Miles took a drink of his wine. Then he looked across the table at Ashley.
“She wanted Henry’s money but she never wanted you. That’s the truth. You don’t owe her a thing.”
Ashley found it hard to speak. “How…how did she feel about my father?”
“She was slumming. When she got tired of him she dumped him without a second thought. Look, Ashley, I love my sister-we’re blood-but Casey has never been a nice person. She was always self-centered and self-destructive. She would have made a terrible mother. You know about her marriage to Coleman?”
Ashley nodded.
“That’s typical of the way she’s lived her life. After Father made her the dean of the Academy she was more careful, until that fiasco. She was always promiscuous and emotionally unstable. She used drugs. She even tried suicide once.”
“No.”
“She was irresponsible, Ashley. She bounced from project to project. She’d get wrapped up in something, pour herself into it, then drop it as soon as she got bored. That’s what she did with your father.”
“She seemed to do a good job at the school,” Ashley said, wanting to defend Casey but suddenly realizing that she was totally devoid of any facts to muster on her behalf. Casey may have given birth to her, but she knew almost nothing about the dean.
“This is typical. Father gave her the position at the school in a last-ditch attempt to help her make something of herself, and I have to admit that she did a great job at first. She was always very bright and she was well educated, but I really doubted that she’d be able to stick with it. But she did. She liked the challenge and the responsibility. The Academy was very important to Henry and she knew that he was placing a lot of trust in her. He didn’t do that often.
“Then she went to a convention in Las Vegas and married that piece of trash on a whim.” Miles looked down and shook his head in wonder. “Do you have any idea the harm that can be suffered by a school like the Academy if there’s even a whiff of scandal? Her marriage to that cheap crook had the potential to be a disaster.”
It must have occurred to Miles that he was getting angrier as he spoke, because he checked himself and took a deep breath.
“There’s nothing to be gained by keeping Casey alive,” Miles said. “She didn’t care about you, she didn’t care about anyone except herself and me. She did love me. Now I’ve got to pay back that love by ending her living death.”
Ashley shook her head. “I can’t give up on the possibility that she might come back. I’m sorry.”
Miles features softened. “Look, Ashley, you shouldn’t be burdened with the added worries you’d have if you had to care for Casey. These past few years must have been tough. I imagine you haven’t been able to work much, and you don’t even have a high school diploma, do you?”
“No.”
“You should be trying to get your life back together. You should be in school. I could help you. Maybe find you a job with Van Meter Industries while you get your GED. Then I could help you with college tuition. We are family. We shouldn’t be adversaries. We should be helping each other.”
Ashley wasn’t certain what to make of Miles’s offer. She hoped that it wasn’t an attempt to buy her off.
“Would you help me even if I continued to oppose you?” Ashley asked.
Miles looked sad. “This isn’t a bribe, Ashley. I’m trying to get you to realize that Casey is not coming back. I want what’s best for both of you, and you should be making up for the time you’ve lost.”
“Thank you, Miles. Let me think about what you’ve said. I’ll visit Casey tomorrow. Maybe seeing her will help me decide what to do.”
Miles saw the waiter arriving with their meals. “Fair enough,” he said. “I promise not to mention the guardianship again.”
Over dinner, Miles told her a series of fascinating stories about his book tour. Ashley drank a little too much wine and found herself laughing hysterically when Miles recounted a bizarre negotiation with a pair of unscrupulous movie producers who claimed to have Tom Cruise and Jennifer Lopez lined up to play Joshua Maxfield and Casey.
Miles asked her about her years abroad. Ashley told him about her travels but was sober enough to keep any important details from him. By the end of the meal, she’d forgotten the serious way the evening started.
Miles waited outside with Ashley while the valet got their cars. When she was about to leave, he gave her a hug and a brotherly kiss on her cheek. A light rain was falling, with more and heavier rain forecast for the next day. Ashley switched on her wipers and concentrated on the road. Occasionally, she glanced in her rearview mirror. A pair of headlights shone in it. She paid no attention to them, because the things that Miles had said about Casey over dinner distracted her.
Was Casey Van Meter really as cold, calculating, and insensitive as Miles claimed? Had Norman meant so little to her? Had getting rid of her own child meant so little to her? If she was this uncaring, how would she react to Ashley if she did survive her coma?
Ashley knew that Terri had loved her unconditionally. There had never been a moment when she doubted that love. So who was really her mother? Did giving birth make you a mother in any but the technical sense? Was Terri, who raised her, loved her, and cared for her any less her mother simply because she had not borne Ashley?
Ashley turned onto a side street and noticed that the headlights in her mirror were still behind her. Alarm chased away her thoughts about Casey. She decided to make a few random turns to see if the car stayed with her. It did. She tried to convince herself that no one was following her, but it was too much of a coincidence that the other car was driving a random route that mirrored hers. She made a sudden U-turn. Her tires squealed on the wet pavement. As she drove past the other car, she stared at the driver’s window, but the rain streaks and the darkness obscured the driver’s face.
Ashley drove fast until she was certain that she’d lost her tail. Then she headed to her apartment as quickly as she could. Her heart was racing, and it didn’t slow down until she was inside, behind locked doors. She rushed to her window before turning on the lights and studied the street below for any sign that someone was watching her apartment. There was no one standing in the rain, and there were no suspicious cars.
As Ashley got ready for bed, she tried to remember everything she could about the ride home. By the time she fell asleep, she half-believed that the tail had been a figment of her imagination.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was raining when Ashley woke up. She dressed in sweats, dark glasses, and a hooded windbreaker, and walked two blocks to a local coffee shop for breakfast. After breakfast, she planned to go to Sunny Rest and visit Casey Van Meter.
The coffee shop sold The Oregonian. She picked up a copy and slid into a booth. The waitress took her order, and she opened the paper. Her face stared back at her from the front page. It was an old photo, taken when she was in high school. She glanced around to see if anyone was staring at her, but no one in the restaurant seemed to have made the connection between the blond athlete in the newspaper and the dark-haired woman in the rear booth.
MISSING WITNESS RETURNS TO BATTLE FOR SLEEPING BEAUTY’S $40,000,000 FORTUNE, the headline screamed. Ashley blinked and reread the figure. The byline of the article belonged to the woman who had tried to interview her at the courthouse. According to the story, which summarized the hearing, rehashed the murder case, and recapped Miles’s rise to literary fame, the person who was appointed Casey’s guardian would control a fortune estimated at forty million dollars. Jerry Philips had never mentioned that little bit of trivia. Forty million! Ashley couldn’t imagine that much money. She’d been living in low-rent apartments and getting by on baguettes, cheese, and cheap wine. Forty million dollars was caviar, penthouses, and yachts.