Jan Burke - Bloodlines

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Bloodlines: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The year is 1958. O'Connor, a young reporter with the Las Piernas News Express, is desperate to discover who has perpetrated a savage attack on his mentor, Jack Corrigan. In and out of consciousness, Corrigan claims to have witnessed the burial of a bloodstained car on a farm, but his reputation as a heavy drinker calls his strange story into question. In a seemingly unrelated mystery, a yacht bearing four members of the wealthy Ducane family disappears during a storm off the coast. An investigation finds that the Ducane home has been broken into; a nursemaid has been killed; and Max, the infant heir, has gone missing. Corrigan recovers his health, but despite a police investigation and his own tireless inquiries, the mysteries of the buried car and the whereabouts of Maxwell Ducane haunt him until his death.
Twenty years after that fateful night, in her first days as a novice reporter working for managing editor O'Connor, Irene Kelly covers the groundbreaking ceremony for a shopping center – which unexpectedly yields the unearthing of a buried car. In the trunk are human remains. Are those of the infant heir among them? If so, who is the young man who has recently changed his name to Max Ducane? Again the trail goes maddeningly, perhaps suspiciously, cold.
Until today. Irene, now married to homicide detective Frank Harriman, is a veteran reporter facing the impending closing of the Las Piernas News Express. With circulation down and young reporters fresh out of journalism school replacing longtime staffers, Irene can't help but wish for the good old days when she worked with O'Connor. So when the baffling kidnap-burial case resurfaces, Irene's tenacious love for her mentor and journalistic integrity far outweigh any fears or trepidation. Determined to make a final splash for her beloved paper and solve the mystery that plagued O'Connor until his death, Irene pursues a story that reunites her with her past and may end her career – and her life.

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O’Connor. O’Connor was here. I must have called his name aloud.

When he turned toward me and smiled, I felt faint. Frank put an arm around me, and whether anyone else was aware of it or not, that was all that kept me on my feet.

The ghost spoke. “Yes, I’m O’Connor-and you must be Irene,” he said, in O’Connor’s voice, but sweetened with a gorgeous Irish accent. “Conn was forever talking of you to me. I’m his brother Dermot.”

He extended a hand. I took it in mine and promptly burst into tears.

“There now,” he said, “it’s all right. It’s all right now.” Somehow we were maneuvered to some chairs, and I managed to regain some semblance of composure.

“It’s the devil’s own day you’ve had, isn’t it?”he said. “But I’m told you and this fellow they’re operating on have caught the one who murdered poor Maureen, all those years ago?”

“Yes.”

“Well done, child. Well done. That would please Conn so, and please him more to know you had done it. And if you need a good cry, you go right ahead and cry.”

We talked for a time, and I said, “You’re here for the DNA tests?”

“Yes, but I’m thinkin’ it will be a waste of good money by Kenny, here.”

“Oh.” I felt let down. Poor Kenny…

“He’s the image of my mother’s eldest brother, you see.”

“What?”

“Me and Conn, we had the look of the O’Connors. Kenny here favors the O’Haras, my mother’s family.” He paused and said, “I’m still glad I came, for many reasons. It’s good to know your family and friends, isn’t it? You’ll have to tell me all about your life, since I haven’t had a report in years now. Frank, don’t be jealous, but Conn always thought she’d end up with a policeman from Bakersfield.”

We explained that Conn was right. We made Dermot promise he’d come to dinner soon, so we could tell him the whole tale.

John Walters interrupted with an announcement that Ethan’s blood type was type O, and he invited anyone else who was type O to join him in donating blood. “Or any other type,” he said. “Because what Ethan can’t use, someone else will.”

“Has anyone contacted his family?” I asked.

“He doesn’t seem to have any,” John said. “His father died while he was in college, and his mother died years ago. No siblings.”

Max and Helen had stood up together when he made the first part of this announcement. When they saw that quite a few others were already on their way, they stayed back long enough to talk to me for a few minutes. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” Max said, “and that the Yeagers are finally being made to pay for some of their sins. Maybe we’ll finally find out what happened to the baby.”

I looked at Helen and said, “I think I know.”

She met my gaze. “Do you?”

“Yes. But perhaps you’d like to be somewhere more private?”

“No,” she said with a smile. “I think I’ve been private long enough, don’t you? But for Max’s sake, let’s ask the nurse if there is somewhere we can talk.”

We were ushered into a small conference room.

“Max,” I said, “you’re the real Max Ducane.”

“I don’t know what the two of you were talking about just now, or what this is all about, but it’s okay, I’m really okay now knowing I’m not Max. DNA doesn’t lie.”

“No, it doesn’t. Which is why, if Helen’s blood were tested, you’d know you were sitting next to your maternal grandmother.”

“What?”

“Do you tell this, or do I?” I asked Helen.

“Allow me to at least technically keep my word to Lillian,” she said.

I nodded and went on. “Sometime around 1936, a rather adventurous young woman who had a job at a newspaper fell in love with Handsome Jack Corrigan. He settled down later, but at the time, she knew that it was hopeless to expect him to make much of a husband. He was probably seeing Lillian Vanderveer when the newspaperwoman learned she was pregnant with his child.”

“The newspaperwoman was not virtuous, I’m afraid,” Helen said.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s likely she would have given herself to anyone else. But at that time, in her situation, unmarried and pregnant, her alternatives weren’t many. She loved her career, in a way that perhaps only someone else who has ink in her veins can understand, but this pregnancy would mean she would lose her job. Abortion would have been an illegal and dangerous back-alley matter, and she was a Catholic girl as well.”

“Again, not a very good one.”

“She wanted the child to live, but what choices did she have? If she gave birth out of wedlock, she and the child would be subject to constant ridicule. There was no chance on earth that her conservative employer would allow her to continue to work for the newspaper. If she tried to support the child through any of the other few jobs that were available to women, she would be consigning both of them to a life of poverty.”

“She was willing to do that for herself, but it was such a hard thing to choose for the child.”

“I’m not so sure about this next part, because I only have the observations of another child to go on-an eight-or nine-year-old boy.”

“A great observer. Just didn’t know what he was seeing.”

“I’m much older than he was then, and although it was there before me, I didn’t see it either, not until we had our talk the other day.” I turned to Max. “Conn O’Connor was a nosy child, dedicated to Jack Corrigan, and not overly fond of Lillian-although he later became her friend. He spied on his hero one night and learned that he was going on a date with Lillian, a married woman. He probably didn’t know that Lillian was in the early stages of a pregnancy. There was a car accident-a horrible accident, one that left Jack partially lame the rest of his life. But what few others know-what O’Connor didn’t know until many years later himself-was that Lillian was injured in that same accident. She miscarried.”

“I’ll let you ask Lillian about her part of this story,” Helen said.

“Perhaps the injury was worse, because she never conceived another child. And there was the possibility, if her husband returned from Europe, that he would ask questions about when and how the pregnancy ended.”

“He was an ass,” was all that Helen would say on that subject.

“Helen liked Lillian, and perhaps she even wondered if Lillian’s child might have been a half brother or half sister of her own. Whatever the case, Helen and Lillian comforted each other, and somewhere in all this time of worry and woe, they came up with a solution. Helen would quit the paper, ostensibly to help Lillian with her new project. They would live in the mountains, away from the prying eyes of local society. Lillian’s name would be on the child’s birth certificate, and she would raise him or her in a life of privilege. She swore, in exchange for Helen’s secrecy-and her child-that she would never deny Helen access to the little girl who was born up in the mountains that winter.”

Max was staring at her, obviously having trouble taking it all in.

“You’d probably like to hate me,” Helen said to him. “Maybe you do. I won’t blame you at all. The promises I made to Lillian were the hardest I’ve ever had to keep. But they were promises.”

He shook his head, saying, “I don’t hate you, but…my God, Helen…”

She began to cry. I wanted to go to her, but Frank put a hand on my shoulder.

Max hesitated only briefly, then embraced her.

“You have questions, I’m sure,” she said, still crying. “I can’t answer all of them, but I’m sure I can get Lillian to see the wisdom of letting some part of these secrets out now.”

“Did Jack Corrigan ever know?” he asked.

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