Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Camellia Rio
Camellia knew that the woman calling herself Cilla Travail was a ginger-haired beauty with a soft smattering of freckles across her nose and that her real name was Priscilla Bishop.
She hadn’t expected Cilla’s “son” to look like heaven in blue jeans, with long black hair that made her fingers want to touch it, and brown eyes full of pain and confusion. He was so beautiful that for a moment she’d forgotten her own name. He was Native American, not red Irish like Priscilla.
Not that she’d expected him to look like her.
The house was small and neat, except for that one room.
While not trashed, she could see that it had clearly been searched.
Funny, though, how the stacks of clothing on the hospital-style bed were still folded, placed specifically enough that she thought they were in order, and the things on hangers were draped across the bottom.
Drawers were open and empty. The cushion was off the rocking chair, but standing upright against it.
Cilla’s room had been searched.
Neatly.
Wolf waved her to the living room where a braided oval rug lay beneath a floral-patterned camelback sofa and a matching loveseat with pretty wood trim. Some clothes lay on one cushion and her host scooped them up—a button-down flannel shirt and a T-shirt, she thought.
Cilla said he worked on a construction crew. The image of him coming in at the end of a hard day, peeling off his shirts on his way to a hot shower, popped in unbidden. She traced his imaginary path with her eyes and, sure enough, there was a closed door at the end of it. Bathroom, for sure.
She should not be this attracted to him. This job could be a threat to her recent vow of celibacy and aspirations to old maid-hood.
“Have a seat,” he said. “You want anything? And by anything, I mean a coffee or a beer, and it’s kinda late for coffee.”
“Is the beer cold?” She sat down on the cute sofa. There was an old-fashioned look to the place, coffee table and end tables like her own mom’s, with little doilies on them and stacks of coasters. There was a TV mounted to the wall.
He must know, she thought. Why else go through his mother’s room like that unless he was looking for the truth?
Was he angry?
Was he dangerous?
A ripple of apprehension tiptoed over her spine and she looked at the room again. Nothing had been thrown or broken. It looked like a careful, respectful search, not a temper tantrum.
Her spine relaxed slightly.
Wolf Travail headed deeper into the house, and when he flipped on the lights, she could see all the way into the kitchen where he’d gone.
In seconds, he was heading toward her again with two dewy brown longnecks.
He opened them both, then handed her one and took the rocking chair between the sofa and loveseat.
He moved with an easy grace that didn’t go with the strain on his face.
His really handsome face.
“So Ma has life insurance? You know she’s still alive, right?”
“Yeah. I know. She left word with her doctor to call her lawyer when she’d passed, or was near passing, if it could be known, and he let me know. I’m so sorry you're losing your mother right now. I can’t even imagine.”
Her voice cracked at the end, and that seemed to make him look at her. She was embarrassed that her eyes burned, but the thought of losing her mom… She reached across to put a hand over his, where it rested on the arm of the chair. “I’m deeply sorry. I mean it.”
“Thank you,” he said, and he was looking into her eyes like he could see that she meant it. “You’re the first person to say that to me, besides her nurses.”
She felt for him. Especially because she was about to tell him that he wasn’t who he thought he was—that none of the things he thought he knew about himself were true.
She took a drink of the beer, ice cold and perfect.
“So…you were looking for something?” As she asked, she nodded toward the bedroom.
He glanced that way, too. “Yeah. It’s uh…personal.”
Yeah, he wasn’t going to admit anything, even if he knew. And why should he? He didn’t know who she was or why she’d come.
She guessed she might as well just spit it out, then.
She took a breath, then said, “Travail wasn’t your mom’s real name. She’s been using Cilla Travail ever since she left home at fourteen.”
He leaned forward suddenly. “How do you know that?”
“She told me.”
He still seemed confused, but he was studying her face like the answers he needed might be found there. “Do you know…?” Then he paused and searched the room as if for the right question. No wonder. He probably had a thousand. “…where I was born?” he asked at length.
Her heart clenched at how eagerly he asked it. She spoke slowly, carefully. “The official records say it was a home birth, attended by a midwife who’s since died. Your birth certificate was issued as Wolf Travail. Cilla didn’t change her own name legally until much later.”
“Probably couldn’t afford it.” He took a deep breath, closed his eyes as if to gather his thoughts. When he opened them again though, the tension lines between his eyebrows had remained. “I still don’t understand why you know these things.”
“Cilla’s lawyer asked me to look into things to make sure none of this messed up the insurance payout. It’s only twenty-five thousand, but—”
“Dollars?”
“Yes. The lawyer helped her apply for Medicaid. It was just approved. She might not even know yet. But you won’t have to worry about that. Anything not covered can go onto a payment plan.”
“How the hell did she do all that?”
“He says she paid a little from her paychecks every week, but uh…” She shrugged. “But I think they might’ve had a thing once. Just a vibe I get.”
He nodded. “Makes sense. Men fall for my Mom, always have, but as soon as they start getting too close, she cuts ’em loose.” He sighed deeply, his grief in his eyes. Then he said, “And how do you fit into all this?”
“Well, the lawyer hired a private investigator on your mom’s behalf—me.”
“You’re an investigator.”
She nodded. “I was paid in advance to…help you figure things out.”
His brown eyes were swimming in emotion. “Like what things?” he asked.
“Like…who you are.” She’d said too much. She was trying to ease into this for his sake. She felt for him. It was way too easy to do.
Wolf looked at her for a long moment. He took a thoughtful pull from his beer, then set it on the stand.
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense, Camellia.
If my mother wanted me to know the truth, why not just tell it to the lawyer?
” He looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head so his long black hair moved behind him.
“Why would she make it so complicated? Why would she need a PI when she could’ve just told me herself? ”
“She couldn’t just tell you herself because she’s never known.”
He frowned hard, rising from his chair. It kept rocking after he stood. “What does that even mean?”
She rose, too, gauging the distance to the door before she went on.
“When Cilla was fourteen years old, Wolf, she found you washed up along the banks of the Rio Grande after a flash flood had raged miles upstream. She mistook you for an immigrant baby and was afraid of what would happen to you if she turned you over to the authorities. So she just…kept you.”
His eyes were as wide as the universe just then, and the pain that swirled in them just as infinite. There was no anger, no menace there. He didn’t smash anything or swear or punch a wall. She didn’t think he was that kind.
Not like Earl.
Wolf
The room started spinning and not from the beer. Wolf reached out for balance and clasped the woman’s shoulder. He hadn’t meant to, but before he could pull his hand away, she covered it with one of hers, and said, “I know this is a shock.”
His mouth was open, but he wasn’t breathing. He was looking inward, focused on nothing. And what he found inside himself was hollow. His mother had found him? Who the hell was he?
Camellia brought her beer bottle around and pressed it to the back of his neck. He sucked in a sharp breath at the chilly contact, then met her eyes. “She found me?”
“Yeah. She did. And this.” She pulled a wad of brown paper from the pocket of her flannel-lined denim jacket, ducking away as she did, so his hand fell from her shoulder to his side again. She handed it to him.
He took the packet and shivered all the way to his bones as he unwrapped it to find a small leather bracelet that spelled out his name in beads: “WOLF.” The O was a round moonstone bead with a howling wolf’s head carved into it.
“Cilla told me this was tied around your wrist when she found you.”
He looked up again. Her dark blue eyes were wet.
“I’ve been paid in advance to help you find out where you came from, Wolf—if and when that’s something you want to do. Okay?”
“I—I don’t know. I can’t even think right now.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to decide anything now,” she said quickly. “Look, I met with your mom and Dan Tyner—the attorney—a couple of times when she was setting all this up. Her story… It got to me, that’s all. I’m at your disposal, okay? Whenever you’re ready.”
He peeled apart the curtain of confusion for a moment. She was taking a card from a pocket, handing it to him. “At least you know your name is really Wolf. At least, that’s what the bracelet suggests.”
He said, “If you talked to Ma, you probably know more about me than I do.”
“It’s all in the diaries. She told me it was. But I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Anything I know, at least.”
He nodded. “I was…searching her bedroom for answers. Easier ones, faster ones, I guess.”
She nodded. “I’d like to…visit her, if that would be okay with you. I want to let her know that her wishes are being carried out. It was important to her. All she had to leave you, she said.”