He opened his mouth and closed it again, then said, “What do you want to drink?”
“I’ll have a Corona too.”
As soon as I ordered it, I was sorry. Drinking beer with Colin reminded me too much of the early happy days on digs when we would sit and watch the sunset streak the sand orange and crimson, discussing what had happened that day while the children played around us. This was the brand we’d always drunk in the Southwest.
“But how did you know she was there?” He leaned across the table. “And is it really her?”
“You saw the photo. And there are—other things.” I told him about getting the ski club e-mail, my fears that the kidnappers would get the information, my rush to St. Brennan’s.
“But how did you find her? Did they give you her name?”
I gave him a steady look.
“What?”
And then, looking at this man I had lived with for twenty-five years, longer than my parents, my sister, or anyone else, looking into his blue eyes wrinkled around the edges by life, his wide, still-handsome face, I knew he could not have been involved. His integrity was something I should never have doubted. I was glad he didn’t know that I had. “You won’t like it,” I warned.
“Delhi, just tell me.”
“It was Sheila and Ethan Crosley. They took her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Back in Stratford. They arranged everything.”
“That can’t be. Ethan? How do you know?”
“She grew up as Elisa Crosley. I saw Sheila today.”
“You saw Sheila? Did you talk to her?” I saw how hard he was fighting not to believe it. Could not believe it.
My Corona sat untouched in front of me. “Where is Ethan teaching now?”
“As far as I know, he’s still at Brown.”
“In Rhode Island?” No more than an hour’s drive from Boston.
Colin took a frantic gulp of beer, leaving a streak of foam on his upper lip. I had never seen him unable to speak before.
“Are you in touch with Ethan at all?” I asked.
He gave his head a sleepwalker’s shake. “I e-mailed him last year about a dig I thought he’d be interested in. The bastard never even wrote me back.”
“I wonder why.”
“But how did they do it?”
I finally reached for my beer. I’d never known what to do with the chunk of lime stuck in the neck of the bottle. Now I just pulled it out and took a long swallow. Then I told him everything I knew, even about my call to Sampson and the rental car. “Sheila admitted it. She said I had signed adoption papers because of my ‘cocaine habit’! She intimated you knew all about it.”
“About what? Their kidnapping Caitlin?”
He looked so disbelieving that I said quickly, “I knew you didn’t know. It was like my taking drugs.”
He thought of something he must have forgotten in his shock. “Did you talk to Caitlin?”
Even one swig of beer was too potent on an empty stomach. Dizzily I signaled our waitress. “Could you bring me a bag of potato chips or something?”
“And I’ll have another,” Colin added, tilting his empty bottle.
“I didn’t plan to. But then Sheila was at her dorm to take her away and I couldn’t let that happen, without Caitlin even—so yes, I did.”
“You actually talked to her.” I expected his reproaches but his voice was wondering. “Is she still so bright?”
“Colin, it was horrible. She thought Ethan and Sheila adopted her because I died in a car accident in Stratford. Then she thought I was her ‘birth mother’ wanting a reunion. I gave her Sheepie and my card to contact us, but I don’t know if she will.”
Colin put his face in his hands. I knew his mind was racing, reinterpreting everything that had happened since Stratford in light of this new knowledge.
Then he covered his face completely and groaned.
“Colin?” I felt a flash of terror. I had no idea what was coming.
The waitress set Colin’s beer and my chips down on the table, but I couldn’t move.
He finally took his hands away and stared at me. “Sheila’s right. I did know. But I didn’t know I knew.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
He leaned close to me, forearms on the table. “I visited them, I guess about 1999, when I was at a conference in Berkeley. I dropped by the house uninvited to try and reestablish the friendship. I missed it. They had a little girl and a boy, both adopted, he was from Nicaragua,. They said she was five and in kindergarten. The boy was just a toddler. Sheila whisked them out of the room before I could really get a look at them, but something about the girl reminded me of Hannah. Except that Hannah was six.”
“They lied about her age to you to throw you off. You showing up like that must have been terrifying. What if Caitlin had recognized you?”
We stared at each other.
“Damn! Why didn’t I recognize her? My own child.” He looked as anguished as I had ever seen him.
I reached across the table and held his arm. I couldn’t let myself think about the years we had lost.
“I knew Caitlin was dead so I didn’t consider it.”
I nodded. “What are we going to do now?”
“After I kill Ethan?”
“Right. I was hoping Sheila would be hit by a car today.”
“Don’t worry, they’re going to pay.” He placed his hands on the table as if getting ready to stand. “Let’s get something to eat.”
I turned to look for our waitress.
“Not here.”
“The clam chowder won’t kill you. I’m too wiped out to go anywhere else.”
He looked reluctant, but settled back down and we ordered two bowls.
“I CHECKED SOME things out this afternoon,” Colin said when we were eating our soup. The oyster crackers floating on top of mine looked like little life jackets. “After you sent the photo, I did some research. But it’s a complicated situation legally.”
“Why?”
“It happened in another country, not here. So the FBI can’t initiate an investigation. The statute of limitations on kidnapping runs out in most states once the child turns sixteen.”
“But they investigated the Lindbergh kidnapping for years!”
“Because the baby died. That made it a capital crime with no limitations.”
Everything that had happened in this endless day, the beer, Colin’s words, conspired to make me feel dizzy, as insubstantial as the paper placemat. I stared down at the maze printed in blue with a treasure chest in its center.
“The Brits have to extradite them to stand trial there.”
“We can’t do anything?”
“File a civil suit, maybe. But we aren’t going to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Delhi, think. Do you want to drag Caitlin through the notoriety of a trial and see her ‘parents,’ her whole life exposed? Do you think that will endear us to her? If anything, it will polarize the situation and force her to choose.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You said they had papers?”
“Forgeries. We don’t even know whose name was on the papers, mine or someone else’s entirely. If you have enough money, you can get phony passports, birth certificates, everything. We have to get those papers!”
Colin gave me a fond, indulgent look as if I were a child proposing to fly to the moon for a picnic. “And you plan to burgle their safety deposit box?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they keep them in the house.” But I was crashing, moving beyond rational thought. “If the authorities get involved, Ethan will have to produce the papers.”
“You’re fading.” Colin looked around, as if for the waitress. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.�
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“Just one more thing. The records say they rented the car until September 27. But didn’t Ethan have to be back to teach before then?”
Colin shook his head. “He took a leave of absence that fall. He told them he had discovered something in England he had to research further. I remember because I was pissed that he hasn’t told me about it. We’d been to the same sites, after all, and whatever he’d found would have stayed his discovery. But he didn’t come home until January, and never published anything about what he thought he’d found.”
So he’d had plenty of time to run down Priscilla Waters. Time enough to work out the paperwork to bring Caitlin home.
Chapter Forty-Six
I DIDN’T BOTHER getting undressed and going to bed. When I got home I dropped my jacket and bag on the kitchen table, grabbed the alpaca throw from Colin’s wing chair, and lay down on the couch. I planned to only sleep for a few hours, enough to clear my head, then call DCI Sampson and get things started.
It was just before 6 a.m. when I woke up, After putting water on to boil for French press coffee, I went upstairs and changed into my usual jeans and a thrift-shop sweatshirt. This one was red and advertised a dude ranch in upstate New York.
Downstairs I waited impatiently for the coffee to finish. I had put DCI Sampson on automatic dial. I expected we would be having a lot of future conversations.
“Ms. Laine.” He sounded resigned.
“You know my missing daughter, the one who was supposed to have drowned? She didn’t drown, she’s alive. I met her yesterday!”
“Oh, yes? Well, congratulations. I’m impressed. You’re a true force of nature.”
“The Crosleys, her kidnappers, live in Rhode Island. I’m calling to give you their address.”
A pause. “And why would I want their address?”
“So you can arrest them. Have them extradited, I mean.”
“For what?”
“For kidnapping my daughter in Stratford! And killing Priscilla Waters. They’re murderers.” I heard my voice, too high-pitched, too loud, and told myself to calm down. I took a breath. “The FBI can’t do anything until there’s an extradition order.”
“Ms. Laine, the only evidence of anything I have on this case is a car rental record along with several thousand others from the same time period. The vehicle was returned without damage and no—”
“They had it repaired! Can’t you check repair records?” But as I said it I knew how hopeless that was. Of the thousands of shops all over England, how many of them kept records nearly twenty years old or would be willing to go through their files?
“In the unlikely event that we did find repair information on that car, they could say that they went into a ditch or a grazed a tree and there would be no way to prove otherwise. We worked diligently to try and solve that case when it happened. We canvassed that road for any witnesses. We found the cabdriver who had dropped Priscilla off at an intersection a half mile away. But he saw nothing and did not wait. Now we have even less.”
“You have a name.” It was so clear to me. Why couldn’t he see it?
“And you have your daughter back.”
“But Nick Clancy doesn’t have his mother.”
“Nor will he.”
“He could have the satisfaction of seeing justice done. Of seeing her killers in jail.”
“He won’t be seeing them in any English jail unless those people fly over here and confess. Perhaps in America you can file a civil suit about your daughter. She must be a young lady by now.”
“Wait a minute! I don’t want a civil suit. I want these people punished! I want them to admit what they did. We can never get that lost time back—but I want them in jail for the rest of their lives.”
“Extradition is a serious matter. Even if we had evidence linking them and the car to what happened—which we don’t, and we investigated it thoroughly—a twenty-year-old hit-and-run would not be given priority.”
“But what about the kidnapping? That’s what I’m talking about.”
“Evidence, Ms. Laine. We need some tangible evidence that these were the people involved.”
“Caitlin’s the evidence. Her DNA matches ours. You heard Nick Clancy tell you that his mother took her from the park for money.”
“I did.”
“Would it help if I contacted Scotland Yard?”
“No. They don’t have jurisdiction here. I’ll look into it further.”
“Thank you.”
I sat back down at the kitchen table.
When I was growing up with my minister father, parishioners would come to him with their troubles at all hours. The phone would ring, sobbing people would arrive and be hurried into the study. The door would be shut tightly. I would overhear bits, but I was always on the edge, not old enough or important enough to know the story.
Patience and David Livingstone hadn’t cared. But I couldn’t wait to grow up, God help me, so I could be in the middle of important adult dramas.
Be careful what you wish for.
Chapter Forty-Seven
WINTER WAS HANGING on.
After another cup of coffee, I trudged out to the barn to get to work. There was no snow in the forecast, which at least would have made the homes and meadows around me look picturesque. It wasn’t even March, which meant at least another month of overcast skies.
Colin was teaching until noon so I couldn’t report DCI Sampson’s response. I had talked to Jane on the ferry, omitting Sheila’s insinuations about Colin, and answering her questions about Caitlin. Perhaps she would see more hope in DCI Sampson’s response than I did.
I was sitting at my worktable listing some books I had bought at a library sale last August, when there was a knock on the barn door and it was pushed back. “Hi?”
At first I thought it was Hannah. But then I recognized the navy snowboarding jacket. “Caitlin—I mean, Elisa!”
“Can I come in?”
“Of course you can.” I stood up quickly.
If this had been one of the Harlequin romances that my friends passed around in high school, we would have embraced and lived happily ever after.
But I don’t live in that book.
I brought her around to the shabby chocolate brown velour couch that I had brought from my parents’ house. No matter where you sat, it sank down unevenly, tipping you to one side or the other.
“Take off your coat. I think it’s warm enough in here.”
“Oh—I can’t stay.” She unzipped her jacket though. Underneath she was wearing a red ski sweater with white reindeer. Today her hair was pulled back in a ponytail the way Hannah wore hers.
I smiled at her, but my hands were icy and my heart was beating much too fast. What do you mean you can’t stay? I found you after nineteen years and you can’t stay?
“Did you drive down here by yourself?” I knew it was a loaded question.
“Not exactly.” She tilted her head and gave me an apologetic smile. “Someone who works for my father brought me.”
In a black Ford sedan?
She looked around. “You have a lot of books.”
“I sell them.”
“I saw that on your card.”
I nodded. “Your father—Colin Fitzhugh—is an archeologist and poet. Hannah is a senior at Cornell, she wants to be a vet. Jane’s in finance in Manhattan, and Jason’s in Santa Fe finding himself.”
A rueful grin. “I know that feeling.”
“Really? You’re a literature major?”
“I love books and sports. Winter sports,” she amended. “But I’m not sure how to make them into a life. Anyway . . .”
“Anyway, I’m glad you came.” I didn’t want to ask her why; I was afraid what the answer would be. Instead I got up from the couch and went to my worktable. “
I want to show you something.”
I came back with a clutch of papers and handed her a photograph I had removed from one of the albums at Thanksgiving. It showed three little girls in navy coats and straw hats with flowers, smiling up at a younger me and clutching their new Easter rabbits.
Caitlin took it in both hands and studied it. “Is that me?”
“That’s you next to Jane. Your grandmother gave you the bunny. I have albums with photos of you.”
“Thanks, but I can’t—”
“Another time then.” I felt like Scheherazade. Keep talking. I told her about going to Stratford-upon-Avon for the summer and how we used to go to the park every day. “Your—‘adoptive’ father, Ethan Crosley, was part of the group of archeologists.”
I watched her face, but couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
Then she moved restlessly, and I said, “I know you have to go, but this is what happened.” Rapidly I told her about Priscilla Waters and how she had deceived Jane, then handed her several photocopies. “These are the stories that were in the papers.”
She read them, wide-eyed.
“I went back to Stratford last month and talked to Priscilla Waters’s sons. They remember you being in their apartment overnight. Before she gave you to the people who paid her to take you.”
“This is so different from anything I’ve heard! Except that my parents adopted me after you died in an accident in England. That’s all they said, they never told me about a twin. Why didn’t they adopt her too?”
I sighed. “Priscilla Waters was the one who died. She demanded more money for kidnapping you and was hit by a car on her way to collect it.”
“How awful!”
I looked into her eyes, blue with green flecks, so much like Hannah’s. “It was deliberate, a hit-and-run. What did your mother say when you saw that I was alive?”
She looked at her lap. “That she hadn’t wanted to tell me the truth, that you were a terrible mother. You—took drugs and neglected me. That’s why you were forced to sign the papers.”
There was no end to their treachery. “For the record, I’ve never even smoked anything. I was too busy having babies to get drunk. And how did she explain why your father, Colin, signed papers—was he a drug addict too?”
A Photographic Death Page 21