G'Day to Die (20 page)

My mood brightening with a sudden thought, I quickened my pace to reach the end of the tunnel.
Unless Henry’s little piece of paradise turned out to be nothing to write home about.

It was glorious. A deserted, horseshoe-shaped cove, hugged by craggy cliffs and washed by sparkling turquoise water that glazed the sand with froth. A break-water of low rocks formed a protective pool around half the beach, while beyond the barrier, the ocean swelled with booming rollers that didn’t look at all user-friendly.

Wow. This place was amazing. A few palm trees, some forbidden fruit, and it really would be paradise. But I couldn’t tell that to the Dicks. I needed to play it down so they wouldn’t think they were missing anything.

In other words, I needed to lie.

I kicked off my sandals to walk barefoot on the beach, hopping on tiptoes when I realized the sand wasn’t just sugary. It was hot! “Ouch. Ouch.” I ran toward the water and sank my toes into the cool tidal sand, tottering off-balance when the ground oozed from beneath my feet on an ebbing wave.

“Turn around and do something sassy!” a voice called from behind me.

Guy Madelyn sat on the beach in the shade of a boulder that may have broken off from the cliff a million years ago. He brandished his camera in the air. “The light doesn’t get more perfect than this, Emily. You want to give it another shot?”

“No! This is the worst hair day of my life!” Well, other than the day in Italy when it caught fire.

“Your hair looks fine. Hold that pose.” He checked his display screen. “Hey, I think we finally hit pay dirt.” He stood up and crossed the beach to me. “What do you think of this?”

My complexion glowed in the light. My hair looked casually windblown. My smile held mystery. My eyes sparkled with a “come hither” look. Good God, I looked sensational. “Wow.”

“Nice, huh? See? I told you all you had to do was relax.”

“Do you have a price list for your wedding photo packages?”

“On my website. Search Guy Madelyn, and that should get you there. Does this mean you’ve narrowed your field of eligible suitors to one?”

Did it? Had my heart made the decision without informing my brain? Did I know subconsciously? Had I always known?

Yeah, I think I had.

I smiled at the revelation. “I know the one.”

“Great. We do honeymoon packages, too. Have you discussed your wedding trip yet? Islands are the big thing. How about a destination wedding? You and a handful of friends and family could fly to Tahiti, or Bora Bora, or Moorea, and the most critical detail you’d have to worry about is making plans early enough to insure that everyone who doesn’t have a passport has plenty of time to apply for one.”

“Speaking of passports, I still have yours.” I swung my bag off my shoulder and poked through the jumbled contents, yanking out Nana’s bloomers and my plastic bag of wet clothing. “Somewhere. I need to get rid of some of this stuff. I think I’ve reached critical mass.”

“Would you like me to hold those for you?”

“That would be great. And while I have you here, would you sign the group card for Heath? I think your signature is the only one that’s missing, other than Jake’s. He had issues with the sympathy thing.” I dug out a pen. “Do you have enough hands?”

“No problem. I juggle more equipment than this when I’m on a job.” He shoved the clothing under his arm, then went down on one knee to sign the card. I grabbed a handful of passports, flipping them open one by one.
Osmond Chelsvig. Margi Swanson.

“If your passport was pink, I could find it in a second.”

“Sorry. Same old navy blue as the States.”

Alice Tjarks. Lucille Rassmuson.
Lucille was wearing her brooch with her late husband’s face on it. Wow, his cigar had come out
really
well.
Dick Teig. Guy Madelyn
. “Found it!” I angled the page away from the sun’s glare to regard his photo once again. “For a good-looking guy, you really do take a horrendous picture. This doesn’t look anything like you.” I eyed the dates on the right. “You were a St. Patrick’s Day baby! Oh, my God, you’re not going to believe this, but you and Nora Acres were born on the very same day: March 17, 1943. Small world, huh?”

“Anytime you get a group together, two or three people will always share the same birthday. It’s a statistically proven fact.”

The next line gave me pause. “You were born in England?”

“Yeah, my dad worked as a newspaper correspondent for a few years during the war. High risk, low pay. He and my mom didn’t stay long after I was born.”

“That’s such a coincidence.” I looked at him as if for the first time and frowned in disbelief. “Did you know Nora was born in England?”

“Really? I thought she was Australian through and through.” He stood up and handed me the card. “Trade you.”

I handed over his passport. “She was orphaned in England and transported to Australia for adoption. I guess that happened to a lot of children after the war.” I searched his face, unable to reconcile what I was thinking. “She lived a pretty hard life in the Outback. Maybe if she’d lived in Canada, she’d have had something to show for her fifty-seven years other than wrinkles. I can’t believe you’re fifty-seven. You look at least a decade or two younger.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” He shook out Nana’s bloomers. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you struck me as more of a Victoria’s Secret kind of gal.”

I snatched the undies from him and glanced around the deserted beach. “I bet you wouldn’t be so cheeky if there were children around. Where are the kiddies, anyway? I thought this place was supposed to be their favorite haunt.”

“I expect they’re in school. Australian school-children don’t take long summer breaks. That’s an American peculiarity.”

I scrutinized his features as I jammed the plastic bag and bloomers back into my shoulder bag. Was it my imagination, or did he resemble Heath through the eyes and mouth? My notion was completely absurd, and yet—“Did your parents take a lot of pictures when you were a baby?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Do you have an album with a lock of your hair, and a christening photo, and all the statistics people mark down for newborns? You know. Baby’s first year?”

“Is that a polite way of asking if I’m adopted?”

My heart pumped double time. “Are you?”

“No, I’m not adopted! And if I don’t have a baby album, it’s because parents in the forties didn’t bother with things like that, especially during wartime.”

“A lot of parents never told their children the truth.”

“Sorry, Emily, but you’re way out of line. If you’re trying to prove that Nora Acres and I had some connection because we have the same birthday, you’re going to end up looking very foolish.”

Spoken like a man without an ounce of female intuition. “Do you remember the photo Nora showed you in Port Campbell?”

“Vaguely. What I remember most was that it was about to disintegrate.”

“It showed Nora posing with her sister, Beverley, and their mother. The twins were in pinafores and had Shirley Temple banana curls.”

Guy lifted his brows. “And?”

“Okay, you might think I’m really grasping at straws, but what if the reason you never had a baby album was because your parents never saw you as a baby? What if Nora’s photo is actually a picture of her mother…and another child who was born in England on March 17, 1943?”

He struggled to keep a straight face even as laughter exploded from his chest. “You think the other child is me? Why would I be posing with Nora Acres? Better yet, do I look like a Beverley to you?”

“No! But you were born in England. The English have been known to stick their male offspring with girls’ names—Evelyn, Marian, Carol,
Beverley
.”

“Are they also guilty of dressing little boys in pinafores?”

“I’ve seen some of my grandmother’s family photos where you couldn’t distinguish the girls from the boys because they were all in dresses and pipe curls. People did that back then. Little boys didn’t get into trousers or have their hair cut until they went off to school.”

“And they all ended up in therapy.”

“Seriously, I think I’m onto something. The twins were placed in different orphanages during the war and never saw each other again, so the only link Nora had to her past was that photo. She assumed the other child in the photo was her sister, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was her brother? What if the children weren’t identical twins? What if they were fraternal twins?”

“I’m not adopted!”

“Oh, my God, Guy! You may have found a sister you never knew you had! Don’t you believe in serendipity?”

“I believe in good fortune happening by accident. I
don’t
believe in pipe dreams. Now, will you drop it?”

“But think what this could mean to Heath! You could provide the closure he and his mother had been looking for for so many years, and that would be so meaningful to him. You look like him, you know. I didn’t see it before because I wasn’t looking for it, but you have the same full lips, the same blue eyes. You even have the same physique! You could have DNA testing done to eliminate all doubt. You have to talk to him, Guy. This is so amazing! You come to Australia to meet the relatives, and you end up with one more than you expected. A nephew! We need to speak to Henry. Heath is supposed to call him later, and when he does, maybe you can—”

“I told you to drop it!”

“But don’t you want—”

“NO! I
don’t
want! Kee-REIST, what the hell is wrong with you? You couldn’t leave well enough alone. You had to keep picking and picking. And that’s a damn shame, because I liked you, Emily. I really did.”

Liked?
Uh-oh. Past tense wasn’t a good sign. “I’m sorry, Guy. I’ve been acting like an unfeeling, insensitive clod. I just get so excited when I start connecting the dots. This has to be a huge shock, and I haven’t allowed you any time for it to sink in. Why don’t we go back to the café and—”

“What a lousy way to learn you’re not who you think you are.”

Guilt lodged like a hairball in my throat. “I’m sorry,” I rasped, hoping a whirlpool would appear at my feet and swallow me whole.

“They could have told me when they were alive, but no, I had to find out after they were dead.”

I placed my hand on Guy’s forearm. “They probably had a very good reason for not telling you.”

“It was all lies. There was no newspaper job in London. It was one giant cover-up to keep the truth from me. But I couldn’t understand why. The newspaper clippings, the old family records, why would they want to hide those from me? Madelyn was one of the most respected names in Australian history. You’d think they would have been proud of that. But that’s exactly why they had to keep it from me: because if I started asking questions, their world would collapse like a house of cards.”

I could hear him talk; I just wish I understood what he was saying. “Um, I’m a little confused. Would you mind backing up to the part about newspaper clippings and old family records?”

He regarded me with eyes so distant, I wasn’t sure he could actually see me. “I found them in the attic after my dad died—after the nephrologist told me that in addition to my being diabetic, my blood type was incompatible with my dad’s, which meant, he couldn’t have fathered me. I found everything—travel documents, passports. My parents left Canada right before the war for Australia. I found clippings about the
Meridia
and photos of my dad with his Aussie relatives. News articles about a ship that carried English orphans to New South Wales in nineteen-forty-six. A record of adoption for an English male child named Beverley Gooch by Nicole and Guy Madelyn.
My
adoption papers. I was apparently born in England, but my parents adopted me in Australia, then whisked me back home to Canada even before the ink had dried. I guess my dad didn’t want the Aussie relatives finding out that Guy Junior, no longer known as Beverley, wasn’t the genuine article. What a blow to the ego, eh? A man so inept, he can’t get his own wife pregnant, so he needs to settle for someone else’s kid.”

“It’s not settling! Adopting a child has to be a wonderfully rewarding experience. Your dad couldn’t have thought that.”

“Then why the lies? Why the isolation? I’ll tell you why. Because he was so ashamed, he couldn’t face telling them the truth! So he cut off all ties to them so he wouldn’t have to. I knew something was wrong. My dad always gave off these tense, angry vibes that would earn you a good smack if you crossed him on certain days. He was so cold and secretive. And that was the other thing. I wasn’t blind. I wanted to know why I didn’t look like either of my parents, and you wouldn’t believe the double talk my dad dished out to explain it. I think that’s the reason I went into photography. I wanted to find a face that looked like mine.”

“And now you’ve found one!” I enthused. “Heath! Did you get pictures of him? Could you see the resemblance?”

Something dark and disturbing flickered in his eyes. “I didn’t need to see him.” He removed his wallet from his back pocket and slid a photo out from its plastic sheath. “I knew the moment I saw this.”