by Susan Wiggs
“That’s me, a genius.”
She shone a desk lamp into the safe, illuminating the thick walls of enameled steel and an odd assortment of objects. “What’s this?” She picked up a plastic Ziploc bag and held it at arm’s length. Inside was a bluish, powdery square.
“A moldy cheese sandwich?” Dominic asked.
Tess burst out laughing. “My God, is the old man nuts?”
Leaning forward, Dominic pulled everything out of the safe and set the seemingly random collection on a desk.
Tess stepped back and regarded the contents of the safe. “I don’t see anything remotely like a Fabergé egg. Looks like more papers and photos to sort through. We’d better go tell Isabel.”
Dominic found an empty cardboard feed box and loaded everything into it, tossing the spoiled sandwich into the trash. Outside, Charlie the shepherd trotted over and gave them a sniff, then went back to stalking a bird in the meadow grass. Evening was coming on, the warmth of the day still lingering in the air, shadows lying long on the ground.
“I can get this,” Tess said. “I mean, if you have to get back to your kids—”
“They’re with their mother.”
“Then Isabel will insist that you stay for dinner.”
“Isabel will not have to twist my arm. Let’s see, canned ravioli and a microbrew? Or Isabel’s home cooking?” Their footsteps crunched on the gravel pathway as they headed for the house. “Where do people hide their treasures?” he asked Tess. “You’re the expert.”
“You’d think I would know,” she said. “But what I’ve discovered is that there is no end to the human imagination or to a person’s ingenuity. I’ve found treasures in every conceivable location, from the bottom of a two-hundred-foot dry well to the inside of a rolling pin. Sometimes the most clever thing to do is to hide an object in plain sight. I had a client in New York who kept his Stradivarius violin on a plastic stand with a beat-up guitar and a souvenir ukulele from Maui. His place was robbed twice, and both times, the thieves overlooked the violin.”
“So sometimes the most valuable thing in a room doesn’t look like much.”
“True.”
“Do you think an untrained eye would recognize a Fabergé egg?”
“A lot of them look like knickknacks, something you’d order from an infomercial on late-night TV.”
“Did Magnus understand its value?”
“I wouldn’t know. But the fact that he kept his proof of ownership tells me he probably had a clue.”
“Then why didn’t he offer it as collateral when he knew Bella Vista was in trouble? I don’t get it.
“Maybe the thing is lost for good and all he has is a piece of paper saying it had once been given to his grandfather.”
“You think I’m on some crazy egg hunt to get you to stall the foreclosure.”
“Not so. You know what you’re doing. And for someone who uses a refrigerator as a fireproof safe, you seem to understand your granddad just fine.”
Tess stopped walking. She clutched at his sleeve. There was a sparkle in her eyes that blew him away. “We need to look in the freezer.”
* * *
Tess felt a surge of hope as she strode into Isabel’s kitchen. “Dominic is here,” she announced. “Can he stay for dinner?”
Isabel set aside whatever delicious thing she’d been preparing, something with fresh basil and roasted peppers. “Sure.”
“Thanks,” said Dominic. “You’ll be rescuing me from a bad night with Chef Boyardee.”
“Don’t be hating on Chef Boyardee,” Tess said in a warning voice. “He and I are on intimate terms.”
“Did you find anything in Grandfather’s safe?” asked Isabel.
Tess gestured at the box Dominic was carrying. “More papers to sort through. But I have an idea.” She made a beeline for the industrial-sized side-by-side fridge and swung open the freezer door. A blast of cold struck her as she surveyed the contents. The shelves were arranged with painstaking neatness, a collection of tempered glass containers, rolled parcels, the occasional packaged item. Unlike Tess’s freezer in the city, there was no sign of one-of-a-kind papers alongside ice-furred microwave meals.
“Can I help you find something?” Isabel asked.
Tess could tell she didn’t like anyone rummaging around on her turf. “It occurred to me that Magnus might have stashed something in here.”
Isabel tucked a stray dark lock behind her ear. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something he wanted to keep safe.”
“You won’t find anything like that. It’s a working freezer. I can recite the entire contents from memory.”
“Of course you can. You probably lie awake at night taking stock.”
Isabel laughed. “Sometimes,” she admitted, unapologetic.
Tess picked up a white wrapped parcel. A pound of grass fed Kobe beef. “You’re sure he didn’t stick something in here for safekeeping?”
“Sorry, no.” Scowling, she glanced at Dominic.
“She had a hunch. She keeps things in her freezer.”
“How do you know what my daughter keeps in her freezer?” asked Shannon, coming into the kitchen.
“I’ve been to Tess’s place in the city.”
“And you looked in her freezer.”
“She keeps things in there for safekeeping.”
Tess’s mother swung to face her. “He’s been to your place. Was that before or after you kissed him?”
“Mom.” Her face heated. “Isabel, why’d you have to go and tell my mother?”
“I didn’t know it was a secret.”
“It’s not. But...oh, for Pete’s sake, Mom. He came to the city to tell me about Magnus, which was more than you did.”
Shannon paled. “I had my reasons.”
Dominic cleared his throat and folded his arms. “You’ve been talking about me.”
“Don’t look so smug.” Tess was grateful he was here to change the subject, even if the subject was her attraction to him. “I talk about my bromeliad plant and my bathtub mold, but that doesn’t mean they’re important.”
He put his hand to his chest. “I’m wounded.”
“I didn’t mean... Oh, for God’s sake.”
“There’s another freezer,” Isabel said suddenly.
“What do you mean?”
“In the basement storage area. We have another one, an old trunk freezer. It’s almost never used these days, but as far as I know, it’s still working.”
The freezer was located in a daylight basement. Isabel led the way past drying racks for apples and herbs. The big freezer was pockmarked with rust spots of age and decorated with an assortment of souvenir magnets—Big Sur, Malibu, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. Tess imagined Isabel visiting these places with her grandparents, and felt a sting of envy. It wasn’t that Tess had been deprived of travel when she was growing up. On the contrary, Shannon had taken her traipsing all over the world. Yet as exotic as that sounded, there was a key element missing—the feeling of family, the delight of discovering something together. Tess’s travels with her mother included endless periods of waiting while Shannon conducted meetings and negotiations. Tess’s memories were filled with a changing array of airports, train stations and hotels. There had been no chance to set down roots and make friends. Tess still remembered the spike of yearning she often felt when she saw school kids linking arms and chatting away, ignoring the lonely girl watching from the periphery.
It would have been nice to know she had a sister.
The freezer was not a neat archive like the one in Isabel’s kitchen. It was a jumble of things, some labeled, some not.
“Grandfather took a lot of payments for things in trade,” Isabel explained. “People he dealt with were cash poor, but they had produce and livestock. He once got an entire side of beef in exchange for one of his used trucks.”
“Please tell me there’s not a side of beef in here,” Tess said.
“Not anymore,” Isabel assured her. “It’s most
ly berries.” Leaning over the freezer together, they methodically removed the parcels and placed them on a nearby table. Tess’s fingers went numb from the cold. She was about to declare her hunch had been wrong when she came across a box wrapped in oilcloth and tied with string. It was the string that gave it away—old-fashioned twine.
“Let’s check this out,” she said. Best not to act too excited, setting herself up for disappointment.
She cut the string and unfolded the oilcloth, then opened a musty-smelling cardboard shoebox that had once contained a pair of ladies’ “Patsy” flats, size seven.
Holding her breath, she lifted the lid. Then she looked across the table at Isabel. “These are not the ‘droids we’re looking for.’”
“Star Wars,” Isabel said. “My favorite movie.”
“Really? It’s mine, too.” Tess liked finding points of commonality with Isabel. At the moment, however, it failed to take the sting out of the disappointment. “No egg,” she said simply.
“So what is all that stuff?” asked Dominic.
“More pictures of Erik,” Tess said.
Her eyes met Isabel’s. Neither of them had a relationship with her father, yet both were deeply curious about the man who had fathered them, then died before they were born.
“Why would he keep photographs in a freezer?”
“This looks like a collection of old passports and ID papers,” Dominic said. “Really old.”
“I bet Grandfather used these during the war years.” Isabel laid them out. Rows of somber, stiff-faced strangers stared up from the yellowing travel documents.
“These are travel papers,” said Shannon. “My lord, look at them all.”
“I’m sure they were used to help people get to America during the war,” said Isabel “I wonder why he kept them.”
“In the freezer,” Dominic added.
“You said he could never remember the combination of the safe,” Tess reminded him. As she studied the old passports and IDs, something niggled at her. She picked up a card in Danish with a fading photograph and an official-looking embossed stamp. “My God.”
“What?” all three of them asked in unison.
“Annelise Winther. The one I was asking you about earlier. There’s a card from her in Magnus’s hospital room.” Tess stared at the girl in the photo. She was a small girl, blond and wholesome-looking, remarkably pretty.
“What do you make of this?” Isabel was paging through a folder. “These are Bubbie’s medical records.”
Tess looked over her shoulder. “They go back to... Look at that. Back to the 1960s.”
Shannon took the folder and paged through the forms while Tess, Dominic and Isabel sorted through other materials. After a few minutes Tess noticed her mother had fallen uncharacteristically silent.
“What’s up?” she asked her.
“Eva had a hysterectomy.” Shannon’s cheeks paled.
“I never knew that,” said Isabel.
“Look at the date. It was before you were born.”
“I suppose that’s why I didn’t know,” Isabel said.
“Look again,” Shannon said. “It was before Erik was born.”
There was a long, frozen moment as they all digested this. They checked and rechecked the date. The color fell from Isabel’s cheeks. “It has to be a mistake.”
“Every single record and form in this file shows the same date in 1960,” Shannon said. “It’s not a mistake. And Erik wasn’t born until 1962.”
* * *
“If Eva wasn’t his mother, who was?” Tess asked.
“I can’t imagine,” Isabel said.
She held her arms wrapped around herself, looking as if she wanted to throw up. Tess glanced at Dominic, who offered a shrug of bafflement; clearly he didn’t know anything about the situation. “Who fathered Erik?” Shannon asked. “Was he adopted?”
“He couldn’t have been,” Isabel said. “He looked just like Grandfather—we’ve all seen the pictures, right?”
“Or are we just seeing what we want to see?” asked Tess.
“No, they’re the image of each other,” Shannon said.
“Isabel, did your grandfather...? Could there have been another woman?”
“No,” said Isabel vehemently.
“Maybe they used a surrogate,” Tess suggested. “Did they do things like that back then?”
“Unlikely,” Shannon said.
“Good lord. If those records are correct... How could he keep something like this from me?” Isabel gave a shudder.
Tess touched her arm, an awkward pat. “I’m sorry.” It sucks, finding out secrets about the people you love. She might have said it aloud if her mother weren’t present.
“If Grandfather would get better, we could dig to the bottom of things and forget about all the other trouble,” Isabel said.
Tess caught Dominic’s eye, and she sensed they shared the same thoughts. Isabel was still in denial about the foreclosure.
“I should go,” Dominic said. “I’ve got some hungry dogs to feed.”
“I’ll walk you out.” She kept her distance as they went out into the star-pierced night. “Can she really be that naive?”
“Isabel? Sure. It’s what works for her.”
“She needs to plan, Dominic. Her troubles are not going to magically melt away, even if Magnus gets better.”
“True. What about you, Tess? Do you have a plan?”
He was offering her a chance to discuss...them. As in, the two of them. But that would require her to acknowledge that there was such a thing as the two of them.
There wasn’t, she told herself. There was...some kissing. A yearning inside her. But there was fear and uncertainty, too, a hard protective shell around her. She was better off alone; this was something she’d always believed. That way, she couldn’t get hurt. “My plan is to help Isabel as much as I’m able. And then I need to get back to my own life—my job, the city, my friends.”
* * *
When Tess returned to the house, she found Shannon and Isabel going through more of the papers they’d found. “Check this out,” said Shannon. “It’s a customs declaration form. Dated 1946.”
“Is the egg listed?” Isabel brightened.
Shannon handed over the faded paper. “Just ordinary things, and precious little of that. A set of butter knives. Christmas ornaments. Four books of negligible value...no treasures that I can see. But then...” She fell quiet. Tess leaned over her shoulder and spied a folder marked Erik.
The cache contained a collection of mementos—school photos, baseball cards, a baseball program autographed by Bob Knepper, some scribbled notes and a college transcript from UC Berkeley. There were some papers bound together with a rubber band that disintegrated at first touch, along with some snapshots.
Who are you? Tess silently asked. She studied his eyes, his face, seeing echoes of her own. As she gazed at his image, some other feeling pushed through the sadness. Familiarity. Looking at her father was like gazing at a wildly distorted mirror. Yes, he was a stranger, but some elements were weirdly similar. They both had dimples. Their eyes and noses were shaped the same, and they had the same hairline.
Did you know Eva wasn’t your biological mother? she wondered. Or was that another secret, stashed deep inside Magnus?
Shannon’s face went white as a sheet, and her hand trembled as she touched the old mementos, taking out an old, creased document from Western Union.
“Mom, are you okay?” asked Tess.
Shannon regarded her with wide eyes, misted by tears and memories. “Erik had it,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Tess asked. She felt a prickly sensation tiptoe over her.
“Erik had the egg.”
Twenty
Berkeley 1984
“Don’t hang up.” Erik Johansen’s voice pleaded through the phone line.
Shannon Delaney slammed down the phone, her heart racing. What did he mean, don’t hang up? What did he think she was going
to do? Sit there and listen to him? He’d already screwed up her life quite enough, thank you very much. After their latest meeting, when he’d discovered she was pregnant with his child, she had come to understand that he would never be a part of her world, or a part of the baby’s, either. To imagine otherwise was to make herself crazy.
She glared at the now-silent phone and felt like ripping it out of the wall but thought better of it. First, her landlord wouldn’t appreciate the destruction, and second, she might be needing the phone in the next few weeks as her due date approached.
“We’re on our own now, kiddo,” she told the baby, studying the huge mound of her belly. Today, Little Delaney was draped in a thrift-shop maternity dress in a fairly vile mustard color. The fabric was soft and comfortable over Shannon’s itchy skin. These days, being comfortable was all that mattered to her. Months ago, she’d had no idea about swollen ankles, having to pee every twenty minutes, thrashing around in bed as she tried to find a position to sleep.... The doctor at the free Planned Parenthood clinic had given her books and pamphlets to read, but they only served to depress Shannon. The literature showed a devoted male in the idealized pictures, rubbing the pregnant woman’s back and feeding her ice chips during the birthing process. Seeing a “normal” couple only made her feel more alone.
“Erik says he wants to take care of us,” she told the baby. “That’s why I keep hanging up on him. If I let him stay in our lives, there’ll be strings attached. Believe me, I know. I was tempted at first, when he said he’d find a way to pay all my expenses. How nice would it be to have money for student loans and hospital bills? I can’t do it, though. Taking his money would mean sharing you. My friend Blackie, in law school, warned me about something called paternal rights.”
The phone started ringing, but she ignored it. A pain tweaked at her lower back, and she stood up and rubbed the spot. Then she brought the palms of her hands over her belly, feeling the itchy tightness of her skin. In the past couple of weeks, the baby had grown enormous, no longer kicked or fluttered. There wasn’t room. The movements now felt like a twisting and turning sensation, as if the child couldn’t wait to stretch himself out.
“Paternal rights,” Shannon said again. “As if ejaculating gives a guy a right to be a dad. It’s not like it cost him anything to provide his DNA.”
