Once upon a time, she’d had a hand in everything that went on at St. Elizabeth’s. Once upon a time, she’d been voted the girl most likely to succeed. It was a narrow contest, between her and Kristen.
Lindsay won that one.
Kristen, however, was valedictorian. And that was more important than any silly senior superlative contest.
Lindsay found herself wondering what her old friend was doing these days. She’d heard sketchy details over the years-Kristen was working as a reporter at the Portland Clarion, had married her college sweetheart, had a child. She always signed her Christmas cards-generic, store-bought ones-Love, Kristen, Ross, and Lissa. She never even bothered to write a note.
Lindsay always tried to do that, at least. And it was a time-consuming process. She ordered her elegant holiday greetings by the hundreds, imprinted with her name, and sent them to all her family, clients, and old friends.
Yet other than once a year, she had been lousy at keeping in touch with Kristen and the others, despite their tearful promises made at graduation.
Maybe it’s time to go back, Lindsay told herself, flipping through the papers again, looking for contact information for someone on the reunion committee.
Then she saw it.
The photograph was a familiar one.
A copy of it still sat, in an eight-by-ten frame, on the bookshelf in her parents’ Nevada condo.
This version was smaller, and glossy instead of an elegant matte finish, but there she was: carefree seventeen-year-old Lindsay Farrell, beaming at the camera, blissfully unaware that just months after the photographer snapped his shot, her life would turn upside down.
But this reproduction of her senior portrait now seemed to bear chillingly symbolic testimony to troubles yet to come: her face was marked, from her right temple to the dimple on her lower left cheek, with an angry red slash.
Chapter 16
“How do you think you did?”
“Hmm?” Leo Cellamino looked up to see an attractive green-eyed redhead smiling at him. Her name was Sarah Ann, or Sarah Rose-something like that. She’d been sitting in front of him in biology lab all semester, smiling shyly in his direction every once in a while.
Now she’d fallen into step with him on the way out of the lecture hall where they’d just completed their final exam.
Ordinarily, Leo would welcome the attention from a pretty girl, but today, his mind was far away from this Queens college campus. All he wanted to do was get back home to his computer and take another look at that e-mail he’d received late last night.
What if it was no longer saved in his in-box? What if it had somehow evaporated into cyberspace overnight?
I should have printed it out, he thought, frustrated. But at the time, shaken by what he had just read-and seen-he didn’t dare.
He was afraid his kid brother, Mario, would somehow get his hands on it. Most of Leo’s stuff wound up in his brother’s clutches at some point. That was what you got when you shared a room with a nosy twelve-year-old.
But Leo couldn’t afford to move out of their mother’s house. Not if he wanted to complete his college education and make a decent life for himself someday. Anyway, Ma needed him around; he was the man of the house now that Pop had taken off for good.
“Leo…? It’s Leo, isn’t it?”
Startled, he looked up and realized that the girl-Sarah Rose, that’s it-was still walking along beside him.
“Oh…right, it’s Leo.” He flashed her a brief smile, ever the gentleman, as his mother had taught him.
“How’d you do on the exam?” she asked again.
“All right, I guess. How about you?”
“I don’t know…I’m not very good at science. And all that genetics stuff was confusing, don’t you think? Dominant genes, recessive genes…” She shook her head.
Confusing? Ha.
Leo could tell her a thing or two about confusing genetics, if he wanted to.
But he didn’t.
It was none of her business that he had grown up the dark-haired, dark-eyed son of blue-eyed, sandy-haired parents of Sicilian decent. That they let him believe he was their biological child until he encountered his first Punnett square in high-school science.
It wasn’t until then that he stumbled across a startling scientific fact: two blue-eyed people couldn’t possibly have a dark-eyed child.
When he confronted his parents with his puzzling find, he half expected them to say that Mr. Davidson, his biology teacher, was wrong. Heck, he expected them to confirm that Gregor Mendel, the father of human genetics, was wrong.
Instead, they told him that he, Leonardo Anthony Cellamino of Queens Boulevard, wasn’t who he thought he was.
He had been adopted as an infant, his mother-not really his mother-told him tearfully, rosary beads tightly clenched in her hand for strength to get through the conversation.
“The doctors had told us we couldn’t have children,” she sobbed. “We were heartbroken.”
“What about Mario, then? How’d you have him?” Leo knew his brother wasn’t adopted; he remembered his mother’s pregnancy, remembered comforting her through her labor pains while his aunt Nita tried to track down his father, who was MIA as usual.
“We never expected Mario to come along. It was some kind of fluke.”
“Fluke?” Leo’s father-not really his father-bellowed. “You call our son a fluke?”
Our son.
In that moment, Leo realized it wasn’t just his imagination that his father always favored his kid brother. That was because Mario was his biological son. Leo was not.
“He was a miracle,” Betty Cellamino amended. “Not a fluke. We thought God sent us another baby to save our marriage.”
That was pretty funny, in retrospect.
His parents-not really his parents-were divorced not long after Leo graduated from high school. He turned eighteen just in time to become the man of the house, and his father took off for Miami or Fort Lauderdale-somewhere down on Florida’s southern Atlantic coast. Leo didn’t know exactly where Anthony Cellamino was now and he didn’t care; he had no intention of ever seeing him again.
But Ma still cried and prayed every night for his return.
And Mario still called him on the sly-mostly asking for money, Leo supposed. Sometimes Pop sent some cash in an envelope addressed to Mario alone.
Leo tried not to let that bother him. Just like he had tried, for the past few years, not to let the truth about his birth bother him.
But it often nagged at him, like an itchy, aging scab that was still firmly rooted on one edge, and that if touched, would rip open and bleed all over again.
So Leo tried to leave it alone.
That had worked, for the most part…until last night.
The e-mail, with the provocative subject line birth parents, came from an AOL screen name he didn’t recognize: cupid 21486.
Leo opened it after a moment’s hesitation, thinking it was probably spam and wondering why he was bothering.
I have information about your birth parents. If you’re interested in finding them, please reply to this e-mail.
He’d still have thought it was some kind of hoax, except for one thing: a jpeg file was attached. He worried just briefly that it might contain a virus. Then temptation outweighed common sense and he opened it anyway.
He found himself looking at a photograph.
It was a professionally snapped portrait of a beautiful dark-haired girl who appeared to be about Leo’s age now, maybe a little younger. He could tell by her dated clothing and hairstyle that the photo had been taken years ago.
With her coloring, her delicate bone structure, and that distinct dimple in her lower left cheek, she bore such a striking resemblance to Leo himself that she could only be a blood relative.
My mother?
He had replied to the e-mail, of course.
Thank you for sending the picture. I’m very interested in finding my biological mother and father and I would appreciate any information you might have.