Mary drew Barbara into the house and closed the door, then led her into the kitchen. “It’s all right, Barbara. I know how you must be feeling. It has to be horrible for you right now.” She poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove and sat down across from Barbara. “Now tell me what I can do.”
Barbara took a deep breath, struggling to control her roiling emotions, finally speaking only when she was certain her voice wouldn’t fail her. “I–I thought maybe if you could tell me where Kelly came from—”
“It was an adoption agency in Atlanta,” Mary told her. “Ted and I had been waiting for almost a year.”
“Atlanta?” Barbara echoed hollowly.
An image of the box on the living room floor popped into Mary’s mind, and she stood up. “I’ll be right back.” A moment later she came back into the kitchen, the box in her arms. Opening it, she began piling its contents on the table, and finally lifted out a photo album. “Look through this,” she said, handing the album to Barbara. “It’s full of pictures of Kelly, from the day we picked her up at the agency right up until a year or so ago.” Her voice took on a wistful quality. “The last couple of years I’m afraid we didn’t take many pictures. Ted’s business wasn’t doing well, and …” Her voice trailed off. “I guess the last couple of years there just wasn’t much we wanted to remember.”
Barbara opened the album and began flipping through the pages. The early pictures, when Kelly was an infant, meant nothing. But as Kelly grew, and her features began to develop, Barbara felt the same familiarity as she had when comparing Kelly to her niece Tisha. From the age of four on the resemblance was there. The two children, apparently unrelated, looked enough alike to have been sisters.
“I found it,” Mary said a few minutes later, interrupting Barbara’s reverie as she sat gazing at a picture of Kelly when she was about the same age as Jenny.
Again, she looked nothing like Jenny, who took after her father, but her resemblance to Tisha, and even more so to Barbara’s own sister, was eerie. At last Barbara looked up from the page. Mary, her expression almost sorrowful, was holding out a folded sheet of heavy paper. “It’s Kelly’s birth certificate,” she said softly. “I — well, I think it tells you what you want to know.”
Barbara took the certificate, her fingers trembling, but for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to look at it for a moment. Finally she unfolded it, her eyes misting over as she studied it.
It was from a hospital in Orlando that she’d never heard of.
It recorded the birth of a baby girl, born a week after Sharon had been born.
The baby had been given no first name, its identification stated impersonally as “Infant Richardson,” the daughter of Irene Richardson.
Father unknown.
Barbara felt her heart sink, but as she studied the signature of the attending physician, something stirred inside her.
Philip Waring.
She’d never heard the name before.
Yet there was something familiar about the signature, something flicking around the edges of her mind.
Then it came to her, and she reached into her purse, digging through it until she found the prescription Warren Phillips had given her the morning Jenny had died.
The prescription she’d never filled.
She flattened the form out and laid it next to the birth certificate.
The scrawl of the attending obstetrician’s first name matched the last name of her own doctor.
The first three letters of the obstetrician’s last name matched the corresponding scribble of the first syllable of Warren Phillips’s own signature.
She stared at the two signatures for a long time, telling herself it wasn’t possible, that it was merely a strange coincidence, that neither of the signatures was actually even legible.
They were nothing more than doctors’ scribblings.
The denials still tumbling in her mind, she spoke to Mary Anderson. “There’s something wrong,” she said quietly. “Mary. I think this birth certificate is a fake.”
Mary Anderson’s eyes clouded. “Barbara, it’s the certificate we were given by the agency. Why would they—”
“Let’s call the hospital, Mary,” Barbara broke in. “Please?”
Ten minutes later Barbara felt a cold numbness spreading through her body.
The hospital in Orlando was real.
The birth certificate was not.
There was no record of an Irene Richardson giving birth to a child in the hospital.
No record of an Infant Richardson at all.
No Dr. Philip Waring had ever been connected with the hospital in any way.
When the phone call was over, the two women looked at each other, Mary Anderson now feeling as numbed as Barbara Sheffield. “What are we going to do?” Mary asked, suddenly fully understanding — and sharing — Barbara’s obsession to find the truth of Kelly’s origins.
Barbara barely heard the question, for she already knew what had to be done.
She wondered if she would be able to bear to stand in the cemetery one more time, gazing at the crypt in which her first child lay.
She wondered if she would be able to watch them open it.
But most of all, she wondered if she would be able to stand the awful reality of finding it empty.
• • •
Tim Kitteridge sighed heavily, his large hands spreading across his desk in a gesture of helplessness as he faced Ted Anderson. “I still don’t see what it is you expect me to do. If your father’s sick—”
“He’s worse than sick,” Ted exploded. “He’s dying. He’s dying, and he’s gone off into the swamp somewhere!”
“Now, you don’t know that,” Kitteridge replied. “All you know is that he wasn’t in his office. That’s a big development out there—”
“I searched it,” Ted repeated for what seemed like the fifth time. He felt his temper rising, but struggled to control it. After he’d left his father early that morning, he’d gone to Warren Phillips’s house and then to the hospital.
Phillips had been in neither place, nor did anyone know where he might be. “I’ll page him,” Jolene Mayhew had told him, but after five minutes with no reply to the page, he’d demanded an ambulance, and gone back out to the construction site.
To find that his father was gone.
Taking the paramedics with him, he’d searched every house on the site, every possible place where his father could have been hiding. When the crew had arrived for work, he’d sent them out, too, certain that somewhere on the hundred acres of Villejeune Links Estates his father would be found.
But there had been nothing.
Nothing, until one of the men had found tracks at the edge of the canal. That was when he’d come to the police station and tried to enlist Tim Kitteridge’s help. He’d told him the whole story, but even as he talked, he’d seen the skepticism in the police chief’s eyes.
“Now come on, Anderson,” Kitteridge had told him after he’d described how his father had looked early that morning. “Nobody ages like that overnight. And I know your father — he’s strong as an ox, and works harder than most men half his age.”
“And he looks half his age, too,” Ted had shot back. “Phillips has been giving him some kind of shots. I don’t know what they are, but I saw what happened to him a week ago. It was like watching the fountain of youth or something. He was feeling really bad, and looking terrible, and an hour later he was fine! But this morning he looked like he was dying!”