Janice Carter - The Real Allie Newman

She frowned slightly in concentration, but gave no suggestion that the names meant anything at all to her. Still, Joel noticed her tapping the business card against her other hand until she tucked it into the pocket of the windbreaker she was wearing. Was her anxiety level increasing? he wondered.

“Katrina was the only child of Spiro Kostakis,” he clarified. “George’s great-uncle, and patriarch of the Kostakis clan in Grosse Point. George said there’d been a granddaughter—Elena—who’d disappeared from the family home when she was only three. Spirited away, apparently,” Joel added, “by her father, one Eddie Hughes—Katrina’s husband and Elena’s father.”

At that, Allie’s head turned his way, her expression almost challenging him to continue. “So far I get no connection to me, other than the fact that I coincidentally resemble this woman—what was her name again?”

“Katrina Kostakis. Or Trina, as she was sometimes called.”

“Was?”

“She’s dead. Killed in a car crash twenty-six years ago.”

“And she is—was—supposed to be…”

“Your mother,” Joel said softly.

Dear Reader,

The one question that is most frequently asked of me is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Often, that’s a tough one to answer, simply because once in a while—if I’m lucky!—an idea for a story line just occurs to me. But generally, ideas for novels are not so easily acquired. I firmly believe that writers are observers of life. We tend to sit back and watch events take place around us—whether in a family context, at parties with friends or even sitting in a train station. There’s always something or someone to see and observe. And with observation comes—in my case, anyway—speculation.

Why is that woman sitting on the bench looking so glum? What’s going through my young nephew’s mind as he listens, transfixed, to a story recounted by his favorite uncle?

The questions go on, eventually leading to a story. Sometimes I find the seed of a story in a newspaper or magazine article. Such was the case with The Real Allie Newman. I’d read an article about two sisters in their twenties who discovered their father had abducted them as small children. Unknown to them, there’d been another whole family searching for them for years—including a mother.

That article got me thinking. What would it be like to learn that your whole childhood had been based on a lie? That the parent you adored was not so exemplary after all? Most of all, would you ever be able to reconnect with the other side of your family?

These were some of the questions I tried to address in this novel. As always, my deep and abiding love and respect for family—the ties that really do bind—motivated me to write The Real Allie Newman.

Janice Carter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dedication:

For family and friends

Acknowledgment

A big thank-you to Linda Christensen,

Pat and Linn Hynds of Grosse Point Farms, Michigan

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

ALLIE LOWERED her head, tucking her chin in until the strap of her helmet bit into her skin. The wind still carried with it the nip of winter, even though April had just arrived and summer was more than a promise away. She figured she was crazy to go cycling on such a misty morning—the streets were slick and the ground was saturated with a week’s worth of torrential rains—but she hadn’t trained once that week and the triathlon was drawing closer.

Her feet eased on the pedals as the cycle whizzed around the bend of the paved bike and footpath that bordered the east side of the Cataraqui River. Allie raised her head just enough to view the stretch of path ahead and swore. The dim outline of a man walking his dog appeared out of the swirling mist scarcely a hundred yards ahead. To make things worse, the man was on the outer edge of the path nearest the riverbank. She’d have to slow down or risk nudging him off the bank. It meant losing time and writing off her goal for the cycling part of her session that morning.

She began to apply the brakes, slowing down as gently as possible to avoid skidding on the wet asphalt, keeping her eyes on the man’s back as he plodded into the plumes of vapor wafting up from the river below. Allie rang her bell, but the sound seemed muted in the damp, heavy air.

The distance between her and the figures shortened. She was just thinking that any second she’d call out a warning and skim past the pair when a rumbling vibration beneath her caused her to brake hard. A section of the riverbank and footpath ahead suddenly broke loose. Allie stared in shocked horror as the man and his dog slid silently down the embankment and disappeared into the shroud of fog blanketing the river.

The bike skidded to a stop inches from the jagged tear of mud, tree roots and broken asphalt. Allie leaped off. She couldn’t hear any shouts for help above the roar of the brown, frothy river, but in the first panicked seconds of the disaster, she shouted for help herself before plunging down the mucky slope into the freezing water. When she surfaced, Allie fought to catch her breath. The man was thrashing in the water just feet away and she kicked hard, propelling herself toward him.

The current had pushed him into the crook of a partially submerged tree and was pummeling him. Allie shouted for him to hang on, but from the way his head kept bobbing back and forth, she doubted he’d heard. She managed to grab on to the collar of his overcoat just as the branch he was caught on broke loose and was carried downstream.

His arms shot out at her touch, clutching at her, pushing her down. Allie swallowed a mouthful of water. The Styrofoam lining of her helmet kept her head up, but the dead weight of his body threatened to send them both careening along with the current. Using all her strength, she pushed his hands up and off her shoulders, grabbing onto his coat again before he could be swept away. She pulled herself closer to him, shouting into his ear to relax, that she was going to try to get him ashore.

He understood then and stopped struggling as she pulled him slowly to the riverbank. Then Allie stretched out her free arm, digging her fingers into the muck where land met water, and pulled. And pulled again for what seemed an eternity of slipping, gouging again and again into the thick, claylike mud until at last she heaved herself and the man onto the narrow strip of shore at the base of the embankment.

He collapsed face forward, gasping for air. Allie rolled onto her back beside him, registering for the first time that he was elderly, his white hair slicked with mud and bits of leaves and other debris. He raised his head and turned filmy eyes in her direction.

The pounding in Allie’s head intensified. The man was blind.

“Jeb?” he asked, his hoarse voice pitched with fear. “Jeb?”

The dog. A Seeing Eye dog. Allie sat up. Less than fifty feet downriver she could see the animal’s small dark head.

“Where’s Jeb?” the man cried.

“It’s okay,” Allie said, “I see him.” She jogged along the shore, slipping and sliding all the way. The closer she got to the dog, the more she could hear its frantic yowling. It seemed to be caught on something, too, which had saved it from speeding down the river and out of sight. Fortunately, the dog was only a few feet from the shore and Allie was able to reach it by wading into the river up to her waist. The leather inverted U handle attached to the dog’s harness had snagged onto the forked tip of a deadhead, and the dog, struggling to keep its head above water, was treading water in a futile effort to reach shore.