"Whom," Sal said, looking up for the first time. He was a handsome young man, or would have been if he smiled. He had deep-set eyes and strong features, made more prominent by his short, short hair, shaved down until it was little more than peach fuzz on his scalp. "Whom you represent."
"Look, someone wants to help you pay for your college education, or take a trip to Europe, if that's what you want. What's the downside to that? Why does it matter who your benefactor is?"
Tess had spoken directly to Sal, but he had turned back to his book, indifferent to the appeal. Apparently, only the rules of grammar and his nickname preference warranted his attention.
"Sal is a straight-A student, with SAT scores above 1300. Almost any college in the country will offer him a full scholarship," Pearson said. "He doesn't need anyone's money. In particular, he does not need anyone's blood money."
"Funny, I thought one of your big issues was restitution to victims. Here's someone trying to make restitution, and you want no part of it."
"Luther Beale may have killed one child, but he came close to destroying every child who saw what he did on Butchers Hill that night. I don't want him anywhere near Sal. I don't care how much remorse he claims to feel. The tiger doesn't change his stripes."
"The leopard doesn't change his spots," Sal amended.
"Don't interrupt, Sal," Pearson said.
"Says so right here," Sal said. "That story is in this book I'm reading right now, man." He turned another page, and Tess glimpsed a vivid color plate, a crocodile's jaws clamped on an elephant's nose. Kipling's Just-So Stories, how the elephant got his trunk. Not a bad cautionary tale for Tess, with her own insatiable curiosity. But why was a high school junior at an elite school flipping through such a childish book?
"Is Sal so well fixed that there's nothing he needs? Even with scholarships, I would think he could use help with college. Perhaps he needs a car, or a new computer. My client would be glad to help him with that."
At the mention of a car, Sal looked a little pleadingly at Pearson, as if to say, What's the harm. Pearson shook his head.
"Easy for you," Sal muttered. "You have a Porsche."
"Penfield is on private property. Sal will be staying here this summer, taking extra credits in math and science to help him catch up. As a courtesy, I'm going to ask that you not return here, and that you never attempt to contact Sal again. If you don't honor my request, I can make it official and obtain a restraining order."
"A restraining order? What do you think I'm going to do? Sit on him and stuff dollar bills in his pocket?"
"Sal is my ward, I am responsible for him. You're not the first disreputable person who has tried to dredge up his past. When Beale was released from prison two months ago, we actually received calls from some tabloid television show, which wanted to stage a ‘reunion.' Disgusting. They offered us money, too. Well, I'm determined that Sal's life will not be lived under the shadow of what happened five years ago."
Tess looked at the well-furnished library, at Sal Hawkings in his navy blazer, khakis, and blue Oxford cloth shirt. She thought of Treasure, his face streaked with lemon pie, squatting in a vacant house. "Sal would seem to be the one kid from Butchers Hill who's done pretty damn well for himself. Why aren't Treasure and Destiny enrolled at Penfield? Or Eldon? How come Sal's the only one deserving of your solicitous care?"
"I'm here because I'm smart," Sal said, slapping his book shut. "The others were dumb motherfuckers, but I knew enough to want to get out, even if it meant going to a sorry-ass school like this. Now excuse me, but second period is about to begin. I don't have time for shit I don't get graded on."
He left the room, taking the Kipling with him.
"You see?" Pearson said. "Any mention of Luther Beale sets him off. Trauma like that never goes away. Now please leave and be prepared to be arrested if you come back."
As it often happened, Tess was in her car and well on her way to Annapolis before she realized what she should have said in reply. It wasn't Beale's name that upset Sal, or even Donnie Moore's. It was the mention of the other children, Treasure, Destiny, and Eldon.
The legislature was long out of session, but Annapolis was busy, swarming with tourists drawn by its over-the-top quaintness. Apparently, the Gap and Banana Republic became much more exotic when fronting on narrow, cobblestone streets. Tess pulled into the public garage off Main Street, although it always hurt her to pay for parking—hence, those two tickets—and walked up the hill to the Senate office building.
She had never covered the General Assembly as a reporter, but she knew the basic civics lesson of how a bill became law. Jeff from Adoption Rights had told her that the failed bill targeting operations such as Family Planning Alternatives was Senate Bill 319, offered by a senator from Carroll County, a once-rural area now considered part of the Baltimore metro area. Tess had found it odd someone from outside the city had sponsored the bill, especially an old pro-lifer like this senator. There must be a wounded constituent somewhere in the mix. If the committee files proved useless, she could always check with the senator's office and see what kind of material he had kept. But changing the law apparently hadn't been all that important to the senator. Over the past five years, he had never attempted to reintroduce the bill.
Tess walked into the empty Senate building and climbed the broad double staircase to the third floor. The secretary who handed Tess the file seemed almost grateful for any distraction.
"What are you trying to find, anyway?" she asked.
"Looking for some folks who testified on this bill, see if they can give me any leads on the adoption agency that inspired it all." Tess pulled out the sign-in sheet that was put out before each hearing. In order to testify, one had to sign in. The list for SB 319 had just five names: the senator himself, someone from the Department of Human Resources, the state agency that oversaw all adoptions, a couple, Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson of Baltimore, and a woman, Willa Mott. The senator and DHR had filed written versions of their testimony, but there was nothing in the file from the Wilsons or Willa Mott.
"Is this everything?" Tess asked.
"If that's all there is, that's all there is. You know, I've been in this office for ten years and I've got a good memory for most of the controversial stuff that comes through, but I don't remember this one at all. What's the big deal?"
"No big deal, but I'd like to find the people who testified. I just wish I knew what they said, or where they fit into the whole debate."
The secretary shrugged. "There's always the tapes."
"Tapes?"
"Senate records every committee hearing. If you know the date and the time—and it's right there, so you do—you can go over to Legislative Reference and listen on a pair of headsets, just like it was an old radio show. Only even more boring, if you know what I mean."
"Can I do that right now?"
"Sure. But I feel sorry for someone who can't think of something better to do on a nice June day than listen to one of our hearings. Whyn't you go down to the dock, have a meal at one of the seafood places? There's this one place that serves the best crab dip. And if you're on expense account, the Cafe Normandy does a real good rockfish."
Tess, trying not to shudder too visibly at the idea of crab dip or rockfish, thanked the woman and headed across the street to Legislative Reference.
Although tempted to fast-forward through the testimony, she listened dutifully to the entire tape. The senator's dull, rambling introduction, with all its little formalities, the agency's defensive posturing—DHR didn't seem to have anything against the bill, it just wanted to make clear it was not to blame for aberrations such as Family Planning Alternatives.
The law itself, as described, was trivial, requiring that such services disclose in their advertising whether they provided abortions. The pro-lifer senator seemed to be trying a preemptive strike, offering a weak, ineffective bill that would keep the government from scrutinizing other agencies that might be pulling the kind of bait-and-sw
itch Family Planning Alternatives had tried: luring women in with promises of abortions, then using all sorts of propaganda to talk them out of the procedure. (One woman, for example, had been told an abortion halved her probability of ever becoming pregnant again and increased her risk of gynecological cancers tenfold.)
The testimony droned on and on. Tess almost nodded off, then the tenor of the voices changed and she snapped to, rewinding the tape.
The Wilsons were a couple who had started an adoption through Family Planning, then broken off the relationship because they had been disturbed by a worker's offer of a steep discount if they would take a biracial, disabled child. "It was like she was running a tag sale, wasn't it, Mike?" the woman appealed to her husband. "‘Would you take a baby like that if we knocked a thousand dollars off the fees? How about two thousand? What if the baby isn't disabled, just biracial?'"
Again, Tess stopped the tape and played it back. Yes, the woman definitely said Mike, despite the fact that she and her husband had signed in as Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson. Unless the woman tripped up again on the tape, and gave their full names or hometown, finding them would be impossible.
Willa Mott, according to her testimony, had been a worker at the agency for ten years and now ran a day-care center in Westminster, the senator's home county. Bingo! Tess thought, writing down the name. Assuming the woman hadn't moved out of state, she'd be easy enough to find, with a name like that. In a nervous, thin voice that suited her spinsterish name, she described the scare tactics her former employers had used, and how she had finally leaked the story to a local television station. A clerical worker, she had sat in on most of the interviews and seen the files on every client.
"Why did you wait so long before telling anyone what was happening?" one of the committee members asked.
Willa Mott stuttered from nervousness. "I myself do not believe in abortion, because of my religious pr-pr-pr-principles. I thought it was right to counsel young women against it. But I began to see that they were hurting the women who came in, and some of them just went someplace else, anyway. It didn't seem Christian to me, what they were doing. I and one of the clients called a television reporter. I didn't go on camera—they shot me in the dark, with one of those machines that makes your voice sound funny. But before the report even aired, my supervisors closed the office and disappeared. I showed up for work one day and the place was locked."
Another senator, a woman, asked a question: "The adoptions they arranged—were those legal and aboveboard?"
"Oh my goodness, yes. If they could have just kept doing that, without trying to coerce the women who came to see them, I would have been proud to work there. But they had a cause, you know? They honestly believed in what they were doing."
The testimony ended there and before Tess knew it, she was listening to a debate over a different bill, something about the state's private adoption laws. She turned her headset in and walked outside, blinking in the bright sun on Lawyers Mall, the square at the center of the State House complex. Tourists were gathered around the statue of Thurgood Marshall, snapping pictures, posing alongside the bronze version of the Supreme Court justice as if he were one of those life-size cutouts of the president or a popular sports figure.
Marshall was a relatively new addition to the State House grounds, added as a way of soothing the hard feelings engendered by a statue of the other Marylander to sit on the Supreme Court, Roger Taney. Taney's claim to fame, alas, was that he had written the Dred Scott slave decision, helping the nation set course for the Civil War. Inevitably, people in the bury-the-past nineties had wanted to tear Taney's statue down, as if that would make everything better. The state, in a rare burst of Solomon-like wisdom, had countered by adding Marshall's likeness. The compromise had worked in ways few imagined. For while Marshall stood in this open square, literally embraced by tourists, Roger Taney sat high on a hill on the other side of the State House lonely and ignored.
Back in her car, Tess turned on the radio and punched the buttons until she found a man talking about the media conspiracy to conceal some Washington scandal. It was a liberal media conspiracy, of course, an allegation that always made Tess smile. The media was one of the most conservative forces she knew.
A traffic announcer broke in, warning of a back-up along the streets west of her office. A rowhouse fire had Fayette and Pratt blocked, traffic snarled in every direction. She would have to swing to the east, approaching the city through the Fort McHenry tunnel, although the tunnel always made her claustrophobic and she resented tolls almost as much as she resented paid parking. But most of all, she hated the idea of all that water beyond the white-tiled walls, hated the moment when the radio went out, leaving her alone in her car, without even the nattering voice of a conspiracy buff to keep her company.
Maybe she should call in to one of the talk shows before she hit the tunnel, share her revelation about the two Supreme Court justices. Most of the shows were desperate enough for callers that they paid for cell phone calls. But she didn't want to talk to some pompous baritone. Tess realized she had been speaking to Jackie in her head about the two statues, imagining what they might talk about when they drove to Westminster looking for Willa Mott. She had always done this, putting away anecdotes she knew would amuse someone close to her, looking forward to the chance to provoke Tyner, make Kitty laugh.
Only Jackie wasn't a friend, she reminded herself, merely a client. Once Tess found her daughter, she'd be gone.
Chapter 14
"Doesn't Carroll County still have an active chapter of the KKK?" Jackie asked, looking nervously around the bagel shop where she and Tess had stopped, killing time before their 10 a.m. appointment with Willa Mott.
"Uh-huh. In fact, they've got a recruiting flier up on the wall over there," Tess said, pointing with her chin toward the bulletin board. "I've heard it's a great way to meet men. Want me to write down the number?"
"You know, some things are not funny."
"I'll concede that if you'll concede some things are."
Jackie broke off a piece of her bagel, then looked at it as if she couldn't remember what she was supposed to do with it. She wasn't quite as tense and nervous as she had been at the Adoption Rights meeting, but she was definitely rattled. Was it possible to want something so much that it scared you?
"Remind me to check my teeth in the rearview mirror before we head out," Tess said. "I don't want to interview someone with poppy seeds in my teeth."
"You should have ordered something without seeds, then." Oh so prim.
"What, like that banana nut thing with blueberry cream cheese you're toying with? I have news for you, Jackie. That is not a bagel. If the local KKK came in here right now, they'd take one look at what you're eating and say, ‘At least she's a Gentile.' Then they'd drag me out of here by the braid like the cossacks who used to come calling in my great-grandmother's village."
"Really? Did things like that truly happen to your ancestors?"
Tess shrugged. "We only have Gramma Weinstein's word for it and she's never been above a little embroidery. Especially if it's in the cause of trying to get one of her grandchildren to eat liver."
"But you're not really Jewish, right? Your last name is Monaghan."
"Judaism comes down through your mother."
"Is that how it works?" Jackie seemed genuinely curious. "I mean, if your father was Weinstein and your mother was Monaghan, you wouldn't be Jewish?"
"I'd be exactly what I am, a nonbelieving mongrel, but I wouldn't qualify for citizenship in Israel." Tess pulled her lips back in a gum-baring grin. "Any seeds?"
"One, up near the pointy tooth. No, other side. You got it."
"Let's go meet Willa Mott."
H. L. Mencken, never a loose man with a compliment, had described Carroll County as one of the most beautiful places in Maryland. In some undeveloped pockets, you could still see the soft hills and long, tapering views that had inspired him. The older towns—Westminster, New Windsor, Union Mills—h
ad the nineteenth-century red brick houses, more like the old German and Mennonite homesteads on the Pennsylvania side of the Mason-Dixon line. It was a place out of a time. Then you rounded a curve in the highway and found a seventies-ugly development hugging the land like a family of jealous trolls, determined to keep anything beautiful at bay.
Willa Mott lived in one of the oldest, ugliest subdivisions south of Westminster. A faded sign in the front yard advertised "Apple Orchard Daycare," but the only tree Tess could see was an ailanthus that no one had tried to chop down until it was too late. The bastard tree had struggled through a crack near the driveway and was now a spindly twelve feet.
"The kids are watching a video," Willa Mott said, opening the door before they were up the walk. "So we have exactly eighty-eight minutes. Although they sometimes like me to sing along with the hunchback."
It was hard to imagine Willa Mott singing, or doing anything vaguely joyful. She looked just as Tess had imagined her while listening to the taped testimony: a plain woman of little distinction. She wore a denim skirt, polyester white blouse, and navy cardigan. Her hair was a dull brown, her eyes a duller brown. The only color in her face was her nose, red with a summer cold. She found a tissue and blew the way children do, one side, then the other.
"Allergies," she said. "The pollen count is 150 today."
"Is that high?" Tess asked.
"Terribly. But I guess you didn't come here to talk about my sinuses." She squinted at Jackie. "I can't say as I remember you. But I guess you've changed some, since back then. Do you recognize me?"
"I think so. Maybe." But Tess could tell Jackie was lying, especially to herself. In her yearning, she was prone to say what she hoped was the right answer, even if it wasn't true.
"Jackie came to the agency thirteen years ago, under the name of Susan King. She would have been just a teenager then, not much more than eighteen. Does that help?"
"Not really. We saw a lot of young girls. Gosh, is that real gold?"
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