“Luke, what are you trying to tell me?”
“With Gramps’s help, I hired an entire team of researchers in England and we went back through a lot of World War II records.”
“To find out where the baby was…was buried?” Joce asked softly.
“Yes and no.” He sat down on an ottoman in front of her. “It was the name Clare that did it for me. Remember in the section where Miss Edi said she kept calling for David when everyone thought she was going to die?”
“Yes.”
“David Clare.”
Joce looked at Dr. Dave. “I’m not getting the point here. What am I missing?”
“Who else do you know is named Clare?”
“No one I know has that last name.”
The two men kept looking at her.
“My mother is named Claire.”
Dr. Dave and Luke smiled at each other.
“Wait a minute!” Joce said. “You’re not trying to tell me that my mother—”
“Was the daughter of Edilean Harcourt and David Clare. Yes, she was. Show her,” Luke said.
Dr. Dave handed Joce some charts such as she’d often seen on TV. DNA charts. She looked at them blankly.
“Sorry for all the secrecy, but if what we suspected hadn’t been true, we didn’t want you to be hurt,” Dr. Dave said. “It was easy to get DNA from you, and not so difficult to get it for Edi. She was a great letter writer and she’d licked a lot of envelopes.”
“Miss Edi was my grandmother?” Joce asked in a faint whisper.
“She didn’t know,” Dr. Dave said. “If she’d known, I’m sure she would have told you. I think that Alex knew about her pregnancy, but no one else did. She stayed in London where no one knew her so she wouldn’t have to answer questions. She was burned just a couple of weeks before she was due to deliver.”
“But the general said the child was stillborn.”
“We figure that’s what he was told. We have no paper proof, but it looks like Alfred Scovill was in Europe at the time, making contracts for helmets, and there was a dying woman who’d just given birth to a baby. As far as we could find out, the birth certificate was made out with Alfred and Frances Scovill as the parents—which, of course, wasn’t true because his wife was back home in the States. But it was wartime, and there were a lot of orphans, a lot of tragedies. No one asked many questions. I think Mr. Scovill took the baby home to his wife in the U.S., moved down to Boca Raton, where no one knew them, and never told anyone the truth. His only concession was to name the child ‘Claire’ from what the dying mother kept saying.”
When Jocelyn tried to stand up, her legs were so weak that she wobbled. Luke put his arms around her to steady her, and held her against him for a few minutes. But Joce pushed away and looked at him.
“This is why you said I might need a doctor here.” She was trying to make a joke, but neither man smiled. They were looking at her hard.
“Are you okay?” Luke asked.
“Just in a state of shock, that’s all. How I wish she’d known. Wish I’d known when she was alive. To share that bond!”
“But you did,” Dr. Dave said, taking her hand. “Alex found out about your mother, about the people who’d adopted her, and he bought a house close to them. He set it all up for her to administer the trust, but then he began to lose his memory.”
“Alzheimer’s,” Jocelyn said.
“Yes. He set everything up through MAW and he concocted that story about knowing the people who adopted you. We figure Alex meant to let Edi spend some time getting to know you, then he’d tell her the truth. But Alex…he simply forgot.”
Luke went to a side table and mixed her a drink. “I think you need this,” he said as he looked at his grandfather.
Jocelyn took the drink and sipped it. “I can feel that you two have something more to tell me. Better get it out before I faint from what you’ve already told me.”
“We found David Clare’s relatives.”