Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil Love and Hope Read online

  Darci then spent ten minutes on the phone with her aunt as she wrote the names of the men down. The second the list was complete, Thelma said, “I know she’s your mother, Darci, honey, but you tell me what you think of a woman who’d—”

  “Thank you so much, Aunt Thelma,” Darci said.”This is just what I needed.” Then she hung up.

  So now it was nearly midnight, and both Adam and Darci were tired, but, still, they kept feeding names into a couple of search services on the Internet. But it was difficult to get information because they had nothing but the names of sixteen men. They had no numbers of any sort. They didn’t have so much as a state where the men could have come from. It was a long, tedious, frustrating search as one search engine after another threw the names out for “insufficient data.”

  At one point, Adam said, “Your mother didn’t . . . you know . . . with all these men, did she? I mean, not in one summer.”

  “I doubt it. Aunt Thelma probably wrote down the name of every man my mother spoke to that summer, and she probably accused my mother of bedding them all. And my mother loves to antagonize her sister by agreeing that, yes, she did the dirty with each man.”

  In an attempt to find the men, they’d had to individually try every state and every possible spelling of the names. And it took a long time for the data banks to look through the records.

  “How many more?” Adam asked.

  “Just one,” Darci answered, yawning, wanting to go to bed. Maybe Adam was a night owl, but she wasn’t. She looked at the list that was beginning to blur before her tired eyes. “Taylor Rayburn,” she said, then yawned again. “Taylor is my—”

  “Go to bed if you want to,” Adam said, taking the computer from her. “I can do this alone. Holy sh—” he began but cut himself off from cursing.

  Darci had typed in the name, spelling it “Rayburn,” but the request had been redirected to “Raeburne.” There were 821 sites for “Taylor Raeburne.”

  “Couldn’t be the same guy,” Adam mumbled as he clicked on the first site. “What would a superachiever like this guy obviously is be doing in Putnam? Ow! That’s my foot you’re on.”

  “Is it?” Darci asked. “And what did you say about Putnam?”

  “Man, boy, or town?” Adam asked, his eyes intent on the screen; then, suddenly, he drew back and turned the computer around for her to see. He had pulled up a beautiful Web site with “Taylor Raeburne” in big blue letters that moved across the screen. On the left was a list of choices that were contained within the Web site.”Taylor Raeburne, author of forty-two books on the occult,” the screen read.

  “You don’t think....”Darci began.

  “That he’s a warlock and into evil?” Adam finished for her.

  “Are you reading my mind again?” she asked, trying to inject some humor into the situation.

  “No. That was from my own mind.” He scrolled down the list, looking for a bio on the author. When he saw the word biography at the bottom of the list, he put the cursor on it, then looked at Darci. “Ready?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not? As you said, what would a man like him be doing in Putnam? I’m sure that all he did was stop at the filling station and my aunt put his name on the list. I can assure you that my mother isn’t one to like men who write books. She likes— Oh, my goodness,” Darci said.

  On the screen had come up a large photo of a man. And even to Darci, her resemblance to him was clear. It was her face, older and quite masculine, but it was, indeed, Darci’s face.

  She fell back against the couch, her eyes wide in shock, unable to speak. All she could do was stare at the picture on the screen.

  “I think we found him,” Adam said, and there was elation in his voice. “You’re a dead ringer for him. You know that old saying that the first child always looks like the father. In this case—” When he looked at Darci, he stopped talking. “Are you all right?”

  She didn’t answer but just kept staring at the photo on the screen, so Adam clicked on exit, shut down the system, and closed the computer. “I think this is enough for one night,” he said, but when Darci still didn’t react, he did what instinct told him to: He pulled her into his arms and held her, her face buried against his shoulder.

  “A shock, huh?” he asked softly.

  She nodded against him.

  “You’ve had a lifetime with one really bad parent, and—” She started to lift her head at that, but he held her down until she calmed. “Yes, one really bad, absent parent, and now you find that, all along, you’ve had a second parent.”

  Pulling back, he turned her head so she could look at him, putting his fingertips under her chin. “You’re not going to chicken out on me now, are you?” he asked. “We’re going to contact him, aren’t we?”

  “He might not like me,” Darci said in a tiny voice.

  At that Adam smiled. “Not like you?!” he said. “How could he not like you? You’re smart, something you obviously inherited from him; you have such a great sense of humor that you can make even an old stick-in-the-mud like me laugh, and you’re frugal to the point of. . . . Well, anyway, you make people like you. You make friends with everyone everywhere and— Stop looking at me like that!” he said, then dropped his hand from her face and got up off the couch. “I told you that you were not allowed to use your power against me. No kissing thoughts!”

  “I wasn’t using any power!” Darci said. “I was merely wishing very, very hard, that’s all. And why not? I thought you liked me. You were saying wonderful things about me.”

  For a moment Adam turned away from her, then he looked back at her, and when he spoke, his voice was calm. “You’re lovely. I didn’t think so at first, but— Please stop looking at me like that. I’m trying to be honest. You are a wonderful person. I’ve never before met anyone like you. I’ve bummed around the world, and never have I met anyone with your ...your enthusiasm for life. The truth is that I like you more than . . . well, more than I should.” Suddenly, he stopped talking. “Actually, I think we’d better talk about this another time.”

  “Are you blushing again?” Darci asked, eyes wide.

  “No, of course not. Men don’t blush. Let’s go to bed,” he said, annoyed.

  “Oooooohhh, yes,” Darci purred.

  Adam laughed. “Get up and go put your pajamas on. And put on those big ones, not that little black thing you bought, but the big ones, got it? And behave yourself!”

  Smiling, Darci got off the couch and went into the bedroom. The bedroom they shared, she thought. As she was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, she decided that it was better to keep her mind on Adam than on the news that she’d just found her father. A father was not something that Darci could comprehend. In school in Putnam the other kids had often taunted her by saying that any man in Kentucky could be her father. Darci had held her head high and True Persuaded the kids to go away. Now, as she snuggled down into the bed next to Adam’s, she remembered that one time she’d done such a great job of True Persuading a boy into being quiet that he’d not been able to speak for three whole days. When he could speak again, he told everyone that Darci had done it to him. But, thankfully, no one believed him. People couldn’t do things like that, could they? they’d said. But still, ever after that, people in Putnam seemed to sense that Darci was “different.” They didn’t know how she was different, but they knew she was.

  And it was this difference that had made Putnam want her.

  In spite of all the turmoil in her mind, Darci was asleep almost before she closed her eyes.

  When Darci awoke at five A.M. the next morning, there was a light coming in through the half-open bedroom door. Was Adam already awake? she wondered. Turning, she looked at his bed and saw that it had never been slept in.

  Rolling out of bed, she went into the living room, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. The curtains were still drawn, and Adam was still bent over his laptop computer, studying the screen.

  “Did you know that it’s morning?” she