“Happy to help,” said Toby. “Guess what, Mr. King? I have another call. This could be them. It is them. Should I take it? I should take it, right?”
“Yes. But, Toby, make it a conference call. And don’t let them know I’m here.”
There was a click, and then Toby said, “Toby.”
“Tobias Dahl?” A woman’s voice, excited. A little throaty, phlegm-inflected. A bass note. Someone with a cough.
“This is Toby.”
“Oh my God.” The voice deepened on “God.” “My God, my God! Tobias—I’m your sister!”
“Oh my God,” answered Toby, smoothly. “This is so weird. I can’t believe this. How are you? No, wait—who are you?”
“I’m Chris Shepard. My name’s Chris Shepard. My God, it’s so good to meet you!”
“Even just on the phone,” said Toby. “Just to hear your voice like this. I mean it’s …” Toby paused, as if searching for a phrase. “It’s totally, completely unbelievable!”
“Just to hear your voice. Which is sort of like my voice. Where are you, anyway. Can I ask?”
“I’m right here, near Seattle—have you been to Seattle?”
“And I’m speaking to you from my home in Ann Arbor. But you know what?” Chris Shepard said. “This is starting to clear up a little, because I lived in Seattle growing up.”
“You did?”
“I did.”
“Weird,” said Toby. “We’re pretty flooded right now. You’ve probably seen us on the news.”
Already, Ed had pythed Chris Shepard, and come up with a half-dozen social-networking possibilities, a CompGlobal business listing, an online-scam posting, a patent abstract, and a mortgage broker. He wished Toby Dahl would cut to the chase. Toby was overrelishing his role instead of moving things urgently forward. He lacked urgency. He was having too much fun.
“It’s really weird,” Chris Shepard said. “I totally, totally wasn’t expecting this. I’m, like, pinching myself. A half-brother.”
“I know. I know. We live in a great age. DNA Reunion is great.”
“They’re great,” said Chris Shepard, with more raw, throaty emphasis. “What a crazy world. What a crazy world. What a crazy, crazy, mixed-up, crazy world.”
“Absolutely,” said Toby, genially.
“I gotta back up,” Chris Shepard said. “I gotta tell you something, backing up. It’s this—when I did this DNA Reunion thing, I had no idea I had a half-brother. It wasn’t like I was looking for a half-brother. Don’t take that wrong—I’m so glad I found you. This opens up a whole new universe! But what I was doing, my brother, Barrett—Barrett had a daughter he didn’t raise. He and the mom went separate ways. And since Barrett died in ’89, his daughter wasn’t going to find him if she got curious about her father. You get it? That was my motive with the DNA Reunion move. To connect with this niece, in case she ever wanted to connect with her father’s side of the family. I’m sorry if I sound like a commercial right now, but DNA Reunion.”
“DNA Reunion,” said Toby. “So you thought you might reconnect with this niece, but instead, out of the blue, you got Toby Dahl. You didn’t know you had a half-brother?”
“Toby?”
“They call me Toby. Chris?”
“Call me Chris.”
Ed was exasperated. “Chris Shepard Ann Arbor” had yielded next to nothing, just lists of names that included “Chris” and “Shepard,” but never the two of them usefully conjoined. He sent a text to Toby: gt on w/it. “Chris,” said Toby, “I’m sorry about your brother. My half-brother. He died in 1989?”
“Yes. Tragically. Terrible depressions. Horrible depressions. I hope I’m not scaring you with the thought that that’s genetic. He was barely in his thirties. It was suicide.”
“I’m sorry about that. I’m really, really sorry.”
“I have the feeling you understand me between the lines, Toby.”
“Yes, I do. I can see already, we speak the same language. Isn’t this weird? Our minds work the same way. It’s very, very sad. I’m sorry. It’s tragic. Now, what about you? You have kids?”
“I have three. One from a first marriage. The other two came in a package with my husband.” Chris Shepard emitted a low, humming stutter, as if assenting to something she herself had just said. “They’re all very nice,” she said.
“That’s so wonderful,” Toby answered. “Three kids. Wow! Uh, so ‘Shepard’—is that your maiden name?”
“No, no, no. My ex’s name. I kept it for my daughter. She’s a Shepard, so I’m a Shepard.”
“In Ann Arbor.”
“A Shepard in Ann Arbor, that’s me, yes. But actually my mother is still in Seattle. Technically, not Seattle. Technically, Bellevue. With an unbelievable third husband. I didn’t see it coming, it’s unbelievably her third husband. One of those late-in-life companionship marriages. His name’s McElvoy, he folds the towels and so forth. But, oh, how I wish I could tell you who your mom was! I’m sure that’s what brought you to DNA Reunion. You weren’t looking for me, but you found me—it’s great! So what can I tell you? Digging something out of my hat. Hmmm … nothing, I can’t tell you anything. I’m a total waste of time! I know that. I know. I can tell you our dad was a terrible philanderer. Our dad thought he was a huge Don Juan. So I don’t know … you know … anything specific. I’m so useless. But what a surprise. What a big, huge surprise this is!”
Ed found images of a bikini-clad Chris Shepard who had a flat brown belly and a ring through her navel. Probably not the Chris Shepard of the raspy voice, who would have been born in the fifties or sixties. The beach belle Chris Shepard was born in ’97. And there were neither two husbands nor three children in her bio. Chris Shepard the younger was a model and an actress. Great tits, long legs. Ed looked at images of Chris the younger while Toby, in his breezy way, toyed with Chris the elder. “Everyone called me Tobe,” he said. “Or Toad sometimes. My dad called me Toad. So your last name was?”
“Cousins. My maiden name is Cousins. Your dad was Walter Cousins. An actuary. Where you are. Where I grew up. He died in 1979, in an automobile accident.”
With that, Ed’s attention to their conversation failed. Because Walter Cousins was a name he’d never forgotten, a name that showed up in his thoughts uninvited. Walter Cousins was the man Ed had killed in a fit of adolescent road rage. But how could that be? Walter Cousins was his father? Could this be a different Walter Cousins, who’d died in a different automobile accident? There had to be a mistake somewhere. Maybe Chris Shepard was adopted, too! Maybe she only thought Walter Cousins was her father. Maybe they both had some other father that neither of them yet knew anything about. Maybe … But Ed couldn’t think of more maybes and instead milked desperately the maybes at hand for whatever thin hope they were worth. After all, if he’d been left on a doorstep, wasn’t there a small probability, maybe even a significant probability, that Chris Shepard had been left on one, too? Maybe Chris had been left on a doorstep but didn’t know it yet—that had to be the explanation. Maybe she and Ed were both the issue of serial foundling producers. Because otherwise—killing your own father? Was he dreaming right now? Had he really killed his father? Ed felt panic weakening his limbs. “What is going on?” he thought. “What’s happening to me? Why is this happening? This can’t be happening. I killed my father? I didn’t kill my father. There’s something wrong. Something’s out of synch with reality. Is someone playing a game with me? Someone wants to sabotage me! No, that’s insane. That’s a movie plot. Conspiracies, enemies, that’s not the explanation. Could I engage in a more ridiculous line of thought? What am I doing? I’m grasping at straws. Because I don’t want to accept reality. But that’s because reality is impossible. I killed my father? I didn’t kill my father! I actually, really killed my own father! Unless this Shepard is a foundling, too. Please, please! This can’t be.”
Toby Dahl was still talking. “… parents, as far as I’m concerned. My dad was a character. He sold boats, he was a yacht b
roker. My mom’s still alive, like your mom—women last longer. She had this bead shop, before that vintage clothing, before that antiques, before that …”
Ed seethed. He pythed “McElvoy Bellevue WA” and got a urologist and a personal trainer up top before adding “phone” to the search field. Nothing, so he entered “Bellevue phone book” and, after a White Pages search, got Reginald McElvoy—there were no other McElvoys—an address, a phone number, and a map.
“… but probably better at midlife, when you’re equipped,” Walter Cousins’s daughter was saying. “Although I’m sure it’s … ”
Ed pythed Reginald McElvoy. A family tree indicating he was born in 1851, a Reginald McElvoy listed as a student in 1934 at a school in Auckland. Or maybe it was spelled MacElvoy, except that didn’t yield a Reginald, or … But there were probably a lot of ways to spell this name, redolent as it was of clans, heavy drinking, and damp air. Pythia could be counted on to meet spelling variations with creativity, because it employed a supple algorithm Ed himself had made revisions on, so there was no need to plug the search field full of spellings. Besides, what would be the point? He already had a phone number for what was in all probability the former Mrs. Walter Cousins—he could cut to the chase just by making a call. Where the daughter had only generalities—Don Juan—the mother, the wife, the betrayed party, the widow, that person might have specifics.
He called. Two people picked up. There ensued a brief, unwinnable battle against the suspicion that Ed was a solicitor who’d penetrated a porous firewall. Ed assumed it was Reginald McElvoy and the former Mrs. Cousins energetically accosting him on separate lines, though they would not identify themselves. The male voice, bravely fluid, concluded with “I know what you’re up to. Don’t call us again. Take us off your list,” and then the female voice, similarly intrepid, said—not to Ed but to her ally in pushing back affliction—“This is not supposed to happen,” before both of them hung up.
So Ed was stopped, momentarily, by a down-to-earth privacy concern. The information he required was guarded by senior citizens who didn’t take calls from strangers. If their tag-team phone defense was any clue, they had a no solicitors sign on their stoop, backed by a Doberman with a tendency to lunge. How could the McElvoys be made to yield? They both had multiple antennae up and were stalwart defenders of their nest, an instinct, thought Ed, that calcifies in one’s golden years, with its beepers, peepholes, door chains, and double window latches. He wanted to laugh. After everything he’d done, he was caught in the net of the National Do Not Call Registry, which Pythia had supported in order to deflect attention from its own myriad invasions. Unless you were an old-school hick, a willful geriatric, a Luddite, or the Google guys, Pythia was already in your house.
But how to get in the McElvoys’ house? All Ed wanted to do was ask the former Mrs. Cousins if she knew whom her ex had gotten pregnant, besides her. Was that a solicitation? Technically—but now Ed thought of something.
He called Toby on a second line. “Tobe,” he said. “You’re doing great with this. You should get an Oscar. But what I need you to do A-sap is ask this Chris Shepard person to call her mother. Tell Shepard you’re going to hang up and that she should call her mother immediately with the message that you, Toby Dahl, are about to call her—you, Toby Dahl, Shepard’s half-brother, are very eager to talk to Mrs. McElvoy-Cousins and will be calling her in just a few minutes. You get it? We want Shepard to make a pave-the-way, introductory phone call for us.”
“This is so much fun. Thanks for including me.”
“Just call,” said Ed.
Fifteen minutes later, with his directives executed, Ed dialed the McElvoy residence again and said, “It’s Toby Dahl. Your daughter just called you about me.”
Both McElvoys must have been on phones again, because the next thing Ed heard was the female voice he recognized from his last call saying, “Reggie?” That voice was not intrepid now, but softly interrogatory and polite.
Reggie said, “Okay, Lydia,” and hung up. Then the former Mrs. Cousins let a beat pass and said, “You can call me Lydia, too. I’m so sorry we’ve had a misunderstanding about solicitation.”
“Did your daughter tell you about me?”
“Tina explained things very, very clearly, as she always does. Very clearly.”
“Tina?”
“Christina. My daughter. She’s always clear.”
It sounded, to Ed, less like maternal pride and more like an observation about a grown child’s neurosis, or, at best, a blend of both. It also sounded like one of those safe, defensive, bland observations designed to stave off depth. Ed joined in: “Very, very clear, I found. Tina was absolutely wonderful,” he said. And then he remembered who Tina was, and how he’d stalked her.
“Well intended. Always well intended.”
“I could feel that,” said Ed. “Her very good intentions. With some people, that’s clear. I’m so glad. I’m really glad. And, look, I have no concerns about our … misunderstanding. Which was my fault. I didn’t explain myself clearly. The way solicitors make end runs around the Do Not Call Registry, I’m exactly like you. Vigilant.” He wanted to say “hypervigilant,” but thought better of it and went on. “So,” said Ed. “So your daughter explained things. So you know who I am. Or how I relate. You have a feel for why I’m calling you tonight.”
“A very good feel. I’m afraid I do. Apparently, my former husband, Walter, is your father—is that right?”
“Apparently.”
“Let me just say first that that’s not a bad gene pool. Three of Walter’s people are centenarians. He has an aunt who is 106. I don’t think many of the men lose their hair, so you’re in luck there as well. Tina told you about Walter?”
“Yes,” said Ed. “Briefly.”
Ed heard a noise like “humph” from the other end of the line, then, “It’s really too bad you’ll never have a chance to meet him. Your father—did she say he was an actuary? That’s another thing that I think is genetic among certain Cousinses. They’re math whizzes. I don’t have that myself. Walter had this party trick he did. He could find square roots. Someone would throw out a number, and Walter would give the square root right away. That was his skill set. Numbers. Math. He was really pretty gifted when it came to math. The sad thing is—what did he do with it? Walter just tended to get sidetracked.”
“Sidetracked?”
“By infidelity,” said Lydia, “to put it bluntly.”
“I don’t want to take all of your time,” said Ed. “But the thing I don’t know is, who was my mother? I really wish I knew who she was. That’s why I’m calling. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Here we come to the interesting part,” said Lydia. “I think I might know the answer to your question, but I have to inquire about something first. How old are you, Toby?”
“I’m fifty-four.”
“So you were born in … ’63. What month?”
Ed thought back to the files he’d seen in Portland and said, “April.”
“April,” said Lydia. “August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April. You see? I know my months.” A rueful chuckle followed, aimed, thought Ed, at aging. “Well,” said Lydia. “It all adds up. You were conceived in the summer of 1962. Where was Walter in the summer of ’62? Walter was taking advantage of a girl we’d hired to help with looking after the children. I’m going to venture that that girl is your mother. In fact, that girl wrote me a letter years later confessing to her involvement with Walter, and telling me she’d had a baby by him. It looks to me like that baby must be you. And maybe this is strange of me to say, but this is good news for you, really good news, because your mother is one of the richest people in the world. You might have just landed on a gold mine.”
Ed couldn’t speak at first. For the first time in his long pursuit of answers, he wasn’t sure he wanted more. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to look. But all of that was fleeting
. Of course he wanted to look. He wanted to go all the way to the end, whatever it was—the truth, nothing less. With this in mind, he shut his eyes and asked, “Who was my mother?”
“Diane King” was the answer. “Married to Ed King. Ed King, the King of Search.”
Diane was gone. Here she’d said that she was going to bed, that she didn’t feel well and was going to bed, and now their bed was empty instead—the bed where for years they’d … Impossible, wasn’t it? Impossible! Impossible! That couldn’t be, could it—incest? No more than patricide could possibly be. Ridiculous, thought Ed. Patricide and incest! Then he called Security, in search of Diane, who’d left the compound at six-forty with a small suitcase. A driver had taken her to Boeing Field, and there she’d boarded one of the Gulfstreams for a flight that would bring her to their English castle. Guido Sternvad was Diane’s pilot. Their plane was currently over Manitoba. “Get them on the phone,” Ed commanded, and then he was sitting in front of his computer talking to Guido, his blathering nemesis. “Guido,” he said, “put Diane on.”
“I can’t,” answered Guido. “Sorry.”
“Guido, not now, no more of your weirdness. I don’t have time for games right now. This is an emergency. Put her on.”
“I’m sorry,” repeated Guido. “I really am, sir. I’d do it if I could. I honestly would. But I’m not in command of Mrs. King.”
“Guido!” Ed screeched. “I’ll give you a million dollars, this minute, today, if you put my wife on the telephone.”
“I’d love to help,” Guido replied earnestly. “But what can I do? I can’t put Mrs. King on.”
“Just listen for once, Guido. Do what I say. Tell her I have to talk to her now. Tell her it’s me. Me. Ed. Tell her it’s me. She’ll get that.”