Hidden Falls

by Newport, Olivia

  Ethan turned his palms up. “So they had a business deal.”

  “The Tabors were a wealthy family,” Jack said. “Back in the day, they owned half of Hidden Falls and had business ventures all over the Midwest. They had losses during the Depression, like everyone, but they came out all right in the end. Harold was a fourth-generation business tycoon. Stephen Pease was an uneducated man who drove a fruit truck when he could get the work.”

  This contract could be nothing, some technicality an attorney advised. Or it could be much more. That’s what Jack didn’t know yet.

  “Buying and selling fruit?” Nicole said. “Did the Tabors have orchards?”

  Jack was impressed. “As a matter of fact, they did. Apples mostly. I have a stack of contracts six inches deep profiling the business operations of the orchards until they were sold.” Jack knew the fruit truck drivers were day laborers—and they had to have their own trucks.

  “I still don’t understand what we’re talking about,” Ethan said.

  Jack leaned forward and made sure he had eye contact with both Ethan and Nicole. “Why would a man like Harold Tabor draw up a contract with a transient worker like Stephen Pease for a vague transaction that on the face of it has no value?”

  Jack let the question sink in. Ethan’s brow furrowed in confusion and impatience, but Nicole sucked on one corner of her mouth, thinking. Jack didn’t have all the answers to his own questions, but he felt fairly certain he was still a few steps ahead of Nicole.

  “What exactly was this transaction?” Nicole tore off a piece of her bagel and tucked it into her mouth. “And what kind of money was involved?”

  “Depends on your perspective,” Jack said. “To Harold Tabor it would have been pocket change, even in the Depression. To Stephen Pease? It would have meant a fresh start. Options. A chance to get out of debt.”

  “And what did Pease have to do?”

  “Deliver a package.”

  Nicole leaned back in her chair. “Must have been some package.”

  “The contents were never specified in the contract,” Jack said. “It was Harold Tabor’s prerogative to consider the package satisfactory, and Pease would get his money.”

  “Sounds like Tabor had all the power,” Ethan said.

  Nicole chewed. “Not necessarily.”

  “He has the money, and he has the prerogative to call the deal null and void,” Ethan said. “What does Pease have?”

  She smiled. “The package. Whatever it was, it mattered enough to Tabor to tempt Pease with the money.”

  Jack waited. If Nicole solved this, he would know immediately. And he had the evidence she would need to prove any theory.

  “So,” Ethan said, “what could the package have been?”

  The three of them stared at one another.

  “The babies,” Nicole said. “Quinn’s notes in Old Dom’s ledgers were about babies.”

  Jack held his breath, his mind rapidly indexing the pages of notes he’d taken as he sorted files. Harold Tabor’s younger brother had three children—all sons. But Harold had married after his brother, and his only child had not come easily. If he did not have a living son on his fortieth birthday, his brother would inherit the lion’s share of the family business.

  Yes, babies were an important link. But Harold had a son who would be five, two years before Harold turned forty. All had been well.

  Jack looked up to see Sylvia Alexander enter the waiting room. “Good morning, Mayor. How is your niece?”

  “Doing well, thank you.” Sylvia paced toward the group. “She’s sleeping at the moment. It seemed like a good time to get up and stretch my legs.”

  “I could go sit with her,” Nicole said.

  “Not just yet.” Sylvia pulled a chair up to the huddle. “Nicole, what babies were you talking about when I came in?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nicole said. “Those Morse code notes Quinn was making in the cemetery records seemed to be about the age of some babies during the thirties. But what stumped me is that I don’t think it was necessarily about the death of the babies. Old Dom’s father had all sorts of notes in those books about the families.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “It could be useful to compare those notes against my files.” He was not entirely comfortable with Nicole’s access to information that he hadn’t seen. She might get ahead of him.

  “Babies during the Depression?” Sylvia tilted her head.

  Ethan grunted. “Somebody has to catch me up. We were talking about a contract between Tabor and Pease about some package, and now we’re talking about babies? And what does any of this have to do with Quinn? Why was he making those notes?”

  “Oh my goodness,” Sylvia said. “My mother’s story.”

  “What story is that?” Jack asked.

  Sylvia blinked three times. Something was coming together behind her eyes, Jack realized.

  “Sylvia?” Nicole said.

  “My mother was young during the Depression,” Sylvia said. “Her mother was the town gossip, so it’s hard to know if the stories she told were true. But just a week ago, my mother was remembering a story about two families with little boys about the same age. Both families left town and no one heard from them again. But there was money involved, and at least one of the boys was sickly.”

  “That fits,” Jack said, nodding.

  “What fits?” Ethan asked.

  Nicole’s eyes widened. “That grave. It’s the marker for Stephen Pease’s little boy.”

  The pieces snapped into place for Jack. “A little boy would be a valuable package to a man who needs a healthy male offspring in order to inherit a fortune.”

  Nicole’s face simultaneously filled with horror and certainty. “One of the boys got sick. It just wasn’t the one everybody thought. Old Dom’s father figured it out.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ethan said. “You think Tabor bought Pease’s kid?”

  The outrageous truth swirled around them.

  “My word,” Sylvia muttered. “Why didn’t I see this before now?”

  Jack scratched his nose. What did the mayor know? He folded his hands in his lap and waited.

  “I found some things of Quinn’s on Friday night.” Sylvia stared at a spot on the floor, concentrating. She covered her mouth with three fingers.

  Nicole scooted forward in her seat. “What did you find, Sylvia?”

  “A Matchbox collection.”

  Now Jack felt as lost as Ethan had been looking for most of this conversation. “Matchbox? Like the little toy cars?”

  Sylvia nodded. “I guess they’re Quinn’s, but I never knew he had them. Sports cars, I don’t know. I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “They must have been his when he was little,” Nicole said. “Why would he hide them in your attic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What else?” Jack asked. A few small metal cars didn’t connect to anything except perhaps Quinn’s mysterious past.

  Sylvia shrugged. “A hood ornament. At least that’s what I think it was.”

  Ethan spilled half a bottle of juice over his knees. Nicole fumbled with a pile of napkins to help with the mess.

  Ethan soaked up the liquid haphazardly. “Kind of a rocket-looking thing?”

  Sylvia looked up. “Yes! How did you know?”

  “It’s from a 1955 Oldsmobile. I gave it to him when I was in college.”

  “Why didn’t I know about this?” Nicole asked.

  “It was just something I found online,” Ethan said. “It was a lot older than Quinn’s Oldsmobile, but I thought he would like it.”

  Sylvia stood up and began to pace. “You gave that to him when you were in college? Like when you were nineteen or twenty?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So only ten years ago?”

  “Yes, I think it was the last time I saw him.”

  “The box has been in my attic for twenty years.”

  “What box?”

  “The box
with the Matchbox cars. But the hood ornament couldn’t have been in it twenty years ago.” Sylvia paced faster. “And that means the documents might not have been there all that time, either.”

  “Documents?” Jack said. He thought he was the only one in possession of relevant documents.

  “A few weeks ago,” Sylvia said, “Quinn volunteered to take some boxes from my garage up into the attic. I didn’t think it was urgent, but he insisted.”

  Nicole reached for her crutches and pulled herself to her feet. “So you think—”

  “He put something new in the box.”

  “My hood ornament?” Ethan asked.

  Sylvia turned to look at him. “And the papers. The hood ornament means he meant them for you.”

  Jack thumped one hand on the arm of his chair. He didn’t want to admit he was losing the line of logic.

  “Nicole,” Sylvia said, “are you still willing to go sit with Lauren?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then, Ethan, I think you should come with me to my house.”

  Jack took comfort in the fact that Ethan looked as disoriented as Jack felt.

  “Quinn must have meant for you to have the documents,” Sylvia said. “That’s why he put them in the box. They were safe there. No one else even knew the box was in my attic, and he knew I wouldn’t look in it.”

  “But you did look,” Jack pointed out.

  “Well,” she said, “circumstances changed when Quinn disappeared.”

  “What do these documents say?” Ethan asked.

  “Come with me and I’ll show you,” Sylvia said.

  Ethan looked around the room. “I think we’re all in this together at this point. What did you see?”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait to see for yourself?”

  “Please, just tell me.”

  “Well, first of all, there was a marriage certificate for Kay Petersen and Richard Jordan.”

  Nicole’s jaw dropped open. “Why would Quinn have a copy of the marriage certificate for Ethan’s parents?”

  “It’s like your dots and dashes,” Sylvia said. “One thing leads to another. There’s also an adoption certificate.”

  Jack’s stomach fell away.

  “I’m adopted?” Ethan looked dumbfounded.

  “No,” Sylvia said. “Your mother was. The document shows Kathleen Pease will henceforth be known as Kay Petersen.”

  Jack heard the breath of every person in the room.

  “Her original birth certificate shows her parents as Dennis and Linda Pease.”

  Jack’s chest heaved. When he’d opened this can of worms, he hadn’t expected to hear any of this.

  “Maybe we should have a look at those documents together,” Jack said.

  “Pease,” Nicole said. “Your mother is a Pease. But …”

  “I really wish you’d let me look at the documents,” Jack said. He was an attorney. He would know what they meant better than anyone else present.

  “Just hold on.” Nicole put her fingers to her temples. “The man in the picture—he’s a Pease? Is he Stephen or Dennis?”

  “I only had a cursory glance at the picture yesterday,” Jack said. “We’d have to pin down the date.” And he would have to sort out the relationship between Stephen and Dennis. Getting at the truth was going to require a few more birth certificates.

  “But the babies,” Nicole said. “The package changes everything.”

  11:07 a.m.

  “You have to go see your parents.”

  This wasn’t the first time Nicole made this statement, but it was the first time Ethan thought she might be right. They stood murmuring outside the waiting room while Sylvia checked on Lauren before leaving the hospital.

  “What in the world will I say to them?” Ethan opened his hands in a wide gesture. “Hi, Mom. Did you know you were adopted?”

  Nicole rested a hand on his arm. “First go with Sylvia to see the documents. I hate to say it, but I think Jack’s right. He should have a look. And I don’t think he’s telling us everything he knows.”

  Ethan eyed her. “I don’t think you’re telling him everything you know, either.”

  “Know is a strong word. It’s more like suspect.”

  “Okay, suspect. You found something in the cemetery notes, didn’t you?”

  Nicole looked over her shoulder and shuffled her crutches a little farther down the hall. “This is going to sound gruesome.”

  “More gruesome than the possibility of a rich man buying a poor man’s baby?”

  Nicole sucked in a deep breath. “When we were at the cemetery that night looking at grave markers, I noticed that sometimes when a baby died, the marker might only say infant or baby with a year. Not even a last name.”

  “So?” Ethan knew sickly babies did not always receive a name, and grieving families might find it costly to purchase and inscribe a tombstone.

  “So … the grave the man in the photo is standing in front of is near two markers with the name Pease. But Old Dom’s father didn’t think it was a Pease baby buried there.”

  “Who did he think it was?”

  Nicole shrugged. “The notes just say a Tabor child took ill.”

  Ethan stiffened. “A Tabor?” Harold’s younger brother, Truman, also had several children. It could have been any one of them.

  “Quinn’s code says things like right age or this one.”

  “So you think—”

  “Don’t you see, Ethan? If the ‘package’ in the contract Jack found was a baby, we’re in a new game.”

  Jack lurked, leaning against the wall a few yards away with his hands in his pockets. Sylvia’s steps slapped the tile floor as she approached. “Lauren’s waiting.”

  Nicole gripped her crutches. “Then I’ll go.”

  Ethan caught the gaze of her emerald eyes and wished he didn’t have to leave her behind. “I’ll call you.”

  Thirty minutes later, Sylvia lifted Quinn’s box from her mantel, and Ethan’s trembling hands unfolded the documents.

  The marriage license.

  The adoption papers.

  A birth certificate listing Dennis Pease as the father of Kathleen Pease, born in a town in Kansas that Ethan had never heard of.

  Ethan laid the papers in a neat row on the coffee table while he rubbed his eyes. He’d been up more than twenty-four hours now. Small letters typed into tiny boxes were running together, but Ethan had the feeling he was missing something obvious. He felt the same way on a regular basis when he was running through diagnostic protocol but not coming up with an answer that made sense for a patient’s symptoms or treatment didn’t relieve the symptoms. It had to be here. If Nicole were there, she’d have a hunch, a theory to turn and look at from every direction.

  Sylvia sat quietly across from him.

  Ethan looked at the morphing forms of his mother’s names. Kathleen Pease. Kay Petersen. Kay Jordan. He looked again at the names of the men identified as her father. Dennis Pease. Carl Petersen. He blinked at the names of the women identified as her mother. Linda Pease. Linda Petersen.

  “My grandmother,” he murmured.

  “What about your grandmother?” Sylvia asked.

  Ethan pointed to the names on the birth and adoption papers. “Linda. It’s Linda on both forms. I think she was married twice. The adoption was so my mother would have her stepfather’s name—Petersen.”

  The doorbell rang. Sylvia stood up. “That must be Jack with the papers from his office.”

  Ethan was reluctant to change position or even turn his head for fear of losing the thread that was beginning to make sense. Jack shuffled across the carpet and dropped onto the sofa next to Ethan to examine the pages Ethan had laid out.

  “What did you find?” Ethan asked without looking up.

  Jack reached into his briefcase, riffled through notes, and tapped the information he sought. “Dennis Pease was the only son of Stephen Pease. He was born here in Hidden Falls—a home birth, which was typical at th
e time. According to official records, he died eight months later, and his parents ran out on their lease and left town the day they buried him.”

  Ethan ran his tongue over his lips. “Then how is it he grew up to be listed on my mother’s birth certificate?”

  “How indeed?”

  “Identity theft?” Sylvia speculated. “Someone found a record of an infant no one would miss and used the name. People still try to do that.”

  Jack nodded. “With enough basic information, much of which would be available in public records, it’s possible to get a birth certificate.”

  That struck Ethan as random. He was a man of science—of patterns and predictability. Even in treating disease, he depended on understanding causation and consistency.

  This was no disease. This was his mother. And there was causation and consistency. No one had to obtain a birth certificate by fraudulent means when already in possession of one that would never be questioned.

  “Jack,” he said, “what was the date on that contract you found between Harold Tabor and Stephen Pease?”

  “Why does it matter?” Jack gripped his notepad.

  “I suppose the date doesn’t matter,” Ethan said. “What matters is the time between when the contract was drafted and when it was considered fulfilled.”

  Jack flipped a couple of pages. “Two days.”

  “And the money was paid?”

  “In full. In cash.”

  Ethan stacked the documents. “May I take these with me?”

  Jack jerked slightly. “I think we need to make sure those documents remain in safekeeping.”

  Ethan wasn’t asking Jack’s opinion. He raised his eyes to Sylvia.

  “Of course,” she said. “I believe Quinn meant you to have them. That’s why he asked you to come to town.”

  Jack protested. “We should at least make photocopies.”

  “These are not original documents.” Ethan folded the papers. “Wherever Quinn got them from, we could get them again.”

  “Santorelli is my guess,” Sylvia said.

  Ethan nodded.

  “I have to advise against this recklessness.” Jack stood when Ethan did.

  Ethan wasn’t interested in Jack’s advice. He thanked Sylvia with his eyes and went out her front door, leaving Jack with his jaw hanging open.