At First Sight - Nicholas Sparks [55]
“Doris? No.”
“Not even at work?”
“No,” Lexie answered. “She’s as old-fashioned as they come. I doubt if she even knows how to turn one on. Why?”
“No reason,” he said.
He saw the confusion in her face but didn’t want to get into it. “Sleep well,” he said. “I love you.”
“Love you, too,” she said, her voice subdued. She opened the car door and slid behind the wheel.
Jeremy watched as she started the car, backed up, and headed down the gravel drive, the rear lights fading as she rolled out of sight. A few minutes later, he was at his desk, leaning back in his chair with his feet propped up.
A lot had been explained tonight, and it all made perfect sense. His suspicions about Rodney had been put to rest—assuming he’d ever really believed them in the first place—but there was still the matter of the e-mails.
If Lexie was telling the truth, Doris hadn’t sent them. But if she hadn’t, who had?
On his desk was Doris’s journal, and he found himself staring at it once more. How many times had he debated whether or not to read it in the hopes of finding an article to write? For whatever reason, he’d avoided it, but he thought again about the latest e-mail.
HAS SHE TOLD YOU THE TRUTH? READ DORIS’S JOURNAL. YOU’LL FIND THE ANSWER THERE.
What truth? And what would he find in Doris’s journal? What answer was he supposed to find?
He didn’t know. Nor was he even sure he wanted to find out. But with the message still playing in his mind, he found himself reaching for the journal.
Ten
Jeremy studied the journal for much of the next week.
For the most part, Doris had been meticulous with her notations. In all, there were 232 names in the book, all written in pen; another 28 women were listed by initials, though no reason was offered as to why they weren’t further identified. Fathers were usually, but not always, identified. For the most part, Doris had included the date of the visit, an estimate of how far along the mother was, and the predicted sex of the baby. The mothers signed their names after her prediction. In three instances, the women she’d written about hadn’t even known they were pregnant.
Beneath each prediction, Doris had left a space where she’d later written in the name and sex of the baby once it had been born, sometimes with a different-color pen. Occasionally she included the birth notice from the newspaper, and as Lexie had told him, Doris had been correct with every prediction. At least with those she’d actually made. There were thirteen instances where Doris hadn’t predicted the sex of the baby—a fact that neither Lexie nor Doris had mentioned. In those cases, Jeremy assumed by further notes that Doris made, the mother would eventually miscarry.
The entries, one after the next, seemed to blend together.
February 19, 1995, Ashley Bennett, 23, twelve weeks along.
Tom Harker the father. BOY Ashley Bennett
Toby Roy Bennett, born August 31, 1995.
July 12, 1995, Terry Miller, 27, nine weeks along. Lots of morning sickness. Second baby. GIRL Terry Miller
Sophie May Miller, born February 11, 1996.
He continued reading, searching for patterns, trying to spot anything unusual. He read through the journal, entry by entry, half a dozen times. By midweek, he began to feel something gnaw at him, as if he were missing something, and he read through the journal again, this time starting from the back. Then he read through it again.
It was Friday morning when he finally found it. In half an hour, he was supposed to pick up Lexie so they could close on the house. He still hadn’t packed for his trip to New York, but all he could do was stare at the entry that Doris had scrawled in shaky penmanship.
Sept. 28, 1996: L.M.D. Age 28, seven weeks along. Trevor Newland, likely father. Found out accidentally.
Nothing else was listed beneath, which meant the mother had miscarried.
Jeremy gripped the journal, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. Only one name, one he didn’t recognize, but initials that he did.
L-M-D. Lexie Marin Darnell.
Pregnant with someone else’s baby.