Eli stood straighter, then walked to stand in front of the man.
“Tell me what you heard.”
Since adults seemed to like to think that children could hear only what the adults wanted them to, Eli usually found it expedient to lie. But he didn’t lie to this man. He told him everything: numbers, names, places. He repeated whatever he could remember of the phone conversation he’d just heard.
As the man looked at Eli, his face had no discernible expression. “I saw you skulking about the office. What were you looking for?”
Eli took a deep breath. He and Chelsea had never told an adult about their collection of letterheads, much less what they did with them. But he told this man the truth.
The man’s eyes bore into Eli’s. “You know that what you’re doing is illegal, don’t you?”
Eli looked hard back at him. “Yes, sir, I do. But we only write letters to people who are hurting others or ignoring their responsibilities. We’ve written a number of letters to fathers who don’t pay the child support they owe.”
The man lifted one eyebrow, studied Eli for a moment, then turned to a passing secretary. “Get this young man’s name and send him a complete packet of stationery from all Montgomery-Taggert Enterprises. Get them from Maine and Colorado and Washington State.” He looked back at Eli. “And call the foreign offices too. London, Cairo, all of them.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Taggert,” the secretary said, looking in wonder at Eli. All the employees were terrified of Frank Taggert, yet this child had done something to merit his special consideration.
When Eli got over his momentary shock, he managed to say, “Thank you.”
Frank put out his hand to the boy. “My name is Franklin Taggert. Come see me when you graduate from a university and I’ll give you a job.”
Shaking his hand, Eli managed to say hoarsely, “What should I study?”
“With your mind, you’re going to study everything,” Frank said as he got off the desk and turned away, then disappeared through a doorway.
Eli stared after him, but in that moment, with those few words, he felt that his future had been decided. He knew where he was going and how he was going to get there. And for the first time in his life, Eli had a hero.
“And then what?” Chelsea asked.
“He sent the copies of the letterheads—you’ve seen them—I wrote to thank him and he wrote back. And we became friends.”
Part of Chelsea wanted to scream that he had betrayed her by not telling her of this. Two years! He had kept this from her for two whole years. But she’d learned that it was no good berating Eli. He kept secrets if he wanted to and seemed to think nothing of it.
“So you want your mother to marry this man? Why did you just come up with this idea now?” She meant her words to be rather spiteful, to get him back for hiding something so interesting from her, but she knew the answer as s
oon as she asked. Until now Eli had wanted his beloved mother to himself. Her eyes widened. If Eli was willing to turn his mother over to the care of this man, he must . . .
“Do you really and truly like him?”
“He is like a father to me,” Eli said softly.
“Have you told him about me?”
The way Eli said “Of course” mollified her temper somewhat. “Okay, so how do we get them together? Where is this cabin of his?” She didn’t have to ask how they would get his mother up there. All they had to do was write her a letter on Montgomery-Taggert stationery and offer her a nursing job.
“I don’t know,” Eli answered, “but I’m sure we can figure it out.”
Three weeks later, Chelsea was ready to give up. “Eli,” she said in exasperation, “you have to give up. We can’t find him.”
Eli set his mouth tighter, his head propped in his hands in despair. They’d spent three weeks sending faxes and writing letters to people, hinting that they needed to know where Frank Taggert was. Either people didn’t know or they weren’t telling.
“I don’t know what else we can do,” Chelsea said. “It’s getting closer to Christmas and it’s getting colder in the mountains. He’ll leave soon, and she won’t get to meet him.”
The first week she’d asked him why he didn’t just introduce his mother to Mr. Taggert, and Eli had looked at her as though she were crazy. “They will be polite to each other because of me, but what can they have in common unless they meet on equal ground? Have you learned nothing from my mother’s books? The rich duke meets the governess in a place where they are forced to be together.”
But they had tried everything and still couldn’t get his mother together with Mr. Taggert. “There is one thing we haven’t tried yet,” Chelsea said.
Eli didn’t take his head out of his hands. “There is nothing. I’ve thought of everything.”