Legacy of Secrets Read Online Free Page B

about his projects, it would take me by surprise how handsome he was. The media described him as ‘a burly, silver-haired, sixtyish man, who could charm the loose change from the pocket of a beggar and the clothes off any pretty woman.’” Shannon smiled wryly, remembering him. “And I guess maybe they were right. He had piercing light-blue eyes and thick silver hair that had once been as black as only the true ‘black Irish’ can have, and he was always immaculately dressed. But his hands were a workingman’s hands; big and powerful. He said it was his inheritance, and that he was descended from people used to hard labor, farming stony Irish fields for centuries.”
    She sighed, remembering. “There were so many stories about him, and there were terrible rumors about his infidelities, but I’m sure there weren’t that many and I know he always tried to be discreet, for my sake. And I guess for Buffy’s. And I know for certain he’d never forgotten what it felt like to be poor and alone; he gave a lot of his money to charities, always anonymously, because he hated publicity. But fame—and notoriety—seemed to seek him out.”
    E VERY MAGAZINE AND newspaper in the U.S. had covered the story of how Robert O’Keeffe had started out a poor boy, an orphan who had labored on Boston construction sites for years to pay for his studies at M.I.T. And how, with an engineering degree finally in his pocket, he had married Mella, an Irish girl from Limerick. They said she was slight and red-haired, a gentle beauty; the love of his life and as alone in the world as he was himself.
    He had found a steady job as a construction engineerand they had bought a little house in the Boston suburbs. A year later, when Shannon was born, he felt life could offer him nothing more. They were happy and content, a perfect little unit.
    Then it all fell apart: Mella took sick with cancer that had gone undetected until it was too late. She died when Shannon was two years old, and Bob stayed home, drinking himself into a stupor every night, alone with his grief, while worried neighbors looked after the baby.
    After a month, he later said, his grief turned to anger at the world for keeping on turning without his beloved Mella and then his anger turned to rage at himself for not being able to help her. He stopped drinking and he buried his frustration and rage in work. He left the baby in the care of a friendly neighbor while he worked all hours that God sent, filling his head with nothing else but blind ambition.
    He said he was lucky: he was always the right man in the right place at the right time. Success came quickly, in a minor way, but he wasn’t content with just that. He borrowed huge sums from bankers who were charmed by his silver tongue and impressed with his dedication as well as his knowledge of his business and his foresight. And within four years he took his small company into the big time. They said he was a man who knew what he was doing and what he wanted and that he was determined to have it. The banks were quick to spot the qualities of a winner. They gave him what he asked and they never lived to regret it, because Big Bob O’Keeffe never let them down.
    When Shannon was six he bought an apartment on New York’s Park Avenue and employed a fancy decorator to do it up. He installed her there with a housekeeper and a nanny and enrolled her at the Ursuline Convent School. They said that in return for his good fortune, Bob offered his services and a portion of his money to various charities and then he began to be seen around the smartest parties in town.
    He met Barbara van Huyton—Buffy—at the very first party the very first week. She was tall and slender in ablack velvet dress, with perfectly cut shoulder-length blond hair, a chiseled nose, and confident hyacinth eyes. Her family had an important name but no money; she was his image of the perfect upper-class girl and he married her six months later.
    Buffy’s friends