who was her own?
“Fuck,” Blackheart said, suddenly, breaking the silence in the room, and startling her out of her thoughts.
“What? Did you find something?”
“Bernard Hebert...fucking Bernie...”
The name didn’t mean anything to her. She waited several seconds and when he still didn’t look up at her she said, “Is that someone you know? His name is in the book?”
He looked up at her then and she saw the flicker of a fire in his blue eyes. “Motherfucker was one of my men. He was an enforcer for the club years ago. I...” He hesitated and then said, “Cut him loose, back in the 90s. He was, at least I suspected he was, feeding information to...” Another hesitation. Patrice was smart enough to know he was trying to put things in a way that wouldn’t implicate him or his club in anything illegal. “He was talking about things he shouldn’t be outside of the club, and messing with...” He stopped again, this time for much longer, and then said, “After I cut him loose, I never saw him again. I was told he moved out to Shreveport and last I heard of him he’d married and had a couple of kids. I thought the threat was removed...” His eyes looked sad for a second, and then angry as he said, “The motherfucker was here...registered at this inn in July of 1997.”
Patrice wasn’t sure what any of that meant. “Did he know my mom?”
Blackheart shook his head. “I have no idea...but if I met your mother at any of the club functions, then he might have known we’d been together...fuck.”
“So what now?” she asked.
He sighed and said, “Let’s finish going through the books. If we don’t find any other possible leads, we’ll head back to Louisiana in the morning and I’ll have a talk with Bernie. Either way, I think he and I will have a talk. It’s way too much of a coincidence to think he just happened upon this place eight months after you were born.”
She nodded. Patrice could feel the adrenaline suddenly pumping through her veins. She didn’t want to know her mother had been killed, necessarily, but somehow...as horrible as that idea was, it wasn’t as horrible to her as thinking that she’d been so depressed that she’d kill herself and leave her child behind. Maybe that was a selfish way to think about it...but she figured if she had nothing else after twenty-six years, the least she could have was the knowledge that one of her parents at least wanted her. Unable to suppress all of the questions she had, she picked the one she was most curious about:
“Who was he messing with?” Patrice expected him to say Sally, since she’d come to find out what Sally Guidry meant to her “father.” But instead, after another long hesitation he said:
“My little sister.”
“Is it weird for you, being here?” Gabe asked Patrice. She was standing near the window of the room they’d checked into at the Inn, staring out into the dark Maine night. He still didn’t know her well enough to always know what she was thinking. When she and Blackheart had finished looking over the books in the basement, she’d seemed almost excited, but Gabe knew a lot about adrenaline rushes and it seemed to him now that she was on a downhill slide as that adrenaline ebbed away and was replaced with questions and doubts.
She turned and looked at him with her pretty blue eyes. Giving him a little smile she said, “It’s all weird. Looking at Blackheart and thinking about him being my father is still weird to me. Did you know he had sisters?”
“Yeah, he has three of them. He’s really protective of them, though. I’ve met them, but he doesn’t let them come around the club.”
She came over and sat down on the bed next to him. “Don’t you think it’s weird that they all live together and none of them has ever been married?”
Gabe smiled. “You’ve met their brother, right? Could you imagine being the guy that had to be good enough for one of his sisters?”
Patrice smiled. “I guess it’s a good thing his ‘daughter’ picked you, huh? He doesn’t seem to have a problem with us being together.”
“I’ll admit, Blackheart cuts me a lot more slack than he does a lot of the other guys. But to be honest I’m just not sure he’s had time to really absorb the fact that you’re his kid...and I might be sleeping with