“It doesn’t matter what she told me. I’m here and I’m asking you for the truth. Okay? If you’re my father, then I think you owe me the truth, if nothing else.” Her voice was low and quiet. Was it weird that she felt so calm? Her eyes were dry. She felt emptied out.
“Laura never had a relationship with Tom. Tom was my friend. He had a girlfriend in Virginia he was very serious about. Laura and I, we had our thing. There was nothing with Tom, not ever.”
“Tel me about his death.”
Dandridge shook his head. “I don’t . . . what do you think happened? We were drinking one night, messing around, playing music. I went to bed. Honestly? Laura was pissing me off. I’m sorry.
Maybe I shouldn’t say that. But . . .” He let his voice trail off as he laughed awkwardly. “I mean, she’s your mother. You know the deal.”
“Yes,” Hannah said, quietly.
“So we had an argument and she cal ed a cab and went back to the hotel. Tom was alone when he went down to the jetty. I don’t know why he went down so late. We thought later maybe he forgot something and went to get it—the cops found the book he was reading in the gal ey of the boat the next day. It could have been something that stupid. The wood on the jetty was slippery as hel .
The cops thought he just lost his footing. He hit his head on the way into the water and he drowned. The postmortem—”
“The postmortem?” Hannah interrupted. “There was a postmortem?”
“Wel , yeah. Any sudden death like that, there’s always a postmortem. And it showed that he’d hit his head but also that he’d inhaled water. They found some of his blood on the edge of the jetty where he hit his head on the way into the water. He’d either been conscious but disoriented or unconscious but stil breathing, when he went in. Either way, the coroner said it was an accident.”
Shit. Hannah wanted to press her face into her hands, to block out the world so that she could think. But he was there and so she couldn’t do that. She clutched her pen and tried not to let her uncertainty and her need for answers show on her face.
“Why are you here?” Dandridge said, suddenly. “Does Rob know you’re my . . . does he know the history?”
Hannah just shook her head. The man sitting opposite her bore no resemblance at al to the monster in her mother’s diary but that didn’t make him a good or trustworthy person. Stil , there were questions she needed to ask him.
“For years I thought Tom Spencer was my father,” she said. “His family paid my mother money to look after me, after his death. They must have believed it too. If you real y are my father, then my mother lied to the Spencer family and you let her do it. Why?”
He flushed. He was silent for a long time, obviously floundering, searching for words. “Shit, Hannah. I was twenty-one and I was stupid. That’s the truth. My dad had just lost a lot of money on a bad investment. I was broke and I was pissed and I was looking for a way . . . I didn’t want to lose everything, you know? And Laura and I had already moved on from each other. We were over by the time she told me she was pregnant. Look, truth is, I didn’t take it very wel .
I didn’t step up the way I should have.”
Hannah took a breath. “Whose idea was it to scam the Spencer family?”
He was very stil . “I don’t know what to tel you.”
“Tel me the truth.”
His flush was deeper. An uneven, splotchy, almost purple that made him look old and sick. The reality of the fact that he’d spent the past eleven years in jail hit her hard.
“It was Laura. But I went along with it. When she realized my family didn’t have any money, or at least not the kind of money that she wanted, she thought about Tom. He was dead. His family were shaken up . . . Laura thought that she could say that she was pregnant with Tom’s baby. If I backed her up, they’d have no reason not to believe her. And she figured they’d pay to be rid of her, as long as she wasn’t too expensive.”
“What about DNA? Why didn’t they ask for a test? For proof?”
“They probably would have, if it wasn’t for me. I went to Tom’s dad. Laura wrote me a script. I told him that Tom had been with a girl in Maine, that the girl had been head over heels for him, that she was a sweet, poor girl from a religious family. He was very upset. He didn’t want Tom’s girlfriend or her family or anyone else in Virginia to know about it. I told him that Laura didn’t want to cause any trouble.
She just wanted to take care of her baby.”
“Jesus.”
“It sounds bad. It is bad, I know. It’s something I’m real y not proud of. But I was young and stupid.” Hannah said nothing and after a moment Dandridge continued. “My relationship with my family was a mess. My dad knew I was using drugs. He wasn’t happy. He’d already threatened to cut me off. I didn’t want to go to him and tel him I’d gotten a girl pregnant. I was scared. I didn’t want my life to change.”
“So the Spencers paid my mother off.”
“Yes.”
“And you took a share too, right?” There was no way he’d lie like that just to take care of Laura and a baby he clearly didn’t want.
He widened his eyes and spread his hands “Not much. Real y, Hannah, not much. I wanted most of the money to be there for you, to keep you safe. Look, I know this al sounds terrible, but you have to understand. Thomas and Toni Spencer, the whole family, they are loaded. I mean loaded. The money they paid Laura they didn’t miss for a second.”
“Their son was dead. They were grieving. You knew it and you took advantage.” Jesus. This was her father. This is what she came from. And her mother. That diary. That goddamn diary. It had been a lie. Every last word of it.
Dandridge was nodding. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I can’t argue with that. But I’ve been in prison for eleven years. I think, if I deserved punishment for what I did, I’ve had it and then some.”
She believed him. God help her. Maybe she was a fool . . . no, clearly she was a fool. Laura had lied to her and manipulated her for years and she’d al owed it. Why? Oh God, why? Hadn’t some part of her known that things didn’t quite add up? She’d been so young when she’d found the diary—discovering it, now that she thought about it, in a box of old papers that Laura had asked her to sort out.
Young, but old enough to know what her mother was. So why hadn’t she seen the truth? Because . . . because there’d been a busy little part of her mind that brushed away doubts, directed her attention away from inconsistencies, reassured her that Laura’s behavior—her neediness, her manipulation, her sporadic outbursts and destructiveness and selfishness—al of it was understandable and excusable, seen through the light of the diary. But only because a part of her had wanted to believe it. That was the worst of it. She, who had so prided herself on her clear-sightedness. She had been the most deluded of al .