Mistaken Identity (14 page)

To 708 Lakeside Drive, Montchanin, Delaware.

The address had been in the prison logs and Montchanin was right outside of Wilmington. Bennie was going to see Bill Winslow. Maybe he was her father, maybe he wasn’t. In half an hour she’d know. Her fingers tightened on the wheel. And if Winslow were her father, could Connolly be her twin? She switched to the fast lane and pushed a button for the CD player. It was all Bruce Springsteen, all the time, and a clear road to Delaware. She brushed the hair from her eyes and accelerated smoothly.

In time the four-lane highway narrowed to a two-lane road that wound past towns and long strip malls with new stucco refacing and neon signs. By the time Bennie was on the second CD of the boxed set, the streetlights had been replaced by split-rail fences and lush green pastures. Trees a century old formed a verdant backdrop; the sun had set and the sky was the color of blueberries. The humidity had lifted as she drove south and the air wafted sweet and earthy. Horses grazed silently, their long tails switching at the bites of unseen flies, and raised their heads to watch Bennie cruise past. The Expedition negotiated skinny country roads that led to estates so vast she couldn’t see the houses.

Lakeside Drive. Bennie slowed and looked around for number 708. She read the numbers on dented mailboxes and burglar alarm logos until she reached a sturdy aluminum mailbox for 708. Her mouth felt dry, but she ignored it. She had found a man who had been a question mark her whole life; now a man who had an answer she needed.

Bennie pressed the gas pedal, twisted the truck onto the asphalt road on the property, and traveled the road until it forked. The right fork continued in black asphalt, tree-lined in a grand manner; the left fork was gravel and stone. If one belonged to the caretaker, it would be the left. Bennie steered onto it, and the woods grew denser with each foot, so she turned on the high beams. Crickets chirped loudly in the woods and in the distance a horse whinnied to her colt. Bennie slowed the truck, its heavy tires making popping noises on the gravel, and in a clearing she came upon a cottage of white stucco.

Could this be Winslow’s house? It stood two short stories high and was encircled like an embrace by a flower garden, dense and mature. Bennie could see white and yellow daisies, a thatch of pink and red rosebushes, and maroon bleeding hearts with other perennials. A raised wooden box contained rows of green vegetables, and pink and lavender cosmos, all leggy stems and feathery foliage, swayed in the cool evening breeze. Bennie felt a prick of resentment. Her father lived in a charming cottage; her mother lived in a mental hospital. How long had Winslow enjoyed these comforts while her mother was renting a series of spare efficiencies on crowded, dirty city blocks, in Philly’s lousiest neighborhoods? With a baby in tow, yet. Maybe two babies.

Bennie cut the ignition, climbed out of the truck, and stretched her legs. Her back window was streaked with doggie saliva at a 60-mph-slant, and Bear swiped at the door with his paw. Bennie let him out, and he bounded to the gravel, sniffed excitedly, then loped ahead. Her heartbeat quickened as she walked to the cottage’s front door, painted a fresh hunter green. Wind chimes tinkled from a small pitched roof protecting the entrance. Bennie willed herself to be calm, then knocked. Nothing happened. She knocked again. No answer. There was a square, bevel-cut window in the door, and she peered inside. It was dark in the house and nothing stirred.

Bennie turned and looked behind her. There was no car in the driveway or anywhere else. Maybe Winslow wasn’t home. She knocked harder. She hadn’t come this far for nothing, had she? She tried the knob and the door twisted open. She hesitated, startled, but Bear scampered through the open doorway. “Damn you!” Bennie cursed, always a sensible response to a golden. “Come, goddammit!” She gritted her teeth and leaned in the shadowy doorway. What she saw amazed her.

The cottage was filled with books. They lined the entrance hall, papered the walls of a tiny living room, and traveled up the steps out of sight. Hardbacks were piled on end tables and overflowed into stacks sitting on the thin hook rug. Suddenly Bear charged from a room on the right. “Hey!” Bennie shouted. “Bad dog!” Bear plopped on his feathery hindquarters, thumped his tail, and smiled up at his mistress. “Act sorry,” she said, pointing a finger, but Bear only sniffed her fingertip. Goldens never understand when you point.

Bennie gripped the dog’s red collar and looked where he had been: a tiny kitchen with a white linoleum floor and immaculate white-painted wood cabinets. On top of the cabinets sat a lineup of books and a box of Saltine crackers. The kitchen was as still as the cottage. “Winslow?” she called from the hallway. “Anybody home?” There was no reply, no sound. Bennie waited, listening, then an idea presented itself. Winslow wasn’t home, but maybe his cottage contained the answers she needed. She squared her shoulders. Until now a guardian of individual liberties, Bennie proceeded to search the house and seize if at all possible.

She walked into the living room. It was spare, furnished with a flowered sofa and chintz chair. She turned on a ceramic lamp on the end table, which cast a gentle yellow light on the volumes on the shelves, and she was able to read the authors’ names. Milton. Spenser. Sandburg. Chaucer. Frost. Bennie slipped a slim paperback off the shelf. Ferlinghetti’s
A Coney Island of the Mind.
She skimmed through pages bumpy with water damage. The pages had been thumbed and the book’s skinny spine had been cracked. So Ferlinghetti had been read, at least once. By Winslow? It didn’t fit the way Bennie had imagined him, in the few times she allowed herself to think about him. She flipped to the front of the book, looking for an inscription or maybe the stamp from a library sale. It was clean. She snapped it closed and moved on to the next shelf.

Fiction, mostly classics.
An American Tragedy. Ulysses. Robinson Crusoe. The Divine Comedy. The Possessed.
The authors were among the best: John Steinbeck, P. G. Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley, S. J. Perelman. But it was too disparate a group. Could a man clever enough to appreciate S. J. Perelman endure
Finnegans Wake
? Did Winslow really read all these books? Bennie turned and glanced around the sitting room. There was no television or stereo, just an old black rotary telephone. She didn’t see a radio, and nothing hung on the walls. A wall of newer books sat behind the sofa, and she crossed the room to read the titles.
Raising Roses. Every Gardener’s Guide to Perennials. Gardening for Small Spaces.
Bennie ran a finger along the books and no dust trail appeared.

She jumped to conclusions, a specialty of hers. Winslow was a neat man, who collected and apparently read a wide variety of books, almost without discrimination. He kept a flourishing garden, so he appreciated nature and beautiful things. His home was in excellent repair despite its age, so he was disciplined and hardworking. He cared for a large estate, so he was responsible enough to hold the job a long time, judging from the maturity of his garden. By all accounts, Winslow was a gentle, nurturing fellow. If not for the fact that he may have abandoned a mother and an infant. Maybe two.

Suddenly Bennie had to know. She went through the shelves, peeked between the volumes, felt behind the books. There had to be something here, something that would tell her more about Winslow. She went to the kitchen and searched through the cabinets, also neat and clean, and even opened the refrigerator, empty except for a bottle of French Merlot. She hurried upstairs, with Bear’s toenails clicking up the stairwell at her heels. At the top of the stair, she found herself on a small landing with a bathroom to her left, a study next to it, then a bedroom. She hurried into the study and found a switch for an overhead light that barely illuminated the room.

Filled with books, the study was no different from the rest of the house except for an undersized wooden desk with an old green blotter on top. Bennie hesitated, then opened the desk drawers, expecting to find bills, papers, or receipts. But there was nothing that would tell her anything about Winslow. Odd. The second drawer contained pencils and pens, Scotch tape in a plastic dispenser, glue, scissors, paper clips. She closed it and opened another drawer. Inside sat a stack of heavyweight black paper. Very odd. Only black paper? Bennie picked up a piece and fingered it. It reminded her of the black paper that was left stuck to the back of the photos. It had the same soft texture and weight, like paper used in a photo album or scrapbook. Then Bennie remembered something Connolly had said at the prison.

He told me he has all your clippings.

Clippings! Where? Was Connolly lying to her? Was Winslow lying to Connolly? Bennie thought a minute. The clippings could be in a scrapbook of some kind, on a shelf like the other books. Bennie replaced the paper, closed the third drawer, and searched through the bookshelves for a scrapbook. There were books about World War II, Roman civilization, the Civil War, and the British monarchy. She reached behind biographies of Gustave Flaubert and Benjamin Franklin. Still no clippings.

She left the study and hustled to the bedroom, dismayed to find Bear lying on the floor, chewing a roll of toilet paper into bite-size bits. “That’s helpful, Lassie,” Bennie said, and yanked the soggy roll from the dog’s mouth. She bent over and picked up the clumps of toilet paper, which was when she spotted something in the shadows under the bed. A large plastic bin.

Bennie set the toilet paper down and peeked underneath. Bear peeked, too, his hindquarters in the air and tail awag. She muscled the dog out of the way, reached under the bed, and pulled out a storage bin. It was about three feet square, with a blue plastic top that said
RUBBER-MAID
. She pulled off the lid. Inside was a stack of small, homemade books, lying side by side, six across and several books deep. Bennie picked up the top book and saw that its pages were black, like the paper from the drawer in the study. From the back of the photos.

She stared at the closed book in her hands. It was only ten pages thick and its cover was of thin cardboard, punched through with a three-hole puncher and fashioned together with common twine. Did she have the right to look inside it? Did she want to? Bennie opened the first page. It was a black-and-white photo of a little boy on a pinto pony that stood incongruously on a suburban street. The boy was outfitted in a neckerchief and cowboy hat. Winslow? Bennie wanted to see the back of the photo, but it was glued in the book. If she pulled it off, he’d know someone had tampered with it. She flipped the page. The next photo took her breath away.

A snapshot of Winslow with her mother. There was no mistaking it. He had the same masculine grin and wore a T-shirt like the one in the photo Connolly had given her. In fact, the picture looked like it might have been the next shot on the roll, and Bennie wondered who had taken it. She looked at the photo again, breathing it in. Her mother looked young and had curled her arm through Winslow’s. Her lipsticked mouth smiled gaily and her eyes shone with happiness.

Her mother? Her father? Bennie tried to dislodge the photo but didn’t force it. What year was it taken? And what about Connolly?

Bennie turned the page. It was blank, with the top layer of paper torn away where a photo had been ripped out. She ran a finger over the ragged patch. The threads of paper matched the tufts on the back of the photo Connolly had given her. Had it been taken from this book? Bennie turned the next page. Another wartime photo. Airmen in groups. She found Winslow quickly in the photo, but it didn’t answer any questions about Connolly. She flipped another page. A bomber with a pinup painted on its riveted nose. Winslow and two other pilots posed in front of it. Were there photos of Connolly and Bennie, together?

The last page of the album was blank, its picture torn out, too. Was this the page that held the photo of Winslow with the two babies? Bennie scratched at the heavyweight paper and its fibers came off under her nail. She squinted at the tangled threads, and Bear leaned over to sniff. She closed the book and reached for the next. Not a homemade photo album, a homemade scrapbook of newspaper articles.

The clippings.

Bennie read the first page, a newspaper listing of law students who had passed the bar. She found her name easily, even in the tiny letters, because it was circled in pencil. Her heart thudded hard within her chest. Winslow had cut out the article and pasted it here, decades ago. She turned the page. A clipping from the
Inquirer
five years later, a brief mention that Bennie had successfully defended one Guillermo Diaz on a murder case. Again her name had been circled in pencil. The page after that was a report of another murder case she had defended, with her quote, “This is a case only a fool would bring. Need I say more?”

Bennie winced, but she didn’t know if it was the cockiness of the quote or the fact that it was circled in the same careful hand. The rest of the book was full of clippings, as was the book after that and the one after that. The homemade scrapbooks—fifteen in all—constituted a chronological account of her career and life. The revelation left her shaking. Winslow had to be her father, and at some level, he had to care. About her.

Right?

Bennie stared at the scrapbook, her emotions turbulent: a combustible brew of anger, exhilaration, and confusion. That the feelings couldn’t be parsed didn’t gainsay their potency. She had always known Winslow’s name, now she knew his face, and his way of life. He lived simply. He loved books and tended perennials. As a young man he served on a bomber and loved her mother. For one night.