Dying for a Clue

by Judy Fitzwater

  Most of the missing children listed at the Web site had been abducted by family members or had disappeared as teenagers. Probably runaways, but who knew? Their parents could only hope that one day they’d call or turn up. But the little ones, the ones who couldn’t possibly take care of themselves, what hope was there for them?

  She plugged in the little information she knew about Diane. Female. White. Brown eyes. Her hair was most likely brown, but who knew under that dye, and besides, it could have been lighter as a child. She left the hair as any. Age now: zero to twenty. She typed in Cat under first name and hit Search. NO MATCHES.

  She deleted Cat and got 123 matches. Back to the main menu, she inserted nonfamily abduction and hit Enter. A page of sixteen names and photos appeared. Most had gone missing as older children, but there were three possibilities: Lori Jean Miller, Cynthia Allison Turner, and Tiffany Elizabeth Stevens, all missing at age three. She’d expected to find a lot more, but surely not every case was posted on the net. None shared Diane’s birth date, November 1.

  She highlighted Lori Jean Miller and hit Enter. Her “poster” came up. Born July 18. Last seen playing in her front yard. Philadelphia, PA.

  Cynthia Allison Turner. Born August 14. Not found at crime scene of parents’ murder/suicide. Bethesda, MD.

  Tiffany Elizabeth Stevens. Born June 22. Mother and child missing from super market parking lot. Blood found in car. Wilmington, NC.

  She stared at the age-enhanced photos, but Diane could have been any of them or none of them. All she was doing was making herself ill. It was too easy to take on other people’s tragedies. Every one of these children needed to be found, to be reunited with their families or, at least, to come to some kind of closure. She couldn’t help them, and it looked like she couldn’t help Diane.

  She bookmarked the site and turned off the computer, frustrated, tired, and fed up. She had to get some sleep. She’d had precious little these last days, and she had Beverly Hoffman’s funeral to get through tomorrow.

  She rearranged the blankets of her bedroll and lay down, Diane and Valerie, their breathing even, not much more than an arm’s length away.

  The floor was hard, but she hardly noticed. Her mind was elsewhere, lost somewhere in the grief of separation, child from parent, the one truly unconditional love. She turned on her pillow, and the tears flowed silently down her cheeks.

  Muffy stirred, stretched, and sauntered over. She lay down next to her, nuzzling her in the darkness. Jennifer burrowed her face into the dog’s short fur and wept.

  Chapter 19

  Beverly Hoffman had conveniently died on a Sunday, making Wednesday afternoon, when the clinic was closed to make up for late Friday night hours, the perfect time for her funeral. Her service was held at the First Presbyterian Church. Good thing, too. It was big enough to house the regular congregation plus a whole lot of curiosity seekers.

  Jennifer arrived a full hour before the two o’clock service, so she could scope out the church prior to taking up post at the far back corner of the sanctuary. It gave her an unobstructed view as the mourners filed in.

  According to Hoffman’s obituary in the morning’s newspaper, she was survived by her husband, Wayne, two children, and her parents, Mrs. and Mrs. Aaron Billings. She’d received her B.S. degree in nursing and immediately gone to work for the East Lake Fertility Clinic. She was active in both church and PTA. No siblings were listed.

  Someone, most likely the husband, had gone to a lot of expense. The casket, draped in a blanket of roses, was polished walnut with brass fittings. It was closed, of course. Dozens of floral arrangements crowded about it.

  As the mourners began to arrive, Jennifer pulled down the wide brim of her black hat. In her black crepe dress and gloves, it was unlikely anyone would recognize her, and that was just the way she wanted it. She was there to observe. Murderers always attended their victims’ funerals, especially in a murder-for-hire case when they thought they had nothing to fear. It was a cardinal rule of the mystery genre, so all she had to do was take careful note of who was there that day, and she’d have her list of suspects. She’d even brought along a pencil and pad tucked into the pocket of her skirt.

  It didn’t take long for the church to fill. Most of the press were there, although she had no idea where Sam was. He told her he was coming.

  She did spy Lieutenant Schaeffer and one or two other policemen she recognized. All were out of uniform, properly attired, properly subdued, and, no doubt, toting their own notebooks.

  Five minutes before two, the family was ushered down the aisle to the front of the church. Paul Collier, supporting a middle-aged man who looked confused and disoriented, led the way. They were followed by a woman in a navy-blue suit and white blouse who, arms linked, walked between an older couple. They had to be Beverly’s parents. Directly behind, carrying a small girl and holding the hand of a young boy, was a man who was an echo of Paul, taller, less stocky, with darker hair than Paul’s graying mane. He had to be Donald, the younger brother. A lanky young man who could have been twenty or so was close behind.

  Another couple followed, but she had no idea who they might be.

  Jennifer felt warm air tickle her neck and jerked back, bumping into someone. She spun around. Sam stood behind her grinning like he’d caught her stealing candy.

  He wore a charcoal suit and looked really sharp. She hadn’t seen him when he left the apartment that morning. She’d been trying to make up for some of those late night hours by sleeping in.

  “At least you didn’t bring a stepladder,” he said. “Maybe you could try climbing up on one of the pews if you need a better look.”

  She scowled. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “I simply asked myself what Jennifer would wear to a funeral. And then I saw this gorgeous woman hiding behind a big black hat and standing alone in the back of the church. Not too many hats and not so much black these days, mostly navy-blue and brown. Besides, I knew you’d be here. The gloves are a nice touch, by the way.”

  He leaned in as though imparting some great words of wisdom. “Murderers don’t really attend the funerals of their victims.”

  Her cheeks reddened. He thought he was so smart.

  “I’m paying my respects,” she said. “I was the one who found her. It only seems right.” That much was true. Even if she hadn’t wanted a look at the attendees, Jennifer would have felt an obligation to see Beverly Hoffman to her final rest. As long as she lived, she’d never get the sight of those strange, dead eyes out of her mind. Just thinking about it made her shudder.

  “You all right?” Sam asked.

  She nodded, shaking off the image. “Do you have any idea who’s with the family up there?” She pointed toward the second pew.

  “That’s Paul Collier with Beverly’s husband Wayne. And Mrs. Collier sitting between Beverly’s parents, the Billingses. The children with Donald Collier belong to Beverly and Wayne. The young man is one of Paul’s sons. He’s a senior at Mercer this year. The thin man with the cavernous cheeks is McEvoy. The short white-haired woman clinging to his arm is his wife. And the tall woman with the gray bun at her neck who’s joining them right now is Dr. Sullivan.”

  “Really? So Sullivan is a woman.”

  “Certainly seems that way.”

  “You get any more on Hoffman?”

  “Yeah. Convinced my editor to let me do a profile of her for the paper. Makes good copy sometimes and gives me an official reason to go poking around. From all accounts, she was as a nice a person as you’d want to meet. She’d been working at the clinic for about sixteen years or so. Everybody liked her—colleagues and patients alike.”

  “I know they worked together, but why are the Colliers sitting with the family?”

  “I thought you knew. They are family. Beverly was Mrs. Collier’s niece.” He pointed at the pew. “That couple she’s sitting between are her sister and her brother-in-law.”

  “But they look older—”

&nbs
p; “They are. Mrs. Collier is the youngest of a brood of eight.”

  The organ music stopped and the minister stepped up behind the lectern.

  Sam touched her arm and whispered, “I’ll talk to you later.” Then he disappeared before she could reply.

  It was just as well. She didn’t want anyone seeing them together. Too many people knew they were friends, and she hadn’t gone to all the trouble of making sure no one would recognize her to have him give her away now. Besides, she could digest only so many family connections at one time.

  Her own family had been about as simple as they come. Just her and her parents and a distant cousin here and there.

  Jennifer continued to scan the crowd as the pastor welcomed the group, the soothing tones of his tenor suddenly breaking her concentration.

  “We are here to say goodbye to our sister Beverly whose time on this earth was far too short...”

  The words rang so familiar. Suddenly she was bathed in an unexpected, debilitating wave of sadness. She felt as if she were suffocating, as if every ounce of strength had been sucked from her body.

  This was the first funeral she’d attended since she’d laid her parents to rest, more than seven years ago. She had thought she would be all right, but the wound was still too fresh, would probably always be too fresh. She missed them so much her chest ached. What did she think she was she doing chasing after murderers? She felt far too young, too vulnerable, too alone.

  She needed her parents to tell her that everything was going to be all right. To tell her what she was doing right, what she was doing wrong. She needed them to love her back, love her absolutely and unconditionally as they had all their lives, right up until the moment when they were gone. So finally, so irrevocably gone.

  Tears washed her eyes as she awkwardly pulled herself to her feet, stumbled out of the pew, and ran on tiptoe toward the high, arched doors open at the rear of the church, toward sunlight and fresh air.

  And directly into a tall blonde woman with shoulder-length hair.

  Jennifer apologized, pulling off her hat and gloves and dabbing at her eyes with a well-worn tissue she found in her purse. She leaned back against the stone front of the church, the sun shining on her face, while she took in great breaths of air.

  “She must have been a relative of yours,” the woman said, stepping out of the doorway. Her face was drawn and lined.

  “No, I...” Jennifer swallowed hard and, feeling enormously foolish, almost laughed. “I’m afraid funerals and I don’t get along.”

  For the first time, she took a good look at the woman. She looked remarkably familiar. Remarkably, in fact, like the photo she had in her purse.

  “You’re Diane’s mother,” she said before she’d had a chance to consider whether it might be a bad idea to let this woman know she recognized her.

  The woman’s eyes brightened.

  “Thank God, yes,” she said. “You know her. Do you know where she is?”

  Jennifer nodded, suddenly more sure than anything else that Anne Marie Robbins was the one person who would help Diane.

  Chapter 20

  Anne Marie Robbins was a wreck. Jennifer wondered how she’d managed to drive all the way from Smith Mountain to Macon without causing some major damage to herself or someone else.

  “She’s fine, really,” Jennifer assured her, pushing a coffee cup in her direction and then the creamer and the sugar. Maybe if she would only drink something, it would calm her nerves. Jennifer suspected the woman hadn’t eaten a full meal in days, but Anne Marie refused to order more than a drink. They were sitting in a booth at the Nu-Way Restaurant, a couple of blocks from the church.

  Jennifer glanced at her watch. The service was still going on. The procession to Rose Hill Cemetery wouldn’t start for at least another twenty minutes.

  “I’ve left an unbelievable number of messages for her,” Mrs. Robbins was saying.

  Her eyelids were ringed with red, and Jennifer could see where she’d put a little too much concealer under her eyes.

  “I didn’t know where else to go. She hasn’t been back to her dorm room in days. And then I saw the obituary in today’s paper. I’ve been checking them each day, just in case...”

  “You recognized the name of the clinic.”

  Mrs. Robbins nodded.

  “There was an incident at the dorm—” Jennifer began.

  “Oh, my God.” What little color there was in the woman’s face completely disappeared.

  “No. I’ve told you she’s fine. Someone searched her room. That’s all.”

  The woman’s eyes again grew huge, and Jennifer quickly added, “While she was gone. She’s been staying with me.”

  Mrs. Robbins looked totally confused. Jennifer dug in her purse and produced the photo as if it somehow validated her connection with Diane.

  The woman studied it and then looked up. “But why you?”

  Excellent question, and one not easily answered in twenty words or less. “She hired a private detective. I’ve been helping him out.”

  “Diane told me about the detective, this Johnny Zeeman character. I went by his office this morning, but he wasn’t there. Bad part of town. She should never have gotten herself mixed up with someone like that. She’s only a child.”

  “She needs to know who she is,” Jennifer insisted, briskly stirring her own coffee.

  Anne Marie looked straight at her. “I’ll tell you who she is. She’s my daughter. She needs my help, not some stranger’s. I want you to take me to her. Now.”

  Jennifer shook her head. Diane could have taken off for Smith Mountain the minute she realized that something was wrong, but she didn’t. She’d headed for Johnny Z’s, a point she thought better not shared with Mrs. Robbins, but one that said a lot about how much Diane trusted her mother’s ability to help her right now.

  “Tell me first,” Jennifer insisted. “Tell me how you came to adopt her. I know about the connection with the fertility clinic. I know she was three when you got her, I know her name was Cat, and,” she held her breath for a second, “I know it was illegal.”

  She was bluffing, about knowing for sure the adoption was illegal and about keeping her from her daughter. As soon as she possibly could, she had every intention of reuniting her with Diane because she was sure, for no good reason except the feeling in her heart, that this woman loved her daughter and would never do anything intentionally to harm her.

  Anne Marie looked like she’d been punched in the stomach. “Does she know?” she managed to whisper.

  “Only what you’ve told her,” Jennifer assured her.

  “I want to be the one.”

  Jennifer nodded. “I promise.”

  “Stew and I had consulted the clinic. We’d been trying to have a child for over six years, closer to seven actually. I was almost thirty-five. They couldn’t help us, not and have it be our own child, genetically, I mean. And we’d run out of money. We couldn’t take out any more loans. I was heartbroken.” She put a hand over her mouth until she regained her composure. “Babies were almost nonexistent for adoption, and the legalities of adopting an older child seemed endlessly complicated. We could have been foster parents, but I didn’t think I could handle falling in love with a child and living with the fear she might someday be taken out of our home.”

  Jennifer dug in her purse, found a clean tissue this time, and passed it to Anne Marie.

  “Paul called me late one night. He said he had a beautiful three-year-old girl who needed a home, but there was a catch. We could ask no questions, we were never to tell her she was adopted, and we would have to relocate from Macon immediately.”

  “But why relocate?”

  “So we could establish a residence as though she were our natural child. A family moves into a neighborhood, no one asks if the children are their own.”

  “And you agreed? Just like that?”

  “No, of course not. But he brought the child to our home. She was tiny, and so scared it made my hear
t ache. When I picked her up, she clung to me and wouldn’t talk. He tried to pull her from me, but she dug her little fingers into my sweater. I knew I could never give her back. She was so afraid. He didn’t say so, but I felt certain she was in danger.”

  “Did he give you any papers?”

  “Yes, a birth certificate already filled out, listing our names as her parents. He had some papers for us to sign. I asked if it was legal, and he assured me it was. But I guess I always suspected they were forged. I just didn’t let myself think about it. I was afraid of what might happen to her if we didn’t take her.”

  “And your husband went along with this?”

  “I didn’t give him a choice. His business is such it doesn’t really matter where we live. I suspect that’s one of the reasons Paul called us.”

  “What about her biological parents?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

  “And you didn’t ask?”

  “I didn’t dare.”

  “Didn’t you care? She was three years old.”

  “Not enough. At least not then.”

  “How did you know her name was Cat?”

  “When I called her Diane, the name on the birth certificate, she corrected me, told me her name was Cat. So we called her our little Diane Cat for a while and finally just Diane.”

  “Do you know of anyone else who...” How could she phrase this so she didn’t alienate the woman? “...anyone else Paul Collier might have helped with adoption?”

  “We asked no questions, just as Paul had said. I had what I wanted. I wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize my child. If I had thought for one moment that letting her come to Macon would bring all this back up...” Her voice choked up, and she waved the tissue at Jennifer.

  “Okay. I want you to write down where you’re staying. You might want to give me your home address as well while you’re at it.”

  The woman searched through her purse for something to write on.