CHAPTER 23
“But you didn’t leave.” Detective Anderson looked toward that mirror on the back of the interview room’s wall. Who’s standing behind that glass? I asked myself. Who are you performing for?
“Like I said, it was Mimi’s idea. When we couldn’t get in to see Jasper, we were both pretty shaken up. I mean, we had been so sure it was the next logical step to take. But we weren’t getting anywhere without an appointment. So I told Mimi we were going to have to find another way.”
“And that didn’t satisfy her?” Sally asked.
“No. She insisted that at the very least Jasper had to know about our mother’s travels. And given how closely our mother worked with him, we figured it was possible he might know even more than that. That’s when she brought up how scientists keep files and records on everything they do. She said if there wasn’t a way for Jasper to answer our questions directly, we’d have to get into his files.”
“And that’s when you cooked up the plan to hide in the bathroom?” Anderson asked.
“It worked, didn’t it? Like I said, the building itself might be secure, but once Mimi and I went up to the seventh floor after it emptied out, the only things that were locked were his cabinets.”
Anderson took another look over his shoulder toward the mirror. I ignored him and continued to relay the events, as best as I could remember them, to Sally. She seemed to be the only person in the room who seemed to care.
I’ll give him this much, the man was organized. Not only was every file labeled, but he seemed to have entire cabinets dedicated to certain topics. The drawers under his desk held files dealing with the administration of the department—budgets, personnel files, stuff like that. Mimi and I looked at those only long enough to make sure they didn’t contain anything about our mother’s travels. Then we looked in the cabinets along his back wall. Those were dedicated to his research files. Applications, authorization letters, and budgets for grants. Flash drives labeled RAW DATA. Dozens of binders filled with papers. Mimi looked at those. She told me they were step-by-step instructions for how to run Jasper’s various experiments.
“You mean protocols?” I asked her.
“Yeah. How’d you know that?” Mimi whispered despite our being alone in Jasper’s darkened office.
“I don’t know.” Then suddenly I did. “I think I heard my mother use that word. I remember thinking it sounded important. Probably any word with more than two syllables would sound important to a kid.”
“Yeah? Well, keep checking in with that little kid, okay? We’ve got to find proof Jasper can’t explain away. Proof that he and Audra had something cooking that involved separating infant twins the moment they were born.”
“Audra?” I asked. “You’re calling your mother Audra now?”
A flash of regret skimmed Mimi’s face. It quickly morphed into a mask of firm resolve. “I don’t know what else to call her. Duplicitous coconspirator doesn’t trip off the tongue. Now get back at it. Find us what we need. It’s the only way we’re going to solve this thing.”
The protocols were arranged by date. Each drawer held an entire year of Jasper’s work. It made it easy for the two of us to walk back in time, as if we were unwinding the spool of the renowned scientist’s brilliant career. Flash drives devolved into floppy discs. By the time we opened the drawers containing data from twenty-five years ago, we discovered carousel rings, the kind used on old slide projectors, jammed into the backs of drawers. Files became thicker, packed tight with papers.
“This is old stuff,” Mimi said. “I’m surprised he hasn’t had these transferred to digital. Man, things were positively stone-age. Look at this.” She pulled a stack of wire-bound notebooks out of the drawer. “Handwritten notes. I mean, how’d they get anything done?”
The top drawer of the next cabinet was marked with the year Mimi and I would have been twelve years old. The year my mother fled. I knew now that she had gone to Florida to raise her other twin, but in that year I only knew she’d abandoned my father and me with no explanation.
I took a deep breath, opened the drawer with a shaking hand, pulled out the top file, and saw my mother’s signature on the first page.
My knees buckled. I took the file to Jasper’s desk and flopped into his chair.
“What do you have?” Mimi asked.
It took me a while to answer. I had no interest in the letters that formed words that formed sentences that formed communication. My eyes traced the broad strokes she used. Her handwriting, something I had no memory of ever seeing before, was confident and efficient. Tall, bold capital letters. No fancy flourishes or wide, loopy curves.
My mother wrote this, I thought. My mother’s hand touched this paper.
I held the sheet to my nose, hoping to catch a whiff of her. Then I laid my hand flat over the page, willing our essences to merge.
“What does it say, Tess?”
I forced myself to read the words my mother had written so many years before. “It’s a summary. She’s reminding Jasper what needs to be done to close out a funding request for a grad student they’d accepted into their lab.” My eyes scanned the entire file. “This is all about who’s assigned to what project. Looks like my mother ran herd on everyone associated with Jasper’s work.”
“Anything specific about the work itself? This is why things need to be digitized. We ought to be able to simply search on the word Florida or twin and get to what we need. Sifting through tons of paper files is not efficient at all.”
I didn’t care about efficiency at that moment. After so many years of treating my mother as a forbidden topic of conversation or thought, I was holding paper she held. It was as close to a real connection I’d had in seventeen years. I could have stopped our snooping right there and then and been content with the treasure I’d found.
If only I had.
“There’s no drawer marked any earlier than when we’d have been five years old.” Mimi shoved the last drawer closed with her foot. She sounded disappointed. “The bastard’s only got his legit research stuff here. I should have known. But we’re onto something, Tess. Look at all this. Jasper’s an organized scientist. He’s got records about his involvement with this stored somewhere, and we have to find them. Do you know where he lives?”
Mimi was looking for something that no longer held my interest. I left Jasper’s desk and started opening file drawers at random, looking for anything that might hold another piece of my mother. I saw her face on a newsletter from the year I would have been four. There she was, smiling in a black-and-white photograph as she stood behind Phillip Jasper, who was holding a giant mock-up of a check. The headline read UNIVERSITY SCHOLAR RECEIVES MILLION-DOLLAR GRANT. In the drawer dedicated to the year I would have been six, there was a framed photograph of Jasper and several other men in suits, each holding a symbolic shovel of dirt. My mother stood next to a sign announcing the expansion of the old genetics laboratory. I studied her face. She looked so prim and professional, wearing a plaid jacket over a gray flannel skirt. Something like a memory pulled at me. She liked a certain green sweater with that jacket, didn’t she? But the memory faded before I could be certain.
What I was certain of was the look on her face. She wasn’t smiling in this photograph as she was in the newsletter.
I laid the framed photo back where I’d found it, closed the drawer, and opened the one beneath it. That drawer documented Jasper’s career the year I would have been five. It was filled with files and folders similar to the ones I’d already seen. I was about to close it when I noticed something different wedged in the back. It was a container, approximately the size of a standard shoe box but made of hard plastic. Opaque white with a blue lid. It took some maneuvering to free it from the overstuffed drawer.
“What’s that?” Mimi asked.
I set the container on Jasper’s desk and lifted the lid. My gasp brought Mimi to my side.
A photograph of my mother, perched on the hood of a car, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, mouth frozen mid-laugh and eyes glistening with joy, looked up at me.
“That’s Audra.” Mimi lifted the photograph from the box. “And obviously not in business clothes. What’s it doing here?”
“That’s my mother.” I heard the bitterness in my voice. “From her time here. Before she made the decision to go raise you.”
“Wow. She really does look like us, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, Mimi. That’s the thing about mothers and daughters.”
I sifted through the stack of cards, letters, photographs, and souvenirs. I found birthday cards meant for Phillip Jasper, signed in my mother’s hand. A few were humorous. The rest were signed with love. There were several programs, most for academic dinners honoring various faculty. Each had the date scribbled across the top in writing I didn’t recognize but assumed was Jasper’s. Under each handwritten date was a brief sentence.
Our first kiss
Blue satin frock with full skirt
She loves me!
Almost caught in parking lot . . . this reminder was punctuated with a drawing of a smiling face.
Mimi stood behind me while I prowled through matchbooks from Chicago restaurants; postcards from Las Vegas, Sheboygan, and Atlanta; keys from seven hotels. There was a paper napkin with a blotted, fossilized kiss in deep pink lipstick. I picked up a folder made of creamy vellum card stock. The front carried an embossed outline of a grand building with the words Stanley Hotel, Estes Park stamped underneath in gold. I opened the folder and saw Phillip Jasper and my mother huddled together. Smiling for the camera. Separated only by the grinning toddler they held between them.
“Hey!” Mimi reached for the folder. “That’s me. What’s Jasper doing in Colorado holding me when I was a baby?”
I snatched the photograph back from her. “That’s not you, Mimi. That’s me. My father may have burned all the pictures of my mother, but he kept the ones of me. I know what I looked like as a kid.”
“Why were you in Colorado?” she asked.
“Look at the picture. I was, what? Two . . . three maybe when this picture was taken? Forgive me for not knowing what took me to the Rocky Mountains.”
“We’re identical twins. Let’s face it. It could be either of us. But look at how happy the two of them look with whichever one of us it is they’re holding.”
I studied the photo in my hand. I zeroed in on my mother. Her eyes glowed with an inner light beautifully captured by the camera. Her smile was relaxed and easy. She seemed so at ease. So happy.
I shoved the folder back in the box, snapped the lid tight, and tucked it under my arm. “Let’s go.”
Mimi hesitated. “But we haven’t found what we need yet.”
I shook my head. “Audra and Phillip Jasper were lovers. Probably for years. I’m keeping this box. It’s leverage to get Jasper to talk if we can’t find the rest of his notes.”
“Don’t you see what this means?” she asked.
A ball of acid rolled in my stomach. Maybe it was an example of that twin talk Mimi liked to yap about, but I knew what she was planning on saying next and I was in no mood to hear it.
“We don’t know anything, Mimi. Nothing beyond the fact they were lovers.”
“Who conspired to keep twins apart? Face it, Tess. Do the math. Your mother and father were married how long before you came along? In all those years she never got pregnant? Then she gets involved with Phillip Jasper and the next thing you know she’s laughing with her arms around her big pregnant belly while he takes secret photos?”
I would have given her every penny in my savings account to keep her from saying the words she uttered next.
“Face it, Tess. Sanford Kincaid isn’t our father. Phillip Jasper is.”
“I’m too exhausted to handle any more of your stories, Mimi.”
“You know I’m right.” Excitement sang in her words. Nancy Drew had solved her mystery. “That may be why they separated us. We’ll learn more about their motivation when we confront our mother. Maybe she had made the decision to end the relationship and stay with your father. Jasper could have threatened to reveal everything if Audra didn’t give him one daughter to raise . . . a piece of his lover he could keep forever. She could have been desperate to keep the affair secret and in a moment of postdelivery vulnerability would have agreed to anything to keep your father from learning of her betrayal. That would explain her immediate and long depression, wouldn’t it? Why she wouldn’t allow your father to even mention Jasper’s name?”
“You’re starting with your stories again, Mimi.”
“But it’s the only thing that makes sense!”
“Then why would she go back to work with a man who’d coerced her into such an arrangement?”
“Maybe she thought it was the only way she could have both of us in her life. If Jasper was lovesick enough to keep these mementos all these years, he’d agree to let her have time with both twins so long as she came back to him.”
“Then how do you explain her departure to full-time life in Florida? Did you have an Uncle Phillip who came to see you while you grew up? Why would he let her take off and raise you all by herself?”
Mimi thought for a moment. “Maybe she threatened him once his career took flight. If he didn’t back away from both of us she’d let the world know he’d had a sexual relationship with an employee. That he’d spent grant dollars on hotels and trips to support what was, by definition, sexual harassment. He’d be a big-enough name to know that kind of scandal would stop the federal money spigot from raining down limitless supplies of research dollars. He probably thought he needed to stay away from both of us.” Her eyes went wide. “Think, Tess. He’d have to keep her quiet. Why, I’ll bet it was his money that kept my mother and me financially secure all those years.”
I didn’t have the energy to reply. Once Mimi got started on her illogical train of logic, there was no stopping her. All I knew was that I was finished for the night. I picked up the shoe box and walked out of Jasper’s office. Mimi hurried to catch up with me.
“Don’t worry,” she said as we waited for the elevator. “We’re getting closer. I’m sure of it. Everything’s going to turn out just fine.”
I remember thinking how comforting that sounded at the time.
I hope I’m never as wrong about anything else ever again.