4

It was almost noon when Kelli pulled into her parents’ driveway the next day. She went straight to the office, determined to finish the cleaning today.

She opened the safe and pulled out the final envelopes. The first, the one marked Miscellaneous, was misshapen, the bottom much thicker than the top. She opened the flap and peeked down inside to see what looked like mostly photographs. She dumped the contents into her lap and picked up the photo on top.

A younger version of her father sat on the bank of a creek, fishing next to a small red-haired boy. Kelli had no idea who the boy might be—was it possible that it was Preston? No, it couldn’t be. Not a single picture had survived the fire. Knowing her father always labeled pictures, she flipped it over. Max, age 3, May 1987.

Who was Max? And how had Daddy come by a photograph from 1987? The only explanation that made sense was that this Max person had given her father this picture after the fire. As a thank-you for taking him fishing? But why would her father keep it in his safe?

All of her life, Kelli had known that her mother, brother Preston, and sister Kaitlin had been killed in a house fire in rural Louisiana when she was barely one. She knew no other details because her father could never bring himself to speak of it. Even Mimi, her stepmother, seemed to know little about it, and she always insisted they never speak of it because it upset Kelli’s father so.

Kelli turned her attention back to the pile of pictures. The next was Daddy holding a chubby baby with short, curly hair. She had her arms locked around his neck, offering a huge smile to the camera. Kelli flipped over the picture. Beth, age 1, May 1987.

Kelli began to flip rapidly through the pictures now. There were more of Max and Beth individually and together. Dad was in some of the pictures, but not all of them. Toward the end, Kelli came to a picture of a woman she didn’t recognize. She was pretty and elegant looking in a non-pretentious, Laura Bush sort of way. She held her hand up over her eyes, shading the sun as she smiled at the camera. Kelli flipped the picture over. Alison, 1988. The very last picture showed all four of them—Daddy, Alison, Beth, and Max—standing together in front of a couple of huge sequoia trees. Kelli turned it over, afraid of what she would see. Family vacation, Kings Canyon National Park, 1988. The photo dropped from Kelli’s hand and fluttered to the carpet.

There was still another envelope yet to be opened. Kelli simply stared at it, minute after minute ticking by.

Odds and Ends.

Finally, she dumped the contents on the floor beside her and found a mishmash of newspaper clippings, notebook paper, and some official-looking paperwork. She picked up the top article from the group, prepared to read about the horrific house fire that had trapped a woman and her two small children, that had left not one single thing in the home uncharred. Her eye fell immediately to the two large photos on the page. The first was a tiny girl, little more than a baby, dressed in a frilly dress, wearing lacy socks and a floppy hat. The other was a middle-aged man, wearing a coat and tie and a broad smile.

The headline read, “Local Man and 1-Year-Old Daughter Missing After Boating Mishap.” Beneath the photos was a sentence in bold type: “An overnight search was launched off the South Carolina coast for David Waters and his young daughter Darcy, when the skiff the two were last seen in washed ashore in foul weather. The Coast Guard captain says he is ‘cautiously optimistic.’”

Kelli studied the pictures. The little girl looked like . . . But she could be anyone, there was no way to know for sure. The man, however, she did know. Her hands started shaking so hard the paper fell from her grasp and fluttered to the ground. The implications of what she was seeing began to take shape, and she ran to the bathroom and puked in the toilet. As she stood at the sink, rinsing her mouth, she looked up at the mirror and spoke her question aloud. “David Waters? Darcy Waters? Who are they, and what is going on here?”

She walked from the room, knowing that the complete and truthful answers to those questions were something she had to find out. And she knew more than enough at this point to know the answers were going to be devastating.