A little busy was putting it mildly. Griffin had attacked the position as CEO with the same fervor he dedicated to all his projects. Hope2O wasn’t suffering from neglect, either. Now that the cat was out of the bag, Sharlene had joined Hope2O’s board and together they were plotting to get Dalton involved. Between the three of them, they would take good care of the charity.
Sydney ran her palm across his leg and she felt some of the tension seep out of him before Griffin added, “But, no, not particularly. Hollister’s condition has stabilized, but we can’t put this off forever.”
“Griffin is right,” Dalton said. “We’ve got to find this girl.”
Cooper looked at them all with a raised eyebrow. “Based on nothing more than a pair of old photographs?”
Sydney scooted to the edge of the seat and reached over to turn the photos so they faced Cooper. By now, she figured she knew as much as any of them, maybe more. “We know this is the girl.” She pointed to the child in the picture. “This was taken years ago, obviously. We figure she’s about Griffin’s age now. This woman here was her mother. When she worked for the Cains she used the name Vivian Beck, but we don’t think that’s her real name.”
“Why?” Cooper asked.
“Because she disappeared after she was fired,” Griffin explained. “We tried to track her down by social security number, but that was a dead end, too.”
Dalton stared at the picture. “So we still have nothing.”
“Not exactly.” Sydney took another sip of her coffee. “When we showed the picture to Hollister, he called the mother Vee, not Vivian. And he admitted that when she came to Houston and got the job as the Cain nanny, she had followed him from somewhere. In a later conversation, he called her Victoria. So I looked up the company records to see where he’d been in the months before she got that job and found out that he’d just returned from—”
“Victoria,” Dalton said.
Sydney looked up at him, but he and Laney were exchanging a look.
“So I was right,” Laney said. “Victoria was the name of the girl’s mother, in addition to being the name of a city.”
Dalton nodded, his expression grim. “So that’s what we know. In 1982 Hollister spent three months in Victoria, Texas. And while he was there, he met and—presumably impregnated—a young woman whose name was also Victoria. So it shouldn’t be too hard to track her down. How many women named Victoria could there possibly be in Victoria, Texas?”
“Exactly,” Griffin said. “Once we find the mother, we should be able to track down the daughter.”
Cooper frowned. “You’re sure this is the woman who wrote the letter?”
Sydney shot a sidelong look at Griffin. He’d gone back and forth on whether or not he wanted to tell his brothers that Caro had written the letter. She took his hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.
“Yes,” he lied as he tapped his finger on the photo of the girl. “I’m sure this girl here is the one we’re looking for.”
“Well, then.” Cooper took one last sip of his coffee before setting his mug on the table. “It seems like you’ve got this all wrapped up. It seems like you’ve won.”
Griffin stood before Cooper could walk out. “I didn’t ask you to come just so I could rub your nose in it.”
“Then why did you ask me here?”
“Neither Dalton nor I have been able to find this girl on our own. We’re all tired of Hollister’s games. I think we should work together—we need your help. I think we should split the money.”
“You want to divide up the company three ways?”
“No. Four ways. Once we find her, we give her a quarter of it. After all, she’s our sister.”