Gail Bowen - The Nesting Dolls

“I’m assuming it was from Abby.”

“Yes,” Mieka said. “After Lisa told us about the tag, Nadine asked if she could look at the gift. She recognized Abby’s handwriting and said she’d like to be alone for a while. Lisa and I took off, and that’s when you came in. When Lisa left, I looked over to see how Nadine was doing, but she was gone.” Mieka pointed to the table. “The gift is still there.”

We went over to the table where Nadine had been sitting. Nadine’s latte was still half-full and the gift, a book in which a parent records the highlights of a baby’s first year, lay beside it.

I picked up the baby book. Bound in navy leather, its design was clean and handsome. Except for Jacob’s full name and his date of birth hand-lettered in copperplate, the cover was unadorned. The heavy vellum pages inside were equally chaste. The first page, in the same copperplate hand, recorded Jacob’s time and date of birth, his birth weight and length, and the fact that he had been born at home, in the cabin that Abby shared with Nadine. I remembered the warmth of its living room, the quilts on the walls, the sound of the river flowing past. It would have been a gentle place for a child to enter the world.

I turned to the second page and felt a fist in my stomach. The name of the mother, Abby Margaret Michaels, had been written in the same careful calligraphy, but the name of the father had been entered in an angry scrawl of black ink that had torn the paper.

The name was Theodore Lazar Brokaw.

I gasped. My first thought was that in her agony at discovering she’d lost the parents she’d believed were her birth parents, Abby had transposed facts. I turned the page. More furious scrawls of black ink. These scrawls all but obliterated the lettering that identified Jacob’s maternal grandparents as Hugh and Margaret Michaels. The new names angrily entered were Delia Margolis Wainberg and Theodore Lazar Brokaw.

Mieka had been looking over my shoulder. “My God. How could that happen?” she breathed.

Fragments of conversations floated to the surface of my consciousness. Myra’s chilling observation. “He always went for the same type: clever, pale, Semitic.” Nadine’s whispered hypothesis when Mieka asked if she knew who fathered Abby’s baby: “I always thought it was someone who had already proven himself in the world.” Theo’s confusion the night of the Wainbergs’ party when he saw Delia: “You’ve gotten old.” The way he’d buried his face in her neck, and his relief when he smelled her Chanel No. 5, the same perfume Abby wore. The photograph I’d shown him, where he had identified Abby not as his daughter but as “my girl, my clever girl.” His sense that Jacob was somehow connected with him. The world had become a confusing place for Theo Brokaw, but his damaged brain had stubbornly held on to certain facts. He knew that it was the second-smallest of the nesting dolls that was the carrier of the secret. He knew that Abby Michaels was the mother of his baby.

Mieka touched the mutilated name of Abby’s father and lover with her forefinger, and then closed the baby book. “What are we going to do with this, Mum?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Abby wanted Delia to know the truth about Theo Brokaw’s relationship to Jacob, but telling Delia isn’t going to change anything. It’s just going to cause more grief.” I picked up the book. “Do you have a shredder?”

Mieka shook her head. “No, but I have a match.”

“This book is evidence in a murder case.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t burn,” Mieka said.

“We’re not the only ones who saw it,” I said. “Nadine Perrault knows the truth.”

“She must be feeling as sick as we are,” Mieka said.

“Yes, but I’m sure she’s also relieved. The book is proof that Nadine wasn’t responsible for Abby’s despair in the last weeks of her life.”

“Do you think Nadine will use this to get custody of Jacob?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I picked up the book and dropped it back in the gift bag. “But now that you’ve raised that possibility, I know that we can’t destroy this. Nadine has a right to use it.”

“It’s a powerful weapon,” Mieka said.

“It is,” I agreed. “And if Nadine uses it, there will be collateral damage. She might get custody of Jacob, but he’ll have to live with some very painful knowledge. So will the Wainbergs.”

“Do you think that’s where Nadine went when she left here?”

I narrowed my eyes at my daughter. “You seem to have developed a knack for raising the worst possibilities. But as Zack says, ‘It’s better to know than not know.’ ” I took out my cell and thumbed my address book till I found Nadine’s number.

The phone rang repeatedly without a response, and I was about to end the call when she answered.

“I’d just about given up,” I said. “It’s Joanne. Where are you?”

Her voice was mechanical. “On the corner, just down the street from UpSlideDown – waiting for a taxi to come by.”

“There won’t be one,” I said, “it’s a busy time of year. Come inside. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.”

Nadine came back through the door a couple of minutes later. She was wearing the smart outfit she’d been wearing the day she arrived in Regina, but the pea jacket was unbuttoned; the black cloche was stuck carelessly in her pocket, and her scarf hung around her neck, unknotted and askew. She was pale and she was shaking either from cold or shock or both. The deadness in her eyes scared me. “Did you see Jacob’s baby book?” she asked.

“I did,” I said. “Nadine, I’m so sorry. I can only imagine what you’re going through.”

Mieka noticed Nadine’s pallor. “Sit down,” she said. “I’m going to bring you some tea with lots of sugar. That’ll help.”

We found a table near the door. A mother with three very young boys was sitting on a bench next to us, attempting to get her children into boots and snowsuits. The boys, determined to stay and play, kept running off on her. When one of the boys ran past me the mother shot me a beseeching look. “Could you…?” I reached out and touched the boy’s arm. “Who’s that on your boot?”

“SpongeBob SquarePants,” he said.

“Could you hold still so I could see him?” I said.

The boy held up his foot. “Is he your favourite?” I asked. While the boy told me about SpongeBob, his mother zipped his brothers into their snowsuits and readied them for the trip home. When she took her son from me, she smiled at Nadine and me. “Thanks,” she said. “I hope you both have a very merry Christmas.”

“I’m sure you will,” Nadine said. We watched as the mother shepherded her boys through the door and turned to give us a final wave. Mieka came back with the tea, and as Nadine drank it, the colour returned to her cheeks. When she was finished, she stood, buttoned her jacket, tied her scarf, and pulled on her hat. She was calm again; she was also very determined.

My mind raced as we walked to the car. I was certain that Nadine would ask me to drive her to the Wainbergs’. I couldn’t refuse, but if I could convince her to wait until the morning to talk to Delia, there was a chance she’d arrive at the same conclusion I had: the price of revealing the identity of Jacob’s father was simply too high.

When we had snapped on our seat belts, I turned the key in the ignition, but I didn’t pull into traffic. I turned to Nadine, prepared to present my argument, but she beat me to the punch. “I’d like you to take me to Theo Brokaw,” she said. “If you don’t know the address, I’m sure Delia Wainberg will have it.”

I was reeling. “I know the address,” I said. “But taking you there is pointless. Theo had a serious fall on the Labour Day weekend. He suffered a brain injury that’s resulted in something like advanced Alzheimer’s. You won’t be able to make him understand what’s happened.”