“Thank you.”
Angela smiled. Ricoh eased her onto his lap.
“I’m a private investigator, and I’m based in Austin,” April said.
“And you posed as a waitress and used the name Nancy Drew?” Jeremy’s tone sounded incredulous. “Really?”
April grinned and shrugged. “Yeah, not one of my most creative aliases.” She turned her attention back to Jenny. “A few months ago, I received a call from a woman who said she’d just discovered she might have a granddaughter.
“Amanda Pearl Featherstone was elderly, and not well. She’d had a visit from a young woman she’d seen a lot of in the years her daughter was growing up. That woman had moved away when Mandy, Amanda’s daughter, was in her teens and experiencing a rebellious upheaval.”
At first, Jenny was only half listening. Now, she focused on April. “Mrs. Featherstone’s daughter was named Mandy?”
April nodded. “This friend of her daughter’s had said she’d run into Mandy in Dallas, several years before. That she’d appeared to be getting her life together because she was in the late stages of pregnancy. She said Mandy intended to give birth and keep the child. Mrs. Featherstone had assumed her daughter was dead because she’d been immersed in the drug culture when she’d run away, and she hadn’t seen or heard from her for more than twenty-five years. Mrs. Featherstone wanted me to find her daughter, if she was alive, and her granddaughter.
“It took a month before I was able to uncover a record of a Mandy Smith giving birth to a baby girl at one of the hospitals in Dallas…but at the same time, I had also discovered there’d been a Mandy Smith who’d died at another, the result of a hit-and-run accident. The events were only weeks apart. I found Mandy’s grave, got a court order, and arranged for DNA testing. The results came in before my client died.
“Mrs. Featherstone grieved the loss of her daughter but hoped for the discovery of her grandchild. At that point, I didn’t think it would be so hard to find you. But I hit a snag.”
Jenny met April’s gaze. “A nurse at the hospital where…where Mandy died, a friend of my mother’s—of my adoptive mother’s—promised Mandy she would protect her baby—me. Apparently, she told the nurse that her family had killed her.”
“If poor Mandy had been using drugs a great deal in her life up to the time she became pregnant, and then suffered the trauma of her accident, she might well have been delusional at that point.” Kate’s quiet words echoed what Jenny herself thought.
“I don’t doubt the nurse and your adoptive mother believed Mandy at the time,” April said. “Absent of any solid evidence to the contrary, they acted to honor Mandy’s dying request—and to protect an innocent baby.”
“You’re certain that I’m Mrs. Featherstone’s granddaughter?”
“I am. We will, however, have a doctor take a sample so we can compare your DNA to your birth mother’s. The estate requires that proof.”
Jenny tilted her head. “Estate? There’s an estate? Is that why that man grabbed me? And, who is he?”
“His name is Douglas Vance. He was a great-nephew to Amanda Featherstone, and had believed himself her only heir, and so had been expecting she would leave her entire estate to him.” April shook her head. “The irony of this situation is Mrs. Featherstone was never going to leave him anything more than she did. Until she learned she had a granddaughter, she intended to leave her estate to charity. Mrs. Featherstone told me that Vance was an inept scoundrel and never saw a dollar he didn’t squander or one he ever earned. But he was family from her husband’s side, and she left him what anyone else would consider a fortune.” She met Jenny’s gaze. “If Vance had somehow succeeded in his plan, and ‘removed’ you from the picture, the will would have reverted to its previous terms as per a codicil. Clearly, the man didn’t read his copy of the document. If he had, he would have known going after you would have gained him nothing.”
The door to the roadhouse opened. Connor Talbot and Mel Richardson came in, nodded to Grandma Kate, and then pulled up a couple of chairs and joined them.
Jenny’s eyes widened. “You two were following the creep, weren’t you? You came in right after he and his friend did, and the first thing you did was look at them!”
“We did,” Mel said. “The creep is a bottom-feeding loan shark slash minor thug. What you might call a big fish in a rain puddle by the name of Brody Carp.”
“He came to our attention a while ago, when we were on the case chasing the man who’d stolen Chloe and Carrie Rhodes’s inheritance.” Connor looked at Grandma Kate. “Of course, we’d been keeping tabs on him, hoping to find an opportunity to have him arrested. And of course, it was a simple matter, once we knew he was trying to find Jenny, to call him with an anonymous tip and have him head this way.”
April looked from Kate to Connor. “Is that how Vance ended up here, too? Because I was certain there was no way on God’s green earth that man could have figured out…”
“He obviously didn’t figure anything out since he grabbed Jenny and demanded we give him Marissa.” Grandma Kat looked at the group. “He is a bumbling, odious man.”
“And one who was dangerously close to the edge of sanity, obviously,” Kat Jessop said. “After he broke into his former investigator’s office, and the investigator walked in on him, there was a scuffle. The investigator went down, hitting his head on the corner of his desk. Apparently, Vance was convinced he’d killed the man, and that was enough to send him
