“Surely not.” Bernard was imperious.
“She’s lost one account already. We can’t afford to lose our last chance!”
“Lose it? What are you talking about? She’s already won it!
“But it’s mine now.” She must have heard the childish whine in her own voice, for she stopped short and got very angry and red in the face. “I won’t work with her. You’ll have to decide, Bernard. It’s her or me this time.”
“Don’t say anything that you’ll regret later.”
“I’ll regret nothing. You will. It’s my account, and I say this idea is a no-go. You’re either with me or against me.”
Bernard glared, clearly angry now, while the circle of onlookers tightened around them.
“You’re way off base, sister. Remember when we talked about loyalty? My loyalty is always to the client. I’m with Hampton-Moore—and he likes this idea. And he likes Faye O’Neill. It’s a go.”
Susan seemed to splinter like broken glass, and Faye saw in an instant how brittle the account supervisor had become. She felt an immediate empathy for the woman, easy to feel this now that she stood on the terra firma of success. She took a step closer, mentally extending the olive branch.
“Susan,” she began in earnest. “I know we’ve had a difficult time in the past but I’m willing to overlook it and try again. If you will. We’d like your input into this campaign. Join us.”
Susan stood tall and straight. Her hair was stylishly groomed, her dove gray silk suit was impeccable, her black patent leather shoes gleamed, the pearls at her neck were impressive. But her face mottled in rage and defeat and the certain knowledge that this one thin woman before her in a modest suit with fly-away hair that couldn’t be restrained and displaying not a bit of flash save for a thin gold star at the neck and a streak had more style and good form and creativity than Susan would ever possess.
“I wouldn’t waste my time,” Susan replied, her perfect white teeth flashing. “You haven’t heard the last of this,” she said to Bernard, but they all knew that her words were empty.
When she left the room, slamming the door behind her, there was a collective sigh of relief. Followed by a thunderous clap from Bernard.
“Aw, to hell with tea. Where’s the champagne!”
Chapter 17
Detective Farnesworthy rocked on his heels while Jack read the slim report of his investigation to date. Scanning the pages, Jack rubbed his jaw, unable to disguise his disappointment.
“So that’s it? A few pages that tell me what I already know? Hell, Farnesworthy, this proves nothing more than I’m a mystery.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’ve turned over every stone I could find, as it were, but there wasn’t a shred of information, not the slightest lead I could follow that enabled me to unearth any information about your biological parents.” He coughed. “Or the first six years of your life.”
Jack weighed the report in his hand. It was light indeed. “Well, I guess that’s that. Hey,” he said with a levity that belied his hurt, “it couldn’t be helped. That’s what comes of trying to give a mutt a pedigree.”
“Actually, sir, that’s not quite it, as you put it.” Jack cocked his head and raised a brow.
The detective’s brows gathered, and he pinched his lips as though enduring a private struggle. Then he reached into his briefcase and handed Jack another sheet of paper.
“It’s just the preliminary list, of course. There were crates and crates of files I haven’t even gone through yet. Don’t know if I should bother, as these lads aren’t any direct relation to you. But there was a connection, and I thought,” he paused then stammered out, “well, sir, you told me to follow up on any hunch, no matter how odd.”
Jack looked up at Farnesworthy, whose cheeks flushed either from embarrassment or the fact that he was sweltering in his suit, vest, and tie worn despite the summer’s heat.
“Right, right,” he replied, scanning the list of names on the paper. “But, Mr. Farnesworthy, I’m afraid I don’t understand. Who are these boys?”
“That’s just the point, sir. I don’t know. Nobody does, not really. While going through the files, I pulled out these names on a hunch. What intrigued me about them was how similar their cases were to your own. Young boys and babies, all left at Mrs. Forrester’s door, this very door here, sir, then taken to the London Home for Boys for adoption. And not a one of them has records. Strange, it is. Highly strange.”
“You say that none of these boys has any background? No parents, no relatives, no history at all?”
“None, sir.”
“But there are at least a dozen boys listed here.”
“Yes, sir. And who knows how many more are hidden in those crates of files.”
“Incredible. I’ve heard of sloppy record keeping, but this takes the cake.”
“But that’s what’s most curious, sir. You see, in going through these files, I’ve realized that once the child was taken to the home, the records were quite complete. It was only prior to arriving at the home that the information is missing.”
“What? They came from nowhere?”
“So it would appear. Of course, we know that can’t be the case, but the fact remains that for those boys, and for you, sir, there is no history.”
Jack was totally nonplussed. He stared at the detective for a moment, then back at the list, then returned his fixed stare to Farnesworthy, who was once again rocking on his heels.
“Oh, sorry, Farnesworthy,” he said, pulling out a chair and removing a pile of papers from the seat. “Please sit down. Coffee? Tea? A glass of cold water?”
“No, nothing, sir. Thank you. I can’t stay long. I only dropped by to make my report. And to ask if you wish me to continue on in the case. I’ve found no additional information about your own history, and as for the other, well, as I said, there were crates of files and that would take a great deal of my time to go through.”
“Carry on!” Jack exclaimed. “This is too good a mystery to let go of now.”
“But it doesn’t make sense to follow this lead, sir. It won’t lead to any answers about you, and it will undoubtedly raise my bill. Considerably.”
“Call it counterintuitive, Farnesworthy, but it’s what I’m good at, and it makes perfect sense to me. And while you’re digging around in those dusty old files...” Jack tilted his head to look upward at the ceiling. “I’m going to have another crack at the memory banks of the cornerstone of the London Home for Boys. Wendy Forrester. And I’m willing to bet those files aren’t the least bit dusty.”
* * *
Jack found Wendy seated on the floor before a small patch of wall, a paintbrush in her hand and several small tins of paints to her left on the floor.
“May I come in, Wendy? I don’t mean to disturb you.” Resting the brush in her palm she looked at him with an expression of delight. “By all means, come in. I’m sure you could never disturb me.” Then, narrowing her eyes, she said with a captivating glint, “Yet, perhaps it is you who might be disturbed.”
Jack chuckled and shook his head. “I should’ve known you’d spot a problem at twenty paces.”
“Come sit, Jack, and tell me all about it.”
In a smooth swoop he slipped to sit beside her, resting his elbows on his crossed knees. The sun flooded the room, warming his back. Behind him he heard the canary twittering and hopping. Looking at the wall, he was heartened to see that Wendy was creating another mural, this one of a pirate ship that swung back and forth on waves like a pendulum. Beaming from portholes were two small faces that were unmistakably Maddie and Tom.
“Looks just like them,” he said.
“Do you think so? I’m glad. I’d like to put you and Faye in the mural as well but, you see...” She struggled for the right words.
“We’re grown-up.”
“Yes,” she replied with a winsome expression. “Speaking of Faye, I haven’t seen much of her the past few days. She is always so very busy.”
“It’s hard to believe she could be even busier. But with the success of her new campaign, which I gather you had something to do with, it’s been full steam ahead.”
“I see,” Wendy murmured, studying his face. “And your ship has already set sail, is that it?”
“What? Oh, you mean my work. Yep, all done. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”
“You’ll be leaving us soon, then, I suppose.” Her voice was quiet and subdued.
Jack’s smile fell, and he picked up a paintbrush from the tin and twiddled it in his fingers. “I’ll miss you.”
“Only me?”
“No, of course not only you. I’ll miss the children.”
“Only the children?”
He chuckled and popped the brush back into the can. “Okay, you minx. Faye, too. I care a great deal about her. And I think she cares about me.”
“Yes, I think she does, too.” Wendy tapped her chin with the wooden tip of her paintbrush, then set the brush in a can and rested her hands in her lap. “Forgive me, Jack, but I’m a bit protective of Faye. She’s like a lovely, sweet flower that’s been trampled under a cruel, heavy boot. She’s so afraid to have dreams anymore. To believe in anything that isn’t somehow proven. She’s responded well to the sun, the warm air, and plenty of what I like to think of as good Number 14 compost. I’d hate to think she might get stepped on again.”
“Wendy,” replied Jack, feeling a bit crushed himself. “I’d never do anything to hurt her.”
“No, of course not. Not intentionally. But a boy like you, so clever, so full of spirit, so...well,” she said a bit distracted. “You see, it’s very easy for a girl to fall in love with a boy like you. And once that happens, it’s cruel not to love her back. The way a woman needs to be loved. The way married people ought to love.” She paused and looked wistfully out the window. “I know.”
“Whoa there, who said anything about marriage? I care a lot for Faye, but marriage? That’s just not for me.”
“You remind me of another boy I know,” she said wryly, returning to her mural.
He frowned and, looking away, caught a glimpse in a mural across the room of Peter Pan flirting with a mermaid. “Oh, I get it. You’re saying I can’t grow up.”
“No. You are a grown man, chock-full of those male hormones that drive you to distraction. You posture and pose and swagger. But being grown-up is quite a different thing than being an adult. You, Jack Graham, are still very much the little boy I once knew.”
Jack swung his gaze away from the mural to focus on Wendy. She was looking up at him with an impish expression on her face, and he homed in on that sparkle that told him that she knew a secret. A very big secret.
“You knew me as a boy?”
“I knew so many boys...”
“Uh, uh,” he said, sidling closer, gently sliding the brush from her hand. “You’re not going to get away with that again. You know something. Come on, Wendy. It’s time. I’m leaving soon. I may never have this chance again to find out who I am.” He paused, swallowing down the hope rising in his chest. “Please, Wendy. I need to know. Do you remember me? Did you know me as a boy?”
Her gaze roamed his face while affection and memories sparkled in her eyes. Then, with a heavy sigh, she nodded, and a bittersweet smile of resignation settled on her face.
“Yes,” she replied at length. “I knew you. And I remember you well. How could I forget you? You were as shiny and bright as a freshly minted coin.”
“I was?” His heart ached to know more about himself, the boy before the man.
“Indeed. You were the most curious boy I’d ever met. You always wanted to figure out how something worked, to see things clearly. Except, the way you looked at the world was different than the way most other people did. It was fresh and new.” She laughed brightly. “Oh, you were nothing if not persistent. Could sit and fiddle with one of your experiments for hours. Pyrotechnics, especially. You were always trying to shoot something up to the stars. We used to have to come and pull you away to get you to eat.”
She laughed lightly in memory. You blew up a few things, started a few fires, that sort of thing. Had the school shaking in its boots, you did. That’s what made you so hard to place. Not many folks wish to adopt a child they perceive as a fire-setter. Then it occurred to me to write Warner Graham about you. He was a dear friend of mine. A brilliant scientist. A physicist, like you are now. Thought he could steer you right—and I believe he did.”
Jack felt a crushing disappointment. “My adopted father was not a physicist,” he told her. “He was a farmer. A Nebraska corn farmer.”
“Oh, well, that, too, of course,” Wendy replied, undaunted. “But that was later. When the war began in Europe, he was called up like most able men, but they saw a different use for a man of your father’s particular abilities. The government sent him off to America to work on some big secret project.” She tilted her white-haired head and thought, “Let’s see, it had something to do with the war effort. All the best minds were gathered together. Why am I thinking New York?”
“The Manhattan Project,” Jack said through dry lips.
“Yes, that’s right. Only it wasn’t in Manhattan.”
“No, it was out west in New Mexico. Los Alamos.” He scratched his head and exhaled heavily, trying to take it all in, to equate the quiet farmer he knew with the kind of brilliant physicist his father must have been to be called to Los Alamos. “You do know what they were building, don’t you Wendy?”
“Yes, surely,” she replied solemnly. “Though not at the time. It was all hush-hush back then. Now of course we all know it was the atomic bomb.”
“My father worked on the Manhattan Project...”
“He did,” she said, nodding thoughtfully. “And it changed him. He never reconciled his part in it. After the war he abandoned science completely and became a farmer, and when he married, he never had children. He wrote me once not long after he settled in Nebraska. In the letter he enclosed a check donating all the money he’d saved during the project to my boys’ home. His letter was a sad treatise on what a terrible thing he believed he’d helped create and how meaningless life had become for him. He wrote that he didn’t want to bring children into the dangerous world that he’d helped create. A world that could end, in the space of time of a breath. Your father had a long spell of melancholia after the project’s successful completion. It was most serious, poor, poor man. Your mother was a saint.” She sighed heavily. “I wept for my dear friend. He was such an optimist when I knew him. So sure he could make a mark on the world. I daresay he did, though not the one he wished.
“When you arrived at my door, Jack, I saw that you were every bit as bright and inquisitive as he once was. Perhaps more so. I immediately thought of my childless friends, Warner and Anne Graham. Well, not immediately actually. You’d picked all the locks at the home and the teachers and administrators were at their wits’ end.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said with a shrug. “I was just curious how they worked. And it was so easy. I love puzzles.”
“I was sure that was it,” she replied, patting his hand. “I knew Warner could teach you so many things and keep your mind busy in the right way.”
“But he never taught me science!” he exclaimed, flabbergasted by all that he’d just heard.
“He must have in some way, for here you are. A scientist, just like him.”
Jack thought back at what it was like growing up with Warner Graham. His father had been aloof. Already in his late forties, he’d seemed ancient to an eight-year-old boy. Yet, in his quiet way he encouraged Jack to observe the world in all it’s vastness and its intricate details, and to accept things as they were without any preconceived prejudice.
“I remember how all the other kids in the area could zip off the names of all the different plants or trees or animals. ‘Hey, Graham,’ they’d call. ‘What do you call this?’ Most of the time I didn’t know, and they laughed at me, made fun of the ‘geniu
s’ who didn’t even know a maple from an elm.” He shrugged and snorted, “I still make mistakes with proper names. But when Warner and I walked through the woodlot that bordered the farm, he didn’t teach me those kinds of things. He’d hold my hand as we walked and talk to me about how trees are the most beautiful and useful products of nature. He’d make me take deep breaths of fresh air and explain how the oxygen we breathe is released by trees. He’d take me to slopes where trees prevented soil erosion, or stoop and point to burrows in the base of trees that were shelter for animals. And right before a storm blew in, when the air smelled like sweet rain and the birds were quiet in their nests and the trees began to rustle, he had me close my eyes and listen to them. Looking back, I can see how he was ahead of his time. He taught me how every living thing was connected.”
“Sounds to me as though he taught you a great deal.”
“All this time I thought he just loved nature. What a fool I was not to realize that he was teaching me that true science is nature.”
Jack rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. It all made sense to him, now. His father, the physicist, had worked on the atom, once believed to be the smallest building block of matter. But though he worked as a corn farmer in Nebraska, Warren Graham’s mind continued to ponder physics. He had taught Jack, through stories, that there were even smaller components, what Jack later learned were protons, neutrons, and electrons. And he’d learned that later that these were made up of still smaller particles called quarks. This gave birth to Quantum theory, the set of rules that described the interaction of these particles.
As a theoretical physicist, Jack played in the sandbox of these mathematical models. By showing his son to sense and pursue connections with the earth and the stars, his father had guided him to study how all forms of energy in the universe were made up of the same infinitesimal building blocks.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” Jack opened his eyes and caught Wendy’s gaze and said defiantly, “Why didn’t you tell me until now?”
“Adoption is a very private matter,” she replied looking at him levelly. “I didn’t want to interfere.” Then, furrowing her brow, she added, “But you seemed so hungry for knowledge about yourself. And you’re quite right about time running out. You’re leaving soon and at my age, well, one never knows when I’ll go on a journey of my own. It didn’t seem right to withhold the truth any longer. Warner was wrong not to tell you.”
Second Star to the Right Page 24
