Kindred Spirits

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  Carol and Mary Kay thanked him for his time—even if it led them right into a wall.

  “How’d it go?” Jeanine asked as Doug Andersson closed his office door behind them.

  “Disappointing,” Carol said. “To say the least.”

  “There was a woman in here a few minutes ago looking for you. She was very excited, but then she got a call she had to take outside.”

  Must have been Beth. They went out and found her leaning against the bumper of the Highlander deep in conversation. When they got closer, she covered the mouthpiece on her cell and said, “I have big news,” and handed them an old high school yearbook. Into the phone she said, “Hold on, Marc. I’ll call you right back.”

  “How’s your dad?” Mary Kay asked.

  “He’s OK, considering.” She shrugged off her worry. “We have some big decisions to make, I think, but according to Marc the doctors are very optimistic. Anyway, look at this.” She opened the yearbook, showing them what she’d found while in the Calais Public Library. Carol and Mary Kay were stunned.

  Not to mention pissed.

  “He lied to us.” Mary Kay tapped the photo of Doug and Lynne at the prom in matching powder-blue formal wear. “Out-and-out lied.”

  Beth said, “Don’t tell me he denied dating her.”

  “He denied ever speaking to her,” Carol said, adding that his exact words were that he wouldn’t have known her to say hello.

  “What a jerk,” Beth said, indignant.

  “There’s only one reason why he would lie about something as innocent as whether they dated in high school,” Mary Kay said. “Because he’s the father and he’s covering his rear.”

  “Right,” Carol agreed. “What I don’t get is why Lynne wouldn’t have just told us he was the father? That would have saved us so much aggravation.”

  “Because she’s protecting him,” Beth said sadly. “Because maybe she might have loved him once upon a time and she doesn’t want us coming in and ruining his life.”

  “Wow.” Mary Kay slung her purse over her shoulder and clasped her hands. “Now what do we do? Abide by Lynne’s wishes and pretend he’s not the father or show him the yearbook?”

  “We do what will help us find Julia,” Carol said. “We show him the yearbook.”

  This time, they didn’t even bother asking Jeanine if he was in. They knew the answer. As Beth went back to her phone call with Marc, Mary Kay and Carol marched past Jeanine’s desk and opened the door to Doug’s office.

  He was sitting there, hands in his lap, staring out the window. Some pressing workload indeed, Carol thought.

  “Mr. Andersson?” she said.

  He swiveled his chair so his back was to them and said rather testily, “I thought our five minutes were up.”

  Carol dropped the yearbook onto his desk. “I thought you didn’t know Lynne to say hello.”

  He kept his back to them.

  “Let’s see. Here you are in the 1980 high school yearbook as Macbeth and Lynne as Lady Macbeth,” she said, though Andersson refused to look. “All those practices and you never recognized her, huh?”

  She flipped to another photo. “And here are you two on the yearbook staff. And here you are hanging out on the school lawn, knee to knee.”

  “What’s your point?” he said angrily.

  Carol closed the book. “The reason why Eunice Swann hired your father to arrange the adoption of her grandchild was not happenstance. Your father had a personal interest, didn’t he?”

  “I think you’re making some pretty wild assumptions based on a couple of yearbook photos.” But he didn’t deny it.

  “If you were so close, as it appears here.” She opened the book again. “How about you give me the name of one other guy in your high school who might have been the father of her baby so we can look him up.”

  “I can’t possibly think back that far.”

  Carol let Mary Kay take over as she randomly found a page and read off names. “Could the father be Bill Danish?” Mary Kay asked. “Thomas Detcko? Vinnie D’Mazilla? Or maybe it was. . .”

  “OK, OK.” He rotated toward them, his head down. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to tell us who adopted Lynne’s baby,” Carol said. “That’s all we ask.”

  “And I told you that I’d love to help, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Mary Kay asked. “Didn’t you love Lynne? Don’t you care that the only thing she wanted before she died was to find her daughter?”

  “Of course, I did . . . I do. But in a small, conservative town where reputation is everything, I cannot take the risk of people finding out that I fathered a child out of wedlock.” He clenched his jaw. There. He’d said it.

  Mary Kay gestured to the framed photo. “I assume local people includes your lovely wife. Surely she has no idea of your love child.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “You’re right,” Carol said, two hands on the desk and leaning forward. “We wouldn’t. For Lynne’s sake.”

  “What do you mean,” he asked, “you wouldn’t tell my wife for Lynne’s sake?”

  “In her letter to us, Lynne never mentioned your name,” Carol said as Douglass listened intently. “She didn’t leave you out to hurt you, but to protect you. It would have been far easier to tell us to hunt down that S.O.B. Doug Andersson and force you to find her baby. Hell, she could have done that herself.”

  He bowed his head again, his bluff called, his cards poorly played. “OK, here’s what happened. Actually, Lynne and I have been in contact.”

  Carol sighed deeply. Finally, they were getting somewhere.

  “We reconnected a few years ago through Facebook. You have no idea what effect it had on me when she wrote that she was dying. Lynne was always so . . . full of life. So vivacious.” He smiled to himself. “I asked her to marry me when she told me she was pregnant, but she didn’t want to be stuck here in Calais. She wanted to get out of this mud hole. I could have given her the world if she’d let me. Nice house over on the Hill District. Security. But there was no stopping her. No matter how hard I tried, there was no way I could get her to stay.”

  Carol said, “Do you mean to tell me that during all your Facebook reconnecting, Lynne never asked you what happened to the baby you two conceived?”

  He shook his head. “I never said that.”

  “Then she did.”

  “Yes.”

  Carol was close to becoming exasperated. This was worse than some of her tougher cross-examinations. “And how did you respond?”

  “That I couldn’t release the information for the same reasons I gave you.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, unable to meet their gazes. “I had no idea she was this close to death. The last I heard from her was a week ago last Thursday when she said she was feeling a lot better and was planning to spend the day outside.”

  “A week ago last Thursday,” Mary Kay said, “was the day Lynne killed herself.”

  “I didn’t know that until I got a call from Dorfman saying that she’d died. I went online and looked up her obituary. . ..” He covered his face with his hands, his shoulders heaving. “I’d hoped he was mistaken.”

  They let him cry. For a while, those were the only sounds in the office, Douglass Andersson catching his breath, the springs in his chair squeaking as his body convulsed in sobs.

  After a long while, he looked up and asked them to tell him everything.

  Carol related the story of Lynne’s suicide and tried to recall her letter to the Society word for word as best she could. “We have no interest in ruining your life or your marriage, Doug. All we want is a way to find Julia.”

  He rested his elbows on his desk and closed his eyes as if he were praying. When he was done, he leaned over, unlocked a bottom drawer, and handed them a thin blue file. “Here. I checked its contents when Dorfman called, and it should have all the information you need.”

  A zip of energy shot through Carol’s arm as she took the file from his out
stretched hand. This was too good to be true. “You don’t want us to make copies?”

  “I don’t ever want to see it again. Take it away from here. Burn it if you want.” Then he swiveled his chair away from them and went back to looking out the window, his shoulders drooped. “Anyway, that chapter is closed and behind me now. The future is all that matters.”

  Carol took a last glance at his family photo, of his innocent children smiling under the protective gaze of their father, and decided that maybe he was right.

  Chapter Fourteen

  They drove the five blocks back to the library since they had the feeling their Highlander was no longer welcome in the Andersson law office’s parking lot. Along the way, they filled in Beth about the details, how Doug Andersson had refused to release the file until the very end, relenting when they promised not to tell anyone.

  “May I just say this is why public libraries kick ass,” Beth said. “Try finding online what I found in the high school yearbook. You couldn’t. This is why the local library must be saved.”

  Mary Kay and Carol parked the car and while Beth went into the library to return the yearbook to Annie, they got some bad coffee across the street.

  “I think this hangover’s finally going away,” Carol said, popping an Advil to make sure.

  “Mine isn’t,” Mary Kay said. “Hear me now and believe me later, I am never drinking again.”

  Carol laughed. “Famous last words.”

  Unable to take the suspense any longer, they met Beth on the steps and opened the forbidden file.

  The paper on top was the adoption decree:

  IN THE ORPHAN’S COURT OF NORTHAMPTON COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA IN RE ADOPTION OF JULIA EUNICE SWANN, A MINOR.

  DECREE

  THE COURT HEREBY DECREES THAT THE SAID JULIA EUNICE SWANN SHALL BE IN LAW THE ADOPTED CHILD OF DONALD MILLER AND HIS WIFE, GRACE SZYMANKOWSKI MILLER AND SHALL HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS OF A CHILD AND HEIR OF SAID PETITIONERS, AND BE SUBJECT TO THE DUTIES OF SUCH CHILD, AND IS HEREINAFTER NAMED AND KNOWN AS ALICE MARIE MILLER.

  WALTER J. SCHNEIDER, P.J.

  COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA COUNTY OF NORTHAMPTON.

  Carol turned over the page to the petition attached. “And here’s Lynne’s signature forfeiting all rights.” She pointed to a scrawl.

  Beth and Mary Kay each took a gander. “That’s her signature?” Beth asked.

  “Keep in mind she’d just given birth,” Mary Kay said. “And she was drugged.”

  “What we’ve got here is sealed forever, you know. Our possession of it is definitely illegal,” Carol said. “Beth, if you hadn’t come across that yearbook we would not be reading this now.”

  Mary Kay checked the file and removed a yellowing memo. “This could be their address.”

  It read: DONALD AND GRACE MILLER, 18 PINETREE LANE, POCONO LAKE, PENNSYLVANIA.

  Carol scrolled through the White Pages listing for Millers on her phone. “That was thirty years ago. Chances are slim they’re still there.”

  “Most people don’t keep their house more than seven,” said Beth.

  “We can track them down, if not by ourselves, then I’ll hire one of Deloutte Watkins’s private investigators,” said Carol. “Do you know how many Donald Millers are in Pennsylvania? Hundreds.” Carol scrolled through page after page, discouraged. “Not a good sign when you run a name and the response comes up ‘Whoa! Over 100 Found.’”

  “Any on Pinetree Lane, Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania?” Beth asked.

  “Nope. Nor any in that area, as far as I can tell. I think we’re screwed, ladies. For all we know, Donald and Grace might have died or moved to Florida.”

  “Usually, it’s the other way around.” Mary Kay jabbed Carol in the ribs. “Hey, didn’t Dorfman say something about checking out Crescent Hollow if we find their names?”

  “Geesh. I must be more hungover than I thought. That completely slipped my mind.” She typed the Millers’ name and Crescent Hollow, Pennsylvania, into Google.

  “Bingo!” Carol held up the phone to show them the address. “Dorfman came through.”

  “We found them,” Beth exclaimed. “Julia’s parents. I never thought we would.”

  “Me neither,” Mary Kay agreed.

  But Carol couldn’t share their enthusiasm. How would the Millers react to three strange women showing up at their door with a letter from the dead mother of their beloved daughter?

  “You know, we really haven’t thought this through enough,” she said. “We have to be very careful. It was hard enough for Eunice and Therese. Imagine what it’ll be like for Julia.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Beth said as they crossed the library lawn and headed toward the car. “I think Lynne did too. That’s why she wrote the letter.”

  “While she was at it, she should have written Doug,” Mary Kay said, “instead of telling him the day she killed herself that she felt a whole lot better and was going to spend the day outside.”

  Beth placed a hand on her arm. “What?”

  “Doug told us he and Lynne were communicating through Facebook,” Mary Kay said. “Her last words were probably to him—right under Farmville.”

  Lynne’s last words hadn’t been to her or Mary Kay or Carol or, probably, even Sean, Beth thought. They’d been to Douglass Andersson, a stranger from a life they’d had no idea she’d ever lived.

  It was so strange to think that Lynne had never so much as hinted about her hidden past. In the course of fifteen or so years, even after the lubrication of fairly potent martinis, she never let it slip that she’d been forced to give up her baby. Or, more recently, that she’d reconnected with her first love online.

  She’d said nothing.

  It was the kind of crazy circumstance Beth had found only in books. And not very good books, at that.

  All of which left her somewhat miffed. Weren’t best friends supposed to share everything? “There was so much going on with her. I had no idea.”

  “None of us did,” Mary Kay said as they piled into the car. “Makes me wonder how much of the real Lynne we knew.”

  “What matters is that she’s sharing her life with us now,” Carol said. “Hey, not even Sean knows what we know, not her sons or her mother, not her doctor or colleagues at work. In the end, it was us she chose. Us.”

  It was small, bittersweet comfort. But it was all Beth had.

  The drive to Crescent Hollow would normally have taken a good four and a half hours. But Mary Kay floored it east, across I-80, weaving in and out of tractor trailers, sending Beth into fits, gripping the door handles and bracing her feet against the dashboard.

  “Have a heart, MK. I’d like to live to see my grandchildren.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got it all under control.” Mary Kay scanned for lurking state troopers and, deeming it safe, depressed the accelerator to 85.

  There was a particular urgency in her need to get this over with and get home. It wasn’t just that they’d been on the road since Saturday morning and the Highlander was getting rank after three days of crisscrossing this big block of real estate called Pennsylvania. It was that her last conversation with Drake had left her in a state of high anxiety. When he mentioned he’d found the birth-control pills, when he asked if he could start telling people the good news, she realized he was getting his hopes up and that’s when she started to panic.

  “Who’s up for a new martini?” Carol asked.

  Mary Kay blanched and gripped the wheel, her knuckles white.

  Beth put down Middlemarch, her umpteenth attempt. “Now? We’re driving.”

  “I don’t mean to drink, I mean to create. My memo’s in so I’ve got nothing to do. I’m bored stiff.”

  Beth said, “There was one I came across the other day, a sherry martini.”

  Carol scoffed. “No, that’s for church ladies. You know what I want to try that we haven’t? A Manhattan martini. Rye, vermouth, bitters, and a Maraschino cherry.”

  “My father would have liked that,”
Beth said. “He liked Manhattans, before the doctors put him on the wagon. Hey, you know what we need to do? Invent a martini to commemorate this trip.”

  Carol clapped. “Now you’re talking. Let me start by saying it should be strong, like we are.”

  “And light,” Beth added. “Maybe some champagne or fruit.”

  “Not dry, though,” Carol said. “Because this weekend has been anything but dry.”

  They decided it should also be slightly sweet and piquant, in honor of Lynne. Strong, sweet, fruity, and bubbly. If they could only have thrown in a touch of determination.

  “What do you think, MK?” Beth asked. “You’re awfully quiet.”

  “Just keeping an eye on the road ahead, hon, and where it’s gonna take us now.”

  They didn’t talk much for the rest of the drive. Carol napped in the rear while Beth put aside Middlemarch and chatted with her mother and Madeleine and then her mother again, hashing and rehashing every minuscule detail of Chat’s tests. Finally, the three of them managed to arrange a conference call that took the good part of an hour.

  The results showed blockage in two arteries, in addition to fluid within the lung walls indicating congestive heart failure. The cardiologist at Grace suggested stents to relieve Chat of chest pains, though they would not necessarily repair the damage done from years of indulging on thick juicy rib eyes at client lunches and Sundays spent vegetating in front of Patriots games on his fifty-inch widescreen TV.

  The alternative was a bypass, a risky procedure in Chat’s case. Needless to say, Maddy was all for at least exploring the option in New York.

  “Bill Clinton and David Letterman didn’t wait around to die,” Madeleine said. “They were whisked into Columbia-Presbyterian and treated immediately. Doesn’t Dad deserve the same? Why should he receive lesser care?”

  Elsie didn’t know what to do. Her preference would have been to make no decision at all. “I wish I could turn back the clock,” she mused, “to when we didn’t have to worry about stents or bypasses. Your father used to be so strong. Do you remember when he used to pull the dinghy across Kindlewah Lake while swimming the backstroke? With you two girls in it?”