“I guess the best way to handle this is to just ask you what you remember about the night you were knocked out.”
Casey started to say something, but she stopped dead, turned pale, and brought her hands to her face.
“Casey?” Dr. Linscott asked.
She shook her head, as if she was shaking off a terrible dream, and then took a deep breath.
“It’s okay,” Casey assured the doctor.
“Is Terri Spencer dead?” Casey asked Delilah.
“Yes, ma’am,” Delilah answered as she suppressed her excitement. Van Meter was going to remember it all and they were going to nail Joshua Maxfield’s coffin shut.
Casey took a deep breath. “I was hoping… But I knew in my heart that she didn’t survive. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t asked her to meet me she wouldn’t be dead.”
Delilah’s heartbeat quickened. “Who killed Terri, Ms. Van Meter?”
Casey looked at her. She seemed puzzled. “Why Joshua Maxfield, of course. Didn’t you know that?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ashley experienced déjà vu as soon as she drove through the gates of the Oregon Academy. Little had changed in the intervening five years. Groups of garrulous students lounged on the grass and walked on the grounds, oblivious to the murder that had robbed Ashley of the woman she still thought of as her mother. Their innocence made her sad. She had been a child once, but Joshua Maxfield had forced her to grow up in the space of one horror-filled evening.
The mansion came into view. Ashley expected it to look different because it had been uninhabited since Henry Van Meter’s death, but Henry had established a healthy endowment for the school before he died, part of which had gone to keep up the Van Meter home. Henry held out hope for Casey’s recovery to the last and he wanted his daughter to have a familiar place to live when she arose from her deathlike sleep. Last week, Dr. Linscott had decided that Casey was well enough to move back to her childhood home.
Ashley parked in the circular driveway that curved in front of the entrance to the mansion but she did not get out of the car. She felt light-headed. Her stomach was upset from worrying about her meeting with her mother. Would Casey reject her? Would she show any affection for the child she’d abandoned? Jerry had volunteered to come with her, but Ashley told him that this was something she had to do alone.
Ashley gathered herself and got out of the car. She was dressed in a conservative suit she had purchased for this meeting. Her palms were damp and her heart raced when she rang the doorbell. A stocky Korean woman with short black hair let her in.
“You must be Ashley.”
“Yes.”
“I’m Nan Kim, Ms. Van Meter’s nurse.”
“Did Dr. Linscott talk to my…Ms. Van Meter about…?”
“They had a long talk about you. He explained everything, and she wants to see you. She’s waiting for you in her room. She wanted me to ask if you want any refreshment.”
“No, I’m fine, thank you.” Ashley wouldn’t have been able to hold anything down anyway.
“Let’s go up then,” the nurse said.
Casey was waiting for Ashley in a large, airy room with high ceilings. Her bed had been moved next to the window so she could look out at the garden and the pool. She was propped up on pillows and had regained some of her lost weight and a lot of her color. Her hair had been dyed blond to look as it had before her accident. A wheelchair and a walker stood in one corner. A comfortable armchair had been placed next to the bed.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Ashley said as soon as she was seated and the nurse had left the room.
“I should be thanking you for visiting. I’m bored out of my mind. I stay in bed most of the day. The only time I get out is for physical therapy or when they help me downstairs for meals.”
“How are you feeling?”
The question sounded awkward, and they both knew that Ashley was stalling so she would not have to start asking the hard questions that had brought her here.
“Coming back from the dead takes some getting used to. There are my missing years and my physical problems.”
Casey paused. She studied her visitor. The close scrutiny made Ashley uncomfortable.
“There’s also you.” Casey smiled. “For instance, what shall we call each other? I don’t know if ‘mother’ is appropriate.”
Ashley looked down. “I don’t want to offend you, but it would be hard for me to think of anyone but Terri as my mom.”
“I can understand that, and it doesn’t offend me in the least. You used to call me Dean, but I’m not anymore, and that’s way too formal for our relationship. So why don’t you call me Casey and I’ll call you Ashley. How does that sound?”
“Okay.”
“How did you find out about your father and me?”
“Your father told Jerry Philips, my attorney, about the adoption. He told me.”
“And why did Henry reveal our relationship after so many years?”
Ashley decided not to tell Casey that Henry needed her to prevent Miles from taking his sister off life support, because she wasn’t certain how much Casey knew.
“I guess he wanted me to know that I still had a family.”
“Do you hate me for abandoning you?” Casey asked.
The directness of Casey’s question caught Ashley off guard. Then it dawned on Ashley that Casey Van Meter was once again the dean. Casey was back in charge.
Ashley decided that she would be direct, too. “I did at first.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Confused, but I don’t hate you anymore. I tried to look at it from your point of view, to imagine how I would have felt if I was pregnant by a man I…I didn’t love.”
Ashley looked down.
“You’re right, Ashley. I didn’t love your father. Marriage would have been wrong for both of us. It would never have lasted. And I was too young to be a mother. When I gave you up for adoption it had nothing to do with you. It wasn’t your fault. I never even saw you. They took you away the moment I delivered. I was sedated. I don’t even have a clear memory of the birth. But it turned out for the best, didn’t it? Norman was a good father?”
“The best.”
“And you loved Terri?”
“Very much.”
Ashley paused and gathered the courage to ask the next question. “Did you ever regret giving me up?”
“There have been moments when I wondered what became of you. I’m glad you had loving parents. I’m happy that you’re a strong, self-confident woman, even if I can’t take any credit for what you’ve become.”
“Did you ever try to find me?”
“No, never.”
“Why?”
“May I be brutally honest?”
“Please,” Ashley said, steeling herself.
“You were never real to me. You were like a dream. I never held you, I never saw you. How could I love you or want you? And what good would it have done if I showed up out of the blue and destroyed your peace of mind? Look at the turmoil you’ve been through since you learned I was your mother.”
Ashley swallowed, fighting the tightness in her throat and the fear that she would cry. She kept her next question overly formal to distance herself from the emotions that were raging inside her.
“What about now? Do you want to get to know me or would you prefer that we not contact each other?”
Casey cocked an eyebrow and flashed a wry smile. “What a silly question. Of course I want to get to know you. I liked you from the first day we met. Do you remember when I showed you the campus? I knew that you were a good person, immediately. I admired the way you dealt with the horror of your situation, your steel, your poise. Had we been the same age I would have wanted you as a friend. There’s still the age difference, but that means less and less as we get older. So I propose that we start off as friends. We can see each other from time to time and try not to force anything. Let’s see how it goes. Is that acceptable to you?”