Page 32 of Lovely Darkness

I lead him to the back of the house and we exit through the French doors the same way Maggie and I did last night. I retrace our exact steps and when we get to the boat, I grab the tackle box and take it to the dining table on the other side of the small galley. I point to the booth. Nick sits and I take the seat across from him.

Then I open the tackle box and pull out the envelope. But I don’t hand it over. I hold it for a moment. Because there’s a lot to this story that he doesn’t know yet.

“I had a baby brother,” I say. “Twins.” We both smile. “Triplets.”

“Fourplets,” Nick adds.

We chuckle about this. And it’s kinda nice, I think. Maybe we can be friends. Maybe this is the day that puts us all on a new path and this envelope in my hand is what does it. I hold it up. It’s tattered, and aged, and yellow. The kind of envelope that comes from time gone by.

“What is it?” Nick asks.

“When my father died, he left me enough. And I got some paperwork, but not nearly enough for an entire lifetime of Company work. And my father, despite all appearances, was a working man, Nick. Just like me.” I expect Nick to sneer at me when I say this. The term ‘working man’ and Old Home don’t quite fit together. But he doesn’t sneer and that tells me something important. Something I look for in men I want to trust, but haven’t made up my mind about yet.

He thinks before he reacts.

Most people assume that if you have money you don’t work. Not hard, anyway.

But I dare anyone to call my job easy.

So his ability to think before he reacts is a tick mark in the “Trust Nick Tate” column.

“But I knew it was there,” I continue. “Had to be around somewhere. I looked. I looked everywhere. And just a couple weeks ago Maggie found the answer. That girl does love a mystery. That’s why we dug up my brother’s grave. Funny thing is, as I mentioned, he was not in that little coffin. But this envelope was.”

Nick’s brown eyes dart back down to the envelope in my hand, then rise to meet mine again. “So. What the fuck is it?” There’s a little bit of an edge to his voice.

“Well, it’s got your name on it. So before I start drawing conclusions, maybe you’d like to take a look?”

I offer him the envelope front side up so he can see his name written in out-of-date longhand. But he doesn’t immediately reach for it. Instead he sighs. “Here’s something about me most people don’t know. I can’t stand a fuckin’ mystery. I don’t like looking for answers. I like solving problems, Adam. I like finishing things and tying it all up in a neat little bow. So why don’t you cut the theatrics and just tell me what the hell it says.”

I cannot stop my smile. “It’s a lot of things, Nick.” I open the envelope, since he’s not gonna oblige me, and then pull out the stack of papers. “This wasn’t the only thing in the coffin. There were birth and death certificates too.”

“Fake ID’s?”

“That’s what Maggie said too. And it’s a logical conclusion. But there’s more to the story.”

He grabs the stack of papers right out of my hand—apparently, theatrics are the quickest way to shorten Nick’s temper—then scans the first page. His eyes narrow. Then he rolls them as he holds the papers up for me like he’s about to start presenting a case and this is his exhibit A. “The flu? This is about the fuckin’ flu? Who cares?”

“No. That’s what I first thought too. I was thinking, OK. So the Company was responsible for the Spanish Flu. I think we all kinda knew that. But that’s not what it was. The flu happened, millions died, but it wasn’t the flu they died from. It was the vaccine.”

Nick looks at the papers again, flips a couple pages, then looks up at me. “Well, fuck. Johnny Boston’s woman wasn’t the first, was she?”

“Not even runner-up. They’ve been doing genetic experiments on humans for at least two hundred years.”

“That’s not even possible. I’m no expert in this shit, but I do know that genetics is a relatively new science.”

“Is it, Nick? Is it?”

He lets out a long, tired breath. “Fuck, I dunno.”

I take the papers out of his hands, flip back to the second page, and hand it to him. “Look at this.”

He scans it, eyes stopping on the parts that matter, then looks back up at me. “So.” He exhales. “We really are related?” He holds the pedigree up so I can see it.

“We’re on the same generation, so I guess we are.”

“But there are like”—he does a quick count—“thirty-four other people on that same generation. And who are the parents?”

I shrug. “Assembly line reproduction? And parents? Can we even call them parents?”