“I know someone who does.”
“Is it old?”
“I doubt if the thing’s a year old.”
“No kidding? Well, has it got teeth, then?”
“Yeah, all of them.”
“There you go. We can do a regular nuclear DNA test using the teeth. We can extract the pulp from the inside of the tooth, and then we’re on the way. No need to go the mitochondrial route.”
“Any particular tooth the best?”
“A molar. They have more pulp to harvest. And, of course, no fillings. Preferably no work at all on the tooth we test.”
“What about time? How long would it take?”
“Sounds like a rush.”
“Yeah.”
“We could do a nuclear short tandem repeat test in… maybe a day. Two days.”
Bern thanked her and was off the line in a few minutes. While he showered, he worked it out. He didn’t know what the hell was going on here, but he did know that he didn’t want people he worked with regularly to be aware of it, whatever it was. The DPS crime lab was out.
He made coffee, hurriedly ate a couple of pieces of toast, and then returned to the studio, where he photographed the reconstruction from every angle he could manage. Then he disassembled the lower jaw and located two molars that were without fillings. He removed them and put them in a small Ziploc bag. Checking his watch, he picked up the phone and called Southwest Airlines and booked a flight to Houston. Then he dialed another number in Houston and had a short conversation before hanging up and heading for Austin-Bergstrom International.
Two hours later, he arrived at Hobby Airport in Houston. He took a cab to the GTS labs in the Texas Medical Center complex and filled out the necessary paperwork for having a DNA string run on the two molars. He paid extra for a rush to get the results the next day. From there, he went to another private genetic-testing lab just off North Loop West. There, he filled out the paperwork to have a genetic string run on himself, again paying extra to have the results by the next day.
From there, it was short cab ride to Willow Lane in the upscale Meadow Wood section west of the Galleria. On a street nearly covered over with old water oaks, he had the taxi drop him off at a two-story Georgian home, its dun-colored walls carefully adorned with precisely trimmed fig ivy.
While he was still walking up the sidewalk, the front door opened and Gina stood in the doorway, smiling at him.
“You handsome devil,” she said, opening her arms to hug him. She was the prettiest seventy-four-year-old woman he would ever see. Her smile was as beguiling now as it had been thirty years ago, when he fallen in love with her as a small boy, and her hair just as blond, as well.
Aunt Gina had cut an elegant swath through Houston’s society set, marrying three men of significant wealth and influence, the departure of each leaving her appreciably better off financially than the previous one. The first, her real love, had died in a car crash in Mexico. The other two marriages were unconscious searches for something as happy as the first, and both ended in divorce. From then on, she dated profusely, while understanding the wisdom of remaining a single woman.
They had lunch together in her bright dining room, which overlooked her beloved rose garden, catching up on news of each other. Then following dessert and a lull in the conversation, she leveled her bright eyes at him across the table and her smile softened.
“What brings you here, Paul?” she asked. “You seem to have something on your mind.”
He nodded and swallowed the last bite of his cream tart, the last half of a strawberry.
“I want to talk about my parents,” he said. “My biological parents.”
She tilted her head to the side and her face took on a look of endearment. “Oh, dear boy, it’s taken you such a long time.”
“Well, it never seemed important before. Sally and Ted raised me, loved me, nurtured me. They were my parents, and I thought they deserved my loyalty.”
“So you’ve just kept your wondering to yourself?”
“They didn’t offer to tell me. I took my cue from that.”
She laughed gently. “You were always so obedient, Paul. You should’ve kicked your heels up once in a while. Well, they had different attitudes about adoption in those days, and God knows your mother wasn’t the adventuresome sort. She wasn’t about to buck conventions. Ted, either, as far as that goes. They were dear people, though, and they did what they thought was best for you.”
“I knew that. I just didn’t want them to feel as if all that they had done for me wasn’t enough.”
“But now you want to know.”
“They’ve been dead a dozen years now,” he said, and let it go at that.
Gina smiled again. That was the way it was with her. She had learned a long time ago that life went down better with a smile, and she had always had a ready one. He tried to smile, too, but he found it hard to hide the weight of what was waiting for him on his workbench back in Austin.
She nodded, understanding. Then she looked out through the tall windows to the sunny garden. Her thoughts drifted, and he wondered if he would ever know what she was thinking at this moment. Gina’s buoyant attitude about life made it possible for her to survive her disappointments with aplomb. But it did not mean that she didn’t feel the ache all the same.
She sighed and looked at him again.
“I’m afraid you’re going to be frustrated,” she warned him. “There’s just so very little to know.”
“There are ways to research things these days,” he said. “Things we’ve never had before.”
“They’re not going to help you,” she said. She paused, then shook her head slightly, ruefully. “You were abandoned at a hospital in Atlanta,” she said. “Your biological mother, God bless her little heart, just walked into that old Lanier Memorial Hospital and left you in a little chair in the maternity ward. The ward nurse got a call saying you were there.” She smiled wanly and shook her head. “That’s all there was to it, Paul. It just doesn’t go any further than that.”
He didn’t know what he was supposed to think about that. He didn’t feel anything in particular.
“And we tried to pursue it,” she added. “Your mother and I. When you were about four, we went to Atlanta and tried to find out if there was anything more. We saw the official Lanier report about that night. Just a little ol’ piece of paper saying what had happened. Six lines. No more. You were handed over to child protective services, or whatever the people in Georgia called it back in those days. Your mother and daddy adopted you when you were only six days old. And that was all there was to it. When you were just a little over two years old, they moved back to Texas.”
“You checked it out?” He found it hard to believe that there was no way to go any further with it.
“We tried. We tried very hard. You know your mother. She just thought if she could find your biological mother, she could do something good for the poor thing. She, Sally, was so thankful to have you. She stayed in touch with that agency-child protective services, whatever-for years to see if any woman ever inquired about that night. But nobody ever did.”
Bern was surprised again. He had always assumed that if he ever wanted to know who his real parents were, he would be able to find out. It was a shock to discover that that door had closed for good. In fact, it had never even been open in the first place.
“I suppose,” Gina said, “that in a very real way, you really were born to Sally and Ted. I mean, you practically had no history at all before they took you in.”
Bern just sat there. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting.
He took a final sip of coffee to cover his surprise and disappointment. He said nothing, and in the silence he could hear the heavy old grandfather’s clock that Gina had shipped back from Heidelberg on her first honeymoon ticking in the living room.
She saw that this abrupt end to his search had caught him off guard, and he knew that she realized that he had probably imagined a far more compelling history for himself.
“I guess you didn’t expect this,” she said softly.
