Chapter Thirty-Three

EVEN WORKING AROUND THE CLOCK, it took Kendall nearly the entire week to finish the historical register application. Part of it was the wild-goose chase of paperwork that the various web pages and applications and links sent her on, checking and double-checking everything that was required for a successful application. She reviewed the samples History Colorado provided. She retook photos when the first set didn’t adequately show the details of the architecture and edited them to show the houses in the best, most preserved light. She actually had to drive to Georgetown before she could find someone who was confident in handling the brittle blueprints so she could scan and attach them. She had the same print shop scan the passages in the pamphlet that mentioned Jasper Green.

She also did more research and was able to find a few other mentions of the architect online—one in a slideshow from an art school in Chicago and another in a catalog on eBay, which she overpaid for and then overpaid again to have FedExed to her overnight. She managed to find his name in the Royal Academy roster and a couple of photos of sculptures housed in obscure English museums. And yet, she was still only partially confident that she’d established the importance of the architect and his relationship to Colorado. It was a call to the Art Workers’ Guild in England that yielded the final piece, a photograph of his name on the fresco that lined the inside of the guild hall, right next to the most important decorative artists and architects of the age. If she couldn’t establish his importance, at least she could establish his proximity to the most influential people of the Arts and Crafts movement. Surely the rarity of his work should help emphasize that it was crucial not to destroy what little was left.

It was Friday afternoon when she finally clicked Send on the email, the application sent via blind copy to Gabe. Her bags were packed, her flight scheduled out of Denver the next day. She closed her laptop and took a deep breath. She’d head over to the attorney’s office to sign the trust into existence, and he’d assured her he would wait until she was gone to have Gabe come in.

Because, of all the things she was preparing to leave behind, he was the most difficult. Knowing he was just across town in his office was torture. She’d avoided Main Street Mocha in case she saw him, instead opting for French press coffee in the bed-and-breakfast kitchen. She caught sight of him out the window one day, walking Fitz by the house, and dropped the curtain when he glanced up to her room. Probably just a coincidence, not an indication he was looking for her. She had to believe that was the case. It was too difficult to leave him behind otherwise.

She half thought he would show up to see her off when she checked out of the B and B the next morning, but it was only his grandfather who met her when she hauled her duffel bag down the stairs.

“What do I owe you?” she asked.

He waved a hand and wouldn’t meet her eye. “Pshaw. It was a pleasure having you. Especially after all you’ve done for Gabe and the town.”

It seemed like overstating something she’d done mostly for her own benefit. She reached into her purse and counted out a handful of hundred-dollar bills, what she estimated the room would be worth back home, and Mr. Brandt’s eyes widened. “That’s far too much.”

Kendall removed one hundred from the stack to placate him and then pushed the money into the man’s hand. “Please. It’s my pleasure. I appreciate the place to stay. And the coffee and breakfast.” She gave the innkeeper a rueful smile, knowing that he understood the true reason she hadn’t been venturing out lately for her morning cup of joe. She would have to stop by Main Street Mocha and say goodbye to Delia before she left. It was a shame that she wouldn’t be sticking around permanently. She had a feeling the owner could turn out to be as much of a friend as she’d been an impromptu mentor.

Unexpectedly, Mr. Brandt gave Kendall a hug, and she had to escape before tears pricked her eyes again. Surely she could get out of this town without crying. Or without seeing Gabe. She had to.

When she walked out to her rental vehicle parked at the curb, however, there was a thick package sitting on her windshield. She shoved her duffel in the back of the SUV before carefully removing the package and bringing it into the driver’s seat with her. It appeared to be a hardboard file folder, at least an inch thick, wrapped in heavy clear plastic. She frowned and unwrapped it.

A note was paper-clipped to the front of it, written in blocky, masculine writing that she somehow knew was Gabe’s even before she saw the signature. Kendall, I’m sorry if I overstepped, but there are some things you need to know before you leave.

Fear struck her heart without her really knowing why. She flipped it open and found a cover letter from Alvarez Private Investigation.

        Dear Gabriel,

                Please find enclosed the information requested regarding Kendall Green and her mother, Caroline Green. I feel confident that had this occurred today, with integrated computer systems, Ms. Green would have been reunited with her grandmother shortly after she was found. Unfortunately, in the 1990s, local law enforcement and social services used independent systems. This is both a failure of technology and of manpower to reunite a child with her family. I hope the enclosed police reports can give Ms. Green some closure on her situation.

Kendall’s heart pounded so hard she felt dizzy. The words blurred on the page. Had Gabe actually hired a private investigator to look into her past? It took several minutes of breathing in and out, staring through the windshield, before she could find the courage to look past the cover letter.

And what she found there was unbelievable. She had to read through it multiple times to understand what the reports were saying, to piece together the significance of what had happened.

On April 21, 1997, a woman matching Caroline Green’s description, identified only as Jane Doe, had been struck and killed in a crosswalk on a street in Golden, Colorado. She hadn’t been carrying a purse or identification, though police speculated that a witness to the hit-and-run had stolen her possessions since she was dressed nicely and likely would have had a handbag. After scouring missing persons reports and running her fingerprints, no matches were found. No one ever came forward, and she was cremated in accordance with the city laws for unclaimed bodies.

Far south in Littleton, Colorado, on that same day, a five-year-old child identified as Kendall Green was left at a drop-in day care and unclaimed at closing time. The employees hadn’t noticed anything suspicious about the woman who dropped her off and only became concerned when she hadn’t returned for hours after she’d said she would. The child had been well cared for and was left with a backpack with her name inked on the inside. Police suspected she had been abandoned by a parent or perhaps even kidnapped and then dropped off. When no matching missing person report was turned up nationwide for a five-year-old girl of her description and no one came forward to claim the child, she was handed off to child protection services, where she entered the foster care system. A new birth certificate and Social Security number were issued, and without an exact date of birth, no one made the connection to a Kendall Green born in Clear Creek County.

Kendall sat there in frozen disbelief, unable to process what she was reading. Her mother hadn’t abandoned her after all. She’d never come home because she couldn’t. She’d been killed—doing what, Kendall couldn’t possibly guess. Maybe meeting with a lawyer. Maybe looking for a job. Maybe just shopping for a used car or any other possibility. And because of bad luck and a failure of governmental communication, no one had ever connected a hit-and-run with an abandoned child a single county away.

Kendall expected tears to come, but she couldn’t even cry through her shock. Deep down, some part of her had hoped that her mother was still alive. That she would be able to ask her what happened. That her mother could say something to explain everything she’d been through, to somehow take away the hurt.

That hope was over.

The words on the page blurred, and she shoved them away. She wasn’t denying the pain that would come. There was time for that later. There were still pages in the file.

She flipped past the police reports and found a transcript of an interview with Bill and Nancy Novak, her foster parents. She scanned the basic questions that established who they were and then found these words:

        JA: How did Kendall Green come to live with you?

        NN: We were on the list to foster to adopt. We couldn’t have children, and we were determined that we would adopt a child who needed a family. When the agency came to us with a girl who had already been in four homes and been returned to social services because she kept running away, we wanted to refuse the placement.

        JA: Why didn’t you, then?

        NN: God. It’s the only explanation. I was on the phone, ready to tell them we wouldn’t take the placement because she had refused to be adopted by her previous families, and instead I asked when she would be here. [laughs] I got off the phone and looked at Bill and asked, “What just happened?” He shrugged and said the situation had been taken out of our hands.

        JA: And how did Kendall settle into the placement?

        BN: It was rough. She was defiant and distant by turns. And then one night she ran away. We didn’t know where she was for six hours. My wife was in a panic. All we could think about were all the things that could happen to a little girl out there and how badly we’d failed her. We drove all around the city and eventually found her in the park next to her old elementary school. We were so relieved. Nancy just held on to her and cried for what felt like an hour.

        NN: When I went to tuck her in that night, she was sitting on the edge of her bed with her bags packed, fully dressed. She thought she was going back. I unpacked her clothes and gave her pajamas and told her she needed to go to bed if she didn’t want to be late for school the next morning. [NN wipes away tears] She might not have softened much, but she never tried to run away after that.

Kendall paused, the pressure in her chest almost unbearable. She’d remembered that moment when Nancy had clutched her and cried, but until now she hadn’t remembered her misery all the way home. How she’d sat up for hours while her foster parents talked about what to do with her, thinking it was only a matter of time until she was sent back again. She’d finally gone one step too far, screwed up the only good thing she might ever have in her life. The memory of that sick feeling hit her so hard she had to swallow her nausea down several times before she continued.

        JA: You mentioned earlier that you wanted to adopt. Did you change your mind after that?

        NN: No! We still wanted to adopt. But Kendall made it very clear that she believed her mother would be coming back for her someday. She refused.

        BN: It was hard for us. We wanted her to be part of our family, but we decided ultimately it was more important to do what she needed than what we wanted. She needed a stable home and we could provide that for her. It was the least we could do after what she’d been through.

Kendall blinked at the words. What were they talking about? She didn’t remember having said that. She had only a vague recollection of her teen years, feeling like an outsider because she was a foster kid, because they’d never taken the step of giving her their last name.

Was it possible she’d blocked that out? Was it possible she’d had it wrong the whole time?

Had she been letting an erroneous assumption affect her whole life without realizing it?

She glanced at the SUV’s clock. She still had five hours until her flight. She looked back at the page, where the address for Bill and Nancy Novak was written.

She had no choice. She had to know the truth. The whole truth.