J. Jance - Betrayal of Trust

I was back in the room, seated at the desk, and had just booted up my computer when she emerged from the bathroom looking like a million bucks. Not so long ago, her appearing like that within touching distance would have caused me to whisper sweet nothings in her ear and try talking her out of the clothing she had just put on.

Not on this particular morning. I believe I may have mentioned that I hate having bad knees. They interfere with far more important activities than just going up and down stairs.

“Did you check your e-mail yet?” She asked the question while slipping on a fetchingly dangly pair of earrings.

Like purses, earrings are something else that must be chosen by the person who will wear them rather than by the person purchasing them. At this late date I have finally concluded that bringing Mel along on the shopping trips is a foolproof way of making sure all her birthday and Christmas presents are perfect.

On that morning in Olympia, what floored me was that she performed this tricky operation-putting what looked like chandeliers into tiny holes in her earlobes-without having to look in a mirror, even though one of those was there on the wall right next to her. And please do not ask me to explain why someone who has been shot more than once would turn squeamish at the idea of putting on a pair of pierced earrings. All I can say is I’m glad the earrings were destined for Mel’s ears and not for mine.

As for e-mail? Yes, we’re on the same account, so we can both see the list of each other’s new mail. But it’s like using the bathroom together. It’s just not done. I don’t read hers and she doesn’t read mine.

I scrolled through my list of new mail, including any number of male enhancement messages, until I found the one with the subject line of Beaumont. I opened it and read the following:

Dear Mr. Beaumont,

My name is Sally Mathers. I believe you are my cousin, my mother’s brother’s son. I hope you’ll forgive me for writing to you like this, but time is of the essence.

My mother, Hannah Greenwald, is in her eighties now and not doing very well. I am her only child. At her insistence, I’ve been sorting out the house here in Beaumont, Texas, where she has lived all her life. The house originally belonged to her parents, my grandparents, Frederick and Hilda Mencken, and my grandmother lived there with my parents after Grandpa Mencken died in the early sixties.

I knew from stories I heard as a girl that my mother had a brother named Hank. His full name was Henry Russo Mencken. Russo was my grandmother’s maiden name. From what I gathered over the years, Hank joined the navy in World War II, went away, and never came home. He died in a motorcycle accident before being shipped overseas.

There were a lot of men who didn’t come home after the war. I had a number of girlfriends whose fathers either didn’t come home at all or who came home as decorated heroes. From what I could gather around the dinner table, Hank wasn’t one of those. He was a bit of a scalawag-sort of the black sheep of the family-who was given a choice between joining the service and going to jail. Compared to jail, the U.S. Navy must have seemed like a reasonable option.

As I said, according to my mother, Hank was a bit of a wild thing. By the time he joined the service, he had been in enough trouble that my grandparents, and especially Grandpa Mencken, pretty much washed their hands of him. You probably can’t imagine a parent doing something like that to his own child. Most people can’t, but Grandpa Mencken wasn’t an easy person to get along with.

Actually, in that regard he and my grandmother were a matched pair. My father always said of Grandma Mencken that she was “as mean as a snake,” but he only said it when he was well out of earshot. I think it’s a miracle that, growing up the way she did, my mother turned out to be such a nice person. You can believe me when I tell you that she and my dad made a lot of sacrifices over the years in looking out for Grandma when other people probably would have walked away, but Mother was Hilda’s only surviving child. There wasn’t anyone else to do it.

I had to stop reading just then because my eyes had misted over. Unfortunately, I could very well imagine a parent washing his hands of his own child. It was the same thing my mother’s father, my other grandfather, had done to his own daughter when he learned she was pregnant with me.

“What is it?” Mel asked. “Is something wrong?”

She was seated in the chair directly behind me, the so-called comfortable one, with her own computer open on her lap. I’m sure she saw me mop my eyes, and she must have wondered what was happening.

“Just a minute,” I said. “Let me finish reading this.”

I returned to the text of the e-mail:

Grandma Mencken lived with us the whole time I was growing up. She was over a hundred when she died. With her it’s the opposite of the good dying young. Somehow I don’t think Mother will make it that long, probably because she used up so many of her good years in looking after Grandma.

At any rate, Mother and Hank were close growing up. They were brother and sister, but they were also good friends. As far as I can tell, after he joined the service, she was the only member of the family who wrote to him regularly. There may have been other letters, but I only found the ones he sent to her. In them he mentioned receiving her letters and told her how much he appreciated hearing from home. He never mentioned letters from anyone else.

Mother said she kept all his letters, tied together with a ribbon. Shortly after the war ended, the packet disappeared. My mother mourned losing those letters; she always blamed herself for being so careless. It turns out they weren’t lost at all. I found them up in the attic, hidden away in the back of one of the drawers in Grandma Mencken’s pedal sewing machine when I took it to the local historical society.

I already mentioned that my grandmother was mean. She once lay down on the floor and pretended to be dead because my mother didn’t buy the kind of cookies she liked. It was only AFTER Mother called 911 and the ambulance was on its way that Grandma got up off the floor and told her, “See there? I fooled you.” I’ll say!!!

But I think hiding Hank’s letters tops that trick. The truth is, my mother never lost Hank’s letters. Grandma Mencken took them. Big difference. Once I found them, I read through them all, one by one. Hank wrote to Mother about a wonderful girl he had met in Seattle. He said that her name was Carol Ann Piedmont, although in his letters Hank always refers to her as Kelly. He told Mother that he was in love, that he had bought Kelly a ring, and that he hoped, after they got married, that she’d come back home with him and live right here in Beaumont. The letters stopped because he died in a motorcycle accident.

After he died, my grandparents refused to get in touch with the girl. Mother was still living at home at the time and couldn’t bring herself to go against their wishes. By the time she was ready to do something about it on her own, the letters had disappeared-until I found them a few months ago.

I didn’t mention finding them to Mother because I didn’t want to get her hopes up that we’d be able to locate Hank’s long-lost Kelly. I used the Internet and searched the available records for your mother’s name. I was surprised to learn that she had never married. It made me sad when I found her obituary, like that was the end of it right there, but that’s when I discovered she had a son.

When I saw your name there in her obituary I had goose bumps. Suddenly it seemed possible that you might be Hank’s son and that your mother had given you at least that much of your father’s history, his hometown, because, I’m sad to say, she had nothing else of his to give you.