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Whether he would see her sacrifice as a favor or not, she wouldn’t have to find out since she didn’t plan to tell him. She also wouldn’t have to confess to feeling relief that the firefighter she barely knew and shouldn’t be planning to get to know better wouldn’t be meeting someone else.
Ross Van Zandt set a heavy file box next to the sofa, leaning back into the cushions without opening it. He could have worked in his office this afternoon, but he preferred to be home as much as he could these days.
He reached for the remote control and flipped on daytime television, not expecting quality viewing but still looking for white noise. As if to confirm his prediction, a local celebrity’s face appeared on the screen in an extreme close-up.
“Good afternoon, Richmond. I’m Douglas Matthews, and I would like to welcome you to Afternoons with Douglas Matthews.”
“How many more times can he cram Douglas Matthews into one sentence?” Ross grumbled.
As the camera pulled away, the black-haired and blue-eyed talk show host leaned in and smiled with unnaturally white teeth, as if he was talking to his best friends. All half a million or so of his buddies outside the screen.
“You’re going to love our lineup today. First up, is your garden ready for the snowy season? Our garden expert will offer the Top Ten tips for planting, pruning and primping to ensure a plentiful spring.”
Ross rolled his eyes as he opened the box at his feet. The talk show host prattled on about how to make marinated salmon with some local celebrity or other, but Ross tuned out the rest.
Why did people watch that garbage, anyway? Afternoons didn’t deal with anything meatier than the best food for roses or favorite boat tours on Richmond’s Kanawha Canal.
From what Ross had heard, Matthews had made a scene at the Starlight Diner when Richmond Gazette reporter Jared Kierney had suggested a show on the Tiny Blessings adoption scandal. Even if Matthews didn’t want to help people by sharing their stories, at least Ross would have expected the talk show host to jump on the story for a ratings boost. With material like today’s lineup, he probably needed it.
“You’ve procrastinated long enough, Van Zandt.” Ross blew out a breath as he forced his attention back to the box of records.
He knew this drill. For the last two months he’d been going through these records systematically, comparing them to the documents on file at Tiny Blessings and trying to weed out the truth from an overgrowth of lies. He was glad he could provide pro bono private investigative services for the agency his wife headed because Tiny Blessings would never be able to afford those services otherwise.
At the squeak on the stairs, Ross was sorry he’d decided to leave the office and pore over more records at home today. Kelly didn’t need any more aggravation these days, and this newest crisis facing the agency was nothing if not aggravating.
Just when they thought they’d put the scandal involving illegal adoptions behind them, more falsified records had been discovered in the walls of the Harcourt mansion during the renovation project by Ben Cavanaugh’s construction company.
Ross had hoped Kelly would relinquish more of the responsibility, and the headaches that went along with it, to Eric Pellegrino, the agency’s new assistant director she’d hired to take the pressure off her pregnancy. But he knew Kelly better than that. For all the crises and bad publicity the agency faced, his wife believed the buck stopped with her.
The woman he loved appeared then at the end of the sofa, her hands resting on her rounded belly, her hair mussed from a nap.
“I thought you were supposed to be resting.”
Kelly frowned at him and then lowered herself on the sofa cushion. “I’m too tired to sleep, but I’m sure I won’t be sleeping tonight, either. Our little acrobat likes choosing that for gym time.”
Still, she gave her stomach a loving pat. “This counts as resting. I’ll even put my feet up if you scoot over.”
Ross did as he was told, as all husbands of extremely pregnant wives should do for their self-protection. Tucking a pillow beneath her feet that she had settled on the brown leather ottoman, he reached in the box and pulled out a stack of files.
“Who are we looking at today?” she asked, holding out a hand for him to offer her a stack.
“I just thought I would flip through these again. Maybe this time a name will ring a bell.”
“I hate thinking that some of these adoptive children searching for their birth parents will never find the answers they’re looking for though we have the answers right here.”
“With a lot of work and even more prayer, we’ll help them find those answers,” he told her.
Ross scooted closer to his wife, propped his feet next to hers and glanced down at the names on the file tabs.
“Bailey-Brock-Brown,” he read aloud. “Brown? If that won’t be like finding a needle in a haystack.” Every single name in those case files was another needle, but neither of them needed a reminder of that.
“Daley-Davenport-Dexter,” Kelly read aloud from her own pile before looking over at him.
Ross shook his head. “No. Nothing.”
“Yeah, me, neither.”
They continued on, listing names back and forth, but none sounded familiar. Even if one had, it wouldn’t have made a difference since these could have been the mothers’ maiden names—if these were the real files and not just another round of doctored documents.
Ross stopped on a file that said “Harcourt.”
“Now there’s a familiar name.” He turned the tab to the side, letting Kelly take a look. “I wonder how many Harcourt offspring are running around Chestnut Grove and the rest of Virginia without any idea who they really are.”
“Maybe a few. As long as the young women’s parents were willing to pay for Barnaby Harcourt’s silence. I doubt he gave relatives a discount on his rates.” Kelly frowned as she always did when she mentioned the founding director of Tiny Blessings whose illegal acts had tarnished the agency’s reputation.
For curiosity’s sake as much as anything, Ross flipped open the file and started calculating.
“This baby’s a thirty-three-year-old man now. Birth mother is named Cynthia. Recognize that one?”
She shook her head. “And her last name could be anything now.”
“The father is listed as ‘unknown.’”
Kelly made a sound of acknowledgment in her throat but didn’t comment further. The absence of a birth father was as common an occurrence in the adoption-agency business as the lack of complete information.
Ross’s hands tightened on the folder. If he couldn’t solve the problems for the agency his wife loved, then he’d at least hoped to help her reunite some of the adoptive children with their birth parents. Even in that plan, he was failing Kelly.
Shuffling the papers again, he smacked the file closed, but when he did, something fell to the ground. It wasn’t much, just a tiny slip of yellowing paper, about the size of a sticky note.
Ross automatically reached down to grab it and stuff it back in the file, but the two words stopped him with his hand still held high: “See Donovan.”
He cleared his throat, his pulse pounding. “Honey, ever see this?”
“What is it?” she asked, but her eyes widened and she reached into the box between them.
It was all Ross could do not to shove his pregnant wife out of the way and start riffling in the box himself, but somehow he managed to wait until she was finished. Her frown didn’t leave any doubt that she hadn’t found the file, but her expression lifted again, and she tilted her head to the side.
“You don’t think—”
“No,” he blurted. He didn’t need her to finish to know how crazy the idea sounded. It was too easy. He’d been a P.I. long enough to know it was never that easy.
But what if it is? an unwelcome voice inside him suggested. Maybe just this once, a case could be as simple as someone forgetting to remove a note from a file that the owner never intended anyone to find.
Ross glanced across the room, his gaze landing on two more boxes of files next to the breakfast bar. Kelly had been bringing them home frequently, cross-checking files from the office with the duplicates found inside the wall at the Harcourt mansion.
“You don’t happen to have any more Ds, do you?”
“I think so,” she said, already trying to push herself off the couch.
“Here, let me get it.”
He couldn’t get to the box fast enough. It was the thrill of the chase, and he knew it well. He flipped through the files, his hands landing on one that said “Donovan.” He carried it back to the couch, so they could look at it together.
“It might not even be the same Donovan,” he said to keep his own hopes from getting too high.
As he opened the file, his gaze, well trained from looking at so many documents, went right to the date of birth.
“It’s a match.”
That they’d both said it at the same time made them laugh, but they stopped just as quickly. Okay, they had a match. Now what?
Ross flipped through the file, reading about George and Edie Donovan and the newborn infant they adopted and named Alex. This version listed the birth mother as Mary Something-or-other, but it was probably the bogus one.
He handed the file to Kelly, already planning his steps. First, he would do an Internet search for the Donovans’ son, and then he would start eliminating from that pool those who couldn’t be this particular guy. Part of him hated to mess up another person’s well-ordered life, but the man deserved the chance to know the truth.
For a long time, Kelly didn’t look up from the file. She simply stared at it as if willing it to complete the puzzle. She leaned her head to one shoulder and to the other as if considering, and finally she turned back to him.
“Isn’t Eli Cavanaugh’s friend, the fireman who moved from Richmond, named Alex Donovan?”
“Hey, Donovan, get out here and shoot some hoops with us,” Trent Gillman called from the court adjacent to the parking lot as Alex climbed out of his SUV.
“Give me a few.” Alex shut the door and started toward the station. Basketball was one of the ways the men and women at the station killed a few hours on slow days or burned off steam after busier or more stressful ones. Today had certainly been one of the more stressful variety.
“Make it quick. We need somebody to kill in three-on-three.” To make his point, Trent drove by Cory Long for a perfect layup and then lifted his arms in a Rocky-style victory dance.
“You mean you need me to let you win?”
When a ball came sailing toward him, Alex ducked inside the gray brick structure through the side door.
He traded his khaki pants and polo shirt for a hooded sweatshirt and loose-fitting warm-ups and jogged back outside to join the game. Already, several firefighters, including Fire Chief Nevins, were taking shots.
“Think fast.”
Alex shot his hands up to his face in time to catch the ball aimed at his head. “Thanks, man.”
“No problem,” Trent said.
On the court, Alex executed a perfect chest shot. “You see boys, nothin’ but net.” Going in for the rebound, he balanced the ball on his right hand, setting up for a shot with his left.
“How was your afternoon with the preacher’s daughter?” Trent asked just as Alex took the shot.
No net this time, the ball bounced off the backboard with a thud and then dropped into the grass. Alex turned back to him, drawing his eyebrows together. “What are you talking about? I don’t know any preacher’s daughter. I was just at a conference with Chelsea’s teacher.”
“You mean Miss Fraser? Miss Dinah Fraser?”
“Daughter of Reverend John Fraser,” Bill Nevins filled in the blank when Alex turned his perplexed expression on him.
Fraser, of course. He’d met Reverend Fraser of Chestnut Grove Community Church, a few times during last year’s Community holiday toy drive.
It was strange, though, that when he’d asked Dinah about her common surname, she hadn’t even mentioned her well-known father. She’d said only that there were a lot of Frasers around. What was that all about? It had been difficult enough for him to picture someone like Dinah as an elementary teacher, but a preacher’s daughter? That just didn’t seem possible.
“Puts a whole new spin on the lovely Miss Fraser, doesn’t it?” Trent said.
Cory, who hadn’t spoken up until then, snickered.
Alex wheeled on his coworkers. It didn’t matter that Trent had only voiced Alex’s thoughts. He didn’t feel like cutting his tactless friend a little slack the way he usually did. Today even the fact that he had a good heart might not keep Trent from landing on his backside.
“Have a death wish, Gillman?” Bill asked, before Alex had the chance. “Then I wouldn’t say another word about the lady.” He put enough emphasis on the last two words to show he meant business.
After a few strange glances among the other firefighters, the subject fell away, leaving only six guys and a round orange ball to fill the void. Alex jumped higher, dribbled faster and guarded more aggressively than he had in a long time. That Trent happened to get fouled a few extra times—in the pursuit of the game, of course—couldn’t be avoided.
Alex couldn’t explain his need to defend a woman he barely knew, but there it was. As much as he would like to believe he would rush to protect any woman’s honor, he wondered if he would be as forceful in every case.
When the game ended, all six men poured off the court, drenched and a little bruised. The chief looked more winded than most as he came up behind Alex and rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Some game, wasn’t it?” Alex said, resisting the urge to shake his boss’s hand off his shoulder. His arm was sore, and he was regretting his “enthusiasm” in the game.
Bill made an affirmative grunt and rubbed his elbow where he had battled tendonitis over the years. “There’s only one thing I can say, Donovan.”
“What’s that?”
“That must have been some conference with Miss Dinah Fraser.”
Chapter Three
Dinah startled in her seat as the fire alarm squawked in deafening, repetitive bursts. As if the alarm signaled the beginning of chaos rather than an announcement for safety, a clamor broke out in the classroom around her.
“Everyone, please be quiet,” she said in a loud stage whisper. “It’s probably only a fire drill.” At least she hoped it was, though she hadn’t received advance warning of a scheduled drill.
Dinah set aside the copy of The Secret Garden that she’d been reading to the class and grabbed her grade book. She would need that to check attendance once they reached their designated meeting place by the curb.
“Now let’s line up by the door. I want everyone to stay in line and be silent until we’re past the flagpole.”
At a lower level of chaos, her twenty-four students followed her down the corridor to the side entry. Just as she reached the flagpole, two fire engines and two smaller trucks that must have been for paramedics came roaring up the street toward the school, lights flashing and sirens blaring. When all four trucks stopped, two firefighters, dressed in full gear, including helmets, climbed down from one of the fire engines and entered the building through the front door.
Definitely not a drill. Dinah’s chest tightened, and as she glanced back to the children and then at the building behind them, she hoped her smile didn’t falter.
She switched from the front of the line to the rear so when they all turned an about-face, she could lead her students back into the classroom. It also put her between the children she adored and the building in the unlikely case this was a real fire.
All around them, other classes poured out of the building, some well controlled and others as chaotic as Dinah’s had been. Some classes had stopped to grab jackets, but most of the students were shivering and fidgeting to keep warm. High-pitched voices chatted about the supposed causes of a fire and the amount of time until recess.
Dinah scanned down the names in her grade book—from Austin Carlyle to Lily Polson to Kellan Stolz. As always she felt a twinge of nervousness until she’d made certain that all of her students stood with her on terra firma.
When her gaze fell to Chelsea White’s name, she looked back to the fire engines. Though all four trucks were still parked in front of the school, most of the firefighters remained inside them. Was Alex Donovan one of the men in the truck, or maybe one of those still in the building? Not that she really cared or anything. She was only curious, and he happened to be the only firefighter she knew in Chestnut Grove.
Still, her cheeks and neck warmed at the thought of him, an unfortunate reaction she’d experienced too frequently these last few days, even more problematic since she thought of him so often.
Dinah shrugged. No matter what she thought and even no matter that they’d made a connection of sorts in their first meeting, the handsome firefighter would probably lose interest the minute he discovered from which branch of the Fraser family tree she’d sprung.
