He sat totally still for a moment, like he was trying to absorb and process the information. He’d gone ashen, and I couldn’t tell if he was even breathing. I held my own breath as I worried about how he’d react. When he didn’t say anything, I added, “You’re an honorary member of that company. The firefighters would love to meet you. They’ve always wondered what happened to you.”
Finally, he said, “I told you it would be a dead end.”
“But it isn’t, or it might not be.” I told him about the envelope his mother had left. “It could be evidence. If she was trying to hide you from Ramsay, then that meant she knew Ramsay was trouble. You have to go to the station and get that envelope. They wouldn’t give it to me—I think it might be enchanted, so they can’t give it to anyone else. That envelope could be our key to beating Ramsay.”
He shook his head. “You’re putting too much hope on something some young woman threw together to leave with a baby she didn’t think she could bring up. You’ve got it in your head that Mina had a change of heart or wasn’t all that evil to begin with, and her last act of courage was to get her baby to safety and leave a huge smoking gun that would expose Ramsay as the ultimate evildoer. But that’s only what happens in books. In the magical world, it tends to work differently.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and asked, “How does it work, then?”
“If she was trying to take over the world using magic but was afraid she was about to fail or be doublecrossed, she could have left an enchantment that would then make her son carry out her dreams or that would put her essence into her magically powerful son so her life could continue, or something equally nasty.”
I tried not to shudder. “You really think she’d have done something like that?”
He raised an eyebrow. “She tried to take over the world using dark magic. What do you think?”
“Okay, then, you don’t have to open the envelope. You have to be there to get it from the firehouse, but then I could take it and open it to find out what it is. It can’t affect me.”
“It’s probably not even something that dramatic. It’s probably just some note about how she hoped I would have a better life than she could have given me. We still don’t even know if that woman was Mina Morgan.”
“You said yourself that it felt true.”
“There’s a difference between feeling and knowing.”
If he’d been one of my brothers, I’d have stuck my thumbs in my armpits and flapped my elbows like wings while making chicken sounds, but I didn’t think that would go over very well in these circumstances. “If you go and we open the envelope and it’s just a ‘sorry for ditching you, kid, but it was for the best’ note, then I give you permission to gloat all you want. But at the moment, it’s the only lead we’ve got.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but he went even paler. He shook his head and said. “I–I don’t know if I can face that yet. I just need a little time, okay?”
“I’m not sure how much time we have. You can mope all you want later, but there’s a lot at stake right now.” When that didn’t get a response, I shifted tactics. “You never told me your birthday was July fourth.”
“I don’t know that it was. That was just the date I was found.”
“Oh, it was your birthday, all right. They said you were ‘fresh out of the oven’ when you showed up at that fire station. The firefighters called you their little Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
As I’d expected, he turned red, but he also smiled. “How much will it cost me for you to keep that quiet?”
“A trip to the fire station? They said you had an open invitation to lunch or dinner, and whatever Vinnie was cooking, it smelled really good. The station’s in Little Italy, so I’m guessing you’d get some good Italian food there. You like Italian food, right?”
His smile faded and he shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Then I’ll have to tell Rod. Or maybe I’ll tell Marcia and Gemma, and Marcia will tell Rod. And I’m sure Jake would find it highly amusing. Of course, we’ll have to throw a huge party. It’s short notice, but I understand there are already fireworks scheduled.”
This time, there wasn’t even a flicker of a smile. “I’m sorry, Katie,” he whispered. “I can’t. Could you, if you were in my shoes? If you found out that there was a chance your parents were someone like Bonnie and Clyde or Lee Harvey Oswald, would you be willing to prove it, or would you prefer to leave the possibility open that it wasn’t true?”