“Maybe that’s why she killed herself. Remorse for hurting the company and people she cared about, like you?”
Kelsey pressed her lips together for a moment. “Maybe. If she killed herself. Though she may have been murdered, you know.”
He grunted, his fork poised in midair. “They said that on the news, but I just thought they were being sensationalistic.”
She exhaled deeply. “No, that’s a possibility. The police won’t say, and I don’t know what to think. For now I’m just biding my time, hoping we’ll have more answers soon. Until then I’m going with suicide. I can’t bear to think about the alternative.”
He nodded, seeming to understand. “Either way, Kelsey, I’m really sorry all this has happened. It’s a big load for you to carry. Too bad your father can’t help you with it.”
“I know. And it gets worse. This afternoon Walter banned me from the office and even had me escorted from the building by security!” She explained what had happened, and though she’d expected her grandfather to become angry on her behalf, maybe even offer to storm down there to the office and give Walter Hallerman a piece of his mind, instead he just ate eggs and nibbled on bacon and let her tell her story. Somehow, his calm response lent calmness back to her.
“I’d give anything for the letter Oona sent back to Sean,” she said, “the one that answered the question of Adele’s identity. But that’s long gone, apparently. Now we’re almost back to where poor Adele was a hundred years ago, faced with the task of proving something almost impossible to prove but that we already know to be true.”
“Well put, my dear.”
Her eggs were growing cold, so she took one last bite and pushed her plate away.
“Grandpa,” she began, settling back in her seat, “if I’m so sure and you’re so sure, why isn’t my father sure?”
Jonah shrugged. “I wouldn’t say he thinks Adele was a fraud. More likely, he’s just open to the possibility. Your father was always a pragmatic man. I have a feeling that as long as the company wouldn’t be hurt by it, he doesn’t really care either way.”
“But she was his grandmother. He loved her dearly.”
Jonah was silent for a long moment as he finished clearing his plate and drank down all his coffee.
“Well,” he said slowly, “let’s think about this for a bit. In the aftermath of such a tragedy, what would a father rather believe—that he lost a daughter or that he lost a niece?”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m talking about Sean Brennan. Think about it. Two young women were coming to America, his daughter and his niece. He learns one of them didn’t make it. If you were him, which would you rather believe? That you’d lost your daughter or that you’d lost your niece? I know it sounds cold, but speaking as a father, I can tell you for a fact that he’d rather have lost the niece.”
“But Sean barely knew Adele, and even then only from letters. He hadn’t been with her in person since she was three years old. Why would it matter?”
Jonah studied her for a moment. “Ask any parent and they’ll tell you why. Take my word on that. There’s a bond there regardless, one deeper and more pervasive than you could ever imagine.”
She nodded, suddenly feeling young and inexperienced and foolish. At thirty-two she could be a parent by now. The fact that she wasn’t made it harder for her to grasp his logic.
“Put it this way,” he said kindly. “Your father loves you so much, as you know.”
“I know.”
“Well, being such a pragmatic man, and having such a deep love for his own daughter, Nolan probably looks at this through the eyes of a loving father and assumes that whether the survivor was really Adele or not, Sean would have been willing to pretend his daughter survived, just to save himself the heartache of having lost his child—the child he’d never had a chance to get to know before then.”
She considered his words. “Even if he knew it was a lie?”
“Maybe—as long as that meant he still got a daughter out of the bargain. What I’m saying is that I imagine this has probably been your father’s thinking all along, that whether the young woman who stepped off Carpathia was Jocelyn or Adele, all Sean wanted was to love her and care for her and give her a decent life. If she said she was Adele, then to him she would be Adele, case closed.”
“Case closed for him maybe,” she replied. “But what about now? What about all these generations later, when her identity is coming under question yet again?”
Jonah stood and carried his plate to the sink, and then he poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. Rejoining her at the table, he sat back with a creak of the chair, took a sip, and met her eyes with a look of challenge.
“Maybe the question now is, what’s really important here? The truth or the money?”
She shook her head, not understanding.
“If Rupert Brennan is right,” he explained, “then from what I understand, he’s owed some money, correct? So my question to you is, are you more concerned with learning the truth, regardless of the consequences? Or are you more concerned with protecting your money, regardless of the truth?”
Kelsey’s face flushed with heat, and for the first time in memory she felt anger toward her grandfather. How dare he ask her that? How dare he question her integrity?
“No disrespect, Grandpa, but I’m offended by your question. Really offended. Those people—Rupert and Rhonda and whoever else is on that side of the tree—they’re family. They descended from the same ancestors we did. As nutty as they may be, if the woman who actually survived Titanic was Jocelyn, then they have every right to what’s theirs. I would never begrudge them that. The money isn’t the problem.”
“No?”
“No! The problem isn’t the damage that their claims could do to the company. The problem is the damage their claims could do to the memory of Adele Brennan Tate, a woman I happened to love and respect very much! That’s what matters.”
By the time Kelsey finished, she was practically shouting, her hands clenched tightly at her sides. To her surprise, however, the old man simply smiled.
“Good,” he said, nodding. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”
Unclenching her hands and placing them flat on the table, she groaned in frustration. “Why do you always ask these kinds of questions, Grandpa?” she demanded. “Are you trying to make me crazy?”
“Nope. I’m just trying to keep the focus on what’s really important.”
“Well, what’s really important for me right now is to figure out the truth. That’s why I wanted to come here today, because I was hoping that was something you could help me with.”
Nodding more somberly, he rose from the table, went to the sink, and turned on the faucet. Realizing he was about to do the dishes, she got up and took his place, insisting that he sit down and let her do it. “One cooks, the other cleans. That’s the rule,” she told him sternly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, moving around to the side of the table and taking a different seat so he wouldn’t be in her way in the tiny kitchen.
“What do you know about any of this, Grandpa? About when your mother first came to this country and found that her identity had been challenged? Did she ever mention any of that at all? Because I never heard a single word about it before yesterday. For that matter, I’ve never heard much about Jocelyn either.”
Kelsey found a plastic tub and a bottle of dish detergent in the lower cabinet. Soon the tub was in the sink, slowly filling with hot, steamy water.
“Well, as you know, my mother never talked much about her past to anyone—especially not about her time on the ship or what it was like the night it sank. But she did write about it extensively in her diary. I have to say, it would have been pretty hard for anyone to fake that stuff, especially the parts about Jocelyn.”
“I don’t know,” Kelsey said, turning off the faucet and plunging the dishes into the soapy water. “I’ve read that story a dozen times, and I don’t recall that it had
much to say about Jocelyn at all.”
“Well, the printed version doesn’t. But she wrote an extremely detailed account of each day at sea, and the sinking and everything, in her handwritten one.”
Kelsey gasped, spinning around from the sink.
“Her what?”
“Her diary.”
Heart pounding, Kelsey wiped her hands on the front of her shirt. “I’ve never heard of any handwritten diary. The thing I was talking about…”
Her voice trailed off as she quickly walked into the living room and over to the bookcase where she knew he kept a copy. She rooted among the nautical tables and books about sailing ships and steamers and finally returned to the kitchen with a small, printed booklet in her hand. She held it out to him, showing the cover that read Titanic: One Survivor’s Story by Adele Brennan Tate.
Kelsey opened the booklet and flipped through the pages. “See? I don’t think this was traditionally published, but it was obviously typeset and printed and bound. There’s nothing handwritten here.”
The old man nodded. “That’s the printed version she dictated to a secretary for publication. I’m talking about her personal diary, the one she started keeping just before she set sail on Titanic with Jocelyn and Rowan.”
Kelsey couldn’t believe it. How many more family secrets was she unaware of?
“Where is that diary now?” she asked, her voice practically a whisper.
Jonah shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea, hon. Haven’t even thought about it for years. But I saw it many times when I was younger.”
Her legs growing shaky and weak, Kelsey sat, dumbfounded. “Are you telling me it’s just been misplaced? Or do you think at some point it was destroyed?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s just been misplaced,” he said, his brow growing furrowed as he thought about it.
Kelsey placed her elbows on the table and leaned forward.
“We have to find that diary, Grandpa. It could be the key to everything.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Kelsey awoke the next morning to a quiet house. Sunlight was streaming into her room, and when she slid the window open an inch, she could hear the waves pounding the shore on the other side of the dunes. It was chilly outside, though, much chillier than in the city. Cold air rushed in through the opening, so reluctantly she pushed the window closed again. Then she pulled on her robe and followed the smell of fresh coffee to the kitchen.
Propped against a mug on the counter next to the coffeemaker was a note Grandpa must have written last night when he set the timer for the coffee. She picked up the little piece of paper and read his spidery script.
Sorry, hon. I’ve gone through everything else I have here, but I can’t find the old diary. Ask your parents. Maybe one of them will know what happened to it.
Deeply disappointed, Kelsey poured herself a mug of coffee and added cream and sugar. Last night the two of them had spent hours rooting through old boxes and bins and trunks trying to find that diary—to no avail. In the end Jonah had finally insisted that she go on to bed, though he promised to get through the last of his papers before he turned in himself.
Still no diary. She couldn’t imagine the family losing something so important!
Kelsey glanced at her watch. Her parents wouldn’t be up for another hour. She would call them then, but in the meantime she decided to go for a run. More than anything, she needed to clear her head.
Fifteen minutes later she was dressed in an odd assortment of layers and walking across Ocean Avenue toward the boardwalk. As she began jogging, she could feel her body slowly growing looser and warmer, and soon she removed her outermost layer and tied it by the sleeves around her waist. As she’d expected, she passed only a few other early morning joggers and a single bicyclist as she went.
Kelsey always forgot how much she loved it here until she came back and was reminded again. Though she could do without the more touristy towns along the Jersey Shore, this sleepy little place always felt like a haven to her. The people were friendly and the pace was slow, and when she wanted to get away from the city and clear her head, it was the perfect destination.
When Kelsey was halfway to her turnaround point, she found her mind wandering back to last night’s prayer at the dinner table. Looking up at the beautiful sky now and listening to the rhythmic waves on the other side of the dunes, it wasn’t hard in this moment to have faith in an almighty God. The hard part was taking that faith back to her busy life in the city, where the evidence of God’s hand was often supplanted by that of man’s. Somehow, looking at a beautiful ocean sunrise always made her feel closer to her Creator, yet looking at a tall and beautiful skyscraper did not bring God to mind at all. Thinking about that now, she realized how faulty her logic was. If God made man, then skyscrapers, just like mountains, would not exist if God Himself did not exist.
Reaching the next block, Kelsey picked up her pace a bit, thinking back to when she was a teenager. Her parents’ faith had always been a more occasional thing—worship service on Christmas and Easter, saying grace on Thanksgiving, trying to be “good” year-round—and she’d always thought that was all there was to it. But then a friend had invited Kelsey to the youth group at her church.
To the people there, faith was a daily walk. Joy and peace were abundant. Life came with a guidebook called the Bible, and at its core were all of the bottom-line truths she needed to know. Looking back on all of that now, she couldn’t decide if her experience had been genuine or just run-of-the-mill teenage dramatics. Kelsey had felt things so deeply back then, her highs so high and her lows so low. On the night she went forward at a Christian concert, she had felt as transformed, as euphoric, as bound to Christ as a bride to a groom. She’d thought those feelings would last forever, but of course they hadn’t. Once the “high” faded, she’d been disappointed, but she’d remained faithful, at least until she went away to college.
After that, God got shifted from the center of her life to the sidelines. And while she never actively, consciously rejected God, she had definitely wandered far from Him.
There had been a time, back when she and Cole were dating and starting to grow more serious, when the two of them had begun to go to church together. Another couple had invited them to join a new Bible study class geared to their age group, one that was just starting up. On a whim they had tried it and ended up liking it far more than they had expected to. They continued to attend regularly, almost every week—until their breakup. After that she’d been too heartbroken to go to any of the places they had frequented together, including church. As that fell by the wayside, so did her focus on God.
She hadn’t even thought about this stuff in a long time. It was as if being with her grandfather—a man whose faith was an integral part of his life, woven into his soul—had woken something up inside of her. Again, her mind went back to that feeling of being on the outside looking in and desperately wanting what she could see. She didn’t know if this sudden hunger for God was just a reaction to the trauma of the past two days or something genuine, but it was worth thinking about. For the time being, though, she would table this mental discussion. A whispered prayer or two couldn’t hurt anything, she supposed, but there was already enough on her plate to think about without throwing God into the mix as well.
When Kelsey reached 1st Avenue, she was more than ready to shift from the boardwalk to the beach. Finally finding her footing on the damp, packed sand close to the water, she once again began to jog, feeling the pull of the softer footing in the back of her calves and thighs. It felt good.
Thus far she’d had a rotten week, one of the most rotten weeks of her life. But in this moment, with the sun warm on her face and the ocean gently lapping at the sand and the sight of seagulls up ahead gliding languorously on currents of air, she allowed herself to let go of all the pain and grief and fear and simply enjoy the moment. All too soon she would be back where she started and life would come crashing in again.
Twenty minutes later, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans with her wet hair combed out straight, she returned to her room, picked up the phone, and took a look at the screen to see who had called. To her surprise, she had four texts and eight voice mails waiting for her. She pressed the button to see who had called, wondering what new development had led to so many messages.
It didn’t take long to find out. Though some of the calls had been from concerned friends and colleagues who had just heard the news about Gloria’s death, there were three messages from Sharon. The first two simply urged her to call into the office as soon as possible, but the third went into more detail. Kelsey, it’s me again. Walter just called together the staff and announced that the company is being targeted for a hostile takeover by Queen’s Fleet Management Group. Please call me!
Queen’s Fleet? That was Pamela Greeley’s company. Kelsey lowered herself to the bed.
Not now. Not them.
Queen’s Fleet was known throughout the industry as “Clean Sweep,” as in an acquisition by them meant all top-level executives gone, whether they were good at their jobs or not. Queen’s Fleet always cleaned house of upper management when they did a takeover to make way for their own people.
How could Pamela, the CEO of Queen’s Fleet, attempt a takeover of B & T? She had known and respected Adele. They had considered each other friends. Now Pamela was going to take over Adele’s company, her very legacy? Kelsey pictured the woman sitting at the ceremony two days ago and realized why she’d been silent while Adele’s name was being besmirched, offering no help in her defense. It was because she already had plans in the works to destroy what Adele had built.
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