A Secret Identity (5 page)

“John,” she’d storm, hand on her hip, “you have the most unsightly, pack-rat habits of anyone I know. One of these days I’m going to clean up this mess, and then you’ll be sorry.”

“Tess,” Pop would answer, “did I ever tell you you’re beautiful when you’re mad?”

“Don’t you beautiful me, John Seward Bentley!” she’d say. “Clean up your room!”

“Or you won’t give me my allowance?” he’d reply, walking up behind her and nuzzling her neck.

“John, stop that! The children are watching!” But her frown, never very serious to begin with, would show signs of severe strain.

“Let them,” he’d say. “And they’ll know what God meant marriage to be.” He’d turn her in his arms and kiss her thoroughly, and she’d cuddle against him, smiling happily.

Maybe they were why I write romances. I’d seen what real love was.

Once, about ten years ago, I’d gone to Mom and Pop’s bedroom. I needed to talk to Mom about something long forgotten. I knocked on the door and she called, “Come in.”

I opened the door to find her and Pop cuddled in the middle of their huge bed, her gray head resting on the grizzled gray hair of his bare chest.

“Oh,” I said, blushing. “I’m sorry!” I started to close the door.

“No, no, Cara,” Pop called. “Don’t go.”

I hesitated, feeling I was intruding, knowing I was intruding.

“I called for you to come in, Cara, love,” Mom said, “because I want you to know that love, true love, doesn’t die with the years. Gray doesn’t mean gone.” And she rested her hand on Pop’s chest. He grinned at me like a young man.

I shook my head in false disdain. “You two are such a bad example to an innocent young woman like me.”

“She needs more proof, Tess,” Pop said. And he bent over and kissed Mom a great smacker.

“I love you guys so much,” I whispered as I closed the door. All day I couldn’t stop smiling.

Now I started crying, and the tears spilled over and ran down my cheeks in a rain of loss.

God, how can I survive this aloneness?

The thought brought an intense, thrumming anxiety. My heart began to pound and my hands shook as I clasped them to my chest.

Always before I’d been alone by choice, alone yet surrounded by people I loved and who loved me. Now I was alone, period.

I was almost in a panic as I ran to the linen closet and pulled out a new box of tissues. I tore it open, grabbed a fistful, and began mopping my face, but the tears kept coming. I returned to the living room with the tissue box under my arm, Rainbow padding behind me. I sank to the floor and, knees pulled to my chest, laid my head on them. I sobbed and sobbed.

A tentative paw patted my thigh and Rainbow whimpered. I reached out and swept her into my lap. For once, she stayed. “Oh, Baby, what are we going to do?”

She had no answer, but she lay still, letting me stroke her and bury my face in her fur. Finally though, she could bear it no longer, and she hopped down. She stalked under Mom’s dropleaf table and began rubbing her head against the box Mom always kept tucked under there.

“So I can enjoy these things anytime I want,” she’d say as she reached down and pulled out the generations of photos lying there.

I crawled to the box and tugged it from its hiding place. It suddenly became my life preserver. I could do better than go to dinner with Pop and Mom tonight. I could live our lives together all over again.

The first picture I pulled out was a very old sepia photo of Pop’s parents, the first John Seward Bentley and his wife, Charlotte, seated in a stiff, formal pose from the early twentieth century. In great contrast, the next photo I pulled out was an informal picture from Ward and Marnie’s wedding five years ago. The sun was shining, the warm June breeze was blowing Marnie’s veil out behind her, and everyone was smiling. Mom, three months short of beginning her final, fatal struggle, wore a midnight-blue that looked stunning with her white hair. Pop’s great chest strained his starched shirt and tux. Marnie was radiant and Ward handsome, though they looked impossibly young.

Even I looked good in the rose gown Marnie made me wear instead of the beige I’d wanted. Marnie had also insisted I “do something with that hair!” The result was an elegant chignon at the base of my neck softened by curls about my face instead of the usual ponytail. The baby’s breath and roses tucked in my hair made me look alive in a way my usual slicked-back style never did.

I smiled through the mists blurring my vision.

For two hours I cried as I looked at black-and-white photos of Pop in his World II Army uniform, of Mom, her hair dark, her smile brilliant, holding the young Trey (John Seward Bentley III, my father), of my great-grandparents standing in the front yard of this very house when it was brand-new, the trees and shrubs so small and unformed.

I found a picture of Ward and me standing with Mickey Mouse on that long-ago vacation. Ward was so happy he almost vibrated as he stood tall and proud. I looked furious.

I pulled out a black-and-white of my mother and father who smiled at me from the beach at Ocean City, New Jersey. It had always saddened me that I couldn’t remember a single thing about them. In fact, I didn’t even think of them as my mother and father. They were Trey and Caroline, the names Mom and Pop always called them when they spoke of them. With a jolt I realized that I was now older than my parents had ever been. They had both been twenty-nine when they died.

I reached blindly into the now almost empty photo box, and my fingers closed over an envelope. I lifted it out. The old-fashioned, Palmer Method handwriting on the front read
John Seward’s papers
.

Curious since I thought Ward and Mr. Havens had all Pop’s papers, I extracted the contents. I took the topmost page and unfolded it.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
it read across the top in a swirl of Gothic letters.

Stunned, I read the paper and then the accompanying letter. When I could finally find my voice, I turned to Rainbow.

“Baby!” I said in disbelief. “We’re not really Bentleys!”

Chapter 4

T
here were eleven Biemsderfers listed in the phone book. I took a deep breath and reached for the phone. My heart was thudding faster than Thumper’s hind foot.

I hated to admit it, but I’d been disappointed in my meeting with Todd Reasoner. I’d expected him to be clever enough to tell me just how I could get the information about Pop’s family in spite of the general consensus about the difficulties—no, the impossibilities involved.

“Go here and ask this question of that person,” my fine new attorney was supposed to tell me. Or better yet, “Just give me a minute to tap a couple of computer keys, and I’ll have everything you need.”

Talk about naïve, but that’s what I’d hoped for, expected, wanted so badly I believed sheer desire would make it happen.

Instead he hadn’t even offered me hope. I sighed so loudly that Rainbow raised her head from her pillow to check out my level of distress. Apparently it wasn’t high enough for concern because she quickly put her head back on the pillow and went back to sleep.

I had to face the fact that Todd was probably right about finding answers. Probably? He
was
right. He was, after all, the lawyer. And everyone involved in the original adoption was dead by now.

“You’ve made yourself this sweet, cozy little world, Cara,” Ward told me the night we discussed my plans. “Only good things happen where you live. True love always wins there. And if something goes wrong, you just rewrite it.”

It was embarrassing to admit even to myself, but I had come to Lancaster with a plotline firmly in place for my adoption search. For me, doors would open. For me, answers would appear. I, in true Bentley fashion, would be in control of the situation. Wasn’t that what Marnie had said? I liked to be in control just like Pop and Ward?

“You can control your writing,” she told me. “The trouble is, you can’t control life.”

Of course I knew that on some level. I wasn’t stupid. And I had gone online before I came up here, looking up Pennsylvania adoption law. It stated clearly that the adoptee had to approach an uninvolved party like the agency through which the adoption occurred or the state itself with a request to meet the natural parents. Then this impartial party would contact the natural parent or parents on the adoptee’s behalf. If there was a reciprocal interest, the plans to meet would be made. If not, that was it. Closed door.

But that law assumed the parties involved were still living. And because in my case they weren’t, I wanted Todd to work miracles to find the answer I sought.

I might as well face it. Neither Todd nor I were going to walk into the Lancaster County Courthouse and be given the information. If it was out there somewhere, I was going to have to search for it in creative ways.

Not that I thought Todd Reasoner was a total washout. Far from it. I smiled softly. I remembered his broad shoulders, his chiseled jaw, his bottomless brown eyes. I actually heard myself sigh again.

I froze, appalled, afraid Rainbow would look at me again, only this time she’d sneer at my adolescent attraction. I sounded just like one of my heroines. I glanced guiltily at Rainbow, but she slept on, deaf to my indiscretion. I sagged in relief and then straightened my spine. Time to take Step One.

Besides, how did I know his eyes were bottomless? I hadn’t even been that close to him.

But I knew they were.

Taking a deep breath, I turned to the phone book and the page I’d opened to in the B’s. A snippet of a psalm came to mind:
“God sets the lonely in families
.”

Father God, I ask that you set me in my family. Help me know where and how to go about this search
.

I put my finger under the first Biemsderfer, an Alan with one L and no E, and dialed. As the phone rang, I muttered, “Res ipsa loquitor,” using Todd’s ridiculous Latin quote as a good-luck talisman, sort of like, “You go, girl.” “Res ipsa loquitor.”

“Yeah?” demanded a teenage girl with no telephone finesse whatsoever.

“May I speak to Alan Biemsderfer, please?” I asked nicely, just to show her how it was done in polite company.

“Sure,” she mumbled around a couple of cracks of her chewing gum. “Hey, Dad!” she screamed, the phone probably mere inches from her mouth. “It’s some lady for you.”

I shook my head to still the roar careening about my skull. If I were related to this particular set of Biemsderfers, phone etiquette would be among my first efforts at communication, believe me.

In a short time Alan Biemsderfer picked up an extension and asked in a decibel level much more conducive to conversation, “Yes?”

My stomach flip-flopped and my palms became so sweaty I had to grip the phone extra tight lest it slip from my grip. Once again foolish hope ballooned inside, pressing the air from my lungs. Maybe he was a long-lost cousin.

I took a deep breath and launched into my spiel. I was pleased and amazed at how normal my voice sounded. “Mr. Biemsderfer, my name is Cara Bentley, and I’m doing some genealogical research. My grandfather was born Lehman Biemsderfer here in Lancaster, and I’m trying to trace his family. That’s L-e-h-m-a-n.”

“What is this?” Alan asked. “One of those things where you’re supposed to buy your family tree and crest or something?” His voice bore the cynicism of someone barraged by telemarketers. Hadn’t he heard of the No Call program?

“No,” I said earnestly. “I’m trying to trace my grandfather’s origins. Seriously.”

There was a small silence. “Well, maybe you are legitimate, maybe you’re not, but either way I can’t help. I’ve never heard of anyone in our family with the first name Lehman.”

The way he emphasized
first name
ever so slightly made me sit up straight. “How about middle name?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. Wouldn’t it be a miracle, a true God thing, if he actually knew someone who had both Lehman and Biemsderfer in his name, even if Lehman weren’t a first name?

“Nope,” he said. “I’ve only heard of Lehman as a last name. There are lots of Lehmans in this area. Maybe you could try them. Now, I’ve got to go.”

I thanked Alan and hung up. I felt unrealistically disappointed and was mad at myself for it. When would I become realistic about this stuff? I grinned wryly. Not today. I quickly dialed Biemsderfer, Beatrice.

“I don’t answer questions on the telephone,” a testy voice stated.

“But—” And just that quickly I found myself talking to dead air.

Next was Biemsderfer, Edward.

Mrs. Edward answered. “Sorry, Ed’s not here. Can I take a message?”

I explained about tracing Lehman Biemsderfer.

“Gee, I don’t know much about the family history. Ed and I’ve only been married a couple of years, and I’m still learning all the ins and outs, you know? But if you want someone who can help, you ought to talk to Ed’s Great-Aunt Lizzie. She’s your woman.”

I scanned the phone book. “I don’t see an Elizabeth in the listings. Or should I be looking for a Mrs. Someone?”

“No, she’s not in the book,” Mrs. Edward said. “She’s in a nursing home someplace. I’ve never even met her. I just hear them talking about her. And her last name’s not Biemsderfer either. I think it’s Martin. Her mother was a Biemsderfer though. You could call Ed another time and ask about it if you want.”

I thanked her and we disconnected.

Biemsderfer, Gerhard and Biemsderfer, K.M. were not home. Biemsderfer, Marlin, Jr., said, as soon as I mentioned genealogy, “Aunt Lizzie. She knows it all.”

“Where do I find her?” I asked.

There was a silence. “I don’t think I should tell you. No offense, but I don’t think I should.” And he quietly hung up.

I tried Biemsderfer, Marlin, Sr., and an elderly woman answered.

“I’m trying to trace my family,” I said.

“Isn’t that lovely, dear.” Her voice was sweet and slightly breathless. “I hope you can. I wouldn’t want to be alone. I don’t know what I’d do without my boys.”

“I’m looking for someone who may be able to give me information about my grandfather, Lehman Biemsderfer.”