Page 62 of A Thin Line

When he left again, I read the text messages from my dad. The first, the one I’d tried to read as I’d fallen down the stairs, made me frown: I checked with Chester and he can’t take me to my appointment in October. He’ll be out of the US during that time. So I’ll call the clinic and see if I can reschedule. If not, I’ll cancel. Chester was his one and only friend, the man who nowadays lived in Colorado Springs.

A couple of hours later, he’d sent another. Is everything okay, princess?

Fortunately, I had a phone again—and, had I felt better, I would have called. Instead, I sent several long messages, not letting him know I’d injured my ankle. I didn’t want him worrying about me any more than he already was.

But I had to try to talk sense into him. Do NOT cancel that appointment. I’ll find a way to make sure you get there, even though Chester can’t take you. We have plenty of time before your appointment date. Please, dad, keep that appointment!!!

I hoped he would understand my insistence with the exaggerated punctuation, but as I clicked through the selection of streaming services offered on the television in front of me, my mind worried that my father wouldn’t take my words to heart.

Another good reminder of why I had to continue hating Sinclair Whittier, no matter how caring he was being at the moment.

After seven whole days of being mostly confined to bed, I was ready to begin moving around again. My ankle was a little tender at first, but after some time, it felt good to walk on it. Both Edna and Sinclair had been like Florence Nightingale, ready to tend to my every need. As much as I’d appreciated and needed it, I wanted to care for myself again.

And I was eager to get back to work.

I had only peeked in that mysterious trunk once, finding it stuffed full of mostly papers, and I wasn’t sure how to catalog them. Today, though, I had a plan. I’d sift through the papers, trying to find a commonality among them. For all I knew, there were other things beneath the top few inches of loose pages.

When I opened the door to the downstairs, I walked cautiously—but I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only had the crumbling stair been fixed, several others had been secured. Curious, I made my way to the other set of stairs to the east—and discovered that those had been fixed as well.

Coming back to the west side where the trunk was, I noticed the spot on the floor where the glass had shattered. It had all been picked up, and there was a large area that appeared to have been swept and mopped, because it looked cleaner than the rest of the floor that wasn’t covered.

I grabbed what appeared to be an old dining room chair from the area where I’d begun storing furniture and brought it back to the trunk where I could sit. I didn’t want to overdo it in the first day on my ankle, so the trunk was the perfect project. But as I started pulling out sheets of paper, I realized I would also need a way to organize what I found. I’d emptied a couple of boxes before I’d twisted my ankle, so I brought those over, hoping I could use them to begin sorting through its contents.

Much of what I saw on top seemed like it could be tossed but, because they were stored in a trunk, I didn’t just want to toss them without checking with Sinclair—so that was how I decided to use the boxes. One would be a potential “trash” box; the other would be to keep, and the “keeps” would eventually go back in the trunk.

There were some typewritten pages stapled together—business proposals full of a lot of legalese. Those seemed like something Sinclair might want to keep, but when I looked at the date on the back pages—without signatures—I realized many of them were over thirty years old. If the Whittiers didn’t already have signed copies somewhere, they probably didn’t need them. So I instead put them in the trash box, knowing Sinclair would have the final say.

After I’d gone through the first inch of papers, I figured all I would find would be related to business. There were even letters between Augustus Sinclair and the county commissioners in Winchester about opening a mine to explore for gold.

It gave me chills. It was like I was watching history unfold.

Finally, though, I came across papers that seemed more personal—some poetry and a few drawings. There were no names on them, but I put them in the keep box. Sinclair didn’t strike me as someone sentimental at all, but even a pragmatic person might see the value in holding on to papers that were potentially written by a loved one.

Then came some photographs. It made me wonder if the reason why there were no pictures around the mansion was because Sinclair didn’t think he actually owned any. Maybe when his father moved out of this residence, he’d taken things like snapshots with him.

Pictures were definitely something to keep.

There were lots of baby photos, mostly taken by professional photographers, staged against specific scenes. But there were a few intimate ones—of a woman that I soon became certain had been Sinclair’s mother. As I looked at photo after photo, I began to form a bigger picture in my mind of the woman who had raised the boys in the snapshots. There were only pictures of her with two boys but there was one with those same children and her belly was swollen with pregnancy.

I found other pictures of those two boys with other women, sometimes with their mother in the picture as well, so I thought the other women must be nannies or aunties, but they were definitely someone important to the children.

If I hadn’t been certain, one close-up shot of the pregnant woman solidified it: Sinclair had said his mother had green eyes like emeralds—and this woman fit the bill. Besides, close up, I could tell without a doubt that she was his mother. They had the same nose and cheeks—and her wistful smile reminded me of an expression Sinclair would get when he wasn’t focused on anything in particular.

The two boys in the pictures had to be his two older brothers—because, even though they bore a slight resemblance to Sinclair, I could tell they weren’t him. Going through the baby pictures again, I searched for him specifically, finally turning them over to see if anything had been written on the backs.

A few had names jotted down: Augie appeared on most of them, with Warren on a few more. I only found one that said Cory—the secret nickname I’d given Sinclair. When I turned it over to see the photo, it was of a baby lying in a crib smiling at the person taking the picture. Even though he was probably no older than two months old, I knew it was of Sinclair. Except…he looked happier in the photo than I’d ever seen him in real life.

The same could probably be said for me.

Finally, I found a formal baby picture in an announcement from the hospital with all his pertinent information—but it was obvious that he wasn’t a newborn in the photo. It didn’t look like his brothers’ newborn pictures and he looked older…more alert and filled out.

There were also some ultrasound photos with dates that led me to believe they were also of Sinclair. If so, he was thirty or thirty-one years old, which matched up with much of what we’d discussed. I already knew he hadn’t been directly responsible for the mine—especially seeing the beginnings of negotiations that went as far back as his childhood.

Still…he was a Whittier, and the Whittiers were bad people.

As I dug deeper, I found lots of health records—not just of pregnancy but also a few that indicated both mental and physical health problems. There was nothing with anyone’s name on them but more factual papers, like What if I’m bi-polar? In fact, there were lots of documents explaining the disorder and medications along with other papers about depression, anxiety disorders, and more.

As for physical ailments, there were printouts about dozens of different diseases.

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