At the bottom of the chest are two handmade baby blankets, the top one folded so that Desi’s name, sewn onto a silken square at the center, is displayed. I assume the one beneath it is mine, but if there is a name on it, it’s hidden in the folds. I take the blanket out and let it fall open. There is no name, but hidden inside those folds is a packet of letters tied together with string. A quick flip through the envelopes shows me they are all addressed to my mother using the name Jane Obermeyer, her maiden name. None of them have a return address, and the postmarks are from several different cities: Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Norfolk, Virginia, and all are dated with the year 1984.
Curious, I slide the top envelope out from beneath the ribbon and remove the letter it contains. I recognize the tight, angular handwriting immediately and my heart speeds up to a racy trot. It’s dated March 22, 1984.
My dearest Jane,
I don’t know how many letters I will be able to send to you so I will try to convey as much as I can in this one. The secret we discussed has gone horribly wrong. Unfortunately, my past has caught up to me and I need to go into hiding for a while, maybe for a very long time. I can’t go into the details, and it’s better if you don’t know anyway. I understand your decision, but hope you will reconsider it. You are right that it wouldn’t be easy, but at least we could all be together. However, if your mind is made up, I don’t think Mattie or you are in any danger. If you ever have any reason to think you are, please call the following number and ask for Dan.
All my love,
Cedric
At the bottom of the page, a phone number is scrawled—312-555-7265—and I recognize the area code as one for Chicago. I shove the page back into its envelope and grab the next letter in the stack. This one is dated April 2, 1984, and, like the first one, it’s short and sweet. In the letter, my father says things are still up in the air and he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to come home. The closing is different in this one, however, as it reads: Miss you.
The third letter is dated July 8, 1984, and the tenor of this one is different from the others, less loving, angrier. He says he doesn’t understand my mother’s decision not to join him.
The fourth letter is dated August 15, 1984—two weeks after Desi was born—and in this one the tone is back to loving. While my father sounds hurt, he also seems resigned. There is mention of an enclosure he hopes will help, and he writes about how he wishes things could be different, but understands my mother’s reasoning. He also says how not seeing me will be the hardest thing he’s ever done.
As I read this, my eyes tear up. All this time, I thought my father left because he didn’t love or want us. Yet here he is, saying how difficult the separation will be for him. What’s more, he’s expressing his love for my mother, his desire to be with her, apparently not knowing she has just given birth to another man’s child. The anger and fury I feel toward my mother right now is so intense that if she was standing before me, I’d be sorely tempted to hit her.
There is one letter left, and before I open it, I take a moment to get my emotions under control. I wipe away tears with the back of my hand, blink hard several times, and remove the letter from its envelope.
November 25, 1984
My dearest Jane,
This will be the last correspondence you will get from me. As I’m sure you have already learned, that one final hope we had has fallen through. Since you seem determined in your decision, I guess there is no choice but to cut all ties. Please know that loving you has been one of the greatest things I’ve experienced in my life, and I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward you because of your decision. Please tell my daughter I love her. Let her know my leaving wasn’t by choice and I did so with her, and your, best interests in mind. Maybe someday we can be together again, but for now it looks as if it isn’t meant to be.
I wish you and Mattie nothing but the best in life. And please remember if you feel endangered at any time, you can contact Dan at the number I gave you before.
Sadly, but with love in my heart,
Cedric
I swipe again at the tears on my cheeks and set the letters, certificates, and divorce papers aside. Then I return all the other items to the chest and put the chest back where it was.
Back upstairs I turn out lights as I go, though I do it more out of habit than any desire to have my presence go undetected. As I leave the house and lock it behind me, I wonder if my mother is still with Hurley at the station. If she is, her questioning is going to get a whole lot more interesting once I get there.
Five minutes later, I pull into the parking lot behind the police department and let myself into the station, using the punch lock code for the back door. I head for Hurley’s office and see he’s not there, but Bob Richmond is.
“Hey, Bob,” I say. He waves at me over his shoulders, but continues doing whatever he’s doing on his computers. “Is Hurley in the conference room?”
“Yeah, with your mother.”
“Thanks. Any luck on finding Jeremy Prince?”
“Some, but nothing exciting. I’ll tell you and Hurley when you’re done with whatever it is you’re doing in there.” He nods in the general direction of the conference room.
What were we doing in there? More importantly, what was I about to do in there? My discoveries in the trunk had me feeling a mix of emotions: confusion, anger, sorrow, determination, even pity.
I turn and head for what serves as an interrogation room here, though it does double duty by also functioning as a meeting room. It doesn’t look like any other interrogation room I’ve seen either on TV or in other police stations. It’s carpeted, decorated—though badly—and has a large conference table surrounded by big, cushy chairs. It has audiovisual recording capabilities that can be triggered from the table. This, and a bolt in the floor by one of the chairs—sometimes used to cuff someone’s feet to the floor—are the only indications the room is routinely used to question witnesses and suspects.
I consider knocking before entering, my hand raised, fisted, and ready to go. But when I hear a faint murmur of voices coming from beyond, I put my ear to the wood to see if I can make out what they’re saying. The door is too thick, but I remember there is an observation room. I’d momentarily forgotten about it, since these days it hardly ever gets used for anything other than a secret trysting place. The door to it is only a few feet to my right, but it has no signage, no different look about it, making it easy to dismiss it as a storage closet. I have no idea if it’s locked, but walk over and give it a try. The knob turns easily and after feeling around on the wall for a light switch, I flip it on and go in.
Turns out the room is a storage closet of sorts. There are several boxes containing extra office supplies: pens, paper, those little notebooks all the cops carry, paper clips, staples, and such. To the left of the door is the observation window—from the conference room side, it appears to be a large mirror—and I can see my mother sitting on the far side of the table, still wearing her surgical mask. She looks cool and collected, not the frazzled woman I expected to see. Maybe Hurley hasn’t hit her up with the hard questions yet.
Hurley is currently the one doing the talking, but his voice is muffled. I study the panel below the window, see a knob with numbers on it, and turn it. Hurley’s voice fills the room.
“. . . and when you do, we can move ahead on this. But if you don’t cooperate with me, I can’t promise you what will happen.”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know anything. If I did, don’t you think I’d tell you?”
“No,” Hurley says without hesitation. “I don’t.”
My mother’s expression is halfway hidden behind her mask, but her eyes briefly grow bigger, giving away her astonishment. Her voice, however, is cool, calm, and collected. “It appears we are at an impasse, Detective.” She enunciates his title slowly, clearly, and I suspect this is an attempt on her part to rile him. I’ve asked her numerous times to refer to Hurley by his first name, since we have
a kid together, live together, and are about to get married. But my mother has steadfastly refused, most likely too disappointed in my financial choice for a husband to bother acknowledging him in any way other than professional.
“Jane, I know you don’t want to get caught up in a bunch of legal entanglements, and I’m certain you don’t want to spend any time in jail. I’m equally as certain you know more about Cedric Novak than you’re letting on. You do understand this is a homicide investigation? And Cedric is suspected of killing two people, possibly more?”
“Cedric didn’t kill anyone,” my mother says dismissively, assuredly.
“How would you know that? If what you’ve told me is true, you haven’t had any contact with the man in over thirty years. Maybe he’s changed during that time.”
My mother stubbornly shakes her head. “Leopards don’t change their spots,” she tosses out, and I roll my eyes. She used that phrase on me all the time when I started dating, usually regarding a boy she didn’t approve of. “Cedric isn’t a saint, but he’s no killer, either.”
I catch something in what she just said and I’m about to rap on the window, or bust into the room, when I realize Hurley has picked up on it, too.
“You say that like you’ve seen him recently,” Hurley says. “You didn’t say he wasn’t a saint, you said he isn’t one. You’ve had contact with him recently, haven’t you?”
My mother fusses with her mask for a moment, adjusting it slightly, stalling for time. Then she says, “I think I’ve had enough talk for one day, Detective. I’m tired and I want to go home. Am I under arrest?”
Hurley hesitates before he answers, “Not yet.”
“Then I’m leaving.”
She rises from her chair, and I know it’s now or never. I make a mad dash for the interrogation room.
CHAPTER 23
I come face-to-face with my mother five seconds later. “Sit down,” I tell her.
“Mattie, please, I don’t have time for this.”
“I think you do.” I hold up the letters I have in my hand.
My mother’s eyes—the only part of her face I can see because of her mask—look sleepy and bored at first, but the sight of those envelopes makes them open wide. She stares at them, blinking several times in rapid succession. Then her gaze shifts to me, her eyes narrowing down to a steely glint. I tower over her by at least six inches, and outweigh her by close to a hundred pounds. Yet that look in her eye instills fear in my heart and makes my legs tremble.
“You invaded my privacy,” she says through clenched teeth.
“It’s my life, too,” I tell her. “I have a right to know the truth. You lied to me. All these years, you’ve been telling me my father left us because he didn’t want to be with us. You said he was a wandering Gypsy who couldn’t settle down. You made me think he didn’t love me, didn’t care about me. But that wasn’t the case at all, was it?”
My mother maintains her flinty glare, and even though I’m quaking a little on the inside, I force myself to meet her steely gaze with one of my own. It’s a battle of wills, one that lasts a good thirty seconds before my mother finally looks away.
“Sit down,” I tell her again, and she turns around and heads back toward the seat she was in before. But halfway there, she stops and settles into a chair at the end of the table instead.
“Let’s discuss the content of these letters,” I say, sitting in the chair closest to her. “What did my father do that came back to haunt him? Why did he have to disappear? Why didn’t you go with him? And who is this Dan person he mentioned?”
“You don’t know what you’re getting into here, Mattie,” my mother says, giving me a pleading look. “There are things you don’t need to know, things it’s better you don’t know.”
“My father is involved in the murder of my colleague and his girlfriend. He’s here in the area. He’s been seen. You need to tell me everything you know. Now.”
She ignores my plea and won’t even look at me, focusing on her hands instead, twirling her thumbs.
“Mom, please.” My frustration level is so high I feel like I’m about to cry. It gets her attention.
She stops twirling her thumbs and looks at me. “Your father was into some bad stuff before he met me,” she says. “And he was a Gypsy, probably still is for all I know. He was part of a band of Gypsies that traveled around the Midwest pulling cons on people. Most of their victims were so embarrassed once they realized they’d been conned that they never reported the incidents. So the group would work an area for several months until they felt their reputation was spreading too much, and then they’d move on to a new town.” She sighs, looks away from me, and a hint of a smile hits her eyes. I can almost see it behind her mask.
“Do you know how I met your father?” she says, but she doesn’t wait for an answer. “He conned me. And then he returned the next day and admitted it to me, gave me back my money. He was a huge flirt, and I was so mad at him that at first I told him I wanted nothing to do with him. But there was something there between us, a spark, a connection . . . and he was persistent.” She sighs. “He wore me down, but I told him the only way we could ever be a couple was if he gave up his old ways. No more cons, no more traveling. He was going to have to settle down. He agreed, and eventually his ‘family’ ”—she makes little air quotes with the word “family”—“moved on without him.”
The smile fades from her eyes and she sucks in a deep breath, making her mask go concave for a moment. “But somewhere in his past, he conned the wrong person. I don’t know the details.”
I grunt and roll my eyes at this.
“I swear, I don’t,” she insists. “All I know is at some point in his past he got his hands on something he shouldn’t have. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t know whom he got it from. Apparently, it was important enough some cops in Chicago were offering him protection. But he didn’t trust anyone and he went into hiding.”
“He wanted you to go with him,” I say.
She nods slowly, then sighs. “He did, but I refused. I couldn’t live like that and I didn’t want you to have to live like that.”
“Plus, you’d already moved on, hadn’t you? Does Desi know she was born before you married her father, and while you were still married to my father?”
My mother’s eyes grow hooded. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mattie.”
“The hell I don’t! The dates don’t lie. They’re all right here,” I say, tossing the papers onto the table. “You didn’t go with my father because you were already with someone else. Not only were you having an affair, you were pregnant with Desi, with someone else’s child while my father was begging you to come with him.”
My mother shakes her head. “You’ve got it wrong, Mattie.”
“Stop with the lies, Mother,” I snap. “If Dad was hiding from someone, weren’t you worried they would come after you, after us?”
“Not really. I didn’t take your father’s name when we got married because he didn’t want to leave a trail that . . . Well, let’s just say his family didn’t approve. We did it in a small, private ceremony and I kept my Obermeyer name. He told me he was giving up the Gypsy lifestyle, leaving his family, but he lied to me. He was living double lives the whole time, spending half of his time with me and the other half with them. So when it came time to make a choice between leaving with him and living life on the run or staying put, I opted to stay put. I couldn’t trust him anymore because he’d been lying to me all that time. So, yes, I moved on. And on the off chance someone figured out the connection between him and me, I had an emergency number to call.”
“Yes, this Dan guy Dad mentioned in his letters,” I say, tapping the stack of them on the table. “Who was he?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I never called him. Never had a reason to.”
I stare at her, wondering if she’s telling me the truth. Given how much she’s kept hidden all these years, I have my doubts.
“Wh
ere’s this number?” Hurley asks.
I slide the letter with the number over to him and my mother leans forward with a sharp intake of breath. “Those letters are private,” she says, her tone strident.
I ignore her. I’m so angry with her right now I don’t care how upset she gets. Hurley looks at the letter, scanning it quickly and then focusing on the number at the bottom. He takes out his cell phone and dials it.
“That number is more than thirty years old,” I tell him.
“Nothing to lose by trying.” We sit in silence, waiting. “Hello,” he says, and my heart leaps. “Is Dan there?” He listens for a moment, and then says, “I see. Where are you located?” He listens again, and then says, “This is Detective Steve Hurley with the Sorenson, Wisconsin, Police Department. May I ask how long you’ve had this number?” I can vaguely hear the sound of a woman’s voice on the other end, though I can’t make out the words. “Okay, thank you for your time.” He hangs up and looks over at me. “The number belongs to a real estate company located in downtown Chicago, and she said they’ve had the number for at least twelve years because that’s how long she’s been there.”
“Is there any way to trace back and see who had it before that?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I’ll look into it.”
My mother sits back in her chair, her arms folded over her chest. Her eyes above the mask look angry. “Can I have my letters back?”
I shake my head. “I’ll give them back to you at some point, but not yet. I want to look at them a little more.”
She glares at me. “You may not believe me or understand it, but I did what I did because I believed it was the best thing for you.”
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