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“Exactly.”
Carter doesn’t elaborate, nor does he need to. Since there’s no child of Lenora’s living at Hope’s End—nor even a mention of one—I assume the baby either died during childbirth or was given up for adoption.
“And you think Ricardo Mayhew’s the father,” I say.
“That’s what Mary thought,” Carter says, confirming what I already knew—that Lenora told Mary everything.
And that Mary shared at least some of it with Carter.
He tips back his coffee cup and empties it. “It makes sense, too. In fact, it’s the only reason I could see for Ricardo killing the rest of Lenora’s family. He was a married man caught in an affair with Winston Hope’s older daughter. Either they didn’t approve and he killed them out of spite, or they demanded he make an honest woman out of Lenora and he killed them to get away.”
“And it’s why he spared Lenora,” I add. “She was pregnant with his child.”
And, I suspect, it’s why Lenora’s been covering for him all this time.
“Anyway, that’s why I started working here,” Carter says. “It’sstupid, but I thought that if I saw Lenora—if we came face-to-face—I’d know.”
“That’s not stupid at all,” I say, thinking about my mad urge to stare into Lenora’s eyes, hoping that doing so would give me some small insight into my own life. “I guess it didn’t help once you did see her.”
“Not really. There’s no resemblance that I saw. But it also doesn’t mean we’re not related.”
I finally take a seat at the other side of the table. Either I trust Carter enough to remain within arm’s reach of him or the news of Lenora’s pregnancy has made me toss all caution to the wind. I’m not sure which one it is.
“Have you considered asking Mrs. Baker?”
“For about two seconds, yeah,” Carter says. “But she’s not exactly happy to talk about the past. Neither is Archie.”
He’s right about that. Despite both having been here in 1929, neither seems like the type to willingly discuss anything about that time.
“So you went to Mary instead.”
“Not until I learned what she and Lenora were up to. The typing and all that.” Carter pauses. Long enough to make me think he’s waiting for me to admit I’ve been doing the same thing with Lenora. I let him keep waiting. I might trust him, but only so much. “When I realized we were both working toward the same goal, I got her involved.”
Now I understand why Carter assumes it’s his fault Mary is dead. He thinks she knew too much. As does Lenora. I can still hear her response when I asked her if she thought Mary died because of what she’d been told. Those two dreadful taps.
“There are ways to tell if you’re related to someone,” Carter says. “Blood tests. They’re using them all the time now to settle paternity cases. I thought, well, if they can do that, then there’s no reason to think they can’t tell if someone’s my grandparent.”
“That’s where Mary came in,” I say.
Carter nods before filling me in on the rest. He contacted a lab that could conduct the tests. All he needed were two blood samples—onefrom him, one from Lenora. Two weeks ago, he went to the lab and got his own blood drawn to be analyzed.
“I convinced Mary to help me with the rest. She agreed to draw a sample of Lenora’s blood for me to take to the lab. After that, all we had to do was wait to see if it was a match. It was supposed to happen the night Mary—”
Carter can’t bring himself to say the rest.
The night Mary died.
“She told me she’d get Lenora’s sample just before putting her to bed,” he says. “I planned to store it in the fridge here and take it to the lab first thing in the morning. When Mary didn’t show, I thought she’d changed her mind or wasn’t able to do it. Then when it looked like she had left Hope’s End entirely, I started to worry my request is what made her leave. Like I’d asked too much of her or put her in an awkward position.”
I’m certain he did. That’s a big request of a caregiver—even a registered nurse like Mary. But she had followed through on it. The bruise I found on Lenora’s forearm is exactly the kind that would appear after having blood drawn, especially from an elderly patient taking the kind of anticoagulant she’s on.
It also means there might have been more than Lenora’s writing inside Mary’s suitcase. A sample of her blood could have been there as well, a theory that only makes Carter feel worse after I share it.
“So itwasmy fault.”
“You’re not the one who pushed Mary,” I say, as clear a sign as any that Carter fully has my trust.
“No, but I put her in a dangerous situation.”