If her mother had lied, if Amy had in fact been full-term...the timing was right.
Steven Hardy was her father. The man who had raped the young Michelle Cooper.
She felt as if she’d walked into a plate glass window. Bang. Dazed, she knew.
No wonder Mom couldn’t love me.
Amy ran for the bathroom, and barely made it before the acrid bile rose from her stomach.
CHAPTER THREE
JAKOB WENT HOME to his condominium, wishing he’d been able to talk Amy into dinner, at least, before he left her. As scrawny as she’d always been, she wasn’t ever very interested in food. He knew damn well she wouldn’t eat at all if she was upset by whatever her mother had put in that envelope.
He swore out loud, then scanned the contents of his freezer. Pizza was easiest. He turned the oven on, continuing to pace restlessly while he waited for the preheat buzzer.
He hadn’t gotten a real good look at what Amy pulled out, but he knew a pair of women’s panties when he saw them. Why in hell would the woman have put a pair of her own underwear in the time capsule?
His pacing took him to the wall of windows that were the reason he’d bought the condo. He was looking down at the Willamette River, dark but for glimmers of gold reflected from downtown lights. To him, the river always looked primitive despite the way humanity had caged it. He loved driving down to Champoeg and seeing the Willamette the way it had looked to early settlers, broad and powerful, floating between banks of deep forest.
The oven buzzed; he put in the pizza and set the timer. He made himself sit down and respond to emails he’d mostly ignored over the weekend. But his attention was only half on them. He kept seeing the shock on Amy’s elfin face when she pulled the last damn thing in the world she could have expected from the manila envelope.
As usual, he’d dropped his phone on the kitchen counter when he came in the door. Not so usual, when he went to the john he took it with him. He kept staring at it, as if he could will it to ring. Call.
Apparently that didn’t work, because it stayed stubbornly silent. He wanted to phone her, but she’d expressed herself too bluntly for him to mistake the message: Thank you, but I want to be alone. I don’t need you now. It wasn’t as if they were close. Jakob frowned. Close? They were strangers, and that was mostly his fault.
He had the momentary sense of standing on the edge of a dark, terrifyingly deep abyss. He didn’t like thinking about Amy, because those thoughts always brought him to this place, one that felt more like fear than he wanted to admit. As always, he found himself mentally backing away from it.
No point in revisiting their relationship. Fact was, he’d never acted like a brother did to a dearly beloved, or even barely tolerated, sister, and she had every reason in the world to resent him at the very least. The wonder was that she’d actually accepted his offer to accompany her to Frenchman Lake.
If something did upset her, why would she turn to him? She probably had good friends, maybe even a guy she was seeing.
Yeah, but then why hadn’t she asked that guy or her best friend to go with her this weekend? She could have said “Thanks but no thanks” to Jakob then and even gotten a little secret pleasure out of rebuffing him.
Maybe she didn’t have any good friends who lived nearby. Yeah, she’d gone to college here, but then moved away. Amy had only been back a few months.
He reluctantly admitted to himself that she had needed him because she didn’t have anyone else.
And because she needed family? He winced at that word in reference to Amy and him.
Nope, he told himself, not going there.
She’d promised to call him. He took another impatient look at the clock on the microwave. 8:39 p.m. Over two hours since he’d dropped her off.
Call, damn it.
* * *
IT TOOK SOME doing, but Amy found her baby book in a box on the shelf in her mother’s closet. She didn’t even know what she hoped to learn, but she was desperate. Anything. A clue. Somehow she was holding her fear and horror at bay. She’d taken a huge leap by assuming her mother had lied to her all her life.
Please let me be wrong.
The closet was vast. When Mom and Ken bought the house, it had had four smallish bedrooms upstairs, and in common with many houses of this era the few closets were grossly inadequate. Especially for a woman who loved shoes.
So the first thing they did was have walls torn out, and the floor space that had been two of the bedrooms was used to enlarge what had been the only upstairs bathroom up here, along with creating a second bathroom and a giant walk-in closet. The remaining small bedroom was for their very occasional guests. Like Amy. So far in her stay, the only reason she’d stepped foot in Mom and Ken’s bedroom was to run the vacuum cleaner around and whisk a feather duster over the blinds and the top of the end tables and dressers.
And yes, she’d known her mother had a thing about shoes, but not the extent of it. In her search to find anything about her childhood or origins, she’d been excited to find underbed rolling containers. Not so much when she pulled them out to find all four of them held shoes.
Wow, Mom. What a waste of money.
Amy didn’t bother with the dresser. Like her mother would keep daily reminders of her unwanted daughter among her socks, jeans or lingerie, where she’d see it every day.
Oh, ugh. Don’t wanna think about Mom’s lingerie.
She also ignored Ken’s section of the closet, which took up about a quarter of it. She could see the gaps where he’d removed clothes and shoes to take to Australia for the two-year stay. It was harder to spot gaps in Mom’s side, because she owned a truly ridiculous amount of clothes as well as the shoes.
Banker-style cardboard boxes marched along a high shelf. Amy dragged a chair in and took them down, one at a time.
Tax returns and files about expenses on the house. Slap the lid on, heave box back onto shelf.
Next.
Bank statements. Credit card slips. Receipts. Amy had always known her mother was obscenely well-organized, but this was ridiculous. Did she keep every scrap of financial information forever?
Amy had reached a corner. She could only remove this box because she hadn’t put the previous one back in place. It weighed less, she realized right away as she lifted it down, which meant it wasn’t packed with dense files as the other ones had been.
She stepped carefully to the floor, set the box on the seat of the chair and lifted off the top.
For a long moment she stared without comprehension. Then an involuntary sound escaped her and she reached out.
Her blankie. Oh, my God, she thought, I’d forgotten it. How could I? How she’d loved this blanket—no, really more of a comforter, with batting inside. The back side was flannel, worn thin by her childish grip. The front was a cotton fabric in swirled lavender and darker purple
