"Graphic."
"The point is, you've been through some serious shit. That's my official law enforcement jargon. Frankly, it's surprising you aren't more on edge than you are. Especially at night."
"It's not just hearing someone at the door," I tell him.
"What else happened?" he asks.
"I thought I saw my father today," I admit.
Sam's expression doesn't change. It's like the words didn't really compute, and he can't react.
"Your father?" he finally asks.
"Yes. I know it's ridiculous. It couldn't have been him. But I saw him twice today. Once before I left and then again when I was coming home after running errands." I close my eyes and shake my head. "Like I said, my mind is slipping. That's the only explanation for it. It couldn't have been him. Of course, seeing all this doesn't help."
I gesture at the stack of papers on the table.
"What is it?" Sam asks.
"It's why I was on the phone with Eric. Remember I told you about my trip to Iowa? I requested some records. It took forever, but they finally got to my house, and Bellamy forwarded them here. Now I think I know why it took so long; there's a ton of it."
He picks up one of the papers and looks at it. "This is a deed."
"Yeah. To a house in Iowa. Not far from the Field of Dreams."
"Did you look it up?" he asks. "Find out anything about it?"
"No. But there are tax records, and my grandparents sold it to my father, who sold it when I was little. Apparently hand-me-down houses is a big thing in the family. Speaking of looking it up, I need to send scans of these to Eric." I take a picture of the deed and then reach for another document. "Look at this. It's a newspaper article about my father winning a soapbox derby competition when he was little."
"So, he grew up there. You never knew that?"
I shake my head. "No. Because he grew up here. That's the thing. He told me stories about Sherwood when he was little. There are pictures. Apparently, he grew up in two places at once. Not that the idea of somewhat ambiguous origins are all that foreign to me. But look at this. My father's actual origins are decidedly not ambiguous."
Sam takes the paper from my hand. "It's his birth certificate. He was born there."
"He was. But it's not exactly his birth certificate. That's in there, too. This is a certificate of live birth from a midwife. Whoever put this stuff together for me really dug deep. They didn't just find public records. They found whatever they could connected to my father and mother. Including this. He was born at home, not in a hospital, and the midwife filled this out as a record. It was likely filed with the court. But do you notice something strange about it?" I ask.
His eyes scan over it several times before he shakes his head. "No."
I point to a section under his name and the names of my grandparents.
"Right here. There are two boxes. Single birth and multiple births. The 'X' isn't in either one of them completely, but part of it is in the multiples box, like when the midwife filled it out, that's where she meant to put it," I explain.
"Your father's an only child," Sam frowns.
"That's what I thought, too."
Chapter Twelve
"It's probably just a mistake. The midwife was filling it out in too much of a hurry and didn't pay enough attention to actually make sure she marked through the right box," Sam offers.
"Maybe. But it's partially in the multiples box. It's not just in a random place," I point out.
"You said his actual birth certificate is in there. What does that say?" he asks.
I sift through the papers to get the copy of my father's official birth certificate and hold it up for comparison with the midwife's form.
"It doesn't have an option for indicating single or multiple births. Not all birth certificates are the same. There are variations from state to state, and the one in Iowa doesn't have that information. It doesn't tell us anything," I tell him.
"Look at the box right next to it," Sam says, tracing his finger from the mark hovering near the multiples box to a wider box beside it. "It's supposed to be for a list of siblings. It's empty."
"I really don't know what to think. About any of this, honestly. It's a lot more than I was expecting, and I'm just trying to process it all. But it's a step. Another piece of the puzzle, even if it essentially knocks a whole bunch of the other pieces off the table." I go through the rest of the papers and photograph each of them so I can send them off to Eric. "It might tell me something about my mother's death or where my father went. Or even the man who was trying to find me when I was in Feathered Nest. I still don't know who Ron Murdock actually was or why he was there. But he led me to Iowa. Whether he realized it or not," I say.
“What do you mean, whether he realized it or not?” Sam asks.
“I still don't understand why he filled out his registration card the way he did,” I explain. “He didn't put his address or even a fake address. He specifically chose a place where he couldn’t possibly live but was close to the town where my father was born and where he married my mother. That can't be an accident. But it doesn't explain why he did it. If he was just trying to conceal where he lived, Murdock could have written down anything. But how would he have any idea I would read his registration card? He went out of his way to make sure he was staying at a hotel nowhere near the cabin I was staying in, even though he knew exactly where I was. He didn't want me to know where he was staying.”
“Or he didn't want someone else to know,” Sam suggests.
“You think he knew someone was after him?” I ask.
“It's possible. You said yourself he didn't have any luggage with them when he checked into the hotel. He obviously wasn't intending on staying in place for long. Maybe he already knew there was a chance he wasn't going to survive and leaving that address was his last resort.”
“But that still begs the question. Was he there to protect me? Or to hurt me?”
“What do you hope Eric is going to find?” Sam asks.
Suddenly, I don't want to talk about this anymore. I finish taking the pictures and sweep all the papers together into a loose stack, setting the envelope down on top of it. If I keep looking at them, they’re going to drive me crazy. I have to trust Eric and let him do whatever he can, so I know where to go next. But for now, I need to focus only on where I am right now.
“You didn't tell me how the investigation went,” I say.
Sam stares back at me as if confused by the sudden detour in the conversation but decides not to comment on it.
“It was bleak, like any suicide is. I've always hated responding to them. Did I ever tell you the first death I had to deal with after going through the academy and joining the force was a suicide?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No. You never told me that.”
He gives a tense nod. “It was only a few weeks after I joined. Everything was still fresh and enthralling. I felt invincible. Like law enforcement had never seen the likes of me.” He hangs his head and lets out a short, humorless laugh. “I was positive nothing was ever going to get to me. That's not the type of cop I was going to be. I was strong and determined. Driven to see the facts and bore down to the center of every case. Then we got the call about a death at the water tower. I figured it was just going to be a transient, somebody traveling through and finally getting taken out by the bottle in his hand or the needle in his arm. There wasn't a single drop of compassion or humanity in me as we got ready to leave to respond.”
“I can't imagine you without any humanity,” I tell him.
“And I never could have imagined you without a sketchbook on your person, or splatters of paint on your clothes. Sometimes people lose pieces of themselves. It's whether they find them again that really makes the difference,” he says.