Why would he want to do that?
Did he know this would happen?
I must have been lost in my thoughts and taken a wrong turn. Still on the first level in the south wing, I came to a tall set of double doors.
Is it snooping if I accidentally find it?
For a moment, I stood and listened for Margaret and Paula. I should have gone to the kitchen to see if they were done for the day. Instead, I turned the large doorknob and pushed one of the two doors inward.
My eyes widened as I took in the splendor of the room.
I hadn’t found Van’s bedroom suite.
I’d found his home office.
I was drawn to a table near his desk.
My stomach sank as I picked up one picture in a silver frame. I knew the man in the tuxedo. It was the woman in the white dress that I didn’t know. “What the hell? You’re married?”
Julia
After saying goodbye to Paula and Margaret, I wandered around Van’s home, searching for more mementos, something to make sense of the picture in his office. I’d been through all the possibilities in my head.
Van was married at one time.
I could live with that fact; after all, he was forty-one years old. What I couldn’t fathom was why he’d kept his wedding picture up if he was divorced. And then another possibility came to me. Maybe Van was a widower. That would make sense, considering how much of a loner he claimed to be. Even Mr. Fields said Van was a private person.
The sun moved closer to the horizon and still no word from Van.
In the library, I’d begun to organize some of the things Van had accumulated. While there were flash drives with folders and folders of documents, it was the old-fashioned paper items, such as older magazines with Donovan Sherman on the cover that I perused. The headlines caught my attention.
Up and coming.
Man of the year.
Most eligible bachelor.
I checked the dates.
The most eligible bachelor magazine was from ten years ago.
If I wasn’t feeling young before, I was now. Ten years ago, I was fourteen and Van was the most eligible bachelor. I flipped open the cover to the article inside. Staring down at the glossy pages, I compared the man he was then to the one I’d gotten to know now. If I were to be honest, I found him more attractive now.
There was a sense of quality to his age. It was probably that unfair issue where men aged gracefully and women just aged. However, as I looked at each picture of Van from a decade before, I believed there was a sadness existing in his green eyes that I didn’t see today.
Taking that magazine to the lounge chair, I turned on a lamp and began to read. According to the article, the pictures of Van with the other women had been taken over a year before publication. Prior to the article’s release date, Donovan Sherman had disappeared from the social circuit.
Each picture was captioned with Van’s name, the woman’s name, the event, and date. The names of the women came from many well-known families, all with socialite names such as Nichole, Lena, Celeste, and more.
If Van was a reclusive, eligible bachelor ten years ago, when did he marry?
I went back to my laptop and pulled up his most recent biography. There was the date he was born and his parents’ names.
Donovan Sherman was born in Austin, Texas, to Michael and Eleanor Thomas.
I reread the sentence.
Why isn’t Donovan’s last name the same as his father’s or his mother’s?