The Way Back to You
Page 1
Also by Sharon Sala
Blessings, Georgia
Count Your Blessings (novella)
I’ll Stand By You
You and Only You
Saving Jake
A Piece of My Heart
The Color of Love
Come Back to Me
Forever My Hero
A Rainbow Above Us
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2020 by Sharon Sala
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover art by Chris Cocozza
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Excerpt from Once in a Blue Moon
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Back Cover
We all have a need to belong to someone somewhere. Even if our lives are about always being on the move, the knowledge that we have a place to call home is what grounds us.
Many of us take a wrong turn on the road of life and have a hard time finding our way back to center.
Home does that for me. But not necessarily back to where I was born, or where I was raised. It’s the people we’re tied to, by blood and by love, that keep us rooted in the reality of life.
I dedicate this book to all the lost ones who finally find the people they are meant to love.
Chapter 1
The entire forty-five years of Sullivan Raines’ existence crashed and burned when his mother died, but it wasn’t from grief. It was the adoption papers—his adoption—that he found in his parents’ safety deposit box, along with the will he’d gone there to retrieve. In shock, he’d dropped the will off at the lawyer’s office and taken the papers and a box of photo albums he’d already rescued from his parents’ home back to his apartment. In going through the box, he found an envelope with a letter, and a silver chain with an ornate cross hanging from it.
I’m sorry we never told you. This belonged to your birth mother. She left it for you.
The rest of the day was a blur, and the ensuing days up to the funeral weren’t any better. He kept replaying vignettes from his past, remembering the times he’d asked his parents why his hair was black and straight when they were both blonds. And how did he get so tall when they were both short? They’d always laughed it off, blaming ancestors or recessive genes, and he’d bought it.
He was still going through the house, moving things he wanted to keep into a storage unit and getting the rest ready for the upcoming estate auction. In the evenings, he would go through photo albums, remembering the events and seeing anew the marked differences of his appearance within the family.
Some pictures were taken at parties, like the one he had at the skating rink for his thirteenth birthday. He grinned at the clothes they were wearing and started eyeing the faces to see if he could remember all the names. One photo stood out from the others because it was him holding hands with a girl out on the floor of the skating rink. They both smiled and waved at the camera as they skated past his dad, who was the family photographer. Her name was Missy, and she was the first girl he kissed. He’d had the biggest crush on her most of that year, but then her family had moved away. When school started that fall, she was gone, and life moved on.
After that trip down memory lane, Sully put the albums up.
The evidence of his adoption was impossible to ignore, and the differences in appearance between him and his family finally made sense. Even though his parents had been wonderful and loving, this lie was huge, and he didn’t know how to get past it.
The adoption papers stated he was the baby of a teenage girl named Janie Chapman. He found out later that his parents knew her because she had lived on their street. Although she’d signed the adoption papers the day he was born, the accompanying letter he found stated that she actually lived with Joe and Dolly Raines for the first six months of his life, nursing him, caring for him in their house while they worked, and then one morning she was gone.
Sully couldn’t get her out of his head. She’d carried him in her belly for nine months, nursed him for the first six months of his life, then disappeared without an explanation? He needed to know why, and the few details he had were what was on his original birth certificate.
He had her name, and where and when he was born. Boone County Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, on June 4, 1974.
Since that was all he had to go on, he chose one of the ancestry sites and took a DNA test. After the results arrived, he hired a genetic researcher named Marilyn Bedford to see if he had any blood relatives registered in the system.
Within two weeks, she found genetic links to a branch of Chapmans, but the only one on the family tree who was still living was a distant cousin.
After a couple of emails back and forth between them, Sully learned the cousin had never met Janie Chapman, didn’t know where she was, or if she was even still alive. All the cousin remembered was hearing her mother talk about the scandal Janie had caused when she got pregnant, and that the last piece of mail the family had received from her was years ago and had been postmarked from somewhere in Texas.
Sully was still thinking about where to go next when he got one last email from the cousin. It was the return address for Janie Chapman that she’d found in one of her mother’s old address books. She apologized for the oversight and wished him well. He typed Grapevine, Texas, into Google search to find the location, then packed a couple of suitcases.
And on a gray and stormy morning, Sullivan Raines drove out of Kansas C
ity, Missouri, driving away from one storm into another that had been fed by a lifetime of lies. He drove straight down I-35, through Oklahoma and into Texas, with steady intensity, stopping only for food and fuel.
* * *
Sunset had long since come and gone by the time Sully reached Grapevine, and then he began looking for a place to stay. After settling on a hotel and getting into a room, he dumped his luggage, cleaned up, and went downstairs to the restaurant to eat. His waiter arrived within a couple of minutes and took his drink order, giving Sully time to scan the menu. The waiter came back with the tall glass of sweet tea and took his order for chicken-fried steak with all the trimmings.
Sully took a long drink and then glanced around the busy dining room, eyeing all the older women with more than curiosity, looking for glimpses of himself in their faces, and not for the first time wished he wasn’t on this journey alone.
His one stab at marriage had lasted eight years before she cheated on him with his best friend. The breakup had been ugly, the divorce even more so. After that, although he’d had a few relationships that went nowhere, he’d never been tempted to try it again.
All of his close friends were guys he knew from work, but now that he was no longer on the job, it was difficult to stay in touch. For a fireman, timing was everything, and the timing in Sully’s life was off-kilter. He needed roots. He might be kidding himself that finding his birth mother would fill the hole in his life, but he had to give it a try.
His food finally came. The chicken-fried steak was crispy on the outside and tender on the inside, and the white gravy studded with peppercorns was as good as the gravy Captain Lawson made at the station.
Sully went back to his room later, showered, set his alarm for 8:00 a.m., and then crawled into bed.
The next thing he knew, his alarm was going off, and sunlight was coming through a gap in the curtains over his window. Anxiety lent speed to his morning routine as he showered, shaved, and dressed. After he checked out, he grabbed a coffee and a sweet roll from the Starbucks kiosk in the lobby and headed out the door. His first step to the beginning of this search was entering the address the cousin had given him into his GPS.
He set out, easily following directions, only to discover after twenty minutes of morning traffic that there was now an apartment building on that location.
Marilyn had given him a list of suggestions as to where to search, so he googled the address of the city hall in Grapevine, and with some help from one of the clerks, discovered a marriage license for Jane Chapman and Bryan Jackson, and divorce papers for the same couple less than two years later.
At that point, Jane Chapman Jackson showed up nowhere else in Grapevine. Sully wondered if she might have left Texas altogether, so he called Marilyn.
“Hello, Sully. How’s it going?” she asked.
“It’s going. The address I had for her is no good, which figures because it was so many years ago, but I did find a marriage license for her and a man named Bryan Jackson, then divorce papers for them less than two years later.”
“Good job,” Marilyn said. “Let me have the details, and I’ll see if I can track her down elsewhere. It may take a couple of days.”
“No problem, and I appreciate your help. I’m sticking around here until I hear from you again.”
“Then I’ll get right on this. You’ll be hearing from me soon,” Marilyn said.
* * *
As it turned out, Sully was in Grapevine for three days before Marilyn Bedford called him again, this time with news that she’d found another connection to Jane Chapman Jackson. The reason it had taken a while was because Jane Jackson married again in Mobile, Alabama, to a man named Robert Carter.
So, Sully packed up his bag, checked out of the motel, and headed for Mobile. He arrived just as the tailwinds of a hurricane were passing through the area and found a safe place to ride out the storms that followed it. But even after the storms had passed and the weather cleared, he had not been able to find a trace of Janie anywhere. Just as he was giving up, he got a call from Marilyn.
“Hello, this is Sully.”
“Sully, this is Marilyn. I have a bit of information that may help you. Jane divorced Robert Carter about six years after their marriage in Mobile.”
“Again? Wow, she doesn’t have a very good track record with husbands,” Sully said. “Do you know where she went from there, or if she’s still somewhere in Mobile?”
“I don’t know where Jane went, but her ex, Robert Carter, never left Mobile. I have a phone number for him. Maybe he would have further information for you. Do you want it?”
“Absolutely,” Sully said, and took down the number. “Got it, and thank you, Marilyn. I’ll stay in touch.”
“Okay, and if I find anything more, I’ll let you know.”
They disconnected, and Sully immediately called the number Marilyn had given him. No one answered, but Sully left a message and his number on voicemail. All he could do was wait to see if Carter called him back.
It was just after eight that same night when Robert Carter called.
“Hello, this is Sully.”
“Mr. Raines, this is Robert Carter returning your call. So you say you’re looking for my ex-wife.”
“Yes, I am, and call me Sully. My interest in your ex-wife is personal and very important to me. I only recently discovered that I was adopted, and according to paperwork I found at my parents’ house, I know for certain that your wife, Jane, was Jane Chapman, my birth mother. You’re her second ex-husband, and I’m having trouble finding new leads. By any chance, do you know where she went when you two divorced?”
“Well, well. You’re something I didn’t know about. As for where she went, all I know is what she said she was going to do. She was looking for a place to live to start a new life, and she wanted to do it in Georgia. She found a place called Blessings on a map and said that was the sign from God that she was looking for. I got one piece of mail from her about a week later. She’d found a key to my old trunk in her jewelry box and mailed it back to me. The return address was 104 Brigade Street, Blessings, Georgia, and I never heard from her again. I want you to know that our divorce was mostly my fault. Jane was a good woman, and I didn’t do right by her. I wish you success in your search. Sorry I wasn’t more help,” Carter said.
“No, this is perfect and I really appreciate it,” Sully said, and hung up, then sent Marilyn a quick text.
Last known destination for Jane was 104 Brigade St., Blessings, Georgia. See what you can do with that.
He got ready for bed, packed everything but what he was going to wear the next day, and fell asleep dreaming that, one way or another, Blessings would be the end of his search.
He overslept, woke up late, then had a tire going low that he had to get fixed before he could leave. Getting a flat fixed turned into buying a new tire, and finding the right size turned into an all-day search. By the time he found the tire, then got it mounted, the sun was going down. Frustrated by the day, and hungry, he went to eat dinner. The logical choice would have been to stay over another night, but after coming out of the restaurant, he made a knee-jerk decision, entered Tallahassee, Florida, in his GPS and left Mobile on I-10, heading east.
He drove with purpose, stopping only when necessary. It was well past midnight when he finally arrived in Tallahassee. He found a motel on the outskirts that looked clean and safe enough and fell into bed without changing his clothes.
He woke up to find a text from Marilyn with a brief message.
No record of Jane Carter at that address. It must have been a rental.
Disappointed, he washed up and was gone by 7:00 a.m., this time heading north toward Georgia on I-95. He had Blessings entered into his GPS, and if nothing went wrong, he should pull into town around midmorning.
* * *
It was a little past noon when Sully passed th
e city limit sign and drove into Blessings. The highway he was on had turned into Main Street, and he began checking out all the businesses as he drove through town. The police station was on Main, as were a hair salon, a pharmacy, a florist, and some kind of exercise place.
He’d read a few months earlier that a few of the Piggly Wiggly supermarkets were closing, and there was evidence of that right here on Main.
The Piggly Wiggly sign had been taken down from the top of the building housing a supermarket, but the little pig logo was still evident. Obviously, someone was running it. Being the only supermarket in a town this size, it should do a good business.
There was an eating establishment called Granny’s Country Kitchen a bit farther up the street, and from the number of vehicles in the large parking lot, the food they served must be good.
Sully knew Janie was no longer at 104 Brigade Street, but he was curious to see what was there and entered the address into his GPS.
He found Brigade Street and drove slowly past the houses, looking for that number. There was a huge gathering a few houses down on one side of the block, and people were going in and out of what looked like a new build. Maybe it was a housewarming party, he thought, and kept on driving without any luck, which told him this was going to require checking in at City Hall for land records and deeds.
He wondered if Jane had remarried again, and would be checking to see if another marriage license had been registered. He also had the library and old newspapers as more places to search.
The more he drove, the more he noticed what looked like high-water marks on the sides of commercial buildings. He knew Hurricane Fanny had just hit this part of the East Coast and it appeared the town was still in various states of recovery.
He made a random choice of streets and left Main to drive through another part of the residential area. Again, he saw more houses in different stages of storm repair. He thought about the windstorms and the floods and tornadoes he’d grown up with in Kansas that brought their own level of devastation and destruction. But wind was wind, and water was water, and no matter how it was delivered, he empathized with what the people had endured.