Hidden Falls (59 page)

“They must have been his when he was little,” Nicole said. “Why would he hide them in your attic?”

“I don’t know.”

“What else?” Jack asked. A few small metal cars didn’t connect to anything except perhaps Quinn’s mysterious past.

Sylvia shrugged. “A hood ornament. At least that’s what I think it was.”

Ethan spilled half a bottle of juice over his knees. Nicole fumbled with a pile of napkins to help with the mess.

Ethan soaked up the liquid haphazardly. “Kind of a rocket-looking thing?”

Sylvia looked up. “Yes! How did you know?”

“It’s from a 1955 Oldsmobile. I gave it to him when I was in college.”

“Why didn’t I know about this?” Nicole asked.

“It was just something I found online,” Ethan said. “It was a lot older than Quinn’s Oldsmobile, but I thought he would like it.”

Sylvia stood up and began to pace. “You gave that to him when you were in college? Like when you were nineteen or twenty?”

“Something like that.”

“So only ten years ago?”

“Yes, I think it was the last time I saw him.”

“The box has been in my attic for twenty years.”

“What box?”

“The box with the Matchbox cars. But the hood ornament couldn’t have been in it twenty years ago.” Sylvia paced faster. “And that means the documents might not have been there all that time, either.”

“Documents?” Jack said. He thought he was the only one in possession of relevant documents.

“A few weeks ago,” Sylvia said, “Quinn volunteered to take some boxes from my garage up into the attic. I didn’t think it was urgent, but he insisted.”

Nicole reached for her crutches and pulled herself to her feet. “So you think—”

“He put something new in the box.”

“My hood ornament?” Ethan asked.

Sylvia turned to look at him. “And the papers. The hood ornament means he meant them for you.”

Jack thumped one hand on the arm of his chair. He didn’t want to admit he was losing the line of logic.

“Nicole,” Sylvia said, “are you still willing to go sit with Lauren?”

“Of course.”

“Then, Ethan, I think you should come with me to my house.”

Jack took comfort in the fact that Ethan looked as disoriented as Jack felt.

“Quinn must have meant for you to have the documents,” Sylvia said. “That’s why he put them in the box. They were safe there. No one else even knew the box was in my attic, and he knew I wouldn’t look in it.”

“But you
did
look,” Jack pointed out.

“Well,” she said, “circumstances changed when Quinn disappeared.”

“What do these documents say?” Ethan asked.

“Come with me and I’ll show you,” Sylvia said.

Ethan looked around the room. “I think we’re all in this together at this point. What did you see?”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait to see for yourself?”

“Please, just tell me.”

“Well, first of all, there was a marriage certificate for Kay Petersen and Richard Jordan.”

Nicole’s jaw dropped open. “Why would Quinn have a copy of the marriage certificate for Ethan’s parents?”

“It’s like your dots and dashes,” Sylvia said. “One thing leads to another. There’s also an adoption certificate.”

Jack’s stomach fell away.

“I’m adopted?” Ethan looked dumbfounded.

“No,” Sylvia said. “Your mother was. The document shows Kathleen Pease will henceforth be known as Kay Petersen.”

Jack heard the breath of every person in the room.

“Her original birth certificate shows her parents as Dennis and Linda Pease.”

Jack’s chest heaved. When he’d opened this can of worms, he hadn’t expected to hear any of this.

“Maybe we should have a look at those documents together,” Jack said.

“Pease,” Nicole said. “Your mother is a Pease. But …”

“I really wish you’d let me look at the documents,” Jack said. He was an attorney. He would know what they meant better than anyone else present.

“Just hold on.” Nicole put her fingers to her temples. “The man in the picture—he’s a Pease? Is he Stephen or Dennis?”

“I only had a cursory glance at the picture yesterday,” Jack said. “We’d have to pin down the date.” And he would have to sort out the relationship between Stephen and Dennis. Getting at the truth was going to require a few more birth certificates.

“But the babies,” Nicole said. “The package changes everything.”

11:07 a.m.

“You have to go see your parents.”

This wasn’t the first time Nicole made this statement, but it was the first time Ethan thought she might be right. They stood murmuring outside the waiting room while Sylvia checked on Lauren before leaving the hospital.

“What in the world will I say to them?” Ethan opened his hands in a wide gesture. “Hi, Mom. Did you know you were adopted?”

Nicole rested a hand on his arm. “First go with Sylvia to see the documents. I hate to say it, but I think Jack’s right. He should have a look. And I don’t think he’s telling us everything he knows.”

Ethan eyed her. “I don’t think you’re telling him everything you know, either.”

“
Know
is a strong word. It’s more like
suspect
.”

“Okay,
suspect.
You found something in the cemetery notes, didn’t you?”

Nicole looked over her shoulder and shuffled her crutches a little farther down the hall. “This is going to sound gruesome.”

“More gruesome than the possibility of a rich man buying a poor man’s baby?”

Nicole sucked in a deep breath. “When we were at the cemetery that night looking at grave markers, I noticed that sometimes when a baby died, the marker might only say
infant
or
baby
with a year. Not even a last name.”

“So?” Ethan knew sickly babies did not always receive a name, and grieving families might find it costly to purchase and inscribe a tombstone.

“So … the grave the man in the photo is standing in front of is near two markers with the name Pease. But Old Dom’s father didn’t think it was a Pease baby buried there.”

“Who did he think it was?”

Nicole shrugged. “The notes just say a Tabor child took ill.”

Ethan stiffened. “A Tabor?” Harold’s younger brother, Truman, also had several children. It could have been any one of them.

“Quinn’s code says things like
right age
or
this one
.”

“So you think—”

“Don’t you see, Ethan? If the ‘package’ in the contract Jack found was a baby, we’re in a new game.”

Jack lurked, leaning against the wall a few yards away with his hands in his pockets. Sylvia’s steps slapped the tile floor as she approached. “Lauren’s waiting.”

Nicole gripped her crutches. “Then I’ll go.”

Ethan caught the gaze of her emerald eyes and wished he didn’t have to leave her behind. “I’ll call you.”

Thirty minutes later, Sylvia lifted Quinn’s box from her mantel, and Ethan’s trembling hands unfolded the documents.

The marriage license.

The adoption papers.

A birth certificate listing Dennis Pease as the father of Kathleen Pease, born in a town in Kansas that Ethan had never heard of.

Ethan laid the papers in a neat row on the coffee table while he rubbed his eyes. He’d been up more than twenty-four hours now. Small letters typed into tiny boxes were running together, but Ethan had the feeling he was missing something obvious. He felt the same way on a regular basis when he was running through diagnostic protocol but not coming up with an answer that made sense for a patient’s symptoms or treatment didn’t relieve the symptoms. It had to be here. If Nicole were there, she’d have a hunch, a theory to turn and look at from every direction.

Sylvia sat quietly across from him.

Ethan looked at the morphing forms of his mother’s names. Kathleen Pease. Kay Petersen. Kay Jordan. He looked again at the names of the men identified as her father. Dennis Pease. Carl Petersen. He blinked at the names of the women identified as her mother. Linda Pease. Linda Petersen.

“My grandmother,” he murmured.

“What about your grandmother?” Sylvia asked.

Ethan pointed to the names on the birth and adoption papers. “Linda. It’s Linda on both forms. I think she was married twice. The adoption was so my mother would have her stepfather’s name—Petersen.”

The doorbell rang. Sylvia stood up. “That must be Jack with the papers from his office.”

Ethan was reluctant to change position or even turn his head for fear of losing the thread that was beginning to make sense. Jack shuffled across the carpet and dropped onto the sofa next to Ethan to examine the pages Ethan had laid out.

“What did you find?” Ethan asked without looking up.

Jack reached into his briefcase, riffled through notes, and tapped the information he sought. “Dennis Pease was the only son of Stephen Pease. He was born here in Hidden Falls—a home birth, which was typical at the time. According to official records, he died eight months later, and his parents ran out on their lease and left town the day they buried him.”

Ethan ran his tongue over his lips. “Then how is it he grew up to be listed on my mother’s birth certificate?”

“How indeed?”

“Identity theft?” Sylvia speculated. “Someone found a record of an infant no one would miss and used the name. People still try to do that.”

Jack nodded. “With enough basic information, much of which would be available in public records, it’s possible to get a birth certificate.”

That struck Ethan as random. He was a man of science—of patterns and predictability. Even in treating disease, he depended on understanding causation and consistency.

This was no disease. This was his mother. And there was causation and consistency. No one had to obtain a birth certificate by fraudulent means when already in possession of one that would never be questioned.

“Jack,” he said, “what was the date on that contract you found between Harold Tabor and Stephen Pease?”

“Why does it matter?” Jack gripped his notepad.

“I suppose the date doesn’t matter,” Ethan said. “What matters is the time between when the contract was drafted and when it was considered fulfilled.”

Jack flipped a couple of pages. “Two days.”

“And the money was paid?”

“In full. In cash.”

Ethan stacked the documents. “May I take these with me?”

Jack jerked slightly. “I think we need to make sure those documents remain in safekeeping.”

Ethan wasn’t asking Jack’s opinion. He raised his eyes to Sylvia.

“Of course,” she said. “I believe Quinn meant you to have them. That’s why he asked you to come to town.”

Jack protested. “We should at least make photocopies.”

“These are not original documents.” Ethan folded the papers. “Wherever Quinn got them from, we could get them again.”

“Santorelli is my guess,” Sylvia said.

Ethan nodded.

“I have to advise against this recklessness.” Jack stood when Ethan did.

Ethan wasn’t interested in Jack’s advice. He thanked Sylvia with his eyes and went out her front door, leaving Jack with his jaw hanging open.

He drove straight to Quinn’s house and parked in front. When he spoke to Nicole, Ethan wanted to give his full attention to the conversation.

“That package,” he said when she answered her cell phone. “I think it was a two-way exchange. And I’m not talking about the money.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Nicole said.

Ethan hadn’t expected her to be surprised. He was confident she knew what he was talking about. A substitution. A trade. A sickly baby boy for a healthy one of the same age.

“My mother doesn’t have to know,” he said. She had lived her whole life without the truth. Ethan was certain of that. What would it change now?

“She deserves to know,” Nicole said.

“It’s not what’s between us,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Your father is what’s between you and your mother. Don’t add this. Everything can change in a day. Remember—no regrets.”

They hung up and Ethan sat in his car in the full light of day, staring at the features of Quinn’s house.

The shutters Ethan had once helped to paint.

The hail-struck dent in the gutter above one window that Quinn never replaced because it didn’t leak.

The strip of siding that he had replaced because squirrels nibbled through it.

The polished door knocker Quinn shined with his handkerchief nearly every day when he left the house.

It all looked so ordinary, as if the house itself was waiting for Quinn to pull into the driveway, turn his key in the front lock, and resume his life. Tomorrow he would go to the high school and relieve the substitute teacher who had taken his classes. The next day he would decide that his lawn needed mowing one last time before winter. He would be the same reliable Quinn so many people in Hidden Falls depended on, with that understanding gleam in his eyes that made people want to tell him their troubles.

Ethan was sure Sylvia was right when she said Quinn wanted him to have the documents. He was equally sure Quinn had wanted him to stay in town for a few days because he knew this moment would come and Ethan would resist it. Quinn had been patient with Ethan’s sullen nursing of familial wounds but never accepted that Ethan’s sense of rejection was final.

Ethan removed his keys from the ignition and opted to walk around the block to the Jordan household, where he stood on the sidewalk and took three deep breaths before knocking on the front door. His father, Ethan knew, would leave it to his mother to see who stood outside the house. He would have the TV on, and he wouldn’t turn it off if the president of the United States came through the door. It had always been that way. Richard Jordan put in his hours at work and figured he’d fulfilled his obligation to support his family. Beyond that, his time was his own. It didn’t matter how tired his wife got keeping up with everything else or what was going on in the lives of his sons. His father’s passivity had fed Ethan’s ambition for as long as he could remember.

“Hello, Mom.” Kay Jordan paid the price for the difference between Ethan and his father. Ethan fished around in his mind for a memory of his mother standing up to her husband. He had none.