Daddy's Girls (10)

“I don’t know,” Kate said.

“He never told me either,” Caroline whispered, staring at both of them.

There was a divorce decree from the state of Texas, dissolving the marriage of James Edward Tucker and Scarlett Jane Carson Tucker. “They must have gotten divorced right before she died. Maybe he didn’t want to spoil our illusions about them, or he was embarrassed. There was a stigma attached to divorce then,” Kate said as she continued to glance through the papers, and then stopped at another yellowed sheet of paper, and handed it to them. It was even more shocking than the first one. Caroline looked over Gemma’s shoulder as she read it. Then both of them stared at Kate. It was a relinquishment of custody and parental rights by Scarlett Tucker. She had given up all right to them, even to visitation.

    “Oh my God, why would she do that?” Caroline said, profoundly unnerved by it. With children of her own, she couldn’t imagine her mother giving them up. In a separate envelope there was a canceled check to Scarlett for three thousand dollars, on the same date as the relinquishment papers were signed.

“Do you think he paid her to give us up?” Gemma looked stricken.

“I have no idea,” Kate said, dumbstruck. “He never told me any of this. All I know is what you know. She died, he said he was heartbroken, and a year later we moved out here. He never liked talking about her.”

“Do you think she sold us to him for three thousand dollars?” Gemma asked them both, and Kate winced.

“That’s a hell of a way to put it. There must be some explanation. Dad wouldn’t have lied to us. He may not have told us the whole story, but he wouldn’t lie. And three thousand dollars was a lot of money to him then, probably all he had saved up. That was a lot for him to pay her. So it must have been important to both of them.”

“Is her death certificate in there too?” Caroline wanted to know. Kate went through all the papers again, but it wasn’t.

“She must have died after she signed these papers, because this is eleven months before we moved to California.”

Gemma looked at them both then, with a thunderstruck expression, and almost didn’t dare say what she was thinking. “What if she didn’t die? What if she’s alive somewhere? What if she’s been alive all this time, and he told us she was dead?” Suddenly, she was suspicious of him, more so than her sisters.

    “Dad wouldn’t do that,” Kate defended him immediately. “There’s got to be an explanation. I wonder if he ever said something to Juliette about it.” They went through the file again and the only significant documents were the divorce decree and the relinquishment of Scarlett’s three children. They opened and read the letter then, it was from their mother to Jimmy, telling him how sorry she was, and that in spite of the papers she had signed, she hoped to see the children soon. She had written the letter a few days later, and must have died almost immediately after. Gemma’s suggestion that she hadn’t died was just too outlandish to consider. A man like him would never have told his children that their mother was dead if she wasn’t. They all agreed that he wouldn’t do that. But there was a terrible nagging feeling in Kate’s stomach. He hadn’t told them about the divorce and the relinquishment of her rights either. And what if Gemma was right, and their mother had sold him custody for three thousand dollars, a thousand for each of them? Selling the custody of children was illegal, but nothing on the check indicated why he had paid her the money. Only the timing of it had made them wonder.

Kate carefully put the yellowed papers back in the envelope, and decided to take them with her to her house. She wanted to read them again carefully. Maybe they had missed something. It was a mystery she wanted to solve quickly, to put their minds at rest. What they’d found raised questions for each of them about their father.

“Let’s do an internet search and see what turns up,” Gemma suggested, after Kate locked the safe and they left the office.

“Why? I’m sure she’s dead,” Caroline said in a whisper. She didn’t want to know. It was just too painful questioning their mother’s death, while trying to adjust to their father’s.

    They walked to Kate’s house. Her computer was sitting on her desk. She turned it on, and without consulting her sisters, she typed in her mother’s name for a national search of her whereabouts, or death records.

“This is crazy,” Gemma said, as Caroline walked away and stared out the window. She was exhausted from the emotions of the past few days, and now they had added their mother’s death to it. All she wanted to do was go home to Peter and her children. Coming to the ranch always made her unhappy, especially this time. The father who had always put her in last place was gone. It was never going to get better now, he was never going to “fix” it. She wasn’t a star, and she didn’t run the ranch for him or do his bidding, so for him she had never existed. Even when she was a child, he always overlooked her, because she was bookish and a good student, which Kate and Gemma weren’t. They were more like him. Bright, but with a more limited scope of interest. Gemma only cared about her Hollywood life, and Kate the ranch. Caroline cared about art and literature and history and other intellectual pursuits in a broader world.

When Caroline turned around, she saw Kate staring at her computer screen, and Gemma gave a sharp gasp, when she saw it too.