Page 25 of Return to Whitmore (The Whitmore #2)

Chapter Nineteen

C harlotte, Addison, and Nina packed their belongings, locked up the house on Madequecham Beach, bought snacks for the road, and made sure the kids buckled their seat belts.

With that, they were en route, first to Fiona and Will’s camp, where they would return to swimming and horseback riding and bungee jumping and whatever else kids did when they had nothing to do but have fun.

After that, the three adults would head to the airport, where Addison would fly back to Hawaii and Charlotte and Nina would fly to Rome.

For a little while, Charlotte allowed herself to pretend she was in the midst of a normal and fun family road trip.

She played Fiona and Will’s favorite songs, laughed with them as she sang (badly) along to the words, and ate snacks till her belly hurt.

Addison was playful and charming, sharing news about her own children, telling Fiona and Will how much they would like their cousins.

Fiona and Will hadn’t known they had cousins on their mother’s side, and they demanded info from Addison, wanting to paint mental pictures of these three fun-loving strangers in Hawaii.

“I want to meet them!” Fiona cried.

“Me too,” Will said.

“One day,” Nina promised, smiling back at them. “We’ll all go to Hawaii and see Aunt Addison again. I promise.”

“Or maybe we’ll come to Nantucket again!” Addison said. “We’ll bring your Uncle Seth. You’ll love him.”

There was an ache to her voice that nearly shattered Charlotte’s heart.

When they reached the summer camp, Charlotte and Addison hung back by the car, watching as Nina said goodbye to her beautiful children, holding them extra-tight before they sped off to see their friends again. When Nina returned, she had tears in her eyes.

“I wanted them to have a great summer, to get away from all the stress of me and Daniel and everything that’s been going wrong,” Nina said nervously. “But I didn’t know they’d handle it this well. It’s like they don’t need me.”

Charlotte threw her arms around her little sister and held her close. “They’re like you, Nina. You were so brave and independent. I’ll never forget how amazed we all were by you, our brilliant little sister, who was up against everything back then.”

Nina beamed, “I wonder what Francesca will say when she sees me again. I’m like a bad nightmare she was able to send away.”

Charlotte’s stomach tightened into knots. “You don’t have to go with me.”

“I want to,” Nina said. “I want to put together more pieces of the puzzle. I want to know how much she knows about the fire, how much she helped cover up.”

Charlotte got in the passenger seat, groaning. “On the phone, she said her husband and son are dead. That’s what she told the private investigator.”

“It’s easy to say whatever you want to believe,” Nina said. “But I want to look her in the eye and tell her that there aren’t any death certificates. I want her to tell us why. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll finally tell me who my birth mother is.”

Charlotte hadn’t thought of that in a while. It remained a secret, buried as deep as the supposed “Whitmore” treasure.

Who was Nina’s birth mother?

At the airport, Charlotte was surprised when Addison burst into tears. She burrowed her face into Charlotte’s neck and whispered, “I wanted to find him. Why didn’t I find him?” But her kids were waiting for her back in Hawaii. She couldn’t wait any longer. She had to go.

Charlotte and Nina held Addison’s shoulders and spoke gently but firmly.

“We’re going to figure out what happened to him,” Charlotte said.

“This is only the beginning,” Nina affirmed. “We’re going to update you all the time.”

“But it’s important that you don’t tell anyone anything,” Charlotte reiterated.

“We don’t know how deep this goes.” She remembered how, before he left Manhattan, Jack hadn’t been able to figure out what Tio Angelo had been up to.

Maybe he had by now. Perhaps by now, Jack was dead.

Maybe Tio Angelo had seen to it. Was he really that evil?

Oh, she didn’t want to think that. But maybe she had to be realistic. Perhaps she had to face this story head-on to make sense of her life.

Before Addison headed to her gate in another terminal, Charlotte set up her camera and asked her a series of questions about her life with Seth Green. It was for the good of the documentary. Addison didn’t hesitate to help.

“He always made me feel loved and protected. He always made me feel like the kids and I came first.” Addison swallowed, her eyes to the window as a plane outside took off.

“But he never once insinuated that he wasn’t Seth Green, that he wasn’t who he said he was.

If I never see him again, I need answers.

I need to know why he kept that from me.

I’m still in love with him, and I always will be in love with him. But I feel like a fool.”

Charlotte cut filming and thanked Addison with a final hug.

“We love you, Addison,” she whispered in her ear. “You’re family and always will be. Thank you for coming out here.”

As Addison sped off to get her flight, Charlotte and Nina went through security, speaking in dull tones as they removed their shoes and packed and unpacked their computers and phones and tablets and film equipment.

Charlotte saw her tracker tag and cursed herself for not remembering to put it in her checked luggage.

Previously, when traveling, airlines had lost her bags, so she’d always longed to have a tag in the bag itself, something that tracked where it went. Next time.

“What a strange time,” Nina said as she put back on her belt after security.

“You and Addison just found out your husbands weren’t who they seemed to be,” Charlotte said, shaking her head to clear it of its messes. “You’re both handling it much better than I would.”

Nina gave her a look. Last night, Charlotte had finally told Nina about the car accident, about how Jack’s driving had nearly killed her ex-fiancé, and about how Ralph had dumped her for someone at his office and she’d never managed to find another love.

“We’ve all been through more than our fair share,” Nina said.

“And there’s more to come,” Charlotte said.

Outside the gate, Charlotte dared to tell Nina the other thing on her mind. This wasn’t the first private investigator she’d met. “Another one came to find me back in 2005. He wouldn’t tell me who sent him or what he was up to. It freaked me out.”

“Did you ever hear from him again?” Nina asked.

Charlotte nodded. “He called a few more times, but I refused to tell him anything, and I refused the money he was offering me. I didn’t want to get involved in anything too sinister. I’d been through too much.”

Nina pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “I hope we’re ready for this.”

Charlotte didn’t answer.

The flight from Boston to Rome was bumpy.

Charlotte ordered a glass of wine and nearly spilled it.

She tried to read her book or watch a film but was too anxious to concentrate.

When she glanced across the aisle at her baby sister, Nina, she found her fast asleep, curled up in a ball.

She was jealous. They both needed their rest.

They reached Rome at eight in the morning.

Customs was fluid for Charlotte, because she was an Italian citizen, but she had to wait a full forty minutes for poor Nina to get through.

When she appeared, her cheeks blotchy from having slept strangely on the plane, she said, “Francesca was legally my mother, wasn’t she?

Couldn’t she have gone through the trouble of making me an Italian citizen? Did she really want to punish me?”

Charlotte tried to laugh. She didn’t want to say, Well, yes, our mother did want to punish you.

To rest up before going to Tuscany, Charlotte and Nina checked into hotels in Rome and agreed to strategize over dinner that night.

As far as Charlotte knew, one or both of their sisters lived in Rome, and as she prepared for their night out, she imagined running into them.

What would she say? She hadn’t googled them lately, but she knew they were both highly successful and career-oriented women with husbands and children.

They probably made Francesca very proud.

Had Francesca called them when the private investigator had begun sniffing around? For some reason, Charlotte doubted it.

Did Francesca secretly think that Charlotte knew where Jack was? The thought rattled Charlotte. She nearly swallowed her tongue.

At a gorgeous Italian restaurant stretching across an ornate piazza, Charlotte and Nina ordered a bottle of red wine and two pasta dishes to share. They reminisced about the Italian meals they’d had as children, the red sauces that had bubbled on the stovetop all Sunday long.

“Those stopped when I went to Michigan,” Nina remembered.

“Did you ever try to recreate them yourself?” Charlotte asked.

Nina shook her head. “The flavors were too painful. I didn’t want to remember. But now that I know Francesca wasn’t my mother, that it was all a mess, I’m trying to make peace with Italian food.” She twirled her fork around and around and ate a huge bite.

Charlotte laughed.

They agreed to get up early, grab the rental car, and head to Francesca’s villa before the private investigator-gardener arrived.

Francesca hadn’t fired him, choosing to keep him close.

Charlotte wanted to get a look at him, to talk to him, to try to sniff out what he was after.

Maybe he would be willing to be interviewed for her documentary.

When they walked back to their hotel that night, Nina asked, “Do you have any guesses about where Jack is? Anything at all?”

Charlotte shook her head sadly. “Sometimes I think he never wants to see me again. We were too close for too many years. It all fell apart.”

“I hate that.” Nina closed her eyes and stopped dead in the center of an old stone bridge. The orange light of the lit-up city glowed in her black hair. Although she wasn’t Italian, she looked the part.

“Throughout the past year of living at Seth Green’s house, I’ve been hoping and praying he’d show up,” Charlotte admitted.

“I realized I could finally go to Nantucket without losing my mind. And when my funding kept falling through, I realized it was the only place I could afford. I figured Jack would get it.”

Nina nodded. “I still can’t believe I tracked you down like that.”

Charlotte didn’t want to say it aloud, but she hoped that Nina’s tracking capabilities would extend to more members of the family. She hoped this was only the beginning.