Baked Alaska

by Josi S. Kilpack

  Sadie raised a hand to her forehead. Of course she didn’t want that, but she didn’t want Shawn to stay in Skagway either.

  “I’m sorry, Sadie,” Pete said.

  As was usually the case, his sympathy unraveled her. “You really think it’s best for him to stay?”

  “Them to stay,” Pete clarified. “Maggie too.”

  Shawn had said that but Sadie hadn’t paid it much attention. “Why Maggie?”

  “Same reason as Shawn—she was close to Lorraina and had motive to poison the wine. She might have had the opportunity too—we just don’t know. I had a good talk with her over breakfast. When we finished, she went to the police station on her own. She’s been in questioning ever since.”

  Sadie tried to stay calm. She leaned against a brick wall and took a breath. “Can I talk to Shawn again?”

  “Of course,” Pete said, and she heard the muted rustle of the phone being passed from hand to hand.

  “Mom?” Shawn’s voice was subdued.

  Sadie felt tears in her eyes, which she tried to ignore. She had to be strong for her son. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I’m just...this is all so much, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Sadie said. “Can I come down and see you?”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “I mean, I just feel like I’m on the edge and seeing you might undo me completely.”

  It was perhaps the only thing he could have said that would keep her from insisting on a face-to-face meeting, even as she worried that he said it because he didn’t really want her to come and didn’t know how else to tell her. She felt so disconnected from him right now. Her heart ached to have him so close, and yet still be so distant in the ways that mattered to her the most.

  “I understand,” Sadie said, even though she didn’t. “Do you need a change of clothes from the ship?”

  “That would be great. A couple days’ worth since I won’t be able to rejoin the cruise until at least Ketchikan, if everything goes well.”

  Ketchikan. That was two more days. Shawn and Breanna would miss even more of the cruise, and yet from the minute Shawn saw Lorraina, the trip had no longer been what Sadie had hoped it would be.

  And now with Lorraina still sick, and Shawn still being questioned, it wasn’t hard to imagine that at some point the police might feel he was a suspect and arrest him. Could she really leave him here with that possibility hanging over his head?

  “Here’s Pete,” Shawn said, a moment before Pete’s voice came over the line.

  “Are you still there, Sadie?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why can’t I stay in Skagway with Shawn? It would make me feel a lot better.”

  “You could,” Pete said, but from his tone it was obvious that wasn’t his first choice. “But there’s still no sign of the gift tag, and while I know the security team is now much more invested in this situation, I have found at least a dozen extreme miscarriages in basic procedure, and I’m wondering if they could use a helping hand on the ship. We still need a lot of answers, and I don’t think either of us can do much good if we stay here. Also, my contact on the ship said that something has come down from the cruise line headquarters about problems on other cruises—I don’t know what it is, but the police have questioned both Maggie and Shawn about other cruises they’ve taken. This is Maggie’s first cruise ever, and Shawn says he hasn’t been on a cruise for five years.”

  “He hasn’t,” Sadie said.

  “Right, so why are they asking? They’ve asked the same question three or four different ways and have gotten all these passenger manifests from other cruises. They even asked if he’s ever gone by other names—it’s really strange. If we’re on the ship, I think I can learn more about that. Here in Skagway, I worry that we’ll just be underfoot. They were open to my involvement in the beginning, but they’re starting to shut me out; I’ve been relegated to the waiting room.”

  “Sadie.”

  Sadie startled and turned around to see Mary Anne standing a few feet away, smiling broadly, her eyes blinking behind her bifocals. “I’m ready to head back to the ship. Are you coming?”

  “Just a minute, Pete,” Sadie said before taking the phone away from her ear. “Actually, I’m going to meet up with Pete here in town.”

  “Your boyfriend, the attorney?” Mary Anne asked.

  Sadie hesitated but nodded.

  “Ah, yes,” Mary Anne said, as though in on a secret. “You probably need to discuss his new client, right?”

  Sadie just smiled. “Hopefully I’ll see you later, though.”

  “I’m going to the karaoke show tonight at nine—want to join me? Glen can’t sing a note.”

  “Well, I’ll need to see what my family has planned,” Sadie said, still smiling. Her cheeks were starting to hurt. She leaned in to give Mary Anne a hug; the woman smelled like lavender soap and hamburger grease. “Thanks for lunch,” Sadie said even though she’d paid for her own fries.

  “My pleasure. See you soon, dear.” Mary Anne hiked the strap of her new purse higher up on her arm and headed toward Broadway.

  Sadie put the phone back to her ear. “I’m back,” she said, relieved to have severed the connection with Mary Anne without hurting her feelings in the process.

  “You have a boyfriend who’s an attorney?” Pete asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Sadie said. A story she wasn’t even sure she understood. “I’ll tell you about it later. Anyway, Shawn said you were talking to Breanna about her staying in Skagway?” She quickly returned to the table and cleaned up her lunch mess with one hand by dumping it into an old barrel that served as a garbage can.

  “Yes, and she said it might be for the best if she could stay where she has cell coverage—I guess things are kind of rough with the wedding? She said she’d just gotten an e-mail from Liam’s mom. I don’t think it was good news.”

  “She did?” Sadie asked. Breanna hadn’t said anything, but then again Sadie still hadn’t read the texts that had come in while she’d been having lunch with Mary Anne.

  “Shawn and Maggie don’t have to stay at the police department, and Breanna said she’d get some hotel rooms for everyone. That way, the three of them can really dig into Lorraina’s history. That will be a lot easier to do here than on the ship.”

  Sadie hated this. Both of her children staying in Skagway without her? And yet, was there really a better option? She liked that Shawn wouldn’t be alone and that they could use the time to learn more about Lorraina. And she liked that Pete felt she could be helpful in doing what could be done on the ship . . . unless he was just trying to keep her from making a scene in Skagway. “You really think this is best?”

  “I do,” Pete said, and his sympathy brought tears to her eyes. He was all business, but he did understand.

  “Breanna will miss Glacier Bay tomorrow. We already missed the whale watching today.”

  Pete didn’t answer. They both knew it wasn’t a deal breaker, just one more disappointment in an extremely disappointing situation.

  “And what about Maggie? How is she doing?”

  “Well, I was hoping you would be able to sit down with her and explain about Breanna staying and them using the time to research Lorraina.”

  Sadie felt so grateful to be included and immediately headed for the police station. “Really?”

  “When she and I were talking earlier, she was really worried that you were mad at her.”

  Sadie was quiet as she walked. She wasn’t mad at Maggie, but she felt cautious. “Did she send those e-mails to the police?”

  “No,” Pete said. “But she did give the security department a bunch of Lorraina’s papers. She had them when she came into the security office yesterday—remember?”

  “Right.”

  “Lorraina had the printed e-mails in that folder. When security asked for Lorraina’s documents, Maggie handed them all over.”

  It was a reasonable explanation, but Sadie still
felt as though being too supportive of Maggie somehow took her support away from Shawn.

  “I think Maggie really respects you, Sadie. It’s upsetting for her to think that you’re angry with her. If you could talk to her and help her feel better about all of this, I think it would mean a lot to her.”

  Would she join them in Ketchikan, too? Sadie wondered. Did Sadie want her to? “I’m almost at the police department. Can I talk to Maggie right now?”

  “Let me see what I can do. Hang out in the waiting area until I come for you, okay?”

  Chapter 28

  Maggie was obviously nervous when she met Sadie in the waiting room ten minutes later. She had her hands between her knees, palms together, and kept glancing at the desk clerk as though making sure the woman wasn’t eavesdropping. As soon as Maggie opened her mouth, the words just tumbled out. Sadie sensed that she’d been holding in a lot of emotion, as every word seemed encapsulated by her feelings.

  “They’re talking to Lorraina’s family,” she whispered, each word agonizing. “And they already contacted my dad for the adoption information. It’s a sealed record, so the courts can’t open it without a warrant from a judge, but they grilled my dad about it anyway. Then they took blood samples and sent them to a lab here in Skagway that can run blood-type tests to see if that tells them anything—there are certain types that don’t match up and Lorraina had a rare blood type, I guess. They said they’d tell me the results when they know.” She’d cried off any makeup she’d put on that morning, but she still wiped at her eyes carefully, as though she didn’t realize she had nothing left to protect. She lowered her voice even more; Sadie leaned in to hear her. “I think they think I did something do her.”

  “But you’ve told them everything, right? About the argument and all that?”

  Maggie nodded and tucked her hair behind her ear. Her hair was sleek and straight, while Shawn’s was a mass of tight curls. Did that mean anything? She could have had it relaxed professionally. Sadie wondered when the blood-type test would be back, and then wondered what any of them would do about the results, regardless of which direction the results took them. What if Shawn and Maggie were related to each other? What if they weren’t?

  “I think telling them all that made it worse,” Maggie said. “I mean, if she’s not my birth mom and she’s lied to me all these weeks, it gives me motive or something.”

  “But if you’re not guilty, then you don’t have to be scared,” Sadie assured her. “They’re going to look into everything, and it’s not like you have some kind of connection to cyanide that could give you opportunity, right?”

  Maggie’s expression fell even more, and Sadie’s heart skipped a beat. “You don’t have a connection to cyanide, do you?”

  “I work for a paper manufacturing company, and we use cyanide in the production process of most of our products. I work in receivables, where all the different raw materials come in.”

  “Oh,” Sadie said. “So, you had access to cyanide, and Lorraina might have been lying to you about being your mother.”

  “It sounds so bad,” Maggie said, looking terrified. “Plus I paid for our trip. She said she was going to pay me back with her next paycheck, and I really wanted to spend time with her so I put it on my credit card. But now the police are saying she doesn’t have any money, that she hadn’t worked in weeks. I completely lost it.” She wiped at her eyes again. “It was just one more thing, ya know? One more hurt in all of this, but I think they saw it as proof that I’m some kind of loony; one more reason I could be mad enough to want to punish my birth...Lorraina. Did you know she has a criminal history for stuff like bad checks and things? I mean, everyone makes mistakes, and I know she didn’t have an easy time of it, but she never told me she’d been arrested for anything.”

  Sadie didn’t comment because she didn’t trust herself to be objective and instead shifted the conversation ever so slightly. “Can you tell me about how she found you?”

  “It was through a website that reunites birth families. She found me through a profile I had put up.”

  “That’s how she and Shawn found each other too.”

  “Yeah, after Shawn had his profile up for just a few months.” The bitterness in her tone put Sadie on edge, and she straightened slightly as Maggie continued, “I put my profile up as soon as I turned eighteen and participated on forums and answered people’s questions for almost three years. Do you have any idea how many people I saw get reunited with their natural families? When Lorraina found me, it was like...” She looked upward, as though trying to find the right analogy hanging from the ceiling. After a few moments, she looked at Sadie again. “It was like Christmas and Easter and my birthday all rolled up into one moment—one event.”

  Sadie hated this topic. She hated thinking that Shawn and Breanna had voids she could not fill. “What kind of things did you talk about on the forums?”

  It was Maggie’s turn to pull back. “I know what you’re getting at. The police already suggested that Lorraina used the information from my posts to make herself seem like my mother.”

  “Could it be what happened?”

  Maggie slumped in her seat, unable to keep up her confidence. “I don’t want to think that,” she said, softly. “Even after all of this, I still want her to have been telling me the truth. Why would she pretend? Why go to that forum and read through all my past posts to learn about me and my history? But that’s what the police think she did. Do you know she told me she was allergic to bees, just like me? And she didn’t like asparagus—neither do I. But Shawn said she cooked asparagus for him at Christmastime. I don’t know about the bees yet.”

  “Did you post about those things on the forum?” Sadie asked.

  Maggie nodded slowly, and her chin quivered, prompting her to take a deep breath and sit up a little straighter. “What kind of person would lie about those things?” She shook her head. “I have to believe she wasn’t lying—that she is my birth mother. I honestly can’t comprehend believing anything else. It’s felt so...good to have her. So...important and healing and right.”

  Sadie wished she could believe Lorraina hadn’t lied about all of this. And yet, if Lorraina wasn’t Maggie’s birth mother, that meant that Maggie’s real birth mother was still out there. Maybe. Would Maggie search for her again? “Did Lorraina ever explain why your adoption record was sealed?”

  Maggie looked into her lap, smoothing her pants over her legs. “I never asked her. I was born in Ohio, and I petitioned the probate court to open my records almost two and a half years ago. It took forever for me to get an answer, but what I got back was that an affidavit had been filed that wouldn’t allow me to open them. They wouldn’t tell me who filed the affidavit, but it’s usually a birth parent. I talked to a lawyer, but she wanted a large retainer and thought I should hire a private investigator to help get information. I didn’t have the money, and Ohio was so far away. So I just kept hoping that I’d find my birth mom another way, which is why I went to all those websites. I never imagined in a million years that someone would take advantage of the information on the site. I still can’t believe it. Lorraina and I talked on the phone a dozen times. We exchanged e-mails. I knew her. I did.”

  “And this cruise was the first time you’d met in person?” Sadie thought Maggie had said something about that when they had talked before, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Maggie nodded. “We met up in Seattle before getting on the ship. This was our big face-to-face after weeks of getting to know one another. I can look back on it now and remember that she talked a lot about Shawn and how she hoped that one day we would have a relationship. She said that he probably didn’t mean what he’d said in those e-mails and she wished she hadn’t sent them to me. Knowing that she knew he was on the ship makes me realize she was prepping me to meet him. I guess she thought we would make up and get along and everything, but at the time I just thought she was sad he’d cut her off, maybe obsessing a little bit. This whole thing was suppos
ed to be...life-changing.”

  It had been life-changing, but in such a different way than anyone expected. Sadie processed through all the information and wondered if she should remind Maggie that Sadie and Shawn had once had a private investigating business and that Ohio was a border state to Michigan, where Shawn lived. Once Shawn was back home, it wouldn’t be difficult for him to sniff out the information about who had filed the affidavit, possibly leading her to her birth parents. It didn’t feel like the right time to say it out loud, though. “I’m so sorry,” Sadie said instead.

  “But I know there’s purpose in this,” Maggie said, straightening her back and trying to look confident. “I know God’s trying to show me something, and I’m trying to keep an open heart about it. I just wish I understood better than I do.”

  Sadie nodded her agreement with the sentiment. She’d seen that very thing play out in her life so many times that she couldn’t discount it. But just because God was leading you through a journey with a meaningful end didn’t mean the brambles along that course didn’t draw blood sometimes. “Did Lorraina ever tell you that she was sick?”

  Maggie looked at her hands again. “I knew she was a recovered alcoholic, and she told me she had a bad liver, but I didn’t know how bad it was until Juneau.” She glanced at Sadie fast enough for her to see the smallest amount of censure in her eyes. “I didn’t know anything about her needing a transplant or Shawn not being willing to be tested to see if he could save her life.”

  Oh, dear. Sadie could feel her mama bear instincts shifting around in her chest. She was not in a good place to hear even the mildest of condemnations against Shawn. She took a deep breath before she spoke and tried to take a diplomatic approach. “He was having a difficult time trusting what Lorraina told him, and he just needed more time to figure things out—time she wasn’t giving him.”