What You Said to Me Read online

  And Georgina’s dinners had expanded Clifford’s waistline.

  Carefully she lifted a beef roast from the oven now and inspected the assorted potatoes and vegetables arranged around it. Not every household task gave her equal pleasure—thus the presence of Graciela—but Georgina was happy when she cooked.

  “I’ve sent Lity out to the garden to see if there is anything we can put straight on the table,” Georgina said. “How was the meeting?”

  Clifford’s hands dug into his trouser pockets. “They have made a plan to register their protests before the president can organize a vote to repeal.” They. He hedged his own opinions.

  “That sounds constructive.” Georgina began transferring the meat to a platter. “Standing up for the western states.”

  “I walked past the People’s Tabernacle.” Cliff tested the waters with the simple statement. His wife stabbed the roast with a fork and her hand trembled slightly, the first sign of nerves. “The lines are lengthening.”

  “I know you are worried about your men, Clifford, but shouldn’t your focus be our family? You cannot save the world.”

  He glanced at the steaming roast and the fresh rolls beside it. How was it they still lacked for nothing in a city of growing want? Georgina would be insulted if he did not eat, but he had no appetite.

  “We could help some,” he said softly. “So many people are losing so much.”

  Her fingers still gripped the fork. “We don’t want our family to be among them, do we?”

  “Georgie, we could help somebody, could we not?”

  She picked up a serving spoon, and it clinked in a ragged rhythm against the china platter. “We have our girls to think about. Missy and Corah are old enough to wed. Once this business is over, we can arrange for them to meet men with prospects. And Lity is bright.”

  “Very bright.”

  “She must finish high school. We can’t let this … distraction … interfere. It’s important that a young woman be able to comport herself in cultured conversation.”

  “Of course.” Cliff’s fingers twiddled keys in his pocket. “We’ve always been of one mind when it comes to the girls. But the men, Georgie. Some of them worked for Mr. Tabor for years. Or my own men could be sleeping on the streets. A donation to People’s Tabernacle could help.”

  He moved closer and with one hand stilled her twitching while he leaned his forehead into hers.

  Her breathing slowed, and she let the weight of her face drop into his.

  “Georgie,” he said. “You know I’ll take care of you.”

  With a small nod, she pulled back. “The table is set. Would you mind calling Missy and Corah down?”

  “Of course.” Clifford restrained his sigh. Georgina was not unkind. But somewhere over the years, she had become insecure, and their home was her cocoon. When she came home from the shops or visiting friends, she did not bring the world with her. In these last six months, she’d cushioned herself all the more.

  He called Missouri and Decorah down from their second-story bedrooms, and Lity came in from the back garden with vegetables to rinse and take straight to the dining room table. Clifford managed to consume enough food to forestall questions about his health, and the girls chattered about not much of anything. Periodically Missy caught his eye, and he gave her a wan smile. While Corah and Lity cleared the dishes, Clifford took a book from the shelf and settled into an armchair in the parlor across from Missy and Georgina. Missy was mending, and Georgina had a needlework project that it seemed like she’d been working on for a decade. Many evenings she would make about two dozen stitches—it seemed to Clifford, who knew little about these things—and then declare she was ready to retire for the night.

  Lity came out of the kitchen, a damp towel over one arm. “Missy! There’s a man at the back door for you.”

  Missouri jumped up and glanced at Clifford.

  “You tell him to go away.” Georgina’s tone clipped.

  “Now Georgina,” Cliff said, rising. “Let’s see what this is about.”

  Missy was already halfway to the kitchen.

  Loren Wade was at the back door, as Clifford suspected. How the young man discovered the location of the Brandt home, Clifford did not know. Missouri might have slipped him the address at some point in the past, or perhaps he simply asked around until he found a shopkeeper who knew them. It wouldn’t have been hard. Georgina had accounts all around town.

  Corah and Lity’s dark eyes were wide.

  “Good evening, Mr. Brandt,” Loren said.

  “Evening, Loren,” Cliff said.

  “You know this man?” Georgina gripped Clifford’s elbow.

  “He works for me. Or he did until a week ago.”

  “Why has he asked for Missouri?”

  Missouri took Loren’s hand. “Because, Mama.”

  “Decorah, Fidelity,” Georgina snapped, “please go to your rooms.”

  “What about the dishes?” Lity asked.

  “Go.”

  They abandoned their towels and left the room, but Cliff doubted they would go as far as the stairs.

  “So you’ve come down,” Clifford said.

  “Mrs. Mitchell won’t keep boarders who can’t pay. I … well.” Loren glanced at Missy. “I wanted you to know I was here.”

  Missouri squeezed his hand and raised her eyes to her parents. “He can stay with us.”

  “That would not be appropriate.” Georgina clenched her hands together.

  “Mama!”

  “Many men worked for your father, and many more knew him because he managed mines for Mr. Tabor. We can hardly take them in simply because of that association.”

  “This is not the same, Mama. Loren and I—you can see it’s not the same. Papa, say something.”

  “It’s all right.” Loren untangled his fingers from Missouri’s. “I didn’t come to cause trouble for your family. I just wanted you to know I’m in Denver. I’ll get by.”

  He slipped out before Missouri could protest again, pulling the door closed behind him.

  Missy glowered at her mother. “How could you do that?”

  “I’ve never even met this man before,” Georgina said, “and you ask me to take him into my home?”

  “I’ve met him before. Papa trusted him to look after the mine. Isn’t that enough? I could share a room with Lity to make space. She wouldn’t mind. Loren would be no trouble.”

  “He’s a miner, Missouri. You can do better.”

  Clifford winced. She might as well have slapped Missy.

  “Papa was a miner when Mr. Tabor found him.” Missy blanched.

  “I believe I’ll retire for the evening,” Georgina said. “This has been quite enough distress.”

  Georgina headed toward the stairs. Clifford heard his younger daughters shuffle out of the way and scramble up the steps. Missy went out in the backyard, no doubt to her thinking bench, as she called the seat in the garden. Clifford went to his small study and took down his journal from the shelf. He wouldn’t go to bed until he knew Missy was safe inside, her tears contained.

  She came to him an hour later, and he looked up.

  “So she knows now,” he said.

  “And she was awful, just as I thought she would be about a miner. She has no trouble living off the work of someone willing to go deep inside the earth every day to dig out silver, but she doesn’t want to know the man who risks his life. What has happened to her, Papa?”

  “She’s afraid,” Clifford said. “She didn’t used to be, and I don’t know why she has become afraid and anxious the older you girls have gotten, but she has.”

  “It’s no excuse for being unkind or uncharitable.”

  Clifford shook his head. He could not disagree.

  “She must know how I feel about Loren. Why else would he come here? Yet she sent him away. What will happen to him, Papa?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Multiplying like rabbits—Nia’s description—was an overstatement. Folders and papers d
idn’t reproduce, but the piles were consuming. There could be no doubt about that, and it had been nearly three months since the boxes arrived from Maple Turn, the small town near St. Louis where Jillian’s client was located.

  Client.

  Yes, Tucker Kintzler was her client—or the Matthew Ryder Foundation, named for his grandfather, was. The foundation would fund the search for as many people as she could find even the smallest leads for. This project was bigger than anything she’d ever undertaken before. Between the folders that held papers and the record books they’d found in the bottom drawer of the old file cabinet with names, dates, locations, and dollar amounts—she hadn’t yet counted up the number of children.

  Dollar signs next to names was a heart-wrenching telltale sight that Judd Ryder, Tucker’s great-grandfather, no doubt never expected anyone else to see.

  Tucker was now trying to redeem evidence of the wickedness.

  A half dozen other genealogists were on board for handling some of the work. A semblance of organization came first, including admitting that some of the cases were so remote that it was unbearable to hope for resolution and nearly unreasonable to spend any time or money on them. Jillian hated the idea that their names should be shut away in files for another fifty years. Or forever.

  But the dining room was the dining room, and her dad loved to cook and have people over for dinner.

  Still, it seemed as if the more she pulled the files apart, the more questions she had about what they contained. The children’s names—were they the names before they were taken from their families or names assigned to them by the people who took them? And of course the families who adopted them likely changed even the first names again.

  She also had questions about where children were “found”—of course they weren’t found in the true sense of the word. Tucker Kintzler’s great-grandfather had sheltered and transported children he knew were stolen, some moments after their births and others when they were old enough to have reliable memories of the events if anyone had listened long enough to hear the stories.

  Then there were questions about references to other people involved in the ring. These seemed to be carefully coded, but they did record who delivered the children to Judd Ryder’s custody and to whom he passed them on.

  Of course none of this was meant to benefit the children.

  But the children and their families were out there. Matthew Ryder, Tucker’s grandfather, himself a stolen baby, had passed last year, but many of the children were as much as twenty-five years younger than he was. Genealogically, there was every reason to expect most from that era were still alive, shopping Medicare supplemental plans, dreaming of retirement travel, debating whether to downsize from the family home.

  Perhaps they were caring for the aging parents who had raised them in their failing health.

  They had a right to reconnect with their first families if they wanted to. But Jillian was racing the clock. Finding the right leads—for so many—could take years, a phalanx of genealogists, and incredibly good luck in many instances.

  Glancing at the antique clock that her own mother had loved, Jillian left the relative tidiness of her office. Only one side chair contained work folders at the moment, for Raúl, the insurance company client who gave her steady work ensuring they were paying out life insurance claims to rightful heirs when family lines ran thin. The pages of her latest contribution to a genealogy journal were printed and laid out on the desk ready for her own red pen to do one last round of editing before submitting the article. At the moment, though, she had to be ready for Tisha Crowder, due to ring the doorbell in approximately three and a half minutes.

  Coffee. Definitely coffee.

  Jillian gave herself an extra shot in this second cup of the morning. Something told her she was going to need it.

  The doorbell didn’t ring for thirteen minutes—ten minutes late. By then Jillian was halfway through her coffee, starting to move files around on the dining room table, and wondering why she hadn’t asked Tisha for the phone number of that shiny new iPhone she was attached to.

  Canyon Mines was a small town, so even though Jillian didn’t know Tisha’s family well, she knew the girl didn’t come from the easiest of households. Brittany wasn’t the first single mother in the family. When they were growing up, Brittany’s mother was the only family member who turned up at school programs—some of the time, at least. But hers was one of many families with a vague long history in the area. In contrast, the Duffys, with a mere twenty-seven years in Canyon Mines, were virtually newcomers still on trial in the neighborhood.

  When the doorbell finally rang, Jillian raced to answer it on principle. Tisha should have been on time. Whether she could do nearly as much for Tisha as her father believed remained to be seen, but she was not going to sign off on court-ordered hours trimmed around the edges.

  “Sorry,” Tisha muttered, not meeting Jillian’s eye. “Line was long at the Cage.” She held a large Italian cream soda.

  “Come on through,” Jillian said. Some people would come to work on time, even if it meant sacrificing the Italian soda. “We’ll find a place to set your drink out of the way of the papers.”

  “I haven’t spilled anything in, like, ten years.”

  Jillian produced a tight smile. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  “I’m not a kid.”

  Jillian ignored the mumbling and indicated a spot at the end of the sideboard where Tisha could set her drink on a coaster and it would be within reach. For visual emphasis, it was right beside Jillian’s own mug. She wasn’t asking of Tisha any rule she didn’t follow herself—no beverages in the immediate vicinity of ninety-year-old documents.

  “I think for today,” Jillian said, “we’ll just work together. How does that sound?”

  Tisha shrugged.

  On the one hand, this felt like stepping back rather than forward, but if it helped Tisha grasp the details of the task, it would be worth investing the time.

  “The label maker is there at the end of the table,” Jillian said.

  Tisha took a long slurp on her drink, set it down, and picked up the label maker.

  Jillian pulled a chair up to the table. “Let’s dive into this stack. It’ll help us clear some space to work.”

  “Whatever.”

  Jillian picked up a brittle folder. “This one has already lost its original label. The ink got smudged somewhere along the way, so we can’t rely on it.”

  “So you have to open it.” Tisha was poised with the label maker. “I know all this.”

  “It looks like it’s from September of 1942. A little boy. Age three.”

  “We don’t need that for the label.”

  “It’s the sort of thing we might need to remember later. A little boy with the last name of Renfeldt. Karl with a K.”

  “So you want the whole name or just the last name?”

  “The whole thing is helpful,” Jillian said, “when we have it. Last name first. R-e-n-f-e-l-d-t, K-a-r-l.”

  “You didn’t say that yesterday.” Tisha poked letters on the label maker.

  Jillian let the comment slide and watched the lettering.

  “Oops, looks like we missed the d,” Jillian said. “There’s a backspace button that makes it easy to correct spelling.”

  Tisha sighed but made the correction.

  “That looks great,” Jillian said. “Print two, remember?”

  “Blue and red. Geez, this is like preschool or something.” Tisha pressed PRINT, tore off the strip, and presented the result.

  “Wait until we add in yellow folders. Then the fun really begins.”

  Jillian’s attempt at levity collapsed. Tisha stuck the two labels on folders.

  “Okay,” Jillian said, “we don’t have much to go on in this original folder, so we’ll just move the sheets to the—”

  “Original contents in the blue folder. I was here yesterday, remember? And two minutes ago.” Tisha reached for her Italian soda and slurped.


  “Of course.” Jillian waited for Tisha to finish with her drink before handing her the contents of the original folder to slide into the new blue one. “I do remember I have a few pages on the table here somewhere with a sticky note that says Renfeldt. There was another name in that file that made me curious, and I dug up some things that might be related for the red folder. If you could help me look for the Renfeldt stack without disturbing any other piles, I’d appreciate it.”

  Tisha’s effort appeared half-hearted to Jillian, but the girl found the papers before Jillian did. A large red paper clip bound them together, with the edge of a long orange sticky note tucked under the bottom of the clip to keep it from floating off.

  “That’s it!” Jillian took the find from Tisha and put it in the red folder. “Now we stack them together.”

  “Do I get a gold star?” Tisha matched up the edges of the folders perfectly and added them to the other paired folders at the far end of the table from the day before.

  They did a few more folders like this, Jillian commenting on the contents, pointing out where she found confirmation of spelling for a name or a tidbit of information that could lead down a promising trail, before forcing herself to sit back and let Tisha look through the stacks on the table for what might belong in the red folders. Though Jillian handled the original documents and file folders around the edges, they were just old enough to leave a trail of dust on her fingers and clothing. Brushing off her khakis felt like brushing away the physicality of the past. These were not mere internet images of census entries or military records. Ghastly as the task was to identify where these children might have come from and where they might be now, with each crumbling folder Jillian opened, she caressed the past. The original folders were too fragile to stand up to use going forward. She had to relocate the documents and establish her own system. Nevertheless, the growing stack of discarded files from the 1930s to the 1950s was an aching sepulchre.