Whew.
Lisa let out a breath she hadn’t realized she ’d been holding. She didn’t even know what she’d been thinking precisely, but it was a relief to discover that whatever it was was wrong.
But if her memory served her correctly, the outfit at least was, indeed, strikingly similar to the one worn by the little girl in the picture.
Trying not to be unnerved by the blank stare of the china eyes, Lisa slid a questing finger along one blue velvet sleeve, rubbed the skirt between her thumb and forefinger, then touched the smocking on the bodice. The velvet was smooth and thick, obviously of good quality. The smocking seemed to have been done by hand and was adorned with real embroidery. Glad now that she had brought the Garcia file home with her, Lisa quickly got to her feet and went into her bedroom to retrieve it from her briefcase, which she had dropped on the floor beside her bed. Opening the folder even as she returned to crouch in front of Katrina, Lisa looked from the little girl in the picture to the doll with widening eyes.
5
Wow, Lisa thought. The dresses each wore were so similar as to appear identical. In fact, the child and the doll looked so much alike that it was eerie.
It was, of course, impossible to tell much from the small, slightly blurry photograph, but the resemblance couldn’t be as uncanny as it seemed. There was no way to know, for example, if Marisa’s eyes were blue or if the embroidery on the child ’s dress depicted tiny pale blue and white flowers with green leaves, as the doll’s did, but it seemed unlikely. Marisa’s skin tone was certainly darker than the doll’s creamy complexion, and the exact shade of blue of her dress also seemed darker in the picture. But both the child ’s dress and the doll’s dress were long-sleeved and full beneath the smocking, were of approximately the same length, and had white-lace Peter Pan collars edged in a tiny ruffle.
Lisa realized her heart was thumping.
Get a grip, she told herself. There is no way that this is anything but a coincidence.
Obviously, the doll had been dressed like a real little girl. Blue velvet smocked dresses must have been popular among the preschool set back about the time she ’d acquired Katrina. Which, since she didn’t remember getting her, must have been when she herself was of preschool age. The doll was supposed to mimic a real child. Therefore, it made sense that she would be dressed like one. There were probably thousands of dolls that were dressed just like this, that looked just like this, scattered all across the country.
As logical as that argument was, Lisa still picked up Katrina and was turning her over to check for a label on the dress or some identifying mark on the doll itself when her cell phone rang. The unexpected burst of Beethoven’s Fifth made her jump.
Her phone was in her purse, which was in the bedroom. Putting Katrina down, Lisa got to her feet and hurried to answer it.
“I’m going to have to cancel our lunch on Friday.”
The voice was her father’s. C. Bartlett Grant was an esteemed federal judge who now lived some seventy miles away in the exclusive Glenview section of Kentucky’s largest city, Louisville. Tall, fit, and still strikingly handsome at sixty-eight, he was a former congressman who had once had far loftier political aspirations. But a losing Senate bid had soured him on personally pursuing public office, and he’d embraced the role of party elder instead. Still a local mover and shaker and, thanks to his two wives, both of whom were or (in her mother’s case) had been heiresses, a wealthy man, he was highly thought of by almost everyone, his daughter and former wife excepted. Though Lisa was his only natural child—he had acquired three stepsons upon his second marriage—their relationship had been rocky since the extremely contentious divorce from her mother, which had taken place when Lisa was six. In fact, they’d had practically no relationship until Lisa had returned home to Grayson Springs the previous autumn. Since then, always at Barty’s (he hated it when she called him that, so Lisa invariably did) instigation, they’d met occasionally for a meal. She figured that since she was now a lawyer like himself, he was afraid that their circles might start to overlap and wanted to do what he could to head off anything unflattering she might say about him.
Barty had always hated being made to look like the bad guy. And of course he didn’t know her well enough to know that she had enough family loyalty to keep her unflattering opinion of him to herself.
“Family obligations?” Lisa asked sweetly, knowing that he put on a great show of being a devoted husband and father.
“As a matter of fact, the trial I’m presiding over looks like it’s going to run long. I won’t be able to get away.”
“I saw in the paper that Todd”—his youngest stepson, who was a seventeen-year-old senior in high school—“was competing in a track meet on Friday.” Her tone was carefully neutral.
He let out a sigh.
“Okay, you got me. Yes, I’m going to watch Todd run. Jill”—his wife—“doesn’t want to go alone.”
“You don’t have to make excuses, you know. I’m perfectly fine with you canceling our lunch to go watch Todd’s meet. I only wish you’d been that good a father to me.”
“Lisa . . .”
“I know, Barty, I know. Age brings perspective.” During one of their earlier lunches, her father had made sure to tell her that he regretted not having been around much when she was growing up, or at all since the divorce. Advancing years, he’d said, had imparted wisdom and caused him to reshape his priorities, with family now being number one. Maybe he even meant it; certainly, with his second family, he acted as though he did.
“I’ve asked you before not to call me Barty.”
“I’ll try to remember.” Lisa’s brow knit as a thought occurred. “I wasn’t adopted by any chance, was I?”
She knew the answer, of course. Or at least, she was as sure as it was possible to be that she did. But something—his lifelong relative indifference to her as compared with his attentiveness to his stepsons, who were not, after all, even related to him by blood; her resemblance to Angela Garcia; the damned doll—caused the question to spring into her mind out of nowhere.
There was the briefest of pauses.
“Why on earth would you ask me something like that?”
“Because I came across a cold-case file today at work concerning the disappearance of a family from this area in the 1980s. The thing is, I look like the dead mother—Angela Garcia. A woman I work with thought so, too. She gave me the file, I brought it home, and I was just looking at the picture again when you called. The resemblance is unreal. And I thought if I was adopted, that would explain so much.”
Like why you’ve never loved me, she thought, but didn’t say it aloud.
She could hear him spluttering on the other end of the phone.
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard! Of course you’re not adopted. Your mother gave birth to you on April seventh, 1981, around seven in the morning, in some hospital or another—I’ve forgotten its name—in Silver Spring, Maryland. I was there, she was there, you came out the natural way. There’s probably even a videotape of it around somewhere. Listen here, Lisa, if you want to succeed as a lawyer, you’ve got to put that over-the-top imagination of yours to rest.”
The fact that she ’d had an imaginary friend when she was a little girl, and then, as a preteen and beyond, been sure enough that the house was haunted that she’d had to sleep with a light on, was, no doubt, the basis of his “crazy imagination” crack. It didn’t make her feel any fonder of him.
“Lisa! Supper!” Robin’s voice floated up the stairs.
“Look, Barty, I’ve got to go. Tell Todd good luck from me when you see him Friday.”
“Lisa—”
But whatever else he had been going to say was lost as she disconnected.
“Lisa!” Robin yelled again. Knowing that such volume meant that her mother was already making her way toward the table, Lisa stuck her phone in her pocket and hurried from the room.
“Coming!” she called back.
When she got downstairs the visitors were gone and her mother was sitting in her state-of-the-art wheelchair at the head of the highly polished mahogany table in the dining room, where they still ate simply because they had always done so, despite the fact that the kitchen would have been much more practical. Hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, a thick Aubusson carpet, and heavy gold silk draperies gave the room a formal feel. Pretty place mats had been topped with her mother’s favorite Herend china, and Robin was in the process of ladling delicious-smelling soup into bowls.
“Annalisa.” Her mother’s still beautiful blue eyes brightened as Lisa entered the room, and a warm smile curved her mouth. Annalisa Seraphina was her full given name, chosen, Martha had often told her, because the name Martha Ann was so plain and she ’d wished for something more romantic her entire life. Therefore, she’d bestowed a wonderfully romantic name on her daughter. Lisa was only glad that no more than a handful of people knew it.
“Hello, Mother.”
Before taking the chair beside her, Lisa dropped a quick kiss on her cheek. Her mother’s skin felt soft and dry and fragile as old silk beneath her lips. Martha had once been five-foot-six with an athletic build and enough energy to make teenage Lisa want to stay perpetually flopped on the couch in self-defense. An expert horsewoman, she’d been a fiercely competitive golfer, loved tennis, and been known throughout the state for throwing the most extravagant parties around. Her Derby bashes in particular were legendary. Always the center-piece of her mother’s life, Lisa had been encouraged to invite her friends to those parties from kindergarten age on up, and she and Nola and the rest had mingled with celebrities and socialites by the hundreds under the big white tents that were set up on the lawn. At the time, she had not realized how special those days were, or how fleeting. Now Martha, at sixty-eight, looked at least a decade older. Her hair, in a sunny blond shoulder-length bob for as long as Lisa could remember, was short and feathery now, and had turned white as snow. Her once round face was so thin that the delicate bones seemed to protrude through the skin. Thanks to the ravages of the disease that was slowly, cruelly taking her life, she weighed barely one hundred pounds. She couldn’t stand or walk, and while she still had some strength left in her hands, she couldn’t lift her arms or dress herself or get into bed or do much of anything at all without assistance. Her breathing was growing more difficult by the day, and her doctors had told Lisa that it would not be long before she would need to be on oxygen all the time, instead of just at night as she was now, while she slept in the hospital bed they’d had installed. But so far her bladder, bowel, and facial movements had been spared. Her speech was hesitant but only occasionally garbled, and her cognitive function was as clear as it had ever been. Which, in Lisa’s mind, was both a blessing and a curse. Her mother was still there, completely herself and mentally wholly intact, inside her failing body. But she knew what was happening to her, and no matter how courageous a face she put on it, the fact that she did broke Lisa’s heart.
“I hear there ’s trouble up at the Buchanan house,” Robin announced as Lisa took her seat. Lisa made a wry face. There were no secrets in Woodford County. No doubt Andy or perhaps some passing neighbor had seen the police cars or heard something and had immediately called Robin to pass on the news or ask if she knew what was going on. “Bud Buchanan got carted off to jail.”
“What—did he do?” Martha asked with interest. Lisa held a spoonful of chicken soup to her mother’s lips, and Martha opened her mouth and swallowed without ever taking her eyes off Robin. Robin had offered many times to sit with them while they ate and feed Martha so that Lisa and her mother could simply talk without Lisa having the bother of trying to get her mother to eat while she consumed her own meal, but Lisa refused, reserving this bit of her mother’s care for herself. She was ever, achingly, conscious that they were running out of time.
“Took a shot at a deputy who came to question him about a hit-and-run out on Travis Road. Drunk, of course. The police came, and they locked him up.”
“It’s a wonder they didn’t shoot him,” Lisa exclaimed, feeding her mother another spoonful of soup. If he’d actually taken a shot at a deputy, the mean old man was in a world of trouble, and deservedly so. She wondered what Scott was doing about it. Something, she was sure.
“The world couldn’t get that lucky,” Robin said darkly. Robin’s take-no-prisoners personality, coupled with Bud Buchanan’s obnoxiousness and proximity, meant they had warred for years.
“Poor—Scott.” Her mother shook her head when Lisa tried to get her to swallow another spoonful of soup. “You—eat. Have you seen him much—at work?”
“I saw him today.” Lisa obediently downed some of her own soup, then offered more to her mother, which this time was accepted. Keeping her mother’s thoughts focused on events beyond the household and her illness was an object with Lisa. As long as Martha was interested in the outside world, Lisa felt, she would hang on. But she didn’t want to burden her mother with anything that might distress her, so she was careful to paint everything that happened in the rosiest possible light. “He sends you his love.”
“Such a—smart boy. I always knew—he ’d be a success.”
Robin snorted expressively. Neither she nor Andy was a big fan of Scott’s. Of course, he ’d had the stigma of his background to overcome as a youth, and they’d rarely seen him as an adult. But years ago, when he ’d been a favorite of her mother’s, Lisa suspected they’d also been jealous.
“Now, Robin. You know he’s—really made something of himself,” Martha reproved. Robin grimaced, but at least she did it so Martha couldn’t see.
“He certainly has,” Lisa agreed cheerfully, forbearing to add that he was also, more often than not, an overbearing jerk, which was beside the point anyway. No one could deny that Scott had done good.
“District attorney,” Martha marveled. “Whoever would have—thought it.”
“Once poor white trash, always poor white trash,” Robin muttered.
“I think we ’re finished with the soup now, Robin.” Lisa shot her favorite old family retainer a quelling look. Rolling her eyes, again out of Martha’s view, Robin took away the soup bowls and returned with plates of baked fish and salad. Her mother’s had been chopped so finely that it was almost unrecognizable. Lisa fed her a bite of the near mush, then made sure to eat some of her own supper. If she didn’t, her mother would notice and refuse to eat until she did.
“Did you—have a good day?” Her mother was focused on Lisa now.
Knowing that Martha genuinely wanted to know, Lisa smiled and nodded and related a highly edited version of her day—no need to report that the Jag had broken down, or that her mother’s golden boy had threatened to fire her, or that she was in the proverbial doghouse at work—as she got Martha to eat her meal. As they talked and ate, Lisa found herself watching her mother. Not for the first time, she noted how little they physically resembled each other. This was, however, the first time it bothered her. But, she told herself, though their features and coloring were not similar, she shared many of her mother’s mannerisms and facial expressions. Leaving aside the effects of her mother’s illness, their voices even sounded much the same, and everyone said they had the exact same laugh. Still, the image of Angela Garcia would not leave her. It was ridiculous to think that the fact that a figure in a grainy, thirty-year-old photograph looked so much like her meant anything—what could it possibly mean? At most, that they were distantly related. What other alternatives were there? That she was Angela Garcia reincarnated? That she was little Marisa Garcia, having been secretly adopted and then somehow age-regressed? How idiotic was that? But the resemblance nagged at her enough so that at the end of her recitation she added, pseudo-carelessly, “Oh, I have to ask you something: What was the name of the hospital where I was born?”
“Saints Mary and Elizabeth’s.” Martha’s reply was prompt. Her face softened as she smiled reminiscently. “It was the happiest day—of my life. I got—my own pr
ecious—angel baby. When they handed you to me, I—cried.” Her eyes sharpened fractionally on Lisa’s face. “Why—do you ask?”
“I had to fill out a form at work today,” Lisa answered evasively. “Mother, eat another bite of this.”
Her mother shook her head. “I’m—full.” She smiled hopefully at Lisa. “I have pictures of the hospital—in your baby book. Would you like to see them?”
Martha liked nothing better than to look through the numerous photo albums she’d compiled of Lisa’s life, and as a result, Lisa had seen enough pictures of herself growing up to last through several lifetimes. Before her mother had gotten sick, Martha had only to pull out a photo album for Lisa to find that she had somewhere else she needed to be. Since she ’d returned home, though, she ’d been much more patient, and thus she’d been treated to numerous photographic trips down memory lane, which she’d endured with good grace, knowing that they gave her mother pleasure. She had not, however, paid any real attention. Now, suddenly, she was not only interested, she was eager.
“I’d love to.”
Beaming with surprised gratification, Martha looked at Robin. “You know where I keep—Lisa’s baby book. Would you bring it to us—in the TV room, please?”
“You want I should bring some ice cream, too? We ’ve got peach.” Like Lisa, Robin was always trying to tempt Martha to eat, and peach ice cream was one of her favorite sweets.
“I don’t—want any, thanks. Lisa?” She looked at her daughter, who shook her head.
Ten minutes later, they were in the TV room with their heads together over Lisa’s baby book. The TV, which had become Martha’s chief distraction as her world continued to shrink around her, was on, but the volume was muted. Tall windows looked to the east, where shadows were just starting to purple the distant rolling hills and creep across fields full of grazing horses. The hand-carved paneling and book- and memento-laden shelves should have made the room feel dark and closed-in, but the bamboo blinds were raised to the tops of the windows to admit the full complement of golden evening light, and that plus the sheer size of the space made it feel surprisingly cheery.
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