I considered the implications. “Only family?”
“Only family,” Isaiah confirmed. “Nephews, great-nephews, cousins once removed.”
“What about Blake’s son?” I asked. Nan had mentioned a son.
“I heard there was a son,” Isaiah replied. “But he took off years before I came into the picture.”
The prodigal son, I thought suddenly, and adrenaline rushed into my veins.
“What do you mean when you say Vincent Blake’s son took off?” I asked Isaiah.
“I meant what I said.” Isaiah fixed me with a look. “The son took off at some point and didn’t come back. It’s part of what made the seals so valuable. There was no direct heir to the family fortune. Rumor had it, when Blake dies, anyone holding one of those—” Isaiah nodded toward the disk. “Gets a stake.”
Isaiah had said that there were five seals. That meant the disk I was holding in my hand was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars. I thought of Toby and the instructions he’d left my mother about going to Jackson if she needed anything. You know what I left there, he’d written. You know what it’s worth.
“More than twenty years ago, Toby Hawthorne stole this from his father.” I stared at the seal, at the layers of concentric rings. “But why did Tobias Hawthorne have one of the Blake family seals? There’s no way Blake was planning to leave one-fifth of his fortune to a billionaire who betrayed him.”
Isaiah gave a shrug, but there was something hard about it, like he refused to give Tobias Hawthorne or Vincent Blake any space in his mind. “I’ve told you what I know,” he said. “And I should be getting back to work.” His gaze went to Xander. “Unless…”
For a moment, I heard the same uncertainty in his tone that I’d heard in Xander’s when I asked him about his father’s file.
“I do want to talk,” Xander said, rushing the words. “I do, I mean, if you do.”
“Okay, then,” Isaiah said.
The rest of us were almost out the door when Rebecca stopped and turned around. “What was the name of Vincent Blake’s son?” she asked, an odd tone in her voice.
“It’s been a long time,” Isaiah said, but then he glanced back at Xander and sighed. “Just let me think for a minute.… Will.” Isaiah snapped his fingers. “The son’s name was Will Blake.”
Will Blake. For a split second, I wasn’t standing there in Isaiah’s shop. I was in Toby’s wing of Hawthorne House, reading a poem inscribed on metal.
William Blake. “A Poison Tree.”
CHAPTER 61
What if Toby hadn’t chosen that poem just for the emotions it conveyed? What if the secrets and lies he’d written about himself went beyond his hidden adoption?
Why did Tobias Hawthorne have that seal?
Rebecca, Thea, and I gave Xander time with his father. The rest of us waited in the SUV. I had Oren pull around the block so that if the paparazzi showed up at the doughnut shop, they’d focus on my SUVs, not Isaiah’s garage. While we waited, my mind raced. William Blake. The Blake family seal. Revenge. Avenge. Vengeance. Avenger.
When Xander climbed into the SUV, he didn’t say a word about his father. “Hit me with all those thinky thoughts,” he told me.
I studied him for a moment. His brown eyes were steady and bright, so I obliged. “What Vincent Blake is doing now—kidnapping Toby, playing games with me—I don’t think any of that is really about a patent filed fifty years ago.” The patent number had told us who we were dealing with. We’d assumed that it also gave us motive, but we were wrong. “I think this is about Vincent Blake’s son.”
“The prodigal son,” Xander murmured. “Will Blake.”
A wasteful youth. Vincent Blake’s distinctive voice rang in my mind. Wandering the world—ungrateful. A benevolent father, ready to welcome him home. But if memory serves correctly, there were three characters in that story…
Everything pointed to the third person in this story being Tobias Hawthorne—and if that was the case, maybe Xander had it wrong. “What if Will isn’t the prodigal?” I said. “On the phone, Blake emphasized that there were three characters in the parable of the prodigal son. The father—”
“Vincent Blake,” Thea filled in.
I nodded. “The son who betrayed his family, took the money, and ran—what if that’s not Vincent Blake’s actual son? What if it’s a man he’d brought into the family fold? Young Tobias Hawthorne. Nan said that Blake’s son was younger at the time, fifteen when your grandfather would have been…” I did the math. “Twenty-four.”
“At fifteen, Vincent Blake’s son might not have been old enough to have one of those seals,” Xander said, thinking out loud, “but he was plenty old to witness the betrayal.”
My entire body felt alive and alert, horrified and entranced. “Witness the betrayal,” I echoed, “and wonder why his father let some nobody from nowhere get away with screwing him out of millions?”
That put Will Blake in the position of the son who had stayed—the good son, upset that the prodigal’s betrayal was rewarded instead of punished.
There are three characters in the parable of the prodigal son, are there not?
Avenge. Revenge. Vengeance. Avenger.
I always win in the end.
“The question is,” Xander said, “why did Toby leave a poem by a poet named William Blake hidden in his wing, way back when?”
“And what are the chances,” I added, one thought leaping to the forefront of my mind, “that Will did have one of the Blake family seals with him when he disappeared?”
If the seal in Tobias Hawthorne’s possession had belonged to Vincent Blake’s son…
It felt like we were barreling toward the edge of a cliff.
“How long ago did Will Blake go missing?” Rebecca wasn’t looking at any of us. Light from the window hit her hair. Her tone was throaty and intense.
I got out my phone and did a search. And then another. Eventually, I was sure: The last time that Vincent Blake had been publicly photographed with his son, Will had been in his early twenties. “Forty years ago?” I estimated. “Plus or minus. Rebecca—”
“Will is one nickname for William,” Rebecca said, sucking every last molecule of oxygen out of the car. “But another one is Liam.”
CHAPTER 62
Mallory Laughlin hadn’t revealed much about the man who’d gotten her pregnant. She’d said that he was older, very charming. She’d said that his name was Liam. And when Eve had asked what had happened to Liam, all she would say was that he had left.
If Liam was Will Blake…
If he’d sought out a sixteen-year-old girl living on the Hawthorne estate…
If he got that girl pregnant…
And if Will really hadn’t been seen for more than forty years… plus or minus…
Questions piled up in my head. Did Toby know or suspect that Will Blake was his biological father? Did Vincent Blake know that Toby was his grandson? Is that why he took him? And if the seal that Toby had stolen from his father really did belong to Vincent Blake’s son—how had it come to be in Tobias Hawthorne’s possession in the first place?