’t feel any violence in him. Unless of course he was a powerful warlock and was able to block me from seeing his true self, as had happened to me in Connecticut. Somehow, I didn’t think so.

  True, he doubted me, but he’d hidden in the back seat of the gardener’s car to get to me so he deserved something.

  “Here,” I said, handing him a pad of paper and a pencil. “Write down some things you’ve lost over the years.”

  He tried to conceal his smirk but I felt it. I didn’t mind. After what I’d been through in my life, a smirk was almost a caress.

  He handed me a list of five items, some of them from his childhood.

  Four of them were easy. “Your father stepped on the ring and broke it so your mother threw it away.”