“Granddad’s Parkinson’s gave him quite a bit of trouble toward the end,” Trent explains. He rubs his forehead, frowning at the envelope as if he’s wondering again whether he should have broken the oath by giving it to me.
I know I’d be wise to open it before he changes his mind, but guilt stings. Trent looks as if he’s failed at something. I’m the cause of that.
I understand loyalty to family all too well. It’s the very thing that has driven me here in the middle of the night.
“Thank you,” I say, as if that will help.
He kneads an eyebrow with his fingertips and nods reluctantly. “Just so you know, it may make things worse, not better. There was a reason my granddad spent so much of his time helping to find people. After he and my gran married and took over the family business in Charleston, he went to law school so he could handle his own real estate contracts…but he also did it for another reason. When he was eighteen, he’d found out he was adopted. Nobody had ever told him. His adoptive father was a sergeant in the Memphis Police Department, and I don’t know that they were ever very close, but when Granddad learned he’d been lied to all his life, that was the last straw. He joined the army the next day and never talked to his adoptive parents again. He looked for his birth family for years but never found them. My gran always felt like it might’ve been better if he hadn’t run across his records in the first place. To tell you the truth, she wished his adoptive parents had destroyed them.”
“Secrets have a way of coming out.” That’s a bit of wisdom my father has shared with me many times. Secrets also make you vulnerable to your enemies, political or otherwise.
Whatever’s inside this envelope, I’m better off knowing it.
Still, my fingers tremble as I slip them beneath the flap. “I can see why your grandfather would’ve been passionate about helping other people find information and lost family members.” But how is my grandmother involved?
The adhesive loosens bit by bit as I pull. I work it slowly, like my mother opening a birthday present, taking care not to tear the paper. “Guess there’s no time like the present to find out,” I say. Gingerly, I remove a smaller envelope that has been opened at some time in the past. The papers inside are folded together like a brochure or an electric bill, but I can tell they’re official documents of some kind.
Across the table, Trent looks down at his hands as I lay out the contents.
“I really…” There’s no point in thanking him again. It won’t save him from wrestling with his conscience. “I want you to know you can count on me to do whatever’s best with this. I won’t let it cause some kind of family issue. I respect your grandfather’s concern, given the kind of research he was doing for people.”
“He knew firsthand what could happen.”
A noise in the house causes both of us to turn as I’m flattening the documents on the table. I recognize the sound of little bedtime feet on a sandy floor. I halfway expect to see one of my nieces or nephews standing in the corridor, but instead there’s a three-or four-year-old towheaded boy with sleepy blue eyes and the most adorable cleft in his chin. I know where he got that.
Trent Turner has a son. Is there a Mrs. Turner sleeping back there? The strangest hint of disappointment tinges the thought a faint shade of green. I catch myself checking for a wedding ring before looking back at the little boy and thinking, Stop that. Avery Stafford, what is wrong with you?
It’s times like this that I wonder what really is wrong with me. Why don’t I feel like a woman who has bonded with her soulmate, forever and ever, end of story? Both of my sisters fell head over heels for their husbands and seemingly never had any second thoughts. So did my mother. So did my grandmother.
The little boy eyeballs me as he circles the table, yawning and scratching his forehead with the back of one arm. He’s dramatic about it. He looks like a silent movie actress practicing an exaggerated swoon.
“Are you supposed to be in bed, Jonah?” his dad asks.
“Ya-huh.”
“And you’re up because…” Trent may be trying to sound tough, but his face has pushover written on it. Jonah braces both hands on his daddy’s knee, lifts a leg, and begins to climb him like a jungle gym.
Trent hoists the boy up, and Jonah stretches closer to whisper, “Is a peterdactyl in my clod-et.”
“A pterodactyl?”
“Ya-huh.”
“Jonah, there’s nothing in your closet. That’s just the movie the big kids let you watch over at Aunt Lou’s, remember? You’ve had another bad dream about it. A dinosaur wouldn’t even fit in your closet. There’re no dinosaurs in there.”
“Ya-huh,” Jonah sniffs. Clinging to handfuls of his dad’s T-shirt, he swivels enough to study me over a wide-open yawn.
I shouldn’t get involved. I might be just making things worse. I have, however, been through this dinosaur thing during holiday sleepovers at Drayden Hill and vacations with my sisters’ kids. “My nieces and nephews had the same problem. They were scared of dinosaurs too, but do you know what we did?”
Jonah shakes his head, and Trent gives me a quizzical look, sandy-blond brows twisting together. He has a very flexible forehead.
Two identical sets of blue eyes invite my solution to the closet-dinosaur dilemma.
Fortunately, I have one. “We went to the store the next day and picked out flashlights—really awesome flashlights. If you’ve got a really awesome flashlight by your bed, then when you wake up at night, and you think you see something, you can turn on the light and shine it over there and check. And do you know what happens every single time when you turn on the flashlight?”
Jonah waits breathless, his little Cupid’s bow mouth hanging open, but Dad clearly knows the answer. He looks like he wants to palm-thump himself in the forehead, as if to say, Why didn’t I think of this before?
“Every single time, when you shine the flashlight, nothing’s there.”
“Ebry time?” Jonah’s not sure.
“Always. Honest.”
Jonah turns to his father for confirmation, and a sweet look of trust passes between them. This is obviously an involved dad. He slays monsters and does tuck-in time. “We’ll go pick out a flashlight tomorrow at the BI-LO. Sound good?”
I notice he doesn’t say, Mom can take you to get a flashlight tomorrow. I also notice that he doesn’t tell his son to be a big boy or insist on hustling the poor kid back to bed. He just shifts Jonah to one shoulder and lays a palm on the table, the fingers pointing toward the documents pressed beneath my hand.
Jonah pops a thumb into his mouth and snuggles against his dad’s chest.
I look down at the papers, surprised that they temporarily left my mind. Jonah is irresistibly cute.
The top page is a grainy photocopy of some sort of official form. HISTORY SHEET, the heading reads in bold, black letters. Below, the subject has been given a number of record: 7501. AGE: inf. SEX: male. The baby’s name is listed as Shad Arthur Foss, church relationships unknown. The corner of the form is stamped with a date in October 1939 and was apparently filled out at a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. MOTHER’S NAME: Mary Anne Anthony. FATHER’S NAME: B. A. Foss. The address for both parents is listed as indigent, river camp. Both the father and mother were in their late twenties when the baby was born.