Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “It’s not fool nonsense.”

  And I’m not your daughter.

  On television, Barbara Walters strolls along a path with a white-bearded, bespectacled man. Behind them, a clock tower sits high above gabled redbrick buildings and broad greens.

  “For decades a fixture on this Ivy League campus, Dr. Silas Moss is a professor of genetics and molecular biology,” Barbara says in voice-over. “Back in 1984, he embarked on a pioneering research project with students enrolled in the university’s interdepartmental biology and society major. Now, those efforts are coming to fruition.”

  Cut to an interior office, with Silas Moss seated behind a desk, his shelves lined with books and framed award certificates.

  “I’ve always known I was adopted as an infant,” he tells Barbara. “But the mother and father who raised me never wanted to give me any details about it. As far as they were concerned, my life began the minute they brought me home. They were incredible people. They were both scientists with busy careers, married in their forties, lived well into their eighties. I loved them dearly, and they gave me a wonderful childhood. But not a day has gone by that I haven’t wondered about my biological parents.”

  “Did you ever try to find them?”

  “Oh, all the time. But where do you begin? Until the past few years, adoptees’ birth certificates listed only the adoptive parents’ names and adoption records are sealed. They can only be opened by a court order for legal or medical reasons. You have virtually nothing to go on, unless you stumble across some clue or your adoptive family is willing to provide information, which they often don’t have and were never given in the first place.”

  “It seems like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

  “Yes. It’s just blind, desperate searching, if you can even call it a search.”

  Amelia thinks of the sea of strangers she’s scrutinized since March, and presses a fingertip to the teary corners of her eyes. Are you my mother?

  “What do you do if you have no hope of finding your birth parents?” Barbara asks the professor.

  “Mostly, you wonder. And you let your imagination create a fairy-tale family. In mine, I was the secret love child of Gable and Lombard,” he adds with a chuckle. “I watched a lot of old movies with my father, growing up. I had blond hair like Carole, and I loved her screwball sense of humor. My own mother was always very serious.”

  “Professor, when you say your own mother, and your father, you’re referring to your adoptive parents?”

  “Of course. They’re the only parents I’ve ever known. And I wouldn’t ever have wanted to hurt them. That’s why I never got too involved in trying to uncover my roots until after they were gone. They passed away about ten years ago, one right after the other. After they died, I went through every piece of paper in their house, looking for information about my adoption.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Not much. Around the same time, a family moved in next door to me. They have three children. The youngest was a foundling.”

  “A foundling? Can you explain?”

  “The dictionary would define it as ‘an infant that has been abandoned by its parents and is discovered and cared for by others.’”

  Foundling.

  So there’s a name for it. A sweet, hopeful name.

  That’s what I am. I’m a foundling.

  “I knew this girl’s story long before I got to know her as my neighbor,” Silas Moss is saying. “I remembered very well that she’d been found down in the gorge on a cold winter night years earlier. It had been a well-publicized case. Like me, she was fortunate to have been taken in by loving adoptive parents, but she, too, wondered about her roots. She and I bonded over our longing to know, but she had little hope of unlocking her own past. For her, the key didn’t lie in sealed written records that might one day be opened. That inspired me to start investigating other kinds of records, if you will.”

  “Biological ones.” Solemn nod from Barbara.

  “Yes.”

  They explain something called DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid. Amelia vaguely remembers learning something about it in high school. It’s a distinctly patterned chain of genetic material found in every cell of every living organism—broad characteristics shared by many, as well as rare ones unique to that person and their biological relatives.

  “DNA testing has been used in paternity suits in recent years and now has the potential to impact our criminal justice system in a very big way,” Barbara reports. “This month, at the Florida trial of accused serial rapist Tommy Lee Andrews, three DNA samples have been presented as evidence in an effort to connect the suspect’s semen and blood to a sample taken from the victim. If the state can obtain a conviction based on DNA, we will enter a bold new era in crime investigation and prosecution. But how does this relate to your work, Dr. Moss?”

  “A person’s DNA is as unique as a fingerprint. There’s a one in ten billion chance that two people would share the exact same DNA. But our blood relatives will have similar markers, sharing ancestral origin, physical traits, predisposition to certain diseases, and so on. When comparing a group of samples, we can look for matches among various markers to calculate the possibility or even probability that two people are related.”

  They discuss a voluntary DNA database Dr. Moss and his students have been compiling over the past few years.

  “Where are you getting these samples?”

  “Students, friends, local residents—anyone and everyone can be a part of this project,” he says. “The more, the merrier, as they say. We put out the call when we started, and more and more people are hearing about us and volunteering.”

  “How does it work?”

  “We get a saliva sample. The cheek swab takes two seconds and is completely painless.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then we map your DNA and use a computer program to compare it to the samples provided from adoptees searching for their roots and birth parents searching for their children.”

  “Have you solved your young neighbor’s mystery?”

  “Unfortunately, not yet, but we’re hopeful.”

  “And have you made any matches for others?” Barbara leans forward, hand fisted beneath her chin, wearing a faint smile that says she already knows the answer.

  “It’s taken a while, but yes. We had our first match last year.”

  The scene shifts, and Barbara and the professor have been joined by a heavyset woman with a tight bleached-blond perm and a stocky, flannel-clad young man.

  “Twenty-six years ago, Dolores Minsk was a pregnant ninth grader who had been sent by her parents to a church-run home for unwed mothers in nearby Buffalo,” Barbara’s voice-over informs the audience. “When her son was born, nuns whisked him away before she even held him, and she signed the adoption papers without question.”

  “All the girls did,” the woman tells Barbara in a quiet, quaking voice. “Whether they wanted to, or not.”

  “Did you want to?”

  “Not when I got there, no. Not when I started to feel him moving, and started to picture his little face . . .” She takes a deep breath. “But then it started to feel like a nightmare, being stuck there, feeling helpless, and . . . you know. They got to me.”

  “Who got to you?”

  “Everyone. My parents, the nuns, the other girls who were further along . . . they would talk about how they couldn’t wait until it was all over, so that they could get their lives back, and pretty soon . . . pretty soon I guess I started to feel the same way, but . . . it wasn’t just about me. They kept saying he deserved better. That I had nothing to offer him. And they were right. I had nothing but . . .” She breaks off, overcome, before choking out the last muffled word. “Love.”

  “The scenario was all too common for teenagers back in the 1960s,” Barbara’s voice informs the audience. “Vulnerable young women in Dolores’s circumstances had very few options. Society may never shed the stigma of b
earing a child out of wedlock, but Roe v. Wade and more widely available access to birth control have changed things dramatically.”

  Back to Dolores. “After they took him away, I just wanted to get out of there, too. But when I got back home, I just . . . I ached for my son. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was a physical ache, more painful than anything I’ve ever felt.”

  “Including childbirth?” Barbara asks dramatically.

  “God, yes. Yes. Everyone told me to forget about him.” The camera zeroes in on Dolores’s hand clutching the young man’s. “But I just couldn’t.”

  Amelia dabs furiously at her own streaming eyes, fingertips effective as a Q-Tip in a geyser. She reaches blindly behind her and grabs a blanket, using it to wipe away her tears and then—who cares?—to blow her nose.

  “You wanted to know what happened to him?” Barbara suggests gently.

  “Yes. And I wanted him back. I knew I’d made a mistake. My parents had told me I couldn’t come home again if I kept him, and . . . where was I going to go? I still had nothing, and I told myself that at least he didn’t have nothing, you know? I figured my son had a great life. It made me feel better knowing I’d done the right thing for his sake, even if I was miserable.”

  “David Kuczowski’s life was anything but great,” the voice-over continues. “His adoptive parents were abusive, and divorced when he was young. Both remarried and had new families. Young David felt as though he never belonged to anyone, as though he didn’t fit in anywhere. Like many lost souls, he turned to drugs and alcohol.”

  The reporter goes on to tell how he landed in a juvenile detention center, later in jail, and ultimately, in rehab. Now clean and sober, he spotted a flyer early last January about Professor Moss’s call for DNA sample volunteers. Always curious about his birth parents, he’d had his cheek swabbed.

  Dolores had done the same thing a year earlier, almost to the date.

  “That seems like a miraculous coincidence!”

  “Not as miraculous as you might think,” Professor Moss tells Barbara Walters. “A lot of people, not just adoptees, experience an acute sense of loneliness during the holiday season—a longing for family ties. New Year’s is a time for making resolutions, for reassessing the past, and for looking ahead. We get an influx of volunteers every January.”

  “Not only that,” Dolores speaks up, “but David was born in January. Every year on that date, I went to church and prayed that he’d come back to me.”

  “You never forgot his birthday?”

  “A mother never forgets,” she tells Barbara with a tremulous smile.

  With that, Amelia loses what little grip she had on her emotions and sobs like a baby.

  Friday night wears on with no sign of the missing millionaire. According to Homicide, the GWB stairwell murder remains unsolved, as well.

  “We can’t ignore a murder less than a mile from where Wayland disappeared, around the same time,” Stef tells Barnes as they drive back to the Park Avenue penthouse.

  “No, but it’s not like Perry and Popper traveled in the same circles. What’s the connection?”

  “What if he was carjacked on the way home from work? Whoever did it got rid of him, went joyriding for a few hours, abandoned the car on the bridge, and took out the junkie on the way back to Manhattan.”

  “Wayland left the parking garage at 5:44 p.m. You saw the streets around that building tonight at that hour. A carjacking around there wouldn’t go unnoticed. Probably not anywhere on the route from the office to his apartment.”

  “Maybe he didn’t head home. Maybe he had a secret habit and went somewhere more desolate to buy drugs? Or to meet a woman at a trashy motel. And then he was robbed, or carjacked, or whatever.”

  Barnes nods. “We need to figure out who this Miss White woman is and what she means to Wayland.”

  “I think we can guess that part. Ever see Deep Throat?”

  “When did it come out?”

  “I think ʼ72, ʼ73 . . . something like that.”

  He sighs. “I was in grade school, Stef.”

  A middle-aged man greets them at the Wayland penthouse, wearing rich leather tassel loafers and a blue blazer with a red silk pocket square. Beneath a swoop of silver-blond hair parted on the side, his face is like an overinflated balloon, with the ruddiness of someone who’s indulged in a few too many steak dinners and martini lunches over the years. As recently as today, if his potent vodka breath is any indication.

  They show their badges and he pumps their hands, introducing himself as Kirstie’s father. “Richard Billington, but you can call me . . . Biff.” He grins and swaggers a pistol finger at them. “Thought I was going to say Rich, didn’t you? I always tell people, that’s what I am, not who I am. Been Biff all my life.”

  Barnes musters a smile and pretends that it’s nice to meet him, feigning commiseration as he complains about the Friday afternoon traffic on the drive in from Boston. Stef does the same, then asks about Kirstie.

  “She’s soaking in a hot bubble bath. Poor thing is exhausted. So is my wife. She went straight to bed when we got here. I’m manning the phones in case the ransom call comes in. Nothing so far,” he adds, as if they’d expected otherwise.

  He invites them into the living room. Sure enough, Barnes spies a conical glass that holds an inch of clear liquid, a couple of green olives, and a cocktail onion.

  Biff follows his gaze. “Dirty martini?”

  “Looks like one to me.”

  He gifts Barnes’s quip with a hearty chuckle. “Quite the detective, young man. But I wasn’t asking for a positive ID. I was offering you a cocktail.”

  “Not on the job, sir, but thanks anyway.”

  Stef also declines, saying, “We’d like to talk to your daughter, when she’s finished with her, uh, bubble bath.”

  “It might be a while.”

  “Can you let her know we’re here?”

  Barnes and Stef settle into the same chairs they occupied this afternoon and Biff disappears, taking his glass with him. When he returns, it’s full to the rim, and he sets a bowl of salted cashews on the table.

  “Help yourselves. Kirstie will be out soon.”

  He asks about the investigation as Barnes and Stef make a famished foray into the nut bowl.

  “Any suspects?”

  “We haven’t determined that a crime has been committed,” Stef reminds him around a mouthful of nuts. “We’ve interviewed a number of people.”

  “Did you find any clues?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  Barnes brushes salt from his fingers and takes a pen from his pocket, feeling vaguely like they’re Scooby and Shaggy, fresh from the Mystery Machine. Billington could stand in for the ubiquitous ascot-wearing millionaire whose mansion is haunted, though an unscrupulous handyman in a phantom costume isn’t likely to hold the key to the Wayland disappearance.

  “What can you tell us about your son-in-law, Mr. Billington?”

  “Call me Biff. He didn’t jump off a bridge.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I don’t know so. I mean . . .” With the halting measure of one scrubbing the liquor from his words, he says, “I do know so. Perry did not jump off a bridge. He’s not that guy.”

  Not that guy, and not a guy who’d wear a yellow tie. Got it, Barnes thinks. But who is he?

  “You’ve met him, right?”

  “No. We don’t exactly travel in the same circles, Mr.—”

  “Biff. Then let’s put it this way. If there were a kitten stuck way up high in a tree, my son-in-law wouldn’t be the guy you’d ask to rescue it. In fact, he’d be the kitten,” he adds with a chortle. “Just kidding, just kidding. But Perry is afraid of heights. Doesn’t even like to fly.”

  Stef gestures at the wall of windows, where the skyline glitters beyond the glass. “Why live up here, then?”

  “Kirstie fell in love with the view, and the privacy. She wasn’t crazy about moving to New York when they
got married. She didn’t want people on the other side of the wall, or walking around over her head in the middle of the night. So they compromised. That’s what marriage is all about, right?”

  Watching him take a generous sip of his cocktail, Barnes asks, “Would you say theirs is stable?”

  “How stable is anything, these days?”

  “Any marriage?”

  “The world. We’re all going to hell in a handcart, gentlemen. Especially now, with the market going haywire. And Perry missing,” he adds—an afterthought.

  “If you don’t believe he’d take his own life, then what could have happened?”

  “He’s a wealthy man. Even wealthier now that he’s inherited his mother’s estate. He was her only heir. Kidnapping makes sense.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Kirstie does. Who would know better than his own wife?”

  Barnes glances at Stef, thinking of Liz, and of the shadowy Miss White. Reading his mind, Stef gives a slight headshake. He’s right. Better not to bring that up now, and risk Biff running back to the bathroom to tell Kirstie before they can. They need to witness her initial reaction, before she goes back to keeping up appearances and professing her husband’s perfection.

  Biff sips and swirls the contents of his glass and tells them he wants to offer a reward for information on Perry’s whereabouts.

  “Let’s face it, if someone abducted the guy, Kirstie doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting him back in good condition,” he says, as if they’re discussing a rented tux misplaced in a storm. “And if he wasn’t taken or, you know, killed . . . well, let’s just say we’re not going to want him back anyway. But we can’t just move on without giving this thing the old college try, so, fifty thousand dollars. Cash. Oh, there you are, lamb.”

  Kirstie has appeared in the doorway. She looks frail, wrapped in a turban, silk robe, and slippers—all white, of course.

  White.

  Ironic, Barnes thinks, that the Other Woman—if that is indeed her role—goes by a name that so perfectly fits the Wonder Bread wife.