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* Twins separated at birth find each other through private investigator

"I think you’d better sit down.”

Linda Gromada was wary. She’d picked up the phone one day last June to hear the voice of a strange woman telling her she wanted to get in touch with Linda’s mother.

The woman’s voice caught her attention. Just a week before, Linda’s aunt told her that a man had called wanting to get in touch with Linda’s mother on behalf of an old friend who hadn’t seen her mother in a very long time.

Could this be the friend? And why was she so secretive?

The woman identified herself as Toni McCue, and said she lived in Illinois.

Then she began to tell Linda what she described as a “sing-song” story: An unmarried 19-year-old woman with long, dark hair went to a hospital in Detroit to give birth. The woman had twin girls; one was sickly and the other healthy. The healthy girl went home with her mother, while the other was left at the hospital to be adopted.

As Linda listened to the woman’s story, she held her breath.

Then the bombshell: “I have reason to believe that we are identical twins separated at birth.”

In an instant, Linda’s world — and her perception of her life — changed forever.

“It’s like, suddenly I’m not who I always thought I was,” she said.

An unknown past
Sitting at an antique oak kitchen table in her Shelter Bay home, Linda sifted through a small pile of photographs that showed two women — looking strikingly similar — locked in an embrace, holding twin babies and lifting wine glasses together.

The photos chronicle her and her twin sister Toni McCue’s reunion after having been separated for 60 years. They met for the first time the day before their 60th birthday on June 29, 2007.

Ten months later, the women both agree: It feels like they’ve known each other all of their lives.

“I remember I was sitting in a chair at her table and she got up to leave and I felt like I was leaving,” Linda said quietly. “She’s so much like me, it’s so easy to love her.”
For Toni, the reunion with her “wombmate” as she calls Linda, had been a long time coming. She’d known she had a twin sister out there somewhere since her mother told her when she was 20 years old.

In contrast, Linda said her family never dropped a hint that she had a secret past.

No, Linda said with a deep sigh, her mother and her family knew how to keep secrets.

Linda grew up with her mother and stepfather in Michigan. As far as Linda knew, the man raising her was her biological father. Turns out her parents married when she was 3 years old. They later had a daughter who Linda considered her biological sister.

Yet looking back, Linda had to admit she always felt she was the “odd person out” in the family. Her stepfather and half-sister were tall and light-haired. She was short, with dark curly hair.

Meantime, Toni had grown up in Springfield, Ill., with her adopted family, who told her at a young age that she had been adopted. Her adopted mother had said her biological mother was “a beautiful young girl with long flowing dark hair.” That’s all she knew.

But no one in the family mentioned a sister.

“I have an aunt and an uncle, and after I found out, I called them and they said, ‘Well, we wanted to tell you, but we didn’t think it was our place,’” Toni recalled recently.

Secrets.

A sister somewhere
One day when Toni was 20, her mother called her and insisted that she come home from college. It was an emergency; her mother had to talk to her right away.

When she came home, Toni’s mother immediately told her about her twin sister. Apparently, a family member had moved into town and let the secret out. Rumors were flying around, and Toni’s mother wanted to tell her before she heard it from someone else.

“I was not shocked,” Toni said from her home in Illinois. “I wasn’t angry. My parents had reasons for what they did. Mom told me she wanted to wait until she thought that I was mature enough to handle the information.”

Shortly thereafter, Toni’s parents traveled with her back to Michigan to help search for her birth mother and twin, with no luck.

Toni would continue to search: once after her adopted mother died in 1970 and again in 1984 after she divorced her first husband. The second time, her uncle told her he had information that her birth mother had moved to Florida.

“I figured I would never find her,” Toni said.

Then last year, she finally got a break.

Last May, Toni made contact with Dean Paisley, a friend of her father-in-law who had just died. Paisley was a retired, long-time FBI investigator and former head of security investigation for Disney World.

Paisley had little to go on. Toni had copies of hospital records pertaining to her adoption and a copy of the certificate her mother signed surrendering custody of her child. He also, of course, had her sister’s birth date.

“It’s not easy to find people that have been separated that long,” said Paisley, who keeps in touch with the twins. “In the beginning, I didn’t think there was much chance that I could find anything.”

Through research on the Internet of data from the U.S. Census in the 1930s, Paisley was able to pinpoint a family in the Detroit area with a daughter who would have been Linda’s mother’s age at the time. He also saw that the family had two sons. Paisley tracked down the phone number of one of the sons; that son had died, but his wife was alive.

About three weeks after Paisley began his search, he contacted the wife, who agreed to pass Paisley’s contact information onto Linda. About a week later, Paisley received a phone call from a woman who wanted to know why he was looking for her mother.

Paisley was on the edge of his seat: Could this be Toni’s long-lost twin?

He explained he had a friend who wanted to talk to her mother. Paisley also said he wasn’t sure if he had contacted the correct family. He began asking questions: Are you the oldest child of your mother’s? Is the oldest daughter’s birthday June 29, 1947?

“She said, ‘That’s my birthday,’” Paisley said. “When she said that, I knew this was the twin. That was Toni’s birthday.”

But Paisley did not want to be the one to tell Linda he was working on behalf of her twin sister. That, he decided, would have to come from Toni.
Paisley then called Toni and told her that he’d found her twin.

She was excited, but frightened.

When it came time for her to call Linda, she became flustered and wasn’t sure what to say. Her husband, Denny, wrote a sort of script for her to follow, just in case she became tongue-tied.

“He said, ‘When you talk to Linda, if she asks you how old you are, then you know that she doesn’t know anything about being a twin,’” Toni said.

She picked up the phone, dialed, and Linda answered. Still nervous, Toni immediately began reading the “script” her husband had written for her. Indeed, Linda asked Toni how old she was.

Toni told Linda to sit down, and then explained how she thought they were twins.

There was silence on the other end, and then Linda cried “Oh, my God!”

A long-awaited reunion
After their initial phone call, the twins began e-mailing back and forth. Linda was intent on seeing a photograph of Toni. She wanted the visual confirmation that Toni was truly her twin.

Toni also wanted a look. When the first photo of Linda popped up on Toni’s computer screen, the similarity was so stark that Denny McCue announced, “Well, you’ve found your sister!”

The women e-mailed back and forth, sharing information about their husbands, friends, their likes and dislikes. They quickly began to tally the similarities: Neither had children, both had tight curly hair, share the same unusual blood type, love dogs, have master’s degrees, worked for state governments most of their lives, suffer with celiac disease and even grow the same color flowers in their gardens.

“We have the same antique oak dining table, for goodness sake!” Linda exclaimed.

The anticipation was too much. Just three weeks after the two had made contact, Linda hopped on a plane and headed out to meet her sister.
They met at a restaurant in St. Louis.

“I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her,” Toni recalled. “I was too overwhelmed for words. We were all crying. I can’t put it into words.”

Linda was a little more reserved, still stunned at the unfolding events.

She and her husband stayed at Toni’s house in Springfield. Toni had decided to throw a party to celebrate their reunion and their 60th birthday. She and her husband decided to surprise friends who attended by not telling them about Linda. Instead, her husband, a baseball fan, wrote on the invitation, “Cardinals versus the Twins: Come see the excitement.”

The twins dressed in the same outfits and flabbergasted friends, who couldn’t believe the resemblance — or their story.

When it came time for Linda to leave, Toni said she was overwhelmed with emotions.

“It was terrible,” she said. “My husband and I sat in the car after she left and cried our eyes out.”

Toni has talked with her biological mother over the past year. Neither of the twins has pressed their mother for the whole story of why she gave one of them up while keeping the other. And they’re not angry — they’re just thrilled to have found each other.

Linda has been back to visit her sister twice since the initial meeting. She’s planning yet another trip this month.

They still have plenty to catch up on — years, in fact.

And for the twin who searched for so long, the reunion has finally given her purpose.

“You know how you say you’re always looking for your special purpose in life; your reason for living?” Toni said. “I always thought I would figure that out, but I never did. Now that I have Linda in my life, it’s very clear — everything feels complete.”

• Beverly Crichfield can be reached at 360-416-2135 or .