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Only there was no additional information. The name of the man with the woman who looked like Ellie’s twin was given in the original article. Ellie did a site search on his name and discovered several more articles on him. But all that did was depress her.
Apparently she and her sister both had lousy taste in men because this guy had dated a half dozen women in the last year that he’d been photographed with. Who knew how many others he’d been with? There was no follow-up article to the one with his mystery woman.
Then Ellie decided it was time to go to the source. Her work with the unemployed had taught her how to research a person’s background for the purpose of supplying sufficient documentation to get into continuing education programs. She started searching for her own birth records and from there, record of any sibling’s birth.
She’d been at it about forty-five minutes when she stopped, so shocked, her eyes could barely focus enough to read the words on the computer screen. Shehad been born a twin and according to the records she was looking at, there was no record of her sister’s death.
Following a hunch, she called a friend at the library. The other woman was a former client Ellie had helped to get into night school and eventually into a position as a reference librarian for a small town west of Boston. She asked the librarian to do a microfilm search on newspaper articles with her family’s name in them around the time of her birth.
Two hours later, her friend called back with news that rocked Ellie’s world right off its axis.
Ellie wasn’t surprised to find her father in his office on a Saturday afternoon, but he was surprised to see her.
He stood up from his desk, a smile of welcome curving his lips. “Eleanor, what are you doing here?”
“I came to ask why you lied to me.”
“Lied to you?” His pale blue eyes narrowed warily. “About what?”
“What’s the matter? Are there so many lies between us that you can’t guess which one I’m angry about?” she asked scathingly.
“I told Sandor not to mention the business deal. I knew it would only upset you.”
“I don’t care about the business deal between you two sharks.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“So, you’re going to marry him anyway?”
“Never!”
George Wentworth seemed to shrink, looking older than his fifty-four years. “I thought…”
“Whatever you thought, you were wrong. But I’m not here to discuss Sandor, or the almost disaster I narrowly avoided in marrying him.”
“You aren’t?”
“I’m here to discuss her.” Ellie threw a picture on the desk.
It was one in which her sister’s lover was difficult to recognize. Ellie had no doubt that her father would start looking for her sister, but the fact that he’d stopped looking at all and filed his lost daughter away with other bad business made her determined not to make it easy for him. She was perfectly capable of finding the other woman, or at least as capable of hiring a good detective agency as he was.
Her dad stared down at the picture and turned gray. “Where did this come from?”
“Ask Sandor.”
His head snapped up. “What does Sandor have to do with it?”
“He thinks I cheated on him.”
“But I told him you were in Spain.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“There are stalking laws in this state. Call off your security detail, or I will invoke them.”
“Damn it, Eleanor, you know I can’t do that. It’s not safe.”
“You mean like she was safe?”
If anything, his complexion turned more pasty. “There was nothing I could do once she was gone. No leads to follow.”
“You gave up.”
“It was the only way to maintain my sanity.” He made a visible effort to swallow. “How did you find out about her?”
“Certainly not from you.”
He flinched, but said nothing.
“I played a hunch and had a newspaper search done of the time near my birth. The kidnapping made the papers.”
“By the time it did, there was no hope left.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about her? I had a right to know.”
“What would have been the use? By the time you were old enough to understand, I knew we would never see her again. Knowing about her would only have hurt you.”
“Since when did you ever care whether or not I was hurt? You didn’t tell me about my sister because you didn’t want me to keep after you to find her. You knew I would. I’m stubborn that way about the people I love.”
