She was his last living relative, and he owed her that much and more for always having a stable place for him and his parents to land between army bases.
A week ago, Miss Janie had called him. “It’s time,” she had said. “The doctor told me today that I’ve got cancer in addition to this forgetting disease”—she refused to call it Alzheimer’s—“and it’s not treatable. The cancer is going to cause the other problem to speed up, so I need you to come home, Noah. Please don’t let me die alone in a nursing home.”
“I’ve just finished a case,” he had told her. “I’ll get things in order here and be there the first of the week. Can you manage until then?”
“Sam comes by every day,” she answered. “But he won’t let me drive anymore. I forget how to get home even from church. I hate that I have to disrupt your life, darlin’, but I want you here with me”—she paused and took a deep breath—“and I want you to find Teresa and Kayla. You’re a private investigator, so you can do it. I need them here with me.”
His head had swirled around in circles that day as he’d promised to do his best to find the two girls Miss Janie had fostered more than a decade ago. He had no idea where they might be, since neither had kept in touch with Miss Janie very well. She had mentioned getting a few Christmas cards and a couple of letters from one of them. On her birthday last March, she’d cried because neither of them had come home to see her ever. Noah had wanted to strangle the both of them.
A loud horn from the vehicle behind him snapped him back to the present. The light had turned green, and he was first in line. He took his foot off the brake, but his mind kept going back to Miss Janie as he drove.
Two years ago, she’d called him when she was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He’d driven up to see her that weekend, and she had insisted that he start the proceedings to put her affairs in order. Now he had power of attorney and was the executor of her will. For the past year, he’d paid her bills because she couldn’t remember if or when she had taken care of them.
That was the day she’d told him about the babies she had given birth to back when she was sixteen. He had wanted to do more than strangle his great-grandparents for the way they had treated his sweet great-aunt. Once he’d done some research, though, he found out that it was not an isolated case. Women who were under eighteen had to abide by their parents’ decisions concerning their rights to keep a baby, or babies, as had been the case for Miss Janie. Her parents, Arnold and Ethel, had made her give the babies up for adoption and had then parked her in Birthright, Texas, with an old-maid aunt.
“I wanted to keep them so badly.” Miss Janie had wept into a lace-edged hanky when she told him about them. “Aunt Ruthie told me later that she even offered to help me raise them, but Mama said I’d shamed the family name. We weren’t supposed to ever talk about it, but Aunt Ruthie and I did, and we celebrated their birthday every year.”
Just thinking about how distraught she’d been even after so many years put a tear in Noah’s eye. If his father, General Adam Jackson, had been alive, he would have told him for the hundredth time that he was soft—that he should have joined the army so they could make a man out of him.
Even though Noah had finished law school, landed a job in a big Houston firm, and had been very successful for the next two years, “the General,” as Noah called him, had died a disappointed man. His only child had not followed in his footsteps, or his grandfather Luther’s for that matter.
The General would have been even more disappointed if he’d been alive when Noah gave up his position in the law firm and went to work with his friend Daniel as a private investigator. The old man probably would’ve turned over in his grave if he’d known that Noah was having doubts about staying with that job and was glad to have a few months in Birthright to decide what to do with his life.