she was in no mood for nonsense. When Tom said he was looking to find any or all death certificates for people bearing the last name of Hobbs, she glared at him and said he was out of his blooming mind.
“Half the people in Kanawha County are named Hobbs, and I hope you ain’t expecting me to pull—”
Tom leaned forward, his elbow propped on the counter. “Really? Half?”
She laughed. “Well, maybe not half, but there’s a lot. Too many for me to be going through if you don’t even know the whole name.”
“Okay then, how about if I give you a couple of names and you check those out?”
“A couple is two.”
He’d planned to check all the names, but with Clara giving him a hard time he had to narrow it down. He already knew Eliza, Louella, and Ben Roland were dead, so he wouldn’t use up his resources on them. Caldonia had said that both Nellie and Edward were sent to live with a family in Huntington, and Virgil had walked away and disappeared. There was still the possibility that Oliver, Dewey, or John Paul had either returned to the area or settled here.
“Look for Oliver Hobbs, Dewey Hobbs, or John Paul Hobbs, okay?”
“I said two; that’s three.”
“Yeah, but they’re all from the same family.”
She spit out a huff of annoyance and asked, “You got the district or year on these deaths?”
“Afraid not. It would probably be sometime after 1918, possibly in or around Coal Creek.”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You can stand here and wait, or come back in an hour.”
“Think I’ll grab a cup of coffee and come back in an hour. Can I bring you something?”
“Huh? Bring me what?”
“I’m going down to the luncheonette. Can I bring you back something? Coffee, an egg sandwich, a pastry?”
She gave a genuine smile for the first time. “Yeah, that’d be real nice. Coffee and maybe one or two of them French cruller things.”
Tom winked at her and returned the smile. As he headed down Virginia Street toward the luncheonette, he was wearing a grin. It felt good to know that despite his five years of retirement, he hadn’t forgotten the tricks of the trade.
On his second trip that day to City Hall, Tom visited the Kanawha County Health Department and the Motor Vehicle Bureau and saw Clara Goodman in the city clerk’s office again. He now knew that none of the missing Hobbs siblings had died, gotten married or divorced, owned a car, or held a driver’s license in Kanawha County.
He also knew that someone in the Hobbs family had requested a new birth certificate for Virgil, and they’d changed his name from Hobbs to Palmer. According to the record Eliza Hobbs submitted the initial request, but the document was picked up and signed for by Martin Hobbs. The processing stamp was dated August 17, 1913.
This struck Tom as strange since according to Margaret and the National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Martin disappeared in January 1910. Tom asked himself why a man with a reward out for his arrest would come home to West Virginia to pick up a new birth certificate for the son he’d cared nothing about.
Before the day was out, he was beginning to understand how Margaret lost track of her family. It seemed as though one by one they’d all disappeared without a trace.
That night Tom sat in his hotel room going through his notes. He’d spent a lot of time at City Hall but come away with very little. He’d eliminated a number of possibilities, but the only new facts he had were the precise dates of Eliza and Louella’s deaths and Virgil’s change of name. There was no Virgil Palmer listed in any of the area telephone books, no driver’s license with that name, and no marriage certificate, so just knowing the name wouldn’t be all that helpful unless he had a fix on where Virgil had settled.
Tom kept coming back to the fact that Virgil was only nine or ten when someone had changed his name and apparently helped him to disappear. Nothing about this made sense, and he simply didn’t believe Martin was the one to claim the new birth certificate.
He circled the dates of Eliza and Louella’s deaths. Tomorrow he’d try the library. Maybe there’d been an obituary in the newspaper, and maybe, just maybe, it listed the surviving kin.
He set the notepad on the nightstand, snapped on the television, and watched the end of N.Y.P.D. The