Betrayal of Trust

When she turned off her light, I got the message: Close the computer; step away from the chair; get in bed; turn out your light. I did all of the above.

Moments later I was snuggled up beside her in bed. I was drifting off to sleep when she awakened me with a snort of laughter.

“What’s so funny?” I grumbled.

“You are,” she said. “I can’t get over the idea that you thought it was strange that Ron Miller’s middle name came from an actual town. You don’t have any room to talk.”

“I didn’t say it was strange,” I corrected. “I said it was pretentious. And now that I’ve seen Ron Miller’s parents’ house, I’m not backing off on a single word of it. I’ll give Ron Miller the benefit of the doubt. He may not be pretentious, but his parents definitely are.”

When Mel’s cell phone alarm went off the next morning, it was time for our complicated single-bathroom tango. I stayed in bed snoozing while she did what she needed to do. Then, once she headed out the door for the elevator, I hit the bathroom. It was ten to eight by then, so I had to step on it. When I came down to the restaurant five minutes later, Mel and Ralph were seated together at a small table, both of them looking like they’d just stepped out of a store window. Compared to the two of them, I looked like a much-rumpled bed.

This is nothing new. Ralph Ames has always been a suave kind of guy. When I first met him, he was Anne Corley’s attorney. After her death, he came my way as part of the deal right along with the money I inherited from her. Since then, he’s been the one who has kept that inheritance not only intact but also growing. I believe that he’s now close to having been my attorney longer than he was Anne’s. And next to my former partner Ron Peters, Ralph is also my best friend.

In other words, I like the guy, but there are times when I also resent the hell out of him. I find it particularly provoking that, no matter the circumstances, he always manages to look like perfection itself. Even though I was wearing clothing fresh from the dry cleaner’s plastic bag, I couldn’t compete with Ralph’s terminal dapperness. And there’s no explaining Mel’s ability to look great no matter what, either.

As a consequence I was feeling a bit grumpy when I joined them in the restaurant where they sat, heads ducked close together, studying something on the table in front of them. I took one of the two remaining empty chairs.

Once I was seated-next to Mel and across from Ralph-I could see they were examining three eight-by-ten photos that lay on the table. Ralph glanced up at me and then pushed the photos in my direction.

“To what do we owe. .?” I began, pulling out my reading glasses and sticking them on my nose. When I saw the subject matter of the photos, my question dwindled away into shocked silence.

The first picture was one I recognized right off. It was my senior portrait from the Shingle, the Ballard High School yearbook. In it I wore my first-ever store-bought suit, purchased on layaway at JCPenney’s. At first glance I thought the other two were pictures of me as well. Upon closer examination, however, I realized that although the young man in the photo certainly looked like me, he wasn’t me. I didn’t recognize either the pose or the clothing. The third picture was of the same guy, grinning my own familiar grin. He was obviously fresh from basic training and wearing a World War II-vintage U.S. Navy uniform.

Ralph tapped first that photo and then the other lightly with his finger. “Meet Hank Mencken, Beau,” he said. “I believe this gentleman was your father.”

For a time I could barely breathe. Yes, I’d had a hint in Sally’s e-mail that this was coming and that I might finally be able to put a name on my father’s identity, but nothing had prepared me for the shock of that moment when I saw his photo for the first time. The world seemed to shift on its axis as I stared into the face of a complete stranger and discovered that it was almost a mirror image of my own.

Just as I had taken one look at Zoe Longmire and known at once that Marsha Gray Longmire was her mother, the same thing was true here. As I looked into the eyes in that photograph and studied the set of the jaw and the distinctive shape of the nose, I knew beyond a shade of doubt that I had found my family tree-my heritage and lineage.

“Mel told me about the e-mail,” Ralph was saying. “She thought I should try to find out what I could in advance of your making contact with Sally Mathers in case she was somehow trying to scam you. As near as I can tell, she’s not. She seems to be on the level.”

I tried to pay attention to his words, but I couldn’t. All I could do right then was stare in stunned silence at the face of someone who had been absent from my life for more than six decades, from before my birth. My mother and I never discussed my father when I was growing up. It was almost as though he was a ghost who hadn’t ever existed in real life. And now the ghost was here, smiling back at me with a crooked grin and straight teeth. Those could have been my own, too.

For a moment, my eyes blurred with tears. How different all our lives would have been if my father hadn’t died in that motorcycle wreck or if he and my mother had married before I was born. What if he had lived long enough to take us back to Texas with him, back to Beaumont? Would my mother and father have lived happily ever after? Would my mother have been able to make the transition from being a Seattle girl to living in the wilds of East Texas? Would there have been other kids besides me in the family, a sister or a brother, perhaps, or maybe even both?

And what would my life have been like if I had been raised as Jonas Piedmont Mencken, with part of my name coming from my mother’s father and part of it from my father’s father? What would it have been like to grow up as the son of a loving father, as opposed to being a cast-off grandson, disowned twice over by two hard-bitten, hidebound old men who had no truck with a “no-good” woman who had borne a child out of wedlock? How had they justified turning away from that mother and child? After all, I was the result of an “unholy” union, not the cause of it. Why had they chosen to punish me right along with her?

All the while I was growing up, every holiday had served as a bleak reminder of how different our lives were from everyone else’s. Other kids came back to school after Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter with stories of joyous holiday dinners and family celebrations complete with grandparents and cousins, aunts and uncles. For our little family it was always just the two of us-my mother and me and no one else.

I guess that’s part of what was going through my mind right then as I looked at the photos-that whole catalog of what-ifs and might-have-beens as opposed to what was.

When I could talk again, I looked at Ralph. “Tell me about him,” I said.

“Hank was a kid from a well-respected family. They had quite a lot of money-oil money, it turns out-but Hank wasn’t especially studious and he wasn’t drawn to the family business, either. He was a kid who liked to have fun, a little too much fun on occasion. Liked to walk on the wild side and all that. As Ms. Mathers told you in that e-mail, he got in some kind of hot water back home and was given a choice of joining the service or going to jail. He joined the navy. That’s how he ended up in Washington State, where he met your mother.

“I believe that after he died and before you were born, your mother made an effort to contact the family. They thought she was some kind of gold digger who was after the family money, and refused all contact.”

“Which explains why she made up a last name for me rather than using hers or his.”

Ralph nodded. “When your father’s parents, your grandparents, subsequently died, your aunt, your father’s sister, became your grandparents’ sole heir.”

“Sally Mathers’s mother.”

“Yes, Hannah. From what your cousin said in that e-mail, I wouldn’t be surprised if your aunt might want to name you as a beneficiary in her will.”

“That seems unlikely to me, doesn’t it to you?” I asked.

Ralph shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”

“I sent Sally an e-mail when we got back to the hotel last night,” I said. “I told her I was involved in a case and that, as soon as it was resolved, I’d get back to her. But I don’t think I ever believed any of this was real. I thought it was some kind of pipe dream.”

“It’s not a pipe dream,” Ralph said. “I’ve checked newspaper records both here in Washington and in Texas. Hank Mencken’s military records show that he died in a motorcycle crash outside Bremerton in the last year of World War II. His body was transported back to Texas, where he was accorded a full military funeral and burial. Because of the family’s status in the community, his death received a good deal of coverage in the local newspaper. The Beaumont Daily Ledger no longer exists, but its archives have been digitized and turned over to the Texas State Historical Association. That’s where I found these two photos.”