by Karen Fenech
Ryder walked by Clare up the porch steps.
“Did she tell you where she was going?” Clare asked.
Ryder stuck his key in the door lock.
“Did you try to find her?” Clare called out.
Ryder stopped. Without turning around, he said, “She doesn’t want me. I don’t want her.”
He went into the house.
She’d been dismissed. Clare took a deep breath to cool the anger that had increased her body temperature and headed up the steps to the front door. While she sympathized with Ryder’s hurt over Beth leaving him, his feelings ran a distant second to her search for her sister.
He had left the wooden door open behind the screen door, and the glass on that one was raised. Clare took up a position on the welcome mat. She leaned on the doorbell for a few seconds, then waited for the chime to stop.
“If you don’t speak with me, Dean, I’ll get my answers elsewhere,” she said loudly enough to carry into the house. “I’ll speak with every person in Farley if I have to, to find out what I need to know. I’m not going away.”
Clare didn’t know Ryder and couldn’t gauge his feelings about the town’s reaction to Beth leaving him. Was he basking in the sympathy of the town as the poor jilted husband or had his pride taken a hit and all he really wanted was to put the incident behind him? If the dust was just beginning to settle on the gossip, she supposed it was unlikely he would take kindly to the prospect of having it stirred up again. Not her problem. At this point, Clare had nothing to lose. Though she had no wish to cause him more hurt, she didn’t have the time to get to know him, to ingratiate herself to him, if it were possible to do so, in order to enlist his cooperation.
She waited a little longer but Ryder didn’t come to the door.
She went back to her car. Behind the wheel, with the air conditioning on high blowing cool air across her face, she considered her next step. She knew the names of Beth’s adoptive parents. Hank and Gladys Linney might still be in town. Their daughter may have confided in them.
If she’d had her laptop with her, she could log onto the Bureau’s database and find out if the couple still resided in Farley. She hadn’t brought it with her, however. She’d planned a reunion, not an investigation.
Clare consulted the diagram of Farley and located Main Street, which she assumed would be like most other towns and house the business district.
Main Street was wide with a row of shops on the east side and a tidy park on the west. A bronze statue on a pedestal presided over an assortment of bushes and lush flowers in a manicured garden. The plaque beneath the statue identified it as town founder Walter Farley.
Driving slowly, Clare read the signs above the shops in passing. Potter and Sons Pharmacy. Main Street Diner. The Pizza Place. Main Street Hardware and Bait. Farley Army Surplus. There wasn’t much activity. A man sat on a bench, fanning himself with a newspaper. Two preteen boys stood beneath the striped canopy of the army surplus, taking turns looking through a pair of binoculars. Though the residents were undoubtedly accustomed to the heat, apparently they had the good sense to stay out of it.
She was looking for a gas station and came to one across from an intersection. And it had a telephone booth. Clare flipped through the directory there looking for Hank or Gladys Linney. She came up empty and went back over the names. It was possible that the parents were deceased, but what about nephews or nieces or other relatives? There were no listings for anyone named Linney.
County records would reveal if the Linneys had died. The county seat was a forty-minute drive out of town. Clare figured it could be faster to visit the local churches and speak with the resident pastors about the Linneys. In a town the size of Farley, how many churches could there be?
Two were listed in the phone book, and both located on a street called July Road. One was Lutheran and the other Methodist. The listing for the Lutheran house of worship also featured a map. Clare tore the page out of the directory.
She reached the Methodist church first. Small residences had been built around it. Two young girls spun a skipping rope on the sidewalk while a shaggy dog leaped beside them.
Clare entered the small structure. There wasn’t anyone inside. She went to the house next door that had been built on the church property, thinking it might be the pastor’s residence and rang the bell. No one came to the door. She rang again. Moments later when there was still no response, she drove on, down the street.
An old station wagon was parked in the gravel drive of the rectory built beside the Lutheran church. Clare parked and walked to it. A round woman answered Clare’s knock. Spectacles dangled from a silver chain around her neck. She lifted them to her eyes and they widened for an instant. The look she gave Clare wasn’t friendly.
Clare attributed the woman’s hostility to her resemblance to her sister, and ignored it. “I’d like to speak with the pastor. Is he available, please?”
The woman nodded once briskly. “Come inside.”
“Thank you.”
The woman ushered Clare into a kitchen. Tea bags, lemon slices, sugar—the makings for what looked like iced tea—were spread across the counter.
Two tall fans stood on the tile floor at opposite ends of the kitchen. Clare made her way to one of them as a man entered the room. He was slim and stoop-shouldered. The woman hadn’t returned with him.
“I’m Reverend Shannon,” the man said. “You wish to speak with me?”
His tone was frosty, as was the glint in his pale blue eyes.
“I’m Clare Marshall,” Clare said. “I’m trying to locate two people who may be parishioners of yours, Hank and Gladys Linney.”
Reverend Shannon nodded. “Yes, Hank and Gladys worshiped here.”
His use of the past tense wasn’t lost on Clare. “Are they not part of this parish any longer?”
“Why do you want to find them? Before I give you any information, I must know what your interest is in the Linneys. I need to be sure that your intentions are pure.”
“Fair enough, Reverend.” Clare explained briefly about the adoption and her search for Beth that led her to Farley. “I believe when you first saw me, you noticed a resemblance between Beth and myself.” The pastor’s lips tightened. Clare took that as confirmation of her statement. “Be assured that my only intent is to find my sister.”
The pastor crossed his arms at his chest. “Hank passed on about two years back. Gladys suffered a stroke shortly after. She currently resides at the Linwood Nursing Facility on Oak Road. I counsel her there.” The pastor uncrossed his arms and pointed at Clare. “You should consider very carefully before paying a call on Gladys. She was devastated by her daughter’s betrayal of her marriage vows.” He stabbed the air with his finger as he went on. “Beth Linney made her choice. It would be better for Gladys and Dean if she stays away. Better for the town. Farley doesn’t need her kind setting an immoral example to our young women.”
Reverend Shannon had worked himself up to a point that his cheeks had reddened and a fine sheen of perspiration glistened on his brow.
Clearly he preached of fire and brimstone in his sermons. Unlikely his parishioners would find a sympathetic or compassionate ear from him.
Clare eyed the pastor and said with sarcasm, “I’ll be sure and convey your good wishes to my sister when I find her.”
Back in her car, Clare found Oak Road on the map. The nursing facility was located at the outskirts of town. The drive there was too short to completely dispel Clare’s anger over Reverend Shannon’s comments. She rolled her shoulders to relieve the tension as she crossed the parking lot.
Inside the facility, the walls were painted a cheery pink, and the three staff members in sight were dressed in uniforms of the same color.
Clare approached a pencil slim woman bent over a desk, sorting a stack of papers.
“I’d like to see Gladys Linney,” Clare said.
The woman glanced up at Clare. There was no recognition in her gaze.
“Ah, okay. Yeah.” She released the papers and reached out to a computer, pushed back to the edge of the desk. “Gladys Linney. L-i-n-n-e-e?”
“-e-y,” Clare said.
“e-y,” the woman repeated. She tapped a few keys. “It’s my first day,” she said. “I haven’t met all the patients.”
That explained why she hadn’t acknowledged Clare’s resemblance to Gladys’s daughter, Clare thought.
“Gladys Linney? Gladys Linney.” The woman kept her gaze on the computer screen. “Room Fifteen. Down this hall on your left.”
Clare had expected to be asked her relationship to Gladys, but the woman said nothing more, and went back to the papers.
Clare made her way to Room Fifteen. Given what the pastor said, it was unlikely that Gladys would welcome a visit from Clare. How would she react to Clare’s resemblance to Beth? Bracing herself for another verbal sparring match, Clare knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
The voice was feeble. Clare strained to hear it. She pushed the door open.
“Mrs. Linney?”
The room smelled faintly of lavender. A woman sat in a deep arm chair in front of the window. Full sun shone on her face, yet her eyes were wide open to the light. A white cane stood against the wall. Clare realized Gladys Linney was blind.
“Yes, I’m Gladys. Do I know you?”
Clare entered the room and went to Gladys. “No, you don’t. I’m related to Beth.”
Gladys turned away from the window then, and leaned forward, her thin hand clutched the arm of the chair. “Beth? Do you know my Beth?”
This is the point where Clare hoped the conversation wouldn’t turn ugly. “I’m Clare Marshall, Mrs. Linney. I’m Beth’s sister.”
“Her sister.” Gladys’s lips quivered. “I can’t say I wasn’t expecting you.”
Clare didn’t know what to make of that. “I don’t understand.”
“I always feared one day someone would come about my Beth and take her away. Realize the great treasure they’d given up and want her back.”
Clare closed her eyes briefly at Gladys’s comment, at the love in her voice. She felt relieved of a burden of worry she’d carried for her sister. For years she’d feared that her sister had been raised by a mother like their own.
There were so many questions she wished to ask Gladys about Beth, but first things first.
“Mrs. Linney, I’ve been looking for Beth for a long time. I recently learned that she lived in Farley, but that she’s no longer in town. Do you know where she went?”
Gladys’s eyes filled with tears. She shook her head.
Clare felt the weight of disappointment. She took a breath and cast it off. Mrs. Linney may know something more and not realize it. “Does Beth have friends or relatives she might contact?”
“No relatives. Both my late husband, Hank, and me are only children. Hank and me are from Tennessee. We found out that we could apply to get a baby from another state and that’s what we did. When we adopted Beth, we moved here and cut all ties with the people we knew from home. We didn’t want nobody knowing that Beth wasn’t our natural child. People can be awful cruel. Didn’t want anyone to give her a hard time about it. We didn’t want her to know either, and think on it, and question if she belonged with Hank and me.”
That answered why people in Farley didn’t know about Beth’s adoption. And Beth hadn’t known herself. A knot of tension in Clare’s stomach eased. Beth had not chosen to cut herself off from Clare.
Clare addressed Gladys again. “Did Beth mention to you that she was leaving Farley?”
Gladys reached out, and removed a tissue from a box on the window sill. “All the time. Beth was a restless child, a restless woman. Hank and me blamed ourselves for her restlessness. We never took Beth out of Farley since the day we moved here with her. We were afraid as she got older that someone might recognize our little girl as their own and want her back. We heard of cases on television where adoptions were overturned and babies were given back to their natural parents.”
“Was there any place in particular that Beth mentioned she’d like to go?”
Gladys smiled. “Everywhere. Beth wanted to see the world, and wanted the world to see her. She’s so full o’ life, nothin’ going to keep that girl down, Hank used to say.”
Clare was barely listening, focused on one thought: Beth could be anywhere by now.
Gladys stopped smiling. “Don’t know what Hank would have said of our little girl if he’d seen her the last couple years.”
That got Clare’s attention. “What do you mean?”
“My Beth is a good girl.” Gladys’s skin pulled taut over her features. Her expression became fierce. She tilted her head back, jutting out her chin. “I know what the talk is in town, that Beth up and run off with a man, but no matter how much she wanted to see some of this world, she isn’t the kind to just up and run away, and surely not to take up with someone to do that. Since that’s what she did, she had good reason.”
Clare didn’t put much stock in Gladys’s statement. A loving mother, she would be looking for a reason to justify Beth’s leaving. Clare was going to let the comment alone and ask about Beth’s friends as other possible sources of information when Gladys spoke up.
“People don’t pay much attention to blind people. They think because we can’t see, all our other senses don’t work either. Since I lost my sight a few years back I pay a lot more attention to sounds than I used to. I can hear the sound of strain in a person’s voice. I can hear a lie. Beth was doing a lot of lying.”
If Beth was having an affair with the trucker, that could account for the strain Gladys heard in her daughter’s voice and for the lies, Clare thought.
“Her and Dean,” Gladys said. “Things weren’t right between them.”
Clare couldn’t disagree with that. A woman happy in her marriage didn’t leave her husband.
“At first, Beth looked to have settled into married life, then she got quiet and jittery,” Gladys went on. “I know Dean was wanting them to have a baby real bad, and was putting a lot of pressure on her to start a family. He did the same about wanting to get married. Hank and me wasn’t sure Dean was right for our Beth. She’s a free spirit and he’s got a need to have order in his life. But, he swept our girl off her feet, pursuing her something fierce. That kind of attention can turn a girl’s head and it did that with Beth whose got a romantic nature.”
“When was the last time you saw Beth?”
“The day she left.”
“What day was that?”
“Friday, last. She’s been gone one week today.” Gladys stopped speaking, unable to continue, then swallowed a few times and began again. “She came by real early in the morning, like always. I wasn’t expecting her, ’cause she’d been by the day before and she usually visited every other day. I asked her what I’d done to get two visits in two days.” Gladys’s voice trailed off. “I thought she come to tell me something. I asked about her and Dean but she wouldn’t say anything. I can’t say that surprised me. She was afraid of him.”
Clare frowned. “Afraid of him? Why do you say that?”
“Her breathing got real fast when she talked about him and I’d be holding her hand, and her hand would go all cold.”
Not exactly proof.
“I want to see my girl again, Clare, with all my heart. But if she’s gone on account of Dean, I’m thinking maybe it’s for the best that she stays gone.”
Clare didn’t know what to say to that. She certainly couldn’t tell Gladys that she was going to end her search.