He perpetuated the unnerving silence and stared at her with as much temerity as she was looking at him. When she shifted her handbag from her shoulder to under her arm, every muscle in his body tensed though he hadn’t actually moved. He was like a cat about to pounce.
He isn’t making this easy for me, Erin thought. Maybe he didn’t want to know what had happened to the younger sister from whom he had been separated thirty years ago. Maybe he wasn’t even aware he had a sister.
“My name is Erin O’Shea,” she said by way of introduction.
“Miss O’Shea,” he spoke her name in that same stirring voice. His blue eyes hadn’t left her face. She moistened her drying lips with the tip of her tongue.
“May I sit down somewhere?” she asked.
With an outstretched hand he indicated a room to the left of the entrance hall and she walked toward it. She assessed the comfortable furnishings of the house. It was tastefully, though not expensively, decorated. Somehow the interior of the house didn’t coincide with her first impressions of her brother. She thought he would have leaned toward a more austere decor to match his taciturn personality.
What was she doing? She hadn’t been with him for more than a few minutes, and she was already analyzing his psyche! Still, the house, this room where she was taking a seat on a splashy sofa, didn’t seem to fit the man. Most likely his wife had decorated the house.
“Is Melanie at home?” she asked politely.
His answer was slow and careful. “No. She had to go out.”
Erin smiled and relaxed somewhat. She was glad that they would have some time alone. Having an audience when she identified herself might make them both uncomfortable. “Now that I think about it, I’m surprised to find you at home in the middle of a weekday. I would have thought you’d be at the bank.” She knew her brother was a banker.
The eyes he had narrowed on her now shifted to her brown suede purse, which she had placed beside her on the sofa. He had a way of making one feel that he hadn’t missed a movement. “I came home early today,” was his only reply.
“Kenneth—may I call you Kenneth?” At his nod, she continued. The time had come. “Kenne
th, what I’m going to tell you will surprise you.” She laughed nervously. “Maybe shock is a better word.” She looked at her hands clasped tightly together in her lap, then lifted her head and met his eyes directly.
“You knew that you were adopted?”
Again the blue eyes narrowed as they studied her. There was an almost imperceptible lowering of his clefted chin to indicate an affirmative answer.
She drew a deep breath. “I’ve been looking for you for years, Kenneth. I’m your sister.”
His face registered no expression. She sat tensely, waiting for some reaction. Erin had expected him to rush across the rug and embrace her, laugh, cry, curse, show dismay, anything but sit there and stare at her with his masklike face fixed in rigid lines.
Finally, he reached for the eyeglasses on top of his head and took them off, twirling the stem in his hand as he said, “My sister?”
“Yes!” She nodded her head enthusiastically, making her short dark curls bounce. “I know it’s incredible, but it’s true! May I tell you what I know?”
“Please.” He still wasn’t excited about her revelation, but at least he was responding. More than anything she wanted to dispel his wariness of her.
“We were adopted from a small Catholic orphanage in Los Angeles. Did you know that?”
“I think so,” he answered noncommittally.
“You are three years older than I. Our mother gave us up for adoption when I was only several months old. I was adopted by a couple named O’Shea. Soon after they got me, they moved to Houston, Texas, where I grew up. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I began to be bothered about who I was and where I came from. I guess that’s true of all adolescents, but having been adopted, it was even more important for me to find my roots, so to speak. I’m sure you can relate to that feeling.”
“Yes,” he said. He was slouching in the overstuffed chair with his arms folded across his chest. It was a relaxed position, but Erin sensed that his insouciance was deceptive. Her brother seemed never to be totally relaxed.
“It was years later that I was finally able, financially and every other way, to begin an earnest search for my true identity. There are organizations now that help adopted children locate their natural parents or lost siblings. Believe me, by now I know them all. I left no stone unturned. Almost four years ago—”
She broke off when the red telephone on the desk rang. With the alacrity of a striking snake, he uncoiled himself from the chair and shot across the room. He jerked up the instrument in the middle of its second ring and answered with a curt “Yes.” He listened for a moment, never diverting his eyes from Erin’s astonished face. “Yeah. No, everything’s cool. I’ll be in touch.” He replaced the telephone receiver and then returned to his chair. “Go on,” he said calmly.
Erin was nonplussed by his abrupt, economical movements. Didn’t one usually say “Excuse me” when they answered the telephone while engaged in conversation with someone else? And why had he attacked the telephone instead of answering it casually? Was he expecting an important call?
“Well, I…” she stammered. What had she been saying? He seemed suspicious of her losing her train of thought.
“You were saying, ‘Almost four years ago…’ ”
“Oh, yes,” she said nervously. “Almost four years ago, I began an extensive search for our natural parents. My adoptive mother understood this compulsion I had to find them and supplied me with the name of the orphanage in Los Angeles. I was heartsick to discover that sometime subsequent to our being adopted, it had burned and all the records with it. That set me back for months. Finally, I was able to locate a nun who had been at the orphanage at the time we were brought in. That was when I first learned about you.” To her chagrin, her voice began to quiver and she could feel tears filling her dark, liquid eyes.