In part two of this episodic psychological thriller, Nicole Jeffords. convinced that healer, Victor Goodlove, who disappeared ten years earlier is buried under her studio, continues her search for him, contacting old patients all over Austin and dis...
I was stunned. I was floored. I had so many questions swirling in my head that I didn't know which to ask first. Eric took a calm sip of coffee and waited. Finally I said, "Maria told me she came from a long line of practicing catholics."
"Either Maria lied, or she doesn't know the truth."
I thought about the portrait my mother had painted of Maria's mother that hung in my living room. "Do you think Maria and I are related?"
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Franyo, Portrait of Clara Becker (Maria's mother)
"Most definitely."
As he said that I realized that if Eric and the Lemberg Foundation had access to DNA records from Ancestry, he'd probably seen mine. I was ninety-seven percent Ashkenazi Jew and the first relative that had popped up was my cousin Kathy in Seattle. After that there were pages and pages of connections I hadn't had time to sift through, some of them Cohens, which was the maiden name of my maternal grandmother.
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Nicole's grandmother, Alma
I figured it was through her that Maria and I were related. Clara Becker and my mother had spent all that time together in Berlin — perhaps they were cousins? Eric watched me sort all this out with amusement on his face. "Okay, give me the details," I said after a minute. "I assume you've seen my Ancestry records?"
He was so fucking smug, sitting there with information about people he didn't have legal rights to. It made me squirm. It made me want to hit him. But he had the answers, so I waited, literally holding my breath.
"Your mother, Franyo? Her father was a Gurevich. That's where the connection is."
"My grandfather's last name was Horwitz," I blurted.
"That's right. And Horwitz — or Horowitz — is another form of the name Gurevich."
If I'd been stunned before, I was totally stunned now. "Are you saying I'm somehow related to Victor's family?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying. It's distant, but the connection's there. And, as you know, that has many implications."
I sure did. Hadn't I been following Victor's story for over a year now? There wasn't a single good thing about being related to Victor Goodlove. It was with him and the Bukh that trouble started.
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Murder on the dancefloor, Tom A La Rue, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
