Legacy of Secrets Read Online Free Page A

bantamweight boxer, despite her bulk and her old Wellingtons.
    I said to Shannon, my mouth full of scone, “Brigid’s older than me, of course. She used to look after me when I was just a wee slip of a girl. She must be over a hundred by now.”
    “I niver did,” Brigid retorted heatedly, brandishing a bread knife in the air over the sticky, rich brack. “We’re the same age and you know it. It’s just you niver admit to it.”
    I fed the encroaching ginger cats and the dalmatians bits of scone and winked at the girl. “You’ll be after forgivin’ Brigid,” I said loftily. “The old woman niver did know her place.”
    Brigid scowled but said nothing, and I smiled brightly at Shannon, thinking it was time I found out her story. I peered closely at her. I could see she was a beauty, though she had yet to grow into it. She had the magnificent copper hair I used to have myself, though mine was never half as luxuriant. And those divine gray eyes, so cool and clear, I knew one day they would drive men wild. That is, if they hadn’t already.
    I leaned forward, inspecting her freckles. “I’ve got this cream,” I whispered, “made up from my mother’s recipe in a village the other side of Kylemore. ’tis miraculous with the freckles. Probably from its proximity to the holy nuns over at the abbey, my mother always used to say.”
    “Humph!” Brigid commented loudly from the stove.
    “Ignore her,” I said, moving my chair closer, “and tell me about yourself.”
    “Well,” she said hesitantly. “My father’s name is Bob Keeffe.”
    Behind me, I heard Brigid turn to listen, but she said nothing. Neither did I.
    “I wondered if you knew him?”
    “Why should I?” I asked cagily.
    She stared at me, nonplussed. “But you know the name, O’Keeffe. And you said I was one of Lily’s bastards!”
    I nodded, sipping my tea, waiting to hear what she had to say before giving away the family secrets.
    “It’s a long story,” she said with a huge sigh. “So I guess I had better begin at the beginning.”
    “It’s as good a place as any,” I agreed, as Brigid pulled up a chair and we settled down to listen.

“I GUESS IT all began three months ago, on my twenty-fourth birthday,” Shannon said. “My father gave a big party that weekend, at our country house on Long Island, to celebrate my engagement as well as my birthday.” She smiled, a wry little half smile that failed to reach her lovely gray eyes. “Actually, it was my third engagement in two years. Dad asked me, ‘Will it stick this time?’ And I told him confidently, oh sure, this is for keeps. He was so relieved that I was happy, though I think Buffy, my stepmother, was just glad I was finally off her hands.
    “Everybody knew ‘Big Bob’ Keeffe,” Shannon said with a proud little smile. “His story was written up in every magazine for years, even though he was reluctant to talk about himself. But when you have the kind of success he had, you somehow become public property, and there are no secrets left anymore. Or at least, that’s what I thought.
    “He never talked to the media about his personal life, only about his business. He was a self-made man, a millionaire many times over, and everybody wanted to know how he had done it.
    “‘Rags to riches, that’s me,’ he would tell them. But that’s all he would say.
    “They said he dealt in property, but he just laughed at that. He called himself ‘a builder,’ and he always wanted to build bigger than anyone else. His skyscrapers dominate the skylines of a dozen American cities and he was buildinghis own dream, the one hundred and twenty-five story Keeffe Tower on Park Avenue, designed by I. M. Pei.
    “People thought it was strange that he never talked about his past, they sneered at him and said it was because he was ashamed of his orphanage background. But it wasn’t true, he was never ashamed to confess he had once been poor.
    “Sometimes when I saw him on television talking