martinis and pretending to be interested in the cocktail chatter of bored suburban housewives who happen to have rich husbands.”
“You’d better hope times have changed, Quinn. In my day, debutantes and wives of the wealthiest entrepreneurs were privy to high-level state secrets and they brought down many a powerful skeptic.”
Quinn glanced back and flashed her a broad grin. “Spies, you mean? Like the rumors that floated around about Marlene Dietrich and Julia Child? Gram, if you believe that nonsense, you’re spending too much time watching late-night TV.”
She rubbed her arms to ward off the chill and listened to his laughter fade as he disappeared into the rain. Going inside, she locked the door, then picked up the phone that connected her to the loft rooms above the garage. “Joseph, it’s Norma. I’d like to ride along tomorrow when you take Hayley to day camp. There’s a little side trip I want to make….” When he asked where, she said, “I learned that a young woman’s renovating the farmhouse where Tony and I lived when we were first married. I’m interested in seeing what kind of changes she’s made to the old place. Nine? I’ll be ready. But I see no reason to mention our plans to Quinn. He’ll think I’m a nostalgic old fool.” She paused as Joseph commented on Quinn’s schedule. “That’s right. One day he’ll slow down. Still, I can’t fathom my grandson getting misty-eyed over relics from his past, let alone mine.” Norma chatted a bit longer before saying goodbye to her driver.
She felt she’d put her dilemma in perspective, but Joseph had underscored another issue. Young men weren’t sentimental. She should never have sent Quinn after her old love letters.
Shutting off the lights around the house, Norma went upstairs to get ready for bed. She’d thought the letters were long gone—thought Tony had found them and thrown them away She wondered why he hadn’t done that, then decided he must have wanted to make sure noone could dig them out of the trash. He’d become more and more paranoid, she recalled sadly, more fearful and suspicious.
Still, her heart felt lighter than it had in…oh, years.
As she washed her face and gazed at her image in the bathroom mirror, Norma Santini imagined herself the pretty girl of nineteen, the girl she’d been when Heinz had written her those letters. Her heart beat a little faster. Heinz—her first love. It was true what the romantics claimed; A woman never forgot her first love.
Chapter 3
Unable to settle down after Quinn Santini left, April spent a good hour mulling over why the man and his grandmother would even consider paying for property that belonged to them. Or at least, belonged to Norma.
As April had been the one to approach them about the letters, she would’ve thought Quinn was more likely to threaten to sue her for their return than pay her.
Eric’s boss—April understood his willingness to shell out the bucks. Knowing Eric as well as she did, she figured he’d probably built the letters into a promised scandal. The lengths to which Eric’s editor was willing to go was further proof that politics was a messy business. She’d checked the newspaper online and read back issues. There were editorials against Quinn’s platform and twice as many supporting his opponent.
So much for unbiased reporting.
But it was Quinn and Norma’s reaction that April found bizarre. It bothered her so much, she let it disrupt her plan to catch up on paperwork tonight.
Of the two Santinis, Quinn had been the one most visibly upset at the existence of the letters. Thinking back to when she’d blurted out the reason for her visit to their home, April recalled Mrs. Santini’s face. Unless her memory was completely off base, Norma had been shocked, but overjoyed, too. Then why had Quinn been so anxious to lay hands on the letters? He’d been willing to scrap what he’d declared to be an important previous engagement. Were the Santinis trying to protect themselves—or the identity of the letter writer?
April went back to her laptop. A college friend had located her birth mother through an Internet search. April didn’t know where to start. In France, perhaps. Darn, what was the name of that city?
It eluded her, and she didn’t own an atlas. Since she lived in the homes she remodeled, she never kept a lot of extraneous stuff. As a rule she scoured flea markets for a sparse quantity of furniture that would show well when she was ready to sell the house.
Scrolling through possible sites, April found a map of France. She hoped the city jotted on the back of Norma’s snapshot would jump out at her. But the print on the map was so small, she couldn’t place anything. And she’d forgotten her printer was on the fritz and that she’d dropped it off at the computer store for repair last week.
Giving up, she stored the map until she could remember the town. Instead, she Googled missing-person sites. Two that she checked out charged a hefty fee. And even to start, they wanted more information than a name, although one site said they’d work from a name and last-known location. Although disappointed that she didn’t seem to be making any headway, she typed in Heinz von Weisenbach’s name and requested a general search. No matches came up. She tried adding France. To her astonishment, two H. von Weisenbachs popped up. She bookmarked the site in case she wanted to go back at a later date. The first listing was a dud. It took her to a family-owned landscape-architect business in Mulhouse, France. April was positive that wasn’t the right city. The blurb listed a Web address should viewers want virtual examples of the family’s work. She scrolled on, muttering, “Sorry, folks. Your company’s a bit too far away to handle my landscaping needs.”
A double click on the second name took her to a U.S. military site with short paragraphs on medal recipients from various wars. Recipients were listed alphabetically. Her excitement quickly fizzled when she saw that this Heinz von Weisenbach, although in a correct age range, must’ve been an American. He’d been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for meritorious service—a medal authorized by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Unwilling to give up, April returned to the professional search site. Muttering, “what the heck,” she typed in her credit card information, followed by von Weisenbach’s name and last-known location as simply France. Satisfied that she’d done the most she could toward solving the mystery of the man in the photograph, April exited the site, and set the laptop on her nightstand.
She’d wasted enough time for one day on Norma and Quinn Santini. Still too restless to dig into boring paperwork but wide awake, she decided to work on something more immediate than worrying about a stranger’s old love letters. She went back to sanding pieces of cove molding that needed to be stained and nailed back up in the dining room. After a light sanding and brushing, she rummaged around until she found a small can of stain mixed to match the built-in cabinets.
Her watch indicated nearly 1:00 a.m. before she finished the chore, cleaned her brush and set the molding on sawhorses to dry.
Her busywork hadn’t produced the hoped-for effect. Long after she went to bed, her mind wouldn’t shut down. She continued to fret over the letters so many people desired. Quinn and Norma Santini. Eric Lathrop. And Eric’s boss. Not for the first time, April wished she had a better command of German.
The last time she looked, her bedside clock read three forty-five.
In spite of an almost-sleepless night, April rose early the next morning. Refusing to ruin another day by dwelling on Santini, his family or the letters, April dressed and brewed a pot of her favorite hazelnut coffee. She prepared cinnamon toast and munched on it while the coffee finished dripping through the French press. The French press reminded her of those blasted letters.
