“What did they say?” Alice asked, amazed.
“Special Agent Clayton and Agent Rogers have them right now. They’re holding them as evidence, but I think they’ll let you look at them whenever you’re ready. But I read them all, and know this right off the bat,” he said pointedly. “You are not the daughter of Sebastian Kehoe. Lynn broke things off with him months before she learned she was pregnant with you. In her journals, she mentioned that the time of her affair with Kehoe was close enough to her pregnancy to make her worry at first.”
“So, he still might be my father?”
Dylan shook his head resolutely. “No, the timing was off once she understood how early in the pregnancy she was. Unfortunately, the timing was close enough to make Kehoe question it. But she had more evidence he wasn’t the father. Despite her insistence to Kehoe that he wasn’t the father, Kehoe persisted in believing he was for years after she stopped seeing him. Lynn had told him during their affair that Alan had some medical issues, and the chance of their conceiving a child was so negligible as to be an impossibility. Maybe it all related to the fact that Alan later was diagnosed with testicular cancer.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I do know that Alan and Lynn always referred to you as a miracle. I sensed the amount of emotion behind it when they said it. If all this is true, then for them, it was true in the literal, not the figurative sense. Especially for Lynn, who would have given up all hope of having a baby after she’d broken things off with Kehoe and resolved never to be unfaithful to Alan again. But since Kehoe was armed with the knowledge of Alan’s supposed inability to have a child, he wouldn’t let go of the idea that he was the father.
“He harassed Lynn about it for years. He was obsessed with her, and wrecked by her breakup with him. Unfortunately for Lynn, Morgantown isn’t a huge city, and the Durand executive enclave is even smaller. She was thrown together with Kehoe on several occasions at business dinners and functions. The more she avoided him, the more Kehoe’s obsession with her grew. Lynn was terrified that he’d expose the truth of their affair to Alan. I think she lived in daily, maybe hourly fear, but did everything in her power to hide that fact from Alan and you.”
“Is that why she taught me to hide? From him?” Alice asked, shivers snaking under her skin. It was incredible to believe, but twenty-some years after the fact, that was precisely what had happened. Alice had been attacked by Kehoe, and hidden in one of the spots Lynn had taught her. It probably would have worked, too, if she hadn’t been so disoriented that she didn’t realize she was leaving bloody tracks that led Kehoe straight to her.
Dylan nodded. “Lynn grew terrified of Kehoe. The real proof that you weren’t Kehoe’s child was that given your blood type, Kehoe couldn’t have been your father. Several months before your fourth birthday, she finally showed Kehoe your medical records and some articles on ruling out paternity through blood type. She’d called Kehoe up to the castle for a private meeting while Alan was out of town on business. Kehoe became enraged when she presented him with the facts. There was no way he could continue to hold on to the delusion that he was the father of the love of his life’s child . . . or that she’d ever come back to him.”
“He hit her, didn’t he?” Alice asked numbly.
“Yes. Apparently, he clubbed her on the side of her head.” Instinctively, Alice touched the left side of her head. That’s where Kehoe had first struck her to disable her. It was the blow the doctor was most concerned about. To think that Lynn—her mother—had endured a similar injury from the same man was another sad but firm bond between them. Dylan noticed her gesture and his expression went hard.
“Go on, please,” Alice insisted.
He inhaled. “You were with a babysitter, but you heard Lynn cry out when she was struck. You ran into the den. She was bleeding from her ear, and—”
“She was terrified to have me in the same room with him, and she told me to run and hide,” Alice finished.
“It was another true memory. Maybe the earliest one you’ve had,” Dylan said quietly. “I was wrong to tell you that it never happened.”
“Why didn’t she speak up?” Alice blurted out suddenly. “Why didn’t Lynn tell the police when I was kidnapped that Kehoe might be responsible? He was, by the way,” she added quickly. “Kehoe admitted to it out there by the bluff, that he hired Cunningham and Stout.”
Dylan froze. “He did?”
“Oh, he did all right. But why didn’t Lynn say anything after the kidnapping? Was she afraid of Alan finding out about her affair with Kehoe?”