“Was their caretaker. His wife looked after their house.”
“Where was she when the fire started?”
“At the main house, washing up after the supper dishes. I heard she saw the flames, run down there, and tried to save her family. The Carmichaels held her back till the volunteer fire department could get there . . . they knew there wasn’t any hope from the beginning.”
I set the mug down, gripped the table’s edge with icy fingers.
Galick leaned forward, eyes concerned. “Something wrong, miss? Have I upset you?”
“I shook my head. ”It’s just . . . a shock, hearing about it after all these years.“ After a pause, I asked: ”Did the Heikkinens have any other children?”
“Only the little girl who died.”
I took out a photograph of my mother and passed it over to him. It wasn’t a good picture, just a snap of her on the steps of our stucco bungalow down south. “Is this Melinda Heikkinen?”
He took a pair of glasses from a case on the table, put them on, and looked closely at it. Then he shrugged and handed it back to me. “There’s some resemblance, but. . . . She looks like she’s had a hard life.”
“She did.” I replaced the photo in my wallet. “Can you think of anyone who could tell me more about the Heikkinens?”
“Well, there’s Janet Fleming. She was Missus Heikkinen’s aunt and the little girl’s godmother. The mother was so broken up that Janet had to identify the bodies, so I guess she’d know everything there is to know about the fire.”
“Anyone else?”
“Well, of course there’s Madeline Carmichael. But she’s living down at Timber Point now, and she never sees anybody.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got my own ideas on that. It started after her husband died. Young man, only in his fifties. Heart attack.” Galick grimaced. “Carmichael was one of these pillars of the community, never drank, smoked, or womanized. Keeled over at a church service in ’Seventy-Five. Me, I’ve lived a gaudy life, as they say. Even now I eat and drink all the wrong things, and I like a cigar after dinner. And I just go on and on. Tells you a lot about the randomness of it all.”
I didn’t want to think about that randomness; it was much too soon after losing my own mother to an untimely death for that. I asked: “About Missus Carmichael . . . it was her husband’s death that turned her into a recluse?”
“No, miss.” He shook his head firmly. “My idea is that his dying was just the last straw. The seeds were planted when their little girl disappeared three years before that.”
“Disappeared?”
“It was in ’Seventy-Two, the year after the fire. The little girl was two years old, a change-of-life baby. Abigail, she was called. Abby, for short. Madeline Carmichael left her in her playpen on the verandah of their house, and she just plain vanished. At first they thought it was a kidnapping . . . the lumber company was failing, but the family still had plenty of money. But nobody ever made a ransom demand, and they never did find a trace of Abby or the person who took her.”
The base of my spine began to tingle. As a child, I’d always been smaller than others of my age. Slower in school, too. The way a child might be if she was a year younger than the age shown on her birth certificate.
Abigail Carmichael, I thought. Abby, for short.
The Catholic churchyard sat tucked back against a eucalyptus grove; the trees’ leaves caught the sunlight in a subtle shimmer, and their aromatic buds were thick under my feet. An iron fence surrounded the graves, and unpaved paths meandered among the mostly crumbling headstones. I meandered, too, shock gradually leaching away to depression. The foundations of my life were as tilted as the oldest grave marker, and I wasn’t sure I had the strength to construct a new one.
But I’d come here with a purpose, so finally I got a grip on myself and began covering the cemetery in a grid pattern.
I found them in the last row, where the fence backed up against the eucalyptus. Two small headstones set side-by-side. John and Ashley. There was room to John’s right for another grave, one that now would never be occupied.
I knelt and brushed a curl of bark from Ashley’s stone. The carving was simple, only her name and the dates. She’d been born April 6, 1969, and died February 1, 1971.
I knelt there for a long time. Then I said good bye and went home.
The old Carmichael house sat at the end of a chained-off drive that I’d earlier taken for a logging road. It was a wonder I hadn’t stumbled across it in my search for the cabin. Built of dark timber and stone, with a wide verandah running the length of the lower story, it once might have been imposing. But now the windows were boarded, birds roosted in its eaves, and all around it the forest encroached. I followed a cracked flagstone path through a lawn long gone to weeds and wildflowers to the broad front steps. Stood at their foot, my hand on the cold wrought-iron railing.
Could a child of two retain memories? I’d believed so before, but mine had turned out to be false, spoon-fed to me by the woman who had taken me from this verandah twenty-four years earlier. All the same, something in this lonely place spoke to me; I felt a sense of peace and safety that I’d never before experienced.
I hadn’t known real security; my mother’s and my life together had been too uncertain, too difficult, too shadowed by the past. Those circumstances probably accounted for my long string of failures, my inability to make my way in the world. A life built on lies and forbidden things was bound to go nowhere.
And yet it hadn’t had to be that way. All this could have been mine, had it not been for a woman unhinged by grief. I could have grown up in this once lovely home, surrounded by my real parents’ love. Perhaps if I had, my father would not have died of an untimely heart attack, and my birth mother would not have become a recluse. A sickening wave of anger swept over me, followed by a deep sadness. Tears came to my eyes, and I wiped them away.
I couldn’t afford to waste time crying. Too much time had been wasted already.
To prove my real identity, I needed the help of Madeline Carmichael’s attorney, and he took a good deal of convincing. I had to provide documentation and witnesses to my years as Ashley Heikkinen before he would consent to check Abigail Carmichael’s birth records. Most of the summer went by before he broached the subject to Mrs. Carmichael. But blood composition and the delicate whorls on feet and fingers don’t lie; finally, on a bright September afternoon, I arrived at Timber Point—alone, at the invitation of my birth mother.
I was nervous and gripped the Pinto’s wheel with damp hands as I followed the guard’s directions across a rolling seaside meadow to the Carmichael house. Like the others in this exclusive development, it was of modern design, with a silvery wood exterior that blended with the sawgrass and Scotch broom. A glass wall faced the Pacific, reflecting sun glints on the water. Along the shoreline a flock of pelicans flew south in loose formation.
I’d worn my best dress—pink cotton, too light for the season, but it was all I had—and had spent a ridiculous amount of time on my hair and make-up. As I parked the shabby Pinto in the drive, I wished I could make it disappear. My approach to the door was awkward; I stumbled on the unlandscaped ground and almost turned my ankle. The uniformed maid who admitted me gave me the kind of glance that once, as a hostess at a coffee shop, I’d reserved for customers without shirt or shoes. She showed me to a living room facing the sea and went away.
I stood in the room’s center on an Oriental carpet, unsure whether to sit or stand. Three framed photographs on a grand piano caught my attention; I went over and looked at them. A man and a woman, middle-aged and handsome. A child, perhaps a year old, in a striped romper. The child had my eyes.
“Yes, that’s Abigail.” The throaty voice—smoker’s voice—came from behind me. I turned to face the woman in the photograph. Older now, but still handsome, with upswept creamy white hair and pale porcelain skin, she wore a long caftan in some sort of soft champagne-colored fabric. No reason for Madelin
e Carmichael to get dressed; she never left the house.
She came over to me and peered at my face. For a moment her eyes were soft and questioning, then they hardened and looked away. “Please,” she said, “sit down over here.”
I followed her to two matching brocade settees positioned at right angles to the seaward window. We sat, one on each, with a coffee table between us. Mrs. Carmichael took a cigarette from a silver box on the table and lit it with a matching lighter.
Exhaling and fanning the smoke away, she said: “I have a number of things to say to you that will explain my position in this matter. First, I believe the evidence you’ve presented. You are my daughter Abigail. Melinda Heikkinen was very bitter toward my husband and me . . . if we hadn’t dismissed her husband, he wouldn’t have been passed out from drinking when the fire started. If we hadn’t kept her late at her duties that night, she would have been home and able to prevent it. If we hadn’t stopped her from plunging into the conflagration, she might have saved her child. That, I suppose, served to justify her taking our child as a replacement.”
She paused to smoke. I waited.
“The logic of what happened seems apparent at this remove,” Mrs. Carmichael added, “but at the time we didn’t think to mention Melinda as a potential suspect. She’d left Camel Rock the year before . . . even her aunt, Janet Fleming, had heard nothing from her. My husband and I had more or less put her out of our minds. And, of course, neither of us was thinking logically at the time.”
I was beginning to feel uneasy. She was speaking so analytically and dispassionately—not at all like a mother who had been reunited with her long lost child.
She went on: “I must tell you about our family. California pioneers on both sides. The Carmichaels were lumber barons. My family were merchant princes engaging in the China trade. Abigail was the last of both lines, born to carry on our tradition. Surely you can understand why this matter is so . . . difficult.”
She was speaking of Abigail as someone separate from me. “What matter?” I asked.
“That rôle in life, the one Abigail was born to, takes a certain type of individual. My Abby, the child I would have raised had it not been for Melinda Heikkinen, would not have turned out so. . . .” She bit her lower lip, looked away at the sea.
“So what, Missus Carmichael?”
She shook her head, crushing out her cigarette.
A wave of humiliation swept over me. I glanced down at my cheap pink dress, at a chip in the polish on my thumbnail. When I raised my eyes, my birth mother was examining me with faint distaste.
I’d always had a temper; now it rose, and I gave in to it. “So what, Missus Carmichael?” I repeated. “So common?”
She winced but didn’t reply.
I said: “I suppose you think it’s your right to judge a person on her appearance or her financial situation. But you should remember that my life hasn’t been easy . . . not like yours. Melinda Heikkinen could never make ends meet. We lived in a valley town east of L.A. She was sick a lot. I had to work from the time I was fourteen. There was trouble with gangs in our neighborhood.”
Then I paused, hearing myself. No, I would not do this. I would not whine or beg.
“I wasn’t brought up to complain,” I continued, “and I’m not complaining now. In spite of working, I graduated high school with honors. I got a small scholarship, and Melinda persuaded me to go to college. She helped out financially when she could. I didn’t finish, but that was my own fault. Whatever mistakes I’ve made are my own doing, not Melinda’s. Maybe she told me lies about our life here on the coast, but they gave me something to hang on to. A lot of the time they were all I had, and now they’ve been taken from me. But I’m still not complaining.”
Madeline Carmichael’s dispassionate façade cracked. She closed her eyes, compressed her lips. After a moment she said: “How can you defend that woman?”
“For twenty-four years she was the only mother I knew.”
Her eyes remained closed. She said: “Please, I will pay you any amount of money if you will go away and pretend this meeting never took place.”
For a moment I couldn’t speak. Then I exclaimed: “I don’t want your money! This is not about money!”
“What, then?”
“What do I want? I thought I wanted my real mother.”
“And now that you’ve met me, you’re not sure you do.” She opened her eyes, looked directly into mine. “Our feelings aren’t really all that different, are they, Abigail?”
I shook my head in confusion.
Madeline Carmichael took a deep breath. “Abigail, you say you lived on Melinda’s lies, that they were something to sustain you?”
I nodded.
“I’ve lived on lies, too, and they sustained me. For twenty-three years I’ve put myself to sleep with dreams of our meeting. I woke to them. No matter what I was doing, they were only a fingertip’s reach away. And now they’ve been taken from me, as yours have. My Abby, the daughter I pictured in those dreams, will never walk into this room and make everything all right. Just as the things you’ve dreamed of are never going to happen.”
I looked around the room—at the grand piano, the Oriental carpets, the antiques, and exquisite art objects. Noticed for the first time how stylized and sterile it was, how the cold expanse of glass beside me made the sea blinding and bleak.
“You’re right,” I said, standing up. “Even if you were to take me in and offer me all this, it wouldn’t be the life I wanted.”
Mrs. Carmichael extended a staying hand toward me.
I stepped back. “No. And don’t worry . . . I won’t bother you again.”
As I went out into the quicksilver afternoon and shut the door behind me, I thought that even though Melinda Heikkinen had given me a different life, she’d also offered me dreams to soften the hard times and love to ease my passage. My birth mother hadn’t even offered me coffee or tea.
On a cold, rainy December evening, Barbie Cannon and I sat at a table near the fireplace in the hotel’s tavern, drinking red wine in celebration of my good fortune.
“I can’t believe,” she said for what must have been the dozenth time, “that old lady Carmichael up and gave you her house in the hills.”
“Any more than you can believe I accepted it.”
“Well, I thought you were too proud to take her money.”
“Too proud to be bought off, but she offered the house with no strings attached. Besides, it’s in such bad shape that I’ll probably be fixing it up for the rest of my life.”
“And she probably took a big tax write-off on it. No wonder rich people stay rich.” Barbie snorted. “By the way, how come you’re still calling yourself Ashley Heikkinen?”
I shrugged. “Why not? It’s been my name for as long as I can remember. It’s a good name.”
“You’re acting awfully laid back about this whole thing.”
“You didn’t see me when I got back from Timber Point. But I’ve worked it all through. In a way, I understand how Missus Carmichael feels. The house is nice, but anything else she could have given me isn’t what I was looking for.”
“So what were you looking for?”
I stared into the fire. Madeline Carmichael’s porcelain face flashed against the background of the flames. Instead of anger I felt a tug of pity for her: a lonely woman waiting her life out, but really as dead and gone as the merchant princes, the lumber barons, the old days on this wild north coast. Then I banished the image and pictured, instead, the faces of the friends I’d made since coming to Camel Rock: Barbie, Penny and Crane, the couple who ran the herb farm, Gus Galick, and . . . now . . . Janet Fleming and her son, Stu. Remembered all the good times: dinners and walks on the beach, Penny and Crane’s fortieth wedding anniversary party, Barbie’s first photographic exhibit, a fishing trip on Gus’s trawler. And thought of all the good times to come.
“What was I looking for?” I said. “Something I found the day I got here.”
Knives at Midnight
My eyes were burning, and I felt not unlike a creature that spends a great deal of its life underground. I marked the beat-up copy of last year’s STANDARD CALIFORNIA CODES that I’d scrounged up at a used bookstore on Adams Avenue, then shut it. When I stood up, my limbs felt as if I were emerging from the creature’s burrow. I stretched, smiling.
Well, McCone, I told myself, at last one of your peculiarities is going to pay-off.
For years, I’d taken what many considered a strange pleasure in browsing through the tissue-thin pages of both the civil and penal codes. I had learned many obscure facts. For instance: It is illegal to trap birds in a public cemetery; anyone advertising merchandise that is made in whole or in part by prisoners must insert the words “convict-made” in the ad copy; stealing a dog worth $400 is grand theft. Now I could add another esoteric statute to my store of knowledge, only this one promised a big pay-off.
Somebody who thought himself above the law was about to go down—and I was the one who would topple him.
Two nights earlier, I’d flown into San Diego’s Lindbergh Field from my home base in San Francisco. Flown in on a perilous approach that always makes me, holder of both a single- and a multi-engine rating, wish I didn’t know quite so much about pilot error. On top of a perfectly natural edginess, I was aggravated with myself for giving in to my older brother John’s plea. The case he wanted me to take on for some friends sounded like one where every lead comes to a dead-end; besides, I was afraid that in my former hometown I’d become embroiled in some family crisis. The McCone clan attracts catastrophe the way normal people attract stray kittens.
John was waiting for me at the curb in his old red International Scout. When he saw me, he jumped out and enveloped me in a bear hug that made me drop both my purse and my briefcase. My travel bag swung around and whacked him on his back; he released me, grunting.
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