Read To The Grave for Free Online Page B

from the flight and he wasn’t really in the mood to open his life up to a stranger on a train, but he didn’t want to be rude.  “I’m kind of here on family business,” he said, being deliberately vague about his profession as a family historian then realising that the man must have thought he meant he was going to a funeral.
    “Oh,” the man said.  “I see.  Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
    The man went back to his newspaper then and Tayte turned away and looked out the window.  Beyond the dim reflection of his dark, unshaved face the view was bleak.  It had been raining when they set out from London and now that they had cleared the city, wet snow was falling and sticking to the glass.  He watched the snowflakes spatter and race across the window and he thought about the girl again.  He’d been thinking about her since he’d left DC, often rolling her name around in his head: Philomena Lasseter .  He liked the way it sounded.  He’d gone over his limited research several times on the plane until the details on her birth certificate were fixed in his memory.  It had helped take his mind off the flight, even if he’d been unable to learn anything more from it.  Now he was in England though, he hoped that was soon going to change.
    He turned his thoughts back to the phone call he’d just made, thinking about Marcus and the old days.  Although they kept in touch, Tayte hadn’t seen him in years and he regretted not seeing him on his last visit.  The assignment in Cornwall had kept him so busy though that he hadn’t had time to give Marcus much thought, let alone do anything about it.  He planned to rectify that this time around and he hoped Marcus would be back from France before he had to return home.
    They had first met soon after Tayte left high school and became interested in genealogy - not long after he’d found out that he’d been adopted, which had brought about a sudden, unrelenting need to learn the tools of the trade he’d been in ever since.  Marcus Brown was the teacher and Tayte was the hungry pupil, and no one had helped him more; although he often thought that if someone like Marcus couldn’t find out who he was, what chance did he have?  No one was better qualified than the estimable Marcus Brown and yet neither of them, their skills combined, had even come close.  It served to remind Tayte how hopeless it was to keep trying, but every time he voiced such thoughts his friend would remind him of one simple truth.  He could hear Marcus telling him it for the first time - could picture him pulling at his goatee as he often did when he had anything thought provoking to say.
    “They say there’s only one certainty in life, Jefferson.  Know what it is?”
    Tayte had been twenty-three years old and he knew well enough.  “Death,” he’d said.
    “That’s right, but it’s not the only certainty, is it?”
    “It’s not?”
    “No,” Marcus said.  “The other certainty is that wherever you want to go, whatever you want to be or do, or find in your case, you will certainly never get there if you give up.  Now pick your chin up off the floor and stop feeling sorry for yourself.  You’ve got work to do.”
    Sometimes Tayte wished Marcus hadn’t told him that.  Sometimes he’d wanted to give up, or thought he had.  But in the end he knew Marcus was right and he wanted to pick up the pieces again.  It just seemed that they had exhausted every angle over the years and right now he had no new angle to explore.
    He pictured the photograph of his mother that he’d been given at the reading of his adoptive parents’ will.  He recalled the address in South America that was written on the back: the Catholic mission in San Rafael, Sinaloa where she’d left him, and how it had led him to Mexico and Sister Manriquez.  He’d been fortunate that she was still there after the seventeen years that had passed since she’d taken him in from a mother who had refused to