“You sure you don’t need company tonight?” she asked. “I can pack up my dinner and drive it over. Plenty to share.”
“I’m fine, sweetheart. Honest. Walt and Louise are over and we’re watching the game together. They’re keeping me company.”
“He’s doing okay, Angie.”
Angie heard Walter’s powerful baritone clearly in the background. Her father had good friends to lean on, to her relief. Worrying wasn’t just her father’s prerogative. She turned on the Nationals game, but kept the volume down.
“Maybe tomorrow we can get together. I have some estate business to go over with you.”
“Whatever you want, Dad. I’m here for you.”
“I know. I’m so lucky”—his words got cut short as he became overwhelmed with emotion—“to have a daughter like you.”
Angie had tears in her eyes as she looked at the photographs hanging on the wall. Some were pictures of her and Madeline, a few with Sarah Winter, as well. But the one that drew Angie’s attention was a black and white photograph of her parents, arms draped around each other, big smiles on their faces. It was taken at Lake Anna, where her family rented a cabin at least once each summer.
Angie felt her mother’s absence profoundly. Angie’s life had always had holes, left by the family she never knew, but her mother’s absence was a new, bigger hole. A hole shaped like the most important woman in Angie’s life, a woman she could see only in pictures, thoughts, and dreams.
“I love you, Dad,” Angie said and hung up. She turned up the volume on the Nats game.
Her father loved baseball, and his passion had rubbed off on her. In high school, she’d been a serviceable soccer player, but on the softball field she’d been something of a star. She was good at fielding, had quick reflexes, a fast release, and could hit for average and power. Her dad had coached her through middle school, and on Sundays the pair were often found at the batting cages over at Upton Hill.
Her dad was a stickler for technique. Keep the shoulders back. Start the swing with the legs and the hips. Drive the front shoulder to the ball. Those lessons got so ingrained they became reflex. When it came time for college, she could see the next level was not for her, but she played on an intramural team where she’d met Madeline and Sarah.
What stayed from her playing days was a love for the game and a commitment to fitness. Angie tried to hit the gym at least three times a week, and she’d recently taken up yoga in an effort to win the battle between her ideal weight and the five or so pounds that crept up on her with the stealth of a panther.
No yoga now, though. Angie was too tired. And there was cold Thai food to eat.
It was the bottom of the fourth in a three-three tie when Angie’s phone buzzed with a text from Madeline.
Are you watching this?
Yeah. Good game.
Not the Nats, goofball! The Bachelor.
Oh, no. Forgot it was on. Any good?
Good? It’s a train wreck. I love it. The fangs are out.
Werewolves in bikinis, eh?
OMG! Rick just tossed Krissy into the pool.
Sticking with the Nats. Did you hear back from Sarah’s mom?
Yes, confirmed. She can’t wait to see us. Can’t believe Sarah’s been gone thirteen years.
Wow. Thirteen? Can’t believe it either.
Let’s text later. Abigail just pulled Rick into the bushes. Must. Watch.
Xoxo talk later.
Luv ya. You doing all right?
I’m ok. Thanks.
Ok bye xx
Every year Madeline and Angie made the drive to New Jersey to visit with Jean Winter, Sarah’s mom, and share remembrances. It was supposed to be just that one year, the first year, the hardest year. It turned into an every year thing, not something that was planned. It just sort of happened, sort of evolved, and now Jean was like an aunt to the girls, like a Walt and Louise but with fewer visits.
Since Angie had no extended family of her own, her relationship with Jean Winter was something she wanted to keep and foster. The best gift Angie could give her grieving pseudo-aunt was closure. It would come only when Angie—or someone, but Angie wanted it to be her—found out what had really happened to Sarah.
People who vanished without a trace haunted the lives of those left behind. Crowds became a breeding ground for hope. Angie would see people who looked like Sarah—it could just be a way of walking, a mannerism, something very Sarah. That was because Sarah wasn’t really dead. That was how Angie felt, and she could only imagine how magnified those feelings were for Sarah’s mother.
Carolyn Jessup already felt the same persistent ache, and probably got flashes of hope within a crowd of strangers. Angie had to find Nadine. The likelihood of a happy reunion dimmed with each passing day.
The Nats game held Angie’s interest more than the takeout. She had no trouble finding space for her leftovers. Her refrigerator was mostly empty. Any day now, a new cookbook would arrive from Barnes & Noble—something about clean eats, her most recent purchase—and Angie would peruse the pages, feeling guilty for not having the time or energy to shop and cook.
She returned to the futon when her phone rang.
“What’s up, Bao?” she answered. Her pulse ticked up a notch or two.
“I think I have something on that photograph. You got a minute?”
Her pulse ticked up some more. “Yeah, sure.”
“Better in person. Can you meet now?”
“Of course. Where?”
“Your place.”
“Okay. What time?”
“Now. I’m downstairs.”
Angie rolled her eyes. “Bao, why didn’t you start the conversation with Angie I’m downstairs. May I come up?”
“You could have been busy. I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”
“Just come up.” She buzzed him inside.
He had a different way of thinking about things, which was why she wanted his help to identify the girl in the photograph. Who could she be? A sister she never knew?
Bao came in wearing a gray hoodie and carrying his skateboard.
“Is that how you got here?” Angie asked.
“It’s how I get everywhere.” He had a studio apartment several miles from Angie’s place, but his skateboard made getting around town a breeze.
Angie got Bao some water from the tap. She would have given him some wine, or a beer, but he didn’t drink alcohol. A vegan and the guy who got Angie into yoga, Bao liked to have a clear head at all times. He was careful with everything he put into his body.
He set the photograph on the coffee table, and there she was—that sweet girl with the sad smile and deformed ear, wearing a lovely pink dress with white polka dots.
“So?” Angie said. “What do you got?”
“I don’t know who the girl is, but I do know where this picture was taken and more important, when.”
CHAPTER 14
When. Angie held her breath in anticipation.
“There are clues here,” Bao said, “that tells us when this was taken, but first—” He flipped the picture over and Angie read the haunting message her mother had written on the back.
May God forgive me
IC12843488
“Some photographic paper has the brand printed on the back, like this one does.”
Angie had been so focused on her mother’s writing she hadn’t paid attention to the wallpaper-like printing on the back. Printed in faint lettering were the words THIS PAPER MANUFACTURED BY KODAK, set at a tilt and displayed numerous times so it covered the entire back of the image.
“Kodak had four common brandings. Velox dates back to the 1940s to 1950s.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I have a friend who’s a photographer. I asked. I don’t get every answer from the computer. Just most of them.” Bao smiled.
Angie returned a smile. “Go on.”
“Kodak Velox Paper. That watermark was used in the 1950s and 60s.”
&nbs
p; “I didn’t think the photo was that old.”
“It’s not. This one here”—Bao’s finger tapped on the watermark decorating the back of the image that read THIS PAPER MANUFACTURED BY KODAK—“came after ‘A Kodak Paper,’ another watermark which was from the late sixties to early seventies. Based on that, we know for sure that this image was printed between the mid-seventies to the eighties.”
“Amazing.”
“Now, look here.” Bao flipped the image over to the picture side. “See this?” He put his finger on the poster plastered to the side of a building in the image background.
000
DS
THS
’m I
IN’?
Angie had studied the poster before at her father’s house. The figure in front blocked out the crucial letters, and she couldn’t get any clues from it. “Yeah, I already looked at that, but couldn’t make anything of it.”
“Me neither. But I went to a website and put the letters into an application people use to help them with Scrabble. It creates all the words that contain those letters. For example, with the letters T-H-S, the application returned words like childbirths, tenths, and paths. I did it for D-S and got a list as well. Apostrophe M, I’m guessing is I’m. I’m also guessing the I-N-apostrophe is I-N-G, but there are a whole lot of words that end in i-n-g, right?”
“Right. And?”
“I couldn’t make out the text between 000 and DS, it was just too blurry, so I wrote a little program that takes all the D-S and T-H-S words and does a search using those three zeros. I figure those zeros have to be some common number, otherwise why print it on a poster? My program ran through all word combos and the numbers one thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, and one million. Manually it would have taken me forever, but my program did it all in a flash. I generated a bunch of image search URLS because that’s what we’re looking for. Am I right, or am I right?”
When Bao said this, he was right.
“What did you get?”
“Well, I limited the words. Based on the poster and font size, I did some calculations and I didn’t think any word was greater than six letters. Also, I used only words that had DS and THS on the end. And I didn’t mix the DS and THS words because there would be too many combinations. So the first search was for one thousand, Alkyds, Poster, then ten thousand, Alkyds, Poster, and so on.”
“That sounds like nonsense to me.”
“It’s total nonsense. I was only looking at the first few rows of images for every number and word combo that got returned. It didn’t take too long. I sifted through a lot of nonsense until I ran a search for ten thousand, AIDS, Poster.”
Bao used his phone to run this exact search query. The results displayed a preview of the images, and he clicked on the first one. The image showed a black and white picture of a bald, middle-aged man. The words on the poster read 10,000 NEW YORK CITY AIDS DEATHS HOW’M I DOIN’?
Angie realized the words they couldn’t make out because they were too small and blurry in the photograph were the most important words of all.
“At first I didn’t know who the guy was,” Bao said, “but I figured it out easy enough. It’s a guy name Ed Koch.”
Angie knew the name. “He was the mayor of New York City.”
“Right on! And there’s a history to this poster. A group called Act Up made it to criticize Koch’s inaction in dealing with the AIDS epidemic. ‘How’m I doin?’ was his catchphrase. He used to ride the subways and greet people with that slogan. I looked that up, too. So the poster was meant to be ironic.”
“But now we know the city. It was New York. Nobody would hang a Mayor Koch poster in another city.”
“We know more than that. We know the exact year this picture was taken. The poster was made in 1988. It could have been plastered to that building for years, but it’s not all torn or faded, so I’m guessing it’s pretty new in this photograph. Who knows, right? But based on the photo paper, we know roughly when the image was taken. So photo paper plus the date the poster was made, and I can tell you with one hundred percent, Bao-certified certainty that this image was taken in New York City and the year was 1988.”
One of Bao’s outstanding talents was his ability to tackle a problem from angles others might ignore. Angie had seen him work his magic on a number of cases, and the police who used to chase him now often thanked him for his efforts. She should not have been surprised at Bao’s findings.
She gave him a big hug. “This must have been a lot of work.”
“You can send my girlfriend some flowers to thank her for letting me vanish for a while.”
“And I can thank you with some thank-you money. How many hours do I owe you?”
“Zero. Put this one on the house, Ange. You’ve done a lot for me. Least I can do this for you.”
“Not happening. I’m writing you a check.”
“When it’s over, how ’bout you buy me a board. Polar Skate came out with a new line that’d be totally gnarly. I’m stoked we got this far, but big questions remain.”
“Right. Like why does my mom have a picture of a little girl from 1988?”
“And why does she need forgiveness? Thinking out loud here. Did your mom and dad ever live in New York City?”
“No,” Angie said.
“Any relatives?”
“My dad grew up in a Michigan orphanage. It’s closed now. He went from foster home to foster home and ended up in California, where he met my mom. They moved from California to Virginia after the big blowout over my mom being unwed and pregnant, with me no less.”
“Like whoa on the guilt.”
“Like whoa, there were no stops made in New York.”
“Maybe a relative you didn’t know?”
“That she kept secret from my dad? I don’t think so. He saw the picture. I think he’d remember a little girl with a deformed ear. Makes no sense that my mom would hide that from him.”
“Well, maybe you should track down the family. Find out for yourself.”
Angie grimaced at the thought. “That would break my mother’s heart.”
“Not to be cold and all, but your mom is gone.”
Angie’s gaze went to the large jade plant resting on the mantel by the window. She had taken the plant from her parents’ home with a solemn vow to keep it alive, not an easy assignment given her work schedule. Angie had made arrangements with her neighbor to water the plant if necessary. It was her mother’s favorite plant. She had tended it with loving care like she did all the green things in the house. Angie felt an obligation to the plant, and in a way, it echoed the obligation she felt toward her mother’s history. Both had to be respected.
“My mom was adamant about having no contact with her family. Not ever. What they did to my father, what they said to her, was beyond awful. I can’t just go opening doors to the past because my mother’s not here to guard them. I respect her too much to do that.”
“Then you may never know.”
Angie gave this only a moment’s thought. “There are other ways of finding out.”
“Like?”
“I’ll go to NCMEC and get the girl aged using age progression technology. Then I’ll put the photo online. This girl would be in her thirties by now. Her friends would be on Facebook. Someone will recognize her and contact me. That way I honor my mother’s wishes and still get the answers I need. And you can get that skateboard.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’m still working on cracking the code.” Bao turned over the picture so they could both see the cipher IC12843488 written on the back. “Maybe there’s an answer hidden inside that sequence.”
Three days passed and no hidden answers were found. In fact, nothing had changed, which meant Nadine was still missing.
Angie was back home, having visited with her father after work. She had another bag of takeout with her. Her phone rang. It was Mike Webb calling.
“Hey, Mike. What’s going on?”
“A security guard
at Union Station saw our poster and called NCMEC, and they just called me. Nadine was there. He’s sure of it. The guy’s name is Sean Musgrave. Good thing I canvassed with new posters. There weren’t any at Union Station when I went there.”
Angie’s heart revved. “Where are your kids?”
“It’s Thursday. They go to their mother’s.”
“Good. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
“What? To go to DC? Musgrave won’t be back at work until morning.”
“Then we’ll be the first ones to greet him,” Angie said. “We can do a scouting expedition in the meantime. Hit up bus stations with the posters. Ask around. Maybe somebody has seen her or bought a ticket in her name. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Fine, if Katie can keep the kids. But this can’t turn into an extended stay. I’ve got to be back for a party on Saturday. It’s a bounce house plus an obstacle course. Big job.”
“Yeah, so is finding a missing girl. Be ready when I get there.”
CHAPTER 15
Exhibit D: Excerpts from the journal of Nadine Jessup, pages 31-33
Mandy was a girl who showed up at the studio one afternoon and left with Ricardo. I don’t know where they went, what they did, or where she came from. She was tall and thin with mocha colored skin and pretty long black hair. She wore tight jeans and had on a low cut top that left her boobs basically hanging out. Ricardo said she was another client of Macan Entertainment. I asked Mandy if she’d been in any movies and she said plenty and gave a laugh. I didn’t know what that meant. I went to the bathroom and when I came out I saw Ricardo kissing Mandy. Like real kissing. He had his hands all over her ass. I don’t know if he saw me, but I didn’t talk after that. I went into my room and sat on the futon and looked out the window at the cloudy sky and dirty street. I had on jeans and a scoop neck sweater, clothes Ricardo bought for me because he hated everything I wore. I looked in the mirror, but I didn’t look anything like Mandy. She was exotic and beautiful. Ricardo came into my room and asked what was wrong. I told him that I saw him kissing Mandy. He said so what if he did? He’s an adult and he can do what he wants. I told him it made me feel jealous. He told me to grow up and then he left with her.
Forgive Me Page 9