crazy. He was a tough man but smart, successful, and respected by all but neighbor Hawksley Carrigan.
Why would he remove his name from the birth certificate?
For him to do that, he had to be sure that Shane wasn’t his.
Except Bill Sheenan was wrong. The private investigator Shane had hired four years ago had been able to run a DNA test off a Starbucks coffee cup that Troy discarded after a meeting with a potential investor—Shane’s investigator—and Troy was a ninety-nine percent match for a sibling, which meant Shane was as much a Sheenan as Trey and Troy, since they were identical twins.
Arriving at the ranch, Shane parked in the gravel area between the house and barn and headed for the two-story log cabin.
He discovered a white envelope tacked to the wooden front door.
Cormac, he thought. Cormac had put the notice in writing.
Shane removed the envelope, unlocked the door and stepped inside to read the paper. He’d been right. Thirty-day notice. In writing.
For a moment Shane didn’t know what to think. He’d been expecting this for awhile but, now that it had come, he was numb.
These past nine months hadn’t been easy or comfortable. But what had he hoped? That living in his parents’ house would heal something inside of him? That sleeping in his brother’s bed would knit that gaping hole in his heart?
Irritated and frustrated, he walked through the house, flipping switches until the entire downstairs blazed with light. But it wasn’t enough. The house seemed to be listening, waiting for something, and Shane synced his phone with his Bluetooth speakers, filling the house with Aerosmith, upping the volume until the glass figurines in the dining room’s china cabinet rattled. Nothing like a good, old 1973 classic to wake the house up. And the ghosts…if they were sleeping.
Did ghosts sleep?
Sing for the laughter…
Shane had been born in 1982—at least that was what his grandmother claimed—but he loved seventies rock, not the disco stuff sweeping Europe and the US, but rock with all its genres…punk, glam, hard, progressive, art, heavy metal. But, by far, hard rock was his favorite and his iPod had been filled with Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Kiss, Aerosmith, Van Halen, and more.
Whenever there was friction in one of the homes, the music was always blared.
The ultra-conservative far right folks would warn that he was going to hell, and complain to the agency that Shane was always listening to satanic music.
Shane would just put on headphones and turn the volume louder.
Knowing no one was within ten miles of the cabin, Shane turned the speakers all the way up now, the music blasting through the house.
Sing for the tears…
He drummed his hand against his thigh as he walked from room to room, circling the downstairs, kitchen to hall, hall through the dining room, dining room to the entry, past the stairs and into the living room.
Standing in the living room, he faced the neat built-in bookcases that framed the lower half of the fireplace. The shelves held maybe a dozen books total, one of them an old dictionary, and the other, an even older Bible.
He took the Bible from the shelf, the black leather scuffed and cracked, and flipped through the tissue thin, gilt-edged pages. Here and there select passages were delicately underlined in pencil. A church program was tucked in the New Testament, in John. Shane wondered if it was there by chance, or if someone had left it there deliberately. A bookmark perhaps. He opened the book more fully, inspecting the pages. More light pencil marks quoted a passage from John 4:16: And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him .
Steven Tyler’s voice rose in the background. Dream on…
Shane closed the book, unable to read scripture in King James English with Tyler’s piercing wail filling the air.
Dream on, indeed.
Jet fell asleep
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley