Quentin & Liz
Date: 10/19/98
From: DSRules

1990

The intercom on Richard Garner's desk buzzed. "Mr. Roger Collins is here to see you."

Richard sighed. "Send him in, Hallie."

Roger strode in through the door, as always, as if he owned the place. "Garner, I demand that you do something about my sister."

"Liz? What do you want me to do 'about' her?"

"I want you to have her committed."

* * * * *

Elizabeth leaned back against her husband, as he reached down to kiss her on her neck.

"Mmmm. . . That feels good."

"It was supposed to," he spun her around in his arms, his blue eyes meeting her brown ones. He held her hands tightly in his. "I'll never hurt you again, Liz," he said. He felt the family heirloom ring that he had only that morning slipped on her finger, before they got onto the train bound for New York.

"I know that, Quentin," she replied, and he reveled in the knowledge that this wonderful, beautiful woman was his. Not just for tonight, or the next year, or the next 20 years, but for all time.

* * * * *

"Why do you want to have Liz committed?"

"Because she's insane, that's why!"

"I'm afraid that you'll have to be a little more precise than that, Roger. What, exactly, has she done that has you convinced that she's insane?"

"Why, she's run off with our Uncle Quentin, that's what!"

* * * * *

"Do you have any regrets, Liz?" Quentin asked as they looked out the window of their sleeper car at the passing scenery.

"Just that it took us so long to get here."

"Here? This train?" He knew what she meant, but couldn't help ribbing her a little.

"You know what I mean."

He pulled her to him and kissed her, long and explicitly. "Do you have any idea how much I love you, Mrs. Collins?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't. Why don't you show me?"

* * * * *

"But you don't have an Uncle Quentin, Roger."

"Uncle, great-uncle, what's the difference? It's still incestuous."

"I'm afraid that it isn't, Roger. Under Maine state law, the only prohibited marriages are between a woman and her father, grandfather, son, grandson, brother, nephew, uncle -- meaning her father's or mother's brother, not her grandfather's brother -- or first cousin. And even first cousins can marry under certain circumstances."

"Are you certain?"

Richard nodded. "Yes. I'm certain."

Roger had the expression that indicated that he was getting ready to start one of his tirades. To mollify him, Richard said, "I'll look into it to make sure, Roger. I'll be in touch with you in the next few days to give you my final decision."

"That's better," Roger said as he turned and left the office.

* * * * *

After Quentin had demonstrated the depth of his regard for her -- twice -- he fell into a deep sleep. Liz lay in his arms listening to the regular clacking of the train's wheels over the rails as she remembered the day that she and Quentin first met.

* * * * *

1972

Liz, just 17 years old at the time, dashed downstairs when she heard her aunt cry out. In the years since Jamison and Carolyn Collins' deaths, when Nora Collins Shaw had moved in with her three children, she had never been anything but sedate, so Liz naturally thought that some tragedy had befallen her aunt.

When she arrived in the drawing room, she found her 35 year old aunt in tears, her arms around a tall man. A *very* tall man. Quite possibly the tallest man that Liz had ever seen.

"Are you all right, Aunt Nora?" Liz asked.

"I'm fine," she replied, dabbing at her nose with the handkerchief that the man had lent her. "Elizabeth, this is your great-uncle, Quentin Collins."

It was then that the tall man turned around. From the first moment that she saw his face, she knew that they were destined to be together.

* * * * *

Quentin stirred beside her on the bed. When she glanced over at him, he was staring at her, his blue eyes startling beneath black lashes.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked, teasingly. "Me, I hope!"

She rolled over on top of him. "And why, pray tell, would I be thinking about you?"

"After that, you can think about something else? I must be losing my touch!"

"Why don't you try again, then?"

Liz seemed unusually tense as Quentin kissed her. "What's the matter?" he asked.

"Who says that anything's the matter?"

"I can tell, Liz. I know you, remember?"

"All right," she sighed. "It's Roger. You know that he won't be happy once he finds out that we've gotten married. I expect that he'll probably try to get our marriage annulled."

"He's welcome to try."

"Quentin!" she rolled off of him and sat upright in bed, glaring at him.

"It won't work, Liz. Our marriage is completely legal. And," he said with a wicked glint in his eye, "I've got a little surprise planned for your darling brother. One that will ensure that he will never cause us a moment's trouble."

* * * * *

After having opened them and removed them from their envelopes, Hallie put Richard's incoming mail in his in-box. She handed one of the letters to him. "I thought that you might find this one interesting."

Richard leaned back in his chair, and began to read the letter. "Dear Mr. Garner . . . ."

* * * * *

Quentin tossed restlessly in his sleep.

"Quentin!" Liz shook her husband.

"Wha -- !" He cried out as he startled awake.

"You were having some sort of nightmare."

"It wasn't just a nightmare. It was a memory."

When she looked at him inquiringly, he elaborated, "It was 1972, and I was going home to Virginia. I had left a note for you, telling you that I'd be back soon. I had been reluctant to tell you where I was going or what I was doing there."

He chuckled ruefully. "I had always planned for my proposal to come as a surprise when I found the right woman. Well, I had found her," he smiled at his bride, "and I had planned to make her mine as soon as I could.

"But I was the one who got the surprise."

"Don't, Quentin. It's over. We're together now." She silenced him with a kiss.

Her kiss stopped him from speaking, but it didn't stop the memories.

It was raining as he drove through the hills surrounding his home, and he lost control of his car. He hadn't been wearing a seatbelt, and was thrown from the car.

That was where the dream always ended. What was always left out was the crushing loneliness he suffered over the next 18 years.

He awoke in the hospital with no memory of the previous 5 years of his life. As far as he knew, it was 1967, and he was 27 years old. They told him that he had been on his way home from a visit to his niece Nora in Maine, but, of course, they had no knowledge that he had been on his way to pick up his maternal grandmother's wedding ring to take it back to Maine and offer it to the love of his life.

It took 18 long years for that part of his memory to come back to him. He sensed that he had lost something important in the missing five years of his life, but nothing concrete ever came to him. The feeling was especially strong when he smelled her perfume, or heard piano music, but they were just fleeting glimpses of the thing he had lost, and as time passed, he became more acutely aware of how he longed to reach out and grasp that memory, and the happiness that lay beneath it.

It wasn't until he went to New York and saw that young woman in the art museum. The one who so reminded him of Liz, with blue eyes. If he'd known then what he knew now, of course, he would have grabbed that young woman and run back to Maine with her, never letting her out of his sight for a moment.

Quentin's mention of his car wreck led Liz to reflect on the 18 years that she had been without him.

The morning after their night together, she awoke to find a note from him on her bedside table telling her that he had to go home for something and promising to return. She had believed his promise, and relied on it to get her through the difficult first few months of her pregnancy. {He'll be back soon,} she promised the little one growing inside her, {and he'll be so happy that you're on your way. . . .}

Of course, Nora, having had three children of her own, recognized the symptoms of pregnancy immediately.

"You honestly think that he'll be back?" her aunt scoffed. "Men like him don't stay when a woman has their baby. They run and never look behind them."

And, as time passed, Liz had to admit that it seemed that Nora was right. So, when she began to show, Liz agreed to go stay with Nora's oldest, Lauren, and her husband in New York. She gave birth in December of 1972, on one of the coldest nights of the year. "Please," she begged the obstetrician. "I know that you won't let me see her, but at least tell the people who adopt her that I want her to be named Victoria."

Soon after she returned home, Paul Stoddard began calling on Liz, and she accepted his proposal, hoping that perhaps she would find a way to find her first-born and bring her home, where she belonged. That never happened, but soon Liz found herself pregnant again, and in 1975, she gave birth to her second daughter, Carolyn.

Paul Stoddard was an alcoholic with a vile temper, and whenever Liz dared speak to him about his drinking, he would beat her. He never damaged her face, but her arms, legs and torso were nearly always a mass of bruises. "Whyever don't you get a divorce?" Roger asked her once when she and Carolyn were visiting him at college.

"I can't do that, Roger," Liz didn't dare say why. It was her fear that no other man would ever want a divorced woman with a young daughter.

And so she put up with Paul's abuse, until one day when he was particularly drunk, Carolyn walked in on them. "Get out of here, you brat!" Paul shouted as he backhanded the little girl.

That was the last straw for Liz. Carolyn fled the room, and Liz picked up the nearest thing to hand, a poker from the fireplace, and, with one blow, crushed Paul's skull with it.

Feeling that she had to pay for what, in her mind, was the cold-blooded murder of her husband, Liz had called the police. Fortunately, Richard Garner had seen the squad cars headed for Collinwood, and had followed them.

They had sent Carolyn out of town to Nora's daughter's home, while Liz's murder trial was conducted. The evidence that Liz had been the victim of spousal abuse at the hands of Paul Stoddard was overwhelming, and the jury had acquitted her of his murder.

* * * * *

"Mr. Garner," Hallie called in to him, "my uncle Eliot's here to see you."

"Show him right in, Hallie!"

An unprepossessing man, T. Eliot Stokes' girth hid the sharpest intellect Richard Garner had ever seen. He was both an accomplished forensic scientist and a highly-regarded private investigator.

Richard rose from his seat and the two men shook hands. "So, what are the results of your tests?"

A smile crept across the large man's face. "These photos are definitely genuine. If they aren't pictures of the same woman, I don't know what they are."

"What are the odds that these two women are unrelated?"

"I wouldn't even know how to begin to calculate that, Richard. Everything about these two women is identical. Down to the pattern of lines around their eyes. They're even too similar for identical twins.

"But they can't be twins," he continued. "Look at this one," he indicated the black-and-white photograph. "This was taken in 1934, at the latest. That building behind her was demolished that year. And," he indicated the color photograph. "This was definitely developed using color film. It wasn't colored on a computer or by any other artificial means that I know of. Color film wasn't widely available in the 1930's. And besides, look at the clothes she's wearing, and the cars in the background. This was clearly taken last year, the year before. Now, they could be mother and daughter, or grandmother and granddaughter, but even that is pushing it a bit. I swear they've got to be the same woman."

"Thank you, Eliot. That's exactly what I wanted to hear." Richard handed Eliot the envelope that contained his fee. "See you later."

"Good-bye Richard." Eliot left the office, and Richard smiled to himself.

"Hallie!" he called out, "Get Roger Collins on the phone!"

* * * * *

The next morning, Quentin watched his wife sleep, while he remembered the events of the previous week. He had known that Liz would take some persuasion after his 18-year absence. He hadn't been prepared for the vehemence with which she would react to his sudden reappearance.

Her eyes had flashed as she looked at him. "Get *out*" she said in a deadly tone of voice.

"Liz, please, let me explain. . . ."

"If you don't leave immediately, I'll have you thrown out! Adam!" She cried out this last word in a loud voice, and almost instantaneously, a tall man, reminiscent of Lurch from the Addams Family, filled the doorway of the drawing room.

"Yes, Mrs. Stoddard?"

"Please show this . . . person . . . off of my property."

Quentin didn't want to cause a scene, so he went peacefully, passing a blonde teenaged girl as he went out the door.

As the door closed, he heard the blonde say, "Who was that, Mother?"

Several days later, he finally found the blonde girl by herself. "Hi!" he said when he approached her.

"Hey, aren't you . . . ."

He nodded. "The man your mother had thrown off of the property the other day."

"What on Earth did you do to my mother? She usually reserves that treatment for pushy salespeople."

She wasn't prepared for his response. "I broke her heart," he answered simply.

Then he continued, "and I really want to make it up to her."

"How do you expect to make a broken heart up to my mother?"

He dug into his pocket and pulled out the velvet box. He opened it so that she could see the ring inside, "with undying devotion. Will you help me?"

* * * * *

At the appointed time, Carolyn slipped downstairs and opened the front door of the house. Quentin walked through the door, and Carolyn mouthed the words, "she's in the drawing room."

Quentin slipped into the drawing room. When Liz saw him, she shouted, "Adam!"

"He won't hear you. Carolyn is keeping him busy helping her with some heavy lifting in the . . . east wing? West wing? Well, far enough away that he can't hear you."

"You've turned my own daughter against me?"

"No, Liz. Carolyn only wants what's best for you. She knows what I'm here to say, and I won't leave until I've said it."

"All right. Talk."

"Well, they say that actions speak louder than words. So . . ."

"Your actions have said plenty, Mr. Collins. Now I would appreciate it if you'd leave."

"But you haven't seen what I've come to tell you yet." He opened the box, and got down on one knee. "This is what I left for 18 years ago, Liz. I wanted to marry you then, and I still want it now."

"It took you a long time to come back, then."

"That wasn't my fault, Liz." He told her about the accident, then, and about the 18 years of amnesia that followed.

"It wasn't until I saw a young woman who looked just like you in New York that. . . . Liz? Are you all right?"

Liz had blanched, and if she hadn't already been sitting, she would have needed to sit down. "You said that you saw her in New York? Oh, God . . . "

"Yes, and that she looked just like you with . . . blue . . . eyes." He began to suspect what she was thinking.

"How old did she look?"

"A little older than Carolyn, maybe." His eyes asked the question.

She answered it with her voice, "That young woman may very well have been our daughter."

"Our daughter? We had a baby?"

Liz nodded sadly. "I was only 18. Aunt Nora wanted me to give her up."

"And so you did. Oh, God, Liz. If only I could have done something to help you. . ." he moved up and sat on the sofa beside her, pulling her into his arms.

They were married the next day, with Carolyn in attendance. When the time came to discuss honeymoons, he told her, "I thought that we'd take a train to New York."

"New York?"

"I've hired a private investigator, who has found a young woman in New York by the name of Victoria Winters, who was born on the date our daughter was born. She was adopted, but her adoptive parents had to give her up several years later, and she's spent the last 10 years in the foster care system. She's searching for her biological parents."

"And you think that's us?"

He nodded. "I'm almost certain of it. We'll never know for sure, though, unless we go to New York, will we?"

* * * * *

Roger arrived precisely on time for his meeting with Richard Garner.

"What did you want to see me about, Richard?"

"These. They came in a letter from a Quentin Collins." Richard enjoyed the shock on Roger's face when he heard the name.

Roger looked at the photos. "It's obvious that this one," he indicated the black-and-white photo, "is a fabrication of some sort."

Richard shook his head. "No, Roger. That is a photo of your paternal grandmother, Laura Murdoch Collins."

Roger silently mouthed the words "Laura Murdoch Collins."

"So, Roger, if you're so concerned about consanguinity, perhaps you should speak to your wife."

* * * * *

Liz was nearly fainting from nervousness as they entered the restaurant. Quentin glanced around the room, finally indicating a young woman facing the other direction, dressed in a black-and-white houndstooth dress.

"Are you sure?"

"She looks just like you did from behind at that age." She looked at him, startled, and he leered, "I have a good memory. Or maybe you just have a memorable backside."

Liz and Quentin approached her slowly. "Miss Winters?" she asked.

When Victoria turned around, Liz was startled by her blue eyes. Eyes that looked exactly like her father's.

"My name is Elizabeth St--," she caught herself, "Elizabeth Collins." She squeezed Quentin's hand gently. "And this is my husband, Quentin. We're your biological parents."

THE END