Illicit Affairs

Chapter 30

Jimmie and I talked for the next couple of hours. Ryan called me on the landline, after trying my cell phone several times, which reminded me I desperately needed to get a new cell phone since mine was probably shattered beyond use in my office...old office. I also needed to ask Chase if he would pick up the box of my personal belongings that I had left behind in my hasty exit. Ryan asked if Jimmie was still there and when I told him yes, he said he was going to hit the simulator for additional practice since Richmond was not one of his best tracks, which meant that he would be a while longer. That was fine with me. There was still so much more I wanted to talk to Jimmie about. So many questions I had now that my eyes were fully opened about my grandfather.

After Jimmie asked about the journal, I pulled it from my bag and showed it to him. He got a flash of recognition when he saw it.

"Erika always carried this around with her. I thought it was some kind of planner or something. I had no idea she kept a journal." He said.

"I'm lucky I got this back." I shook my head. "I thought for sure my grandfather would have destroyed it, knowing what was in it."

Although Jimmie had seen some of the entries thanks to the article that had been released, there were other entries that had not been published. I guess whoever leaked it had only submitted the ones that revealed Jimmie as my father. A lot of the entries were about him, like how she had discovered him on a girls trip to California and brought him into the race team.

As we were flipping through the pages, I found something I had not noticed before...and apparently the journal thief had not caught either...there were a couple of pages that were stuck together. After carefully prying them apart, a newspaper clipping fell out. It was an obituary.

"Jimmie, do you know who this Natalie Payton is? Why does she look like my mother?" I asked, the newspaper clipping was shaking in my hand.

Jimmie took the clipping from me and looked at the journal pages, where all that was written was:

I finally found her and it's too late. She's gone.

The date of death was approximately twenty two years ago. Who was this person?

"She does look a lot like your mother. Enough so that they could be sisters." He suddenly looked as if he had gotten an aha moment as his eyes widened with some unspoken realization. "There were rumors going around that your grandfather had another daughter and a mistress, but I always thought it was just a rumor." Jimmie said, his voice dropping lower.

"Maybe it wasn't a rumor after all. I've been turning a blind eye to several rumors over the years thanks to my blind loyalty and absolute trust in my grandfather but now I'm thinking I really should have paid more attention to them." Now my head was spinning in a thousand different directions. I never have thought of myself as naive...far from it, but now I'm not so sure. Did my grandfather have another family that he had kept hidden all those years?

"I guess I can understand that, you dismissing all of the talk. You had no reason to believe any of it. The secrets surrounding everything are pretty intimidating and I'm sure you have heard all of the supposed rumors and conspiracy theories that may not be rumors or theories. I've tried to ignore all of them as well, because like you, I was loyal to your grandfather. I didn't think anything was amiss and I know how people like to talk and how easily rumors get spread, but I would not allow myself to believe he was anything but honorable." Jimmie was now shaking his head, which made me feel a little better about my own ignorance.

"You're talking about my grandfather's leukemia right? Do you know if it's true that he faked it, or did he really have it?" I asked the first supposed rumor that popped into my head.