Chapter 7 #2
“I suppose you know where my dad lives,” she said, as he pulled back into the traffic lane.
“Yeah.”
As they drove out of the French Quarter, then to St. Charles Street, Craig kept glancing in his rearview mirror, making sure that nobody was following them.
“I guess you’re used to this cloak and dagger stuff,” Stephanie murmured.
“Part of my job description.”
As he drove up St. Charles, then turned onto St. Andrew Street, her heart started to pound. She hadn’t exactly had a pleasant encounter with her father, and she hadn’t expected to meet up with him again so soon.
“You get out. I’m going to leave the car around the corner,” he said as he pulled up in front of the house.
“I’ll wait for you outside.”
He gave her a critical look. “You really don’t want to be here, do you?”
“No. And I’m thinking that it’s not so great for you.”
“Because?”
“Because he’s given me to John Reynard, and he’s not going to be happy to see me with another man.”
“Given is a pretty strong word.”
She shot him a fierce look. “You don’t think I agreed to marry Reynard because I was madly in love, do you?”
“No. I thought you were interested in his money.”
She dragged in a sharp breath. “Thanks.”
“I didn’t know you then.”
“And now you do?”
“You can’t lie with your thoughts.”
“At least that’s something.”
He turned his head toward her, then looked back to the road. “I’m working my way through this situation—just the way you are.”
“You had some experience with it.”
“This is different.” He waited a beat before saying, “To get back to the current problem, tell your father I’m a detective you’ve hired to find out who the men were.”
“He’ll think John could handle that on his own.”
Craig shrugged. “Do you have a better idea?”
“No.”
Stephanie climbed out of the car and walked up the driveway toward the detached garage. When she looked inside and saw that her father’s car was missing, she breathed a little sigh of relief, then started wondering where he was.
Because she said she’d be outside, she waited for Craig on the wide front porch.
“It looks like my dad isn’t home,” she said.
“Good.”
“I hope so. He doesn’t like . . .”
She stopped.
“What.”
“Me sneaking around.”
“What the hell does that mean? This is your house.”
“Not anymore. I moved out.”
“Your father sounds like a real winner.”
“He’s had . . . a hard life.”
“Oh, come on.”
“He was used to wealth and privilege, and he lost that.”
“His own fault,” Craig pointed out.
“Maybe that makes it worse.”
“Do you always come up with excuses for him?”
“Let’s not go on about him,” she snapped, and he pressed his lips together, maybe because he realized he would gain nothing by going on about her on her father’s failings.
After she unlocked the door, she turned to him. “Come inside, but wait in the front hall.”
“I should check out the house.”
“For what?”
“Intruders.”
“Unlikely.”
To her relief, he stayed in the hall while she darted into the living room, then circled through the rest of the downstairs before climbing quickly up the stairs.
Leaning over the balcony, she beckoned to him. “Come on.”
“What are we looking for?” he asked when he reached the top of the stairs.
“I’m not sure; it was almost thirty years ago, so it’s not going to be on the computer, but Mom kept some boxes with papers and pictures in the top of her closet.”
Craig followed her into a bedroom where the furnishings were antique and the once-expensive fabrics were dusty and faded.
“Your dad sleeps here?” he asked.
“This was Mom’s room.”
“They had separate rooms?”
“She told him about fifteen years ago that she needed her own space,” Stephanie answered, embarrassed to be revealing private family matters.
The room had two large closets, both full of women’s clothes.
When Stephanie saw them, she caught her breath.
“Everything’s still right where she left it,” she murmured.
“I guess he misses her. Or he didn’t feel like making the effort to get rid of her stuff. All he had to do was shut the door.”
She dragged in a breath and let it out. “I feel funny about poking around in their lives.”
“Yeah, but we need to do it,” Craig answered. “Are those what you’re looking for?” He pointed to the cardboard boxes neatly stacked on the top shelf. They were old department store boxes, the kind nobody made anymore.
“Yes.”
He lifted several down and set them on the bed.
Instead of reaching for them, Stephanie stood unmoving.
Craig turned his head toward her. “I know this is making you feel . . . unsettled.”
She nodded. “And Dad is going to be mad if he comes back and finds me snooping.”
“I guess that’s tough. But maybe we can get out of here before he gets back. Do you want me to help you look?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
They each opened a box and began looking through the contents. Inside were old photographs of Stephanie and her parents, plus other memorabilia.
Craig held up a childish crayoned picture of a house surrounded by a flower garden. “You did good work.”
“I must have been pretty young. It’s a drawing of this house.”
“I actually can tell.”
She found a pile of essays she’d written.
“It’s strange to find this stuff. I wouldn’t have thought she’d kept it.”
Craig said nothing, only continued searching through papers. When he pulled out a thick folder, she looked at him. “What’s that?”
He thumbed through the contents.
“Do you remember anything about a place called the Solomon Clinic?”
“What is it?”
“Maybe this is what we’ve been looking for. It was a fertility clinic in Houma. There’s a copy of an application, then instruction sheets for what your mother was supposed to do before going there.”
He handed her some of the papers, and she went through them.
“I guess this is it.” She looked up from the documents. “We found out about me. Does the Solomon name mean anything to you?”
Craig considered the question. “As a matter of fact, it does.”
“How?”
His stomach clenched as he said, “Like you, I used to listen in on conversations. Probably all kids do.”
“And what did you hear?”
It was after Sam died, and my mother was pretty upset. I think I heard her on the phone trying to get some information about the Solomon Clinic.”
“You really remember that?”
“Yes, because of the way she was reacting. In her grief, I think she might have been considering trying to get pregnant again, but she found out that the clinic had closed.”
“She could have gone to someone in the DC area.”
“Maybe she thought Dr. Solomon was God—and he was the only one who could help her. For all I know, he could have acted that way with his patients.” He dragged in a breath and let it out. “Anyway, she apparently gave up on the idea.”
“But it sounds like your mother and mine went to the same place.”
“Only she didn’t take you back there for checkups, did she?”
“You went for checkups?”
“Yes. I remembered going somewhere with a waiting room full of kids my age. Now I think it must have been part of the deal—that the parents would bring the kids back to be examined.”
“And my mom was back in DC, so she couldn’t do it.” He thought for a minute. “I wonder if she agreed to take me and Sam there for checkups, but then didn’t comply.”
“Was she that kind of woman?”
He lifted one shoulder. “She was always willing to bend the rules when it suited her.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“I was supposed to have Ms. Franklin for my sixth-grade homeroom teacher. Mom got me into a different class because she thought Ms. Franklin was too lenient with the kids. Another time we moved into an apartment building where you weren’t supposed to have pets, but she brought our cat anyway.
Lucky for her it was a well-behaved animal and didn’t mess up the place. ”
They gathered up the papers and put them back into the boxes, then returned the containers to the top of the closet.
“Your mom found out the clinic closed,” she said.
“But maybe we can find out something online—or if we go to Houma.”
Stephanie turned to straighten out the bedspread where they’d laid the boxes, and he took the other side, pulling to remove the wrinkles.
“If we get out of here before your dad comes back, he’ll never even know we were here.”
They hadn’t finished smoothing out the bed when they both heard the front door open.
“What do you want to do?” Craig asked in a harsh whisper.
“Climb out the window,” Stephanie answered in the same tone.
“You’re kidding.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want Dad to find me upstairs with you, and I don’t want to get into an argument about what we were doing—not if I can help it. And I sure as heck don’t want him telling John about it.”
“We’re on the second floor.”
“But there’s an easy way to get out. We can climb onto the sunroom roof and get down that way.
” She hurried toward the window, opened the sash and stepped out.
Craig looked around to make sure nothing was out of place in the room, then he followed her onto the roof.
When he was outside, he closed the window behind them.
They moved along the wall toward the edge of the sunroom, and Stephanie pointed to the trellises that were fixed to the walls of the sunroom.
“Let me go first,” he said.
“No, I’ve done this before.”
“You snuck out of the house?”
“When I was grounded, yeah. The trellis is as good as a ladder.”
“But you haven’t used it in years, right?”
She shrugged. Before he could stop her, she stepped over the side, holding on to the weathered wood as she began to lower herself. He watched her going down, thinking that the wood might not be as solid as when she’d tried this last.
His speculation was confirmed when he heard a cracking sound and she fell several feet before catching herself.
“Are you all right?” he called.
“Yes.”
When she’d made it to the ground, he followed, testing the rungs as he went. The rest seemed solid, and he reached the lawn right after Stephanie.
They stared at each other. He would have hugged her in relief that they’d made it, but he knew that touching her now was a bad idea. They’d forget what they were supposed to be doing—which was getting away from her father’s house before he discovered them.
She must have been thinking the same thing. After long seconds, she walked rapidly across the back of the house and turned the corner.
As soon as she disappeared from sight, he heard her make a strangled sound.
“Stephanie?” he called in a hoarse whisper.
She didn’t answer, and he hurried to catch up, then stopped short when he rounded the corner.
Stephanie was standing rigidly in front of a man who was holding a gun to her head.