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Could we start with just... Could you say your name?

Clarence Hines. Grew up in a little place named St. Berners. Then the South Coast, Avenue of land.

Today, Clarence lives in a house that he built in the town of Whitburn, not far from where he works, building another big oil platform.

But I've been pretty steady on my life.

There's a vintage Camaro in the garage. The kitchen looks out over a windy pond. The place is spotless. Clarence is medium build. He has a thick mustache and short dark hair. A subtle twinkle in his eye. I've come here to ask him about that day at the Bullarm Fabrication Site. When he first met Tracy Avery. One of the first things she said was how much he looked like her husband, Craig's brother, Clifford.

So I said, Yes, always someone looks like somebody. And I said, Who's your husband? And she said, Craig Avery.

When Tracy said the name Avery, theory. Something started to take shape in Clarence's mind, something unsettling. But the coincidence didn't end there.

She said, Craig's birthday today. And I said to I said, Yes, why is my birthday tattoo today. And she said, What? And with that, she left the room.

Clarence was left alone in his office.

I got a feeling there's something going on here. It's something happened. My whole body was just shaken. Hot. Flashes just overcome. It wasn't a good feeling, I could tell you. I just didn't want to talk about it, didn't want to deal with it. And from that point, I want no part of it.

Was there a reason why When Tracy and Craig Avery sprang to action, speculating and investigating, Clarence Hind pulled back? They usually say in small communities, everyone knows everything. But for Clarence Hind, there were so many hidden truths, so much he didn't yet know, and so much he would rather not know. I'm Luke Quintin, and from CBC, this is Come By Chance. Episode 2, Mistaken Identity. Where you're from in Newfoundland, which Bay or which community you live in means a lot. Although they're not that far from one another as the crow flies, separated by sea and the harsh rocky landscape, over the centuries, each place has developed its own identity. And where you're from can feel like it's a part of you. St. Bernard's, where Clarence grew up, is in Fortune Bay, one of the many thousands of isolated coves folded into this rock in Atlantic, which rarely seem to give up their secrets. It's not that far from its nearest neighbors, but tucked away on a dead-end road. It feels like its own little universe. What was it like growing up in St. Bernice? What do you remember about that place?

It was a lovely life. Couldn't ask for no better. I loved the community. I loved the people there. It's not very good in the wintertime, but the summers are nice. What happens in the winter? Well, I'll salt water on the windows, and you can't see through the windows in the house or anything like that growing up because everything is all salt and freezing. The summertime, you can't get no better. It's lovely. All the fishing boats and coming and going and people lobster fishing.

The Heinz family, Rita and her husband Chesley, lived in a small bungalow with the water on one side and the forest on the other. They had a wood stove for heat and a well in the garden. By most standards, Newfoundland in the 1960s wasn't a place with a lot of money. It was, for the most part, a subsistence economy. People feeding themselves and their family in whatever ways they could.

My father was a fisherman and worked on the Draggers and worked in the Lumberwoods to make a living. And my mother stayed home to raise children.

Did your mom have a garden or anything like that?

No, she didn't have time for that.

Tell us about your siblings. Who else was in your family?

I got two brothers and five sisters.

So it was eight of us. Clarence was the oldest, but his siblings used to tease him at times because he looked a little different from the rest of his family. His youngest brother Ches used to call him Freddie.

He just said, I look like Freddie Fender.

Freddie Fender, the Texas musician with big hair, was famous for his dark handlebar mustache.

Just the way I looked, I guess, and my hair used to be the way he was, I guess. It's dark complexion, bushy hair to hair. I didn't see where it came from, I'll be honest.

When Rita Hines had come home to St. Bernard's from Come By Chance Hospital with Clarence years earlier in the snowy winter of 1962, his identity, even when he was only a few days old, had caused some concern in the Hines family.

When I came home from the hospital and my dad's sister came into the house, I guess, come out to see the newborn, she said that my dad's not just his baby, which is my father. I guess because I looked darker than any of my parents.

Who did she tell this to?

She just said it to mom and my father, just right there.

Rita and her husband Chesley were both quite young. Rita was just 20. Did they have a little laugh afterwards at the suggestion that their son was not Chesley's baby? Or did the story stick? And did Rita and Ches privately wonder, why did their son look a little different? In spite of the comments when they brought Clarence home from the hospital, in the end, the family didn't make too much of it. Maybe Clarence took after some of the distant family on their mother's side. For Clarence and his siblings, it's the childhood of the outdoors, the silver of the codfish, green of the woods, the open water. In many Newfoundland outports, the heartbeat of the community is on the wharf, where most of the action takes place. And that was where Clarence got his first job, weighing fish as they came in on the boats.

They're all jumping around in the net and stuff. And the gaws were all over the place, of course, squawking. So I just put the hoist down, hook it on, lift it up, that'll give you the weight of the fish. I started to work there, I think 13, 14 years old, probably. For up I finished high school, right?

Thirteen? That's pretty young.

Yeah, I was young.

Did it feel young to you at the time?

Not really at the time, I guess. I was just glad to go to work. Had my own money. Yeah, for beer. I shouldn't say that, but anyway.

The sea around the island of Newfoundland has been the center of life for many different cultures. Indigenous groups have been hunting and fishing these waters for thousands of years. Next came the Vikings and a series of explorers from Europe, the Basque, the French, the Spanish, the English, and then the Irish. All here to fish the Grand Banks, where the warm Gulf stream meets the icy Labrador current. It was for centuries the most productive abundant fishery in the world. Men and women from the west of England and Catholic communities in Ireland began to make homes around the codrich waters. And For centuries, the fish were salted all along the island's rocky shores to be shipped in barrels to Europe. The tiny communities which sprang up in the coves and bays near the best fishing grounds became known as outports. And were often only accessible by boat. But even when the roads came in, many of the holdovers from the island's more isolated past were still in full force, including the fact that the church was still, for many, the center of life. So the whole community was very religious when you were growing up? Yes, it was.

Growing up, you had to be in before dark and stuff like that, right?

That was a religious thing?

Yeah, that was back then. Yeah, Curfew. Curfew. Kind of didn't get in before the priests get out walking the roads, right?

What would the priest do? Go walk the road?

Yeah, just walk the road. And if you're out, they tell you to go home or whatever, right?

The church has long had a hold over Newfoundland, but I've never heard anything like this. Priests walking the laneways of a town, enforcing a curfew. It's hard to say whether that authority was a source of comfort or oppressive control, but it certainly had implications.

My experience growing up as Catholic, I don't know if it was different than the other religion, but we never, ever talked about anything. With the family, never, ever. Parents wouldn't tell you not even.

Then one day when Clarence was about 13 years old, that all changed.

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Clarence Hydes was just a kid, 12 or 13 years old, hanging out one day with some friends when he heard a rumor that a girl from his town named Bernie was in fact, his sister. How did you react to that news?

I ran home. I ran home and asked if it was Bernie, my sister?

When Clarence ran home to confront his parents, maybe for the first time in his life, they revealed a hidden secret about the family. They told him, yes, Bernie or Bernadette, as she was called, was indeed his sister. The rumors he had heard that day were true. When Clarence's mother, Rita, gave birth to Bernadette, she and Chesley were a couple, but they weren't yet married. And Rita was living with her uncle.

She was around or so. And the priest just came into the house and basically took the baby from mom, gave her to another, and that was it. Right in the beginning, when she was only a little infant. But as mom moved out of her uncle's and got her own house and moved in with my father, I guess they could have got her back. But then more children came online, I guess. I don't know.

Maybe it sounds a bit strange, but in the end, finding out that he had a sister on the other side of the community didn't really change life much for Clarence, or apparently for the Heinz family. Life moved on, and eventually, like many Newfoundlanders, Clarence moved off the island to find decent work. He found it on the railway, repairing the tracks out West. He was just 16. Had you ever seen the train before?

No. There was no trains on our way, right? But we worked and lived on the train.Well, that's cool.Yeah..

While he was away, his parents had a new baby, a brother named after their father, Ches. In winters, Claire, as most people call Clarence, would come back and see the family. Ches Jr. Was always interested in what his older brother was doing.

I used to always be chasing him everywhere he went. Everywhere Claire was, I was always just lagging behind, waiting for him to say, Come on.

Would he take you?

Oh, yeah. Normally.

Clarence was in his late teens back for the winter, with his little brother, still just a toddler on the back of his Skidoo, rushing through snow trips. Eventually, after years of hopping back and forth on the railways in the late 1980s, Clarence returned to the island permanently, met his wife, Sheryl, and settled down. Then the family got some devastating news that their mother, Rita, had been diagnosed with cancer. And in 1993, Rita passed away, aged just 51. With their mother gone, Clarence helped his father keep the family going.

Me as the oldest, I try to hold everybody together and make sure we all try to help out the younger kids. The youngest was my brother Ches.

I was 13. Mom passed away, so I didn't really know what was going on.

Just a few years later, there was another tragedy. Ches senior died of cancer, aged just 64, and the Hein siblings were left without a mother or a father.

I was hard losing parents, especially so close together after being through it once before.

And so Clarence took his younger brother Ches under his wing.

After that, Ches was almost like a son to me, I guess, right?

Just made sure I was on the right path and everything, and made sure I was planning out my future, helped me with that stuff. Just told me I need to decide what I was going to do. Made sure I had a plan. Somebody to point me in the right direction as a kid, someone to help take care of me, basically.

These losses brought the Heinz siblings closer. But Clarence also had his own growing family to support. And it was at work that the seeds of a mystery really began to take root in Clarence's life. After the cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s, many Newfoundlanders found new work, constructing oil platforms which were designed to drill for oil, not far from the fishing grounds. The most important of these was the 600 kiloton Hibernia oil platform that was being built in Trinity Bay. It's 1993. Clarence has just started work as a welder at the huge bull arm construction site. On any given day, there are as many as 2,000 workers on site.

The very first day I was in there, it was in orientation, and there was a guy there across a couple of tables over, waving to me, and I waved back.

Clarence doesn't recognize the guy. He's just being polite.

After orientation was over, he came over, and he just grabbed me from behind. And he said, What are you doing, Cliff? And I just turned around and basically said, Oh, you get me mixed up on that Cliff. I said, Clarence, how are you doing? Just grabbed me on the upper waist here. Just like, tickle, more or less. Right?

That's something you do with a stranger.

No. He thought it was his next door neighbor. He said, I was wondering what Cliff was doing in here today in orientation, because he never said anything to He was talking to me last night when I was talking to him.

And so he had seen Cliff the night before.

Night before. So after I explained, I said, No, I'm Clarence. We are from Sayy Burners. He said, This is unbelievable. I honestly thought you were him.

Clarence had no idea who Clifford Avery was, but this guy seemed so sure.

He just didn't know what to say. He was just, There's no way. He said, You got to be related to the Avery. And I said, No, I'm not related to no Averys in Hillview. I just figured it was nothing, really, because I figured it got me mixed up in some other guy. And I said, Yes, that was someone looks like somebody, right?

Clarence put this incident out of his mind until a few years later, when he was living with his wife and children in a suburb called Paradise. That day, he was out shopping in the city.

I was in store in St. John's, Thies & Ross. My oldest daughter now was only probably five I was six years old, and we were just walking around the store, me and her, looking for something to buy. And this lady was singing out, singing out to Clifford, Clifford, Clifford. And she was singing out, looking towards me. I didn't answer because I'm not Clifford. I never looked. I never bothered. I thought she was singing out someone else.

The woman in this toy store was not about to let this go.

She came right up to me. She said, Clifford What are you doing in here? And I said, She's in with me, daughter, buying a few ties or whatever. She said, Why are you in St. John's? I said, I live in St. John's, Paradise. She said, When you move in here? I said, Well, I've been in here, I don't know, probably 10 years prior. She said, I didn't know you lived in here. I said, You must be getting mixed up. She's your Cliff Avery. And I said, No, I'm not Cliff Avery. I'm Clarence Hines. And pretty much that was it. I went on my own way.

Another case of mistaken identity that Clarence parked somewhere far in the back of his mind. Eventually, the Hibernia oil platform Clarence had been building was towed offshore, and many of its workers went with it. For Clarence, this meant spending many weeks at a time away from home, offshore on the rig, with nothing to look at except pipes, machinery, and the slate blue ocean as far as he could see, beyond the vast metal and concrete outpost.

The first three weeks, I loved it. You wake up in the water every morning, go to work, and you're in that one spot for 21 days. You got no outside life, only work and sleep. But I stuck it in 14 years First.

In that 14-year period, did you feel like you were... Was your life the way you wanted it to be?

No. Well, you're missing out on pretty much six months every year. Three on, three off. You're gone six months. So you missed it on your child growing up. Missed out being around your wife, family. But I done it for a living. It was a good living. So I continued doing it, and I was pretty much taking one trip at a time. I wasn't looking ahead. One more trip after three weeks. I'll go back for one more. And next thing, he got 14 years gone, which is a long time. But that was it. I thought what I had to do for me. Me against me.

This is a common Newfoundland story, and that's just life on an oil rig. Big chunks of your life are spent at this lonely outpost, the waves just passing you by. Clarence eventually did return to land full-time, and he got another job at the Bullarm Fabrication Site, this time working on a second major oil platform called Hebron. By 2014, he's got a senior position, and he settled into a routine at the fabrication site. And that's when the new cleaner, Tracy Avery, comes into his office. Although he's heard the name Avery before, this time, when Tracy starts to ask questions, things feel different.

Right away, I asked him how old he was. I'm like, Where were you born?

And when he said, Come by chance, it was just too many coincidences. Coincidences the Clarence did not want to think about.

My whole body was shaken. Like, hot flashes just overcome. And from At that point, I want no part of it.

Clarence had already lost so much, lost out in growing up without an older sister, Bernadette, who was taken by the priest, and then both his parents. He had been taught to let the mysteries lie. Maybe digging into this would open up more rooms he would rather not think about, the possibility of losses that would be too much to bear. While Clarence wanted to avoid it altogether, the Averys were determined to find out the truth, whatever it took. And one brother in particular just had to know. Clifford. Once it got in his head that this is a possibility, he needed to know the truth.

He told me, he said, You want to get a DNA test done? He said, I'll get it done with And from there, it just escalated.

You've been listening to Come By Chance, produced by Novel for CBC. The series is written and produced by me, Luke Quintin, and produced and edited by Joe Wheeler. Our Assistant Producer is Madelyne Parr. Our Field Producer is Rebecca Nolan. Sound Design and Scoring by Daniel Kemson. Roshne Nier is our digital coordinating producer. Original Music by Adam Forin. Music Supervision by Joe Wheeler and Nicolas Alexander. Our senior producers are Veronica Simmons, Willow Smith, and Damon Fairlist. Our production managers are Charlotte Wolf, Cherie Houston, and Sara Tobin. The series was developed by Madelyne Parr. Creative Director of Development and Novel is Willard Foxton. The fact checker is Valerio Rocca. Our executive producers are Max O'Brien, Cecil Fernandez, and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is our senior manager, and Arif Narani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.

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