A Secret Identity (2 page)

I rounded a curve and was forced to slow suddenly and dramatically for a closed buggy, gray and fragile-looking, moving slowly ahead of me. As I inched along in its wake, I stared at the large, red reflective triangle on its lower back and the rectangular red reflectors placed at intervals up the sides and across the top of—what do you call the back end of a buggy? It wasn’t a trunk like on a car or a hatch like on a van. It was more like a little wall, but that word seemed too substantial for the gray surface in front of me. Small battery-driven taillights blinked at me but gave no answer.

At the rate we were moving, I’d be back at the Horse and Buggy tomorrow morning. Did I dare take a risk and pass in spite of the solid yellow line and long, slow curve? Or did I have to trail along at one horsepower until the buggy turned into a farm lane somewhere?

As I worried over this quandary with more energy than it was worth, a car zipped up behind me, slowed momentarily, and then sped around both me and the buggy. Question answered. I hit the gas and followed. After all, he had a Pennsylvania license. He must know what he was doing.

I pulled back in my lane and ambled on, each bend in the road opening another vista of patchwork fields, farmhouses, barns, and silos. The overwhelming color was green: emerald, celadon, olive, lime, forest. Fields of burgeoning crops; copses of maples, beeches, and pines; lawns and gardens; and vines. I sighed. I’d never realized before how soothing green was.

I rounded another curve and once again hit the brakes, jarred out of my near stupor by the delightful sight before me. One thing for sure, we never saw anything like this in the congestion and traffic of Silver Spring.

A small Amish girl of eight or ten stood in the middle of the road, her small face screwed-up in concentration as she drove an ungainly herd of Holsteins across the road from the pasture to the barn. She waved a stick to encourage the beasts, but they seemed unaware of the goad or the child as they plodded slowly across the macadam to the safety and release of the barn and its milking machines.

The girl, her hair pulled back in a bun at the base of her neck like a little adult, ignored me and the two cars waiting from the opposite direction. One of the cows stepped out of line and started wandering toward me. The little girl calmly and authoritatively whapped her on the flank. The cow immediately fell back into place.

I looked left and saw for the first time the boy in black breeches and white shirt, his straw hat pushed back on his head, bare feet flying. He was shooing the cows along from behind by waving his arms and shouting at them. As the last milk cow passed out of the pasture and through the gate, he pulled it closed. Climbing the bottom rung, he carefully fastened a rope loop around the top rail of the gate and the adjoining fence. He jumped to the ground, raced into the road after his sister and herd, and turned to grin at me. I grinned back and waggled my fingers. He ducked his head shyly, ran through the gate into the farmyard, and pushed it shut behind him.

That night I dreamed of towheads in straw hats, buggies pulled by graceful horses, and barefoot little girls wielding big sticks. It was the soundest sleep I’d had since I’d found Pop’s papers.

I arrived at the office of Todd Reasoner, Esq., at 2:55 the next afternoon. I walked to the receptionist’s desk, noted her nameplate, and extended my hand.

“Hello, Mrs. Smiley. I’m Cara Bentley.”

I admit I’d gotten used to a certain response to my name. Those who knew Bentley Marts hopped to attention as if I had something to do with the stores’ success, and readers of romance novels frequently recognized my name too. Mrs. Smiley, however, turned her dour face toward me, and I felt as though I were not only tardy, which I wasn’t, but had brought in a significant helping of manure on my shoe.

“How do you do,” she said frostily, letting my hand hang suspended in space while her fingers remained on her computer keyboard. “Mr. Reasoner will be with you shortly. Please have a seat.” She tipped her head toward a pair of paisley-upholstered chairs against the far wall.

I took a seat, feeling I should sit at attention and wondering whether everyone who waited under the gimlet eye of Mrs. Smiley reacted the same way. To show she didn’t intimidate me—or at least to convince myself she didn’t—I boldly crossed one beige linen-clad knee over the other and straightened my beige silk shell. Still, I don’t think my shoulders had been thrown back so rigidly since inspection at Camp Sankanac when I was a kid.

Maybe she disapproved of slacks, but certainly mine were loose enough to be modest, and besides everyone wore slacks. Except the Amish. And the Mennonites. I’d seen more dresses in my two days in Bird-in-Hand than I’d seen in years. Then again, maybe Mrs. Smiley’s aversion was to beige. Or to me. Or to everyone.

Ignoring me, she bent over her work, her sensible blue dress buttoned to the neck, unrelieved by jewelry or scarf. I could see her low-heeled blue pumps under the desk were pressed neatly side-by-side. Her gray hair was carefully permed and sprayed. Wire-rimmed glasses hung around her neck on a chain. She suddenly grabbed them and pushed them onto her nose. She sniffed, set a folder of papers on her right, and began typing at terrifying speed.

Surprisingly, her fingers were beautifully manicured with hot pink nails. On the third pink fingernail of each hand were little white flowers with jeweled centers that sparkled as her hands danced over the keys, creating a beauty completely at odds with the sterility of the rest of her.

Like the writer I was, I began creating a persona for Mrs. Smiley that explained her hauteur and her nails. Somehow I knew she wouldn’t like me giving her a husband who had left her for a younger woman who wore hot-pink, low-necked tops and tight jeans instead of merely pink nails. Nor would she like my imagined pudgy professor who pursued her now, trying without success to find the hot pink part of her that allowed the nails.

She carefully ignored me for an eternity of five minutes, during which I had remade her by dying her hair a soft brown, having her wear lots of corals and roses, and transforming her into a lovely heroine overcoming a lifetime of sorrows and pain. Finally Mrs. Smiley rose, looked suspiciously at me, and beckoned. “Mr. Reasoner will see you now.”

I unfolded my legs and followed her to a door, where she paused and knocked softly. When she pushed open the door, she stepped aside for me. “Miss Cara Bentley,” she said for all the world as though she were announcing the queen. I tried to look regal.

Todd Reasoner rose, a smile of professional welcome on his handsome face. Maybe it was the last five minutes in Mrs. Smiley’s presence or the years of talking to little, brittle Mr. Havens, our family attorney, but I perked up at the sight of my new lawyer.

He glanced quickly at Mrs. Smiley, nodded absently, and said, “Thank you.” Her cheeks turned almost as pink as her nails as she bobbed her head in his direction. I watched in fascination.

She’s smitten, I thought. Who cares that he’s twenty or thirty years her junior. She thinks he’s wonderful. The son she never had? Or the man she’d always dreamed of? No wonder my pudgy professor didn’t appeal to her.

I looked at Todd Reasoner again and understood why she was so taken with him. It might have been the curly brown hair or the deep-brown eyes or the neatly tailored tan suit over a white shirt and tan tie with incredibly narrow, brown, diagonal stripes. Or it might have been the shoulders, broad enough for one of my heroines to swoon against quite effectively or the jaw so strongly hewn that I could cut my finger on it, were I ever fortunate enough to touch it.

He came from behind his desk as Mrs. Smiley withdrew and indicated a seat in a padded leather chair. “Miss Bentley,” he said politely as I took the proffered seat. He then retreated behind his desk to his own padded leather chair.

As he took his seat, I glanced around the room. On the wall were the obligatory diplomas, matted and framed, a BA from Ursinus College, and a JD from Dickinson Law School. I saw he was a member of the Pennsylvania Bar, the frame of this document a magnificent cherry with several gold stripes worked into the wood lest anyone miss its import.

A pair of what appeared to be original watercolors hung on the wall to my right, lovely renditions of Lancaster County without any of the cloying cuteness aimed at the tourist trade. Beneath the paintings were a sofa and two chairs. A beautiful quilt, a kaleidoscope of animals tumbling from an ark marooned on Mount Ararat, hung on the wall behind Mr. Reasoner. A fern, a philodendron, and a hearty croton sat on a credenza under a window.

“How may I help you, Miss Bentley?” Todd Reasoner asked.

I turned my attention to him. Such a hardship. “I’m beginning an adoption search, Mr. Reasoner, and I need clarification on Pennsylvania laws concerning the accessibility of records.”

He nodded. “For yourself, I assume?”

“Well, sort of. I’m seeking the information for my curiosity, but the person whose records I’m seeking is my grandfather.”

He studied me a moment. “Are you seeking this information for him without his permission? Or can he no longer search himself?”

I felt the weight of missing Pop settle on my chest like a heavy stone, the pressure debilitating. I forced a breath. “He died recently.”

The lawyer dipped his head. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” I studied my knees for a moment. “He was ninety-three when he died, and I’ve learned since his death that he was adopted. That we aren’t ‘blood’ Bentleys. That there’s a history we know nothing about.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out an envelope. I drew from it the Certificate of Adoption and passed it across the desk. I read from memory as Todd read for the first time.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

In the Court of Common Pleas, No. 2, of Lancaster County in re: Adoption of Lehman Biemsderfer, June 1919. Be it remembered that I, Herman F. Walton, Prothonotary of the Courts of Common Pleas, No. 2, of Lancaster County, do hereby certify, that the following is the true and correct copy of the decree:

entered by the said court in the above case, to wit:

Now, the 20th day of August A.D. 1919 the court, upon consideration of the foregoing petition, being satisfied that the welfare of the said Lehman Biemsderfer will be promoted by the adoption prayed for in said petition, do upon motion of A.R. Furst, Esq., for petitioners, grant the prayer of said petition, and do order and decree that the said Lehman Biemsderfer shall assume the name of the adopting parents, and be hereafter known and called by the name “John Seward Bentley, Jr.” and shall henceforth have all the rights of a child and heir of the said John Seward Bentley and Charlotte Brooks Bentley, equal with any other children they may have, and shall be subject to the duties of such children in accordance with the provisions of the Act of Assembly in such cases made and provided
.

In testimony whereof, I have hereto set my hand and affixed the seal of the Court, this 20th day of August in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and nineteen
.

The red, raised seal of the Court of Common Pleas of Lancaster County decorated the lower lefthand corner of the paper while the signature of Herman F. Walton, the prothonotary, filled the right.

Todd looked up when he had finished, and I handed him the letter that always made me want to weep.

Chapter 2

I
had gotten Todd Reasoner’s name from Mr. Havens, our family’s business lawyer.

“So you plan to do an adoption search?” Mr. Havens was careful to sound dispassionate. He was a spare little man who somehow commanded great attention and respect. I think it had something to do with the way he carried himself, exactly like the ex-Marine he was, and the absolute authority with which he always spoke. It was like a real-life equivalence of the old ad, “When Dean Havens speaks, everyone listens.”

I nodded. “I want to find out what my heritage is—what our heritage is.”

“Do you have a medical reason for seeking this information?” He seemed genuinely concerned. “I never heard your grandfather mention any genetic problems, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t or isn’t one.”

I shook my head. “No medical problems that I know of. I just want to know who we are if we aren’t Bentleys.”

“Cara, my dear, I think a search going back three generations is most likely doomed to failure.”

He made his observation gently, but its effect was to stiffen my backbone. When we quiet, go-with-the-flow people actually make a decision, we get very stubborn about it.

I smiled with a sweetness I didn’t feel. “I just know I feel compelled to try.”

He nodded. “I wish you well. You understand that you’ll need a member of the Pennsylvania bar to assist you since state laws differ on adoption and the accessibility of pertinent information and records.”