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Mom: Are you coming back up?
Me: I will after I talk to my attorney. You will have to be there with me though. They won’t let me be alone in the room with him.
Mom: This whole thing is so crazy. Come up when you can.
I know it’s no good for Mom to be sitting up there by herself, so I send a quick text to Vanessa to see if she will go sit with her. After waiting ten minutes without a response I tell her that I will go instead and to come up when she can.
Before leaving the house, I decide this may be my best chance to look through Mom’s cedar chest since Charles is snoring so loudly that I can use it as a monitoring device. I slip into Mom’s bedroom and turn on the light, glad that her and Charles don’t share a space. There are several stacks of mail on top of the chest so I quickly move them to the bed and carefully open the lid. After removing several photo albums, I come upon her diary and beneath it is a stack of letters and cards neatly bound by opposing rubber bands. Bingo!
I scan through them quickly and find a postcard dated roughly a year before I was born. Ray had sent it from Hawaii, but it didn’t say anything romantic. I assume he was being discreet since it was a postcard that anyone could read. Right beneath it however, is a letter. I quickly open it and begin skimming through it. Ray had also written this while they were in Hawaii and he talks about how lonely he is without her. Even though Maggie and Darla were with him, he couldn’t stop thinking about his true love. If Dad read any of these, I can see why he would have been devastated.
My heart continues to sink as I look through more of the letters. I’m not sure why he wrote so many of them, but apparently it was easier to write than to call on the phone. This was before cellphones were popular, so he probably had to talk on the phone at home or the one at work. I suddenly have a vision of them calling each other from payphones at a predetermined time. It gives me a new appreciation for living in the digital age.
I take three letters from the stack, spanning an entire decade. In one of the letters Ray suggests a paternity test to establish whether he or Victor is our father. Bingo! My intent is to get them photocopied and overnight them to Jürgen this afternoon. Hopefully Mandy will do the same, so we can put one portion of their circumstantial case against me to rest.
My stomach rumbles nervously due to the fact that it’s probably going to be up to me to find the real perpetrator. The detective and FBI will simply keep trying to connect me to whoever is committing these crimes. My stomach rumbles again, telling me that I need to pick up some breakfast on the way to the hospital. It’s going to be another long day. I send Tony a text, letting him know that I would like to go back to the hospital as soon as he is up.
~~~
“Good morning, Mom. I brought you some breakfast.” I hand her a box with a ham, egg and cheese sandwich on a freshly made croissant and a vanilla latte.
“Mmm, thank you. They both smell delicious.” She gives me a pain filled smile. “Tony got up to bring you in?”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure he slept in the car.” I open my box and pull out the sandwich.
“He’s a good man,” Mom muses, sipping her latte. “If I were twenty years younger.”
“Hey, cougars are all the rage right now. Especially ones that have money like you,” I tease her. “Instead you go for an old fart.”
“You be nice.” She shoots me a dirty look. “Charles has been good company for me.”
“I understand, Mom.” I give her a smirk and let it go.
As we both eat our sandwiches in silence, Tyler suddenly lets out a very definite moan. We both glance at each other and spring from our chairs simultaneously. His eyes are still closed but there is definite movement in his right hand.
Mom immediately reaches for it. “Tyler are you there?”
He lets out another audible moan and squeezes her hand just slightly, before silence once again fills the room. “I’m sure that’s a good sign,” I assure her as she kisses his hand and stares down at him intently.
“It’s a great sign!” she replies with tears forming around the edges of her eyes. “Did you see him squeeze my hand?”
“I did. He was trying to open his eyes, too.” I reach up and rub my fingertips along his forehead. “His eyelids were fluttering.”
“He’s going to make it.” She smiles, continuing to squeeze his hand tightly.
Mandy
After dreaming for what seemed to be hours, I finally regain full consciousness. The first thing I notice is that something hard and uncomfortable is beneath me. I roll onto my side and reach back to find my phone. I roll onto my back again and try to stretch the resulting kink out of my spine.
