Relative Impact Read online

  “No. Mildred has an eye for younger men.”

  He took off his boots and plopped down on her leather sofa. “I was promised Thai food. But first you need to tell me about the new job. Who died?”

  For the past couple of years, ever since her brother got out of the Air Force, the two of them had teamed up to help solve cases that had slipped through the cracks. Max had spent the first ten years of his Air Force career in special operations as a combat air controller, imbedded with Marines, Navy SEALs and Army special forces. The last ten years of his career, after going through Officer Training School, were spent as a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He was charged with investigating everything from financial crimes, to murders, and even counter espionage. But for some reason, still unknown to her, he had retired as a captain and was hanging out in limbo with her and their online investigation service.

  She sat next to Max on the sofa and opened her laptop, bringing up her DNA test. “On a whim, I had my DNA tested,” she said.

  He quickly viewed the ancestral break-down. “Is this accurate?”

  “Yep. I even called them yesterday to verify.”

  “Italian? How would our parents not know this?” He sat back against the cushion, an expression of doubt on his face.

  “You’re right. But according to the DNA folks, we got fifty percent of our Italian heritage on our paternal side.”

  “I was no math major,” Max said. “But that means dad was one hundred percent Italian.”

  “Making his entire paternal and maternal line Italian,” she concluded.

  “But mom also gave us some Italian,” Max said.

  “Right. Italian, German and Jewish came from her.”

  Max simply shook his head.

  “That’s not all,” she said. “This is why I wanted you to drive over.” She pulled up another part of the report, which showed known relatives and their relationship to Robin.

  Leaning forward for a look at the screen, Max twisted his gaze toward his sister. “Those are first cousins and an uncle.”

  “If you scroll down more, you’ll see second cousins in Italy. One’s in Rome, another in Naples. But the majority are from Calabria.”

  “That’s down in the toe, right?”

  “You know your geography,” she said.

  “It helps that I deployed out of Aviano in the north of Italy and the Navy base in Sicily a number of times.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Max looked stunned by the news. Kind of the way she felt yesterday, she thought.

  “Let’s get that Thai food,” he said. “Then we’ll come back and figure out what to do.”

  The Thai restaurant was only two blocks from Robin’s building, so they walked downtown in the mid-day sun. For late April, the flowering plums would have normally been through with their pink display, but spring was coming late to the Rockies. The rivers were still flowing strong with the recent snow melt.

  They sat and ordered and tried to wait without discussing the current situation.

  Finally, Max said, “I must say that I’m completely confused. If I had known we were Italian, I might have started eating better pasta earlier in my life.”

  “Wells is not a hotbed of Italian restaurants.”

  There were exactly zero Italian restaurants there, in fact. The closest one was in Salt Lake, some one hundred and sixty miles away.

  “Why do you suppose dad didn’t have us eating pasta growing up?” she asked. “I mean, I know some Italian families in Salt Lake. They all have their favorite family recipes.”

  “Good question, sis.”

  Their food came and they each ate a bowl of curry chicken—Max had the red and Robin the yellow. When they were done, they paid and wandered back to her condo complex.

  As they entered the front reception area, Robin ran into a lawyer friend of hers, who lived on the sixteenth floor.

  “Is this your new boyfriend?” her friend asked.

  Max laughed. “Only if this is West Virginia.”

  “This is my twin brother, Max,” Robin explained. “I told you about him.”

  The woman waved her hand. “That’s right, you did. But you downplayed the level of hotness. Shame on you.” The cougar undressed Robin’s brother with her eyes, looking for an entry to pounce.

  Robin and Max went up the elevator with this woman, who could not stop talking. Robin was happy when they finally got off on her floor.

  They got back into Robin’s condo and Max said, “She’s pretty hot. But she needs to put something in that mouth.”

  “Trust me. She does. We call her the barracuda in the office. She has a voracious appetite, especially for younger men.”

  “That leaves me out,” he said.

  “She’s in her mid-forties. Never been married. No kids.”

  “That’s you in five years.”

  “I was married and tried to have kids,” she reminded him.

  “I know. I’m sorry, sis.”

  Robin sat on the sofa again and opened her laptop. “It was embarrassing the way she looked at you. Like a piece of meat.” She pulled up her DNA test again and said, “Okay, back to work. What do we do about this?”

  Max seemed to be in deep thought. Finally, he said, “We’ll check on the uncle first. He would have some knowledge of our father.”

  “Pasquale Borelli? Does that mean our name should be Borelli?”

  “That’s the only name we have so far. So, you’re probably right. It also means we know nothing about our parents. Our whole life was a lie. Let me do some quick research on this guy.”

  Robin crossed her arms over her chest. “I didn’t want to do that until you got here. That’s more your area of expertise.”

  While Max did his thing on her laptop, she paced back and forth in her two-bedroom condo, her anxiety heightened by all of the soda and her lack of sleep. But her brother was a calming presence to her. If anyone could understand what was going on, it was Max Kane. Or maybe Max Borelli, she guessed.

  After only an hour, where her brother had texted someone during the process, and gotten a number of answers, Max finally sat back in the sofa.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “If this Pasquale Borelli is our uncle, maybe we don’t want to find him,” Max said.

  “Why?”

  “When he was eighteen, he was in some trouble with the law.”

  “For?”

  “Assault.”

  She let out a deep sigh and said, “Since then?”

  “Seems to have cleaned up his act. He did some time in the Army. Now, he lives out east, is married, and has two children.”

  “The first cousins that showed up on my DNA test.”

  “Two of them. The other one is from a family named Aldo. Their mother was a Borelli.”

  “Our aunt on our father’s side,” Robin said.

  “Looks like it,” Max said. “I sent all of the information to a friend.”

  Robin smiled. “You mean NCIS Special Agent Martina Lopez. You can say it. I know she came to visit you a couple of months ago.”

  “A month ago,” he corrected.

  “You never mentioned how that went.”

  “It was fine,” he said coyly.

  “Where do we go from here?”

  “How much time can you take off?”

  “As you know, my work is flexible. Why?”

  He raised his fists in the air and said, “Road trip. We’re heading to Vermont.”

  She was hoping he would be as excited as her to take on this investigation. It had bothered the both of them their whole life that they were the last of the Kane clan. Now, with a quick search by her brother, they had direction in their life. How would it be to know someone with their blood? Her excitement was overwhelming.

  3

  Christina Borelli owned the best coffee shop in Bennington, Vermont. Which was quite an accomplishment for a thirty-two-year-old single girl with an English degree from nearby Benni
ngton College. She was an attractive woman with raven hair and the well-proportioned body of someone who didn’t overindulge with food or drink. Some might consider her a mousy bookworm, but Christina took that as a compliment. She was comfortable in her skin, and she didn’t feel compelled to let others know what she was like under her bulky jeans and heavy sweater.

  Roma Coffee Shop sat in an old brick building that had been a bank up until thirty years ago. Christina had exposed the high ceilings, painting it black, along with the red brick, which still had bullet holes from a bank robbery in the 1930s. The robbery story added charm to the place, she thought.

  It was nearly ten in the morning on a Friday, and Christina sat in a far corner sipping a tall Illy cappuccino—the best Italian coffee she could get her hands on without paying an arm and a leg.

  Christina cycled through her emails and saw one from the company where she had taken her DNA test. She had been extremely busy recently, and she had avoided all but personal emails from her close friends and relatives. But this one had an interesting title, mentioning that she had relative matches. It was probably one of her relatives in Italy, she guessed. She had already been linked to her father, which was a no-brainer, since she had forced him to spit in the tube. Her other link was for her first cousin in Lebanon, New Hampshire—Frank Aldo. She had also talked Frank into taking the test. Deep down she wasn’t sure if the DNA tests were legitimate, so convincing her father and cousin to take the test was a test of her own. Her brother Bobby had also taken the test, and his results showed up on her page as well.

  Clicking on the Relative Section, she saw there was a first cousin link for some woman named Robin Kane. She thought back through her family tree and tried to come up with a Robin, but she came up blank on that name.

  She picked up her phone and texted her cousin Frank: ‘Do you know a first cousin of ours named Robin Kane?’

  A couple of seconds later she got a response from Frank. ‘No such person, cousin. Why?’

  Instead of typing in again, she hit the call button and waited.

  “Holy crap,” her cousin said. “I didn’t know you knew how to speak.”

  “Funny boy,” she said. “Are you still living free or dying?”

  This was a constant conflict of theirs. He was a gun fanatic and she was opposed to anything that could kill. There was enough violence in the world, she guessed. But, if anyone should own guns in this country, she guessed that her cousin Frank and her father should be those people.

  “That’s right, girl. Are you shaving your legs yet?”

  “Hey, that’s uncalled for. I shave. I just don’t like being told to do so by a patriarchal society.”

  “Hence the reason you’re still single.”

  “We’re both thirty-two,” she said. “Did I miss the invitation to your wedding?”

  “Can we get back to the issue at hand? I actually work for a living.”

  He was right this time. Frank owned his own electrical company, a skill he had learned during his six years in the Navy. And her ‘work’ was more of a passion for coffee that paid her with modest profit.

  “Fine,” she said. “Back to this Robin Kane. You have no idea who she is?”

  “Not a clue. And I’ve done extensive background on our family tree.” Frank hesitated. Then he said, “What if she’s the bastard child of one of our dead uncles? I’ve heard stories about them being some horn-dogs.”

  Christina knew about two of her uncles from Boston dying in their early twenties, so that was a possibility.

  Frank continued, “Where is she from?”

  “The program doesn’t tell us that. But there is an email for her.”

  “Do we really want to know?” he asked.

  “My mom just came through the door,” Christina said. “I can ask her.”

  “Let me know. I have to get back to work.”

  “Don’t zap yourself.”

  “Don’t burn your lip with your coffee.”

  She shook her head, but she waited too long to provide another jab. She lifted her chin at her mother, who stood in line waiting to order her normal coffee.

  Jackie Borelli wouldn’t have looked sixty-years-old if she didn’t let the gray come in to her normally blonde locks in a couple of long streaks. Christina knew her mother still had a nice figure under her practical professorial clothes. Her mother was a full professor of Environmental Studies at Bennington College. Because of her relationship to that institution, Christina had gotten most of her degree paid for her. Which was a good thing, since the tuition there was ridiculously high. Why did socialist institutions of learning always charge so much for tuition? That was beyond her level of knowledge.

  Her mother got her coffee and wandered over, sitting across from Christina.

  If Christina leaned to the left, her mother was a full-on, card-carrying socialist. It was hard owning a coffee shop and not believing in competitive capitalism. She provided the best coffee in town, and her socialist friends were willing to pay for this product. The more she paid in taxes, the more she started seeing her cousin Frank’s perspective—not to mention her right-wing father, who seemed to hate the government more than some of the anarchists she knew in town.

  “They charged me full price,” her mother said. “I thought I was still getting these free. You look well.”

  Translation? Christina wore too much make-up. “You look comfortable, as usual. Nice sweater.”

  Her mother rubbed the gray sweater covering her healthy breasts. “Locally sourced fine wool from free-range Merino sheep from a Sunderland farm. Handcrafted on an eighteenth-century loom by a little grandmother named Esther.”

  “That had to cost you a fortune,” Christina said. “Enough to feed a small Peruvian village for a week.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” her mother asked.

  “Just a little. I imagine most sheep run free in a pasture.”

  “One would certainly hope so.”

  Christina wondered now if there really was an Esther. “You’re not teaching this morning?”

  She sipped her coffee and then said, “My students are in the field this morning with graduate assistants. They’re studying the impact of global warming on the local bee population.”

  “Bobby might be interested in those results,” Christina concluded. Her little brother was a beekeeper and maker of honey up north near Manchester.

  “I see you still sell his honey here,” her mother said.

  “I have a hard time keeping it on the shelves.”

  They sat in silence for a minute. Christina saw that business was heavier than normal for a Friday.

  “You look like you have something to tell me,” her mother said. “Are you finally coming out as a lesbian?”

  “I told you. I like men. It’s just hard to find a real man in this town. Most sit down to pee.”

  “Trust me. That’s not a bad thing. Easier to clean the toilet. So then, what is it?”

  She always had a hard time keeping anything from her mother. And it wasn’t like she needed to do so. Jackie Borelli encouraged her to experience sex with both genders, and she was a huge advocate of drinking and smoking pot.

  “Do you know anyone named Robin?” Christina asked.

  Her mother shook her head. “No, why?”

  “You know I took the DNA test recently. I got a hit on a close relative.”

  “How close?”

  “First cousin. A woman named Robin Kane.”

  Her mother took a sip and a dribble of coffee dropped onto her locally-sourced wool sweater. Christina handed her mother a napkin, which she used to dab the moisture.

  “I see you’re still using paper napkins,” her mother said.

  “It’s cheaper than cloth,” Christina said. “And is much less negative to the environment than washing all of that cotton.”

  “Hmm. Have you talked with your father about this Robin person?”

  “Not yet.”

  “The only possible expla
nation is either a glitch in their system, or one of your uncles fathered a bastard child before dying.”

  She had never gotten the full story of how her uncles had died. That was a subject off-limits in their family.

  Her mother finished off her coffee and stood up. “I do have papers to grade this afternoon. We should do dinner this weekend. I know of this great little restaurant that’s part of a B&B a few miles out of town.”

  Christina hesitated.

  “My treat,” her mother said.

  “A dedicated socialist opening her purse? I can die now.”

  Jackie smiled and said, “Spreading the wealth. Marx would be so proud.”

  Then her mother wandered out of the coffee shop.

  Christina went back to her laptop and pulled up the sparse profile of her newfound cousin. There was no image or address, other than an email. So, she typed a quick message to her supposed cousin and clicked send. What harm could it possibly do?

  4

  Max and Robin had traveled for days across America on I-80, and they were now in Pennsylvania heading north on I-81 near Scranton. Rain pounded the windshield of Max’s Ford pickup.

  Robin sat in the passenger seat quietly checking her email on her phone.

  “What’s the news,” Max said. “Stock market up or down?”

  “Since when do you care about the markets?”

  “I could probably do just as well putting my money on black or white at the casino roulette table,” he said. This wasn’t entirely true. What money he had in the market was held in ETFs that tracked the S&P 500.

  “That lawyer you met the other day in my condo building.”

  “The cougar?”

  “The barracuda. Anyway, she wants me to help her on a drunk driving charge.”

  “She got picked up?”

  “No. A young man. Probably one of her boy toys. I told her no. She knows I don’t deal with those.”

  He had heard this before from her. “They have ride share apps to prevent these things.”

  “Right. But that’s not the interesting one. I’m a little dumfounded by this email I just got,” she said.

  He waited for her to talk as he tried his best to see through the mist of highway water thrown up by 18-wheelers.