I laughed. “Okay, you’ve made your point.”
We fell silent again, then I said, “Helen, what about Warren Ducane’s claim?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. Lily is right, but a few facial features and expressions hardly prove he’s Max. Still, there’s something…something about him that truly does remind me of Katy. Wishful thinking, probably. If Lily and Warren both accept him as their heir, he’ll be the richest young man who ever asked you for your phone number.”
“Aren’t there blood tests or something that can be done?”
“If Katy or Todd were alive, they might be able to show something- although I believe those tests can only exclude people who aren’t parents, not prove that a person is the parent. In any case, it doesn’t matter-Katy and Todd are dead.”
“Kyle said their bodies were never found.”
“No, they weren’t. But believe me, the world would have heard from Katy by now if she were alive.”
Early the next morning, a press release was issued by the office of an attorney named Zeke Brennan. Kyle Yeager was legally changing his name to Maxwell Ducane, and would instantly become the wealthiest young man in Las Piernas. The release stated that he would not be available for interviews.
O’Connor tried calling his hotel. He had checked out.
Lillian Vanderveer Linworth would only say that she looked forward to getting to know the young man better, but had no plans at present to change her will. Mitch Yeager refused to comment.
Kyle-or Max-didn’t call me.
Twenty-four hours after the announcement, O’Connor filed a story noting the disappearance of Warren Ducane.
24
“W HAT ARE YOU DOING?” SONYA YEAGER ASKED HER HUSBAND. “ARE you cooking?”
Mitch Yeager looked at her with disfavor. “No, I’m standing here in my robe and slippers at the stove, holding onto a pan, because I lost my way to the bathroom.”
“Mitch, I really get that you’re angry.”
He clenched his teeth. She had gone to one of those est seminars a year or so ago and hadn’t been able to talk right since. I get. I get. Werner Erhard was the only one who got-he got a lot of money for telling people that they couldn’t leave the room to take a leak while he insulted them. Now, there was a racket. A fucking cult. Mitch had let Sonya go to get her out of his hair for the weekend. When she wanted to keep enrolling in other courses, though, he refused-he didn’t want his kids talking like she did now.
“A man gets up to make a glass of warm milk for himself,” he said. “What’s it to you?”
“We have a cook. It doesn’t look right for you to do stuff like this yourself.”
“Who the hell is looking? And who the hell cares if they do?”
“I get that,” she said, nodding her pretty blond head. “But I could have done that for you. All you had to do was ask.”
“I didn’t want to trouble you,” he lied. He suppressed an impulse to tell her that she’d be better off spending her time with the peroxide bottle, because her dark roots were showing. She took comments about her hair to heart, and he didn’t want to have to deal with one of her crying jags.
“It wouldn’t have been any trouble, Mitch. I like doing things for you.”
Problem is, you only do one thing well, he thought to himself. Aloud he said, “Go to bed, Sonya. I’m fine.”
“Okay, I get that you want to be alone.”
“Right.” Well, if Werner could teach the bimbo that much, maybe the money hadn’t been wasted after all.
He poured the milk from the pan into a glass and took it into the larger of his two studies. He flipped a control on the Lionel train set that occupied most of the center of the room and idly sipped his milk as he watched the black steam locomotive make its way around the elaborate circuit laid out for it.
He had bought this train for that little shit who was now calling himself Max Ducane.
He tightened his fist in anger, thinking of the boy giving up the name he had given him. He had bestowed his brother Adam’s middle name on him, and now he rejected it. Rejected the Yeager name, too.
Mitch sat down in an overstuffed chair, took another sip of milk.
Some of his earliest memories were of Adam, warming a pan of milk in the small, sloping kitchen of the tiny ramshackle house downwind of the San Pedro canneries, a rented home in an area that reeked of fish processing (to this day, Mitch could not eat a tuna fish sandwich), a few blocks from the wharves where fishing boats were anchored. His father worked on boats if matters grew desperate, but mostly made a few dollars playing cards with sailors and longshoremen.
When Mitch had been a toddler and troubled with sleeplessness, Adam used to prepare warm milk for him. Warm milk was one of Mitch’s few pleasant memories from those days.
It was typical of Adam, who was seven years his senior, to act as both mother and father to Mitch, although both parents were living at that time. Their mother spent the hours she wasn’t drinking passed out on the sofa or floor. Their father, Horace Yeager, avoided the house as much as possible.
Horace had hoped that eloping with Myra Granville, the only child of his wealthy employer, would earn him advancement in the company, if not a life of luxury and leisure. Instead, the old man fired him.
Horace then sent his wife in to plead their case-she was informed that her father would not speak to her unless she was no longer living with Horace Yeager. The birth of a grandchild-thought by Mr. Yeager to be a surefire way to soften his father-in-law’s heart-only brought about a notice from an attorney, informing his wife that she would not inherit a penny.
By the time Mitch began school, Horace Yeager was living in another house with another drunken woman in another part of the country. Mitch’s mother told other people Horace was dead. Within a year, this was true-he was killed by an unknown assailant after he had won a large amount of money in a card game. The money was missing.
Not long after their father abandoned the family, a remarkable person appeared at their door. Mitch remembered looking in awe at the long black car that pulled up in front of the house. A liveried chauffeur came to the door and offered to take Adam, Mitch, and their mother “home.” Mitch was six years old. Adam, at thirteen, was less impressed, but no less eager to live at the mansion so often pointed out to him by their father.
Their mother’s response to this olive branch was to reply that the chauffeur could tell her father to go fuck himself. The man’s startled expression indicated that he was more surprised to hear a woman use such language than the boys were, but he said nothing back to her. He pulled a white envelope from his vest, placed it on the kitchen table, and left.
The envelope was embossed with their grandfather’s monogram. His mother stared at it, then said to Adam, “Open it and read it to me. I don’t want to touch the damned thing.”
There was not, as expected, a letter. There was nothing in the envelope but money.
Their mother was more than happy to touch the money. Mitch saw Adam palm five dollars out of it before he handed it to her. Adam used the five dollars to make sure they ate. The rest, their mother spent on booze.
The chauffeur continued to come by once every two weeks, always bringing an envelope. He always handed it directly to Adam. Adam and Mitch, forbidden to mention their grandfather, began referring to him as “the chief” and spent every night before the chauffeur was due worrying that the old man might change his mind about supplying money to boys he did not know and a woman who despised him.
Adam once took a greater share of the cash for their household expenses, and their mother beat the tar out of him for it. Mitch tried to help Adam fight her off, and got a black eye for his trouble.
Adam repaid her by walking to the landlord’s house and tipping him off about the chauffeur’s schedule. The landlord learned to come by the house to demand the rent within minutes after the chauffeur appeared.
Adam contrived in this way to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Mitch gathered scrap wood for the fireplace, the sole source of heat for the house. That winter, it wasn’t enough-Mitch came down with a
