“How were you able to track down these records?” Gabe asked.
“That’s kind of a funny coincidence,” C. D. said. “After I came home from Vietnam, I’d been living in Savannah off and on for about twenty years. Retired there, after working as a longshoreman out at the Port Authority, and I knew a couple of guys, like me, who were Good Shepherd alumni. One of ’em told me about a reunion they were having a couple of years ago. It was the home’s 275th anniversary. So I went along out there, ’cause I was curious to see how the place had changed.”
“I imagine there’s been quite a bit of change since you lived there,” Gabe offered.
“Yeah, the ‘cottage’ I lived in, it’s some kind of classroom now,” C. D. said. “The whole place is a boys’ prep school now, ’cause you really don’t have a lot of honest-to-God orphans these days.”
“My mom has a friend whose father and two brothers grew up at Good Shepherd, back in the Depression years,” Brooke said. “Their father had died, and their mother had to work and couldn’t care for three boys. So she kept his sisters and the boys were raised at the Children’s home.”
“That happened a lot,” C. D. said. “Anyway, at the reunion party, I ran into a guy who lived in my cottage. He was a couple of years older than me, but like me, he’d been at St. Joseph’s before Good Shepherd. And he was telling me that he’d been able to look up his records. In the church office. I forget what they call it.”
“The archdiocesan office,” Gabe said. “All the diocesan records were moved there after the girls’ orphanage was closed and remodeled.”
C. D. snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s what it’s called. Anyway, they won’t let you look at the records unless you can prove you were what they call a former ‘resident.’ I told the woman there, ‘Hell, I wasn’t a resident, I was an orphan.’” He rattled the papers on his lap. “That’s where I found all this stuff.” He smoothed the newspaper clipping. “They let me look in my file. How about that? I found this clipping. And when I saw the picture of her holding me on her lap, something clicked. And I remembered her. How she come to see me, every year, at Christmas, and on my birthday, or what they told me was my birthday. I remembered she smelled like some kind of flowery perfume. And she had a pearl necklace, and I tried to play with it, but she’d slap my hand away.”
C. D. paused in his story. “Now you tell me, why would she come see some little kid in an orphanage, bring him presents and all like that, unless she had a connection to him?”
“Good question,” Gabe conceded.
“When you came to work here, did you tell Josephine you thought she was your mother?” Brooke asked.
He shook his head emphatically. “No. Because I wasn’t sure yet. I kinda wanted to get the lay of the land, check things out. I came over on the ferry, talked to Shug and asked about a job, and he’s the one brought me up to the house and told Josephine maybe I could run the boat and help with some other stuff around here.”
“And she never recognized you? Didn’t recognize your name?” Gabe sounded skeptical. “Come on, C. D. This is an entertaining story, but none of it proves that you are her son or her heir.”
“How about this?” C. D. asked. He handed over a faded color snapshot of a brick cottage surrounded by towering oaks similar to the ones on Talisa. Brooke squinted to read a plaque.
“That’s the Samuel Bettendorf Cottage at Good Shepherd,” C. D. said. “I looked it up in the records. Josephine donated the money for it to be built in 1946—the year I got put over there once they closed the orphanage.”
“And what do you think that signifies?” Gabe asked.
“It means she felt guilty about walking away and giving me up,” C. D. said, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “Hell, I can’t explain why she did the stuff she did. I just know I am her son, and after all these years, it’s about damn time she did right by me.”
He looked from Brooke to Gabe, then back at Brooke again, and then donned his sunglasses. “Kinda upsets your apple cart, don’t it? You and your mom and those women upstairs? Looks like none of y’all are gonna be heiresses after all.”
Brooke shrugged. She didn’t know what to say or how to feel. Just the night before, the mistress of Shellhaven had shocked them all by telling them about a murder that had happened nearly eighty years ago, right here on this island. This morning, Josephine was dead, her estate left in limbo. Horror, grief, shock, disbelief. And now this. She was numb.
She stood up and held out a hand to C. D. “Good luck to you, C. D. I hope you’re able to prove your claim. And I truly mean that. If Josephine really did walk away and leave you in an orphanage all those years ago, you deserve to inherit. But in the meantime, I need to get back to the mainland. To my own son.”
41
They found Marie and Lizzie in the kitchen, having lunch. Louette looked up from the sandwich she was eating.
“Did C. D. tell y’all that crazy story of his? ’Bout how he’s Josephine’s son?”
“What’s that?” Marie asked, startled. “You mean C. D., the man who pilots the boat? He’s Josephine’s son?”
“That’s what he thinks.” Louette’s voice dripped scorn. She stood up and motioned for Brooke to take her chair. “Sit here. You want some lunch? I got chicken salad and crab salad.”
Gabe dragged a chair up to the table. “I’d love a crab salad sandwich.”
“I’m not really hungry,” Brooke said. “But if it’s all right, I’d like to call the ferry to book a ride back to the mainland.”
“Oh, I already took care of that,” Louette said. “You’re on the two o’clock, if that’s all right.”
Brooke gestured to Lizzie. “Will that give us enough time to get you to the airport for your flight back to California?”
Lizzie reached for a potato chip from the bowl in the center of the table. “I’m not going home. Not just yet. I canceled my flight.”
“But … I thought you were in such a rush to get back. For your deadline and everything,” Brooke said.
“I was, until last night, when Josephine started spinning that amazing story of hers, and then, after what happened this morning, it dawned on me, there’s a story right here. Like, a once-in-a-lifetime story. And I’m a part of it. So instead of packing this morning, I pounded out a query letter and emailed it to a couple of magazine editors I know in New York, and I heard back from one right away, and she loves the idea. So I’m staying.”
“Here?” Gabe asked. “At Shellhaven?”
“Why not? Louette doesn’t have a problem with that, do you, Louette?”
“Be nice to have company, especially with Josephine gone,” Louette said.
“Do you have a problem with me staying here?” Lizzie asked Gabe pointedly.
“No. I mean, as I said, I’ll petition the court to be named administrator of the estate, but in the meantime, I guess there’s no reason you couldn’t stay on.”
“Then it’s settled,” Lizzie said. “Now what’s all this about C. D.? He really claims he’s Josephine’s long-lost son?”
While Gabe polished off two crab salad sandwiches, a homemade pickle, and a couple of tea cakes, Brooke recited what the lawyers had just heard from C. D.
“This story just keeps getting better and better,” Lizzie said, rubbing her hands together gleefully. “Josephine, an unwed mother! Now it’s not just a magazine article or a book. We’re talking potential movie deal.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Gabe said, brushing cookie crumbs from the front of his golf shirt. “I hated to burst the guy’s bubble, but an old newspaper clipping of her holding a little orphaned tyke at Christmas probably isn’t going to hold water in court.”
“That man is crazy,” Louette said, shaking her head. “I never heard a story so crazy. Even if it were true, don’t you think Josephine would have recognized her own flesh and blood?”
“It does strain the imagination,” Marie said. “Abandoning a baby in a church? And then going to the orphanage every year at Christmas to visit him? How could anybody be that cruel? Even Josephine?”