BEFORE I LEFT THE HOSPITAL, I TRACKED DOWN HARLEY Coffin and made certain he understood exactly where the Judge—and I—stood on the operation question. I’d also sat for a while in the straight-backed chair, holding my father’s hand while he slept. He seemed peaceful, some of the deeply etched lines in his face smoothed out. He must have dreamed of something pleasant, because occasionally I watched his wrinkled lips twitch into a brief smile. I also made certain the nurses’ station and Dr. Utley’s office had all my contact numbers and that the medical power of attorney had been copied and placed in the Judge’s chart.
As I crested the second of the two bridges leading onto Hilton Head, I glanced at my bag. The original of the Judge’s instructions lay tucked inside, and I’d decided to carry the document with me at all times. If it came to a showdown with the overbearing Dr. Tom Utley, I wanted to make certain I had my ammunition close at hand.
I bypassed the turnoff to the Simpson & Tanner office and headed for home. When I pulled into my driveway, I smiled to see Dolores Santiago’s banged-up blue Hyundai squatting on the pine straw beside the house. There had been times in the past few months when it seemed as if I might lose this woman who had cared for me after my husband’s murder, had nursed both my body and my spirit back to life. Her troubles weren’t over, but the local immigration attorney I’d hired on behalf of Dolores and her family was optimistic. In the meantime, we tried to carry on as if the events of the days leading up to last Christmas were just a bad memory.
I stepped into the foyer to the whine of the vacuum cleaner, picked up the mail stacked neatly on the console table, and carried it with me up the three steps into the kitchen. I checked the answering machine, but only Erik had left messages. I filled the tea kettle and set it on the stove.
Into the sudden silence, I called, “Dolores, it’s me. I’m in here.”
I heard the brisk tread of her feet on the hardwood floor a moment before she appeared in the great room.
“Ah, mi pobre Señora! El Juez, he will be better?”
“How—?” I began, then realized it didn’t matter. Despite the annual influx of tourists, all of Beaufort County was really like a small town. News—both good and bad—traveled fast. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It’s his heart, but he doesn’t want them to operate.”
“Sí,” she said, nodding. “He is tired, no?”
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but perhaps she was right. Life had been a battle for my father ever since the first of his strokes. Maybe he’d just grown weary of the fight. I blinked against the tears.
The kettle whistled, and Dolores climbed the steps to the stove. “You rest, Señora. I make the tea.”
I let her fuss over me, mostly because it gave both of us solace, a familiar assignment of roles we’d first assumed the day I came home from the hospital, burned and scarred from the explosion of Rob’s plane. Without thinking about it, my hand strayed to the ropy tissue that scored my left shoulder.
We sipped tea in companionable silence while I sorted through the mail, tossing most of it aside. I looked up to find my part-time housekeeper studying me over her cup.
“What?” I said, and she smiled sadly.
“The good God will protect El Juez. I will pray.”
“Thank you.”
It seemed to me there would be a lot of messages heading skyward, in both English and Spanish, on behalf of my father. I wished I could believe they would do any good. I shook off my sadness and rose.
“Are you finished in the office? I have some work to do on the computer.”
“Sí. I go now for the shopping.”
“Fine. I probably won’t be around here much, so don’t overdo it.”
“Sí, Señora,” she said. “I leave for you some things to heat. Very fast. No trouble.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
In the bedroom Rob and I had converted to an office, I turned on the computer and logged in to my e-mail account. I’d been reluctant to leave the hospital, but Lavinia had insisted. There was nothing I could do but watch my father sleep, and I knew she’d be on the phone to me the moment there was any change. Maybe if I kept busy, I thought, I could push away the horrible, sinking feeling in my gut. At least for a while. Besides, I’d made a commitment to Joline Eastman. Her fear of loss had to be at least as crushing as my own. Maybe more.
Erik had sent the newspaper articles as attachments, and I downloaded and printed them out. There wasn’t much more than what he’d told me the night before: the fact of the existence of the family grocery store on Edisto and that a Maeline Hatcher, possibly née Mitchell, still lived nearby. I dialed the phone number Erik had included, but a robotic voice informed me that it was not in service. Some temporary problem, I wondered, or had the phone actually been disconnected? Had we come this close only to lose our best lead so quickly? Maybe I would have to go up there and find out, although the idea of being that far away from the hospital scared me.
I glanced at the phone, but it sat mute. I should have given Lavinia a cell, I thought and made a mental note to remedy that situation. Erik could get one for me quickly. In the meantime, all I could do was wait.
On impulse I turned back to the computer and Googled “Julia Simpson.” The first ten of several thousand results popped up on the screen, and I scrolled through a few pages of them. Unfortunately, I had no way of knowing which, if any, of them was pertinent. I tried the search again, this time adding “Edisto Island,” but it didn’t change the results. There was nothing in my father’s obituary to indicate where this other daughter of his might live, but I’d fastened on the mention of his having had a law practice there early in his career, something I’d never known. And then there was the newspaper cutting I’d found in Lavinia’s treasure box. It, too, had involved Edisto, although there didn’t seem to be any connection between the two.
Still, I logged on to the archives of The Charleston Post and Courier, the paper in which Erik had located the story about the Mitchells’ grocery store, but found nothing relevant. I wandered around the Internet for a while, hunting for some other newspaper from which Lavinia might have cut the clipping about the drowning accident, but again I struck out.
I redialed the number for Maeline Hatcher and got the same disembodied message. I could feel the tension of inaction bunching in my shoulders.
“You’re driving yourself nuts,” I said aloud to the empty house. I needed to be doing something. I’d badger someone at the ICU nurses’ station into giving me an update on the Judge. I reached for the phone again just as it rang.
“Bay, honey, it’s me,” Lavinia said.
“How is he?”
Her snort of laughter lifted my heart. “Almost back to normal. Cursin’ and carrying on, just making everyone’s life miserable.” She paused. “They’ll be glad to get rid of him.”
It took me a moment to decode her meaning. “They’re sending him home? When?”
“As soon as we can get him packed up and loaded in the van.” Lavinia sounded almost giddy with relief.
“What’s the prognosis? About the blockage, I mean?”
The silence lengthened, and I knew the news wasn’t all good. “They’re going to try some medication, see if that helps. Dr. Utley wasn’t too happy, but your father wasn’t gonna be budged on it. So he has a passel of prescriptions we have to get filled, and he’s been ordered to stay in bed for at least a week. Harley Coffin will check on him every day.”
“That’s great news.” I felt myself smiling. “I’ll be right over and help you get him home.”
“No need, child. The ladies from the church are here. They’ll give me a hand. It’ll take us a while to get all the paperwork done, and he’ll probably sleep most of the rest of the day. Why don’t you stop by for supper? I could probably use your help then.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. He was askin’ about you earlier. I’ll tell him you’ll be there tonight.”
“Okay. See you then.”
I hung up and dropped my head into my hands. The sense of relief was almost as emotionally overpowering as the fear had been, and it was a few moments before I could breathe normally again. Maybe Lavinia’s and Dolores’s prayers hadn’t been entirely in vain.
I glanced back at the computer screen and checked the clock in the lower right-hand corner: 10:43. I had several hours before I needed to be at Presqu’isle, plenty of time to check out why Maeline Hatcher’s phone was out of order. I closed Google, and a sudden thought struck. Perhaps fate had given me a chance to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone: The road out to Edisto Island lay not far beyond the little town of Jacksonboro. Maybe, if I had time . . . Outside, I heard the familiar whine of Dolores’s old car.
No! Somehow, I had to put aside the mystery of my sister and the strange newspaper article tucked into Lavinia’s keepsake box. Kimmie Eastman deserved all my attention, I told myself firmly as I signed off and went to help my friend carry in the groceries. I kept the teenager’s face firmly fixed in the front of my mind as I helped Dolores restock the pantry. Twenty minutes later, I’d changed into comfortable slacks and a sweater, pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator, and tucked a couple of granola bars into my bag on my way out the door.
If the gods smiled, I might have a compatible bone marrow donor for Kimmie nailed down by sunset.
Traffic on Route 17 came to a complete standstill as a massive front-end loader lumbered across the highway several cars ahead of me. The widening project had been going on forever, it seemed, and I’d forgotten how snarled things could get. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, my mind floating to my father and the doctor’s decision to let him go home. From there it was a short mental leap to his obituary—the necessity for which was now indefinitely postponed, thank God—and then a quick jump to Julia Simpson.
I’d never had even the slightest clue such a person existed. It still didn’t seem real to me. How could he have kept such a secret all these years? Who was she? Where was she? Maybe I should just ask him. The envelope holding the obituary hadn’t been sealed. Maybe he wanted me to find it. I thought about that for a few moments. He hadn’t given a residence for Julia in the almost terse summation of his life he’d prepared for the newspaper. Had that been intentional? Or maybe he didn’t know. What if all this had been orchestrated? What if he’d sent me to find the power of attorney knowing full well my curiosity would get the better of me?
I jerked back to reality when a horn sounded behind me, and I realized traffic had begun to move again.
What if he didn’t know where she was, and this had been his way of sending me off to find her? “Get Julia,” he’d mumbled from his hospital bed. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. He’d been in and out of consciousness, the flow of oxygen to his brain interrupted, or so the doctors claimed. He wouldn’t have been able to formulate something so devious in his condition.
Would he?