“Did he tell her about the divorce?”

“Let’s just say she wasn’t coherent afterward. At the least he must have told her I’m not being straight with him. She said he wants the girls to move back in with her and Dad.”

“What did you say to that?”

“I told her the girls are happy with me, and we aren’t going to upset them with another move. Luckily, it was late in the day, so we left, and I haven’t talked to her since.”

“Don’t you think it’s time to tell her at least some of what’s happening? And him?”

“It’s not the kind of thing you blurt over the phone to a nuclear submarine commander, is it? Especially if his calls are monitored.”

“Are they?”

“I don’t know that they aren’t.”

I wasn’t looking forward to sitting down with Mom and telling her that her older daughter was involved in a murder, but Sophie was right. I hoped I wouldn’t have to tell her everything else I’d learned, at least not yet. I wanted to keep my conversation with Jonah private, along with my suspicion that Wendy had partied with way too many male admirers at a biker bar.

Most especially I hoped I never had to tell her about the scary assortment of drugs in my sister’s medicine chest.

“Are you going to talk to her today?” Sophie asked.

I was still scurrying for a reason not to. “Not only is she going to be upset, she’ll want to call the authorities. And who can blame her? I’m stuck, and I don’t know what to do next.”

“She might be able to get information about Kearns’s job at the Autumn Mountain Club, since that’s where he probably met Wendy.”

I’d done enough research to know that Gracey Group still owned the club, but I hadn’t wanted to call and give my name, in case my call got back to someone in our main office or worse, my father. Instead I’d tried to get information by calling and pretending I was an adoptee who had put my birth information on an adoption registry. Wasn’t it simply amazing that Milton Kearns had done the same, and all his information matched mine? Now that I was so close to finding my father, could they help me locate him?

The office manager had insisted that all employee information past and present was confidential. Even though I gave Meryl Streep a run for her money, I still hung up a failure.

In turn Sophie had tried to locate the employee who Wendy claimed had led her to the Golden Aspen Resort and Spa, but with so little information, she’d been unsuccessful, too. The staff had been in and out on holiday vacations, and between the murder and rumors the resort might close its doors, half were already gone or scrambling for new jobs.

“Anything else?” I asked.

She told me she planned to follow up on a couple of leads about places Kearns might have worked. “But even if they pan out,” she warned, “the leads aren’t recent enough to be helpful, unless they point me somewhere else.”