style="font-size:15px;"> Still, she gave her stomach a loving pat. “This counts as resting. I’ll even put my feet up if you scoot over.”
Ross did as he was told, as all husbands of extremely pregnant wives should do for their self-protection. Tucking a pillow beneath her feet that she had settled on the brown leather ottoman, he reached in the box and pulled out a stack of files.
“Who are we looking at today?” she asked, holding out a hand for him to offer her a stack.
“I just thought I would flip through these again. Maybe this time a name will ring a bell.”
“I hate thinking that some of these adoptive children searching for their birth parents will never find the answers they’re looking for though we have the answers right here.”
“With a lot of work and even more prayer, we’ll help them find those answers,” he told her.
Ross scooted closer to his wife, propped his feet next to hers and glanced down at the names on the file tabs.
“Bailey-Brock-Brown,” he read aloud. “Brown? If that won’t be like finding a needle in a haystack.” Every single name in those case files was another needle, but neither of them needed a reminder of that.
“Daley-Davenport-Dexter,” Kelly read aloud from her own pile before looking over at him.
Ross shook his head. “No. Nothing.”
“Yeah, me, neither.”
They continued on, listing names back and forth, but none sounded familiar. Even if one had, it wouldn’t have made a difference since these could have been the mothers’ maiden names—if these were the real files and not just another round of doctored documents.
Ross stopped on a file that said “Harcourt.”
“Now there’s a familiar name.” He turned the tab to the side, letting Kelly take a look. “I wonder how many Harcourt offspring are running around Chestnut Grove and the rest of Virginia without any idea who they really are.”
“Maybe a few. As long as the young women’s parents were willing to pay for Barnaby Harcourt’s silence. I doubt he gave relatives a discount on his rates.” Kelly frowned as she always did when she mentioned the founding director of Tiny Blessings whose illegal acts had tarnished the agency’s reputation.
For curiosity’s sake as much as anything, Ross flipped open the file and started calculating.
“This baby’s a thirty-three-year-old man now. Birth mother is named Cynthia. Recognize that one?”
She shook her head. “And her last name could be anything now.”
“The father is listed as ‘unknown.’”
Kelly made a sound of acknowledgment in her throat but didn’t comment further. The absence of a birth father was as common an occurrence in the adoption-agency business as the lack of complete information.
Ross’s hands tightened on the folder. If he couldn’t solve the problems for the agency his wife loved, then he’d at least hoped to help her reunite some of the adoptive children with their birth parents. Even in that plan, he was failing Kelly.
Shuffling the papers again, he smacked the file closed, but when he did, something fell to the ground. It wasn’t much, just a tiny slip of yellowing paper, about the size of a sticky note.
Ross automatically reached down to grab it and stuff it back in the file, but the two words stopped him with his hand still held high: “See Donovan.”
He cleared his throat, his pulse pounding. “Honey, ever see this?”
“What is it?” she asked, but her eyes widened and she reached into the box between them.
It was all Ross could do not to shove his pregnant wife out of the way and start riffling in the box himself, but somehow he managed to wait until she was finished. Her frown didn’t leave any doubt that she hadn’t found the file, but her expression lifted again, and she tilted her head to the side.
“You don’t think—”
“No,” he blurted. He didn’t need her to finish to know how crazy the idea sounded. It was too easy. He’d been a P.I. long enough to know it was never that easy.
But what if it is? an unwelcome voice inside him suggested. Maybe just this once, a case could be as simple as someone forgetting to remove a note from a file that the owner never intended anyone to find.
Ross glanced across the room, his gaze landing on two more boxes of files next to the breakfast bar. Kelly had been bringing them home frequently, cross-checking files from the office with the duplicates found inside the wall at the Harcourt mansion.
“You don’t happen to have any more Ds, do you?”
“I think so,” she said, already trying to push herself off the couch.
“Here, let me get it.”
He couldn’t get to the box fast enough. It was the thrill of the chase, and he knew it well. He flipped through the files, his hands landing on one that said “Donovan.” He carried it back to the couch, so they could look at it together.
“It might not even be the same Donovan,” he said to keep his own hopes from getting too high.
As he opened the file, his gaze, well trained from looking at so many documents, went right to the date of birth.
“It’s a match.”
That they’d both said it at the same time made them laugh, but they stopped just as quickly. Okay, they had a match. Now what?
Ross flipped through the file, reading about George and Edie Donovan and the newborn infant they adopted and named Alex. This version listed the birth mother as Mary Something-or-other, but it was probably the bogus one.
He handed the file to Kelly, already planning his steps. First, he would do an Internet search for the Donovans’ son, and then he would start eliminating from that pool those who couldn’t be this particular guy. Part of him hated to mess up another person’s well-ordered life, but the man deserved the chance to know the truth.
For a long time, Kelly didn’t look up from the file. She simply stared at it as if willing it to complete the puzzle. She leaned her head to one shoulder and to the other as if considering, and finally she turned back to him.
“Isn’t Eli Cavanaugh’s friend, the fireman who moved from Richmond, named Alex Donovan?”
“Hey, Donovan, get out here and shoot some hoops with us,” Trent Gillman called from the court adjacent to the parking lot as Alex climbed out of his SUV.
“Give me a few.” Alex shut the door and started toward the station. Basketball was one of the ways the men and women at the station killed a few hours on slow days or burned off steam after busier or more stressful ones. Today had certainly been one of the more stressful variety.
“Make it quick. We need somebody to kill in three-on-three.” To make his point,
