Tangled Roots (Hannah Ives Mysteries, Band 17) - Hardcover

Talley, Marcia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 072788882X ISBN 13: 9780727888822

Verlag: Severn House Publishers Ltd, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Can Hannah Ives untangle the roots of her ancestry to solve murders from the past and present?

Hannah Ives’s sister, Georgina, has some astonishing news. A DNA test has revealed she is part Native American, and Hannah’s test has similar results. The link seems to come from their late mother. But how?

As Hannah dives into constructing her family tree, she uncovers a heart-breaking love story and a mysterious death, while DNA matching turns up two second cousins, Mai and Nicholas. Hannah and her niece, Julie, are eager to embrace their new relatives and learn about their surprising ancestry, but Georgina’s husband, Scott, isn’t so keen. Are there more shocking revelations to come? And can Hannah untangle her family roots to uncover the truth behind a devastating tragedy?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marcia Talley is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of seventeen previous crime novels featuring sleuth Hannah Ives. Her short stories appear in more than a dozen collections and have been reprinted in several of The Year's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories anthologies. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime, Inc. Marcia lives in Annapolis, Maryland, but spends the winter months in a quaint Loyalist cottage in the Bahamas. Previous titles in the popular Hannah Ives series published by Severn House include Footprints to Murder, Mile High Murder and Tangled Roots.

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Tangled Roots

By Marcia Talley

Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2019 Marcia Talley
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7278-8882-2

CHAPTER 1

It started with a phone call. Doesn't it always?

Although my cell phone was resting face down on the patio table within easy reach, vibrating noisily against the glass, I almost didn't pick up. My hands were encased in rubber gloves while I smoothed marine varnish over the sun-bleached teak of our deck chairs. I could tell by the ringtone, however, that Georgina was on the line. I knew from experience that she'd keep dialing my number until I silenced the chimes either by switching the phone into airplane mode or chucking it into the rhododendrons. So, I caved.

I dunked the paintbrush into a yogurt tub filled with paint thinner, peeled off the gloves and used a damp pinky finger to accept the call.

'Hey,' I said as I leaned over the table and stabbed the speaker button. 'What's up?'

I hadn't heard from my baby sister in two or three weeks. It's probably not nice to say, but Georgina usually called only when she wanted something. I braced myself.

'Did you ever send in that DNA test kit I gave you?'

Georgina had been dabbling in genealogy lately, exploring the Alexander family tree. How she found the time between caring for four school-age children and Scott, her high-maintenance, self-employed CPA husband, I couldn't imagine.

'Not yet. Why?'

'I don't know why I even bothered to give it to you, Hannah,' she huffed.

'I'm sorry, sis. It slipped my mind, is all. I'll get to it soon, I promise,' I said as I puzzled over where I'd put the damn packet. At a family picnic a couple of months before, Georgina had given me and our older sister, Ruth, each a test kit. At the time, she'd seemed eager – with Scott egging her on – to join the Daughters of the American Revolution which required tracing our forefathers (and mothers, Ruth had been quick to remind her!) in an unbroken line back to 1776.

'How hard can it be to spit into a tube?' Georgina sighed in exasperation. 'And postage paid?'

'Sorry,' I apologized again. 'Is it important?'

'I don't know,' my sister said, sounding cautious. 'It's just that I think they might have made some sort of mistake when they tested mine.'

'Yeah?'

'The English and Scottish roots I expected,' she continued. 'There was a smattering of Scandinavian and Iberian Peninsula that didn't surprise me, the Vikings and the Romans, you know,' she rattled on, 'but according to Gen-Tree ...' She paused. 'Are you sitting down?'

'Don't build me a clock, Georgina. Just tell me what time it is!'

'Gen-Tree says I'm twenty-five percent Native American.'

I reached for a chair I hadn't yet painted and sat. How could my fair, green-eyed, red-headed sister, and by extension Ruth and I ...?

The Alexanders, I knew, emigrated to Virginia from the Scottish Highlands sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, and our mother's family, the Smiths, descended from frugal, Puritan stock, going back – Grandmother Smith always claimed – to 1630 and the Winthrop Fleet. My husband, Paul, used to tease that this explained my propensity to rinse out and reuse Ziploc bags.

'That's nuts,' I said, after catching my breath. 'It's probably a mistake. Got contaminated, or your sample mixed up in the lab with somebody else's.'

'That's what Scott thought,' Georgina said.

'Call them,' I suggested. 'Ask them to re-do it.'

'I did, Hannah, and they're sending me another test kit for free, but it'll take weeks and weeks to get the results! That's why I was hoping you'd sent yours in. I mean, we should be the same, right?'

'As far as I know. Have you checked with Ruth?'

'She flat-out refused to do it. Hutch said he had serious privacy concerns about those testing companies.'

Ruth's husband was an attorney. He always agonized over the fine print.

Frankly, I thought it'd be rather cool to have Native American blood, but I didn't see how that could be possible. Twenty-five percent? I did the math.

If that were the case, one of our four grandparents would have to have been a full-blooded Indian. I'd known my grandparents on both sides – they'd lived well into their eighties. A long-ago Alexander had migrated from Virginia to southern Maryland where he married a sixteen-year-old Catholic girl related to George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore. I'd forgotten the fellow's name, but the couple prospered, growing tobacco on a Chesapeake County farm not far away from the one now owned by my husband's sister, Connie. She raised cows down there, though, not tobacco.

Stephen and Charlotte Smith had been farmers, too, on a two-hundred-acre spread near Norwich in rural Vermont, now home to a Christmas tree farm run by one of my second cousins. A cemetery not far from the King Arthur Flour Company was chock-full of our relatives. A wedding photograph still sits on my living room mantel: Grandpa Smith, string bean tall, his sandy hair sticking out in tufts from beneath a broad-brimmed hat. Grandma, diminutive, deceptively frail, her peach-colored hair in full bloom around her face.

'Hannah? Are you still there?'

'Sorry,' I said. 'I was just trying to wrap my head around all this. Honestly, I don't recall any one of our grandparents having Native American features, but I'm not sure what I'd be looking for.'

'Maybe Mom or Dad was adopted,' Georgina cut in. 'Or maybe ...' She paused dramatically. 'Maybe there were shenanigans.'

I laughed out loud. 'Let's wait until our tests come back, OK?'

She giggled. 'OK. Thanks for putting up with me, Hannah.'

Georgina could be a handful, that was certainly true, but it wouldn't help to agree with her. As I watched the varnish in the open paint can start to skim over, I tried to remember where I'd put the darn test kit. Under the bathroom sink?

'Hey!' Georgina was saying when I tuned in again. 'You're much better with computers than I am, Hannah. How 'bout I set you up as co-editor on Gen-Tree.com? You can check out the information I've entered so far. Do a bit of poking around.'

'Sounds like fun,' I said truthfully. I'd seen the ads for Gen-Tree on television. Click on one ancestry hint – a flapping pennant icon – then another and another, leading back to – potentially – Adam and Eve. It could end up being more addictive than playing Words With Friends. 'Maybe there'll be horse thieves in the family, or moonshiners,' I mused.

'Then again,' Georgina said, 'they could all be totally boring. Like accountants.'

After we said goodbye, I capped the paint can, cleaned the paintbrush with turpentine and trotted upstairs to shower. The Gen-Tree test kit was, as I suspected, under the bathroom sink. After I dried myself off, I put on a fresh top and a clean pair of shorts, grabbed the kit and padded barefoot down to our basement office. I sat down at the computer. While I waited for it to power up, I opened up the packet and read the instructions.

Activate the fifteen-digit code. Check.

Agree that I can't sue the company for DNA results I didn't like. OK.

Receive emails from our business partners? I don't think so.

Health reports? You bet.

I also agreed, in spite of the vagueness of the wording, to allow my DNA to be used for projects to 'better understand the human species'. Why not, I reasoned. It's the closest I'll probably get to doing scientific research.

When I got to the section about DNA matching, I called Georgina back.

'When you sent in your sample, did you sign up for the DNA...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Severn House Publishers Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 072788882X
• ISBN 13: 9780727888822
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland