Fall from Grace by Richard North Patterson Read Free Book Online

putting girlfriends in his will, for godsakes.”
    “So maybe he was crazy,” Jack said in measured tones. “Or maybe, in his way, he fell in love with Carla Pacelli.”
    “That’s a complete oxymoron. Ben Blaine wasn’t capable of love.”
    Jack met his gaze. “I think he loved your mother once. At least as much as he was capable of love.”
    “When?” Adam asked with real scorn. “Before I was born?”
    “Yes,” Jack answered. “Before you were born.”
    Adam folded his arms. At last, he said, “I may have left here, and he may be dead. But it’s not over between us, after all. It won’t be until I undo everything that bastard has done.”
    Jack’s expression was tinged with melancholy. “How, exactly?”
    Adam felt the same steel enter his soul he had felt ten years before. “I haven’t worked that out yet. But trust me, Jack, I will.”
    Five
    Adam found his mother in the den, his father’s sanctuary. It was filled with photographs of Benjamin Blaine with world leaders, politicians, missionaries, mercenaries, and soldiers in half-forgotten wars. There was nothing of his family in it. Yet Clarice had gravitated there, sitting on the leather couch in the dim light of Ben’s desk lamp, as if to search for meaning in her life with this man. Adam sensed the desperation beneath her composure—she had lost not only her inheritance but her identity as a woman. In the end, Ben had taken everything.
    “What are you doing, Mom?”
    “Remembering.” Her voice was quiet and bitter. “Taking stock of my accomplishments. Except for this last manuscript, I took part in every one he wrote—proofreading, researching, or just telling him what I thought. And no one knew but me.”
    Adam sat beside her, absorbing the weight of her loss. For as long as he could remember, he had felt for her, all the more so when, still young, he had learned to decode the meaning of his father’s nocturnal disappearances, the jaunty look he took on in the wake of some new conquest. The boy Adam had loved her, worried for her, and wished that he could protect her from hurt. But he did not want to be like her—despite everything, the person he admired was his father.
    Now, filled with anger and pity, he did not know what to say. Instead, Clarice told him, “I’m sorry, Adam. For everything.”
    Adam took her hand. “He made this mess, not you. As always.”
    Turning, she looked him in the eyes. “I don’t mean the will. The way you look at me now is all too familiar. I can see how worried you are.”
    “Shouldn’t I be?”
    “I suppose so. But that’s the point—you always were.” Her voice was new to him, clear and filled with reckoning. “I loved you both even more than you know. But instead of standing up for you and Teddy, what I gave you was an inconstant mother who drank too much. So you became my parent, helping me as best you could, while I went on pretending for others that my marriage was better than you knew it to be. And when you grew old enough to understand it all, you left in disgust.”
    “Only with him.”
    Clarice shook her head. “Not just him. I think you were smart enough to realize that on a more elevated plane, we had replicated Ben’s family of origin—the acquiescent mother, the demeaning father, the sons who suffered at his hands. And, as Ben did, our youngest son broke away. The worst part for me was knowing that only he gave you the strength to do that. Because you were so much like him.”
    Adam felt a stab of fear, the need to protest that, like Jack, he had the ability to reflect, a concern for how his desires might impact those around him. But what he said was, “There’s a biblical quote that goes something like ‘When I was a child, I acted as a child. But when I became a man, I put aside childish things.’ To the day he died, my father was a cruel and destructive child, with a child’s self-absorption. No one else was real to him.”
    “There was more to Ben than that,”