“Which he did,” Tate said.
His eyes locked with Bryan’s. The man was his father, though he’d never met him before last night. And the man he had known and loved as his father had been gunned down right before his eyes.
“I didn’t know about Nelson’s ultimatum,” Bryan said, continuing the story. “I just got a note from Zee saying that our affair—and I couldn’t believe she’d given it such a shoddy name—was over and that she wished it had never happened.”
Despair had prompted him to volunteer for a dangerous overseas mission. When his plane malfunctioned and began spiraling down toward the ocean, he actually welcomed death, since he’d just as soon die as have to live without Zee. Fate intervened, however, and he was rescued.
While recovering from the injuries he had sustained, the FBI approached him. He had already been trained in intelligence work. They proposed that Bryan Tate remain “dead” and start working for them undercover. That’s what he’d been doing for the last thirty years.
“When I could, I came to see you, Tate,” he said to his son. “From a careful distance, never getting close enough to risk running into Nelson or Zee, I watched you play football a few times. I even tracked you around the base in Nam for a week. I was at your graduation from UT and law school. I never stopped loving you or your mother.”
“And Nelson never forgot or forgave me,” Zee said, bowing her head and sniffing into a Kleenex.
Bryan touched her hair consolingly, then picked up the story again. His latest assignment had been to infiltrate a white supremacist group operating out of the northwestern states. At the outset, he had come across an extremely bitter Vietnam vet whom he recognized as Eddy Paschal, Tate’s former college roommate.
“We already had a thick dossier on him because he had been implicated in several subversive and neo-Nazi activities, including a few ritualistic executions, although we never had enough evidence to indict him.”
“Jeez, and to think I slept with him,” Fancy said with a shudder.
“You couldn’t have known,” Dorothy Rae said kindly. “He had us all fooled.”
“I would rather have kept him alive,” Bryan said. “He was ruthless, but extremely intelligent. He could have been very useful to the Bureau.”
Bryan looked toward Tate. “You can imagine how astonished I was when Nelson contacted him, especially since Paschal’s philosophies were antithetical to yours. Nelson cleaned him up, gave him that spick-and-span image, paid for a crash course in public relations and communications, and brought him to Texas to be your campaign manager. That’s when I realized that Nelson’s intentions weren’t what they seemed.”
Tate backed into the wall and leaned his head against the pastel plaster. “So he planned to have me killed all along. It was one big setup. He groomed me for public office, instilled in me an ambition for it, hired Eddy, everything.”
“I’m afraid so,” Bryan said grimly.
Zee left her chair and went to Tate. “Darling, forgive me.”
“Forgive you?”
“It was my sin he was punishing, not yours,” she explained. “You were merely the sacrificial lamb. He wanted me to suffer and knew that the worst punishment possible for a mother would be to see her child die, especially during a moment of personal triumph.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jack said, also coming to his feet.
“I can,” Tate admitted quietly. “Now that I think back on everything, I can believe it. You know how he preached about justice, fairness, paying for one’s mistakes, retribution for transgressions? He believed you had made atonement with your life,” he said, nodding toward Bryan, “but mother hadn’t yet paid for betraying him.”
“Nelson was very subtle, very clever,” Zee said. “Until last night I didn’t realize just how clever or how vindictive. Tate, he manipulated you into marrying Carole, a woman he was sure would remind me of my own unfaithfulness. I had to close my eyes to her flagrant infidelity. I couldn’t very well criticize her for committing the same sin I had.”
“It wasn’t the same, Zee.”
“I know that, Bryan,” she stressed, “but Nelson didn’t. Adultery was adultery in his estimation, and punishable by death.”
Jack was upset. His face was pale, ravaged from a night of mourning. “It still doesn’t make sense to me. Why, if he hated Bryan so much, did he name the baby Tate?”
“Another cruel joke on me,” Zee said. “It would be another constant reminder of my sin.”
Jack pondered that for a moment. “Why did he favor Tate over me? I was his real son, but he always made me feel inferior to my younger brother.”
“He counted on human nature taking its course,” Zee explained. “He made it obvious that he favored Tate so that you would resent him. The friction between you would be another burden for me to bear.”
Jack stubbornly shook his head. “I still can’t believe he was so conniving. Not Dad.” Dorothy Rae reached for his hand and pressed it between hers.
Zee turned toward Avery, who had remained silent throughout. “He was dedicated to getting vengeance on me.
He arranged for Tate to marry Carole Navarro. Even after I learned of her shady past, it never occurred to me that Nelson was responsible for her conversion from topless dancer to wife. Now I believe that he engineered that, just as he recruited Eddy. In any case, they formed an alliance at some point.