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  Perhaps Sheila had. If so, would I?

  Of course not. I had no desire whatsoever to profit from my birth mother's death, and my every impulse was to assure the man of that. And yet, I couldn't shake the feeling that my personal gain might not be the only thing at stake—that I owed it to Sheila to at least understand the situation before refusing her bequest.

  I always loved you, Meara.

  The words haunted me. I had resolved to be strong, that never again would I let my soft heart make me vulnerable to another person’s manipulation.

  But despite every way in which Sheila had dropped the ball, despite however shallow or immoral a person she might have been, I knew that I couldn’t turn my back on those desperate brown eyes that had—in their last moments of life—looked into mine with such affection.

  And if I thought I could, I was kidding myself.

  "I am sorry about your father, Fletcher," I called out, trying to keep from my voice the sadness that swelled within me. "And I’m not trying to make trouble for you. I don’t want to be your enemy."

  He paused in mid climb, and for a moment I thought that he would turn around and say something.

  But I was wrong. He continued climbing, and within seconds he was out of sight.

  Chapter 6

  It didn’t feel right—looking through Sheila’s things. No matter how many times I reminded myself that it had to be done and that there was no one else to do it, I still felt as though I were trespassing.

  There wasn’t much to see: one dresser filled with lingerie and separates, and perhaps half a closet’s worth of hung-up clothes. On the closet floor lay two large, battered suitcases, which I assumed were empty until I picked them up. When I realized they were full, a heaviness settled over me.

  Had Sheila, in her forty-six years, amassed only enough belongings to fill two suitcases and a couple of garment bags? Or did she have another home somewhere?

  My heart beat fast as I dragged one of the suitcases out of the closet and heaved it onto the master suite’s exquisite four-poster mahogany bed. The bedroom was no more ornate than the others in the inn, but its bathroom was larger, and it was connected to a small sitting room and walk-in closet. My guess was that the room had once been rented like all the others, but that Mitchell had moved here from the white frame house sometime after Rosemary’s death. Like Sheila, the belongings he had carried to the inn were bare bones. If he had been a man of gadgets and tools, he had left them elsewhere.

  My hand trembled slightly as I fidgeted with the suitcase’s metal latches, though what I was afraid of, I wasn’t sure. The lid creaked upward on stiff hinges, and as I gazed at the contents beneath, I breathed a sigh of relief. More clothes. These for colder weather, including a worn leather jacket, wool hat, and gloves. A pair of weatherproof boots. A decorative hand mirror. A plastic snow globe from the Washington Monument.

  That was all.

  I closed the suitcase again, pushed it aside, then retrieved its mismatched mate. The second was almost as big, but not nearly as heavy. I lifted it onto the bed and opened it hurriedly, anxious to end the process.

  On top lay a faded handmade quilt in a Texas Star pattern, well used, but carefully folded. Below it lay a single book: a King James Bible, red, leather-bound, and worn. I lifted the Bible and opened it. The inscription page was blank, dashing my sudden hope of uncovering some of my biological family’s history. Yet, as I ran my thumb along the book’s outside edge, I noticed that there were gaps among its gold-gilded pages. I slipped a finger into one, and my breath caught as a tiny black-and-white picture fluttered down onto my lap.

  I picked it up.

  The picture was of a baby. A typical hospital newborn shot—showing only a tiny head with squinting eyes and one clenched fist. The infant, like most babies at that tender age, looked annoyed. Its dark, wavy hair was sparse. It looked like no one I knew, but then, most newborns didn’t. I flipped the photo over.

  Amanda Michelle.

  I sat motionless for a moment, then turned the picture over again, staring into the tiny eyes. Could it be me?

  Yesterday in the hospital, Sheila had called me Mandy. Either the infant in the photo was me or, in her delirium, she had confused me with someone else.

  A sister?

  My heart leapt, and I worked hard to reign in its exuberance. Having—or finding—siblings had always been one my deepest longings. As loving as my small family was, I had spent much of my childhood feeling lonely. Not a holiday went by that I hadn’t wished for other children to make mischief with, or even for other adults to fill the empty seats at our table. At Thanksgiving the three O’Rourkes had always feasted sensibly on slices of turkey breast or a portion of a ham. And though I never said so to my mother, who had a tendency to take any complaint as a personal failing, I would have traded half my Christmas presents just to see a whole bird on the table—and to engage assorted cousins in a bitter fight over the drumsticks.

  The knowledge that I might have biological half siblings somewhere in the world had served as both a constant comfort and tantalizing hope from as early as I was able to understand the concept. I had nursed the prospect silently, like a dirty secret, right up until the day of my first meeting with Sheila, when to my great disappointment I learned that she had never married nor had any other children, and that furthermore, neither my maternal grandparents nor my birth father were still living. My birth father had died in a motorcycle accident only a year after I was born; she was sure I had no paternal half-siblings, either.

  I had accepted the grim news without question. Now I had to wonder.

  Keep your head, Meara. I continued to stare at the baby in the photograph, trying not-so-subconsciously to rule out any likeness to myself. But there was little to go on. I had no idea what I had looked like as a baby; my parents had no photos of me before the age of four.

  Amanda Michelle, I repeated to myself. It could have been my birth name. I knew full well that my adoptive parents had named me for my Irish grandmothers, Meara and Kathleen. Sheila could have named me Amanda—then thought of me as Mandy ever after.

  It made perfect sense.

  My heart fell at the thought, and I chastised myself. Learning that my birth mother had held on to a picture of me should be uplifting, not disappointing. It had been foolish of me to resurrect the sibling dream at all—even for a moment. I was an only child, and I always would be. That was nothing to complain about.

  I replaced the baby photo in the Bible and flipped farther along its width. Another gap in the pages appeared, and I opened to it.

  A second photograph lay wedged near the Bible’s spine. This one was in color, though time and inexpensive printing had distorted its hues to a pinkish purple. I stared at the image as if I were looking at a ghost, my pulse racing. There could be no doubt this time. The child in the picture was me.

  Three, maybe four years old, playing in a sprinkler. A two-piece, checked swimsuit spanned my thin frame while my unruly hair, even wet, flung out in all directions like an explosion. My brown eyes sparkled as I mugged for the camera. My cheeks were rosy, my smile bright.

  I flipped the photo over in my lap. The back side was blank. Grabbing up the Bible, I pored through its pages roughly, looking for others. The baby picture fell out again, and along with it, one more photograph.

  I was around two years old, wearing a dress, white and frilly, with shiny shoes. My hair was shorter, pulled back from my face into two ponderous dog ears. I was standing against an institutional-looking hallway of painted concrete block—perhaps a church. Someone adult-sized had been crouching beside me.

  But that someone was gone. A jagged, ugly cut ran along my side, leaving only empty space where my companion should have been.

  Who?

  My stomach roiled. I gathered the pictures together and stuffed them back into the Bible, then replaced the book in the suitcase. My heart thumped like a jackhammer.

  I knew that I had been in the foster care system befor
e my parents adopted me. It was one of the few things they had told me. But how long had I lived with Sheila? After she told me in the coffee shop that I had been relinquished as an infant, I assumed that I had spent the next several years bouncing around in foster homes, waiting for appropriate adoptive parents. But if that were true, Sheila wouldn’t have had any pictures of me other than the newborn shot.

  She didn’t give me up at birth, I thought, confirming a suspicion I had resisted, even when nagged by my common sense. A healthy infant cleared for adoption wouldn’t require prolonged foster care. Children languished in foster care because of how long it took to legally terminate parental rights. Which is what the state did when parents were neglectful. Or abusive.

  I grabbed both suitcases by the handles and hefted them back into the closet, the leather suddenly seeming hot enough to singe my fingers. I didn’t want to touch them. I wanted nothing to do with anything of Sheila’s. I started to walk out the door, but didn’t make it. Instead I stopped and fell upon the bed, turned my face into the coverlet, and cried.

  ***

  I could always be counted on to shed tears at touching movies and sad books, but I didn’t often cry for myself, and almost never with this much abandon. The events of the last twenty-four hours, however, could not leave me unscathed. I had met my birth mother once again, seen in her face the love I had always wanted to see, then watched her die before my eyes. She had kept pictures of me in her Bible—she had been thinking of me all along. Yet when we met that day at the coffee shop, she had lied to me.

  I had probably lived with her, off and on, throughout my early childhood. The person cut from the photograph was likely some foster parent or other—some meaningless nonentity she preferred to pretend didn’t exist. She cared enough about me to keep my pictures, but not me. Not as a child. And not as an adult.

  She had lied to keep me away from her.

  Minutes passed, and just as I was beginning to feel that the worst of my sobs had subsided, I was startled by the sound of approaching footsteps squeaking on the ancient floorboards. I wiped my face on my sleeve and looked up.

  An elderly woman, stooped from the waist and skinny as a chopstick, watched me from the doorway. She appeared to be somewhere in her seventies or eighties, with a heavily wrinkled, age-spotted face and a thin crown of white hair bound up in a net. Her expression was dour, her frown lines permanent. She was clad entirely in polyester except for a ragged cotton apron whose pockets overflowed with aerosol cans and cloths.

  "Don’t mind me," she insisted in a scratchy voice. "I’m just here to tidy up a bit."

  I sat up straight and tried to finish drying my face with the opposite sleeve. The woman walked slowly toward me, then reached into a pocket and produced a large square of cloth, an old cotton diaper turned dust rag. "Try this," she suggested.

  I accepted the makeshift handkerchief, then stood up and thanked her. "I’m sorry if I startled you. I’m sure you didn’t expect to find a sobbing stranger in the master suite."

  The woman stared back at me with dark eyes that were anything but startled. Rather, their piercing gaze suggested she knew everything about me but the color of my underwear. "I expected you all right," she said with a cocky tone that was neither friendly nor hostile. "I’m just glad to see you’re not still asleep. Can’t stand people who lay around the bed all day."

  She tilted her chin, the dark eyes probing me still further. "Your mother was a lazy one."

  My pulse quickened slightly, but I was too worn out from crying to react any more dramatically than that. "It sounds like you knew Sheila better than I did," I answered smoothly. "She didn’t raise me. I was adopted."

  The woman’s already wrinkled face wrinkled further. "You mean that hussy gave you up?" she exclaimed. "A pretty little thing like you?"

  I tried to take a deep breath, but the air came in with ragged heaves. The woman didn’t mean to be cruel, but reminders of my rejection always struck deep, evoking pain from a wound that would never completely heal. Yes, I had been "given up." It was a fact, and the compliment trailing afterward did nothing to lessen the sting.

  I didn’t answer, but as the woman took in my reaction her eyes softened. "You were raised by good people, then?"

  Her attempt to be comforting, if that’s what it was, was so off the mark I had to smile. Clearly, she did not think Sheila had been "good people." At this point, I was not inclined to disagree with her.

  "My parents were wonderful," I confirmed. I took another deep breath, studying her. Rough social skills or no, the housekeeper was the only person I had met so far who actually knew Sheila, and no matter how difficult the topic was for me, I needed some answers before I could settle the inheritance issue.

  "It’s very nice to meet you," I offered, attempting a more proper introduction. "My name is Meara O’Rourke; I assume Mr. Falcon told you I would be staying here last night. I should be leaving very soon, though. I hope I’m not in your way."

  Her face didn’t smile. "My name’s Estelle Harkins. I’ve been housekeeper here for twenty years, and you’re not in my way," she answered cryptically.

  "In that case," I began, my voice still trembling more than I would like, "I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about Sheila."

  Her hawk eyes bore into me, but their expression was not unkind. Their scrutiny was more like that of a mother dog, sniffing an orphan puppy while debating whether to add it to her brood.

  "I’ve got to work," she said finally. "If you want to talk, you can help." She extracted a cloth and can of furniture polish from her apron and extended them. "Damned lot of wood in this place."

  I took the cloth and can without hesitation, welcoming the opportunity to keep my hands busy. Estelle walked across the hall to the front bedroom opposite my own, then proceeded to polish each piece of furniture with a devoted intensity. I imitated her actions to the best of my ability, but since I couldn’t find a speck of dust anywhere, I felt useless. Several minutes of silence passed before I worked up the nerve to speak.

  "What I was wondering," I explained, my hands still dusting, "was how Sheila and Mitchell met. How long they dated. Whether you thought they were really—" I broke off awkwardly. "Or if maybe you suspected—" My voice cut out altogether, and I swallowed hard. I would not cry again in front of this woman.

  She stopped dusting and stared at me a moment. Then she stepped over and inspected the chest of drawers I had just finished, running a bony finger over its carved trim, squinting at the result. "Waiting a year’s the least you can do respectably, you know," she said flatly. "Those two started up long before that. I’d find a brassiere here, a lady razor there. I knew Mitchell had a woman living with him. It was none of my business, and I didn’t call him on it. But they were plenty ashamed. Every time I’d show up, she’d take off the other way."

  I was breathing far more rapidly than necessary, and I took a moment to remind myself, once again, that I was not responsible for my birth mother’s character.

  Estelle pulled a plastic bottle from her apron and began polishing a spotless mirror. "After that first time I caught her lazing around the bed, she stopped hiding. But she always seemed nervous, like I was the police. I told her what Mitchell did was on his own conscience, and that he could deal with his children on his own time—I wasn’t going to be the one breaking their hearts." Her expression turned regretful. "But then I had no idea Mitchell would be fool enough to marry her, either."

  She moved on across the hall to my room, where she began to polish the walnut vanity. Glad that my things were already packed up and out of her way, I set about removing imaginary dust from the bed’s iron headboard. "Was your impression," I asked, willing the conversation to be over soon, "that they were in love?"

  Estelle’s only answer was a sideways, cynical stare.

  I took a breath. "But Mitchell did marry her," I reasoned. "He didn’t have to. She was already living here."

  Estelle stopped dusting. She raised herse
lf to her full height, which appeared uncomfortable for her spine. "Love had nothing to do with it," she said sternly. "Mitchell was lonely; she was a willing, good-looking woman. He was too blind to see that any woman living out of her car—" her voice broke off. When she spoke again, it was with renewed determination. "I’ve got nothing against you, young lady. And your mother was always nice enough to me, I’ll give her that. But this place was Rosemary’s more than it was his—it came down through her family. She wanted her children to have it after they were both gone, and that’s the way it should be."

  We looked at each other in silence, and when she seemed certain that her point had been made, she relaxed her back and bent at the waist again. An acute pain had taken over my midsection, and I felt like doubling over as well. "Do you think that Fletcher—"

  She cut me off in a trice. "What do you know about Fletcher?" she asked, her tone suspicious.

  "Virtually nothing," I answered, surprised. "He came by the inn this morning—"

  "What did he say to you?"

  My brow furrowed. "He didn’t say anything," I explained, perplexed. "In fact, he couldn’t get away from me fast enough."

  The wrinkles on one side of the older woman’s mouth deepened, pulling her lips into a crooked grin. "Well, that’s just as well," she said pointedly. "You take some advice from a woman who’s been around a long, long time, and stay away from that one." She leaned in toward me, her hawk eyes glistening. "As far away as you can get."

  Chapter 7

  When the phone rang, I was only too glad to excuse myself from Estelle’s company. The caller, David Falcon, informed me that he was on his way over to the inn, and as I had several calls of my own to make before we began our meeting, I left the older woman to her cleaning and remained at the phone. My heart seemed hopelessly heavy now, and my mind still reeled with conjecture. But I delved into the tasks before me with verve, hoping that—as Colleen O’Rourke was always so fond of saying—honest work did soothe the soul.