Her Secret Son

by Hannah Mary McKinnon

  Lisa shook her head. “Remember what Mrs. Banks said after the funeral? When Grace arrived here she already had Logan, and she came directly from Portland.”

  “That’s true,” Ivan said.

  “Is it?” I looked at them. “At this point we should take everything Grace ever said with an entire salt mine.”

  “Josh...” Lisa said.

  “Let’s ask Vital Records here for Logan’s birth certificate, to be absolutely sure,” Ivan said. “Are you okay with that, Josh? I can handle the paperwork.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “I’ll sign whatever you need.”

  “Okay, so that’s adoption partially covered, for now at least,” Ivan said.

  “What about fostering?” Lisa said. “That’s still a possibility, isn’t it?”

  “Not from the conversations I’ve had,” Ivan said. “There’s no way there wouldn’t have been any caseworker visits since Josh moved in with Grace. Besides, he’d have needed a background check, too. Then there’s the money Grace would’ve received.”

  “There wasn’t any, not that I saw, anyway,” I said.

  “Right. Not fostered then—” Ivan tapped his notepad with the tip of his pen “—unless Logan slipped through the cracks in the system somehow. I mean, it can happen.”

  “What if she fostered him in Maine and brought him to Albany?” Lisa said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Can you just move out of state with a foster kid?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ivan said. “But just because something’s illegal doesn’t mean people won’t do it. I’ve got some contacts in Portland. I’ll make some calls, see if there’s a warrant—”

  “A warrant?” I said. “What kind of warrant?”

  His eyes darted over to Lisa. “Uh, for her arrest. For leaving with a foster kid or unlawful restraint or something. I’ll call them now.”

  Ivan got up and headed for the den, his voice too low for Lisa and me to hear from the kitchen. I didn’t know what to say. The entire situation felt as if it were happening to someone else. This couldn’t be my life, a tangled, mess of lies and half-truths, mysteries and secrets tripping me up at every turn. How would we ever find our way back to any kind of normal? How would I tell Logan that Grace wasn’t his mother?

  “Are you going to be okay tonight?” Lisa asked quietly.

  “Yeah.” I clenched my teeth, forced a smile. “I’ll be fine.”

  She shook her head, let out a sigh as she leaned forward to rub my arm. “You don’t look fine, and I don’t blame you. Uh, you don’t think you’re going to have a—”

  “Drink?” I shook my head. “No, I’m not, Lisa. I mean, I want to, believe me. A bottle of Jack’s or whatever is looking very sexy right now, trust me, but I won’t. I can’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I know that’s hard to believe considering the amount of times I said I wouldn’t and got shit-faced five minutes later. But I’ve got Logan to look after—”

  “But the other day—”

  “A one-off, I promise. I can’t let myself fall apart. For him.”

  Lisa nodded, the question of what I’d do if Logan was no longer there, if he were taken from me, a rotten lingering smell in the air we both ignored. I couldn’t face that possibility, not ever. As I busied myself with making yet another cup of bloody tea, Ivan returned.

  He shook his head. “No warrant. Nothing. Not even an outstanding parking ticket.”

  “Well, that’s good news.” Lisa crossed her arms, furrowed her brow. “Okay, this might sound crazy but...what if a friend had a baby but couldn’t look after him, so Grace stepped in?”

  “Then why lie?” I ran my hands over my face. “Why all the lies?”

  “To protect Logan?” Lisa said. “Maybe she didn’t want him to know.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said, and I wanted to believe it, I really did, but I’d done a lot of thinking since I’d given the samples to my sister. At first I told myself the DNA results would come back proving Logan was Grace’s, but as the days passed, puzzle pieces kept slotting together in my brain, even though I tried to keep them quarantined in separate parts of my mind.

  Some were what I’d considered smaller, trivial things. How she’d always refused to take out a loan, barely used her credit card, paid off the bills every month—early—even if it meant we’d scrimped to get by. Her driving had been careful, deliberate, always a mile under the speed limit, never running a red light, stopping properly at crossings, following every rule of the road. She’d been so respectful of the law she wouldn’t even jaywalk, for God’s sake, and I’d praised her for it, teased her, and she’d replied she’d never been one to get into trouble.

  Other things had frustrated me, too; how she wouldn’t consider marriage, or discuss buying a place of our own one day, saying she didn’t want to be tied down. It had been more than that. Way more. She’d had secrets. Secrets she’d been petrified of anyone finding out. Things she’d been ready to run from at a moment’s notice.

  “What if she stole him?” The weight of my words threatened to crush me flat, right there in the kitchen as Ivan and Lisa looked at each other. “Come on,” I said. “Are you going to sit there and tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind?”

  Ivan answered first, choosing every word slowly and deliberately, sidestepping the question like any good lawyer might. “It’s a little premature to jump to that kind of conclusion.”

  “Then what do I do?” I said, slamming my palms on the table. “What the hell do I do?”

  “Nothing right now,” Lisa said. “You—”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” I threw my hands in the air. “How can I do nothing?”

  “What option do you have?” Lisa said.

  “The police?” I said.

  “Are you crazy?” Lisa said, her voice bouncing off the ceiling. “What will you say? ‘Hello, Officer, can you help me? This kid isn’t who his mom said he is and I’ve no idea who—’”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” I said, shouting now, too. “But surely the right thing to—”

  “The right thing to do?” Lisa scoffed. “The honorable thing? Think about it. If Grace—I can’t believe I’m saying this—if Grace took Logan they’ll investigate you, as well. What about your record, your DUI—”

  “That was years ago—”

  “Maybe, but what if they take Logan away from you immediately?” she said. “Keep him until they figure out who he is? You’re not his legal guardian, remember? Wasn’t losing Grace enough? And what would you tell Logan if—”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Josh, listen to Lisa for a sec,” Ivan said, his tone calm, even. “Imagine what this will do to the poor kid.”

  “Please don’t call the police, Josh,” she said. “We don’t know anything for sure yet, so you can’t. You just can’t. Grace must’ve had a reason to—”

  “Fuck Grace.” I ran a trembling hand over my face.

  “You don’t mean that, man,” Ivan said. “We know you don’t.”

  “I bloody well do,” I spat. “I don’t know who she was. I mean, if she lied to me about Logan, what else did she lie about? What did we mean to her? What did anything mean to her?”

  “She loved you!” Lisa said. “You know she did, Josh, you’re not thinking straight.”

  “Damn right I’m not.”

  “Please, don’t make a rash decision. No one’s going to come looking for Logan—”

  “But that’s exactly it,” I said, my shoulders sagging. “That’s exactly how it’ll be from now on, me worrying someone’s going to figure this whole mess out.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Ivan said. “And until then, nobody else knows.”

  “Somebody does,” I said quietly. “I think somebody out there is missing a kid.”

 
; CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The night was long and full of research. Articles and videos, news reports and dedicated websites about children who’d vanished—some found, many still missing—and once I’d set foot on that mine-filled road, I couldn’t bring myself to tiptoe back.

  Even when I had triple vision and headed to bed at 3:00 a.m., sleep danced on my pillow, taunting me, refusing to let me rest because of information and caffeine overload in equal measure. My body finally won the war, succumbing to exhaustion, but all my dreams were about Logan; him disappearing through a crack in the wall, sucked into quicksand or snatched away by hooded figures.

  A few hours later I stumbled to Logan’s room like an extra on a zombie show, hovering in the doorway as I watched him stir, thinking, Who are you? Who are you really? I tried a smile that threatened to break my face as I reached out and touched his shoulder, but I had to keep pretending. There was no other choice. “Hey, sleepyhead, time to get up for school.”

  Logan yawned and immediately bounded out of bed. “Come on, Cookie,” he said, urging her to run behind him. Despite my insistence, the puppy hadn’t spent a single night in her basket, but instead had settled on Logan’s bed, sandwiched between her young master’s legs. I wished Cookie’s sleeping spot were the only thing I had to worry about.

  “Will you be home again after school?” Logan called out on his way to the bathroom.

  “Sure will,” I said, wanting to give myself a round of applause for sounding so normal. I hadn’t even told him I’d lost my job yet. At this point it almost felt irrelevant.

  After he’d gone to school I returned to the den, went through the pages of notes I’d made the night before, still talking myself into believing Logan had been adopted or fostered. But my mind kept on asking if Grace had stolen him, telling me that if she had, and I didn’t do something, I’d be denying Logan and his actual parents the right to be together. In turn that meant if I didn’t act on my suspicions and seek the truth, I would be complicit in Grace’s lies. For the millionth time I asked myself if I could live with that, if it was something I could handle for any length of time. The answer was no.

  On the flip side, if I did what I thought was right, what Lisa had blasted as the honorable thing, I could lose Logan. There was no guarantee I’d get any kind of parental access, and if Grace had kidnapped him—the thought made me want to vomit—I’d be investigated, our faces splashed all over the news. Could I be charged as an accomplice despite my innocence? Thrown in jail? If I asked Harlan for help now, would he call the police? Was destroying the only life Logan had ever known something I could live with? Again, the answer was a resounding no.

  I spent more than an hour wandering around the house, then went for some badly needed fresh air with Cookie, but my mind kept circling back to the questions on a loop. Day or night, wherever I was, no matter what I did, there was no escape, no release.

  A short reprieve came in the form of Mrs. Banks, who rang the doorbell midmorning. “Can I ask you for a favor, Josh?” she said, a deep shade of crimson creeping over her cheeks while she fiddled with the button hanging from her bright orange jacket that had turned her into a clementine on legs. “I’m going away for a few days, to New York.”

  “How fantastic, Mrs. Banks. Have you been before?”

  “Never,” she said, lowering her voice and smiling brightly. “Want to know a secret? I met someone on one of those dating sites two months ago, and he’s taking me.”

  “You met someone online?”

  “Oh, don’t look so surprised. Everyone’s doing it these days.” She had the giggle of a woman a third of her age. “Although I feel a little old for this dating game, to be honest, it’s been a long time. Anyway, would you keep an eye on the house while I’m gone?”

  “It’ll be my pleasure,” I said. I’d have agreed to rebuild it from broken matchsticks if she’d asked. Anything to stop my mind from disintegrating.

  “Thank you. Well, I won’t keep you. You’ll be late for work.”

  “No, I won’t. They fired me,” I said, figuring she was going to find out from someone soon enough and it may as well be me. “I wasn’t focused, apparently.”

  Mrs. Banks shook her head before muttering what I could have sworn was “assholes” under her breath. “It’s hardly surprising you weren’t on top form, given the circumstances,” she said. “It hasn’t even been three months. What did they expect?”

  “A robot?”

  “No doubt. Maybe Grace will come back to haunt them.” When she saw my expression her face fell. “My goodness, I’m sorry. That was incredibly insensitive, but...oh, Josh, I miss seeing her. She was always smiling, always happy... Anyway, I’d better let you get on with your day. I don’t want to intrude so—”

  “You’re not,” I said. “I could do with some company. Do you have time for a coffee?”

  “Are you sure? Well...a quick drink of juice would be lovely, please,” Mrs. Banks said, and followed me to the kitchen, where she sat down as I poured her a glass. “I can ask around, see if I can help find you a job?”

  “You would do that for me?”

  “Of course. And between us, I never cared for Leila or Ronnie much. I only hired their company because of you, just like I continued shopping at Ruby & Rose’s because of Grace.”

  “She told me you were a regular.”

  “At least two trips a month. Ruby was an acquaintance, so I was delighted when I introduced her to Grace, and she got hired.” Mrs. Banks drank some juice and smacked her lips. “Is this orange?”

  “Pineapple, Logan’s favorite. Grace never mentioned you helped her find a job.”

  “Well, it was nothing, really. She had a job lined up here, but when she arrived from Portland, her childcare fell through.”

  The hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I tried not to shiver, forced my voice to stay politely interested. “Really?”

  “Didn’t she tell you? The boss didn’t wait for Grace to make other plans and gave her job to someone else. That’s the corporate world for you, I suppose. So there’s Grace, a single mom, money tight, no family to help with the baby... I had to do something.”

  “And you got her the job at Ruby & Rose’s?”

  Mrs. Banks waved a hand. “Took me two minutes. I did Ruby’s hair every other week until we both retired. She was looking for someone, Grace and I had already discussed books a few times, and I knew how much she loved reading...it was simple.”

  “So that’s when you started looking after Logan...”

  “To be honest I needed the company as much as Grace needed the help. My daughter had moved away, my husband had left and I missed my grandson, so—”

  “Do you remember where Grace had the initial job lined up?”

  “I’m not great with dates, but I never forget a name. Mayor and Mayor.”

  “The insurance firm?”

  “The one and only. Never did enjoy their annoying commercials.” She drained her glass and stood up slowly. “Well, I’d better get going. I still have to pack. Broadway here I come.”

  “Thanks,” I said as we moved to the front door. “And have fun in New York.”

  After she’d left I grabbed the tablet. Fresh mug of tea in hand, I opened the browser, typed in Mayor and Mayor, called the main number and asked for the HR department.

  “Hi, I’m, uh, Ronnie Thompson,” I said to the man who answered. “We do homebuilding and landscaping. I need a reference for someone who worked at your company... Grace Wilson.” I gave him her date of birth and crossed my fingers.

  After a lot of clicking on his keyboard and a string of sighs he said, “I don’t have any record of... No, wait...she said she worked here?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “For, uh, ten months, seven-and-a-half years ago.”

  “I’m afraid that’s incorrect,” he said. “Ms. Wilson never joined the co
mpany.”

  Injecting as much fake surprise as I could muster I said, “Are you sure?”

  “Uh-huh. Didn’t show up on her first day. Note here says she called a week later, told us she was no longer interested. But if she put us on her résumé, well...not a good sign, you know what I’m saying?”

  “You’re right. I should check the other companies she’s listed,” I said. “What do you have on her résumé? I wonder if they’re the same.” I jotted down the names and dates he gave me, thanked him and hung up. Three minutes later I confirmed where Grace had worked right up until October thirtieth, weeks after Logan was born. No mention of any absence, she’d been there full-time until she’d left. If she’d already had Logan then, what would she have done with him during the day? She’d have needed an accomplice, and if someone else had been involved, where were they now?

  I hung up the phone and pulled out my research notes, looked at the timeline and facts I’d written on the pad. I added October thirtieth, circled it three times in red pen, did the same with November eighteenth, the day I remembered Mrs. Banks saying she’d met Grace in the rain. A possible gap of nineteen days where something might have happened. Only nineteen.

  I went back to my internet searches, reopened the FBI’s missing children site I’d found, studied the details of a baby who’d disappeared months before Logan was born. Supposedly born. Had we celebrated Logan’s real birthday, or was it a day Grace had plucked out of thin air?

  I leaned closer to the screen, tried to determine if the baby was Logan, my pulse pounding as I read his name: Carter Jeremiah Polisano. I wasn’t an expert in baby sizes, but the dates didn’t match. If Logan was Carter, he’d have been almost a year old when he and Grace arrived in Albany, and there was no way she could’ve passed him off as a newborn. I opened the missing person’s sheet and read about Carter’s mother, who’d been found dead in a field, the boy’s whereabouts, and that of his older sister, still unknown.