Stirring Up Murder

by P. D. Workman

  “Okay. You’re doing fine, so don’t mind me.”

  Vic nodded and went back to work. Erin ate her meal slowly. She didn’t want to be done when Vic was still trying to get her first few mouthfuls down.

  “How’s the research going?” Vic asked. “Did you mind being taken away from it tonight?”

  “No, not really. I keep running into dead ends and I just get frustrated. Other people seem to manage to find long-lost family members, so why can’t I?”

  “You’ve just started. Sometimes those searches take years, you know. Decades, even.”

  “Don’t tell me that!” Erin’s heart sank. “That was pre-internet. Now, it should just be a matter of doing a few searches, and then… bingo, here’s your new family!”

  “Even when you know someone’s name, it can be hard to find them on the internet. Not everybody even has email or social accounts. Some people who do still don’t leave any tracks. And since you don’t even know her name…”

  Erin shook her head and wound noodles around her chopsticks. “How can I not even know my own sister’s name? I mean… not even her birth name. How do you begin a search when you don’t even have a birth name? Every time they talk about tracing adoptees on TV, they always say ‘her birth name was…’ Where do you start if you don’t even have that?”

  “I wish I could tell you. Usually there is a friend or family member who knows the history. Or hospital records. Or an attending nurse. Pretty hard when you don’t have any of those things to start with.

  “Everybody who knew anything is dead. The hospital only keeps five years’ worth of records, and even if they did keep them longer than that, they’ve had black mold and a fire. Not just one or the other, but both!” Erin sighed in exasperation. “If I believed in God, I’d think he was trying to tell me not to look any further. Every time I think I found a way to track her down, it’s blocked.”

  “God will make a way for you.” Vic gave her a mischievous grin. “If there is a God.”

  “I can’t just sit back and rely on some power of the universe to take over and direct my life.” Erin used a pot sticker to wipe up juices on her plate. “If I did that, I never would have gotten anywhere in my life. I haven’t gotten where I was by sitting still.”

  Vic gazed at her for a minute. “No… but you didn’t get the bakery because you decided that was what you wanted to do and saved up and bought it.”

  “No,” Erin admitted. “I just took the opportunity when it was presented to me. I thought this was my one chance to do what I always wanted to and make gluten-free baking for people with dietary restrictions.”

  “But you don’t think an opportunity like that was more than just chance? Maybe fate? Or God? Or the universe?”

  “It wasn’t chance or God. It was Clementine. I guess she knew how much I liked it when she ran the tea shop. She didn’t have any other living relatives. So she left it to me.” Erin shrugged. There was nothing coincidental about that.

  “I’m not convinced it wasn’t by divine design. How do you explain the fact that you wanted to start a baking business and that’s the opportunity that Clementine gave you?”

  “I hadn’t ever thought I’d be able to start a baking business. I just liked making gluten-free food for friends and clients who wanted it. I liked baking because I liked working with Clementine when I was a little girl. It’s no coincidence or design. It’s just history.”

  “Okay.” Vic gave a wide shrug. “Whatever you say, Erin. It was all just you and Clementine and your history together. I just think it all fits together rather nicely. That doesn’t always happen, you know. I liked hunting when I was little, but if my Uncle Archibald left me a hunting lodge, I wouldn’t run it. I’d just liquidate it and get out of there.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “No. Because for you it was meant to be.”

  Chapter Three

  W

  hen Erin got home, she invited Vic to join her for the evening, but Vic sighed and shook her head.

  “No, it’s okay. You’ve got things to get done tonight, I’m sure, and we need to get to bed soon.”

  Having to start baking bread before dawn, they always tried to be early to bed and very early to rise. Erin sensed that Vic had other things on her mind.

  “Are you sure? We can talk if you want. I don’t have anything that has to be done tonight. Just taking care of the animals and making my lists for tomorrow.”

  “Goodness, if you don’t have your lists made yet, I’d better leave you alone for sure. You’ll need at least a couple of hours for that.”

  “I’m not that bad,” Erin protested. “No more than an hour, I swear.”

  Vic laughed.

  “Really, though, Vicky. If you want to talk, or just sit together a while…” Erin couldn’t quite bring herself to use the local ‘set a spell.’

  “We just had dinner. I’m talked out. Thanks, though.”

  “Okay. Have a good night. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Vic nodded and headed for her loft apartment. Erin shut and locked the door. Maybe she’d read a bit before bed. Or have a long soak in the tub. Or look over Clementine’s genealogy books for some tiny clue that would help her to find her sister.

  But as she had told Vic, she still had to take care of the animals, feeding them and changing their litter. And she needed to write up her lists for the next day.

  She had just finished changing Orange Blossom’s and Marshmallow’s litter and was again considering the idea of a nice hot bath when the doorbell rang.

  Erin checked the peephole before opening the door. There had been too many threats to her life over the last year to be casual about opening the door. But she only needed a peek to see that it was Terry Piper. She opened the door and invited him and K9 in.

  “Your light was still on, or I wouldn’t have stopped,” Terry said. “You aren’t headed off to bed yet?”

  “No, not yet. I can visit for a bit. I still have to write up some lists—and no comments from the peanut gallery.”

  He grinned. “You’re not that bad.”

  “Saying it that way makes me feel worse than when Vic wisecracks about it. I can’t help it if lists make me feel good. Call me weird, but it’s my way of calming down and getting everything out of my head so I can sleep at night.”

  “If you can multi-task, we can visit at the same time as you are writing. Then you don’t lose any time because I’m here. Or you’ll lose less, anyway.”

  “Sounds good.”

  They both sat down. Neither of the animals had had much attention, with Erin being out to dinner and then working on other things, so they both wanted her attention. Marshmallow hopped over and started nibbling at her bare toes and Orange Blossom jumped up beside Erin onto the arm of the couch, keeping a close eye on K9. Erin laughed. She gave Orange Blossom an ear scratch and patted Marshmallow with her foot. It was going to be a few minutes before she would be able to get started on her list.

  “Vic said you’ve been looking for your half-sister,” Terry commented. “Any luck?”

  “No. She was asking me about it tonight too. But I’m really not getting anywhere. I kept putting it off over the holiday season, because I always had so much going on and wanted to be able to really give it my attention, but I feel like I’ve lost momentum by not getting right onto it.”

  “It’s been twenty years. It’s not like a few more months makes that much difference.”

  “Logically, that makes sense, but that’s not what it feels like.”

  “You’re not getting anything from the hospital or government searches? I thought you could search adoption records now.”

  “If you’re the adoptee, yes. But you have to have standing in the file, and that’s only the adoptee and the birth parents. Biological siblings are just like the public. No access.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s not too helpful.”

  “No. I thought getting my own DHS records was hard, but that’s nothing co
mpared to the roadblocks I’m running into here.”

  “What about court records?”

  “What?”

  “Court records are public, for the most part.”

  “Wouldn’t that be just the same as the adoption registry information?”

  “No. I don’t think so. You should be able to do a search.”

  “How? Is it a name search? Because I don’t know what her name was either before or after adoption.”

  “Normally, yes, but I think you can get paper copies of adoption orders for a certain window of time. If you had all of the adoption records for the year after she was born… would that do it?”

  Erin nodded slowly. “I guess it’s a start. It would at least reduce the pool from all of the residents of Tennessee to everyone who was adopted during that period.”

  “Only half of them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the other half are boys.”

  “Oh! Duh. Of course. Still, it’s going to be a lot of names to sift through, isn’t it?”

  “It shouldn’t be too bad. Just this county, girls, the year after your sister was born. It should be a fairly small set.”

  “That’s a really good idea. I’ll see what they’ll let me do next time I go to the city.”

  “What about adoption reunion boards? It seems like they’re all over the internet.”

  “It all seems a little daunting.”

  “I could help you with it, if you like. I don’t think it would be too hard. And it can’t hurt anything. Just putting your name on a forum with the information that you know. Place, hospital, birth date. A lot of people don’t have any more information than that.”

  “Maybe you could use some of your police databases,” Erin suggested.

  “And what would I look for? Search DMV for all women with that date of birth? There’s no guarantee that she still lives in Tennessee or has a driver’s license. You didn’t stay here. You moved to Maine, and all over the east coast. At least I had a name when I was checking your background. Even then, you weren’t so easy to keep track of when you kept changing it.”

  Erin could feel herself blushing. She shrugged. He had asked her before about her past, but there were plenty of things from her past life that she just wasn’t willing to have to tell him about. A person was entitled to a little privacy.

  Orange Blossom had settled in beside Erin and was purring happily and Marshmallow was sprawled on top of her feet. Erin picked up the notepad that Vic had given to her for Christmas and opened it up to list everything she needed to remember for the next day. Terry bent down to scratch K9’s ears, then leaned back in his seat, relaxing.

  “I have an ulterior motive to helping you find your sister.”

  Erin didn’t lift her eyes from the page. “Mm-hm?”

  “You realize that if she is found, she’s entitled to half of the Plaint estate?”

  At this, Erin did look up. “What?”

  “Her father was Adam Plaint.”

  “Well, yes. That’s what it looks like, anyway. Obviously, no one has done a paternity test.”

  “Assuming her parents had a pretty good idea about when they had been with each other, your parents were both pretty sure she was not your father’s.”

  “Right.” Erin nodded, saddened by this. As excited as she was to find she had a sister, it would have been even more amazing if she had been Erin’s full sister.

  “Well, if Adam does prove to be her father, then half of Trenton’s estate would go to her. He died intestate, so it goes first to his parents—who we now know are both dead—and then to his siblings. The sister, Sophie, is dead. That leaves Davis and your half-sister, who is also Trenton’s half-sister.”

  “Davis can’t inherit Trenton’s estate anymore, can he? He’s in prison.”

  “That doesn’t stop him from inheriting, unless it can be proven that he had something to do with Trenton’s death. And so far, all we have on that front is speculation.”

  Chapter Four

  T

  he fixer presented his thoughts to his boss and waited for his feedback.

  “These all seem half-baked,” the boss said finally, shaking his head. “What are the chances that any of these approaches are going to work? We can’t leave it to chance.”

  “If you don’t want her killed or kidnapped, then everything else is just chance. All I can do is give her a push in the right direction and see how she responds. I’m usually pretty good at reading people, figuring out how to influence them. But some people… Even when you think you’ve found the right trigger, they still don’t respond.” He shook his head, his mouth twisting into a bitter grimace. “Some people are extremely stubborn and can’t be blackmailed or bullied.”

  “Kidnapping is no good,” the boss said, shaking his head. “It could take months, even years, to get everything sorted out. We can’t keep her under wraps for that long. It has to be voluntary. We need her to go into hiding and to stay there.”

  “So you don’t have a problem with any of the plans I’ve outlined? I can’t guarantee the success of any of them, but one of them… it only takes one of them to work.”

  “We’ve both dealt with this family before.” His boss shook his head in disgust. “You know she might respond exactly the opposite way to what you expect. If she’s anything like the other one…”

  “I can’t make any promises. There is only one permanent solution, and you said no to that.”

  “It needs to be soon,” the boss said, ignoring the suggestion. “It won’t be long before they manage to trace her.”

  He nodded and stood up. “Okay, then. I’ll do my best to get her out of the way.”

  “Do it,” the boss said. “Make sure it works.”

  Chapter Five

  E

  rin measured orange zest into the muffin batter, the sharp oils tickling her nose.

  “So you’re still looking for her?” Vic asked.

  Erin focused her attention on Vic, trying to pick up the thread of the conversation. But they hadn’t been talking about anything. There was only one person that Vic could have been referring to, though, only one person Erin was looking for.

  “Yes, Terry gave me some other suggestions of places to look or get searches. I kept running into dead ends.”

  “You think it will work? You’ll be able to find her? Even though you don’t know her name?”

  “I don’t know.” Erin gave the batter a few stirs and looked at her recipe card. “I hope so. I’d really like to. Terry seems to think that it’s possible. But after all of the issues I have had dealing with DHS and government agencies, I can’t let myself get carried away. Who knows what problems I could run into.”

  Vic was quiet. She turned on the mixer for the cookie dough and didn’t try to carry on the conversation over the loud motor. Erin looked over at her. Vic’s usually sunny disposition seemed to have been dampened. She stared into the mixing bowl as if reading tea leaves, her expression dour. Had people been saying things to her again? Erin policed the customers who were prone to say rude or ecclesiastical things to Vic, trying to make sure that Auntie Clem’s was a safe place where Vic didn’t have to worry about being attacked for being transgender.

  Or was there something else on her mind?

  “Have you heard from Willie?” Erin asked.

  Vic looked at Erin with a jerk, startled as if she hadn’t even known Erin was in the room. “What? Oh… no, not really. He’s sent me a few texts, but we haven’t had any real conversations. He did say that he might not be able to call me much while he was out of town.”

  “But everything is okay?”

  “Sure. Everything is fine.”

  “I just wondered. You seem like you’re sad or worried about something.”

  “What do you think she’s going to be like?”

  “Who?”

  “Your sister.”

  “Oh.” Erin pressed her lips together, thinking about it. She’d had a lot of differen
t foster siblings over the years, all different personalities. Some had been angry or cruel. Others had just drifted through like ghosts, barely registering in Erin’s world. A precious few had been friends, or closer, like family. Like Carolyn. But Erin hadn’t stayed in one home for long, never more than a year or so. She had learned to be like the ghosts, not investing anything in the relationships. Just drifting through the homes, trying to remain invisible. “I don’t know, Vic. I’ve never had a biological sister. I don’t have a clue what she’ll be like. Will she be like my mother or Adam Plaint? Aunt Clementine? Me?” She shook her head. “I really don’t know what to expect.”

  “Do you think you’re going to be close? Keep in touch?”

  “She’s the only family I have, so I hope so…”

  She saw Vic’s lips form a protest, and then Vic turned off the mixer and the kitchen seemed unnaturally silent. Vic pulled off the mixing bowl and started to form teaspoons of dough into balls.

  “I mean she’s my only biological family,” Erin said. “Of course I have other family. The homes I grew up in. My friends.” She tried to give Vic a reassuring smile. “You and the animals. You’re my family too. Just a different kind of family. The kind you choose.”

  “But you’ll have more in common with a biological sister. I’ve read those studies. Twins separated at birth, and how alike each other they are when they are reunited. All the funny quirks that are actually family traits.”

  “But those are identical twins. This sister of mine… she’s eight years younger. And we don’t even have the same two parents. We only share one parent, so our shared genetic traits are more like… one quarter instead of one hundred percent like identical twins.”

  “I know with my family, though, siblings and cousins… when we get together at family reunions or funerals, there are family traits. Things that automatically connect you. Like magnets. They draw you together. You have more in common than strangers.”