smiled at her exuberance. “That’s good. You haven’t been here a full day and already found some of your kin.”
Jenna practically skipped up the stairs to her room. Her aunt hadn’t been listed so she may not have a phone. But it didn’t matter. She’d wait until midmorning tomorrow and visit her. Jenna could hardly wait to see her aunt’s face when she identified herself.
She had a difficult time falling to sleep that night.
By the next morning, Jenna was filled with anticipation, although she was nervous, as well. This was the day that she had been waiting for all these years. She could feel her heart thumping.
Jenna found the place with no trouble. She pulled up in front of her aunt’s row house and slowly got out of the car. She took a couple of deep breaths to relieve the constriction in her chest, then walked up to the door and knocked. When she heard no one stirring, she worried that her aunt might have moved. Wouldn’t that be ironic after Jenna had come so far to see her?
Jenna knocked again and waited.
A female voice yelled, “I’ll be there when I get there. Just hold on. And you’d better not be peddling anything because I’m not interested!” At her last words Morwenna Hoskins swung open the door. At least Jenna guessed this was her aunt, although seeing her didn’t trigger any memories.
The years had not been kind to Morwenna. Jenna knew that she was in her fifties and yet she looked considerably older. Morwenna leaned on a cane and looked at her with suspicion.
“Well? What do you want?”
“I, uh, I mean, hello,” Jenna said. “I’m not selling anything. Actually I came from Australia to find you. I’m your niece, Jenna.”
Whatever reaction Jenna had expected, she hadn’t thought she would be stared at with such distaste. Morwenna studied her without stepping back to invite Jenna inside. Instead, her aunt continued to stand in the doorway as though she had never heard of her.
Jenna didn’t know what to say. Why wasn’t her aunt more pleased to see her?
Finally, Morwenna spoke. “My niece? If you’re from Australia you must be Hedra and Tristan’s girl.”
Jenna relaxed a little and smiled. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
Morwenna scowled. “I told them and told them that nothing good was going to come of their moving halfway around the world. That’s exactly what I told them. ‘Nothing good will come of your move.’ And I was right, wasn’t I? They were there no more than two years before they were gone—swept away by floodwaters or some such fool thing. I always said they should have listened to me, but then, Tristan always thought he knew best about everything.” She eyed Jenna warily. “So what do you want?”
Dismay swept over Jenna. “I, uh, I just came by to introduce myself. I’m afraid I don’t have many memories of living in Cornwall, but since this was the place I was born, I came back to get to know the rest of my family.”
Morwenna was shaking her head before Jenna stopped speaking. “You’ve had a wasted trip, then. You don’t have family around here. I don’t know where Tristan found you—he would never say—but it wasn’t around here.”
Jenna stared at Morwenna, thinking she had misunderstood her. “Found me?”
“It’s like what I told that man from Edinburgh that came looking for you a few months ago…we’re not blood relatives. Who knows where they got you? Hedra showed up here one day with a newborn, proud as she could be. Tristan was beaming from ear to ear. I warned them about taking somebody else’s child to raise. You never can tell what’s in the blood, you know. Why, someone unknown like that can grow up to be thief or a murderer or something worse.”
Jenna stared at the woman, doubting her ears. Was the woman insane? What was she rattling on about…and what did Morwenna consider worse than murder?
“Am I understanding you correctly?” Jenna finally managed to say. This woman was shattering her world. “You’re telling me I was adopted?”
“Are you deaf or something? Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. You’re adopted.” Her eyes narrowed. “You didn’t know, huh?”
“No. I had no idea.”
“Well, somebody should’ve told you before now, to my way of thinking. I can remember when I got the news that Tristan was gone. That was an awful time for me. My only sibling and all. A terrible time. If he’d only listened to me, he might have been alive today.” Morwenna made a face. “I was real put out with them people calling from Australia, wanting me to take you in. I told them I had eight of my own to raise and I certainly didn’t need a seven-year-old underfoot, as well.”
Morwenna’s words beat at Jenna as though each one was a stone aimed at her heart. She had no way to protect herself, nothing to say. So the authorities had attempted to find a member of her family to take her before placing her in an orphanage.
Jenna stared at the woman in horror. She had to get away. Thank goodness she hadn’t been invited into the woman’s home. She would have felt suffocated by her anger and cruelty.
Despite the shock of discovering she’d been adopted, she was fervently grateful that she was no kin to this woman.
“Thank you for clearing up my confusion,” Jenna said quietly. “You mentioned a man from Edinburgh asking about me. Could you give me his name?”
“That’s been a few months ago. Let me think…I believe it started with a D. Something D…Davis, Dennis…no, that’s not right.”
“Could you describe him?”
“Why? You thinking about looking him up? He said he was from Edinburgh but he didn’t fool me. He had an American accent. No telling where he was from. Wait a minute. His name sounded French…Dumas! That’s it. Something Dumas. I don’t remember his first name. You look nothing like him, if that’s what you’re thinking. He has dark hair and eyes and he’s tall.” Morwenna flicked a glance up and down Jenna as though to emphasize her statement.
Jenna knew she was far from being tall, so she nodded her understanding. “I appreciate your help,” she said, wanting to run while Morwenna was drawing breath and before she continued talking.
She turned and walked back to her car, her shoulders back and her chin up.
Only after she entered the pub where she’d eaten the night before did she realize that she was trembling. She vaguely recognized that she was in shock. She asked for a cup of tea and when it was ready she went over to one of the back tables and sat down.
Nothing about her life was how she had thought it was. The Craddocks had adopted her. Why hadn’t she known? There was nothing in the papers her parents had left to have warned Jenna. Her birth certificate showed Hedra and Tristan as her parents and said that she was born at home. She didn’t have to look through them again to know that there had never been a mention of an adoption.
Jenna flashed back to the time when she’d been taken to the orphanage. She had never felt so bewildered or so alone. Jenna realized that the only constant in her life since then was that she had no one…no one at all.
So what was she going
