I pulled out a stool and sat at the counter, my hands in front of me. She stood on the other side of the stove. Behind her there was a laundry room and the back door. From there, wooden steps descended to a small garden. Madeleine never took her eyes off me as she backed through the laundry room to the door. She unlocked it and pulled it open. But she didn’t turn and run. She just wanted a clear exit if she needed it. She came back to the kitchen and stood across the counter from me, knife in hand.
“Thanks for staying,” I said.
She acknowledged that with a nod, but didn’t speak.
“I’m just trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Claire,” I said. “We want the same thing.”
“Maybe.”
“How long did you know Claire?”
“Two years. We met right after she moved to Boston.”
“How did you meet?”
She shifted the knife from her right hand to her left, then rested its blade against the stone countertop. I could hear birds singing in the garden through the open back door.
“I work in the Harvard Book Store,” she said. She didn’t take her eyes from mine. They were light gray, the same shade as Claire’s. “Two years ago, she walked up to my desk and asked where to find Oliver Sacks. We looked each other up and down and decided to get a drink instead.”
She had a plainspoken Midwestern accent. She might have come to San Francisco from Boston, but I’d have bet she’d spent time in Minnesota before that. In any case, she didn’t speak anything like Olivia Gravesend, whose untraceable inflection called to mind a Connecticut Yankee raised in a Gstaad chalet.
“You were a student too?” I asked.
“I was when I met her, but I graduated a year ago. From Emerson, not Harvard.”
“You’re older than her?”
“By three years, as far as we could tell.”
“It’s not rocket science,” I said. “You take your birthday and subtract hers. She was born December twenty-ninth—”
“I told you, it’s hard to explain. Dig in to things like that—when we were born, and where—it gets weird.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either,” Madeleine said. With her free hand she was rubbing her elbow, kneading it deeply, as if she had to press hard to reach as far as the pain. “But I think Claire figured it out. She mailed me a ticket and a key to this house. She said we needed to talk. I got the letter the day she died. I saw her picture online and didn’t know what was going on. I went to her house—the Beacon Hill house, in Boston—and tried to get in. But she wasn’t there. I still thought it could be a mistake.”
“You thought it wasn’t her?”
“If there were two of us, why couldn’t there be three?” Madeleine said, as if that question explained everything. “So I came to San Francisco but she didn’t show up. I had to admit it was Claire. Not a third one, or a fourth, or whatever.”
Madeleine might have been in the air while I was talking to the nanny who’d seen her knock on Claire’s door. While I was following a blood trail through the park to find the man I’d killed, she’d been in this house waiting for a woman who was never coming home.
“Why did she ask you to come?” I asked. “What did the letter say?”
“I already told you—she wanted to talk. I figured she’d finally found something. But I still don’t know what.”
“Let’s back up,” I said. “This isn’t making sense.”
“I told you—nothing about us makes sense.”
“So you met her in the bookstore, and you looked each other over and decided to go get a drink,” I said.
“What would you do, if you looked up and saw your doppelganger?”
I was pretty sure I’d go get a drink. But I might not have invited my mirror image along. Drinking by myself was trouble enough.
“What did you talk about?” I asked.
“We found a quiet place,” Madeleine said. “Somewhere we could be alone. And the first thing she did was pull up her hair and show me the scars. She’d seen mine already. I never tried to hide them, but she did.”
I thought of the way Olivia Gravesend had shut me down as soon as I brought up the scars.
“Her mother was ashamed of them,” I said. “Eventually it rubbed off.”
“So she hid them,” Madeleine said. “First for her mother’s sake, and then it was second nature.”
“What did she tell you about them?” I asked.
“She didn’t tell me anything—she asked me what I knew. She wanted to know how I got them.”
“And what did you say?”
“The same thing I tell anyone who asks,” Madeleine said. “That I’ve always had them. The first time I used a hand mirror to see my back in the bathroom, they were there.”
“But your parents—”
“I grew up in foster homes,” Madeleine said. “In Seattle, and then in St. Paul. My parents adopted me when I was eight. Go ask them and they’ll tell you—I know more about the scars than they do. And I don’t know anything.”
“Then who are you really?” I asked.
“If Claire were alive, you could ask her the same thing. Or you could go ask her mother. You don’t really think Olivia Gravesend gave birth to Claire, do you? Claire didn’t buy it.”
Madeleine was right, of course. I’d noticed the physical difference, but hadn’t questioned it. Olivia Gravesend looked nothing like her daughter. She was shorter, and her nose was sharper. Olivia had the Gravesends’ dark hair. I’d seen portraits in two of their mansions, and raven-black hair was a family trait that went back to the 1700s. Olivia had told me she hadn’t married Claire’s father, and that Claire had never known the man. Those could both be true, if wildly deceptive, statements. I’d taken it as a given that Olivia had known her daughter’s father, even if just for one night. But maybe she’d never met him either.
“You’re the one standing here,” I said. “Who are you?”
With her free hand, she reached behind her neck. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought she was touching one of her scars.
“I never cared about any of this until I met Claire,” she said. “I was too busy getting by.”
“She changed that?”
“I was twenty-one—old enough for an adopted kid to ask the State of Washington for her original birth certificate. So I wrote to the Department of Health. As long as my birth parents hadn’t requested anonymity, I’d be within my rights.”
“And?”
“I got a certificate back,” she said. “It lists my place of birth, and my residence, as St. John Catholic Church, in Yakima. Where my parents’ names should be, it says foundling child.”
“You were abandoned in a church.”
“It says I was born October thirty-first, 1996,” Madeleine said. “But the certificate was issued on October thirty-first, 1999. Which means the health officer took a guess and said I was three.”
“What health officer?”
“It’s Washington law,” she said. “Someone finds an abandoned child, they’re supposed to call the police. The police take the kid to the local health officer to figure out an approximate birthday. Then he fills out a foundling certificate.”
“Who named you Madeleine?”
“The health officer, by law,” she said. “Maybe it was his mother’s name. When I was adopted, I got a new birth certificate. I became Madeleine Adair. But before that, I was Madeleine St. John.”
“After the church where they found you.”
She nodded.
“You don’t remember any of this?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “At least nothing I can get my hands around. I remember sitting on a bed and looking at a blue curtain, and there was a woman on a chair next to me, and I remember knowing it was too late at night. I was supposed to be asleep, and I wasn’t, and there were people coming in and out from behind the curtain, and I was afraid and thought maybe I was in trouble.”
“That was t
he hospital?” I asked. “Where they took you right after the church?”
“I guess.”
“Anything else?”
“I remember riding in a car. I think it was my first time in a car. Maybe my first time seeing a car. It was night, and there were bugs hitting the windshield—splat, splat—and everything was very fast.”
“But you don’t know who was driving?”
She shook her head.
“Do you know how many times I’ve tried to remember that face? How many times I got drunk in high school, and then lay down on the floor and watched the ceiling spin, and thought maybe—maybe this time—I’d remember?”
“I can guess.”
“Claire tried to walk me through it. She tried to jog my memory—she picked me up once, at my apartment. Three in the morning, and she came up and knocked until I woke up. She made me come downstairs and get in her car, and she drove me out of the city and into the woods. A spring night, and she was on some winding back road that followed a stream. Going fast, so the mayflies would hit the glass. And I was crying, because I couldn’t remember, and I knew how much she wanted me to.”
“What about Claire?” I asked. “Didn’t she have a birth certificate?”
Madeleine nodded. She began rubbing at her elbow again.
“I have a copy upstairs,” she said. “In my suitcase. It says she was born December twenty-ninth, 1999. In St. Thomas.”
“The Virgin Islands?”
“Yeah.”
“Was she a foundling?”
“Not according to the certificate,” Madeleine said. “It lists the mother as Olivia Gravesend. The father is unknown.”
If everything Madeleine told me was true, then three months after she turned up in a Yakima church, Olivia went to the Caribbean and gave birth to a baby girl who would grow up to look exactly like Madeleine. Including the scars. I tried to imagine a pregnant billionaire, who could choose any hospital in the world, going to the Caribbean to deliver her child.
“I’ve never met Olivia Gravesend,” Madeleine said. “But I’ve seen her picture. What do you think?”
I didn’t answer that. I had a client to protect. What I thought about her was private, and when I dealt with her, it would be just the two of us.
“What about Claire?” I asked. “If she wasn’t related to Olivia, were you related to each other?”
“We thought it was more than that,” Madeleine said. “That day we met, after we left the bar? We went back to her house, got online, and ordered a DNA kinship test. It came in three days, and she called me. We used the swabs in front of each other, and sent them back by FedEx. A week later we got the results. We were the same.”
“The same?”
“The lab tested seven hundred thousand genes against each other. They all lined up.”
“What does that mean?”
“That we’re identical,” Madeleine said. “Monozygotic twins. There was one egg, fertilized by one sperm. The zygote split in two, and we grew into what we are—the same.”
“That’s not possible. Not if you’re three years older than Claire.”
She’d started shaking her head before I even finished the first sentence.
“You can freeze embryos,” she said. “You can keep them on ice for years. Decades. And then you implant them. So we could have started from the same zygote. But I got implanted first. Claire stayed in the freezer. We might have been born from the same woman, or we might have had different birth mothers. Surrogates, I guess.”
I studied her face. She stood across from me, one hand on her hip and the other tapping the knife’s blade against the counter. Her eyes stayed on mine.
“You’re not kidding, are you?” I asked. “You guys studied this. And you really believed it.”
“I told you,” Madeleine said. “Everything about us is complicated.”
I couldn’t disagree with that. She was certainly complicating my life. I wanted to verify the things she’d told me, which would mean hours on the phone and in front of a computer. I wanted to drive down to Carmel and talk to Olivia Gravesend. I didn’t want to do either of those things with Madeleine looking over my shoulder. But at the same time, I couldn’t leave her alone. She might run off, which would be even worse than having her around.
14
“What do we do now?” she asked.
I looked at my watch, then at her knife.
“If you trust me enough to put that down, we could get lunch.”
She unzipped her purse and put the knife inside it. It was long enough that its handle protruded from the top.
“Compromise,” she said.
“Fine.”
We could have gone on foot to a restaurant on Chestnut Street, but neither of us thought it’d be a great idea to have Madeleine walking around this neighborhood. If Claire had made any friends here, by now they probably knew she was dead. Seeing her stroll past would do more than raise an eyebrow. So she called a car. I sat next to the driver, up front, and she was behind me. The purse was in her lap, her fingers on the knife’s handle.
We got sandwiches and mineral water at a coffee shop, and sat at a table near the back.
“Does Olivia know about you?”
“God, no,” Madeleine said. “Claire didn’t tell her anything about this.”
“She was afraid she’d get cut out if she rocked the boat?”
“She never said it that way.”
“What did she say?”
“Mother’s sensitive,” Madeleine said. “I shouldn’t upset her.”
When Madeleine imitated Claire, her easy Midwestern accent disappeared. Instead there was the Gravesend inflection. If you couldn’t quite call it Old World, you could call it Old Money. I thought about the weight of the money that followed Claire wherever she went. It would have expanded her life, but it also drew a circle around her. She might have seemed like an easy target.
“So it was all about the money,” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“What happened to your arm?” I asked. “You keep rubbing your elbow.”
“It’s nothing.” She took her hand away and set it on the table. “It’s arthritis. I’ve had it a while.”
“At your age?”
“Claire had it too. So that makes two of us.”
“Any other medical issues with you two?”
“Crap vision,” Madeleine said. “I wear contacts but need reading glasses, if it’s dark.”
“And Claire?”
“She had laser surgery. Some specialist in Tokyo.”
“Anything else?”
She shook her head, which was just as well. I wasn’t sure what I could do with anything she was telling me. So I changed the subject.
“What about the San Francisco house?” I asked. “Does Olivia know about it?”
“I thought she gave you the keys.”
“That was for Boston,” I admitted. “I went there and found keys in Claire’s desk. And I haven’t said anything to Olivia yet. Was Claire secretive about the place here?”
“I’d never heard of it until I got the letter,” Madeleine said. She took her sandwich apart and picked at it with her fork. “Why?”
“Claire’s state of mind,” I said. “I want to know how she was behaving at the end.”
Which was partially true. I was also trying to figure out if her house was a safe place to stay. I didn’t want to sleep in my apartment as long as it was bugged. And I didn’t want Madeleine sleeping in Claire’s place if there was a chance another masked man would break in during the night.
“Do you think she jumped?” Madeleine asked.
In truth, at that point I didn’t know what I thought.
“Do you?” I asked.
“She wouldn’t have done it,” Madeleine said. She shook her head with some conviction. “She was getting close. She wanted to talk to me. This thing was her obsession, but it wasn’t driving her mad. She just wanted to know where she came from.”
“It sounds like it was more her obsession than yours.”
“Why wouldn’t it have been?” Madeleine asked. “I grew up knowing my parents weren’t my own. I had a borrowed last name. My past was a black box. I didn’t learn to accept it. It’s how it always was. But for Claire?”
“How was it for Claire?”
“She had all her shit together, had her life tied up with a nice bow. Then she walked into a bookstore and met me.”
“But you don’t know what she found,” I said. “Do you?”
“I don’t.”
“How are you?” I asked. “I mean, under stress. When things aren’t going well, how do you hold up?”
“You’re asking if I think about killing myself. You’re thinking if it’s a predisposition to act that way, and Claire and I were twins, then we’d do the same thing.”
“Something like that.”
“I’ve never thought about suicide,” Madeleine said. “And I haven’t always had it so easy. I didn’t have a staff. I couldn’t jet to Europe for a different perspective on my problems.”
Several times now she’d pointed out the contrast between her upbringing and Claire’s. I wondered what lay beneath that. Jealousy doesn’t have to lead to anything. Plans aren’t the same as actions. Yet the motive was undeniable, and Madeleine’s resemblance to Claire gave her an opportunity. Her plan might simply have been to erase and replace Claire, and walk into her millions. But it could have been even more complicated. There could be angles I hadn’t imagined. I had to be cautious.
I pulled out my phone and lifted it, screen facing away from her.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to take this call.”
I stood up and walked outside, not looking back at her. On the sidewalk, with my back to the window, I dialed my source in Homicide Detail. Elijah answered on the fifth ring, his voice heavy. Usually he didn’t get out of the Hall of Justice until seven a.m.
“Crowe?”
“That’s right,” I said. “You and Jeremiah want to make a little extra money this week?”
Elijah and his brother lived in an apartment above their uncle’s Mission Street appliance shop. Jeremiah worked days to Elijah’s nights, which meant they’d go a month at a stretch without seeing each other. They communicated via notes on the refrigerator, and when they ran surveillance jobs for me, they could patch together twenty-four-hour coverage with a couple of sticky notes, a delivery van, and a shared bus pass.
Blood Relations Page 10