Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  “Part?”

  I’d thrown in the comments about twins and frozen embryos to see how she’d react. But she just looked confused.

  “She wanted to know where she came from,” I said, nudging a little harder.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Then I’ll tell you what you’re not telling me—Claire wanted to know where she was born,” I said. “She wanted to know who she really was. And why she had those scars.”

  Olivia Gravesend opened the pack of cigarettes and looked into it. The lie was coming apart. I could tell from her posture. She’d been rod straight in defiance the last time I saw her. All that support had come out of her spine.

  “She was my daughter. My Claire.”

  “Mrs. Gravesend,” I said. “I can’t help if you’re not straight with me.”

  “I’ll show you her birth certificate, if you don’t believe me—”

  “The one that says she was born in the Virgin Islands. That you’re the mother and the father is unknown.”

  She looked up sharply, then nodded.

  “You found a copy in Boston. Or got one from her school.”

  It would be easier to let her think that.

  “Picture it from my point of view. I’m sitting here looking at the sixth-richest woman in the world—”

  “Fifth.”

  “Okay. Fifth. You were forty-eight years old, and well educated. Why would you go to the Caribbean? The hospital in Charlotte Amalie sends anything serious to Puerto Rico.”

  “I brought my own doctor,” she said. “It was a natural birth, at home. We have a place there, in the old town, overlooking the bay—I wanted—”

  “It’s bullshit,” I said. I’d spoken quietly, but she stopped talking. So I went on. “I believe you’ve got a house there. And I’m sure you had a doctor who’d do anything you asked.”

  “Crowe.”

  “I’m not saying you did anything wrong,” I said. “From a moral perspective. From a legal perspective, it’s a different story. You broke plenty of laws.”

  “You need to understand.”

  “I do,” I said. “Driving down, I figured it out. You found Claire somewhere. She’d been abandoned, and was sick. You couldn’t stand to let her out of your sight. You brought her to St. Thomas, and sent your doctor to the vital statistics clerk. He reported a home birth. You figured they wouldn’t ask too many questions. If they did, so what? You could buy cooperation. And at the end, Claire would get a U.S. birth certificate.”

  My client had stopped looking at me. Quietly, she took a cigarette from her pack. The last one, I saw. She lit it, and blew smoke to the side. Then she turned to face me.

  “And the Gravesend name,” she said. “She got that, too. That was the main thing.”

  “So it’s true?”

  “My name is what mattered. It was supposed to right the wrongs that had been done to her.”

  She turned to face me, then held up her hands, twelve inches apart. The cigarette was between her left thumb and forefinger.

  “She was this big, the first time I saw her. A tiny thing. Purple and screaming. And still perfect in every way. She glowed—you have no idea.”

  “I can picture it.”

  “You can’t, Crowe. No one understands until they’ve seen it,” she said. “Not unless you have one.”

  “I don’t.”

  She blew smoke and nodded.

  “I knew it the first time I saw you. Because I used to look the same way—as if I could put everything that mattered in one bag, and leave.”

  “But you wanted children.”

  “I did,” she said. “And, god, did I try. Look at me. At who I was back then. I could get anything I wanted. Except one thing. And then, just when I had given up, I had her in my arms. What do you think it would have taken to make me let go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” she said. “The second I picked her up, I understood if I put her into the system, there was no guarantee I’d get her out again. It’s not finders keepers. Not for little children. It’s a labyrinth. Children get lost in it. Do you know what I was most afraid of, Crowe?”

  “No.”

  “That whoever did that to her—drilled the holes in her back, abandoned her to starve—might someday come back. He could lay a claim on her. To keep her safe, to give her any kind of life at all, I had to change the rules.”

  “Break them, you mean.”

  “If it works, it doesn’t matter.”

  “You made her vanish, and then reappear.”

  She took one last drag on the cigarette and flicked the butt over the railing. It spun out over the lower terrace, got a lift from the wind, and then plummeted toward the ocean.

  “When she came back into the world, she was a Gravesend. And I was her mother.”

  “We’re going to need to start over,” I said. “You need to tell me from the beginning.”

  She stood up, and so did I.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “All right.”

  16

  We relocated to a walnut-paneled barroom. Some ancestral Gravesend had gone all out. There were batwing saloon doors, and polished brass tap handles, and a view across the Pacific that stretched toward a blue eternity. The butler came from somewhere, summoned by a means I hadn’t noticed.

  “Brandy for me,” Mrs. Gravesend said. “And, Crowe—what’s yours?”

  “Anything’s fine. Brandy, if that’s what you’re having.”

  He poured our brandies and brought them to us at a table by the window. We sat with the snifter glasses between us and waited for the old man to leave. When he had, Olivia drank a small sip and began without any sort of prompt from me.

  “I’d been involved in the Mission Carmel my whole life. I’m talking about the minor basilica, on Rio Road—San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo. I was baptized there, and so was my mother. And I helped out whenever anyone asked. To the point that if something came up—if they needed to fix the roof, if some idiot came at night with a can of spray paint—the bishop knew he could call me. And I would make it right.”

  “Okay.”

  She took another drink of her brandy, and I did the same.

  “On October twenty-ninth, 1999, the bishop called me with something else. The parish priest had been late in the chapel, cleaning up after a wedding. He heard a knock at the door, then cries.”

  “Where did he find her?”

  “Right outside the chapel doors. Swaddled up, and in a box. He saw the taillights of the car, racing off.”

  “She was in a cardboard box?”

  “The kind you’d keep files in, with cutouts for handles. A banker’s box.”

  “Okay.”

  “I still have it,” she said. “The swaddle, too. And photographs I took, to show how she was. What they’d done to her.”

  “You have all that here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the first time we met?”

  She drank the rest of her brandy. Before she set the glass back on the table, the butler came in through a side door. He wiped down our table with a white towel. I’d hardly touched my drink, but he refilled both our glasses. I wondered how Olivia could stand to live in a house like this. She might have privacy if she snuck out a window and climbed onto the roof—but even that wasn’t a given. Watching on my cell phone in Boston, I’d seen a man planting bugs in my apartment, and I hadn’t been home since. I wasn’t sure I could ever go back there again.

  When the butler was gone again, she said: “I didn’t tell you because it didn’t matter.”

  “How could it not matter?”

  “Claire didn’t know. She never had any idea. She was my daughter, and that’s all.”

  “There were at least five people who knew otherwise.”

  “The bishop died years ago,” Mrs. Gravesend said. “Cancer. The priest never knew what the bishop and I arranged
. And anyway, he was killed in Uganda. Less than a month later. I paid to fly him home.”

  “And the doctor?” I asked. “Did he die too?”

  “No idea. He took other employment.”

  “When?”

  “Claire was three. So I doubt he told her anything. And he never knew where I got her, or how.”

  “You had the same butler back then?”

  She glanced at the door he’d disappeared behind.

  “Mr. Richards would never tell anyone.”

  “Even Claire? If she asked him straight out?”

  “Never.”

  “There’s also the person who dropped her off,” I said. “Maybe her father. What if you were right twenty years ago, and that person wanted her back? What if he was looking? If Claire wasn’t the only one searching, that doubles the chances of one of them finding the other. Which is the kind of thing I’d need to know.”

  She spent a while considering that.

  “I should have told you,” she said. “And I’m sorry. You get so used to a story, it becomes the truth.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said. And then, when I saw her face, I tried to soften the blow. “But it doesn’t make any difference. I haven’t lost that much time.”

  “Then maybe I should have told her,” Mrs. Gravesend said. “If she knew how I felt about it—that it was dangerous—maybe she’d have done everything differently.”

  “You were just trying to protect her,” I said.

  But I agreed with her. She should have warned Claire. If she had, her daughter might be alive right now.

  “What was she like when you found her—aside from the wounds?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Any other medical problems?”

  “She was weak. She was malnourished and underweight. She had IV marks in her arms.”

  “Anything that didn’t go away, with time and care?”

  “No.”

  “When did she get arthritis?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “She stopped running track in high school—her knees hurt. No one ever said arthritis. Who told you that?”

  “No one,” I answered. “When did she go to Tokyo to fix her eyes?”

  “Two years ago. She hated wearing glasses.”

  “If she’d been diagnosed with something serious—cancer, say—would she have told you?”

  “I think so. But how could she have been? The medical examiner didn’t find anything like that.”

  “True.”

  “You don’t think she jumped, do you?” she asked.

  “At this point?” I asked. “Not really.”

  We finished our drinks, and then Mrs. Gravesend walked me through the house until we reached her cavernous bedroom. As in Claire’s room, there was an armoire. My client took a key and unlocked the bottom drawer. Inside was a cardboard box. Brown, with a faux wood print on the lid. I knew the type well—they litter every law office in the country. They fill up empty offices and are stacked in hallways like building blocks. She lifted it out easily and handed it to me. There were no files in this box. I put it on the end of her bed and set the lid aside.

  Inside, there was a thin swaddling blanket, striped with blue and pink. It was folded into a neat rectangle. She’d folded it so that a line of evenly spaced bloodstains ran down the middle. The blood was rusty with age. Next to the swaddle was an envelope.

  “Those are the photographs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you wash the blanket, or wipe down the box?”

  “Of course not.”

  “How many people handled it?”

  “The priest, the bishop, and me.”

  “And the guy who dropped Claire off,” I said. “Assuming it’s a man.”

  “And him.”

  “Okay.”

  I took out the packet of photographs, then put the lid back on the box. The photos were stuck together with age. They were three-by-five prints, clean at the edges and sharp at the corners. I gathered Olivia Gravesend hadn’t looked at them in all the years she’d had them. When I pried the first photograph loose from the stack, and flipped it over to look at it, I could see why.

  Claire had been such a tiny thing. I could have cradled her in two cupped hands. She was still young enough that her eyes were more black than blue-gray. From the front, she might have looked fine. But most of the photos didn’t show her from the front. Olivia had rolled her onto her stomach and photographed her from the back. The wounds were all there, so fresh they might have been just cut. Some of them were still bleeding. Her back glistened with the sheen of antibiotic ointment. Claire’s little face was to the side so it was framed in every shot. She was screaming.

  I put the photographs back into the envelope and handed it to Olivia.

  “I’m taking the box,” I said. “I know a guy who does good forensic work. It’ll cost you, but he’s worth the money.”

  “What about the pictures?”

  “If I need them, I’ll call you.”

  The truth was I didn’t think I’d need them, and they weren’t the kind of thing I wanted to be carrying around. Better to leave them here.

  There were still hours of daylight when I left the Gravesend place. Claire’s box was in the trunk. Madeleine’s bottle of mineral water was next to it. Between those items and the hair in my wallet, there was plenty to keep my forensics guy busy. But before that, I had one stop. In Carmel, I turned off onto Rio Road and drove down to the old mission. The chapel was still a Roman Catholic basilica, but the square of barracks-like buildings beside it had become a museum. There was a parking lot with room for fifty cars, and almost every space was empty. I got out of my car and went across the paved plaza toward the chapel. A fountain gurgled beneath a leaning stand of Spanish bayonet plants. The front façade of the chapel had a Moorish bell tower on the left, and a shorter tower on the right. It looked like the kind of place James Bowie and Davy Crockett would choose for a last stand. I went up to the door and found it unlocked, so I stepped through, into the cool shadows of the chapel.

  Inside, it smelled of candlewax and smoke. Old wood and damp earthen walls.

  A gray-haired man in workman’s clothes was sitting in the front pew. He didn’t turn around when I came in. There was no one else in the chapel. A couple of votive candles flickered in a niche along the side wall. I took a seat in the back row of pews, and waited.

  After ten minutes, the man rose and started down the aisle. Now I could see that he had a white and wiry beard to match his ponytail. There were dirt stains on the knees of his jeans, and his forearms were torn up from working in the roses. A time-blurred tattoo marked his forearm. A crucifix that bore the silhouette of Christ, knees bent and head down. I watched him come toward the door. He stopped when he was even with me.

  “You need me?”

  “Do you work here?”

  “Not for money.”

  “You’re a volunteer?”

  “Since I retired—fifteen, sixteen years.”

  That was a disappointment. He hadn’t been at the mission the night Claire arrived. But in sixteen years, he could have talked to a lot of people. He could have picked up the institutional memories.

  “You got a minute?” I said. “I’m trying to find out about a priest. Before your time, but not much.”

  “Let’s go outside.”

  I followed him out, and we went to the parking lot. Aside from mine, there were three other occupied spaces. I thought he’d walk to the old Mazda pickup truck, but when he took out his keys and clicked on the fob, a BMW’s lights flashed. The vanity plate said TOPDOC. The plate holder was made of polished pink metal. He leaned against the trunk, and saw me eyeing the car.

  “My girlfriend’s,” he said. “I’m supposed to get the oil changed.”

  I handed him my card. Leland Crowe. Private Investigations.

  “My client is a young lady, and she’s looking for her family,” I said. “When
she was a baby, someone dumped her. Here, at the mission. A priest found her.”

  “When was this?”

  “Twenty years ago. October of ’ninety-nine.”

  “I never heard about a baby.”

  “The priest went to Africa right after he found the girl. And he got killed there.”

  His eyebrows came together, rearranging the creases in his face.

  “Why does he matter?”

  “He saw the car that dropped her off. He’s gone, but maybe he said something to someone. Maybe he kept a journal. I don’t think he did anything wrong, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “You can go see him, if you want.”

  “What?”

  “If you’re talking about a priest who died in Africa, we must be thinking of the same guy,” he said. He pushed himself up from the car’s trunk and pointed back at the mission. “He’s right around the side of the chapel, up against the wall. I cleared the weeds around his grave this afternoon.”

  I walked back across the courtyard and found the little cemetery alongside the chapel. Most of the older graves were unmarked except for abalone shell outlines. Those likely dated back to the eighteenth century. But I found one headstone from the 1930s, and then I found a small black stone with a bronze plaque. I knelt down and brushed some of the dust from the bottom lines:

  THE RIGHT REV. DAVID E. MARTINEZ

  Born August 15, 1964, in Salinas, California,

  This beloved pastor of Carmel gave his life in defense of three children,

  Kibaale, Uganda, February 10, 2000.

  Agnus Dei

  Olivia Gravesend’s second story was holding together better than her first. I walked past the chapel’s long shadow and found my way into the museum. A woman was locking up the front door. I asked her about the Right Rev. David Martinez. Though she knew he was buried beside the chapel, she hadn’t known him. Nor had she heard of a little girl getting dropped off in the middle of the night twenty years ago. She did know that the previous bishop of the Monterey Diocese, Martin Pascutti, had died a while back. Cancer, she thought. I thanked her, and let her go ahead of me to the parking lot. Once her little Mazda truck was gone, my car was the last one left. I unlocked the Beast, swung into the low driver’s seat, and hit the ignition.