“Were you listening to us? Did you hear everything?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
I hadn’t known how Belinda and I were going to proceed with Kat right there in the house, but now I don’t have to worry about how much to tell her. She knows everything.
“Do you have questions for me, Kat?”
My daughter looks from me to Belinda and back again. She nods, and I don’t care if she has a slew of questions. I hope we spend the next hour on the floor, she and I, as she asks me her questions in her sweet voice that I too infrequently hear.
Kat points to Belinda.
“There’s a baby.” Her voice is soft, just above a whisper.
“Yes, love.”
“Our baby?”
I hesitate a moment before answering. “’Tis Miss Belinda’s baby.”
“And mine?”
I don’t know how to answer her. I say nothing.
“My baby, too?” she asks.
I look back to Belinda, who seems to understand, just as I do now, the reason for Kat’s intense interest. She understands in the simplest of ways that any baby that belongs to her father is her brother or sister. She has a sibling—something she didn’t have before and which I see very clearly now she has always wanted.
Belinda stares back at me and reaches down to wrap one armaround her middle as if to embrace her unborn child. I turn back to Kat.
“Sweetest, everything’s a bit topsy-turvy at the moment. I don’t have a good answer for you.”
But Kat looks past me to Belinda, and I see only resolve on her young face. She already believes she is a sister to the baby that Belinda is carrying. The lack of full confirmation from me means nothing.
“Is that all, love?” I ask. “Do you have more questions?”
Kat slowly shakes her head. I can see that she has, in fact, more questions, but none of them matter like the one about Belinda’s child.
“All right, then. To the library.” I rise from my knees and reach out to help Kat to her feet.
The three of us cross the foyer into the library and I head toward Martin’s desk. Kat lingers by the door. She’s never liked being in the room Martin uses as his office.
“He keeps this desk locked and I don’t know where the key is,” I tell Belinda. “But we have to get into it. I think we might find some of our answers in here.”
I remove a hairpin and insert the point into the keyhole of the main drawer, the largest one. I jiggle, jab, and jostle to no avail. Then I ask Belinda for one of her hairpins and try that. I try again with mine. I try with a darning needle, a buttonhook, and a hatpin. And then I try the hairpins again, only this time I use mine and Belinda’s at the same time. The mechanism inside the lock turns at last and I pull on the handle.
The drawer is orderly, with folios of documents neatly piled upon one another. I pull out the first, lay it atop the desk, and open it.
On top is my and Martin’s marriage license, followed by Kat’s birth certificate, then the deed to the house.
I flip past these and there is the marriage certificate between James Bigelow and Belinda Louise Dixon of San Rafaela, California. Belinda stiffens next to me as she sees it, too, and I move past it. Next is his own birth certificate, one Martin Charles Hocking of White Plains, New York, son of Albert and Maureen Hocking. After that is the birth certificate for a James Wilder Bigelow, born March 12, 1873, near a town called Trinidad in Las Animas County, Colorado, and right past this is the death certificate for this same person in 1876. James Bigelow died of scarlet fever at the age of three. Martin was two years old at the time, which is why he was able to so easily use this person’s identity. They were only a year apart in age.
“The real James Bigelow was just a little boy when he died,” Belinda says numbly as she reads the document at the same time I am reading it.
“Yes.”
“But how did he know about him?”
“I don’t know.” I keep at the task.
