Mistaken Identity (15 page)

Then Bennie reprimanded herself.
Think like a lawyer, not a daughter.
The scrapbooks proved only that Winslow knew her mother and that he had kept track of Bennie. It was slender evidence on which to assume that Winslow was her father or that he loved her. And the clippings contained nothing of Connolly, neither proving or disproving their relationship.

Right.

Bennie closed the book and placed it on the top of the stack. She sat motionless for a minute, then replaced the books in the plastic bin in the order in which she had taken them out. The last one to return was the one with the missing photographs. She ran her fingerpads over its dark, pebbled cover. It was all she had of a secret history and she wanted to hold it in her hands another second. Her fingers encircled the back of the book, where she felt something cool, papery, unpebbled.

She turned the book over. There was a small pink envelope taped to its back. Bennie hadn’t seen it the first time around. She turned the book sideways so she could read the envelope. The ballpoint ink was faint and clotted in spots. “To Bill,” it said, in a woman’s hand. Her mother’s hand. There could be no mistaking it. Bennie had seen her mother’s writing a thousand times, on powers of attorney, medical releases, and informed consent forms. What Bennie held in her hands now was a letter from her mother to her father. Maybe.

Bennie felt her throat thicken. She hadn’t heard them utter a word to each other, but she could read their most intimate thoughts. She freed the envelope from the scrap-book.

“F
ive minutes to lights out!” shouted the guard, and inmates began shuffling to their cells for the night.

Alice was already washing up in her cell. She dried her face and spotted Shetrell’s girl, Leonia, glancing at her as she lumbered by. Weird. Leonia’s cell was on the lower tier of the unit, underneath the ground floor. What was she doing on the upper deck so close to lights out? Goin’ up to Shetrell’s for a quickie? Disgusting. Alice didn’t get it. She liked her men with dicks. Anthony had been the exception, and Alice used to call him the only dick without a dick. She wasn’t sorry he was gone. She was only sorry she’d ended up in jail for it.

Alice stepped close to her cell door and watched Leonia amble down the hall. The big girl’s arms hung apart from her sides, the steroid shuffle. Alice flicked out the light and edged away from the door, watching. Leonia looked back over her shoulder in the direction of Alice’s cell.

Alice stood motionless in the darkness at her door.

Leonia turned back and walked past Shetrell’s cell without going in, then continued down the hall and took the stairs down to her tier, where Alice lost sight of her.

“What’re you doin’?” Alice’s cellie whined from her bunk. “I was readin’.”

“Shut up,” Alice said. Wondering.

B
ennie slipped a finger in the small pink envelope. Inside was a slip of rose-colored paper and she tugged it out. It came only reluctantly, apparently unopened for years, and she unfolded it.

Bennie stared at the letter, reading it again and again. What? I’m leaving
you
? She had been told that Winslow had left her mother, not the other way around.

She shook her head, astounded. The date on the letter was roughly a month after Bennie was born. Had her mother left her father with a newborn? Maybe newborn twins? It didn’t make sense. It seemed incredible.

But there it was, on paper. The letter wasn’t signed, but it had to be from her mother, it was her handwriting. Still, Bennie wished it had been signed with at least a “C,” just to be sure. The photos, the handwriting, the way it was faithfully kept and even hidden, all of it taken together indicated the note was from her mother, but it struck Bennie as a circumstantial case. Or maybe she was thinking like a lawyer, not a daughter.

She refolded the note. She felt shaken, her body hollow. She returned the note to the envelope, then held the letter in her palm, feeling the old-fashioned heaviness of the stationery. Smelling the vaguely perfumed scent to the paper. Tea Roses, her mother’s perfume, or did she imagine that? Still, she couldn’t bring herself to put the note back right away.

Then Bennie paused. Whose note was it anyway? Whose secret to keep? It was truth, after all, and to keep it secret was to treat it as if it were property, fencing out others like trespassers. But truth wasn’t property, to be owned and held exclusively by anyone. Truth was to be shared, commonly and collectively owned. Bennie had a right to know the truth, certainly of her own birth, and no one else had an equal right to keep it from her. No, the note belonged to her. She placed it in her jacket pocket, put the scrapbook back in the bin, replaced the lid, and shoved the box under the bed.

Bennie rose unsteadily. Her history had changed, or at least her view of it. She questioned everything she’d been told and much that she hadn’t. Would her mother leave a man with a newborn, or twins, with no means of support? You’d have to be crazy.

But her mother was crazy. Stone-cold crazy.

Bennie felt vaguely sick inside. She needed to know the truth about Connolly. She had a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole picture. “Let’s roll, Bear,” she said, and left Winslow’s cottage with the golden lumbering sleepily after her.

From the front step of the cottage, she could see the gabled roof of the main house against the darkened sky. Maybe Winslow was there, or at least they would know where he was. Bennie hustled to the Expedition and tricked Bear into jumping in without her.

She hurried through a pasture with grass barely long enough to tickle her ankles. A green, fresh scent filled the air and fireflies glowed on and off, oblivious to mounds of horse dung that Bennie avoided like land mines. She reached the main house, a stately mansion covered with the same white stucco as Winslow’s cottage, glowing alabaster in the dark. Huge white pillars supported its slate roof and front porch, which soared to four airy stories. Green-painted shutters framed rows upon rows of bubbly mullioned windows. Bennie paused at the imposing front door and rang the brass bell under a working gaslight.

The door opened almost immediately, and the sweet, aged face of a uniformed maid appeared. “Can I help you?” the woman asked.

“I’m an attorney, Bennie Rosato. I need to speak to the owner of the estate.”

“At this hour?” The maid’s gray eyebrows made a snow-dusted roof over her eyes. “Why, they’ve all gone to bed. Is something the matter?”

“Uh, no. I’m trying to find the caretaker, Bill Winslow. I went to his cottage but he wasn’t there. Do you know where he is?”

“Mr. Winslow is on vacation this week and the next two. He takes three weeks every year.”

Bennie wondered if it was a coincidence. “Do you know where he went on vacation?”

“No. Shall I tell him you called?”

“I was wondering, how long has Mr. Winslow worked here?”

“Let me see. Mr. Winslow and I came to the family about the same time, almost thirty-nine years ago.”

Bennie hid her reaction. All her life, he had been here. “So you must know him well.”

“Well, no.”

“In almost forty years?”

The maid’s eyelids fluttered. “I have my duties in the house, and Mr. Winslow works the grounds. He does like his privacy.”

“Does he have any family?”

“No, not that I know of.”

“Any children?”

“No. I must say, I know nothing about that, and I’m terribly uncomfortable discussing Mr. Winslow’s personal business any further. Please call again when Mr. Winslow returns.” The maid closed the heavy door with a solid brass click, leaving Bennie on the outside with her questions.

It was a feeling she was getting used to.

By the time Bennie got home, her bedroom was dark and Grady was sound asleep. It was just as well. She didn’t want to explain about her trip to Delaware or her lease of a crime scene. She had never done anything like that and didn’t know a criminal lawyer who had. Bennie sensed she was crossing a line, but decided to go with it. Coming so late to Connolly’s defense called for pulling out all the stops.

She undressed quickly in the darkness, piling her skirt on top of the exercise bike and stepping out of her pumps. She felt exhausted and there was still so much work to do. She padded to the bathroom, followed by Bear, and stopped halfway in the dark hallway. Her home office was on the right, still unpainted.

Bennie stood at the doorway and looked in. Moonlight streamed through the window, casting a cool white square on the messy files and law books. She scanned the configuration of the room: file cabinet, with the top drawer left open, overstuffed bookshelves, computer table with right-hand tray slid out, then another bookshelf, as unkempt as the first. Last night’s coffee mug still sat on the table tray; it would have a thick, sticky ring on its bottom. Her office was the lived-in, under-construction equivalent of Connolly’s.

Bennie picked her way through the clutter on the floor, unpacked files and wallpaper books, down the narrow path to her computer table. Bear followed and nestled into his customary circle under the table as she sat down, accidentally nudging the cord for the computer mouse. The monitor came to life with a prickly electrical sound and drenched the room in vivid cobalt. Bennie moved the mouse to the Microsoft Word icon and clicked a white page onto the screen. She faced the blank page and wondered what it would be like to be a writer like Connolly. Bennie had always wanted to be a writer, but had never admitted it to anyone.

Bennie clicked off the blank page and dialed up the Internet, then plugged “twins” into the search engine. She came up with a list of webpages and surfed the sites, most of them made by twins for other twins. She clicked on a photo of little girls with identical grins and matching orthodonture, feeling a surprising stab of envy.

She went back to the search engine, typed in “adoption,” and got lists of websites about the subject. She skimmed the first few stories about how adoptees had found their birth parents and researched companies that located birth parents and siblings, with endorsements from satisfied adoptees. None of the endorsements were from the newfound parents or siblings. Why?

She eased back in the chair. Being found was at best an ambivalent experience, not the stuff of short, poignant testimonials. Bennie knew from experience.

She had never felt so lost until Connolly found her.

T
he first thing Wednesday morning, Bennie hurried along Twentieth Street to the Free Library of Philadelphia, swimming upstream against the businesspeople striding to work in lightweight suits and dresses, smelling of mousse and determination. Noisy rush-hour traffic flooded the Benjamin Franklin Parkway for the start of the business day and swirled around Logan Circle, clogging the four lanes into the city. The sun burned hot; it felt muggy even at nine o’clock in the morning, setting horns honking.

Bennie reached the arched facade of the Free Library, a massive, columned edifice of marble, sitting majestic as a lion at the foot of the Parkway. She climbed the steps and pushed open the brass door as soon as the blue-shirted security guard unlocked it for business. Bennie needed to find a defense witness, someone who remembered the clothes Connolly was wearing the day Della Porta was murdered.

She hustled into the entrance hall with its grand staircase, a chamber as hushed and elegant as she remembered from her childhood. Glistening glass display cases lined the huge room, the high ceiling was vaulted, and the marble floor was fawn-colored, inlaid with malachite. Bennie dug. in her briefcase, retrieved her legal pad, and skimmed her notes. Connolly had said something about the pretty wrought iron in the library. One pretty room with ironwork, coming right up.

Bennie ducked into a large room on the right under a sign for Lending Library. Two desks flanked the front door and the main area contained shelves of new releases. A wrought iron balcony ringed the room, but the room wasn’t pretty, and she guessed it would be the busiest room in the library. Not the best place to become an author. Bennie left and went back to the entrance hall. On its other side was another large room, its entrance under a sign for Music Department. The room was dim, owing to the odd green tint of its windows, and the requisite wrought iron was scarce.