into. I couldn’t go there with her.
She brought the bottle of Baileys’ Irish Cream down from the cupboard, filled two small glasses with ice, and poured the liqueur. We sat at the kitchen table and sipped our yummy drinks in silence for a moment.
“I want to know when all of this could have taken place.” I tried to calculate. “First Byron and Elaine were in love. A year later, Byron and Wanda were married. So where in that time frame did Byron and Marjorie hook up?”
Byron had been a busy guy, that much was clear.
“See for yourself,” Mom said, and passed the thin, aged certificate over to me.
It was a smudged and faded carbon copy of a document titled Certificate of Live Birth. All the boxes were filled in except for the name of the baby. The box for “female” was checked, so it was safe to say that Marjorie had given birth to a little girl.
It was strange to be studying this unknown child’s birth certificate. What was even more surreal was that the child’s date of birth was only a few months after Elaine wrote her letter to Byron and left for Africa.
“Whoa.” I stared at Mom. “So Marjorie was involved with Byron while he was dating Elaine.”
“That’s what it looks like,” she said, frowning as she chewed on an ice cube.
“But somewhere in the middle of all that, he married Wanda.” I handed the document back to her. “You’re right. That’s one bizarre family. And Elaine didn’t say a word about it. Do you think she knows about the baby?”
With a slow shake of her head, Mom admitted, “I haven’t got a clue.”
My eyes widened as something else occurred to me. “Do you think Wanda knew?”
Mom gripped my hand. “The real question is, does Byron know?”
The next morning, in an abundance of caution, Mom and I went back to Byron’s house to examine every volume in Wanda’s massive wall of stacked books. We lucked out and arrived while Byron was away, so there was no need to fabricate a story about why we were looking through all those books again.
I was good at a lot of things, but I wouldn’t have been able to bring a poker face to a confrontation with Byron Frawley. Come to think of it, I wasn’t even sure I owned a poker face.
While Mom tackled the books in the shorter stacks, I went straight for the Jane Austens. It only took a few minutes to gather up the four remaining volumes, and the documents we found tucked inside them were doozies.
“Mom, look at this,” I said after scanning the document I’d found inside Persuasion.
Mom stared in amazement at the faded paper. It was a Certificate of Adoption from the State of Texas dated within weeks of the birth certificate we’d found the day before. So now we knew the child’s name. Elizabeth.
And inside the copy of Emma was a faded photograph of a little girl wearing a frilly white dress. We both assumed this was Elizabeth. In the photo, she looked about four or five years old, but by now she was probably in college.
There were other photographs as well, each slipped inside one or another of the dark green leather bound books that made up the six-volume set of Jane Austen classics. If only I had taken more care to bundle up the entire set in the first place, we might have had some answers sooner.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mom muttered.
“Good idea.” As I drove back to her house, I happened to glance down and saw that I was filthy. I longed to take another bath, but first, Mom and I had some logistics to work out and a few decisions to make.
“What should we do?” Mom asked, twisting her hands together “Who shall we call? Wait. Maybe we should just leave it alone. We could shut these items away in our safe deposit box and never say a word about them again. Or should we confront the people involved? Which ones? This is so upsetting. I just don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll think of something.”
She shifted in her seat to look at me. “You’ve had to deal with
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