The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

Hours later, when we were in his small kitchen preparing dinner, Luke asked what I planned to do next.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I have to be careful. Look what’s already happened because of me digging around in the past.”

“It’s not your fault, Rachel.”

“Regardless of whose fault it was, it happened.” I leaned against the counter and watched him chop vegetables. The knife sliced through a succulent red bell pepper, down, across, again and again, leaving red stains on the wooden chopping block. With a shiver, I turned away, and busied myself stirring the rotini pasta that was boiling in a pot.

“Maybe you ought to stop now,” Luke said. He scraped the pepper slices into a skillet that already held snow peas, mushrooms and olive oil, and turned on the burner under the pan. “Just come back to work when your arm heals, and we’ll get on with our lives.”

It was something I’d said to myself many times in the last few days. I longed for the things that meant normality. I missed the clinic, the people I worked with, the warm little bodies and wide eyes of my patients. Even the smell of alcohol and antiseptic would be a balm to me now. But I was useless for the moment, unable to efficiently do exams, give injections, perform surgery with only one hand. And when my cast came off, I had to complete my search.

“I’ll never have any peace if I don’t at least find out who Michelle and I really are.” 

Luke sighed. “Have you had any luck remembering your real parents’ last name?”

I shook my head. “I looked through the phone book yesterday. I was hoping something might ring a bell, but nothing did. I know I was just a kid, but how could I forget my own last name?”

“It’s a miracle you can remember anything after what that woman did to you.”

“Luke, please,” I said wearily.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

“It would have been in the papers. Two little sisters disappearing together.” Olive oil sizzled in the skillet. I removed a spatula from a drawer and stirred the vegetables. “If I find the story, I’ll find the names.”

“Do you remember when it happened?”

“Well, she brought us here the summer after our father—after Michael Goddard died. So it must have happened just before that. When I was five.” Realization struck me like a blow. “I don’t even know for sure how old I was. How old I am.”

We fell silent a moment, as I stirred the vegetables and he tipped the rotini into a colander to drain. Steam rose in a cloud from the pasta.

***

August 26. The day Mother had chosen as my birthday. I had no idea why, and suspected it was a random choice. But it had been my birthday for twenty-one years, and when it came round again I woke with the thought, I’m twenty-seven today. It was almost certainly a lie but it still felt like the truth. I lay in bed remembering the year Mother had the weeping cherry tree planted as a gift to me.

Luke had bought concert tickets weeks before—Mary Chapin Carpenter at Wolf Trap—but I couldn’t imagine rousing myself to go. Over an ordered-in dinner at home, Luke gave me his gift, an exquisite gold chain necklace made of tiny interlocking hearts. With a wry grin, he said, “I told you this would be a birthday to remember. I had no idea.”

Earlier in the day a bouquet of yellow roses—Mother’s favorite, never mine—had arrived with a card that said simply, “Happy birthday. Michelle.”

I heard daily reports about Michelle from Kevin. She’d moved into his apartment temporarily. He was careful to tell me that she was using the bedroom and he was on the couch. At night he heard her moving about, and when he woke at odd hours he always saw light under the bedroom door. She ate almost nothing. Poor Kevin thought he was witnessing a simple display of grief, and I couldn’t tell him how much the girl he loved was concealing.

At our next meeting, Michelle sat two chairs away from me at a conference table in the McLean office of David Waterston, Mother’s attorney and executor. Waterston, a lean blond man in his late fifties, sat across from us. Next to him was Annette King, the glossy and severely professional woman he’d found to handle the house sale.

My sister spoke only to the lawyer, never so much as glancing at me for agreement or clarification. I might as well not have been present. She looked even worse than Kevin had led me to expect. Always thin, she’d lost weight noticeably since Mother’s death and now approached gauntness. Heavy makeup under her eyes didn’t quite hide the dark circles.

I tried not to stare at her, fastening my gaze instead on the table before me. Sunlight cut through the blinds and lay in slashes across the gleaming oak surface. I felt like a fraud, discussing my inheritance from a mother who wasn’t my mother. I tried to imagine how the discreet and scrupulous lawyer would react if I sprang the truth on him.

I snapped back to attention when I realized he’d asked me a question.

“Is this arrangement all right with you as well as your sister?” he repeated. “Your mother’s secretary handling the closing of her office? She’ll disperse the case files of those patients who have found other doctors, and destroy the inactive files.”

As if recalling the distant past, I remembered when I thought Mother might have a file about me in her office. But no, she wouldn’t have committed such secrets to writing.

“That’s fine,” I said.

Except for a gift of $10,000 to Rosario, Mother had left her estate of more than a million dollars to Michelle and me, evenly divided. When we became adults she’d put our names on the title to the house so that part of our inheritance wouldn’t be delayed when she died. Michelle and I had protested at the time, telling her we refused to think about her death when she was barely fifty. Now her foresight meant we could put the house on the market quickly.

Waterston had taken the real estate agent on a tour of the property the day before. She’d come to this meeting with a suggested price and a long list of things that would have to be done to Mother’s perfect house to make it marketable.

Annette King, probably in her forties, had sleek chin-length hair of an unnatural shade of blond and wore a crimson linen suit and lipstick to match. She made me think of a gaudy Christmas ornament. I watched her long fingers dance over the papers and legal pad she’d arranged before her, and wondered if her red-painted nails were real or fake.

“My thinking is that I should hold off showing the property to locals,” she said, her voice crisp and impersonal. “I’d like to avoid any pointless showings to people who just want to satisfy their curiosity. And I’d rather not answer a lot of questions. So until people forget, I’ll limit showings to buyers coming in from out of the area.”

Until people forget. Some people never would, not even strangers to whom we were no more than names in the newspaper and on TV. People who’d never met us probably discussed our messed up lives, speculated about us. They would remember.

Ms. King tapped a nail on her legal pad. “As you’ve requested, I’ll arrange the repainting and so on, and handle all the contractual matters. You won’t have to be involved except to approve the final price once we’ve got an offer.” She ran the tip of her tongue along her brilliant red lower lip. “But before we can get started, we do need to have an empty house.”

Her eyes darted from me to Michelle and back again.

“What do you want us to do?” I asked Waterston.

He sat forward, adjusted his tie and cleared his throat. “The house is yours now, but the contents are part of the estate. If you like, we can schedule an estate sale as soon as we have permission from the probate judge. In the meantime, everything in the house has to be catalogued and removed to storage. But if you want to keep everything—”

“I don’t want any of it,” I said.

A short silence followed, and I realized how harsh and abrupt I’d sounded. I glanced at Michelle. Tears stood in her eyes. I leaned toward her over the chair that separated us. “Mish,” I said softly. “Keep whatever you want. I’m not interested in the money from the sale.” 

She turned to look at me for the first time, and as she did a tear spilled down each cheek. She started to speak, but her breath caught on a sob.

“Oh, Mish.” I rose and went to her side, awkwardly leaning to embrace her with my free arm.

She pressed her face into my shoulder, and I felt the wetness of her tears on my blouse.

“We’ll get through this,” I said. “We’ll get all this done and behind us.”

The real estate agent gathered her papers, slapping them together briskly. “I’ll be in touch,” she said. “And you can call me anytime, of course, if you have questions.”

As she bustled out, Waterston also rose. “I’ll let you two have a few minutes to talk,” he said. He closed the door softly behind him.

I sat in the chair next to Michelle and reached for her hand. Her skin felt icy. “Mish,” I said, “how have you been?”

“I miss her so much. I can’t believe she’s dead.” With a low moan Michelle began to cry, rocking back and forth in her chair. Tears poured down her face and spotted the front of her blue dress. I waited silently.

When her sobs subsided, she turned beseeching eyes on me and said, “She was a good mother to us, wasn’t she? I mean—She gave us so much—”

“Yes, she did.” I took my sister’s hand again. Her fingers tightened around mine. “If I could turn back time, if I could make all this go away, believe me, I would.”

She looked down at our clasped hands. Her voice was a whisper. “She was trying to kill you. She would’ve killed you if I hadn’t stopped her. I didn’t imagine that, did I?”

“No, you didn’t imagine it.”

When she raised her eyes to mine again, I saw that she’d begun to accept the truth, or what she knew of it. But I also saw anguish on her face and in every tense line of her body. How much more could I ask her to accept?

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” I said, “about what to do next. I want to try to find out who we really—”

“No!” She shot to her feet, rocking her chair backward. “You can’t, you have to let it drop.”

I stood and reached out to her. She stepped away from me.

“I just want to know,” I said. “I need to know.”

“Is this his idea? Is he pushing you to do this?”

“Who are you talking about, Mish?”

“Luke! He just wants to come between us, he’s determined to keep us apart—”

“Luke has nothing to do with this. He’s not coming between us.”

“Then why are you with him instead of me?” She wailed the words like a heartbroken child.

I held out my arm and this time she came to me, wrapping her own arms around me and burying her face in my shoulder.

“Nobody will ever come between us,” I said. “I have to stay with Luke, but anytime you need me, just call or come to me. I love you so much, Mish. I always will.”

***

When I sat once more in the periodicals room of the Library of Congress, looking at newspapers on microfilm, I began to doubt my memory again. I’d been so sure the abduction happened during warm weather, but I worked my way through June, July, August, scouring every page, examining even the smallest articles, and found nothing. I requested the April, May and September issues.

Nothing appeared in the April papers. I was near the end of May, pausing to rub my throbbing temples, when I spotted the one-paragraph item in a regional news roundup column. Two Young Sisters Disappear from St. Cloud Playground.

I held my breath while I read it. Catherine and Stephanie Dawson, ages five and three, vanished while their mother was in a nearby shop. In St. Cloud, not Minneapolis.

I sat back, covering my face with my hands, unable to stop the tears. Catherine and Stephanie. I fumbled a tissue from my purse and wiped my face, not caring what people at the surrounding desks thought. I read the little item over and over.

We were the daughters of John and Barbara Dawson. I could see them, still not sharply defined but clearer than they’d ever been. My real mother was slender and had shoulder-length hair that might be auburn, like mine. My father was tall and lanky. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was blond. That must be where Michelle got her coloring.

I rushed to the circulation desk and asked the clerk if the library had back issues of the St. Cloud papers. He flipped through a little box of cards. His casual, “Nope, sorry,” was like a punch in the stomach.

But I had the names. It was a beginning. I made a copy of the little story that would lead me back to my real parents. Then I made another copy of the story about Michael Goddard’s accident. It was a part of the puzzle. Someday soon I might have all the pieces, and the complete picture would come clear. I didn’t know yet whether I would go any farther than that.

***

“Are you sure you want to do this by yourself?” Luke said.

I was packing a suitcase. The cast had been taken off my arm that day and the muscles protested at being put to use again, so I folded blouses and slacks mostly with one hand. The doctor wanted me to start physical therapy at once, but I’d told him it would have to wait. I had something to take care of first.

“Let me go with you,” Luke said. “I’ll cancel my appointments for a week—”