Foundlings (The Lost Dragons Book 1)

by Finley Aaron

  No one ever came forward.

  Our parents—Mom and Dad, the people who adopted us—had been on a waiting list for a baby for almost a decade, and had all but given up hope of ever being parents when they got a phone call asking if they’d take us.

  They did.

  We’ve been here ever since.

  Most of the time, I don’t worry nearly so much about that duffle bag and who might have left it at the rest stop or why. I’m usually more concerned about making it from the library to my bedroom without damaging my library books.

  But ever since this afternoon, getting home from the library is a vastly less pressing concern.

  Apparently, I can get home by just imagining myself in my room.

  But how is that possible?

  Judy hoists her shovel and is about to start scooping again when I ask, “Remember earlier, how you said what I did isn’t humanly possible?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think what you just did is humanly possible, either.”

  Judy steps closer to me. Half her face is covered by a scarf and the ear flaps of her hat. Basically, the only thing I can see is her hazel-brown eyes.

  They look scared.

  “You know how, a little over fifteen years ago, we were found at a rest stop in a duffle bag?”

  Something dark like fear or maybe just melancholy brooding crosses Judy’s face like a shadow. “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

  “Where do you think that duffle bag came from?”

  She spills all the theories we’ve contemplated before. “It was found at an eastbound rest stop, so it probably came out of a vehicle traveling from the west—Colorado or Wyoming, maybe Utah, Nevada, California. But you know, they ran stories in the papers and on the news, asking everybody who knew of a woman who’d given birth to twins recently, to check to make sure those twins were still there. Everybody’s twins were accounted for. Nobody ever stepped forward. It’s like our mother gave birth in secret and then just…vanished.”

  I study my sister’s face closely. It’s difficult to imagine that a woman could hide her pregnancy, give birth in secret, and then leave her baby somewhere for someone else to find. Hard to imagine, but it sometimes happens.

  But twins? Don’t women get bigger when they’re having twins? Don’t they have more medical complications? Surely she would have needed help with the delivery. Wouldn’t we have been more noticeable than a single birth, harder to hide?

  Or is that precisely why we were abandoned in the first place?

  “I think we need to find out where we came from.” I inform my sister.

  “We can’t.”

  “We need to try.”

  “What are you saying? The police did a full investigation. They ran news stories, they dusted the duffle bag for finger prints. The FBI even tried to find where we came from, but couldn’t. That was over fifteen years ago. I think we’re now what you call a cold case. The clues are dried up, or whatever. Seriously, where do you think you’re going to start?”

  I lean on my shovel and think it over. The rest stop is our last link to whoever left us there. They interviewed the teenager who found us. She said there was another vehicle in the parking lot when she pulled in. Some kind of Jeep or Suburban or something, maybe a dark color, she wasn’t really sure. No idea on the plates or anything, because she wasn’t paying any attention. It pulled away before she thought it might be important.

  Of course, there’s no video surveillance footage or anything. It was 1974.

  Judy shovels a couple more scoops of snow, then stops. “Whatever happened to the duffle bag?”

  I toss another scoop of snow into the bushes and shrug. “The FBI had it, right? They dusted it for fingerprints?”

  Judy’s got this determined look on her face like she sometimes gets. When she gets that look, there’s no sense trying to reason with her. “We need to find that bag.”

  We finish scooping the driveway in a hurry, snow flying, like a mini driveway-clearing tornado. Then we tromp inside and peel off our boots and gloves and coats and things on the landing three steps down from the kitchen.

  Mom stands at the top of the steps and asks, “Would you two like some hot cocoa?”

  “Yes, please.”

  By the time we finish hanging up our things to dry, Mom has the cocoa ready.

  I’ve been thinking it over ever since Judy brought it up, and I’ve made up my mind. There’s no way we’re going to get anywhere on our search unless we let our parents in on what we’re looking for. We don’t have to tell them about the freakish things we’ve done, but we do need to interview them, at least.

  They’re almost like witnesses.

  Well, the closest thing we have to witnesses.

  I’m about to open my mouth to ask, when Judy swallows a gulp of hot cocoa and poses the question to Mom, point blank.

  “Whatever happened to the duffle bag we were found in?”

  Mom’s putting away the last of the dinner dishes. She hangs a skillet from the pot rack above our heads and looks thoughtful. “The FBI dusted it for fingerprints. To my knowledge, they never found any, other than those belonging to the girl who discovered you. The bag had a lot of your things in it—clothes, diapers, bottles, formula. They searched through all of it, but they didn’t find any clues.”

  “So where is it now?” I ask.

  Mom taps one finger against her lips and makes a thoughtful face. “I sold most of your baby things on garage sales, or gave them to other new moms. But the duffle bag I kept. I think it’s in the attic.”

  Judy stands. “Can we see it?”

  “Finish your cocoa first.”

  We drain our cups in record time and then shoo Mom ahead of us all the way to the attic. She opens the narrow door in the hallway upstairs. Cold air rushes down to greet us.

  The attic isn’t heated or very well insulated, or any of that. It’s lit by only one lightbulb, and there are cobwebs and even spiders in the corners. We almost never go up there except to get something that’s been stored away or to find a place to stash things we don’t regularly use.

  “Hmm, bags, bags,” Mom hunts under our luggage and those special suit-carrying bags we got to carry our fancy clothes when we went to Paris last winter. Not that we needed to wear fancy clothes on that trip, but I think Mom and Dad thought we should look extra good since it was Paris. We haven’t touched the bags since.

  “Here it is.” Mom holds up a bag by its strap. It’s a plain black bag, a little dusty, I guess maybe from storage or the FBI dusting it for fingerprints. I’m a little surprised by how small it is. I mean, I guess it’s an average-size duffle bag, but the two of us fit in there with clothes and things? I suppose we were small and our clothes were tiny, but I don’t know, I just expected something enormous, like those giant duffles basketball players carry.

  Something big enough to hide a clue.

  This bag just looks like a plain old bag.

  Disappointing.

  But it’s our only link to whatever we are and wherever we came from.

  “Mind if we take it downstairs and look through it?”

  Mom hands it over with a bittersweet smile. “It belongs to you.”

  Judy and I head to my room (it may be smaller than Judy’s, but it’s warmer, and after being outside and then in the attic, I feel like we need the warm).

  There are still some cloth diapers folded in a neat little pile inside the bag. Judy takes them out and unfurls them each in turn, as if waiting for a clue to come tumbling out, even though these things were probably wrapped around our bottoms tons of times between when we were found and when we finally got potty trained.

  I’m not surprised that none of them contains any clues.

  The stairs creak, and Mom and Dad come to stand in the doorway, watching us investigate.

  The bag has a few different zippered compartments. I unzip each in turn and feel around carefully, even checking with my flashlight, just in case.r />
  In one of the pockets, I discover a couple of old Kleenex, which do not appear to have been used. They are neatly folded together and starting to disintegrate, leaving white fibers all over my hands.

  “Careful with those. Here, let me see.” Judy takes them and gently unfolds them before lifting one up toward my bedside lamp, and peering at it with one eye closed, as though she might be able to read a secret message written in invisible ink, or something.

  “Sorry, Judith,” Mom apologizes. “I think those were my Kleenex. We used the duffle as a diaper bag for the first few days that we had you, until we had a chance to buy a proper diaper bag.”

  I can see the apology on both our parents’ faces. They’ve never hidden from us that we were adopted. In fact, when we were younger, they made it sound extra special, like the stork delivered us to them precisely because it knew they would love us best of all.

  But I think they feel bad, not having any information to give us about where we really came from, or our tendencies toward genetic diseases, or any of that.

  “It’s okay, Mom.” Judy carefully refolds the Kleenex. “We were just…curious.”

  Probably Judy is trying to make Mom feel better, because Judy is all sorts of into people’s feelings and making sure no one is sad. But she’s also always been curious about our real mom. Maybe more than curious.

  Whether for Judy’s sake or my own, I’m not yet ready to give up the search. Surely there’s something inside this bag, somewhere. It’s our only link to where we came from. If there’s nothing there, we’ll probably never know, so I’m not about to leave a single stitch unexplored.

  I feel around the main compartment. Maybe there’s a hidden pocket or something sewn into the lining. Anything.

  The bottom of the bag has a sort of stiff inner reinforcement thing to help the bag keep its shape. I feel all along the seams. It’s sewn to the bag on three sides, but on the fourth side, there’s no seam.

  That side must have been left open so the manufacturers could slip the panel in. I have other duffle bags and they’re all put together more or less the same way.

  I slip my hand past the missing seam and feel around inside.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  It all feels like the inside of the bag, the same weather-resistant fabric.

  “Sorry, Roo,” Dad says.

  But then my fingers touch something.

  Paper.

  I pull it out.

  Judy looks at me with eyes wide, and our parents lean in for a closer look.

  “It’s an envelope.” A used envelope, the top end torn completely off when somebody got this thing in the mail and opened it. My hands are practically trembling as I turn it over, hoping beyond hope there’s an address on the other side, and it’s not to the house we’re already in.

  There’s an address on the other side. Handwritten in blue ink.

  It’s not to the house we’re already in.

  I glance up at my parents, half expecting them to announce they left the envelope inside, along with the Kleenex.

  My mom, who sometimes can read what Judy and I are thinking just by looking at our faces, assures me, “I’ve never seen that before.”

  “Me neither,” Dad adds.

  Fading Blue ink spells out the words:

  Mike Smith

  Lizard Head Road

  Boulder, WY 82923

  “Boulder, Wyoming?” Mom reads. “I’ve heard of Boulder, Colorado. Wyoming, hmm?”

  There’s no return address. There may have originally been one, but whoever opened this envelope was either sloppy or in a big hurry, because they tore off much of the top. The postmark doesn’t even include a town—that part got ripped off—but most of the date is still legible.

  “It looks like it was sent in October of 1974.”

  Judy’s eyes go extra wide. “We were found in November of 1974.”

  “November twentieth, 1974,” Mom specifies. “The hospital estimated that you were about a week old, since you looked like newborns but you had belly buttons, not stumps. So they assigned you the birthdate of November thirteenth. But of course, we don’t know for sure.”

  While Mom’s reminiscing, I’m studying the envelope. Too much of the date is missing. I can only guess the month is October because the curved bottoms of the O and C remain. The number for the day was torn completely away; the 19 is clipped a bit on top, but the 74 is as clear as anything.

  “This envelope was mailed about a month before we were born,” I mutter, trying to determine if there’s any significance to the timing.

  “Who’s Mike Smith?” Judy asks.

  Dad shakes his head. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a thousand Mike Smiths in the United States. Could there be a more common name?”

  I’m still trying to trace what might have happened. “Someone mailed this envelope to Mike Smith a month before we were born. Somehow, the envelope made it into the same bag we were found in—within a month’s time, give or take.”

  Judy nods. “We were in this bag with the envelope, weren’t we? The envelope was sent to Mike Smith. Did he put it in the bag?”

  Goosebumps raise the fine hairs at the back of my neck. “Did Mike Smith put us in the bag?”

  Chapter Three

  “Who is Mike Smith?” Judy repeats the question, which right now feels like the most important question in the world.

  “Why would he put us in this duffle bag and leave us at a rest stop?” I’m trying to imagine what would drive a person to do such a thing. Did he want rid of us? Was he hoping to come back and pick us up later?

  Was he our father? What happened to our mom? How did she feel about us getting left in a bag? Did she even know about it?

  Was she even still alive?

  My parents are frowning. Looks like their cozy bedtime story about the stork isn’t going to cut it anymore.

  Dad steps past where Judy and I are sitting on the floor next to the bag. He perches on the edge of my bed. “We often wondered what might have happened. It’s possible that whoever left you was hoping to hand you off to someone who was to come along later, but you were found before the switch was made.”

  Judy looks puzzled. “But if somebody was supposed to pick us up, why didn’t they come forward when our story was on the news?”

  Mom crosses the room to sit next to Dad. “It’s possible they were involved in something illegal and didn’t want to get caught.”

  “An illegal baby exchange?” The thought boggles my mind.

  Dad takes hold of Mom’s hand. “Sometimes, when people are unable to have kids of their own, they start to feel desperate. We waited over a decade with our names on a waiting list before it was our turn. It’s possible someone else might not have been so patient.”

  “So this Mike Smith?” Judy seems stuck on the question. “Who’s he?”

  I stare at the torn envelope in my hands. “Where’s Boulder, Wyoming, anyway?”

  “Let me look in the atlas.” Dad steps past us again and heads downstairs.

  I follow him, and he grabs the road atlas from the bookcase and heads for the dining room table.

  “Wyoming.” Dad opens the travel-size booklet to the correct page. “Here, you look. I need my reading glasses.”

  While Dad goes to hunt up his glasses, I search the tiny print for a town named Boulder. Either Wyoming doesn’t have too many towns, or they’re not all listed. I recognize the blue line of Interstate 80, which leads from Nebraska west through Wyoming.

  Judy and I were found in a rest stop on I-80.

  I follow the blue line, scanning either side for towns.

  “Got it!” I announce as Dad returns with his glasses, and Mom and Judy join us around the table. I read the tiny red numbers that specify the miles between points. “It’s forty miles from I-80 at Rock Springs, north to the town of Farson. Then it’s another seventy miles to Boulder.”

  “One hundred and ten miles?” Mom sounds slightly overwhelme
d.

  “No, wait.” Dad corrects my estimate. “It’s seventy miles from Farson to Pinedale. Boulder is probably only fifty more miles or so.”

  Mom leans over to look at the map. “Ninety miles off the interstate, plus how far down I-80 from here?”

  “I’ll have to add all the numbers together. Judy, can you grab me a pencil and paper?”

  But Mom’s already making a disapproving clucking noise with her tongue. “It’s hundreds of miles from here.”

  “What are you thinking?” Dad asks, with that intrigued note in his voice like he gets when Mom suggests we abandon our daily chores and go for a hike on a lovely day.

  Like maybe there’s an adventure to be had, however small.

  I love hearing that note in his voice, and I feel my hope rise along with it.

  But Mom shakes her head. “I was thinking maybe we could go there and try to find this place, but it’s late December, and it’s a long trip.”

  “The kids get off early from school on Wednesday for Christmas Break, and then they don’t have to be back for nearly two weeks.” Dad still sounds intrigued.

  “But Wyoming, in December?” Mom clucks her tongue again. “This place looks like it’s in the mountains.”

  “It’s on the other side of the Continental Divide,” I admit, jotting down the mileage numbers on the pad of paper Judy brought me.

  “If the weather stays mild—” Dad begins.

  But Mom cuts him off. “We’ve got four inches of snow on the ground.”

  “But what about in Wyoming? What’s their weather like?” Dad wonders out loud.

  While I’m listing mileage numbers on the notepad, Judy has found a calculator and starts adding them up. I have to flip through the atlas for the Nebraska roads, but it doesn’t take me long to get them all written down.

  “Seven hundred and ten miles,” Judy announces triumphantly.

  “How long of a drive is that at fifty-five miles per hour?” Dad asks.

  Mom only whimpers.

  Judy punches the numbers. “12.9 hours,” she concludes.

  Mom whimpers again.