Chapter 9
NINE
GAbrIEL – TUESDAY EVENING
“The Puffins?” Gabe said. He looked at Casey and then Elton, his eyebrows reaching for his hairline.
“Yep. One of Washington’s best-kept secrets, the tufted puffins. Unfortunately, the population is dwindling for reasons we don’t understand,” Casey replied, coming around to perch his hip on the arm of the couch. The couch creaked under his weight.
“Do not break my furniture. This thing is vintage.”
“Vintage Ikea maybe,” Casey muttered, shifting again.
“Maybe so, maybe so. It keeps my ass off the carpet, so don’t break it.”
He glanced down at the yearbook, where a tufted puffin floated serenely across the cover, bobbing in the waters of the Salish Sea. “How did I not know about this?” Gabe waved the booklet. “Puffins! Real puffins.”
Gabe was not any kind of birder, but he could filibuster with the best of them.
Learning that puffins were a local high school’s mascot was officially the best part of this weird-ass week so far, and it was only Tuesday.
Much better than possessed furniture and strange young women claiming he was their father.
“Quit your stalling and see if Heidi’s in that book,” Elton ordered. “Or else hand it over and let one of us take a look at it.”
Gabe narrowed his eyes in response to Elton’s bossy but correct assumption that he was avoiding opening it.
Heidi had saved the damn thing for a reason.
Still, Gabe felt apprehensive, his natural curiosity at bay for the time being.
If Casey and Elton hadn’t been there, he would’ve stuck the boxes in a closet and ignored them forever. Which both of them probably knew.
“Fine.” He sat down on the opposite end of the couch from Elton and flipped the book open to the first page.
“Like ripping off a Band-Aid. Oh look, they had a band.” He pointed to the photo of kids with French horns, tubas, and trumpets that took up the first page. “I bet they still do. Do high schools have marching bands anymore?”
“Gabriel,” Elton growled, reaching for the book.
Rolling his eyes and catching Casey’s amused glance, Gabe gave in and skipped forward a few pages to where the student pictures began.
Six to a page, the shots were, of course, printed in black and white.
He appreciated that Casey shifted so he could look over Gabe’s shoulder while he searched for his mother.
“She could have left a damn clue, maybe thrown another letter in one of these boxes.”
What fun would that be, Chance?
All the underclassmen years were lumped together in alphabetical order, while the senior class was listed separate from the rest. A quick glance informed him that there was no one with the last name Karne. Not a big shock. Gabe had long suspected that his surname had been created out of thin air.
“No Karne. Why am I not surprised?”
“Keep looking,” said Elton. “Do you want me to drive home and get my magnifying glass?”
“No, I do not need a magnifying glass.” Maybe he did, but he wasn’t admitting that right now. The pictures weren’t so small he couldn’t focus on them. He just didn’t want to.
“Suit yourself,” Elton said with another huff.
Gabe ran his index finger under each shot of the impossibly young-looking students, searching for the one who might be Heidi. Why else would she have kept this yearbook? Gabe had never been one hundred percent certain of her age, but his mom would have been what, sixteen or seventeen in 1978?
A quick calculation told him there’d been no more than two hundred students that year, less than fifty in the senior class.
Gabe’s final high school had had a population of over two thousand, allowing him a comfortable level of anonymity at the time.
Less than two hundred? Everyone knew everyone else’s business, which Heidi would’ve hated.
“She wasn’t a senior, or she didn’t have her picture taken,” Gabe said to his audience. “Hang on while I go back through the rest of the riffraff.”
He flipped the pages back to the start of the undergraduates and forced his finger to move slowly down the page and not skip past anyone. There was nothing on the first few pages.
At the next one, Casey bumped Gabe’s shoulder. “Oh, check it out, third row, middle.”
Staring out from the yearbook page was Eli Rizzi. He’d been a junior, which meant he was somewhere around seventeen years old. Gabe would never have recognized him, proving that he also might not recognize his own mother.
“Who knew he’d grow up to be a POS. Does he look like a criminal to you? Although look at those weaselly eyes.” Gabe said, peering closer at the grainy picture of the former Twana County sheriff. “Why did I think he moved here from somewhere else?”
“Westfort is somewhere else. Back in those days, it seemed far away,” Elton told them. “The bridge over the isthmus wasn’t built until the early 1980s, so if the weather was bad or the tide high and dangerous, people didn’t come or go from here to there.”
“What a pig. I hate that he probably knew Heidi.”
His attention strayed up the page, and he sucked in a sharp breath. There, nestled in between O and Q, was his mother. At least, he thought so.
“Shit, there she is.” He jabbed a finger toward a black-and-white image with Holly Pritchard underneath. Holly. Holly wasn’t a name he’d noted when Juliet Carter had stopped by with her faked paperwork, but Pritchard was.
He stared at the photo, narrowing his eyes.
Unless Heidi had a doppelg?nger, this was his mother.
This very young version of his mom reminded him of Marcia Brady—she’d had long, straight hair of an indeterminate dark blond or brown, held back with what looked like plastic clips.
She wasn’t smiling. Which, to be fair, Heidi hadn’t done often over her life. A true-life case of resting bitch face.
You smiled enough for the both of us, Chance.
Elton and Casey leaned in to get a closer look, their heads momentarily blocking his view.
It was Elton who nodded first, saying, “You’re right. She couldn’t have been much older when she showed up looking for work.”
“Holly Pritchard. Huh. There you are, Mom. Why did you decide to use the name Heidi Karne?” She’d claimed she’d never married, but Pritchard had been a name she decided to shed. Gabe looked away from the picture to Elton, as if the old man he considered to be family might have the answer.
“Can’t say. Heidi Karne is the only name I knew her by. But I’m not surprised to learn she was from around these parts. How else would she have known about Heartstone Island? We aren’t exactly the center of the universe.”
“And she never said anything to you about Westfort or her family?”
“No, not that I recall. And I don’t think she ever used that name with me, but that was a long time ago.
I could have forgotten. I’ve heard the name Pritchard, there’s plenty of them around, but never had any reason to connect Heidi to them.
” Elton pursed his lips and shot Gabriel a complicated glance.
“Heidi was not someone I would describe as open or warm. As you know, she didn’t invite many people to get to know her.
Frankly, I’m still scratching my head over David Delacombe.
I suspect he was a one-time-only incident of letting her guard down. ”
Ah yes, Gabe’s sperm donor, David Delacombe. In a way, it was nice to know Heidi had had what he was going to imagine was a steamy affair at least once in her life. It made her a bit more human to him. David must have been something to get past Heidi’s barriers. Or a fast talker.
“And she ended up saddled with me.”
Elton waggled his head. “I understand that Heidi wasn’t perfect, but she kept you. She didn’t have to. And now it’s starting to look like she was trying to get away from something. What, we don’t know—”
“Family makes the most sense,” Casey interjected.
Elton nodded again. “Family, most likely. But she kept you, Gabe. There were other options for single mothers back then. She kept you, kept a roof over your head, brought you up the best she knew how. Whatever you take away from this”—he gestured at the unsmiling picture of his mother—“don’t forget that.
Heidi did the best she could with what she had to work with. ”
“I think I want a reason to be angry with her.” He really did. Gabe wanted to be furious, to rail at his mother for her shortcomings and the decisions she’d made. But Elton was right, she had done the best she could. Maybe his childhood could’ve been better, maybe not.
“Not all my memories are bad. Actually, most of them aren’t, and the bad ones I most likely brought on myself. Let’s face it, I can be impulsive sometimes.”
Casey was unable to repress a smirk. “Sometimes?”
“Yeah, yeah, so sue me.” A smile played at the corner of Gabe’s lips.
“Unless there’s a set script, I improvise.
And okay, yeah, it occasionally doesn’t go quite right.
But in all seriousness, I’m a bit unsettled by all this and the possibility that there’s more I don’t know.
That she hid so much from me. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what made Heidi tick, and it turns out I didn’t know anything, not even her given name. ”
He felt like he should be angry, but what he felt instead was exhaustion coupled with a sense of loss.
A history had been hidden, one that he had no real tools to connect back to.
Gabe glanced down at the yearbook. Maybe that was the point of this?
What if the solution was to meet Heidi-slash-Holly while trying to discover the truth?
It’s not pretty.
Yeah, well, that wasn’t a surprise.
“There are those who would argue that a taken name has more meaning than a given one,” Casey pointed out.