“When the school discovered I was pregnant, they sent me home, and my father demanded they find the boy responsible.”
She crossed the room and sat back down beside him. The couch was the only piece of furniture in the apartment, aside from the kitchen table—which had no chairs with it—and a bed in the one other room.
“Galen arrived.” She shook her head. “The school had contacted the gang Galen was affiliated with back in New York to try to find your father, maybe alongside the police, I don’t know. But Galen convinced your grandfather I was pregnant with his child. I denied it and refused to marry him, but in the end, I had no choice.”
His grandfather forcing her to marry Galen must have been what Jacob had referred to. The thing his grandfather had wished he hadn’t done. “Why didn’t you try to contact my real father?” Forrest asked.
“I did. I still am.”
“You still are?”
“Yes, I’ve been trying for years. I even used Rose Nightingale’s name to search for him, knowing Galen would intercept any mail sent to me. In the beginning, Galen promised to help me find your father, said he’d grant me a divorce when it happened. I soon learned he was lying. You see, your father knew I’d given him a false name, and he gave me one, too, as a joke.” She laughed slightly. “We called each other crazy, silly names, but never our real names. Galen, however, knows your father’s real name. Over the years he’s shown me pictures of him. Real pictures. I know it’s him.”
“That’s why you want to stay here?” Forrest asked. “So Galen will reveal where my father is? What makes you think he will after all these years?”
“Because I was the one who buried the printing plates under your fuel tank.”
He shook his head, knowing it was useless to explain how that implied she knew everything that had transpired. “They’ve been found, Mother. It’ll make no difference to him to know who buried them.”
“He knows I buried them,” she said. “He knows I have other evidence, too, that I’ll take to the authorities if he doesn’t tell me what I want to know.”
“They don’t need any more evidence,” Forrest said.
“They might.” She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them. “I know where the banker is buried. Galen killed him.”
Forrest stood and walked across the room and wished there was more than water to drink. Letting that bit of new, yet not surprising, information settle, he said, “So for twenty-seven years, he’s been holding out on you, and you’ve been gathering evidence on him. Battling.”
“Yes.” She looked at him as if he didn’t understand. “I loved your father, Forrest. I still do. I won’t ever stop looking for him.”
“Isn’t twenty-seven years long enough for you to understand Galen is never going to tell you?”
“I just want to know where the pictures are. Then I’ll have the clues to find him myself.”
Forrest shook his head, until another question sprung to his mind. One that Nasty Nick’s arrest hadn’t answered. He realized he now knew the answer and voiced it. “You paid someone to break into the Plantation, to search for those pictures.”
Without demonstrating a hint of regret, she answered, “Yes, but they didn’t find anything. I told them they could take whatever they wanted. Thought the idea of things being stolen might make Galen reveal his hiding spot. It didn’t, of course. Nothing I’ve tried has worked.”
There was another question rambling around in Forrest’s head. “If you’ve been searching for a lost love all these years, why did you tell me to leave Norma Rose alone? To not dredge up the past.”
“Because you never loved Norma Rose,” she said.
That couldn’t be denied. “Maybe not, but—”
“Roger Nightingale would have killed Galen, given the opportunity, and then I’d never—” She leaped to her feet. “That’s the phone.”
It wasn’t until she opened the door that he heard a faint and faraway ringing.
He’d seen the pay phone upon entering the building, two flights down, in a small booth in the narrow entranceway.
Her running footfalls had barely stopped, when his mother shouted up the stairwell, “Forrest, it’s for you.”
No one had this number except Jacob. Forrest’s heart skipped several beats as he ran for the door. Please, don’t let Twyla have taken a turn for the worse. Please, he prayed while running down the stairs.
Forrest met his mother halfway up the stairs. She was smiling brightly, which confused him. Minutes ago she’d still been crying. Crying over a love twenty-seven years old.