“THIS IS A RISKY PLOY,” Esme said as we power walked to the coffee shop the next morning. “We don’t have anything but Yvonne’s word, and I trust that about as far as I could throw her, which I’d be happy to do except Denny would have to arrest me for assault and that’d be hard on him.”
“I don’t see any downside to giving it a try,” I said. “Like Jack said, eventually we’re going to have to tell Dinah Leigh and Conrad what we’ve learned, whether we can prove it or not.”
Chelsea was waiting for us, sipping her coffee and looking around like somebody might attack at any moment. Esme went inside to get our coffee and I sat down and started right in.
“Thanks for coming, Chelsea. I think maybe you can help us figure out what to do about this fine mess we’re in. You and Lincoln weren’t arguing about your engagement that night, were you? You were arguing about whether to tell Dinah Leigh about the circumstances of Conrad’s birth.”
Chelsea tried to look confused, but involuntarily drew in a sharp breath. “How did you find out?” she asked. “Lincoln swore to me he’d hold off. He promised me,” she said, hiccupping a sob.
I was already feeling bad about ambushing Chelsea and now I felt even worse. “I’m sorry,” I said as she fished around in her bag for a tissue. “Lincoln never told us anything, he never had a chance—” I stopped abruptly, realizing I was only making matters worse.
“Aunt Yvonne told us,” Esme said, sliding into the seat opposite Chelsea and passing my coffee to me. No apple fritter, I noted with regret.
“She told you?” Chelsea said, her eyes going wide as saucers. “She just told you? Why would she do that?”
“She was worried about Conrad having the DNA test and she thought we could dissuade him,” I said.
“Oh my gosh,” Chelsea said. “But if nobody else in the family got tested what would it matter? I still don’t understand why Yvonne would go to you and just tell you.”
“She seemed to be under the mistaken impression that we were required to keep it confidential. We had to disabuse of her that notion and let her know Dinah Leigh was our client and that our obligation was to her. She didn’t take it well.”
“And Dinah Leigh still is your client,” Chelsea said. “You don’t need to tell her about this, you don’t need to tell anybody.”
“We do need to tell her, and we need to tell Conrad, too. We’re only missing a few pieces of the puzzle, and I suspect we might learn those inside a blue envelope you told me you didn’t remember seeing.”
Chelsea tilted her head and gave me a hard look. “Yvonne didn’t tell you about that. She couldn’t have.”
Neither of us said anything. I was debating whether to rat Emma out, but in the end there was no need.
“Emma,” Chelsea said, but without malice. “I knew somebody had been snooping around my room. I thought it might be her.”
“She swears she didn’t, and if it means anything, I believe her, but she did see you put the envelope in Dinah Leigh’s jewelry case. So I assume it’s in the hotel safe now?”
“Yes,” Chelsea said.
“I think you’d better tell us what’s in it,” I said.
“You mean you don’t already know that, too,” Chelsea snapped.
“No,” I said, my voice calm. “I only know that it was something important enough for you to lie about it. If you want my guess, I’d say it was a letter from Conrad’s father. Emma said the handwriting was spidery and I know Herbert Nelson had to retrain himself to write with his left hand after the accident. Did he provide some sort of documentation about the adoption?”
“It was a letter,” Chelsea said, nodding. “And it was from their father, but there are no documents about the adoption, if that’s what you want to call it. He knew he was dying and he wanted Conrad to know the truth. I hope it made him feel better to write it all down but I wish he’d burned it afterward. It’s going to cause a lot of misery for a lot of people now.”
“There’s no help for it, Chelsea,” I said. “They have to be told.”
“Did Aunt Yvonne tell you everything?” she asked. “Did she admit her part in it?”
“Yes,” Esme said. “I think she’s worried about that.”
“She should be,” Chelsea said. “And she’d better get a good lawyer.”
“Oh, I doubt they’ll take any legal action against her at this point,” I said, figuring the forgery of county documents from more than a half century ago probably wouldn’t be on any prosecutor’s list of priorities.
“Why not? Don’t tell me there’s a statute of limitations,” Chelsea said.
“There probably is,” I said. “And anyway, what she did wasn’t that bad.”
“Not that bad?” Chelsea said. “It was horrible.”
I couldn’t decide if she meant Yvonne forging the birth certificate, or if the letter might support Esme’s theory about Yvonne being the mother.
“We’ve seen far worse,” I said with a shrug, hoping she’d be forthcoming.
It didn’t work.
“What kind of cesspool do you people work in?” she asked. Before I could answer, she got up from the table and grabbed her bag. “Come by the hotel later this morning and I’ll give you the letter,” she said. “At least I won’t have to be the one to tell them.”
She started to walk away, then froze in place. She turned slowly and approached the table almost in slow motion. “You don’t think this had anything to do with Lincoln getting killed, do you?” she asked.
Esme and I looked at each other. “I can’t see how they’d be related,” I said. “It’s bad, but it’s certainly not worth killing over.”
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “I don’t think you have any idea what this is going to do to all of them.”
We watched her make her way to her car and get inside. She sat there for a full minute and I could see she was sobbing. Finally she collected herself and drove away, and Esme turned to me. “Are we that jaded?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said with a sigh. “Guess we’ve uncovered too many dark family secrets.”
We walked back to my house, showered, dressed, and headed to the hotel. I didn’t want to give Chelsea a chance to change her mind. Dinah Leigh was in the spa when we arrived at the family’s suite, and Chelsea told us she needed to make a couple of phone calls that were time sensitive. “Then I’ll go down and get it for you.”
We told her we could wait and she went into her room and closed the door, leaving us with the lovely Aunt Yvonne, who speared us with death stares.
“What’s she getting for you?” she demanded.
I figured now was as good a time as any to let Yvonne know the jig was up, and as disagreeable as the woman was, I felt sorry for what she was about to go through with her family.
“Your brother-in-law wanted Conrad to know the truth. He wrote a letter toward the end of his life and told him everything about the circumstances of his birth.”
“I seriously doubt that,” Yvonne said with a sniff. “Herbert was a coward.”
“Maybe facing death made him brave. And he did write the letter,” Esme said. “Chelsea’s getting it for us. Then we’ll all need to sit down and have a serious conversation.”
I sat down next to Yvonne and tried to make my voice sympathetic. “Yvonne, are you Conrad’s mother?”
Her head snapped up and for the first time I saw shock in her eyes. Her doughy face went through several changes of expression, none of which I could read. She worked her mouth and I could see she was trying to speak but couldn’t get words to form. Finally she sighed and her voice came out ragged. “You two are pretty smart, aren’t you? Yes, I gave birth to Conrad, and Herbert and Marie raised him. None of us wanted him to know. And since I’m the only one of us three left, I still don’t want him to know. Don’t I have any rights?”
“Not legal ones,” I said, “but we’re listening.”
“Okay, fine. Marie was carrying a baby when they came to live with me after Herbert lost his job at the graphite plant. She lost that one, too, and she was nearly ’bout crazy. Like I told you, she lost three right in a row. And I was running around with a no-account man I met at a bar when I was sowing my wild oats and I came up pregnant. I didn’t want a child. I knew I couldn’t raise one by myself and I surely didn’t want to tie myself to that side-winding sot. So we worked it out between us, Herbert, Marie, and me. Our business. Family business. Nobody else’s. Wasn’t then, isn’t now. Now I need to be by myself for a while, so leave me alone.”
With that she rose and picked up her cane, which I thought for a moment she might use on Esme and me. But she snatched up her cigarettes and lighter and headed for the door. For a woman in need of a cane, she was swift.
Fifteen minutes later, Chelsea came back into the room, pale, but with her jaw set. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said, pausing at the door. “I hope you two know what you’re doing.”
Clearly she didn’t think we did, but there was no turning back now.
Alone, Esme and I had a talk and decided to stick to the plan. It wasn’t like there was urgency. Time wouldn’t change anything and it could wait until after the wedding. We could give them that one day of joy unsullied by the new reality of their actual blood relationship.
Dinah Leigh came in, looking refreshed and happy. “Sophreena, Esme, I didn’t know you were here. More questions for us?”
“No,” I said. “We’re all set. We’re waiting for Chelsea. She’s got something for us that got left out of your memorabilia box.”
“Where is she?” Dinah Leigh asked, moving briskly around the room, depositing her gym bag in a closet and helping herself to ice water from the minibar.
“I think she had an errand,” I said vaguely. “Don’t let us interrupt what you need to do. We’ll be on our way as soon as Chelsea gets back.”
Patricia came in just then, eager to discuss some campaign plans with Dinah Leigh, and the two settled at the table by the window. Esme and I twiddled our thumbs for another ten minutes.
Yvonne returned and, still skewering us with her coal-black eyes, settled into the chair opposite the sofa. She picked up a ragged paperback mystery from the table and started to read, or pretended to. I leaned over and said to her sotto voce, “We’re going to wait until after the wedding.”
“Aren’t you generous,” she spat back.
Another fifteen minutes passed and I began to fear the worst. Chelsea had decided against giving us the letter and was destroying it as we sat here like saps.
A few minutes later a near hysterical Chelsea opened the door of the suite and practically fell inside. She was breathless and disheveled. “Somebody jumped me in the stairwell,” she said. “Dinah Leigh, they got your jewelry. I’m so sorry.”
We all rushed to her, all except Yvonne, who showed her concern by casually putting down her book and turning in Chelsea’s direction.
Patricia picked up the phone and called the front desk, requesting security.
“No, don’t do that,” Chelsea said, her eyes wild. But it was too late.
She stammered out the story, which was a little disjointed, but I had no doubt it was true. “I was in the stairwell. I always take the stairs when I can; everybody knows that. Someone came in behind me when I reached the landing on the floor below us and slipped a pillowcase over my head. He told me to get on the floor and tied my hands behind my back. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs. He was going up, not down, which didn’t seem right to me. I got my hands free—they’d been tied with only a shoestring, I mean literally a shoestring. I ran up the stairs after him, but there was no one in the hallway.”
“You poor dear,” Dinah Leigh said, guiding Chelsea to a chair and stroking her hair. “Don’t worry, the jewelry is insured. I’m just so grateful you weren’t badly hurt.”
Almost immediately the room was filled with people. Marc came scurrying in along with three or four hotel staff. No one seemed to be in charge and everyone was asking questions and fussing over Chelsea. Finally Cyrus came into the room and restored order. He made profuse apologies to Chelsea and to Dinah Leigh and turned to his men.
“Search every room,” he said. “I don’t care how disgruntled the guests are, I want this thief found. Dinah Leigh, would you describe the case for them.”
Chelsea, who seemed to slowly be regaining her wits, put up a hand. “You don’t need to do that,” she said, choking back a sob. “I know who it was. It was him.” She turned to glare at Marc.
“I think she’s delirious,” Marc said, looking totally taken aback. “Maybe we should call the doctor to sedate her again. She’s out of her head.”
“I saw your shoes, Marc,” Chelsea said through clenched teeth. “They’re custom, remember? You like to remind everybody about that. None other like them. I saw your stupid shoes.” She looked to Cyrus. “The case is a circular zipper case, tan leather.”
Cyrus narrowed his eyes. “Search Mr. Benson’s room first, if you would,” he told the security guys. “And be thorough.”
“Marc?” Patricia said. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Marc protested. “I’m telling you, she’s off her rocker. That happens to some people. I don’t know why she’s making these wild accusations, but clearly Lincoln’s death has messed her up. Dinah Leigh, you know I’d never steal from you.”
“I thought I knew that,” Dinah Leigh said. “But I also know Chelsea is quite stable and she doesn’t lie.”
One of the security men came in a few moments later holding a round zip case in his gloved hand. “This it? Found it in the suitcase in his closet,” he said, jerking his head in Marc’s direction.
Marc set his lips hard. “I was protecting this family,” he said. “I was protecting you, Patricia. I wasn’t after the damned jewelry. I just wanted—”
He was interrupted by the sharp rap of Yvonne’s cane on the coffee table. “Shut up, Marc. Close your mouth and use your head. I’m sure we can straighten this all out without having to air our family’s dirty laundry in front of outsiders.”
“This particular family member will be coming with these outsiders,” Cyrus said, motioning for his men to take Marc. “The police are on their way, and he can explain everything to them.”
“I want someone to explain all this to me,” Dinah Leigh said. “Right now.”
“To me, too,” Patricia said, stepping forward to stand beside her mother.
I looked across to the hotel security man who still held the case. “Would you mind unzipping the case so we can see the contents?” I asked.
“Already did,” the man said. “Lots of jewelry, looks expensive.”
“Only jewelry?” I asked and looked a question at Chelsea. She took in a deep breath and looked down at the floor.
The man looked to Cyrus, who nodded. “Open it.”
The man put the case on the table and zipped it open. Lots of sparkly stuff but no blue envelope, no paper of any kind.
“Please, Cyrus, what’s going on here?” Dinah Leigh pleaded. “Sophreena? Esme? Do you know anything about this? Will somebody, for the love of God, tell me what’s going on?”
Esme and I exchanged a look. “We need to talk,” I said.
“Does it have to do with this thief?” Cyrus asked.
“It relates to his motive, but that’s all,” I said, nodding toward Marc, who was still protesting being escorted from the room. “You can take him down. We’ll come talk to the police,” I said, “but give us a few minutes.”
Once they’d all cleared out, with Dinah Leigh and Patricia still demanding to know what was going on and Aunt Yvonne sitting silent as a sphinx, Chelsea found her voice. She rose slowly and turned to Esme and me. “I’ll go get Conrad. He should be here,” she said, her voice robotic. “You’ll have to do it. I can’t. I can’t even be here for this. I won’t be able to bear it.” She went over and hugged Dinah Leigh, who was totally perplexed. Chelsea bit her lip as the tears started to fall. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” she told her, then turned for the door.
We waited, with Dinah Leigh and Patricia growing ever more strident in their demands to know what was going on.
“Keep your britches on,” Yvonne said. “These two will drop everything on you soon enough,” she said. “And you can blame Conrad for all of it. Didn’t I tell you digging around in the past is only asking for trouble?”
“I should go down and be with Marc,” Patricia said. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but Mother, you know he’d never steal anything from you.”
“I know, Patricia, but they did find the jewelry in his suitcase—what are we to make of that?”
“They won’t let you see Marc right now,” I said. “And I think maybe you’ll want to stay for this discussion. Just be patient a few minutes longer.”
Just then there came a rap at the door and Dinah Leigh opened it on a clearly curious and confused Conrad. Phoebe came in behind him looking equally bewildered.
“Family only,” Yvonne barked. “Phoebe, you can go wait in your room.”
Conrad’s face reddened. “Phoebe is family, Aunt Yvonne, and she’ll be staying. Now, what is this about?”
Esme rearranged the seating as if preparing for a therapy session and I had the fleeting thought it might be a good idea to have a therapist on standby. When we were all seated I turned to Yvonne. “I’ll do you the courtesy of letting you be the one to tell it if you wish,” I said. “But given new developments, it looks like we can’t wait any longer.”
It didn’t take me long to rue that decision. Yvonne told it with all the tenderness a hammer has for an anvil. There were gasps and protests and shocked silences. But Yvonne plodded on as if reciting a grocery list. “And so, all this fuss over a little biology. I was your birth mother, Conrad, but Marie and Herbert raised you and they were your parents. And lucky you were to have them. Lord knows I wasn’t cut out to be a mother.”
“But I remember the day he was born,” Dinah Leigh protested. “My mother was pregnant with him when she left Quinn County.”
“You remember the day we told you he was born,” Yvonne said. “Your mother lost that baby and I was already in trouble when y’all got there. We made the agreement and she stuffed her shirt and kept up the plan. I was a big-boned girl back then and I was able to hide my condition even when I was well along. And then I took leave from work to take care of my sick sister. At least that’s what I told people. We had to make a little adjustment in the baby’s age, so that’s why I kept him at my house for the first few months, so we could keep him out of sight.”
Conrad spoke, his voice constricted. “So I wasn’t a sickly baby?”
“You were fit as a fiddle,” Yvonne said.
“But I saw him,” Dinah Leigh said. “I saw him when he was a newborn.”
“You saw him through the window at my house,” Yvonne agreed. “We told you he was too frail for you to see him close up or hold him. You saw a baby’s face. We had him all wrapped in blankets. You were young and anyway, you didn’t know anything about babies; you’d never been around any. And everything worked out fine for everybody, so I don’t see why everybody’s getting so het up over this.”
“So,” Conrad said, “Dinah Leigh, we’re actually cousins, not siblings at all. They lied to us all those years. I feel I’ve lost something. Something very precious to me.”
“Me, too,” Dinah Leigh said, wiping at her eyes with an already sodden tissue. “And I’m angry about being deceived. But in the end it doesn’t change anything between us, not really. We’ve been brother and sister all our lives.”
“What,” Patricia said, injecting herself into the conversation with such force some of us jumped, “does any of this have to do with Marc taking my mother’s jewelry?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Yvonne snapped before I could reply. “Herbert went soft in the head in his last days and left a letter to Conrad telling you all this, which Marie and I never wanted another soul to know. I don’t know what got into the man. I didn’t know the letter existed until these two told me,” she said, jerking her head toward Esme and me. “I was hoping they’d honor my wishes and not tell you about any of this, but they showed up here saying Chelsea was going down to get that letter for them. So I called Marc and told him he needed to get to it and burn it. Patricia, this would not be good for your career if it came out to the public. Marc was looking after you like he always does.”
“By attacking Chelsea?” Patricia cried.
“He didn’t hurt her,” Yvonne said. “But I trust he got that letter and did away with it and now nobody outside the family needs to know about any of this.”
“Idiot!” Patricia spat. “He didn’t think getting arrested for assault would hurt my career?”
“He hasn’t been arrested. Chelsea won’t press charges—whatever else you can say about her, she’s loyal,” Yvonne said with a swat. “So there you have it.” She spread her gnarled hands as if ending a presentation. “You all know every bit of it and meteors didn’t fall, the seas didn’t dry up, and the world didn’t end. No one else knows other than these two, and I understand they have to keep mum. That only leaves one weak link,” she said, turning a hard stare on Phoebe.
Phoebe clutched Conrad’s arm. “As long as you don’t try to make me call you my mother-in-law, I’m fine with whatever Conrad decides. But let me go on the record as saying I think you’re terrible.”
“Duly noted,” Yvonne said. “Can’t say I’m deeply wounded. I’ve got no apologies to make, so if any of you are waiting for that, you’ll be waiting until they’re pouring frozen margaritas in hell. If I had to make the same decision over again I wouldn’t do a thing different. Except maybe visit Herbert more often in his dying days and make sure he couldn’t get his hands on pen and paper.”
“You had no right to destroy that letter,” Conrad said. “It was meant for me. What did it say?”
“I don’t know,” Yvonne said. “God knows what was going through the man’s mind. But it doesn’t matter. Now you know and you can all just wallow in this, or you can accept it was all for the best and get on with your lives. I don’t have much life left, so I’m surely not going to squander it fretting about something that happened way back then.”
I looked around the room. Yvonne was right in one respect. It was all out there now and the world hadn’t ended. But there was pain traced on every face; even Yvonne’s eyes were dark.
I began to feel like an intruder, and judging by the way Esme was shifting in her chair, she felt it, too. I asked to speak with Dinah Leigh privately and we stepped out into the hallway. “I’m really sorry about this. I wasn’t going to tell you until after the wedding,” I said. “And I’d hoped to break it a little more gently, but I couldn’t hand over research I knew to be false. I’m so sorry for the pain this is causing.”
“You did your job,” Dinah Leigh said, and I noticed her hands were trembling. “Don’t apologize for that. This will take some getting used to, but we’ll be okay.”
She slipped back into the room to be with her family, in whatever form that family had rearranged itself into, and Esme and I headed home.
I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.
* * *
Esme and I were so demoralized by the time we got home, we decided to withdraw from the senator’s project as well. It was depressing. Two failed jobs at once; that had never happened to us before. Though technically we hadn’t failed on Dinah Leigh’s job, it had just blown up in our faces.
There are times you just have to take your losses. We’d be okay financially. We had several small jobs waiting and if we started in tomorrow, we’d be able to wedge those in before our next big job, which would take us to Louisiana, Esme’s old stomping grounds, in about a month. That would give us some time to lick our wounds over these failures and get our mojo back.
But more important than our business failings, Lincoln Cooper’s murder remained unsolved and that was casting a pall over everything. We’d been so busy since his death we hadn’t had the time to properly mourn the passing of a friend. It seemed to hit me all at once. He was probably killed by someone he knew. And there was a good chance it was someone we knew, too. That thought made my skin crawl and I found myself in the weird position of rooting for Chad Deese to be a killer. This was wholly unfair, since I’d only met the guy once, but if the choice came down to him or Chelsea, J.D., Damon, Ken, or any of the others we knew from Lincoln’s world, the rude reporter got my vote. Now if Denny could just find some way around his pesky alibi.
We started packing up the materials from the workroom. “I wish I could’ve read that letter,” I said as I put the Nelsons’ memorabilia into an archival file box to be delivered back to Dinah Leigh. “Now I’ll always wonder what it said.”
“Me, too,” Esme said. “It must’ve been hard for Herbert Nelson to write. I mean psychologically and physically. And judging by the headache I’ve come down with, I don’t think he’s too happy somebody interfered with his message to his son.”
“Doesn’t seem fair. Yvonne got a chance to confess to her part in the story, if you could call what she had to say a confession,” I said. “But Herbert never had a chance to tell his side.”
“And now he never will since Marc destroyed the letter. Denny called while I was getting the boxes from the garage. They found burnt paper bits in the wastebasket in Marc and Patricia’s bathroom.”
“Enough to reconstruct?” I asked, hopeful.
“Tiny bits,” Esme said. “And a few in the toilet bowl. He burned it and flushed it. He really didn’t want that thing getting out and that’s all he had time to do. He had to know shoelaces weren’t going to hold Chelsea long.”
“No, but that’s what was available on the maid’s cart,” I said, remembering I’d seen it in the hallway when we came to the room. “She had her spray bottles hooked onto the cart by shoelaces. So while he was helping himself to the pillowcase he took shoelaces, too. What I don’t understand is his level of desperation. I guess I am jaded. It probably would’ve caused a minor scandal if Patricia’s family background had gotten out to the public, but I don’t think it would have been an insurmountable one. Politicians have overcome much worse chicanery by their relatives than this.”
“You forget the candidate,” Esme said. “Benson’s already fighting an uphill battle trying to mold Patricia into somebody likable.”