Second to Cry Read online

  ‘He needs your help,’ Buck said, almost choking on the words as they were so hard for him to say. ‘He knows something is wrong, she’s lying to him about the paternity of their son. He deserves to know the truth. He’s a good man; he would never have got you involved unless he was completely certain.’

  ‘Well, thank you for your time.’ Aiden stood up and held his hand out to Buck Fern, but the old man didn’t take it.

  ‘When will you stop being taken in by pretty blondes?’ the old sheriff asked spitefully. ‘My brother needs you! Aren’t you supposed to do the right thing even when the odds are stacked against you? He’s hired you, do your damn job!’

  ‘Thanks again, Sheriff,’ Aiden smiled, choosing to ignore the comment and instead just vacating the office.

  Outside there were rumbles in the distance which suggested that the storm was close. Aiden sat in his car for a moment, contemplating what to do.

  Buck Fern was adamant that his brother didn’t have dementia and, for now, he was the most reliable source Aiden had so he had to accept what he said. It was Deena he now had questions for.

  Sighing, Aiden realized that since moving to Avalon he felt more like a private investigator than a lawyer.

  Large, heavy drops of rain began to splash down on his windscreen, washing away the dust which had accumulated on his drive over.

  He imagined Meegan at home, anxiously watching the rain as she knew that it preceded the more frightening parts of the storm. He needed to be there with her, to comfort her and remind her that she was safe. The case would have to wait until the following day when he would resume his role of private investigator/lawyer.

  It was raining heavily by the time Aiden arrived home. Meegan was sat cross-legged on the floor in the lounge, staring intently out of the window.

  ‘It’s really coming down out there,’ Isla noted from the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah, looks like we’re in for some rough weather,’ he was careful not to use the word storm for fear of distressing his anxious daughter.

  ‘Me no like rain,’ Meegan told him as he approached to kiss her, her eyes wide and sincere.

  ‘I know,’ he said, leaning down and kissing her forehead. She smelt of grass and vanilla.

  ‘Make it stop,’ she instructed, pressing her small palms against the glass of the window.

  ‘I wish I could.’

  ‘How was work?’ Isla called.

  ‘Fine.’

  Aiden took off his jacket and shook off the few droplets of rain which had attached themselves to him during his short sprint from the driveway.

  ‘Still on the paternity case?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Aiden tried to sound nonchalant. He wasn’t in the mood to discuss the case, not yet. He was still conflicted over it all. Nothing seemed to make sense or add up. Someone was lying to him, he just wasn’t sure who.

  A distant murmur of thunder crackled and Meegan screamed.

  ‘Nooo!’ she wailed. ‘No storm!’

  ‘I was hoping she’d be in bed before it came,’ Isla said as she came and scooped up the distressed little girl.

  ‘Nooo!’ Meegan cried again, her face scrunched-up and red with despair as she cried rivers of anguished tears.

  ‘It’s okay, baby girl,’ Isla whispered, her voice soothing.

  ‘We should have moved to California,’ Aiden joked.

  ‘Shhh,’ Isla continued to try and console Meegan who refused to stop crying. ‘Aid, can you go finish dinner?’ she asked over the din of Meegan’s despair.

  ‘Sure.’

  The kitchen of Aiden’s home was modest yet functional. The kitchen in their Chicago apartment had been the height of modern luxury; minimalist with plenty of chrome. This kitchen felt much more homely.

  It was a small room, just about accommodating the white wooden circular dining table which seated four and presided in the middle of the grey tiled floor. The units were also white wood and the kitchen surfaces were grey granite which had been dulled by time. It was a pleasant space though it would definitely benefit from the addition of some colour. Isla had tried to liven it up with bright green-and-yellow gingham curtains and some flowers in a vase on the table, but really the whole room needed to be re-done. As Aiden headed in there to prepare tea, he made a mental note to look into getting a new kitchen.

  There was already chicken in sauce bubbling on the stove which Aiden merely had to stir. The stove was located near the window and outside he could see that the rain had become torrential and was lashing against the glass with a frightening ferocity.

  Watching the weather had always relaxed Aiden. There was something therapeutic about it. One thing he really missed about working and living in the city was that in being so high up in a tower block, you could see an approaching batch of bad weather coming from miles away, a dark blot in the sky which gradually grew closer and closer.

  He hoped that Meegan’s fear of storms would soon subside. As a child, Aiden used to sit with his father and watch storms as they unleashed their fury on nearby farmland. His father had taught him that if you counted between a rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning, that each second counted for a mile.

  ‘When it’s two miles, you head for the shelter,’ his father had told him. ‘Until then, you can sit and watch and enjoy it. Its nature’s fireworks show.’

  Aiden wanted to sit and count the miles with Meegan, just as he had as a child.

  ‘Can you close the curtains in there?’ Isla asked from the living room as Meegan settled into more silent sobs in her arms. ‘She might settle more if she can’t see anything.’

  Leaning forward, Aiden obliged, blocking out the watery scene with the green-and-yellow square patterned curtains.

  The family settled down for dinner and, bar the fury of the weather outside, a calmness ensued.

  Meegan, distracted by her dinner, forgot her fears about the impending storm and instead focused on getting her meal all over her face and hands.

  Aiden and Isla had a much more civilized approach to their chicken in sauce and baked potatoes.

  ‘So was work okay today?’ Isla asked between mouthfuls.

  ‘Yeah, it was fine,’ Aiden nodded, then sighed and added, ‘well, it’s proving a tougher case than I thought.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The wife came to see me.’

  ‘The Playboy model?’ Isla sounded unimpressed.

  ‘Yeah. She came and told me that her husband only wants the paternity case because he is senile, suffering with dementia and basically forgetting key things, like having his second child.’

  ‘I suppose he is old,’ Isla considered.

  ‘But I’ve met him,’ Aiden countered, placing down his cutlery. ‘And he seemed completely compos mentis.’

  ‘Perhaps the dementia comes and goes, that’s what happened to my Aunt Lorrell.’

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to just take his wife’s word for it. So I went to see his brother.’

  ‘Isn’t that?’ Isla raised a concerned eyebrow.

  ‘Yeah, Buck Fern.’

  ‘That must have been fun,’ she said sarcastically. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Well I tried to skirt around it but eventually I had to just come out and ask if his brother had dementia.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Weird, so one of them is lying.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Aiden agreed.

  ‘Finished!’ Meegan informed her parents proudly, pointing towards her now-empty food bowl. The problem was that, rather than eating her dinner, she was wearing most of it.

  ‘Meegs, you’re such a mess!’ Isla moaned, getting up to get a cloth and momentarily ignoring her own dinner.

  Meegan giggled happily, satisfied with her mess.

  ‘Want me to bath her?’ Aiden offered.

  ‘Would you?’ Isla said gratefully. ‘I’ll tidy up down here then if you can sort her.’

  Bath times were easily one of Aiden’s favourit
e times of the day. He struggled to believe that he’d missed out on so many when they lived in the city.

  Meegan loved to sit in the water and play with her rubber ducks. She had three and they were a family.

  ‘This is you and Mommy,’ she explained to Aiden as he washed her hair. ‘And this one is me!’

  In the bathroom, which had no windows only a fan outlet, it was easy for Meegan to forget about the storm outside. Aiden could hear it distantly; the drum roll of thunder and the relentless patter of rain, but Meegan was blissfully distracted.

  ‘We are going swimming,’ she splashed the ducks around in the water, giggling merrily as she did so.

  Aiden watched her fondly. She was around the same age as Davis Fern. Aiden had never doubted that she was his child. From the moment she was born he’d held her in his arms and knew she was his, that they would for ever be bound to one another. He considered how he’d feel if he suddenly found out that she wasn’t actually his and that someone else was her father.

  He watched Meegan splash about in the bath, her dark hair now wet and plastered to her head. He loved her, and the love went beyond sharing DNA. If Aiden wasn’t Meegan’s father, he would still be her daddy. Two years was more than enough time to fall in love with a child and forge a bond. As he rinsed the soap suds from her hair, he pondered just what had happened to make Samuel Fern want to be disconnected from his youngest son?

  The storm was almost upon them as Aiden towel-dried Meegan and dressed her in her favourite purple nightdress. Now they were in her bedroom, he could see through the curtains the electric flashes of lightning, so he counted the seconds between the bolts and the rumbles of thunder. Meegan was now too tired to be scared, her eyes fluttering beneath the weight of her fatigue as she was prepared for bed.

  ‘Are you tired?’ Aiden asked gently.

  ‘No!’ Meegan retorted angrily, then yawned.

  ‘Well, it’s bedtime now.’ Aiden carefully lowered her in to her crib.

  ‘Lord Mugglesworth,’ Meegan murmured sleepily. Aiden knew she was referring to her beloved stuffed hedgehog so he retrieved him from her toy basket and placed him beside her. Within a matter of seconds of her head touching her pillow, Meegan was sound asleep, transported from the terror of the storm, from the routine of family life, to the serene world of dreams.

  ‘She’s sleeping? Good,’ Isla whispered from the bedroom door, peering round to look in. ‘It’s right above us now so I’m glad you managed to get her to bed okay.’

  Downstairs with his wife, Aiden watched the storm unfold. Sat on the sofa before the windows he saw the rain tear in to the earth, kicking up mud and grass shoots as it did so. The sparks of lightning lit up the sky, breaking up the darkness of the night. Even though it was only early evening, the storm had blotted out the sun making it feel much later.

  The thunder continued to echo above them, like the rumbles of an angry God’s stomach, hungry for destruction.

  ‘What are you going to do about the case?’ Isla asked as they sat, each with a beer, watching nature’s firework show.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If you want my opinion, and I’m loath to say it, I’d trust Buck Fern on this one.’

  ‘You would?’ Aiden asked, surprised, certain that his wife would side with Deena Fern. He’d previously found that women would often have a strange allegiance to one another, as if they were bound by an unwritten code of sisterhood to support one another.

  ‘Yeah. I mean, who has something to lose? Buck doesn’t risk anything in telling you his brother is of sound mind. In fact, it would probably benefit him if he did have dementia as he would be able to lay some claim to the estate. The wife, on the other hand, risks losing everything if the second son actually isn’t his.’

  ‘So you think she’s lying about the dementia to get me away from the case?’

  ‘I think she’s lying about a lot of things.’

  Aiden nodded and sipped thoughtfully on his beer. What Isla was saying made a lot of sense but it saddened him to consider that maybe Davis wasn’t actually Samuel’s son. Because if Aiden proved him to not be the father, the family would be torn apart and that was never a nice sight to see.

  ‘Don’t feel guilty about any of it,’ Isla said softly, sensing her husband’s anxieties. ‘You’re only doing your job.’

  ‘Well sometimes my job sucks,’ he sighed. ‘The part I hate in all of this is that there is a kid involved. And kids are always innocent; it’s only the parents who make the mistakes.’

  ‘I know.’ Isla leant her head against Aiden’s shoulder and they continued to watch the storm, which now appeared to be losing some of its previous venom, already moving on to another town.

  Aiden finished his beer and continued to dwell on the case. Then, suddenly ,he thought of Brandy and how she hated storms. He hoped that she was okay in Chicago, and safe. As the storm outside began to dissipate Aiden realized, with a pang, just how much he missed her.

  He felt reluctant to proceed with the paternity case without first confronting Deena directly about it. Maybe people were right, maybe he was just a sucker for a pretty blonde, or maybe he kept finding women who needed saving. Either way, he knew he owed it to her to speak with her first. He knew with strange certainty that it’s what Brandy would want him to do as, like him, her concern would be over the welfare of the child.

  Deena Fern was the kind of woman where everyone she went, she turned heads. Various sets of eyes would follow, stalking her every move. It had always been that way, since long before the Playboy shoot, though that had made things more prominent, amplified it all. Deena had been attracting attention since she turned thirteen and suddenly developed breasts and stopped being tall and awkward and became lean and curvaceous.

  She enjoyed the attention, particularly as a young woman. She learnt quickly how to manipulate men using her physical attributes to get what she wanted. In high school she barely sat any exams, yet had her diploma. Her wardrobe was a trophy case of everything her looks had given her; designer shoes, dresses and handbags all worth a small fortune.

  Deena liked using her looks to get ahead. It was easy and required little effort on her part. But her perspective shifted when she became a mother. Suddenly her looks were irrelevant. She felt lost after a lifetime of trading with her beauty. It didn’t matter to Jude and Davis what she looked like, all they cared about were the cuddles when they felt unwell, or the kiss goodnight after a story.

  The day Jude was born, Deena Fern changed. She stopped being the former model, the tease and she became a mother. It was a role she knew she’d happily maintain until the end of her days. Whilst scary at first and an adjustment, being a mother fulfilled her. She was needed for more than her pretty face and that gave her confidence to be herself, to stop hiding behind the make-up mask.

  Yet as Deena entered motherhood and her confidence as a woman grew, her powers as a seductress seemed to wane. She felt Samuel slipping from her grasp, pulling further away. He too now saw her as a mother, not an object of desire. He ceased buying her the extravagant gifts, no longer whisked her away for impromptu weekends in historic European cities.

  Instead he moved her to Avalon and hid her away, no longer wanting to show off his prize. Deena was at a loss as to what to do. As her looks were failing to entice him, she had no idea how to deal with him. Like all other men, Samuel Fern had responded so easily to a low-cut dress, to provocative lingerie, but none of these tricks worked now; he’d only scoff and tell her to remember she was a mother. Perhaps that was the problem; Deena couldn’t be both to him, she couldn’t be both a siren and also the mother to his children. But, as the latter, she was almost completely invisible to him. She adored being a mother, it validated her, gave her life purpose, but she missed being adored by another. She longed to feel hungry eyes gorging upon her flesh, to see them panting with desire. Deena Fern became lonely.

  *

  Aiden knew that Deena was in the park with her sons even before
he saw her. The body language of the other few dads there with their children gave her away.

  They were no longer watching their little bundles of joy as they tottered between the monkey bars and the swing set; instead their gaze was fixed intently on the sandpit, where Deena Fern was perched on the edge, her two sons happily playing inside, filling pitchers full of sand only to immediately empty them again.

  It was late on a Saturday morning and the air was still crisp from the previous night’s storm. The sun had appeared, drying out the ground but had yet to bestow its full heat upon the town.

  Isla had gone to have her nails done at the next town over which apparently had an ‘adequate’ beauty salon, so Aiden was in charge of Meegan and when asked what she wanted to do, the toddler had promptly replied, ‘Park.’

  And so here they were. And, as luck would have it, so was Deena Fern.

  ‘Sand!’ Meegan declared as soon as they stepped within the gates of the park. She began to walk awkwardly over to the sandpit, focusing intently on making sure she didn’t fall over. But she did, several times. Usually she’d scream and wail but not at the park, at the park she was too concerned with having fun.

  Meegan was pulling herself into the sandpit as Aiden caught up with her. She reached out to grab at the pitcher Davis was filling and Aiden stopped her, ‘Play nice, Meegs,’ he said in his stern father voice.

  Deena looked up from her perch on the edge and regarded him from behind her sunglasses.

  ‘Mrs Fern.’ Aiden smiled politely.

  ‘Mr Connelly,’ she sighed. He could see from her body language that she was not happy. She tensed up and began to pick at the wooden outer structure of the sand box. If her boys weren’t having so much fun she would probably have immediately left.

  Meegan was now immersed in a game with Jude and Davis, where they all tried to fill one pitcher between them as quickly as possible. Aiden noticed how his daughter, in her frantic attempt to move sand, was cupping it with her small hands and managing to get more of it over herself than in the pitcher. He’d have to bath her before Isla got home.

  ‘Could we talk?’ Aiden asked Deena after five minutes of awkward silence. He didn’t like to discuss sensitive matters around children but he had no choice. The only thing that was keeping her from running off was the children and he certainly couldn’t go to her home to speak with her.