Birthright

by Nora Roberts

  security system, putting the lights on a changing pattern of time and location while they were in Maine.

  They’d have stopped the newspapers, had the mail held, informed neighbors of their plans to be away.

  They were, she thought as she crossed the flagstone walk to the big front porch, sensible, responsible people.

  They liked to play golf and give clever dinner parties. They enjoyed each other’s company and laughed at the same jokes.

  Her father liked to putter around the garden and pamper his roses and tomatoes. Her mother played the violin and collected antique watches. He donated four days a month to a free clinic. She gave music lessons to underprivileged children.

  They’d been married for thirty-eight years, and though they argued, occasionally bickered, they still held hands when they walked together.

  She knew her mother deferred to her father on major decisions, and most of the minor ones. It was a trait that drove Callie crazy, one she perceived as a developed subservience that fostered dependence and weakness.

  She was often ashamed of herself for viewing her mother as weak, and for viewing her father as just a bit smug for fostering the dependence.

  Her father actually gave her mother an allowance. They didn’t call it that, of course. Household expenses. But to Callie’s mind it came to the same thing.

  But if these were the biggest flaws she could find in her parents, it hardly made them baby-snatching monsters.

  Feeling foolish, guilty and ridiculously nervous, Callie let herself into the house, hit the foyer lights, then punched in the code for the security alarm.

  For a moment she simply stood, absorbing the feel. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d been alone in the house. Certainly before she’d moved out and into her first apartment.

  She could smell the faint drift of Murphy Oil Soap that told her Sarah, their longtime cleaning woman, had been there within the last few days. There was the scent of roses, too, strong and sweet from her mother’s favorite potpourri.

  She saw there were fresh flowers, some elegant summer arrangement, on the refectory table that ran under the staircase. Her mother would have told Sarah to see to that, Callie thought. She would have said the house enjoyed flowers, whether anyone was home or not.

  She crossed the unglazed checkerboard of tile and started up the stairs.

  She stopped in the doorway of her room first. Her childhood room. It had gone through numerous incarnations from the little-girl fussiness that was her first memory of it—and her mother’s vision—through the eye-popping colors she’d insisted on when she’d begun to have her own ideas and into the messy cave where she’d kept her collection of fossils and old bottles, animal bones and anything else she’d managed to dig up.

  Now it was an elegant space to welcome her or any guests. Pale green walls and sheer white curtains, an antique quilt on a wide four-poster bed. And all the pretty little whatnots her mother collected on shopping expeditions with friends.

  With the exception of vacations, sleepovers at friends’, summer camp and the summer nights when she’d pitched a tent in the backyard, she’d always slept in that room until she’d left for college.

  That made it, she supposed, in whatever incarnation, part of her.

  She moved down the wide hallway and into her father’s study. She hesitated there, wincing a bit as she looked at his lovely old mahogany desk with its pristine surface, the fresh blotter in its burgundy leather holder, the silver desk set, the charming folly of an antique inkwell with quill.

  The desk chair was the same rich leather, and she could see him there, as likely studying a gardening catalogue as a medical journal. His glasses would be sliding down his nose, and his hair, pale gold and shot with silver, would fall over his wide forehead.

  This time of year he’d wear a golf shirt and chinos, over a very fit frame. He’d have music on—probably classical. Indeed his first formal date with the girl who’d become his wife had been a concert.

  Callie had often come into this room, plopped down in one of the two cozy leather chairs and interrupted her father with news, complaints, questions. If he’d been really busy, he’d give her a long, cool look over the top of his glasses, which would make her slink out again.

  But the majority of the time she’d been welcomed there.

  Now she felt like an intruder.

  She ordered herself not to think about it. She would simply do what she’d come to do. After all, they were her papers.

  She walked to the first of the wooden file cabinets. Anything she needed to find would be in this room, she knew. Her father took care of the finances, the record keeping, the filing.

  She opened the top drawer and began to search.

  An hour later, she went downstairs to brew a pot of coffee. Since she was there anyway, she raided the pantry and dug up a bag of low-sodium potato chips. Pitiful, she decided as she carted the snack upstairs. What was the point in living longer if you had to eat cardboard?

  She took a ten-minute break at the desk. At the rate she was going, it wasn’t going to take her as long as she’d estimated. Her father’s files were meticulously organized. She’d have been nearly done already if she hadn’t gotten caught up in the file dedicated to her report cards and grades.

  Walking back through her own past had been irresistible. Looking through the school file made her think of the friends she’d had—the digs she’d organized in backyards in elementary school. Her pal Donny Riggs had caught hell from his mom over the holes they’d dug in her garden.

  She thought of her first real kiss. Not Donny, but Joe Torrento, her heartthrob at thirteen. He’d worn a black leather jacket and Redwing boots. He’d seemed pretty sexy and dangerous to her at thirteen. Last she’d heard, he was teaching biology at St. Bernadette’s High School in Cherry Hill, had two kids and served as head of the local Rotary.

  There was her best friend and next-door neighbor Natalie Carmichael. They’d been as close as sisters, had shared every secret. Then college had come, and after a year or so of trying to maintain the connection, they’d drifted apart.

  Because it made her sad to think of it, she got up again and began to go through the second file cabinet.

  Like the school file, medical records were precisely organized. She flipped past the folder marked for her mother and the one marked for her father and drew out her own.

  It was where she should have started in the first place, she realized, and certain the simple proof she wanted would be there, she sat again. Opened the file.

  She noted the childhood inoculations, the X rays and reports on the broken arm she’d suffered at ten when she’d fallen out of a tree. There was her tonsillectomy in June 1983. The dislocated finger she’d earned trying to slam-dunk during a pickup basketball game when she’d been sixteen.

  She reached for more chips as she continued to scan the paperwork. He’d even kept the basic stuff from every one of her annual checkups until she’d moved out of the house. Jesus, even from the gynecologist.

  “Dad,” she muttered. “That’s just anal.”

  She didn’t react until she’d gone straight through every paper. Then she simply turned the file over and went through every paper a second time.

  But she found no hospital records of her birth. No paperwork from pediatric exams for the first three months of her life.

  Didn’t mean anything. She rubbed a fist between her breasts when her breathing quickened. He just filed them somewhere else. A baby file. Or he put them in with her mother’s medicals.

  Yes, that was it. He’d kept the documentation of her pregnancy and had kept his daughter’s earliest records with that. To close the event.

  To prove to herself she wasn’t worried, she poured more coffee, sipped at it before she rose to replace her file and pull out her mother’s.

  She couldn’t, wouldn’t, feel guilty for going through papers not her own. It was only to put all this to rest. She scanned through, trying to pick up
key data without actually reading what she considered her mother’s private business.

  She found the reports and treatment for the first miscarriage in August of 1969. She’d known about it, and about the one that followed in the fall of ’seventy-one.

  Her mother had told her how they’d devastated her, had even sent her into a clinical depression. And how much finally having a healthy baby girl had meant to her.

  And here, Callie noted with a shudder of relief, here was the third pregnancy. The ob-gyn had been concerned, naturally, with the diagnosis of incompetent cervical os that had caused the previous miscarriages, had prescribed medication, bed rest through the first trimester.

  The pregnancy had been carefully monitored by Dr. Henry Simpson. She’d even been admitted to the hospital for two days during her seventh month due to concerns about hypertension, and dehydration due to continued morning sickness.

  But she’d been treated, released.

  And that, to Callie’s confusion, was where all documentation of the pregnancy ended. The next of the paperwork picked up nearly a year later with a sprained ankle.

  She began to flip through more quickly, certain she’d find the rest of the documents mixed in.

  But they weren’t there. Nothing was there. It was as if her mother’s pregnancy had stopped in its seventh month.

  There was a knotted ball in her stomach as she rose again, returned to the files. She opened the next drawer, thumbed through looking for more medicals. And when she found no folder that fit, crouched and started to open the bottom drawer.

  Found it locked.

  For a moment, she stayed just as she was, squatted in front of the polished wooden cabinet, one hand on the gleaming brass handle. Then she straightened and, refusing to allow herself to think, searched through her father’s desk for the key.

  When she didn’t find it, she took his letter opener, knelt down in front of the drawer and broke the lock.

  Inside she found a long metal fire box, again locked. This she took back to the desk, sat. For a long moment she simply stared at it, wishing it away.

  She could put it back, stick it in the drawer and pretend it didn’t exist. Whatever was inside was something her father had gone to some trouble to keep private.

  What right did she have to violate his privacy?

  And yet wasn’t that what she did every day? She violated the privacy of the dead, of strangers, because knowledge and discovery were more sacred than their secrets.

  How could she dig up, test, examine, handle the bones of dead strangers and not open a box that might very well hold secrets that involved her own life?

  “I’m sorry,” she said aloud, and attacked the lock with the letter opener.

  She lifted the lid, and began.

  There hadn’t been a third miscarriage. Nor had there been a live birth. Callie forced herself to read as though it were a lab report from a dig. In the first week of the eighth month of her pregnancy, Vivian Dunbrook’s fetus had died in the womb. Labor was induced, and she delivered a stillborn daughter on June 29, 1974.

  Diagnosis: pregnancy-induced hypertension, resulting in missed pregnancy.

  The cervical defect that induced the miscarriages, the extreme hypertension resulting in the stillbirth made another pregnancy dangerous.

  Less than two weeks later, a hysterectomy, recommended due to cervical damage, made it impossible.

  The patient was treated for depression.

  On December 16, 1974, they adopted an infant girl whom they named Callie Ann. A private adoption, Callie noted dully, arranged through a lawyer. The fee for his services was ten thousand dollars. In addition, another fee of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was paid through him to the unnamed biological mother.

  The infant, somehow it helped to think of it as the infant, was examined by Dr. Peter O’Malley, a Boston pediatrician, and deemed healthy.

  Her next examination was a standard six-month checkup, by Dr. Marilyn Vermer, in Philadelphia, who had continued as the infant’s pediatrician until the patient reached the age of twelve.

  “When I refused to go to a baby doctor anymore,” Callie murmured and watched, with some surprise, as a tear plopped on the papers she held.

  “Jesus. Oh Jesus.”

  Her stomach cramped, forcing her to bend over, clutching her middle, hissing out breaths until the pain subsided.

  It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be true. How could two people who’d never lied to her about the most inconsequential matter have lived a lie all these years?

  It simply wasn’t possible.

  But when she forced herself to straighten, forced herself to read through the papers again, she saw it wasn’t just possible. It was real.

  What the hell do you mean she’s taken the day off?” Jake shoved his hat back and fried Leo with one searing look. “We’re at a critical point in plotting out the site, and she takes a goddamn holiday?”

  “She said something came up.”

  “What the hell came up that was more important than doing her job?”

  “She wouldn’t say. You can be as pissed off as you want. At me, at Callie, but we both know this isn’t like her. We both know she’s worked sick, exhausted, injured.”

  “Yeah, yeah. And it would be just like her to flip off this project because she’s ticked I’m on it.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” Because his own temper was starting to spike, Leo moved in. Height difference kept him from getting in Jake’s face, so he compensated by drilling a finger into Jake’s chest. “And you know damn well she doesn’t play that kind of game. Whatever problems she has with you, or with me for putting you here, she’ll handle. But they won’t interfere with the project. She’s too professional, and she’s too bullheaded to let it.”

  “Okay, you got me.” Jake jammed his hands in his pockets and stared out over the field they’d begun to segment. It was worry that had anger gnawing at him. “Something was wrong with her last night.”

  He’d known it, seen it. But instead of convincing her to tell him what was wrong, he’d let her shrug him off, scrape at his own pride and temper.

  Old habits die hard.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I dropped by her room. She was upset. It took me a few minutes to realize it didn’t have anything to do with me. I like to tell myself anything that gets under Callie’s skin has to do with me. She wouldn’t talk about it. Big surprise. But she had some pictures out. Looked like family shots to me.”

  What he knew about her family would fit in one shovel of spoil.

  “Would she tell you if something was wrong with her family?”

  Leo rubbed the back of his neck. “I’d think so. She only said she had some personal business, that it couldn’t wait. If she could, she’d be back before the end of the day, if not, she’d be here tomorrow.”

  “She got a guy?”

  “Graystone—”

  He kept his voice low. Digs were always fertile soil for growing gossip. “Give me a break, Leo. Is she seeing someone?”

  “How the hell do I know? She doesn’t tell me about her love life.”

  “Clara would grill her about it.” Jake turned back now. “Nobody can hold out against Clara once she gets her teeth in. And Clara would tell you.”

  “As far as Clara’s concerned, Callie should still be married to you.”

  “Yeah? Your wife’s a smart woman. She ever say anything about me?”

  Leo aimed a bland look. “Clara and I discuss you every evening at dinner.”

  “Callie. Jesus, Leo, stop busting my balls.”

  “I can’t repeat what Callie’s said to me about you. I don’t use that kind of language.”

  “Cute.” He stared off toward the pond, his eyes shielded by his dark glasses. “Whatever she’s said, whatever she thinks, she’s going to have to start making some adjustments. If she’s in some sort of trouble, I’ll get it out of her.”

  “If you’re so damned co
ncerned, so damn interested, why the hell did you get divorced?”

  Jake lifted his shoulders. “Good question, Leo. Damn good question. When I figure it out, you’ll be the second or third to know. Meanwhile, short a head archaeologist or not, we’d better get to work.”

  He’d fallen for her, and fallen hard, the first time he’d seen