Lydia's Hope (10 page)

“Look, I’m not a con man.” He put his hand out and just as quickly withdrew it. He’d
better not add assault to the list of complaints she was probably creating in her
mind. “Lydia and her husband are neighbors of my mother out in central Pennsylvania.
Lydia was injured in the accident that killed her—your—parents and only recently learned
the truth.”

Chloe lifted the phone and pressed a button. “Your story is even less likely than
most I’ve heard. I’d suggest you leave unless you prefer to be escorted out. Security
will be here in a moment.”

Time was slipping away, and he hadn’t accomplished a thing. “At least look at the
documents. You were only a baby at the time, so you couldn’t possibly remember.”

“There’s nothing to remember.” Her chin lifted, and Seth saw the resemblance to the
haughty grande dame in the photograph on her desk. Chloe might carry her parents’
genes, but it seemed her grandmother had done a good job of transforming the rest
of her.

“If you’ll just look—” This time it was the door opening that cut him off. The museum
guard was short, slight, and probably well past retirement age, but he carried the
authority in this place, and Seth wasn’t about to start a confrontation with the man.

“Mr. Miller is leaving, George.” Chloe’s voice was as cool as her eyes. “Please see
that he gets off museum premises.”

“Yes, ma’am.” George’s gaze swiveled from Chloe to Seth, and he gestured toward the
hallway. “After you, sir.”

It seemed Seth was out of choices. The woman wouldn’t even hear him out. Her mind
was closed. When he reached the doorway, he looked back, thoroughly annoyed.

“In the event you decide to step out of your secure little world and face the truth,
you can reach me at the number on the card.”

She didn’t speak, and her face might as well have been carved from ice. Seth walked
quickly back the way he’d come, hardly aware of the security guard trailing along
behind him. Of all the superior, stubborn women he’d met, Chloe Wentworth ranked right
up at the top of the list.

But by the time Seth reached the sidewalk outside the imposing museum building, his
annoyance with Chloe had ebbed, to be replaced by sorrow and regret. He’d been so
sure he could handle this for Lydia. Now he’d blown the only chance he’d get to bring
her and her sister together.

* * *

Chloe
tried to focus on the grant application that had occupied so many of her working hours
lately, but her gaze kept straying to the papers Seth Miller had left on her desk.
By the time she’d made her third careless error in the proposal for funds to expand
the museum’s educational programs, she shoved away from the keyboard, annoyed with
herself.

Get rid of the papers he’d left behind, and she’d get rid of Seth Miller’s intrusive
presence. Leaning across the desk, she scooped up the documents and dropped them into
the waste can.

There. Now she could concentrate. Her grandmother had been right in her often-repeated
mantra. The world is filled with people who will try to take advantage of you because
you’re a Wentworth.

Seth Miller wasn’t the first person to feign an interest in Chloe because of who she
was. Not that Miller had seemed interested in her as a woman, aside from that one
lingering look at her legs, but his story had been ridiculous, hadn’t it? As for his
supposed proof . . . anyone could fake something that looked like a photocopy of a
marriage license. Given a computer and a few minutes’ time, she could do it herself.

Frustrated, Chloe snatched the papers out of the waste can and then dropped them back
in. She shouldn’t let herself be caught up in the man’s story.

“Playing basketball with the trash?” Kendra Phillips stood in the doorway, looking
at her with raised brows.

“Something like that,” Chloe admitted, managing a smile for her friend. Kendra, a
conservator who spent most of her days in the basement laboratory, wore a lab coat
over a multicolored tunic and seemed to have forgotten the tiny paintbrush stuck behind
her ear.

Chloe ought to be ignoring her previous visitor, but the urge to confide in Kendra
was strong. Kendra, having battled her way from an inner-city school to one of the
best grad-school programs in the country, had seen it all. They’d met when they were
both pursuing their master’s degrees. Kendra’s fund of sometimes brash common sense
could be relied upon to sort out the truth quickly, and she was a good antidote to
the more hidebound members of the museum’s staff.

“Well?” Kendra advanced into the office and perched on the edge of Chloe’s desk, her
long, beaded earrings brushing cheeks the color of milk chocolate as she leaned toward
Chloe. “You going to tell me what’s wrong, or should I start guessing?”

“Someone came into my office this morning.” She gestured toward the business card
that lay on her desk, and Kendra picked it up, scrutinizing it. “He said he was here
as a favor to a friend, a woman named Lydia Weaver something or other, I don’t remember
the last name. Anyway, he said that this woman is my sister.”

“You called security, right?” Kendra’s perfectly arched eyebrows lifted even higher.
She’d never hesitate to have an annoyance kicked out. In fact, she’d probably do it
herself, not bothering with the intermediary.

“Of course,” Chloe said. “I don’t have a sister, to begin with. But he insisted that
my parents actually had two other children, both girls.”

“I assume he provided some sort of proof? Like the papers you’re tossing in and pulling
out of the trash with such decisiveness?” Kendra grinned.

Chloe fished out the copy of the marriage certificate. “Look at it. Diane Wentworth
and Eli Weaver. The dates and names are right, so that certificate is probably genuine,
but the rest of his story was ridiculous. How could I have two sisters and not know
about it?”

Taking the document from her, Kendra frowned at it. “Your parents died in an accident
when you were still a baby, right?”

Chloe nodded. Maybe that sense of having no parents to rely upon had been what brought
about her somewhat unlikely friendship with Kendra. But while Chloe had been taken
in by her grandmother after her parents’ deaths, Kendra had been bounced to a succession
of foster homes.

“I was only about a year old when the accident occurred. My grandmother told me that
she came to the hospital where I’d been taken. My parents died, so as soon as I could
be released, she and my grandfather brought me home with them. If I’d had any siblings,
she’d have told me, surely.”

Wouldn’t she? A faint flicker of doubt touched Chloe’s certainty. Her grandmother
seldom talked about Chloe’s parents. Well, never, in fact, unless Chloe asked a direct
question. It was as if their deaths had wiped them not just from this world but from
ever having existed. Was that Gran’s natural reserve at work, or something more?

“Did this guy offer any proof of your relationship to these so-called sisters?” Kendra,
always practical, latched on to the most critical part of the story.

“No. He said something about not being able to get the birth records yet. Even if
he had them, that wouldn’t convince me. They could easily be fakes. My grandmother
says—”

She stopped, having had a front-row seat several times to the antipathy between her
grandmother and her friend. Kendra wasn’t the sort of person Margaret Wentworth associated
with, and Kendra had scant patience with what she saw as snobbery based on outmoded
ideas of social class.

“Your grandmother assumes everyone’s a con man after her money,” Kendra said bluntly.
“I doubt she’s the best reference point in a situation like this.” She tossed the
business card to Chloe. “It would be easy enough to check up on this guy, anyway.
You can see if he’s who he says he is.”

Chloe nodded reluctantly, not sure she wanted to pursue the matter even that far.
She found herself picturing Seth Miller’s face—the sharp line of his jaw, the determined
set to his mouth, the cool way his gray-blue eyes had surveyed her.

“I have to admit he didn’t look like a con man.”

“Honey, no successful con man looks like one. That’s his stock-in-trade.” Kendra slid
off the desk. “Get busy and do what you know you should have done from the minute
the guy left. Check up on him, and check up on his story. You’re a researcher, so
treat it like any research problem.”

“Pretend I’m searching out the provenance of an eighteenth-century dower chest?” Chloe
managed a smile for the first time since she’d ordered Seth Miller out of her office.

“Exactly.” Kendra headed for the door. “Do you want something from the cafeteria?”

“Chicken salad sandwich, please.” They normally took turns picking up lunch at the
museum lunchroom, sometimes carrying it out to a park bench near Independence Hall,
where they could watch the tourists walk by.

“Get started on the research,” Kendra ordered, and disappeared from view.

Kendra was right, of course. This was a research problem, pure and simple. And her
grandmother need never know that Chloe had been digging into the story of her parents’
deaths.

The logical place to start was with the man, Seth Miller. She picked up the business
card, his final words echoing in her mind.
In the event you decide to step out of your secure little world and face the truth,
you can reach me at the number on the card.

She didn’t like his snap judgment of her. She wouldn’t be getting in touch with him,
but he might be surprised at just how good she was at ferreting out the truth, starting
with one Mr. Seth Miller, if that was really who he was.

Ten minutes later Chloe was staring at the photo of Seth Miller on the company website.
There was no denying the identity of the face with the gray-blue eyes staring confidently
at the camera. She flipped quickly through the site, searching for more information.

The software company was relatively well-known, so that lent an air of authenticity
to the whole business. And apparently they thought highly of Mr. Seth Miller, designer.
She ran the cursor down through a list of his achievements and awards.

So it appeared Seth Miller was genuine, in that he was who he had claimed to be. Still,
a man could be good at his job and sleazy in his private life. His business reputation
didn’t mean he couldn’t have some unsavory motive for contacting her.

Chloe frowned. She was starting to sound like her grandmother, who seemed to become
more suspicious with each passing year. Still, granting that Seth Miller was the real
thing, even granting that his motives were good, he was still mistaken.

His parting words slipped into Chloe’s thoughts again, making her a bit uncomfortable.
She prided herself on being independent. She didn’t hide behind the Wentworth name.

She picked up the other paper, looking at the newspaper article.
AMISH KILLED IN VAN ACCIDENT
, the headline read. The piece was fairly brief, the dateline a town in Ohio she’d
never heard of.

A van load of Amish people headed from Pennsylvania to a wedding in Ohio had crashed
into a tractor trailer when the van’s driver apparently fell asleep at the wheel.
He had been pronounced dead at the scene; several adults and children had been taken
to area hospitals.

Grandmother had told her about the accident when she’d been old enough to ask questions
about her parents. Gran’s voice hadn’t wavered, but her skin had seemed to shrink
against the bones of her face, frightening Chloe and making her hesitate to bring
the subject up again.

She had, of course, as she’d grown older and understood more. Her grandmother had
given her as little information as possible. Still, eventually the whole story had
come out. Diane, an only child, had been the stereotypical rebellious, troubled daughter,
the way her grandmother told it. She had capped a series of problems by running away
from the parents who’d loved her.

Gran said they’d learned, eventually, that she’d married an Amishman and joined his
faith. Chloe could still see the distaste in her grandmother’s face as she insisted
her daughter had been sucked into something that was little more than a cult. According
to Gran, Diane had died in an accident that never would have happened if she’d stayed
in the world where she belonged.

That led, inevitably, to one of her grandmother’s favorite maxims.
Stick with your own kind in life, and you won’t get into trouble.

So Diane’s parents had been left to bring up Diane’s baby daughter. Daughter, singular.

Well, obviously the next step was to find out if there was any truth to Seth’s claim
that she had siblings. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Everyone left a paper trail.

Everyone left a paper trail except, it seemed, the Amish. A frustrating half hour
later, Chloe had become thoroughly annoyed at what seemed the Amish gift for staying
off the grid. It was almost as if they had something to hide.

Finally she found what she was looking for. Not even the Amish could elude the government’s
desire to register births. She was staring at the screen when Kendra came back in,
carrying a plastic sandwich container.

Kendra put the sandwich container on the desk. “I was going to bring this in earlier,
but you looked so absorbed I didn’t want to interrupt. Did you find it?”

Chloe nodded slowly and turned the monitor so that Kendra could see it. “I wouldn’t
have believed it possible that my grandmother could lie to me about something so important,
but there it is. Eli and Diane Weaver had two other children—Lydia, the person Seth
Miller spoke of, who is four years older than me, and Susanna, two years older.”

Chloe drove her fingers into her hair, as if in that way she could shake some order
into her chaotic thoughts. How could her grandmother have done this to her? Surely
she’d realized that Chloe would find out eventually. What right did she or anyone
have to keep information like this from the person it most concerned?