Lana crossed the hallway and opened another door. Finally. Diana’s room. This one had a more lived-in feel. Diana clearly wasn’t rushing home to her husband the instant the land negotiations were over. The queen bed was hastily made, the bureau littered in perfume bottles and creams, plus a wineglass that had yet to make it down to the dishwasher. Lana ran her hand across the silky duvet cover, which had a delicate pattern of roses and thorns around the edge.
Lana moved to Diana’s bureau. It was about half-full of clothes, including an entire drawer of lingerie. Lana carefully lifted the flimsy nightgowns in search of something incriminating but found only silk and lace.
In the bedside table, though, she made a discovery. A stack of red envelopes, each sliced open at the top, in the top drawer. Lana didn’t have time to paw through months of tawdry love letters. But she couldn’t resist a quick peek.
The letters were not the smutfests she expected. They were cards. Generic, store-bought holiday cards with “Merry Christmas” swirling across the front. The stack started in 2000 and went forward from there. Inside each one, someone had written a simple message.
2001 said: “Dear Mr. Rhoads and Miss Diana, thank you for the gift of your friendship.”
2005: “Congratulations to Miss Diana on your engagement. May you be as happy as I was with my Alejandro.”
2015: “We hold your kindness in our hearts.”
The writing in the earlier cards wasn’t familiar to Lana. But in the later ones, she recognized the same blocky print from the handwritten note she’d found at the land trust.
As Lana sifted through the cards, a photograph fell out of one dated 2008. It was a snapshot of a tired-looking woman with long black hair, holding hands with a tall young man. They were standing outside an apartment building on a dusty street, somewhere inland maybe, one of those hard, dry towns that swallowed up work and spat out debt. The boy looked twelve or thirteen. His face was spotty, his limbs too big for his thin frame. But his wide smile and bright eyes were unmistakable. It was Ricardo Cruz.
Lana heard her daughter calling her name from the bottom of the stairs. She filed the cards back into their stack and shoved them into the drawer.
“Coming,” she called down.
Lana descended the stairs, churning through what she’d found. She knew the Cruz family had worked on the ranch at one point. But she doubted many ranch hands sent heartfelt Christmas cards to their bosses for years after their employment had ended. There was something more there. A relationship with Ricardo and his mother, one that was important to Diana. And try as she might, picturing it now as something sexual felt like a stretch.
“It got quiet. I thought they were coming out.” Beth nodded her head down the hall. “But now I’m not so sure.”
“Hear anything good?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘good.’”
Lana listened to the muffled voices. She could make out Martin yelling about how he needed this and Diana lashing back that it was her turn now, that he never took responsibility for anything. It sounded like their dispute was genuine. If not, they were trying to win an Oscar with their performance.
“There is one thing I wanted to show you.” Beth gathered up a stack of plates, and Lana followed her to the kitchen.
“This is different,” Lana said, taking in the light-colored wood in the bright room. Her eyes swept over the drawings of birds, her mind subconsciously supplying names for all the species she’d gotten to know over the past few months.
“Look at this,” Beth said, walking over to the framed photograph by the sink. “Martin told me it’s from when they built the new barn after the fire. When I was packing up Mr. Rhoads’s room at Bayshore Oaks, I found a cut-up copy, just Hal with that woman and the baby. I wondered if she might be—”
“Sofia Cruz,” Lana said.
“Who?”
“Ricardo’s mother. And that’s Ricardo.” Lana pointed at the toddler squirming in the woman’s arms. The pieces were falling into place quickly now.
“Do you think it’s possible Ricardo was Hal Rhoads’s son?” Beth asked.
Lana thought of the cards she’d found upstairs, addressed to both Hal and Diana, their simple messages blending formality and warmth. “I don’t think so. I think . . .” Lana rubbed her eyes, rerouting the connections she’d made upstairs to everything they’d mapped on the corkboard in the back bedroom.
“I have to talk to Jack,” she said. “I’m going outside.”