Due Justice

Chapter 12

Tampa, Florida

Friday 3:00 p.m.

January 8, 1999

I intended to go back to the office, but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. Nothing on my calendar until Monday morning. A good time to play hooky. I pulled over to the side of the road and put Greta’s top down.

Driving over the bridges, the water on either side, the wind blowing through the car and the top down rejuvenated my spirit, if not my hairstyle.

On the way home, I couldn’t help thinking about Carly and what kind of child she had been before she learned the big secret. Kate had two sons when Mom and I came to live with her. Later, Carly was born. Since I was ten years older, I learned about the birds and the bees a lot sooner, and I knew Kate had been widowed far too long to have another baby. The boys must have at least suspected, too, but Kate was so happy about the pregnancy and kept referring to the baby as “your brother or sister,” that none of us was willing to challenge her on it.

When Carly was born, and as she grew up, it just ceased to be important to all of us who Carly’s father was. To us, she was our sister, so it didn’t matter. And Carly never questioned it. Until the year she was ten. That year, her science class studied the gestation time for dogs, cats and human babies. She began to ask questions about why her appearance was so different from the dark hair and eyes her brothers had, and finally, the exact date of their father’s death.

From that point on, Carly began hounding Kate about the identity of her father. And the boys, being boys, wanted to know with whom their mother had had an affair. Kate refused to say, at least to her children. I don’t know what she told my mother at the time. Kate would only say that all her children were hers and they were brothers and sister.

For Carly, it was as if she had lost all perspective. I’m not sure ten year olds are supposed to have perspective, but Carly did. At least, until she decided finding out her father’s identity was to be her sole mission in life. She pestered all of us endlessly about it. She made a list of all the men she knew, and relentlessly questioned my mother, Kate and the rest of us about them. When did Kate meet each one? How? How well did they know each other?   She kept completed questionnaires on all of them, and meticulously correlated their relationships with Kate to her birth date and what she calculated as her date of conception. She’d interview them in circumspect ways, always trying to find out if he’d been around at the right time, if he was the right age. Each time she ruled out someone she considered desirable, she’d go into a deep depression and refuse to talk to any of us for days. By the time I was in college, Carly had filled several loose-leaf notebooks of father contenders, viable and rejected.

It was hard to tell whether the serious rift between Kate and Carly resulted from a secret kept too long, or the natural animosity of a teenage girl toward her mother. In either case, Carly was never the same toward any of us. She went away to college at the University of Colorado and rarely came home after that. None of us knew her, really, since we hadn’t talked to her seriously since she was a child. Mark was the closest to her, and she was the most jealous and distant from me.  Carly has always seen me as some kind of competition for her place in her family. She knew I wasn’t really a blood relative, and she felt she wasn’t a full blood relative either. The self-imposed competition made her brittle, even a little flaky.

When Carly secretly moved to Tampa, after her mother and I moved here, we didn’t even know it for a long time. I think she did it partly because she was jealous of my relationship with Kate, and partly because she was beginning to grow up. She entered Stetson Law School and became a lawyer like her two brothers and, not coincidentally, me. It’s hard to beat the competition if you’re not in the same game. Carly wanted a real contest.