Secrets Rising (10 page)

"
Jordan, an Edgewater native and recipient of the purple heart, is survived by his wife, Mary Baker Jordan, and his parents, Edgar and Doris Jordan
." She sat back. "Well, so much for the girl friend theory. He had a wife."

"Which doesn't mean he didn't have a girlfriend, too, Miss Ivory Tower. In fact, that would be all the more reason to hide her pregnancy. Trade places with me, and let me see that article."

Rebecca rose at the same time he did and stepped away, attempting to switch positions without touching Jake, but he moved the same direction. She felt a flush rise to her face as she moved back and he did the same.

Jake put his hands on her shoulders and gazed at her, a faint, suggestive grin tilting the corners of his lips. "This is a tough dance. There's no music, and the floor's carpeted, but you just follow my lead, and we'll get this step right."

As Jake turned her, it did seem like a dance, and her blood pulsed faster in rhythm to the primitive beat of some music felt rather than heard. They seemed to be revolving round and round in a waltz of desire, though she knew they only moved half a circle.

Then they were still, his hands on her shoulders, his breath warm on her cheek, his nearness setting off some insane electrical storm in her body. His masculine scent along with a faint wisp of the deep blue scent of denim swirled around her, blocking the musty odor of the library just as his deep blue gaze blocked the sight of everything around them.

Without moving his hands or his eyes, he lifted one thumb and traced the line of her jaw. His lips moved, parting ever so slightly. Or maybe it was only a shifting shadow.

Blushing hotly, a little breathless and vaguely disappointed, she fell into the chair where Jake had been sitting, where the warmth of his body lingered.

What was the matter with her? She wasn't even sure she liked Jake Thornton. Certainly she couldn't get along with him. Her hormones, however, completely ignored any problem she had with him. She understood and accepted that she'd lost control of her life, but what had happened to her resolve to at least take charge of her own body chemistry?

"Couple of follow-up articles here. I'm going to see if Eunice will print copies for me." Jake's voice contained faint traces of huskiness. She wasn't the only one dealing with runaway urges. Knowing that made it more exciting but also more difficult. If she knew he had no interest, that she was alone in this absurd attraction, she'd be too embarrassed to even let herself think about him. As it stood now, she not only had to struggle to control her thoughts of him, but she found herself speculating on what he might be thinking.

As if her life wasn't messed up enough, she was fantasizing about a man who embodied exactly what she didn't need right now—someone who held himself aloof from the world, someone who had no need for human involvement.

She focused on the newspaper in the viewer Jake had been scanning. John and Nancy Whittaker's oldest son made the Dean's List at the University of Texas at Austin.

Edgewater was the town of vintage movies. Even now it was like taking a step back into a more innocent time...except for the creepy feeling that had begun with Mayor Morton's visit, then been reinforced by the threatening phone call in the middle of the night and Chief of Police Gates' intrusion at lunch. Even sitting in a library, a place she'd always before considered a haven, that eerie sensation of things out of kilter still niggled at the base of her neck.

Rebecca nodded her agreement. She'd wanted to suggest that herself. After looking at so many articles for so long, she could have seen her own birth announcement and not recognized it. But she wasn't going to admit that to Jake, wasn't going to give him any reason to try to send her home. While that would solve her problem of wrestling with her irrational fascination with the man, she couldn't go back when her life was still in chaos, still unresolved.

The park was small with half a dozen kids climbing over the playground equipment on one end and a grove of trees on the other. The grass was freshly clipped, and a lanky teenage boy was just pushing a mower into a small wooden shed in the middle.

Jake pulled onto the graveled parking area on the wooded end, and Rebecca spotted a weathered picnic table on the shady side of a huge oak tree.

She sat on one side of the table with Jake on the other.

"It's not so hot here," she observed. "Kind of nice, actually." And surely, separated from Jake by the splintery wooden table, sitting outside in bright daylight with kids shouting and laughing somewhere close by, she could get away from the fluttery sensation of being near him.

Head bent, he shuffled through papers in his briefcase. A breeze stirred the leaves above, and sunlight fluttered across his ebony hair.

"Lots of background stuff here," he said, his voice dark yet shiny with streaks of light, sounding just the way his hair looked. "Mayor Morton and Jordan served together in the Army. Morton saved Jordan's life, killed three men who ambushed the two of them and shot Ben in the stomach and him in the shoulder. Both men subsequently received honorable discharges, and Morton came back here with Jordan. Our good old boy with the cowboy hat and down-home drawl is actually from Ohio."

"That's very interesting, but what does it have to do with my mother?"

He looked up, his eyes now the color of the faraway, cold sky at sunset in winter rather than midnight in summer. "It may not have anything to do with your mother, or it may have everything. Morton knows something about her, so we need to know more about Morton." He returned his attention to the papers. "They don't seem to have had many leads in Ben Jordan's murder. I don't remember reading anything in the 1980 papers about them catching the guy who did it. Did you see anything?"

"No, nothing. But I could have missed it. I wasn't looking specifically for that."

He studied the photocopies for a few minutes longer then passed them to her. "You might see something I didn't, something that has meaning to you but wouldn't to me."

It was the first time he'd admitted she might actually be a help instead of a hindrance. She took the papers from him and bent over them, reading carefully though she had little hope she'd find anything.

He shook his head. "It wasn't with the copies. It was under the top folder." He turned the paper so she could see it. Across the top in red block letters someone had written: "Go home. Your mother's dead."

The wide-open park seemed to close in around Rebecca. "Janelle. You said since my mother used the name Jane Clark on my birth certificate that Jane might really be her first name."

"This woman died fifteen years ago." His words grated over her like coarse sandpaper, scraping away the skin and drawing blood.

"Let me see it."

Wordlessly, he handed it to her.

She stared at the black and red images on the white paper, concentrating all her efforts into forcing them to coherency, something she really didn't want.
Go home. Your mother's dead
. The glaring, personal note, then the impersonal print of the news story. Janelle Griffin...dead at thirty-one...accidental overdose of prescription sleeping pills...graduate of Edgewater High School...volunteer at Edgewater Memorial Hospital...member of First Pentecostal Church of Edgewater...survived by her parents, the Reverend and Mrs. William Griffin.

In the summer heat, a cold hand gripped her heart and squeezed, shutting out the possibility of warmth ever entering that region again.

Dead
.

"Don't go jumping to conclusions. We have no proof this woman is your mother," Jake said.

"Somebody went to a lot of trouble to put this in your briefcase. This article and the note to forget my mother confirms the phone call telling me she's dead." Rebecca was humiliated to feel tears rolling down her cheeks. Angrily she swiped them away with the back of her hand. She wasn't going to cry, especially not in front of Jake.

For a fleeting moment she thought she saw sympathy in his eyes, then the look was gone, replaced by his usual impenetrable expression. She didn't want sympathy from him.

"We've got plenty of time to get to the cemetery before dark," he said.

Her throat tightened. She swallowed twice before she could speak. "Then you do think this is my mother."

"Rebecca, I'm not suggesting we go to the cemetery to mourn this lady. I'm suggesting we go there to check out the stones, her family, dates of birth and death...anything. Research. Investigative work. What you hired me to do."

"Go to a cemetery to check out the stones?" She felt a sob rise and turned it into a semblance of a laugh as it came out. "That's what you call
investigative work
?"

He pushed himself off the bench and rose. "That's right. Unless you're firing me, I plan to continue to do my job. Now are you ready to go back to your air conditioned house in Dallas and check the mailbox and answering machine for my reports?"

She swung her legs over the bench and stood also, glaring at him through a film of tears that blurred the harsh angles of his face. "No. I'm going to that cemetery. If that is my mother, I want to see her grave."

"Suit yourself." He closed his briefcase and picked it up then walked away. She followed close behind.

***

The cemetery was small, but even so it took them almost two hours to find Janelle Griffin's grave. The area was well-tended, the Bermuda grass newly mown.

She studied every word, every carving on the gray marble, trying to ferret out the secrets of the woman's life.
Beloved daughter
, it read. Not wife or mother. The two words told their own story of loneliness. The sensation surrounded Rebecca, and she couldn't tell if it came from the grave, from the inscription on the stone or from her own heart.

"Her father died five years after her," Jake said. "Apparently her mother's still alive. Paternal grandparents and great-grandparents are here. All Reverends. Three infants." She looked up, and he hastily added, "Born in 1895, 1904 and 1906. Infant mortality was high in those days. Here's another single woman, Janelle's great-aunt, judging from the year of birth, dead in her fifties. Looks like Janelle's family has lived in Edgewater for generations."

Rebecca walked around the area, reading the story carved in stone. "A prominent family, like you said, a long line of ministers, the kind of people who would have been scandalized if their unmarried daughter had turned up pregnant. The kind of family who just might have enough influence to get the police department to declare an overdose of sleeping pills accidental. Her mother's still alive, and the Mayor and the Chief of Police are still protecting her. She'd have been sixteen or seventeen when I was born. A teenage girl, again like you said."

"Am I? How much more evidence do we need? Do you want to have the body exhumed so we can do DNA testing?" She looked away, toward the last sliver of sun resting on the horizon. "This whole thing has been pointless. I never had a mother to search for. I've been chasing a ghost, a will o' the wisp."

The enervating loneliness wrapped its tendrils around her, stealing the energy from her body, from her soul. She started to sink to the ground, to rest for a moment or a lifetime on the cool grass, but Jake's strong arm stopped her.

Painful sobs she could no longer suppress heaved themselves up from somewhere deep inside, pouring onto Jake's broad chest, drenching his denim shirt, while he held her firmly with one hand on her back and stroked her hair with the other. She willed herself to stop, but her body was no longer under her control. Even as one corner of her mind berated her for her weakness, she leaned against Jake, crying in huge gulps.