Page 18 of Old Secrets

I grimaced at the thought of having to go through so many years of my childhood, printed out, itemized, and scrutinized. “More importantly, if my ma did have documents she was supposed to give me, where did she get them? Why did she destroy them?”

“And if they were related to your species, why did she hide you aren’t human? She had to know something. Why else beat you so much if you showed any animalistic behaviors?”

“Well, she was very concerned about her reputation and the appearance of our family to the point she murdered her own son.”

“That’s true.”

“You can’t expect sanity from the insane, Jake. And to kill her own child because he wasn’t the perfect, healthy baby she wanted is an act of utter insanity. We’ll never know which form of mental illness, but you have to be mentally ill to do that.”

Jake heaved a sigh. “Not necessarily. Not every human is good, and she valued her reputation more than his life—and she likely saw a way out of the situation she believed she could hide well enough to fool everyone, including her husband. Not every killer is mentally ill, you know that as well as I do.”

“I know, but it seems easier to swallow if I can say she wasn’t quite right in the head. The other option is chilling.”

“It means she knew precisely what she was doing, did so understanding she did a foul and terrible thing, and cared more about how others perceived her than the lives of the children in her care. And worse, the system ignored any of the signs—as did your pa.”

I nodded. “And she was smart.”

“She was smart enough to murder her own child and instill enough plausible deniability she got away with his murder. And your pa probably couldn’t bring himself to believe she’d do it.”

That I could also believe.

Pa had always tried to see the best in people, even when they showed him their worst.

“Let’s assume your ma was in league with this group. Why would she join forces with them?”

I took a few minutes to think it through, and I grimaced at where my thoughts took me. “I can think of a few reasons, but the top one would be getting help to hide the baby she didn’t want—and get a lead on another child without the legal loopholes on adoption. I was adopted from overseas, which is a cheaper and easier process. What if the entire adoption had been falsified? And if she was willing to kill off a baby for being inconvenient and ruining her reputation, hiding it from everyone for a long time, she would be willing to raise me for whatever goal they had in mind.”

“Such as cultivating someone inside the FBI to do their dirty work. We already found some moles, so it was entirely possible they wanted you to be a mole, too. I could see this group trying to manipulate you through your parents—and it would have been much easier if your ma cooperated with them.”

I could buy into that theory, which disturbed me enough I grabbed the pictures of the people believed to have been my intended parents.

In life, they’d been a young couple ready to add to their family. The autopsy notes indicated the woman had undergone a partial hysterectomy at some stage in her life and likely would have developed some form of cancer. The man had suffered from undiagnosed cancer and wouldn’t have lived for long.

“The autopsy report, outside of the slashing, is pretty bad,” I commented.

“Yeah, I saw that. I appreciate how thorough the autopsy work had been, but I cringed at the thought of what would have happened if they hadn’t of been murdered.”

“Yeah, that’s not a pretty picture. She would have been a young, single mother with an adopted child and grieving for her husband in a world that had little care for single moms no matter what the cause. Then she ran high odds of getting sick and dying, too.” I shook my head, pondering how to connect the deaths of my first parents with how I had been adopted again.

The time frame spanned years, and I’d stayed an infant through the entirety of it. “Someone would have noticed I hadn’t been growing, Jake. It’s impossible. Someone doesn’t stay an infant for years without undergoing stunted development testing.”

“Which leads me to believe your ma knew you weren’t human, your pa didn’t, and she did a lot of work hiding your developmental delays. She tried to bar you from going to the doctors. Your pa took you on the sly.”

Little by little, things began to make some sense, although gaping holes in my history remained. “And because he took me on the sly, he didn’t have good records and couldn’t really put the pieces together himself, especially if the doctors weren’t all that concerned.”

“And when you were growing up, doctors weren’t concerned about those sorts of abnormalities. You were slow to develop but you were healthy, so why be worried? Your ma probably fed him some lines he could understand, and what mattered to him was that you were healthy.”

I read between the lines. “And because I was healthy, Ma had no reason to get rid of me as long as he didn’t express any worry over my slow development.”

“And your pa was a man of integrity, so he wouldn’t accuse his wife of murdering their son without proof—and your ma was a lot of things, but she did a good job of hiding the truth. She had just enough plausible deniability and had hidden just enough evidence to dodge her day in court. The only justice served was that you rid the Earth of her before history could repeat itself.”

“Do you think my ma was involved with them?”

“I can think of two scenarios. In the first scenario, they were the ones who kept you, confirmed you weren’t human, and then used your ma to cultivate you. When they couldn’t cultivate you, they tried to get rid of you, who would be living evidence of a different crime: the murder of your first parents. The other scenario is that someone else rescued you from the group and put you into the adoption system with falsified papers. But who? Why?”

I could think of a possibility. “The same person who sent me to America in the first place.”

“That is a possibility, yes. I think we need to figure out what happened to you between the death of your first American parents and you being adopted by the Johnson family.”