Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  19

  Madeleine didn’t sleep for long.

  For ten minutes around sunrise, the sky was pink and underlit. Out the study window, the bridge’s south tower was glowing a rich golden red. Then the sun got above the low clouds, the morning became gray and shadowless, and Madeleine woke up. Downstairs, she opened her bedroom door. Instead of going up, her footsteps led down. I listened for the front door, but she didn’t head that way. I heard kitchen sounds: water running, beans in a coffee grinder. I gathered what I’d found in Claire’s desk and went downstairs.

  “Good morning,” Madeleine said. “Again.”

  She’d ground the coffee and put a kettle on the stove. Now she was looking through the cabinets.

  “I saw a French press,” I said. “Up, and to the right.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I have a cup?”

  “Of course,” she said. “How was Mrs. Gravesend?”

  “Upset, but understandably so.”

  “I meant, what did you learn?”

  “At first she stuck to her story—Claire was her biological daughter, born in the Virgin Islands. But she opened up once I challenged her.”

  “Claire was a foundling too.”

  I nodded.

  “She was left at the Carmel Mission, bloody wounds up and down her spine. This was two days before you showed up in Yakima. A priest found her after someone knocked on the chapel door. But he got killed in Africa. The only other person who knew about it was the bishop—and he’s dead too. Cancer.”

  “So what now?”

  “Coffee,” I said. “And then I have some questions.”

  She finished making the coffee, and then when we each had a mug of it, I began to show her what I’d brought from upstairs. The first thing was a slim Moleskine notebook. It was dog-eared and bent, as though Claire had been in the habit of shoving it deep into her purse or her pockets to keep it out of sight.

  “In Boston, I found two keys,” I said. “One of them opened the front door. The other fit a lockbox behind the Dalí print in her study. And that’s where I found this.”

  “What is it?”

  “You tell me.”

  I passed the notebook across to her. She slid the elastic strap off its cover and opened it. For five minutes I drank my coffee and watched her read. When she looked up, I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

  “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Okay.”

  “Except, it sort of fits.”

  “How?”

  “Look at this,” she said. “She wasn’t asking questions about police reports, or abandoned children, or child abuse rings. She was thinking about science, and research. Which makes sense, for Claire. She always leaned in that direction. One night we sat out in her back patio, by the fire—you saw that?”

  I nodded.

  “So we sat there, and she wanted to talk about experiments. As in, what if we were part of one?”

  “And?”

  “If we’re twins, and I’m older, then she was frozen as an embryo,” Madeleine said. “Where would you go if you wanted to find a lot of frozen embryos? Human embryos.”

  “A lab?”

  “Not just a lab. A fertility clinic. They get dozens of fertilized eggs but only implant a few of them. They keep the rest on ice.”

  “But the scars?”

  “That’s where the experiments come in.”

  I pictured a fertility doctor who was running something on the side. Either pure research or an additional income stream. Something involving genetics, since that’s where Claire had put her money.

  “What did Claire think?” I asked.

  “She didn’t know. At least not then. But she must have gotten somewhere on her own, right?” She pressed her hand on Claire’s secret journal. “These are her notes. She was interviewing people.”

  “Scientists, it looks like.”

  Whatever Claire was searching for was probably written down in this notebook. The problem was that she’d gone about her business as though she feared someone might be watching over her shoulder. Her first layer of defense was to omit her sources’ names. On top of that, she’d veiled the substance of her discussions in an incomprehensible, but quaintly Victorian, code.

  Asked Doctor A about c—, and its effect on t—. He talked for an hour, showed me cross-sections of D—’s brain, some video taken before she died. He told me about Professor B, at Columbia. Went to New York on the next train . . .

  She made it to Columbia, and found Professor B, who mentioned Source C. Source C was harder to track down, and she’d left Harvard to do it, but she eventually found him in California. She confronted him coming out of a dinner party in Santa Monica, and somehow talked him into meeting her at a bar. He was the one who told her about Madame X. The rest of the notebook—five entries spanning three pages—detailed Claire’s apparently fruitless search for Madame X.

  Madeleine read to the end, then closed the book and gave it back to me.

  “Who are these people?” she asked. “And what did she want from them?”

  The notebook wasn’t giving any answers. I had more questions after I’d read it than before I’d found it. Who was D? Why did Doctor A have cross-sections of her brain, and video taken before she died?

  “Columbia must have a faculty list,” Madeleine said. “Why not email every male professor in a scientific field and ask if he met with Claire—or someone who looked like her, if she wasn’t using her own name?”

  “I think we should wait on that,” I said. “It’s a good idea, but if someone in this notebook is connected to Claire’s death, I’d rather not telegraph our first punch.”

  “Then what?”

  I gave her the second folder I’d found upstairs, which had been in an unlocked filing cabinet. It held a small stack of monthly statements from Claire’s bank, and from her credit card company. All of the statements were addressed to the San Francisco house. Evidently she’d been living here long enough to have her mail redirected from Boston.

  “So?”

  “So other than cell phones, there’s no better way to track a person than with a credit card,” I said. “Claire didn’t have a cell phone on her—it’s not on the inventory schedule attached to her autopsy report. And she didn’t have any credit cards, either. Which means this is a lead the police don’t have. And if we can’t follow the people in her notebook, then we can do the next best thing.”

  “Follow the money.”

  “Check this out,” I said. I showed her the most recent statement. The account activity was already thirty days old. “She was getting cars from the rental places in North Beach, buying gas and lunches in towns up and down the coast. Look.”

  She read it. Then she pushed it back.

  “These are weeks old—useless, probably. You should get the most recent transactions from her bank.”

  “I’m not like the cops,” I said. “I can’t serve search warrants. And if I call the banks and start asking questions, the only thing I’ll get is a dial tone.”

  “So what do we do?”

  I showed her the file folder where I’d found Claire’s credit card statements. On the tab, she’d written her email address. Beneath that was something I didn’t understand. I hoped Madeleine did.

  “I think the top line, the email address, is her login name,” I said. “So she can manage this stuff online. Which means this thing down here is a password.”

  I pointed to the second line of Claire’s careful handwriting.

  C x x x x x x x x x 99

  “But wouldn’t that account be shut down?”

  “Why would it be?”

  “Because she’s dead.”

  “They don’t know that.”

  “The coroner or the medical examiner or whoever did an autopsy—don’t they issue a death certificate, and file it somewhere?”

  “The only place they send death certificates is the Social Security Administration. But Claire probab
ly wasn’t getting Social Security, was she?”

  “So all her accounts are still open?”

  “Whatever she had, wherever she hid it, it’s all still out there. All totally active. Bank accounts, credit lines, social media—everything.”

  Madeleine took the file folder, sliding it across the counter. I sipped my coffee, and watched as she studied the veiled password, tapping her fingertip against each x. Her lips were moving, spelling something out as she counted. She shook her head, and tried a different word. The second one must have been a better fit—she repeated it, whispering faster. Then she looked up at me.

  “Claire Bear,” she said. “It’s what her mother called her when she was little. She liked it. Sometimes she’d call herself that, admonishing herself, in her mother’s voice.”

  “She’d do what?”

  “Claire Bear, if you have one more glass of wine, your head will assuredly ache tomorrow,” Madeleine said. She sounded eerily similar to Olivia Gravesend. “Claire Bear, your gentleman caller is waiting at the restaurant, and you’re not even dressed—but I suppose it wouldn’t be the absolute worst thing in the world if you were to stand him up.”

  I pulled the folder back to my side of the counter, and tapped my finger along the spaces as I spelled out the words.

  “And she was born in ’ninety-nine,” I said. “Do you have your phone?”

  She pulled it out, and I passed her one of the statements. On the bottom of each page there was a website address. Valued Customers were invited to visit for more detailed information.

  Madeleine used her thumbs to tap in the address. Then she paused, set down the phone, and looked up.

  “It’s okay to do this?”

  “All we’re doing is taking a look. And who’s checking?”

  She considered that a while. Then she typed Claire’s login name, and the password. The screen went blank. Somewhere—I pictured a subterranean server farm in the Nevada desert—a computer was evaluating our credentials. Madeleine and I watched together, leaning from opposite sides of the counter.

  You’re almost there! Because we don’t recognize the device you’re using, please identify yourself by answering the following security questions.

  There were three questions, preselected by Claire when she set up the account. What is your favorite sports team? What was the name of your first grade teacher? In what city were you born? I glanced up at Madeleine.

  “Did she ever talk about a sports team?” I said.

  “We went to a couple of Red Sox games. She’d never been to anything like that. I think she had fun.”

  “So, the Red Sox. She went to Stevenson School, kindergarten through high school—right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I searched her bedroom, in her mother’s house,” I said. “There was a ribbon from a fourth grade science fair. Second place. And a draft of something she’d written in her senior English class.”

  “But we need her teacher’s name.”

  “She never told you?”

  “How would that have come up?”

  “I thought you stayed up all night, talking about everything.”

  “Come on.”

  I took out my burner, and dialed Olivia Gravesend. The butler answered on the second ring.

  “Gravesend residence.”

  “This is Crowe.”

  “Mrs. Gravesend is out.”

  “You’ll do,” I said. “If you know the name of Claire’s first grade teacher.”

  He paused, and I could picture the thought-wheels turning. He didn’t particularly like me, but I was the only person taking a serious look at Claire’s death. And whatever the distance imposed by their peculiar relationship, he’d loved Claire.

  “It was Mrs. Knore.”

  “Spell that.”

  “K-N-O-R-E.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Richards,” I said.

  He hung up. I turned to Madeleine.

  “Type in Mrs. Knore. That’s K—”

  “I heard.”

  She typed with her thumbs, then tapped the screen to move the cursor to the input field for the last question.

  “What about the place of birth?” she asked. “That’s kind of up for grabs.”

  “Charlotte Amalie,” I said. “For all she knew.”

  Madeleine grabbed the credit card statement. She flipped back to the first page, jabbed her finger into some text at the top that I’d paid no attention to.

  Congratulations! You’ve been a Valued Customer for one year, and you’ve already earned Gold Medallion Status! Log in to the website to learn more.

  “I met her more than a year ago,” Madeleine said. “By the time she got this card, and picked these questions, she had a pretty good idea she wasn’t born in the Virgin Islands.”

  “Did she have any hunches?”

  “She didn’t have a clue.”

  “Then type in unknown,” I said. “Let’s see what happens.”

  She typed, hit the ENTER button, and then we waited. The screen went blank again. Signals traveled and servers churned. This time, it didn’t take long.

  Welcome back, Claire! Did you know you’ve earned Gold Medallion Status? Click here to learn more.

  “They’re really pushing that medallion program,” I said.

  “If it was a card I could get, it’d just be a scam. But for her, it’s probably legit. Free hotels in Monte Carlo or something.”

  I didn’t take my eyes from the screen, but I didn’t miss the fact that she had, once again, contrasted her financial situation with Claire’s. Now she had the ability to log in to Claire’s account anytime she wanted. It could be interesting to see what she did with that.

  “Go to Account Activity,” I said.

  Madeleine tapped the link, and we both leaned in close to the phone, to read through the mundane transactional history of Claire Gravesend’s last twenty-six days on earth. If she had known the days were running out, she hadn’t done a lot to treat herself. And for a multimillionaire, she appeared to have a remarkable ability to scrounge a five-dollar lunch from a gas station. But maybe that was just because she’d been on the road a lot. She’d rent a car for a few days, and stay in motels up and down the coast, then be back in the city long enough to need a thirty-dollar trip to the grocery store. She hadn’t been going crazy. If she’d been blowing money on diamonds, on cars like the one she’d flattened, she hadn’t been doing it with this card. Though God knows she could have, with her available credit.

  We scrolled to the bottom of the list. Her second-to-last charge was a five-hundred-dollar credit hold for a room at a Mendocino bed-and-breakfast. The B&B had never undone the hold, and had never charged her for the room. That probably meant she’d never checked out, and the B&B didn’t know what to do.

  Her last charge might have been in a bar. She’d bought something for twenty-six dollars and change at a place called the Creekside.

  “Click on that one,” I said. “I want to see more.”

  Madeleine clicked on the link and we read the few lines of text that came up. There wasn’t much information. The date of the transaction, and the address and phone number of the business that had submitted it. The place was up a forest road to the northeast of Mendocino. About as remote as you could get, in that part of California. Madeleine touched the screen, her fingertip tracing beneath the date and then the address.

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  “We don’t know the time. Just that it happened the day she fell.”

  The transaction had gone through sometime after midnight, the same morning Claire had died. At least the drink fit—her autopsy report noted a blood alcohol level of point-zero-five. She hadn’t been legally drunk when she died, but she might have been when she left the bar. Mendocino was three hours north of San Francisco. A hundred and fifty miles. Some of the roads were so curvy that you couldn’t speed if you wanted to. And I’d found Claire just before five in the morning.

&nbs
p; “The timeline works,” I said. “She might’ve had a couple hours to get to the Refugio.”

  Madeleine shook her head.

  “And then what? Pick the lock, run up the stairs, and jump off the roof? For what?”

  “I didn’t say it made sense. It’s just possible.”

  “Yeah, but it really doesn’t make sense,” Madeleine said. “And if the police didn’t find her credit card, where was it? In the rental car still? At the bar?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I scanned the credit card transactions and found the rental car. Like the bed-and-breakfast, the car company had put a hold on the account. And that hold, too, hadn’t been lifted. I ran my finger under the transaction and watched Madeleine scan it.

  “So where’s the car?” she asked.

  “Maybe somewhere in the Tenderloin.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We go up to Mendocino and ask around. At the bar, and the bed-and-breakfast.”

  “We?”

  I had a feeling she’d come in handy, but I didn’t want to explain that to her. She might refuse to play along. Either on moral grounds or for simple considerations of safety.

  “You’ve got something else to do?” I asked.

  Apparently she didn’t, because she put her phone away, set her coffee mug in the sink, and spoke to me over her shoulder while she was rinsing it.

  “Give me a minute. I’ll grab some things.”

  As soon as she was upstairs, I took out my burner and texted Elijah. I told him I’d be out in an hour, mystery blonde in tow. He and Jeremiah needed to cover the empty house and follow anyone who broke in. It had taken me about twenty minutes at City Hall to find the place, and my only clue was an unmarked key. If I could do that, so could anyone else.

  20

  We reached Mendocino just before noon and passed through the town without stopping. Fifteen miles up the coast, past Fort Bragg and the village of DeHaven, we turned off Highway 1 and onto the forest road. Madeleine had been using her phone, but turned it off and set it aside.