“You are brave, Maggie. You saved Gabriella’s baby.”
“I left her in an orphanage!” Guilt stretched over Maggie’s face. “I couldn’t leave Oakwood—I had to stay for Gabriella. I made a promise I’d watch over her girl. She watched over me, kept Foster from touching me—she kept me safe! I owe her my life. But I deserted her baby.”
“No.” Joel sat back on his heels, and Ivy found herself blinking fast to avoid matching tears to Maggie’s. “No. You are Hallie’s guardian, just as Widow Bairns is yours. Hallie will forever thank you for that.”
Maggie swiped at her tears with her arm, wiping them on her sleeve. She nodded, seeming only to half believe what Joel stated.
Silence pervaded the room. After a moment, Joel cleared his throat. “Maggie, what was Gabriella’s real name?”
Maggie raised her head, spearing him with a determined expression. “I’ll never tell.” Her voice was hard. “Her daddy sold her to Foster. Plain out sold his daughter for money. I won’t have him coming for his granddaughter so he can do it all over again. That’s one secret you will leave with me and I will take to my grave. I swear it—on my body and my soul.”
Chapter 44
Kaine
Kaine heard the sound of footsteps on the porch and the sirens screaming up the road. Mr. Mason heard it too. She launched to her feet the moment his gun rose, and the front door flew open as Grant charged through.
“He’s got a gun!” Kaine screamed. It was all happening as if someone had stilled the moment. She saw Mr. Mason pointing his pistol at Grant. Without hesitation, Grant hurtled toward Mr. Mason, putting his body in front of Kaine’s. Tackling an elderly man brought no remorse to Grant as he straddled Mr. Mason. Gripping the older man’s wrist, Grant slammed it against the floor twice until Mr. Mason released the pistol. Kaine sprung forward and snagged it, holding it by the grip with both hands and aiming it at the man who claimed to be her distant relative via the Foster line.
“Kaine. Better set that down. I’ve got him.” Grant shot her a sideways glance.
She looked at the pistol that shook erratically in her hands. Adrenaline was seeping from her, leaving behind a horrible quake.
“Just lay it down,” Grant said again.
Surprised by the firmness in his voice, Kaine laid the pistol on the floor by the window. She wrapped her arms around her body. No way was she stepping away from the gun.
“There’s no use holding me down. I’m not fighting anymore.” Mr. Mason’s personality seemed to morph back into the aged, weaker man of the museum. Grant moved off him, then yanked him off the floor with little gentleness. He shoved him onto the bottom step of the staircase and waved his fingers at Kaine.
“The gun.”
Kaine bent and retrieved the pistol, placing it in Grant’s outstretched hand. He stuffed the gun in the back of his jeans. Any other day, in any other setting, Kaine would have no problem admitting that Grant looked remarkably sexy just now. But physical attraction was quite low on the bullet list of importance at the moment.
Grant reached for Kaine. She backed away, shaking her head. She didn’t want to be near Mr. Mason. She didn’t want to hear his ridiculous tales of ancestry, the idea that she’d descended from the Fosters. That the very people Kaine had spent her entire career working against were the sort Mr. Mason claimed she came from.
“He’s crazy.” Kaine reached behind her head and tightened her loosened ponytail, more for something to do with her hands than anything. Grant stood over the elderly man, even as he cast a glance out the window at the police pulling to a stop outside the house.
“He told me that Gabriella, not Ivy, was my great-great-grandmother, and that her baby’s father was Myrtle Foster’s son! I mean, he’s nuts, right?”
Grant’s jaw clenched.
“What is it, Grant?”
He let out a sigh. “He’s not crazy, Kaine. He’s right.”
“He’s right?” Kaine repeated in disbelief.
Grant nodded. “The voicemails I needed to check when we got here earlier?”
“Yeah?”
His jaw muscle twitched again. Grant continued to grip Mr. Mason’s shoulder, even as the cops exited their cars. “One of them was from Joy. She was so excited, she called me instead of you. Force of habit, I guess. She found more of the story in Maggie’s book. It’s all true. Right down to the fact that Gabriella saved Maggie’s life.”
Kaine drew in a shuddered breath. “So I’m a descendent of the Fosters? The ones who trafficked women?”
They were interrupted as the police took over. Mr. Mason was whipped around to face the wall, his hands cuffed, with one of the officers quoting the man his rights. Grant turned over Mr. Mason’s gun to another cop, and the next several minutes were chaos.
“We’ll need you down at the station.” Detective Carter shook his head in disbelief as the other cops led Mr. Mason from Foster Hill House. “We need a statement with your account of what happened here. I just can’t believe it, that Mason would do this.”
Kaine couldn’t either, but neither could she speak. The sick feeling was growing in her stomach. The story—her story—was unfolding in an ugly tale. Maybe the old man was right and it should have been buried and kept dead in the annals of history. Who wanted to be remembered as the offspring of rape? A result of an antiquated ring of trafficking?
“Hey.” Grant took hold of her arm, and Kaine realized she was still shaking.
She looked up at him. “I can’t, Grant. I just—can’t fathom.”
He led her out of Foster Hill House. Kaine paused on the porch, turning back toward the place. Detective Carter stood in the middle of the doorway, watching her, but Kaine looked beyond him—toward the stairwell that led up to the third bedroom. The stairwell that was guarded by the portrait of her own grandmother, three times removed. Myrtle Foster.
“Myrtle Foster knew, didn’t she?” Kaine swallowed hard. Her throat throbbed with emotion.
Grant cleared his own throat. “I called Joy, before I saw Sophie in the field. I was going to come. I was going to tell you. Maggie recounted in her diary that when Oakwood ran Myrtle and her children out of town, Arnold had already seen his father sneaking women through Foster Hill House. After the war, he came back to Oakwood and used the house, now abandoned, as a place to stop off as they transported women to and from the North.”
Kaine turned her back to Foster Hill House and walked with Grant down the porch stairs toward his truck. Sophie danced around in the bed of the pickup, her tongue lolling out, oblivious to her role as a pawn in Mr. Mason’s attempt to distract Grant and get Kaine alone. It had worked.