Page 20 of Skin Game
“Like ripping off a Band-Aid. Oh look, they had a band.” He pointed to the photo of kids with French horns, tubas, and trumpets that took up the first page. “I bet they still do. Do high schools have marching bands anymore?”
“Gabriel,” Elton growled, reaching for the book.
Rolling his eyes and catching Casey’s amused glance, Gabe gave in and skipped forward a few pages to where the student pictures began. Six to a page, the shots were, of course, printed in black and white. He appreciated that Casey shifted so he could look over Gabe’s shoulder while he searched for his mother.
“She could have left a damn clue, maybe thrown another letter in one of these boxes.”
What fun would that be, Chance?
All the underclassmen years were lumped together in alphabetical order, while the senior class was listed separate from the rest. A quick glance informed him that there was no one with the last name Karne. Not a big shock. Gabe had long suspected that his surname had been created out of thin air.
“No Karne. Why am I not surprised?”
“Keep looking,” said Elton. “Do you want me to drive home and get my magnifying glass?”
“No, I do not need a magnifying glass.” Maybe he did, but hewasn’t admitting that right now. The pictures weren’t so small he couldn’t focus on them. He just didn’t want to.
“Suit yourself,” Elton said with another huff.
Gabe ran his index finger under each shot of the impossibly young-looking students, searching for the one who might be Heidi. Why else would she have kept this yearbook? Gabe had never been one hundred percent certain of her age, but his mom would have been what, sixteen or seventeen in 1978?
A quick calculation told him there’d been no more than two hundred students that year, less than fifty in the senior class. Gabe’s final high school had had a population of over two thousand, allowing him a comfortable level of anonymity at the time. Less than two hundred? Everyone knew everyone else’s business, which Heidi would’ve hated.
“She wasn’t a senior, or she didn’t have her picture taken,” Gabe said to his audience. “Hang on while I go back through the rest of the riffraff.”
He flipped the pages back to the start of the undergraduates and forced his finger to move slowly down the page and not skip past anyone. There was nothing on the first few pages.
At the next one, Casey bumped Gabe’s shoulder. “Oh, check it out, third row, middle.”
Staring out from the yearbook page was Eli Rizzi. He’d been a junior, which meant he was somewhere around seventeen years old. Gabe would never have recognized him, proving that he also might not recognize his own mother.
“Who knew he’d grow up to be a POS. Does he look like a criminal to you? Although look at those weaselly eyes.” Gabe said, peering closer at the grainy picture of the former Twana County sheriff. “Why did I think he moved here from somewhere else?”
“Westfort is somewhere else. Back in those days, it seemed far away,” Elton told them. “The bridge over the isthmus wasn’t built until the early 1980s, so if the weather was bad or the tidehigh and dangerous, people didn’t come or go from here to there.”
“What a pig. I hate that he probably knew Heidi.”
His attention strayed up the page, and he sucked in a sharp breath. There, nestled in between O and Q, was his mother. At least, he thought so.
“Shit, there she is.” He jabbed a finger toward a black-and-white image withHolly Pritchardunderneath. Holly. Holly wasn’t a name he’d noted when Juliet Carter had stopped by with her faked paperwork, but Pritchard was.
He stared at the photo, narrowing his eyes. Unless Heidi had a doppelgänger, this was his mother. This very young version of his mom reminded him of Marcia Brady—she’d had long, straight hair of an indeterminate dark blond or brown, held back with what looked like plastic clips. She wasn’t smiling. Which, to be fair, Heidi hadn’t done often over her life. A true-life case of resting bitch face.
You smiled enough for the both of us, Chance.
Elton and Casey leaned in to get a closer look, their heads momentarily blocking his view.
It was Elton who nodded first, saying, “You’re right. She couldn’t have been much older when she showed up looking for work.”
“Holly Pritchard. Huh. There you are, Mom. Why did you decide to use the name Heidi Karne?” She’d claimed she’d never married, but Pritchard had been a name she decided to shed. Gabe looked away from the picture to Elton, as if the old man he considered to be family might have the answer.
“Can’t say. Heidi Karne is the only name I knew her by. But I’m not surprised to learn she was from around these parts. How else would she have known about Heartstone Island? We aren’t exactly the center of the universe.”
“And she never said anything to you about Westfort or her family?”
“No, not that I recall. And I don’t think she ever used that name with me, but that was a long time ago. I could have forgotten. I’ve heard the name Pritchard, there’s plenty of them around, but never had any reason to connect Heidi to them.” Elton pursed his lips and shot Gabriel a complicated glance. “Heidi was not someone I would describe as open or warm. As you know, she didn’t invite many people to get to know her. Frankly, I’m still scratching my head over David Delacombe. I suspect he was a one-time-only incident of letting her guard down.”
Ah yes, Gabe’s sperm donor, David Delacombe. In a way, it was nice to know Heidi had had what he was going to imagine was a steamy affair at least once in her life. It made her a bit more human to him. David must have been something to get past Heidi’s barriers. Or a fast talker.