14

I met my father’s old best friend today.” Kelli sat propped against the headboard in her hotel bed. “Seems like a nice man. Kind of rough around the edges, but he’s just the kind of person my father would like.”

“You didn’t tell him who you were, right?” Denice sounded worried in spite of the fact that she certainly knew better.

“No, of course not. I did exactly what I told you I was going to do. I went in, assessed, and left.” Kelli decided it was probably best to leave out any more specific details.

“Good girl. By the way, I’ve been doing some research, and I guess you are not completely alone in your situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“So far I’ve found two similar cases. The first happened in the late seventies. A father in Massachusetts picked up his two girls for visitation. He never returned. He didn’t try to fake their deaths or anything, but he took them away, changed everyone’s name, and started a new life. It was almost twenty years later when they finally found them—the girls were both in their twenties by then. All this time, he had been telling them that their mother died in a car wreck. He took the Social Security number from a boy who had just died and managed to fly under the radar.”

“So when they found them, the mother was still alive?”

“Yep.”

“What happened?”

“He claimed that he had taken the girls because his ex-wife was an unfit mother. The girls loved their father and defended him wholeheartedly. In the end, it went to court and he got probation, but from what I’ve been able to find, the girls never did reunite with their mother. I’m still looking into that, though, so I’m not completely sure yet.”

“If my mother was abusive, why would my father have left my sister and brother there alone? What kind of father would do that?”

“Good question. And that brings me to the second scenario I found. A married father of five disappeared while on a business trip to San Diego. They found some of his stuff scattered in a rough part of town, so it looked as though he might have been robbed and killed, but they never found the body. Several years later they finally had him declared dead, and a life insurance policy was paid out to his children. More than sixteen years later he reappeared. Turns out, he had been living all over the place, and apparently he’d left because he was gay and wanted to start a new life. Best I can tell, for the past few years there has been a big fight going on about whether the kids have to pay back the insurance company.”

“Pay them back?”

“They paid out on a life insurance policy for a man who was still alive.”

“Wow. I’d never thought of that.” Kelli shook her head. “I wonder if there was life insurance money involved here. I guess it doesn’t matter in this case, though, since my father is dead.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t dead twenty-four years ago, if there was indeed a policy paid out back then. That’s just one more reason to keep things quiet.”

“In your second story, did the family reconcile?”

“I don’t think he’s winning any Father of the Year awards. Sounds like most of his kids are pretty angry.”

“I guess they would be.”

“I know. I’m thinking this one is more in line with your father. Maybe he just wanted to start a new life.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Kelli thought about what Denice had just said. “This just makes me all the more certain that you’re right about not telling my family who I am. Being the wife or kid who was left behind without a word could not be a healthy thing to find out, insurance money or not.”

“Exactly.” Denice paused for a minute. “So what is your next step?”

“I’ve been doing some research, too. Other than being a history teacher, and teaching music lessons on the side, the only thing I can really find out about my mother is that she is on the Women’s Ministry Team at her church. I figure showing up at church is the least obvious way to maybe get a look at her. I’m hoping I’ll get some sort of inspiration for the next step after that. I’m still trying to figure out about my brother and sister.”

“All right, then. Go forth and quietly conquer.”

“That’s my hope. Although in all honesty I have to doubt anything good will come out of my going to church. . . .”

Denice laughed. “That could be taken more than one way.”

“And pretty much any way you choose to take it, it’s still true.”

My dad was hot and cold about the whole church thing. Every now and then he would get on a kick that we needed to start going regularly, or sometimes just that I needed to be going regularly. Most of the time, though, he avoided the place altogether.

I asked him once if we needed to go to church to go to heaven. He said being in church didn’t make a person a real Christian any more than being in a garage made you a car. He said the people there just wanted our money and they were judgmental but no better than us. I threw these lines back at him a few years later, after an incident in high school put him back on one of his jags about me needing to attend more consistently. Somehow, when he had said those lines, they were true and acceptable. When his teenage daughter who had been caught ditching class said them, he came back with, “That’s what someone with a guilty conscience says.”

Looking back on it, it seems he was right.