Marcia Talley - A Quiet Death

Something wasn’t making sense. There had been no mention of a child in the letters. No mention of anyone named Aupry. Yet, if clues to Skip’s paternity lay in those letters, then his father had to be Zan.

‘Zan?’ I asked.

She raised one elegant eyebrow.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘When I couldn’t track Skip down, I had to look through the letters for clues in order to find you.’ After a moment, I said, ‘I hope I’m not being too nosy, but is Nick’s father named Alexander Aupry?’

Lilith smiled enigmatically. ‘No.’

‘Why didn’t Skip take his father’s name, then?’

I was hoping she’d let her lover’s name slip and I could catch John Chandler in a lie, but she simply looked pained and said, ‘Things were different back then, Hannah. An unmarried woman. An unexpected pregnancy.’

Suddenly, Lilith smiled. ‘Unexpected, but definitely not unwanted. Nick was my gift from Zan, and Zan…’ She shrugged. ‘Well, Zan was no longer part of my life. So…’ She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘We, that is my family and I, decided it would be best if Nick were raised by my mother’s brother in Switzerland. Nick always knew I was his mother, but… well, for many reasons, it was easier if he took his uncle’s name.’

That’s where I’d heard the name before – in the report of the Air France crash that took the lives of Lilith’s parents: Lucille Aupry. Aupry was Lilith’s mother’s maiden name.

I wondered what Lilith meant by ‘family.’ By my reckoning, her parents had been dead for almost twenty years by the time Nick was born. Who did the troubled young woman turn to for advice? Her aunt? Her grandmother?

Lilith sat quietly, gnawing on a thumbnail as if trying to decide how much to tell me. Finally, she looked up. ‘When Nick got old enough to ask about his father, I lied. I told him I didn’t know who his father was. Before Nick was born, I lived in New York City, as you know, working as an artist. I was part of the “New York scene.”’ She drew quote marks in the air with her fingers. ‘Painting all day, clubbing every night. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Some nights I never went to bed at all. I’m not proud of that, mind you. I’m just telling it like it was.

‘Do you remember Andy Warhol’s show, Fifteen Minutes ? On MTV?’ she continued.

I stifled a groan. I suppose there must have been a time when MTV actually aired music videos rather than littering the television landscape with mindless prank and reality shows like Jackass and Jersey Shore respectively, but I was never a dim-witted twelve-to-eighteen-year-old, so I never fit in with their demographics. ‘On MTV? I must have missed it.’

‘I appeared in Warhol’s first episode, along with Jerry Hall and Dweezel and Moon Zappa.’ Lilith grinned. ‘That was in 1986.

‘I don’t know what came over me, but I told Nick that he was the result of a one-night stand. Honestly, you’d think I could come up with something better than that, even when stoned.

‘The last time Nick came to visit, we had an argument about… well, never mind. I left him alone in the house, to stew in his own juice, and went out by myself to the movies in Cambridge. Nicholas doesn’t deal very well with chaos. That’s probably when he found…’

Lilith slid the package off the table and placed it in her lap, cradling it against her breast like the precious object it was. ‘Nicholas looks a lot like his father when his father was the same age,’ she said. ‘Sometimes when I look at my son… well, my heart aches.’

‘And Zan is… who?’

Lilith chuckled. ‘If I wouldn’t tell Nick, my own son, why would I tell you, Hannah?’

I felt my face redden. ‘Sorry.’

‘No need to be.’ She drained her cup and set it down carefully on the saucer. ‘It’s something that happened a long time ago. No need to dredge it up. Both Zan and I live other lives now.

‘One thing that puzzles me, though, Hannah. If Nicholas is still alive, most likely recovering from his injuries somewhere, why didn’t he contact you? You said you left word at the hospital telling him that you had his package.’

I decided there’d be no harm in telling Lilith about the sleazy lawyer who’d come knocking at my door. ‘I believe your son is working through an attorney. I think there’s a very good reason he’s doing that. He doesn’t want me to know who he is.’

Lilith blinked. ‘Why on earth?’

‘Back on the train, when Skip thought he was dying?’ I paused, trying to recall Skip’s exact words. ‘He confessed to a killing.’

‘Nick? You have to be joking.’

‘I’m afraid not. He didn’t tell me any more than that, but I held his hand and we prayed together. Whatever happened afterwards, I like to think that prayer gave him peace of mind.’

Lilith reached out and squeezed my hand. ‘Thank you for that, Hannah. Not everyone would have been so caring, especially under the circumstances. My God, it must have seemed like a war zone.’

The horrors of that day seemed another world away from Lilith’s quiet garden, where the sun dappled the autumn leaves and decorated the water with shimmering light. ‘What troubles me is this,’ I said after a moment. ‘If Skip asked me to pray with him about his role in a killing, maybe he doesn’t want to be found.’ A chilling thought entered my head. ‘Do you think Skip tracked down and murdered his father?’

Lilith smiled. ‘No, no. Zan is very much alive.’

Hearing that, I felt a great sense of relief. ‘You still see him, then?’

‘Alas, no. We haven’t been together since 1987.’ Again, she stared off into the trees as if a memory were painted there. ‘We spent a magical New Year’s Eve in Seville.’

‘If Skip is twenty-three…’ I counted backwards and came to the obvious conclusion. ‘Zan doesn’t know about Skip, does he?’

‘No. I never told him.’

‘Why not?

‘Hannah, Zan was Roman Catholic. He had a wife and two young daughters. I just couldn’t.’ She pressed a hand to her mouth, took a deep breath. ‘We’d already gone our separate ways when… well, when I found out that Nicholas was on the way.’

‘But surely, if Zan had known-’ I began.

Lilith raised a hand, halting me in mid-sentence. ‘Zan and I were soulmates. Separating from him was the hardest thing I ever had to do. It nearly killed me. It nearly killed us both. But after we’d made the decision to part, the last thing in the world I wanted was for Zan to come back to me purely out of a sense of obligation.’

I nodded, encouraging her to go on.

‘I wasn’t much of a mother, I’m afraid. More tea?’

As she tipped the teapot and refilled our cups, she continued. ‘Money wasn’t an issue, so Nick went to boarding schools, here and abroad. He got a great education, that’s true. Graduated with honors from Stanford. He’s just started working at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab on some project involving thought-controlled prosthetic limbs. I can’t begin to understand it.’

‘What did he hope to find among your letters?’

‘Proof of his father’s identify, I guess.’ Then she told me something I already knew. ‘But there’s no evidence of that in Zan’s letters. As I said, he didn’t know.’

‘But wouldn’t DNA testing establish that Zan is his father?’

‘Of course. But Nick would have to locate his father first.’

‘And get him to submit to the test,’ I added.

Lilith nodded in agreement, then said, ‘As I said, I didn’t even know Nick had taken Zan’s letters. I keep them in…’ She waved a hand. ‘Under my bed.’

‘What do you suppose he wants from his father?’

‘Acknowledgement would be my guess.’ She stared off into the trees where two crows were engaged in a noisy squabble over prime position on a limb. ‘As I said, Nick’s last visit ended badly. I’ve tried calling him on his cell to smooth things over. I’ve left messages, but he’s not calling me back. I thought maybe the lab sent him away on business. I didn’t know about the accident, of course.’