“Whatcha got there?” Milton asked me.
I read the pages “Breakin. Thieves took some cash and a computer. Mostly they trashed the place, including some art.” I read the report. “Somehow, the primary alarm failed, but a secondary one was tripped, and our guys arrived six minutes later. Take a look.”
Milton took a photo from me and ogled the damage. Sofa cushions ripped open, lamps knocked to the floor, a glass coffee table smashed, and the very expensive paintings, split canvases drooping like tears, the strips hanging below the gilt frames. “Wowza,” he said. “Looks like they wanted to find something, huh?”
No. It didn’t. You didn’t smash a lamp to look for something or cave in a glass-topped coffee table because you suspected it hid anything. What it looked like was rage. Someone had worked up a good old-fashioned case of anger and expressed it with primitive tools: a bat or a crowbar, and a razor or knife. I thought it likely the theft was secondary, perhaps a smokescreen. I didn’t correct Milton’s assumption. He was older than me, and I’d been raised to respect my elders. Besides, he didn’t handle investigations. He handled the books.
“Might have to pay this one out.” I checked the claim and whistled sharp through my teeth.
Milton raised his head, “What?”
“The paintings that got ruined were worth millions,” I said.
“Holy moly.”
“One was by Keith Haring.”
Milton shook his head. “Management won’t like it.”
No, they would not. Of course, it was the insurance company that was on the hook for the paintings, but our security company could suffer a loss of face, or worse, in light of the alarm failing. They had better hope it was the fault of the owners, or an act of God. I was always suspicious of the first; not so, the second. Who was I to question God?
“Where was the house?” Milton asked.
“Williamstown, Mass,” I said. ACE covered Connecticut, Massachusetts, and the western half of Rhode Island. Why they chose to cover only half of the country’s smallest state never made sense to me.
“Lucky no one was home,” Milton said. “Could’ve got nasty.”
“Yeah.” Only most of the time, it wasn’t luck. Burglars preferred empty houses. A clean snatch and grab to a potential hostage situation. They’d seen enough movies to know those rarely ended well.
Milton said, “Gonna grab a snack. You want anything?”
“Trusting the vending machine again?” Milton had refused to use it for a month after it ate a dollar and refused to dispense his snack or return his money.
“Hunger knows no reason,” he said, jingling coins in his palm.
“Good luck.”
He left for the vending machine, democratically installed in the middle of the long building. I slid the burglary papers aside and took out the folder I’d smuggled inside my jacket. Opened it up. Inside were photocopied pages from Elizabeth May Gardner’s diary.
Her handwriting was less bubbly than I’d expected. Her capital Gs had horns and her capital Ds were emaciated, as if they longed to be capital Is. Much of the diary was a record of small events: fights with her parents, trips with her friends, a leather jacket she wanted, and the hope that her photography might place in competitions. There were a few romances before Donald Waverly, but they seemed less intense.
Donald drove me to the park today. I wanted to take pictures of the trees’ budding leaves, the actual moment of budding. Donald said it was impossible. I said it wasn’t. He asked if I was calling him stupid. Sometimes he gets upset over trivial things. None of the pictures came out as I wanted. On the way back, Donald stopped the car and told me I was the smartest girl he knew. Then he gave me a flower he picked in the woods, a lady’s slipper. They’re almost endangered, and you shouldn’t pick them in the wild, but I didn’t tell him. It would have made him feel bad. The flower is in a vase on my desk, tiger-striped and beautiful.
Donald didn’t know his wildflowers, or he didn’t care about the vulnerability of lady’s slippers. The passage established that he got angry over small stuff and would follow up with an apology. Classic abusive behavior.
Went out with Donald and friends to the movies. It was hard to follow the film with everyone gabbing. After, we ate at Sandy’s. Donald wanted to drive to the lake, but I told him I didn’t feel well and that Aunt Flo was in town. He was annoyed and called me an ice queen. Later, he called to apologize. I’ve got a heating pad on my stomach. The cramps are awful.
In January, he hit her.
Went to see Gordon Lightfoot, with the birthday tickets Mom and Dad got me. Donald wore a tie, and he looked so handsome. The show was incredible. On the way home, I asked what his favorite part was, and he said, “‘Reading my Mind.’” I said, “Oh, you mean ‘If You Could Read My Mind,’” and he hit my face with the back of his hand while driving. Then he told me to stop correcting him. I cried.
He stopped at a gas station and bought me a stuffed bear and a Tab. He held the soda to my face and said he was sorry and he’d never do it again and he didn’t know what came over him. Work has been making him take on crazy extra hours. He cried, saying I was the best thing in his life. He begged me not to leave him.
My cheekbone is blue-green, but I can cover it with makeup. If I pull my hair forward, you can hardly spot it.
Lewis had followed up with the staties about Donald. About why, in light of his abuse, they hadn’t pressed harder on his relationship to Elizabeth Gardner. They said they had, but the paperwork told a different story. They’d asked a few questions, sure, but given how he was the only guy in the picture, they hadn’t grilled him. They’d checked that he was working the day she went missing. So? She wasn’t reported missing until 10 p.m. He could’ve snatched her after work or between jobs.
We had his driver’s license, a rental application for the apartment he’d had when he dated Elizabeth, and a copy of his auto-insurance policy. That was it. He hadn’t committed any crimes. He hadn’t married or divorced anyone. He hadn’t bought a home. It was possible he was a squeaky-clean citizen. But I doubted it.
“It worked!” Milton said. He held up a bag of chips in his left hand. The game announcer reported that the score was now 7–1, Red Sox. He grinned. “This is turning out to be quite a day, isn’t it?” Ah, Milton. Full to the brim with optimism.
“Yes,” I said, closing my folder and returning to the claims work. “Quite a day.”
Two and a half hours later, I ate my sandwich while checking the alarm logs on a recent breakin. The bread was very chewy. My molar wasn’t happy about that. I needed a root canal but didn’t want it and could hardly afford it.
“Tooth bothering you?” Milton asked, all sympathy.
Damn it. I hated being transparent. Loathed being the object of pity. “Fine,” I said. “They used too much hot sauce today.” There was no hot sauce on the sandwich.
“Hey, Milton,” I said. He was eating spaghetti and meatballs he’d cooked from scratch. Milton was a bit of a gourmet. He looked up. His napkin tucked into the top of his shirt, prevention against stains. “When you’re doing genealogy, you ever have trouble finding people?”
He stopped chewing and swallowed. “Sure. All the time. Especially when you’re dealing with poorly kept records.”
“Ever have trouble because someone changed names?” I asked. Donald Waverly. So little data made me think he’d adopted an alias, that he’d taken a new name. Lewis wasn’t convinced, but he thought the idea had merit. The real problem was, if that wasn’t his name, how did we find him?
“Well, women can be troublesome because they change their names when they marry. I once heard a historian tell a group of women that if children were named after their mothers, it would make his job a lot easier. You see, you always know who the mother is. But the father?” He shrugged. “Unless you run a paternity test.”
“Sure.” Not the direction I was going in. “What about false names? What if someone got in trouble and assumed a new ident
ity?”
He exhaled through his nose, a high, whistling breath. “That’s a toughie, Mike. If someone’s new name is nothing like their family name, then what connects the two? Photographs would help, but only if you had both names, right? As a police detective, you probably know more than I do.” He was forever deferring to my expertise, which felt particularly rich today, given that I felt I had none.
He twirled a long strand of pasta around his fork. He brought real silverware from home to eat his meals. No plastic utensils for Milton. “You’d be surprised at how many times people just use their mother’s maiden name or their street name as assumed names. Maybe because it’s easier for them to remember.” He ate the mouthful of pasta.
How could I know what Donald Waverly’s mother’s maiden name was if all I knew was his assumed name?
“Look for a birth certificate with the mother listed as Mrs. Xavier if Xavier is the false name,” Milton said, as if he’d heard my mental question. “Or look for addresses with a street name that matches the name.”
“Milton,” I said, “You’re a genius.”
His face matched the color of his red sauce, and he batted his hands around, deflecting my praise. Then he paused and looked up. “Are you interested in genealogy, Mike? Like I said, I can help you find your Finnegans.”
My heart ached for one second as I considered that there was one Finnegan I’d pay for Milton to find. Only I didn’t think his skill set would be of much help in locating Susan. I doubted he knew much about illegal abortionists in 1970s Boston. And just like that, my euphoria evaporated. I set the last quarter of my sandwich down.
“Tooth?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Aches like a son of a bitch.”
CHIEF THOMAS LYNCH
THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 1999
1530 HOURS
Wright came into my office. Used to be, I could go months without the pleasure of his company in my space. Not anymore. Every day, it seemed, he had ideas and theories that translated into more work for me, like checking out whether a teacher at Susan’s high school who’d been charged with indecent exposure had taught her. (He hadn’t.) Between him treating me like I was his detective and him insinuating that I needed reading glasses, I had had my fill of Lewis Wright.
“Remember our bet?” His face was 100 percent smug. No way. He hadn’t done it, had he?
“You found the father of Susan’s baby!” We both started at the volume of my words and looked to the closed door. Nothing happened, so I repeated my question, at a normal volume.
“No. But what if I discovered that she didn’t go through with the abortion?”
“What?” How did he know that? “What’s in the folder you’ve got there?”
“If I show you, I think you’ll agree that you owe me a bottle,” he said.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
He slapped the folder onto my desk. I turned the cover over. “A birth certificate?” I looked at the copied form.
Place of Birth: Suffolk County
Place of Birth: St. Ann’s Hospital, Dorchester, MA
Mother’s stay before delivery in hospital or institution: 16 ½ hours
Full name of child: James Michael Shaughnessy
If plural births, twins or triplets? If so, born 1st, 2nd or 3rd? N/A
Born alive or stillborn: Alive
Date of birth: April 6, 1973
Sex: M
Color: W
Father: Blank
Mother’s maiden name: Susan Shaughnessy
Present name: Susan Shaughnessy
Residence: 15 Cedar St., Somerville, MA
Color or race: White
Age at the time of this birth: 16
Place of birth: Avon, MA
Occupation: student
I hereby certify that I attended the birth of this child who was born at the time of 6:23 p.m. on the date above stated. The information given was furnished by Susan Shaughnessy related to this child as mother.
Signature of the attendant at birth: [illegible scrawl]
Physician, parent or other: Dr. Frederick Chambers
Received at the office of city or town clerk: April 9, 1973
A gold seal was affixed to the bottom of the form. It was raised. You could see that, even on the photocopy.
“James Michael,” I whispered. Finny’s first name was the baby’s middle name, and their father’s name was the baby’s first name. Was that who she’d named him for? Her father and brother? Or did the baby’s father share one of those names? The baby’s father, unnamed on this document. “She had the baby.” I’d been so certain, we’d been so certain, that it was the abortion that killed her. That she’d made a poor choice and entrusted her life to some doctor more afraid of being caught performing illegal surgeries than he was for his patient’s health.
“Didn’t go through with it.” He sounded pleased, as if he approved of her choice.
“She had the baby, and then what?” I asked.
“Don’t know. My buddy in the BDP got this. He couldn’t believe it. That it had been filed all this time and no one thought to look for it.” He nodded at the form. “Shaughnessy is her mother’s maiden name.”
“This is great. Now we have leads to chase. Starting with …” I peered at the tiny type on the form, “St. Ann’s Hospital. I don’t know it.”
“My buddy, Grant, says it’s famous. There was a home for unwed mothers and for orphans attached to it, called Gracie’s Place. Back in the day, girls got shipped there by parents who pretended their daughters had gone away to visit aunts or travel. The babies were given up for adoption, and when the girls came home, no one was the wiser.”
“What about the babies?”
“Given to people who couldn’t have them,” he said.
“You know what this means?” I asked.
“Mike has a nephew he doesn’t about.”
“Bingo.” How were we going to tell him? Good news, your sister didn’t die on an abortionist’s table. Bad news: she had her baby and gave it up for adoption, and we have no idea where the baby is, or your sister.
“They must have adoption records,” I said.
“Might be sealed,” Wright said. “Not sure if we’ll be able to get them to give us a peek.”
“We’ll jump that hurdle when we get to it. At least we know where to search next.” I laced my hands together and said, “Not looking forward to telling him.”
He didn’t ask “who.” He knew.
“It’s good news, in some way,” he pointed out.
From outside, Finny called “Lewis? Where you at?”
“I’ve got to go.” He hurried to the door.
“Hey!” I said, halting him at the door. “You did real good. You earned that bottle.”
A rare smile lit his face, and then he ruined it by saying, “You’re damn right I did.”
It would’ve been cruel to withhold the information from Finny, but given the way he’d reacted to the last breaking news I’d shared about his sister, I decided telling him offsite would be best. I told him that I hadn’t found Susan, but I had a promising lead. I asked him to meet me at a diner I’d heard him boast had a good Cuban sandwich. We took separate cars so as not to arouse suspicion at the station. “They’ll think you’re dating me,” Finny joked.
“You wish,” I said.
At the diner, Finny greeted the waitress by name, and I wondered if I’d done the wrong thing. If he ate here regularly, maybe I should’ve picked a different spot. One where he wouldn’t have to relive this conversation over and over again. We put in our orders, and as soon as the waitress was six feet away, he said, “Tell me.”
I told him about finding the birth certificate, though I glossed over how that happened. “She had a baby, a boy. Named him James Michael.”
“James, after our father. Is the baby alive? Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.”
“I can’t believe she was at St. Ann’s. Yo
u know that’s within spitting distance of our house? … She was maybe five miles away all that time?” His gaze got misty, and he sipped his beer. “Why didn’t she call us? If she was going to have the baby anyway, she could’ve come home.”
“Could she?” I asked. His jaw flexed. “I’m asking. It seems like your dad was strict. It was the old days. And maybe she thought if she did it this way, well, she could start new once the baby was adopted.”
“Why didn’t we check there?” he said, smacking his palm against the table. A couple across from us shot a look our way. I repaid them with a frosty glare. They went back to their meal.
Our dinners came, and neither he nor I ate much. He kept saying things like, “I have a nephew I’ve never met,” and, “Mom is going to lose her mind when she finds out.”
“Maybe keep this close until we know what happened to the boy, yeah?” I suggested.
“Why? Do you think something bad happened to him?” he demanded. He peeled the label from his beer bottle and put the tiny strips of paper on the table.
“I have no idea. I really don’t. That’s why I’m nervous about sharing the news.”
He nodded. “You’re right. Would be awful to tell them about him if something happened … Dave isn’t going to believe this. When are you going up there? Are you going in person?”
The waitress stopped by, her eyes going to the pile of stripped paper. “Everything okay?” She aimed her comment at him.
“Yeah, great. Thanks, Cheryl.”
Her eyes went to his plate and his uneaten sandwich. A frown crossed her face. “You sure you don’t want anything else?”
“Some of your chocolate ice cream,” he said. “It’s amazing. You gotta try it,” he told me. He was talking fast, too fast. He reminded me of my partner, Rick, when Rick was snorting lines, and his speech turned blurry with all the thoughts he couldn’t control.
“Sure thing,” she said, spinning on her heel and heading for the kitchen. I wished I could join her. It was painful to watch him this way. Fidgety, anxious, excited, scared. It was too much.
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