“Emma, when my mother escaped from her ex-husband, she didn’t do it by herself. Someone helped her. Someone whose name I heard on the TV when I was a teenager, and whose husband was there for me during the darkest moments of my life.”
“My mother,” I whisper.
Dean nods. “She wasn’t rescued. She was the rescuer.”
Realization widens my eyes, and I scramble to pull up the pictures Eric sent of the Doc Murray cold case in Florida.
“Look at the dog tag. ‘Call Spice’. This was left behind in the cabin, and strong evidence suggests it was ripped off of Doc Murray before he was dumped in front of that construction site. Dean, you said the man who helped you during those four days when your mother was missing was wearing a dog tag. Can you bring up the picture of your graduation again?”
“Sure,” he says. He goes back into the spare room and comes back a few moments later, staring at his phone. “Here it is.”
He turns the screen toward us and shows me the picture again. I look closely at the image of a teenage Dean standing beside the man I know as Ron Murdock. I focus carefully on the collar of Murdock’s jacket. Something stands out to me, and I point it out.
“There,” I say. “If you look really closely, you can see the edge of a chain under his shirt. It’s coming up just enough, but it’s there. He’s wearing one of these necklaces. That’s at least three men wearing these tags. The only explanation I could ever come up with for why Murdock was in my memories was that he had something to do with my father. I figured he had to be my father’s handler, but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was there for my mother. It was him at the house with me the night she died. Up until now, I couldn’t remember. I knew someone was there. I didn’t see him fully or talk to him, but the TV was on, and I knew Dad wouldn’t just leave me at home by myself without saying anything to me. It was him. Ron Murdock was there to take care of me that night.”
“Then what happened to him?” Sam asks. “Why did you never meet him, and why didn’t you see him again after that?”
“I did see him again,” I say. “A year ago, when he died on my porch. My name wasn’t written on that piece of paper because he had just found it or because somebody told him to find me. He already knew me. He came to tell me something, and he died for it.”
“Whoever killed him must have known who he was,” Dean muses.
“But why kill him that night? What was happening that night that made him come for me and his shooter come for him?” I asked.
“Because that was the night you came back to Feathered Nest,” Dean offers.
His words hit me directly in the middle of the chest, feeling like they punched a hole in my ribs and burrowed into my very being.
“Back?” I ask. “That was the first time I was there.”
“I don’t think so,” Dean tells me. “I wasn’t sure when I first saw it, but I am now.”
“Saw what?” Sam asks. “What are you talking about?”
Dean pulls my mother’s medical records toward him and flips to a later page. He turns it around to face me and points his fingertip hard into the paper.
“Right there. This note was added into her record by hand. It doesn’t look like the other entries. It’s not about a specific appointment and doesn’t have anything other pages do, like vital signs, weight, or complaints. All it says is seven-two-three, L,B,F, seven-eleven. Then, under it, A,L.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“July twenty-third. Live birth. Female. Seven pounds, eleven ounces. Signed Alice Logan.”
My lungs close, clawing the breath down out of my throat, so all I can do is shake my head.
“No,” I say. “It has to mean something else. I was born in Sherwood.”
“Do you have a copy of your birth certificate?” Dean asks.
I get up and head for the room that will always be my father’s office. There’s an old filing cabinet there, stuffed in the corner of the closet. I put copies of all the important papers he left me when he disappeared in that cabinet, with the others going into a safe deposit box. Opening the drawer, I sift through the file folders and documents until I come to my birth certificate.
“Here,” I say.
He takes it, glances at it, then turns it to me.
“Homebirth,” he says.
“Yes,” I confirm, nodding. “I was born at my grandparents’ house. It’s one of the reasons I was so confused about finding out about the house in Iowa. That’s where my father was born. I never knew that. I didn’t realize they still spent stretches of time there when I was young. I thought they were always in Virginia. I don’t have many memories from when I was really little, but some of them are from Sherwood. I know we didn’t stay there consistently, and I don’t have any really strong memories until I was about six or seven.”
“Emma,” Dean says, obviously trying to stem the flow of words. “A woman who has an unattended homebirth can go into a hospital with the baby to get it checked out and file for the birth certificate. She doesn’t need to provide any proof of when or where she gave birth. All that matters is what she says.”
“So, you believe my mother gave birth to me in Feathered Nest, then brought me to Sherwood to get my birth certificate?” I ask, knowing I sound completely incredulous.
“Yes,” he says. “I think that’s exactly what happened.”
“Why would she do that?” I ask.
“The one reason a mother will do anything. To protect
