Jazzy’s phone call woke Reve from a sound sleep. She’d been in Cherokee Pointe for five days and had spent part of each day with her sister. Odd as it seemed, that was how she had begun to think of Jasmine Talbot. The rest of the time, she’d kept busy exploring the town, its quaint shops and tourist attractions. On Tuesday she’d had lunch with Reba Upton. The minute Jazzy’s name came up in their conversation, Reve had made it clear that her loyalties lay with her sister. Yesterday, she’d dined with Cherokee County’s other grand dame—Veda MacKinnon. The woman’s invitation came as a surprise, but she’d been so insistent on their becoming acquainted that Reve had gone as much out of curiosity as anything else. By the time lunch ended, Reve’s curiosity had been satisfied. Miss Veda wanted exactly what Miss Reba wanted. To play matchmaker. Where Miss Reba had high hopes her grandson would find one redheaded twin as alluring as the other, Miss Veda was looking for a suitable wife for her son Brian.
Now Reve had a new rule—no more lunches with any woman who had an unmarried son or grandson between twenty and sixty.
Last night, after dinner together, Reve had let Jazzy and Caleb persuade her to go with them to Jazzy’s Joint. She’d felt as out of place in the honky-tonk as the proverbial bull in a china shop, but she’d stayed until closing, learning about that part of Jazzy’s world firsthand. What would her Chattanooga friends have thought of her if they’d seen her in the smoke-filled bar, rubbing elbows with hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-living men and women?
“Reve, are you up yet?” Jazzy asked, excitement in her voice.
Reve yawned. “Not yet. I’m still in bed.” She eyed the digital clock on the nightstand. “What are you doing up this early? It’s only nine-fifteen.”
“Galvin just called.”
“Galvin?”
“You remember—Dr. Galvin MacNair.”
Reve shot straight up. “Are the DNA test results back?”
“Yep. Galvin got them first thing this morning. He said we can come right on over.”
“Did he—”
“No, he didn’t tell me anything. So, how long will it take you to get dressed and meet me at his office?”
“I’ll need a quick shower.” Reve’s mind spun with a variety of thoughts, but one remained front and center. Today was D-day. “Give me fifteen minutes.” Thank goodness her cabin was inside the city limits, a less than five-minute drive into the heart of town.
“Caleb’s coming with me,” Jazzy said. “That’s okay with you, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s okay with me.”
“We’ll know for sure in just a little while.”
“Yes, we will.”
“Reve?”
“What?”
“We already know, don’t we? We are sisters.”
“Yes, we’re sisters.”
“I called Aunt Sally before I called you. I told her the test results are back and I want the three of us to meet at my apartment later today.”
“Did she agree to come into town and meet with us?”
“Yes, she did. And she promised that she’ll tell us the whole truth.”
“I hope we’re ready for the whole truth,” Reve said.
“If we aren’t ready, we’d better get ready.”
“Right. Okay, then, I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”
Reve hung up the phone, jumped out of bed and stripped out of her pajamas on the way to the bathroom. As soon as she had donned a disposable plastic cap, she took a quick shower. Then she dressed hurriedly in a pair of black designer jeans and a white cable-knit sweater. After running a brush through her hair and applying lipstick and blush, she grabbed her coat, purse and car keys, then headed out the door.
The telephone rang again.
She started to ignore it, but couldn’t bring herself to leave before finding out who was calling. She tossed her coat, purse and keys on the living room sofa in her dash toward the wall phone situated between the living room and kitchen area of the cabin.
She picked up the receiver. “Hello.”
“Ms. Sorrell?”
“Yes.”
“Griffin Powell here. I have an initial report for you. I can either fax you a copy or overnight it by FedEx, but if you’d like, I can give you the highlights over the phone right now.”
Reve’s stomach growled. She needed coffee and a bite of something to eat before facing so many hard, cold facts. Why had the DNA results and a preliminary report from Mr. Powell come in all at once? Because that’s the way life is, she reminded herself.
“Give me the highlights,” Reve said.
“An infant, thought to be only a few weeks old, was found in a Dumpster in Sevierville by the sanitation workers assigned to empty the Dumpster. Both men are now dead, but one man’s wife remembered him telling her all about it.” Griffin Powell paused as if waiting for permission to continue.
“Yes, please, go on.”
“All right. The baby girl was naked, except for a diaper. She was wet, dirty and covered in ants. She’d been dumped right on top of a broken jar with some jelly still inside it, and the sugar had attracted the ants. Other than the ant bites, the child had no marks on her, except a cut on her leg where she’d hit the broken glass when tossed into the trash.”
Sour bile rose from Reve’s stomach. For a minute there, she thought she might throw up. She still had a tiny scar high up on her thigh and the only thing her adopted mother had ever told her was that the scar was the result of an accident when she’d been a baby. “How long had she—had I been in the Dumpster?”
“I spoke to the police department and was given access to the files on the baby. The doctor who examined her—you—believed you’d been left there between ten and twenty-four hours earlier. It was considered a miracle that you didn’t die. You spent a week in the hospital. The local papers ran stories about you. They referred to you as the miracle baby and as an infant determined to live. I’ll send you copies of those old newspaper clippings.”
“Is that how the Sorrells found out about me, the newspaper articles?”
“In a way. The story didn’t make the Chattanooga papers, but it seems that one of the Sorrell lawyers was vacationing in the mountains and just happened to pick up a local newspaper. He contacted Spencer Sorrell immediately because he knew they had decided only a few weeks earlier that they wanted to adopt a child. And even thirty years ago, Caucasian infants were at a premium.”
“So you spoke to—”
“To every lawyer still alive who worked for your adopted parents at the time.”
“Oh, I see. You’re thorough, aren’t you, Mr. Powell?”
“I do my best.” He paused again, but this time didn’t wait for her permission before continuing. “Using their money and power, the Sorrells took custody of you the day you were released from the hospital. But you don’t need any information about your life as Lesley and Spencer Sorrell’s daughter, do you? You want to know who disposed of you, who threw you into that Dumpster.”
Reve’s heartbeat went crazy, beating ninety-to-nothing. “Have you found out who—”
“There were no arrests made,” Griffin Powell told her. “They never found the person, although they had a description of a suspicious character throwing something about the size of a baby into the Dumpster the night before you were found. The truth is, from what I’ve learned, the police didn’t even look for the guy. Nor did they try very hard to locate your birth mother.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Spencer Sorrell didn’t want your birth mother found. He had the clout, even out of his home territory, to have the police file the case away as unsolved.”
Reve took several minutes to absorb the information. Mr. Powell waited patiently. Finally she said, “Is that it? Is that all you’ve come up with?”
“At this point in the investigation, yes. But I should have more within a few days. I’m trying to access records that aren’t open to the public. My agents and I are greasing a few palms along the way and bypassing the proper channels, but very soon I should have a list of all the twins born anywhere within a hundred-mile radius of Sevierville and Cherokee County around the time we believe you were born, give or take a month each way.”
“And once you have that list?”
“We use that list to track down the whereabouts of each set of twins and their biological mothers. If we come up with even one set of twins who are unaccounted for, then—”
“That set of missing twins might turn out to be Jazzy and me.”
“And if we have a mother’s name on a birth certificate, we can trace the mother’s steps thirty—no, thirty-one years ago.”
“It sounds too simple,” Reve said.
“Something like this is never simple,” Griffin told her. “Could be there are no missing twins. And if there are, we might not be able to locate the mother. If she’s the one who disposed of the twins, more than likely she left the state and changed her name.”
“And if the mother didn’t dispose of the twins?” Strange how she could talk about such an evil act as if it had happened to someone else. But it hadn’t happened to another person. It had happened to her. She’d been disposed of like unwanted trash. And what about Jazzy? Had she been thrown away, too, only somewhere other than the Dumpster in Sevierville? Maybe only Sally Talbot could answer that question.
“If the mother wasn’t responsible for getting rid of her babies, then there’s a chance whoever did dump the twins might have killed the mother.”
Reve gasped quietly.
“That’s just one theory.”
“Yes, I understand. Listen, Mr. Powell, the DNA results are back and I’m on my way to meet my sister at the doctor’s office.”
“I don’t think you need those results, do you, Ms. Sorrell?”
“Not to prove Jasmine Talbot is my sister, but Jazzy’s Aunt Sally has agreed to meet with us today, once we have the undeniable proof that we’re twins. I’d like for you to drive in from Knoxville and be there when we question her. It’s possible she’ll be able to give you some vital information that will help us discover our mother’s identity and find her…if she’s still alive.”
“I’ll have to rearrange my schedule, then I’ll leave right away. Where do I meet y’all?”
“Jazzy’s apartment is directly over Jazzy’s Joint, at the end of the block on Loden Street. You can’t miss the place. There’s a set of outside stairs that take you straight up to the apartment.”
“All right then, I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
Reve hung up the phone, retraced her steps and, with purse and coat in hand, left the cabin. By noon today, she might possibly know the answers to some of the most important unanswered questions in her life.
Jazzy met Reve at the door leading into Dr. MacNair’s reception room, grabbed her hands and squeezed them tightly. “Are you ready for this?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“I don’t know why I’m so nervous. After all, it’s like we both said—we already know the results even before Galvin tells us.”
“But hearing him say it makes it an irrefutable fact.”
Laughing, Jazzy let go of Reve’s hands. “Would you believe I actually know what that means? I’m not stupid and I’m not illiterate. Oh, I know I don’t have your college degrees or your polish and style, but I’m streetwise and I’m a self-made woman. I—”
“You’re rambling, honey, that’s what you’re doing.” Caleb came up beside Jazzy and put his arm around her waist. He smiled at Reve and said, “That’s what she does when she’s nervous.”
Reve directed her gaze at Jazzy. “Look, I know I’ve been a bit of a snob ever since we first met and that I probably gave you the impression I was looking down my nose at you, but—”
“You did look down your nose at me,” Jazzy said. “But who could blame you? After all, if you could have chosen a sister, it sure as hell wouldn’t have been me, would it?”
“No, not when we first met, but that was before I got to know you. We’re just now really becoming acquainted, and spending time with you these past few days has given me a chance to realize what a very special person you are, Jasmine Talbot. You’re bright and funny and caring. You light up a room with your effervescent personality. You’re a smart businesswoman who started out with nothing and has made a success of her life.”
Jazzy starred at Reve, her mouth agape, a dumbfounded expression on her face.
“I believe you’ve rendered her speechless,” Caleb said.
“Heck, this is more than I’d hoped for. I thought maybe you were warming up to me.” Jazzy grinned. “But I had no idea you were beginning to like me as much as I like you. I know we’re very different, but—”
“But we’re twin sisters who have quite a few things in common,” Reve finished for Jazzy. “The least of which is a biological mother and father.”
Dr. MacNair’s receptionist, Lynne Swindle, called out, “Jazzy, are you and Ms. Sorrell ready to talk to Dr. MacNair? He’s waiting for y’all in his office.”
Reve and Jazzy looked at each other, smiled and nodded.
“We’re coming.” Jazzy reached out and grabbed Caleb’s hand.
When the threesome entered the doctor’s small, cluttered office, he rose from behind his desk. “Have a seat.” He indicated the two nondescript metal chairs in front of his desk, then glanced at Caleb and shrugged. “I’m afraid you’ll have to stand. Sorry.”
“No problem,” Caleb replied.
Reve and Jazzy sat, side by side, their backs straight and tense. Jazzy perched on the edge of the chair while Reve crossed one ankle behind the other and placed her hands in her lap.
“I don’t know how much y’all know about DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid—but it is universally accepted as the definitive means of identification. There are two methods currently in wide use, one being the RFLP technique, which is detailed and accurate, but can take anywhere from three weeks to three months to get results. Since y’all wanted quick results, the lab we sent the DNA samples to used the PCR method, which is polymerase chain reaction, and is now used more and more by law enforcement. The whole process takes place in a single vial that contains—”
“I realize you find DNA testing fascinating, Dr. MacNair,” Reve said, “but could you possibly skip over the chemistry lesson and go straight to our DNA test results?”
Galvin’s ruddy face darkened, turning beet red. “Oh, certainly, Ms. Sorrell. Certainly. I apologize for—”
“Good God, Galvin, just cut to the chase will you!” Jazzy jumped to her feet. “Tell us the DNA test proved beyond any doubt that Reve and I are twin sisters.”
“Uh, yes.” Galvin gulped. “The PCR test results, which are seen as a series of dots—” Jazzy growled. Galvin gasped when he realized he’d been about to go into another unwanted lengthy explanation. “Yes, the test results prove that Jasmine Talbot and Reve Sorrell are identical twins.”
“I knew it!” Jazzy grabbed Reve’s hands and yanked her to her feet, then hugged her fiercely.
Unaccustomed to physical displays of emotion, Reve didn’t respond immediately. She waited almost a whole minute before she wrapped her arms around her sister and hugged her. This was only the first step in unearthing the truth about their births. A part of Reve wished she’d never heard of Jazzy Talbot, that she’d never come to Cherokee Pointe back in the spring searching for her look-alike. But neither her life nor Jazzy’s could ever return to the way it had been before. She had set things in motion out of curiosity and a burning need to know the truth. Now their lives were picking up speed and spinning out of control. DNA confirmation of their sisterhood. Sally Talbot prepared to tell them what she knew, everything she knew. And Griffin Powell on the verge of discovering their mother’s identity.
All Reve could do was move forward on the tidal wave and hope the truth didn’t destroy her or her sister.