You Don't Want To Know

Chapter 35


Wyatt jumped up and started around the desk. “Of course you were pregnant!”

“Then show me,” Ava said. “Prove it!”

“Oh, for the love of God—”

“I’m not kidding, Wyatt. They should be here on the computer, shots that were never printed and framed. We had a digital camera then. There have to be dozens of pictures that were uploaded.”

“I don’t think you wanted to be photographed much. Because of all the miscarriages, you were kind of superstitious about it.”

“But there has to be something,” she insisted. “During the holidays or at a family barbecue, a group shot where I’m trying to either hide or display my baby bump.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Let me see.” Rounding the desk, she stubbed her toe, swore under her breath, and swung the computer monitor toward her as she worked the keyboard. “Most of our pictures are in here, except for those we printed out, right?” She looked up at the bookcase where family portraits were posted, and sure enough, there she was with Kelvin, a few weeks before the accident. The picture was taken at the marina, sailboat masts rising above them, and only showed them from the chest up. They were laughing and she, at least facially, didn’t have an ounce of extra fat on her.

“Wait a second,” Wyatt said just as Jewel-Anne rolled into the room.

“Let her look,” Jewel-Anne said, and there was something in her tone that was a warning.

“Okay. Four years ago . . . ,” Ava murmured. Wyatt had reluctantly given up his chair and she sat down, taking over the keyboard, pulling up the family picture files. She sifted through dozens of shots of various family members, and in any picture that showed her, her back was turned or it was a head shot. There were none that showed her pregnancy.

Wyatt asked, “Why are you obsessing about this now?”

Ava didn’t answer, just kept looking. Her fingers flew over the keys, and she scrolled through file after file, finding nothing until . . .

Noah!

All at once, pictures of her son dominated the files. Hundreds of shots documenting him returning from the hospital, sitting up for the first time, then crawling and walking. There were videos as well; she’d watched them hundreds of times in the past two years, keeping his image alive. Her insides turned to jelly. Something here was wrong . . . very wrong. But Noah was real. The pictures and videos proved what her memory insisted. She sank deeper into the chair.

“I don’t think I . . .” She swallowed hard, then forged on. “Did we adopt Noah?” Her brain was thundering. “Is that what happened?”

He didn’t answer. Looked away. And that was an answer in itself.

The silence in the room stretched to the breaking point. She heard the pounding of her own heartbeat in her ears and wished she could take the words back. Dear God, was it true? Was she not Noah’s mother?

“Tell her,” Jewel-Anne urged, and Ava whipped around, her gaze zeroing in on her cousin. There was just the hint of malice in her eyes.

Ava’s world seemed to collapse. “You knew?” she charged. Then to Wyatt, “Tell me what?” Bracing herself on the desk, she tried to keep the pounding in her head at bay. Now, after wanting to know the truth for so damned long, she was afraid of it. Her gaze strayed to the computer where hundreds of pictures of Noah were saved. Her baby. Her son.

Jewel-Anne couldn’t stand it. “Of course you’re not his mother!”

“Shut up!” Wyatt snarled.

Rather than pin Jewel-Anne with her gaze, Ava turned accusing eyes on her husband. “What is this, Wyatt?”

He seemed to struggle with some inner battle, then gave it up. “You are Noah’s mother, of course you are. But . . .” His jaw worked. “You didn’t give birth to him. It was a private adoption.”

Ava didn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Her heart was drumming, denial burning through her veins, though she sensed she was finally hearing the truth, or at least part of it. “You were five or six months along and had surprisingly barely begun to show. Then you lost the baby..”

Her heart cracked . . . pain swept through her.

“It wasn’t the first miscarriage, of course, but this one, a boy, was the closest to term,” he said quietly, his eyes dark. “You took it so hard. You just lost reality. Adoption seemed like the right choice. I knew of a pregnant teenager. She was looking for a private adoption through our firm,” he said quietly. “The timing was perfect. She gave birth right after the boating accident. You were still recovering and we decided not to tell anyone that the baby was adopted.”

“And no one questioned it?” Ava was shaking her head. Though bits and pieces of his story struck a chord, the pieces were disjointed, not connecting in her brain, like flotsam and jetsam strung out in dark, shadowy water. “The staff . . .”

“Were all paid well.”

“And no one broke their silence?” No, that couldn’t be. Pointing a finger at Jewel-Anne, Ava said in disbelief, “She knew and didn’t tell anyone?”

“I can keep a secret if I have to,” Jewel-Anne shot back, tossing her head primly.

“Why would you have to?”

“Because it was the best for everyone. Especially you,” Jewel-Anne snapped. Absently she stroked the head of her doll, and Ava couldn’t help but remember the effigy she’d dug up in its tiny little casket. Jewel-Anne had to have been behind that somehow.

“I don’t think you’d do anything for my benefit,” she said slowly.

“But then you don’t really know me at all, do you?” her cousin tossed out, a smirk twisting the corners of her mouth again.

Wyatt said, “No one has said anything. Yes, Jewel-Anne knew, and so did Khloe and her mother. Virginia’s loyal and Khloe is one of your best friends. She and Simon were split at the time. I doubt that he even knows. As for Demetria, she was hired later, after Jewel-Anne came back to the island. Graciela wasn’t on staff at the time, though she had been earlier, and the ranch hand who was working then knew how to keep his mouth shut.”

“But everyone else . . . ,” Ava whispered.

“None of the rest of the family knows. Not even Ian. They weren’t here then and have never questioned that Noah was our son, our own flesh and blood.”

“I don’t believe this,” Ava whispered, though part of it rang true. She sensed, deep in her heart, that Noah hadn’t been born from her body, that there was another woman who had given him life . . . a faceless woman who had given up her son. “You shouldn’t have lied to me,” she told her husband in a shaking voice.

“Ava, you were so messed up.” Wyatt walked to the bookshelf, looked at a picture of the three of them taken when Noah was barely one. The happy little family—all of it a damned lie.

He touched the picture frame, then said, “You made yourself believe that Noah was our flesh and blood, and any other suggestion would throw you into a frenzy, a panic attack. I talked to you in the hospital, but at the mere mention of the word adoption, you freaked out.”

She remembered so little of her stay at St. Brendan’s. “So the staff there, at the hospital—they know?” There had to be some way to check out this story.

“Just Dr. McPherson and that’s patient–doctor privilege.”

“Who is the mother?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does!” she said, jumping up from the desk chair. “She’s the one! Don’t you see? The birth mother, she’s the one who stole our baby!”

“Don’t be irrational!”

“Irrational? I just discovered the baby I thought I’d borne was adopted and you’re calling me irrational?” Her mind was scrambled, images of the past burning through it, each and every one at odds with the truth. “What about the baby’s father? I mean, the biological father?”

“Out of the picture.”

She was shaking her head, trying desperately to sort everything out. “He signed off his parental rights?”

“Never even knew he had a kid.”

“Then he could be behind it!” Frantic, Ava looked from Wyatt to Jewel-Anne. Her cousin’s smirk had fallen away. Now she appeared as shell-shocked as Ava. “Have you tried to track these people down? Do the police know?” she demanded. “We should call Snyder right now!” She was already reaching for the house phone on the desk, but Wyatt grabbed her wrist.

“Don’t, Ava,” he warned.

“Why not?”

“It won’t do any good.”

The receiver still grasped in her hand, she felt a sudden premonition. “You know what happened to our son,” she charged, breathing hard, staring Wyatt down. His face was only inches from hers, his features hard and set, the darkness in his soul reflected in his eyes.

“The birth mother and father of our son are dead.”

She shrank away from him. “Dead?” This was too much to take in all at once. “How?”

“Motorcycle accident.”

“Both of them? Together? And he didn’t know about the baby?”

“They’d split up for a while.” He released her hand, and she put the phone back in its cradle. “Then got back together. I don’t know if she ever told him about Noah; if so, nothing came of it before they were killed, riding the bike down the Oregon coast. As I understand it, he was driving and tried to pass one of those motor homes hauling a car and didn’t see the oncoming car. He skidded out trying to avoid it.”

She felt sick to her stomach. “Oh my God.”

Don’t take this at face value. It could all be a convenient lie! He’s lied to you for years.

Jewel-Anne was silent. She seemed subdued, maybe nonplussed, and the joy she’d gotten from taunting Ava had totally seeped away as one hand idly touched the shiny dark hair of her doll.

“What are their names?” Ava asked.

“Ava, don’t do this. Let it go,” Wyatt said.

“I want the names of my child’s birth mother and father,” she insisted, anger flaring that he’d kept this secret so long. “Who were they? Who were they, Wyatt? Who were the birth parents of our son?”

He glared at her for a full five seconds and time seemed to stretch forever. Only after the clock in the hallway chimed the half hour did he say, “Tracey. Tracey Johnson and Charles Yates.”

Jewel-Anne drew a breath. Obviously this was new information to her as well.

Something inside of Ava cracked. Hearing the names made the faceless people who had created her son so much more real. “Clients of yours?”

“An associate’s.”

“You should have told me, Wyatt.” She skirted around him and headed out the door, squeezing past Jewel-Anne and her wheelchair. “You should have had enough faith in me to tell me the truth about our son!”

“Ava!” he yelled.

She ran. Instead of footsteps following her, she heard a frustrated, “Son of a bitch,” that chased her as she flew up the stairs, her dull head swarming with questions, her heart twisting with the pain of her new discoveries. It was as if she lived in a House of Horrors where nothing was what it seemed.

Everything Wyatt had told her about Noah and the fact that he was adopted swirled around in her head. Tracey Johnson? Charles Yates? Had she ever heard the names before?

Wait, Ava. Don’t fall for this! Wyatt lies!!

In her room, she yanked her computer from its case, and even though her husband probably had some tracking device attached to it so he could see every Web site she visited, she Googled the names he’d given her along with the words motorcycle accident and Oregon.

It took some sifting, as she wasn’t an expert surfing the Internet, at least not as quick as she’d once been, but eventually she found a few hits. Sure enough, there had been a horrendous motorcycle accident three years earlier, about the time Noah had been one. Both Charles Yates, twenty-six, and his twenty-one-year-old fiancée, Tracey Johnson, had died as the result of their severe injuries.

“No,” she whispered, but she searched for their obituaries and finally found them. The obits listed their hometown, where they’d graduated from high school, that Tracey was a student at a community college and hoped to become a nurse. Yates worked for a small trucking company.

Real people.

With next of kin who were listed as well.

Her hands were shaking over the keys. She had to see these people. She had to try and discern any resemblance to her son.

It took a while, but she was able to locate pictures of the victims. Staring at the flat images, she wondered if Noah had Tracey’s pointed chin or Charles’s curly hair. Possible? Yes. Proof? No.

She needed more than Wyatt’s word and a confirming accident report and obit to trust that she had truly found her son’s birth parents.

No, no, no! her mind screamed, and yet there was truth in Wyatt’s confession. Should she believe that he was only protecting her, that he’d worried the truth would send her spiraling back into a complete mental breakdown?

She shook her head.

In the obituary, Tracey’s parents, Zed and Maria Johnson, were listed as living in Bellevue, a city east of Seattle. She started looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. You can do this, she told herself, though the task was daunting.

Using several search engines on the Internet and the phone book listings, again via her computer, she narrowed things down to Z Johnsons in the greater Bellevue/Seattle area. Of course, the phone number could be unlisted, the parents split up, or they could have moved. Half a dozen reasons to abandon her search flew through her brain and she dismissed them all.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” she said aloud just as she heard a knock on her door. “Yes?” she said, expecting Wyatt to poke his head into the room.

Instead of her husband’s voice, Ava heard Khloe’s. “Hey, Ava, are you okay?”

She sounded worried, but Ava wasn’t even sure of her friendship any longer. Theirs had been a rocky relationship, ever since Kelvin’s death. After closing her laptop, Ava climbed off her bed and tucked the shopping bags onto the highest shelf of her closet. There was just no reason to invite questions, not even from Khloe.

Cracking the door, she said, “I’m fine.”

“Jewel-Anne told me what happened. I walked into the kitchen to grab my reading glasses and there she was, looking like she’d seen a ghost. I made the mistake of asking her what was wrong.” Khloe, glasses still curled in her fist, hesitated, then added, “Look, Ava, I don’t know what to say. Did I know about Noah being adopted? Yes. Did I want to say something to you once you’d forgotten? You bet. But . . . you were so . . . volatile. So distrusting. So . . . well, out of it. I was scared that you might relapse even further.”

“So you were never going to say anything?”

“We wanted you to know. It was just a matter of when.” She sighed and glanced down the hall. “Mom and I discussed it often enough, but we needed you to be able to deal with the news so that you wouldn’t flip out and . . . you know, hurt yourself again.”

Again.

Self-consciously, Ava tugged at her sleeves to hide her scars.

Little lines of worry burrowed between Khloe’s eyebrows as her eyes met Ava’s again. She shrugged, seeming suddenly embarrassed. “I just thought I should tell you I’m sorry. About . . . about everything.”

“Me too,” Ava agreed, and felt a lump forming in her throat. Why was it when someone showed her the least bit of kindness she was suddenly near tears?

“I, um, I was a real bitch when Kelvin died,” Khloe whispered, glancing at the floor a second. “I blamed you.”

“Everyone did.”

“I know, but it wasn’t your fault,” she whispered, emotional herself. Clearing her throat, she added, “I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, I was so caught up in needing to blame someone, anyone for his death, that I really didn’t consider that you lost a brother, too.”

“So why didn’t anyone notice I wasn’t pregnant?”

Khloe shook her head. “You’d gained so little weight I guess and no one saw you much. Even me. We’d go months . . .” She lifted a shoulder. That bothered Ava. A lot.

“I guess I never really did the math.” Her face showed lines of strain. “Let’s face it—I really didn’t care. I was too deep into my own misery at losing Kelvin. Maybe we all were, but I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry. Though I don’t wish your brother dead, if he were still alive, I might not have met the love of my life.” She brightened a little and Ava let it slide. Khloe and Simon’s marriage had never been stable, but everyone, it seemed, lived in his or her own fantasy around here.

“You want to come down and bury our sorrows in chocolate cake? Mom made a three-layered one for Simon’s birthday.” Her eyebrows lifted a bit and Ava was reminded of Khloe as a child, the oldest of six kids, the girl who had, years before, done anything on a dare, was always up for the next party, and had been Ava’s best friend.

All before Kelvin’s death, of course.

“Fudge icing,” she said, hoping to lure Ava.

Ava glanced down the stairs. “Thanks, but I had a big dinner.”

“And a big fight,” Khloe said.

“Yes.”

“I thought you might want to talk.”

“Not now, but I’ll take you up on the cake.”

Khloe brightened. “Good.”

Together they walked downstairs and Khloe found a packet of instant decaf coffee. Heated in the microwave, it was tasteless, but it didn’t matter. They split a piece of the gooey-rich cake that was large enough to feed half of Anchorville.

All the while, she was aware of the seconds being ticked off, time she could be using to locate relatives of Noah’s birth parents or getting familiar with her new microcamera and recorder. Again, she was cautious, trying not to rouse any more suspicion than she already had, so she forced herself to dally over the last bites, even pressing the tines of her fork into the crumbs as if she couldn’t give up a final taste of the dark chocolate.

It was all a sham, of course, and even though reconnecting with Khloe felt good, she just didn’t have time for it right now. After sipping the last dregs from her coffee cup, she yawned and stretched her arms over her head as if she were bone tired. Another fake-out. Inside, she was jazzed. Ready to set her plan into motion.

Wyatt walked in on them just as she was shoving her chair back to its spot at the table. Ava didn’t know what to say to him, but Khloe did: “Pretty big lie,” she pointed out, and when he looked up sharply, she added, “Jewel-Anne told me what happened.”

He said, “I guess the secret’s out.”

“It should never have been a secret,” Ava retorted.

He nodded, but Ava didn’t believe he really felt contrition. Besides, his reactions were all wrong. While Ava felt as if she could jump out of her skin, anxious to look into a new lead in her son’s disappearance, Wyatt hadn’t even bothered trying to find the birth grandparents. What was wrong with him? Why wasn’t he chasing them down? And why all the damned secrecy?

Because he knows. He knows that Noah’s not coming back.

Her heart shattered, but somehow she managed to carry her cup to the sink and rinse it out. Her fingers shook, but hopefully no one noticed as she placed the mug into the dishwasher, said her good nights, then hurried up the stairs.

As she reached the second floor, she heard the soft sound of Jewel-Anne’s electric wheelchair retreating down the hallway. For a fleeting second, Ava wondered if Khloe had purposely come to distract her so that Jewel-Anne could snoop inside her room. . . .

Stop it! Those two women don’t even like each other! It was nothing! Forget it, and get on with what you need to do.

Inside the bedroom, she saw nothing out of place, no telltale wheelchair tracks on the carpeting around her bed, nothing moved that she could tell. She yanked her computer down from the top shelf and fired it up. Quickly, she retrieved her previous search and then, taking her cell phone into the bathroom, she made the first call to one of three Z Johnsons listed in the phone book.

Nervously she waited. The phone was answered by an automated voice that told her the phone number was no longer in service. The second wasn’t answered, not even by a machine, but on the third, a woman answered, her voice groggy with sleep. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Johnson?”

“Yes.”

Here goes nothing. “My name is Ava Garrison, and I’m sorry to bother you, but I was hoping you could tell me something about Tracey.”

Silence.

Ava plunged on. “I believe she was your daughter.”

“Who is this again?” the woman asked. “Why are you calling me?”

“I know this is hard, but I had a son who was adopted, and I think Tracey was his birth mother.”

“What! No!” Click! The phone went dead.

“Damn it.” She dialed again and this time a man answered.

Before she could say a word, he said, “Leave us alone. I don’t know what you want, but let our daughter rest in peace.”

“Please, please don’t hang up. My son is missing, has been for two years, and I just found out that Tracey might have been his birth mother. Can you please help me?”

A pause and then a long sigh. “I’m sorry, lady, but this is too painful for us.”

“I understand,” she said desperately, “and I’m sorry, but I’ve lost my son, too. I’m trying desperately to find him. If you could please help me. My name is Ava Church Garrison, and I adopted my son about four years ago.” She gave the man the date of Noah’s birth and her phone number. “I’m trying to find him. You’ve lost a child. You know what I’m going through. Please, can’t you help me?”

There was a long pause, and then muffled conversation as if he were talking to someone else. Holding her breath, Ava waited, counting her heartbeats. Finally he said, “All we know is that Tracey got herself into trouble, and she told us about it, but she went away, gave the baby up. We don’t know anything else. So, please, don’t call back. If you do, we’ll have to call the police.” Another hesitation, then, “Good luck.”

Click!

The phone went dead again and she knew if she dialed back, she’d get nowhere. Was the threat empty? Did the Johnsons know where Noah was, or was the connection no more than another dead end?