Roz Fox - A Secret To Tell You

So much for unbiased reporting.

But it was Quinn and Norma’s reaction that April found bizarre. It bothered her so much, she let it disrupt her plan to catch up on paperwork tonight.

Of the two Santinis, Quinn had been the one most visibly upset at the existence of the letters. Thinking back to when she’d blurted out the reason for her visit to their home, April recalled Mrs. Santini’s face. Unless her memory was completely off base, Norma had been shocked, but overjoyed, too. Then why had Quinn been so anxious to lay hands on the letters? He’d been willing to scrap what he’d declared to be an important previous engagement. Were the Santinis trying to protect themselves—or the identity of the letter writer?

April went back to her laptop. A college friend had located her birth mother through an Internet search. April didn’t know where to start. In France, perhaps. Darn, what was the name of that city?

It eluded her, and she didn’t own an atlas. Since she lived in the homes she remodeled, she never kept a lot of extraneous stuff. As a rule she scoured flea markets for a sparse quantity of furniture that would show well when she was ready to sell the house.

Scrolling through possible sites, April found a map of France. She hoped the city jotted on the back of Norma’s snapshot would jump out at her. But the print on the map was so small, she couldn’t place anything. And she’d forgotten her printer was on the fritz and that she’d dropped it off at the computer store for repair last week.

Giving up, she stored the map until she could remember the town. Instead, she Googled missing-person sites. Two that she checked out charged a hefty fee. And even to start, they wanted more information than a name, although one site said they’d work from a name and last-known location. Although disappointed that she didn’t seem to be making any headway, she typed in Heinz von Weisenbach’s name and requested a general search. No matches came up. She tried adding France. To her astonishment, two H. von Weisenbachs popped up. She bookmarked the site in case she wanted to go back at a later date. The first listing was a dud. It took her to a family-owned landscape-architect business in Mulhouse, France. April was positive that wasn’t the right city. The blurb listed a Web address should viewers want virtual examples of the family’s work. She scrolled on, muttering, “Sorry, folks. Your company’s a bit too far away to handle my landscaping needs.”

A double click on the second name took her to a U.S. military site with short paragraphs on medal recipients from various wars. Recipients were listed alphabetically. Her excitement quickly fizzled when she saw that this Heinz von Weisenbach, although in a correct age range, must’ve been an American. He’d been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for meritorious service—a medal authorized by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Unwilling to give up, April returned to the professional search site. Muttering, “what the heck,” she typed in her credit card information, followed by von Weisenbach’s name and last-known location as simply France. Satisfied that she’d done the most she could toward solving the mystery of the man in the photograph, April exited the site, and set the laptop on her nightstand.

She’d wasted enough time for one day on Norma and Quinn Santini. Still too restless to dig into boring paperwork but wide awake, she decided to work on something more immediate than worrying about a stranger’s old love letters. She went back to sanding pieces of cove molding that needed to be stained and nailed back up in the dining room. After a light sanding and brushing, she rummaged around until she found a small can of stain mixed to match the built-in cabinets.

Her watch indicated nearly 1:00 a.m. before she finished the chore, cleaned her brush and set the molding on sawhorses to dry.

Her busywork hadn’t produced the hoped-for effect. Long after she went to bed, her mind wouldn’t shut down. She continued to fret over the letters so many people desired. Quinn and Norma Santini. Eric Lathrop. And Eric’s boss. Not for the first time, April wished she had a better command of German.

The last time she looked, her bedside clock read three forty-five.

In spite of an almost-sleepless night, April rose early the next morning. Refusing to ruin another day by dwelling on Santini, his family or the letters, April dressed and brewed a pot of her favorite hazelnut coffee. She prepared cinnamon toast and munched on it while the coffee finished dripping through the French press. The French press reminded her of those blasted letters.

Gazing out the window above the sink, she was glad to see that although the sky was overcast, the rain had apparently blown out to the coast before dawn. That was the usual pattern for fall storms sweeping up from the south. The squalls came and went quickly this time of year.

When she’d poured herself a cup of the rich, dark, nutty-tasting coffee, she strolled in to check the cove molding. The stain had dried and looked terrific. Balancing her cup on a nearby sawhorse, she got busy nailing the moldings around the newly painted and wallpapered, dining room. This was the stage of remodeling April loved most, when rooms she’d visualized for so long came together. In this case, she’d waited six months for Robyn to locate period wallpaper that closely resembled the paper she’d uncovered beneath three layers of newer wall coverings. The wait had been worth it. It was these extra touches that had buyers standing in line for one of her finished houses.

After her last project had been featured in the real estate section of syndicated papers in Virginia, Maryland and D.C., her mom finally began to pay attention to April’s enterprise. So much so, that at the last family gathering, Bonnie Trent had even ventured faint praise. Unlike the cutting remarks leveled by April’s snobbish sisters-in-law or the outright denigrating comments made by her brothers.

Midway through the painstaking task of fitting corner molding, the growl of a car engine forced April to scramble off her ladder, parting the plastic to peer out the living room window. The sight of a big black Lincoln Town Car idling in her driveway rattled April for a frantic second. Her immediate reaction, foolish though it might be, was that Quinn Santini had sent a hit man after her.

Her panic subsided the minute an elderly stoop-shouldered gentleman wearing a chauffeur’s cap climbed from the car and opened the back door. April identified the woman who emerged—and stifled the hysterical giggles as her exaggerated fear gave way to relief.

Still, seeing Norma Santini arriving here at all—let alone in such style—was a shock. Especially, dressed as she was today in square-toed boots, jeans and a rather ordinary car coat. April was caught off guard, and yet curiosity sent her scurrying to her door.

“Oh, good, you’re home,” Norma said brightly as she glanced up. She’d been taking in her surroundings, paying little heed to the mud puddles along the unfinished drive. “I expected to see this place crawling with workmen. Except for the new shake roof, the old place looks much the same as I remember it.”

“I generally work alone, except for a few specialized projects and for those I hire craftsmen,” April said, talking too quickly. “I stay true to the period of the home, but I do make some changes. For instance, I open up small, dark rooms and create larger ones with more light. Homes built back then didn’t have the open spaces we prefer now.”

Norma paused on the lowest step and made a second slow circuit to look around. “I see you also opened up the front and made the house more visible from the road than it used to be. I cleared the area near the house to plant a big garden. I liked the privacy provided by the trees between the house and the road.” She made a sweep with her right hand. “That’s where I hung at least a dozen bird feeders. A useless attempt to keep the pests from eating my corn and tomatoes. This land is on a flyway, so we were inundated with migrating flocks.”