Marta Perry - Sound Of Fear

Robert frowned, taking a step away. “I know.” His voice wasn’t entirely steady, either. He’d adored Juliet in his own staid way. “It may be nothing, but one of the detectives dropped by with the coroner’s report. It had raised some questions in his mind.”

“Questions?” Her mind shied away from imagining a coroner’s report.

“Perhaps I’m making too much of this. You might already know.” He shook his head slightly, as if to clear it. “The autopsy confirmed something that seemed...odd.” He held up a hand to silence her when she would have burst out with a demand to hear it, whatever it was. “It seems that Juliet Curtiss, your mother, never had a child.”

Amanda froze, staring at him. The words were in English, all right, but they didn’t make any sense. “What do you mean? Of course she had a child. I’m standing right here.”

“Juliet never bore a child,” he repeated. “There isn’t any doubt, Amanda. I read the report for myself, and then I called the coroner for confirmation. Juliet never gave birth.”

Her sluggish wits started to work. “You mean I’m adopted? But why on earth wouldn’t she have told me?”

Robert shrugged, seeming relieved that the worst of his news-breaking was over. “I believe specialists do recommend that the child be told, but it could be that Juliet couldn’t bear the idea that your feelings about her would change if you knew she wasn’t your biological mother.”

At some level she wanted to laugh at that, because it was so ridiculous to think of Juliet in those terms. But if she started to laugh, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to control her emotions.

“Be serious, Robert. Juliet wasn’t a clinging mama. That wasn’t the sort of relationship we had.”

Amanda paused to consider what she’d just said. She and her mother had certainly been close, but Juliet didn’t dote. It hadn’t been in her nature. True, Amanda had lived at home since her practice and her life had fallen apart in Pennsylvania, but they’d lived very independent lives. Juliet had her work, and Amanda had hers.

“You never thought...” Robert began, stepping delicately in what no doubt seemed like a minefield to him.

“Never,” she said flatly.

“You see the problem,” he said, frowning again. She thought he held back impatience when she looked at him blankly. “Legally,” he explained, “your mother... Juliet...must have adopted you prior to the time I met her. You’d have been about eight, I think, when she bought the brownstone. That was the first bit of business I did for her.”

Obviously Robert expected her to concentrate on the problem. She tried to rein in her wandering thoughts. Focus, she ordered herself. “Yes, I’d have been eight when we moved uptown. She’d had her first really successful show, and our lives changed.”

Not that she’d minded the life they’d had before that. The tiny apartment in one of Boston’s many ethnic neighborhoods had been home. But Juliet had wanted more...for herself, but certainly for her daughter.

“If you don’t remember any other life, Juliet must have adopted you when you were quite small.” Robert wore his worried look. “There surely are papers to that effect somewhere.”

“Aren’t all her legal documents at your office? She always said she didn’t have the talent or the energy to deal with things like that. Her work...”

“She was an artist, of course. But that’s no excuse for not having your affairs in order.” That was as close as Amanda had ever heard him come to sounding critical of Juliet. “You can see the quandary that leaves us in now. We must establish your legal position in regard to your mother’s estate.”

“But she had a will. You showed it to me, remember?”

“At my insistence, she did.” He sounded grim. “It leaves everything she possessed at the time of her death to her daughter, Amanda Elizabeth Curtiss.”

“Well, then...”

“Come, Amanda. Concentrate. You’ve always been the practical one. If you’re not her biological daughter, the language becomes ambiguous.”

“You mean our home might not be mine?” That possibility did penetrate the fog in which she groped. The brownstone was home. It might be lonely without Juliet, but every inch of it was filled with memories.

“If someone contested the will on the grounds that you are not Juliet’s daughter, that might well happen.” Robert clasped her hands in a firm grip.

“Someone must be aware of the circumstances. What about her brother, George? They’d been estranged for a long time, but he did come to the funeral. Surely he’d know...” Know where I came from. She finished the sentence in her mind.

This was crazy. It was like spinning on ice in an out-of-control car. Every anchor she reached for slid from her grasp.

“George Curtiss is the last person I’d confide in at this point. Don’t you see, Amanda? He can’t know there’s any question, or you can be sure he’d have brought it up.” Robert’s frown deepened. “There were good reasons for the breach between him and your mother. If half of what she said about him is true, he’d be contesting the will in an instant if he even suspected.”

“Then what should I do? How can we find out?” If her uncle didn’t know...but he wasn’t her uncle, it seemed, any more than Juliet had been her mother.

“First of all, it’s essential that we find any documents relating to you. You’d better have a good search throughout the house for papers. You must have a birth certificate, at least. We may want to hire a firm of private investigators to look into it. And whatever you do, don’t talk about this to anyone but me.”

She blinked at that. “But my closest friends...”

“Not your friends, not anyone. Not until we have a better handle on your identity than we do now.”

Her identity. Amanda had always known who she was and where she belonged. Now it seemed she didn’t know at all. Who was she?

* * *

AMANDA WALKED THE four blocks home, glad to be outside even in the chill dampness of the mid-October afternoon. The wind was strong enough to wipe away some of the fog from her thoughts.

But that didn’t help much. It served only to expose how much she didn’t know. She’d always been able to talk to her mother about everything. Amanda couldn’t begin to come up with an answer for her silence on this crucial subject. Why didn’t you tell me?

She rounded the corner and the brownstone came into view—a three-story building sandwiched between two taller ones, looking squat in comparison. Someone was just coming down the three stairs from the glossy black door.

In another step Amanda had identified him. Bertram Berkley, Juliet’s agent. She wondered, as she always did, if that could possibly be his real name, or if he’d taken it to fit his persona—the sleek, successful artists’ representative whose sponsorship, according to him, ensured entrée to people of influence in Boston’s art world.

He spotted her and swooped down on her, kissing her ceremoniously on each cheek. “Amanda, my dear. You poor child. I just came by to see how you are. You surely haven’t been out already.” He made it sound as if she’d breached some unwritten rule of mourning.

“I went back to work today.” Bertram’s extravagant manner always made her feel even more intensely grounded than she already was. “I have a job, remember?”

“Surely they didn’t expect you to be back a scant two weeks after your mother’s tragic demise.” He linked arms with her and marched her up the steps to the door. Obviously he intended to come in.

She detached her arm. “I wanted to go back, but I have to admit, I’m wiped out. I appreciate your stopping by.”