David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

She tilted her head to the side and her face took on a look of endearment. “Oh, dear boy, it’s taken you such a long time.”

“Well, it never seemed important before. Sally and Ted raised me, loved me, nurtured me. They were my parents, and I thought they deserved my loyalty.”

“So you’ve just kept your wondering to yourself?”

“They didn’t offer to tell me. I took my cue from that.”

She laughed gently. “You were always so obedient, Paul. You should’ve kicked your heels up once in a while. Well, they had different attitudes about adoption in those days, and God knows your mother wasn’t the adventuresome sort. She wasn’t about to buck conventions. Ted, either, as far as that goes. They were dear people, though, and they did what they thought was best for you.”

“I knew that. I just didn’t want them to feel as if all that they had done for me wasn’t enough.”

“But now you want to know.”

“They’ve been dead a dozen years now,” he said, and let it go at that.

Gina smiled again. That was the way it was with her. She had learned a long time ago that life went down better with a smile, and she had always had a ready one. He tried to smile, too, but he found it hard to hide the weight of what was waiting for him on his workbench back in Austin.

She nodded, understanding. Then she looked out through the tall windows to the sunny garden. Her thoughts drifted, and he wondered if he would ever know what she was thinking at this moment. Gina’s buoyant attitude about life made it possible for her to survive her disappointments with aplomb. But it did not mean that she didn’t feel the ache all the same.

She sighed and looked at him again.

“I’m afraid you’re going to be frustrated,” she warned him. “There’s just so very little to know.”

“There are ways to research things these days,” he said. “Things we’ve never had before.”

“They’re not going to help you,” she said. She paused, then shook her head slightly, ruefully. “You were abandoned at a hospital in Atlanta,” she said. “Your biological mother, God bless her little heart, just walked into that old Lanier Memorial Hospital and left you in a little chair in the maternity ward. The ward nurse got a call saying you were there.” She smiled wanly and shook her head. “That’s all there was to it, Paul. It just doesn’t go any further than that.”

He didn’t know what he was supposed to think about that. He didn’t feel anything in particular.

“And we tried to pursue it,” she added. “Your mother and I. When you were about four, we went to Atlanta and tried to find out if there was anything more. We saw the official Lanier report about that night. Just a little ol’ piece of paper saying what had happened. Six lines. No more. You were handed over to child protective services, or whatever the people in Georgia called it back in those days. Your mother and daddy adopted you when you were only six days old. And that was all there was to it. When you were just a little over two years old, they moved back to Texas.”

“You checked it out?” He found it hard to believe that there was no way to go any further with it.

“We tried. We tried very hard. You know your mother. She just thought if she could find your biological mother, she could do something good for the poor thing. She, Sally, was so thankful to have you. She stayed in touch with that agency-child protective services, whatever-for years to see if any woman ever inquired about that night. But nobody ever did.”

Bern was surprised again. He had always assumed that if he ever wanted to know who his real parents were, he would be able to find out. It was a shock to discover that that door had closed for good. In fact, it had never even been open in the first place.

“I suppose,” Gina said, “that in a very real way, you really were born to Sally and Ted. I mean, you practically had no history at all before they took you in.”

Bern just sat there. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting.

He took a final sip of coffee to cover his surprise and disappointment. He said nothing, and in the silence he could hear the heavy old grandfather’s clock that Gina had shipped back from Heidelberg on her first honeymoon ticking in the living room.

She saw that this abrupt end to his search had caught him off guard, and he knew that she realized that he had probably imagined a far more compelling history for himself.

“I guess you didn’t expect this,” she said softly.

“No, I didn’t,” he said.

“I wish I had something for you,” she replied. She reached across and laid her hand on his, her right hand, which was never without the beautiful Colombian emerald ring that matched her eyes. “If I’d known you were coming to ask me that question,” she added, “I would’ve made up a most wonderful lie for you, dear boy, something that would have made you happy.”

After visiting for another hour or so, Bern left Gina’s in a taxi, leading her to believe that he was headed to the airport to fly back to Austin. She would have insisted he stay with her if she had known he was going to be in Houston overnight, but he wanted to be alone. He went to a pharmacy, where he bought a toothbrush and toothpaste, a plastic razor, and shaving cream. Then he checked into a hotel overlooking the West Loop Freeway.

He stood at the window, watching the traffic going north and south in the blistering heat of the summer afternoon, and thought about his situation. He was caught up in something very weird here. He had no doubts now that the genetic testing was going to confirm that the skull was indeed that of his twin brother. That was a huge leap of logic, he knew, but something told him it was inevitable.

He remembered Becca Haber saying that her husband (was he really?) had been an “orphan. Abandoned. Parents unknown.” Now Bern had discovered that his own origins were exactly the same. He could not believe that this was a coincidence.

What about Becca herself? How much of her lie was a lie? What part of it was truth? The thing that concerned him about all of this was that someone was orchestrating it-if not Becca, then someone else. If someone wanted him to know that he had a twin brother who was now dead, why would they do it this way? What was this approach going to achieve that couldn’t also have been achieved by simply coming to him and telling him?

According to Gina’s story, Bern must have been separated from his brother at birth, because the hospital documents made no reference to another child. Or perhaps there had been two children left at the hospital, but someone there-or at child protective services-decided to split up the two boys and falsified the documents. Maybe they’d thought it would be easier to put the boys up for adoption as singles rather than as a pair. Was that sort of thing done? It seemed improbable, although conceivable.

Or had his biological mother separated the brothers at birth? And the reasons why she might have done such a thing could be endless.

Picking up the ballpoint pen and notepad from the hotel desk, he sat and jotted down these questions and others, then looked at them, as if staring at them would bring some clarity to the bizarre problems that they presented.

Did someone want him to investigate his brother’s death? Had he been murdered? Who would have known about the twins? Someone at the hospital. Someone at child protective services. His biological mother? Or his father? Again, why wouldn’t whoever was behind all this just come to him and reveal the truth and ask for his help? It seemed unnecessarily perverse to do it the way it was being done.

Or maybe none of these questions came even remotely close to what was happening. Maybe he had been swept into an unimaginable situation, as bizarre and unbelievable to him as Alice’s aphasia had been to Becca Haber when he had tried to explain it to her. He could imagine now how she must have felt.