Finding Ashley by Danielle Steel (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📗

for decades, long before I got there, and when I realized what was happening, and how it was handled, I finally gave up and left. It took me another year to give up my vows and ask to be released. It soured me forever on everything I believed about the goodness and innocence of the Church. I didn’t want to be part of it. It turned my years as a nun into a travesty. I felt as though I did more harm than good and had been part of a cabal to coerce those girls into giving up babies they wanted. Their parents didn’t even show up to pick them up after what they’d been through. We just put them on a plane and sent them home, two weeks after delivery. Stand ’em up and out the door. Next. It was heartless and profitable. Be careful,” she warned Hattie, “if you read too much about it, it may do the same to you. I didn’t want to be part of a church that did things like that for pure profit. Maybe, if they’d done it for free, out of ignorance and some archaic beliefs, I could have forgiven them. But not for profit to the degree it was. I’m sure there were some innocents involved, but the nuns who ran Saint Blaise’s then knew what they were doing. They didn’t care at all about the girls, just about the babies they could sell to rich, desperate couples. The truth is ugly,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice, but her eyes were sad when she talked about the girls.

Hattie showed her the photograph of Melissa at sixteen then, and Fiona shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember her. The only thing I remember about that year is who the movie stars were that we gave babies to. I think there were three major stars that year.” She named them, and Hattie was startled by who they were. All three were very famous Hollywood actresses. “If you do some research, you might dig something up that way. See who adopted daughters. It might be a backhanded way to find your sister’s child, if she was adopted by a major Hollywood figure. If not, I don’t think there’s any way to track her down. There are still some nuns around who were part of it, but most of them are ancient now. The really old ones have died, and they’ve spread the living ones around. I tried to find them when I wrote the book, but I found very few, and none of them would talk to me. The Church tried to discredit me, and claimed that I was psychiatrically unbalanced, but they didn’t get far with that. The bottom line is that it’s not a pretty thing the Church did, however good their original intentions were, and they don’t want anyone to know about it. It’s been swept under the rug, and they won’t tolerate anyone uncovering it now. It doesn’t make them look good. That’s why they burned the records. They had too much to hide to preserve them.” It was a wartime tactic, and it worked. All evidence that might have led to Melissa’s baby had turned to ash in the fire.

They talked for a while then about the future of the Church, and Hattie’s work in Africa. Two hours after they had met, Hattie and Fiona Eckles parted, and Hattie thanked her for all the information she’d provided.

“Check out those movie stars, and see if you can find anything out that way,” Fiona encouraged her. “It’s worth a shot.”

“I will,” Hattie promised, and stopped at an Internet café on the way back to her hotel. She signed on, and googled the names of the three actresses Fiona had mentioned. The first one had been dead for fifteen years, but it mentioned that her daughter was an actress too, and had starred in a recent film. She was the right age. The other two stars were still alive, one had retired recently, the other was still working, and nothing was said about their children. But all three were leads that Hattie intended to follow up on. If Melissa’s baby hadn’t been adopted by a famous actress, the trail would end there. But in the meantime, there was always hope that Ashley had been one of the lucky ones adopted by a famous mother, which would make her easier to find. Hattie printed out the information and went back to her hotel.

She had nightmares that night about her sister as a teenager, screaming in pain during the delivery, and nuns running away with her baby while she tried to crawl after them and couldn’t. Hattie awoke in the throes of a rising wave of panic, crying for Melissa. And like Fiona, it made her feel guilty by association. How could nuns do something like that? The venal cruelty of it all overwhelmed Hattie and made her suddenly ashamed to be a nun. She wanted to throw her habit away. She wanted to go home to the safety of her convent, but she couldn’t yet. She was on a mission, and had a job to do. She knew she had to follow it through to the end. She didn’t know if she would ever tell Melissa all that she had learned. But she loved her as never before for all that she’d endured. And Hattie knew what she had to do next. She couldn’t go back to New York, at least not yet. She had to go to L.A., and track down the two living actresses, and the three adopted children if they had been born in 1988.

In the morning, she exchanged her return ticket to New York for one from Dublin to L.A., with stops in London and Chicago on the way. She hated L.A., after her one visit there as a young actress, but it didn’t matter. She would have gone to the ends of the earth now