Don't Say a Word - Barbara Freethy [97]
"Experience. It's a waste of energy. It won't get you anywhere."
"I guess you're right, but it's hard."
"Look at this," Alex said, holding up a manila file folder. He pulled out a piece of paper. "Your birth certificate."
She took the paper out of his hand. She'd seen it before when she'd gotten her driver's license and on other occasions. But now she read it more closely. There was no father's name listed, just her mother's and hers, and the hospital, St. Claire's, Berkeley, California. "It sure looks like I was born here. It has an official State of California stamp."
"It looks authentic," Alex agreed, "but papers can be bought and paid for, especially if a governmental agency is involved."
"That's what the reporter told me. I didn't know it was so easy to make up an identity for someone."
"If your mother did that, she had help."
Julia dug into her own box, which consisted mostly of scarves, gloves, and other accessories. Nothing there. She turned to the next one.
A moment later, Alex whistled. "You were a chubby little girl."
She frowned, slipping the photo from his hand. It had been taken at her eleventh birthday party, and she was definitely bulging. "They fed me a lot of Italian food," she complained. "My family thinks the more you eat, the happier you are, and I hadn't lost my baby fat yet."
"You're carrying more than a baby there," he teased. "And look at those railroad tracks on your teeth."
"Oh, shut up. I'm sure you weren't always this attractive."
"So you think I'm attractive?" he said with a charming wink.
"I think you're full of yourself, that's what I think."
"You like me."
"I don't." But she was still smiling when she tossed the photo back into the box. "Concentrate on what you're doing."
Slowly but surely she progressed through the boxes and moved across the room, finally landing on a box of costumes. Now that she knew her mother had traveled to Russia as a seamstress, the costumes took on new meaning. She pulled out the red cape she'd worn when she'd played Little Red Riding Hood in the third grade, then the angel costume she'd sported one Halloween. "We always had homemade costumes," she said. "My mother loved to sew. She never said she'd done it professionally, though."
"Of course she didn't," Alex replied. "She obviously wanted to hide her past in every possible way."
"Which means we probably won't find anything here."
"Keep digging. Sometimes people get careless."
With a sigh, Julia set back to work. The next box held Christmas cards and letters and an address book. The floral-patterned address book had been by her mother's bed the day she died. Her mother had wanted to let people know she was sick and was thinking of them, so she'd spent most of the last month writing brief notes. When she was too tired to hold the pen, Julia and sometimes Liz had written them for her. Unlike most of the other items in the room, which were from happier times, the address book reminded Julia of how bad that last week had been, watching her mother fade away before her very eyes. She was glad that she had been with her, but sometimes she was sad, too, because the image of death occasionally overpowered the other memories. She didn't want to remember her mother sick; she wanted to think of her happy and healthy.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she opened the address book and skimmed through the pages. There were three letters stuck in the back of the book, addressed and stamped and ready to go. Liz was supposed to have mailed them the day they were written, but she must have forgotten. The first one was to Pamela Hunt, the mother of a close friend of Julia's. The second was addressed to Grace Barrington, one of the waitresses who had worked at DeMarco's for at least a decade. And the third… Julia held the envelope up to the light, realizing that the writing was definitely her mother's, the letters weak and somewhat messy, making the name almost illegible. It took her a moment to decipher the writing.
"This is odd. It's addressed to Rick Sanders. I've never