by R. G. Belsky
I pretended to be interested in his construction plans so I could find out what I needed to know. After the interview, I asked him if he wanted to join me somewhere for a drink. Sitting in a bar on Lexington Avenue, he told me about his apartment in Gramercy Park, his wife, Anne, and his adorable daughter, Lucy.
I’m not sure how I wound up in bed with him. Some of it had to do with pure physical attraction, I suppose. I always was attracted to muscular, construction-type guys.
But there was another reason I did it, too.
I decided I wanted to see Lucy.
The daughter I’d given up eleven years earlier.
And what better way to do this—as cold and unfeeling as it sounds now to say it—than by sleeping with the man who was now her father.
I think I felt there might be some kind of closure for me in sleeping with the man who had become the father of my daughter. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it seemed to at the time.
I still remember the first time I met Lucy. I’d gone to Patrick’s office, and she was there with him. I had to pretend, of course, that Lucy was just the little girl of this man, nothing more to me. He introduced me to her as one of his business clients, and she politely shook my hand.
It was such a surreal moment as I struggled to keep my emotions in check. She had light brown hair like me, freckles like I had when I was little, and—maybe it was just me—I thought she looked just like a young version of Clare Carlson. I wanted to tell her that. Instead, I just shook her outstretched hand, smiled, and said hello.
Patrick and I had started out first having sex at hotels or some of his residential projects, but then wound up sometimes going to his home during the day. Anne Devlin was away a lot on business trips, and Lucy was at school, so we figured we were safe. Patrick never knew about me being Lucy’s biological mother or how I tracked him down. The funny thing, though, was that after a while I forgot about how weird it seemed to be doing it in the house where Lucy lived. It was almost like I started to think that I belonged in that house, instead of Anne. I began to fantasize about it being me and Patrick and Lucy there. It all seemed so perfect.
Until that day when Lucy walked into the bedroom and saw us together.
She wasn’t supposed to be home from school for hours. But there had been a gas leak at the school that day and classes were let out early—with the teachers making sure all the children were escorted home safely. And so Lucy was left off at the door, walked inside the house, and heard noises coming from her parents’ bedroom. She pushed open the door, saw us in bed together having sex, and screamed like any eleven-year-old might when suddenly confronted by a scene like that. Then she ran out of the room crying.
Patrick went after her and eventually calmed her down. I’m not sure what he told her, how he explained it all—but she finally stopped crying and went to her bedroom. I knew that because I peeked in that room before I left and saw her looking out the window. Like a little angel, I always remembered thinking.
It was the last time I ever saw Lucy.
What had that done to the psyche of an impressionable eleven-year-old girl—to see her father having sex with a woman who wasn’t her mother?
Not the mother she knew, anyway.
Did that incident somehow play a role in her disappearance, which came soon afterwards? Had she run away? Had I unwittingly made it easier for a kidnapper to abduct her because of her confused emotional state? Those are the questions that have haunted me over the years.
Of course, it seemed bizarre and strange at first when I spent so much time in that house during the hours, the days, the weeks afterward—covering the story as a reporter for the Tribune about the search for Lucy.
I barely spoke to Patrick. I was afraid that one of us might say or do something to give away our secret relationship to Anne. So instead, I wound up becoming extremely close to her. We were like best friends or even sisters, Anne would say. She always laughed about how closely we’d bonded during those troubled times. And why not? We shared something really special together: We were both Lucy’s mother. Even if she never knew that.
I always wondered if someone would recognize me from all the time I’d spent there before Lucy disappeared. Like a neighbor. But no one ever did. And, after a while, the relationship just became natural. Me and Anne. Hoping and praying and believing that we’d get a break in the case and Lucy would be found. Anne Devlin kept believing that long after I had stopped. She would never let go of that slender hope she continued to hold onto. And she had made me promise a long, long time ago to help her find the real answers about Lucy, no matter how long it took.
“You owe me, Clare,” Anne Devlin had said.
I sure did owe her.
More than she would ever realize.
CHAPTER 52
“HOW DID YOU find out?” I asked Elliott Grayson.
“I checked the adoption records.”
“Those are supposed to be secret.”
“Well, you found out about the Devlins from them, right? How did you do that if they were private?”
“I pulled some strings,” I said. “I’m a reporter. I know how to get information no one else can obtain.”
“I’m a US Attorney, so pulling strings isn’t very hard for me either.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why would you ever check that in the first place?”
“I’m an investigator. When you started asking new questions about Lucy Devlin, I got curious. So I investigated. And I eventually found the adoption papers with you listed as the biological mother. You must have been just a kid then. Barely out of high school.”
“I was in college,” I said quietly.
“Anyway, I was able to confirm that you and the Clare Carlson in the adoption papers were one and the same person.”
“But you didn’t tell anyone else?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I figured I might be able to use that information to my advantage at some later date.”
“Like now.”
“Exactly.”
He took out a packet of papers and handed them to me. They were copies of the adoption documents. On top was a form I’d filled out before leaving the hospital. I read through the words on the page now, still numb and in shock over what was happening.
NAME: Clare Carlson.
AGE: 19
SEX OF BABY: Female.
There was a picture of me taken at the hospital that day, too.
The young woman in it stared back at me from the piece of paper I was holding—young, confident, so sure that she was doing the right thing.
I remembered exactly, now, when that picture had been taken.
It was right after I handed my baby girl over to a nurse.
The last time I’d seen her until I tracked her down to the Devlins.
* * *
So much has changed since that day more than twenty-five years ago when I gave birth to the baby that would become Lucy Devlin.
My father’s dead now. The rift between us was never really repaired. He was a stubborn man. I’m stubborn, too, and neither of us would ever admit we were wrong. Having that baby cost me my father. If I could go back and relive that period of my life, maybe I’d have handled things differently. Or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter because we don’t get do-overs in life.
Don Crowell is dead, too. I looked him up on the Internet one time just out of curiosity. I’d never told him I was pregnant and—as far as I knew—Crowell went through his life barely remembering me as just one of a series of one-night stands he’d probably had with lots of women back then. He joined the Air Force after college, rose to the rank of major, and flew a number of dangerous combat missions. He later piloted commercial aircraft, safely bringing down a crippled jet to Los Angeles with more than 300 people aboard on a foam-covered runway at LAX. Then, one night as he was walking to a store a block from his house, a drunk driver sped through a red light and mowed him down in the c
rosswalk. Crowell was killed instantly. Life is unpredictable—you never know what’s out there waiting for you.
For years, I’d kept alive the spark of hope that Lucy was still alive somewhere—all grown up, healthy and happy and wondering sometimes about me just the way I did about her.
Then I cried for her when they said they found her body in that grave in Dutchess County.
Now I wasn’t sure what to believe anymore.
I’m forty-five years old, a three-time divorcee with no discernable marriage prospects in my immediate future. And, even if I did find someone and get married again, I had no reason to think it wouldn’t turn out badly, given my track record with men. I mean, the last guy I was interested in was Elliott Grayson.
What does that say about my judgement?
I’d had my chance to be a mother—when I was very young—and I casually just threw it away.
I thought there’d be more chances, more opportunities for me then.
But it never worked out that way.
And now all that was left were the regrets.
* * *
“Let’s you and me make a deal,” Elliott Grayson said.
“What kind of deal?”
“I’ll give you something if you agree not to run with your story. Whatever it is you’ve found out—or think you’ve found out—about me. In return, I’ll give you something I believe you want very badly. Something even more important—more valuable to you—than this story.”
“You’re offering me a payoff?” I asked incredulously.
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“No way.”
“Maybe we can both save our careers this way.”
“Look, I know this will look bad for me if it all comes out. Make me look like a dishonest journalist. A tramp. A backstabber to Anne Devlin who preyed on her feelings to break stories and win a Pulitzer Prize. A terrible woman who gave her baby up for adoption without so much as a second thought. TMZ and the all-news cable channels and the tabloid press will have a field day with me. I’ll probably lose my Pulitzer, my job, maybe even my whole journalism career if that happens. But I’m still going to do the right thing. I’m going to tell this story. Whatever it is. And there’s nothing in the world you can do to stop me.”
I talked about my integrity as a journalist. How I’d spent my entire career following a code of journalistic ethics. How I’d lectured my reporters about this code—about always doing the right thing as a journalist—so many times over the years. The meaning was very clear. I could not be bought no matter what he offered me. My integrity as a journalist was the most important thing that I cared about in my life.
Or so I thought.
“Why don’t you at least listen to my offer before you reject it?” Grayson said.
“Because there’s no point.”
“This is an offer you can’t refuse.”
“I can’t be bought, Grayson.”
“Your daughter’s still alive,” he said. “I know where Lucy is.”
CHAPTER 53
“LUCY IS ALIVE,” I said, repeating what he’d just told me in shock and disbelief, even as I heard myself say the words.
I had clung to that hope for fifteen years, ever since the day she disappeared. Just like Anne Devlin had. I knew it was a long shot all the way even back at the beginning, and that hope faded away to almost nothing as the years passed without any news. And then, of course, the last flicker of hope died when her body had been found in that grave in Dutchess County.
Except now everything had turned upside down again.
“She’s alive and well,” Grayson said to me. “She’s a grown woman now, of course. Married, with a little daughter of her own. She’s very happy.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you that unless we make a deal.”
“Where is she?”
“Same answer.”
I nodded.
“What kind of a deal are we talking about?”
* * *
The deal Grayson offered me went something like this:
He would answer my questions as truthfully and fully as he could on Lucy Devlin, the bodies in the New Hampshire grave, the other missing children, Sandy Marston, Patrick Devlin, and even the death of his own sister.
In return, I agreed not to put it on the air or tell anyone else what I knew.
And then—after the Senate election, when he was in office—he would tell me where Lucy was.
Grayson said that when the truth came out, it would show he had always tried to do the right thing. Even if I broke my promise and went public with it after he told me about Lucy and the election was over, he thought he could probably survive the long-term political fallout. But the immediate scandal might torpedo his chance to get elected. His priority at this point was just to keep me quiet until then.
“How do you know I won’t double-cross you?” I asked. “I mean, I could just listen to everything, promise you not to tell anyone, and then go ahead and put it on the air anyway tonight. What’s stopping me from doing that?”
“Three reasons,” Grayson said.
One of them obviously was the information he had about Lucy. He wouldn’t tell me where she was. Not until after the election.
“What are the other two?” I asked.
“First, I’d just deny it. Claim we never had this conversation. Everyone knows you’ve been out to get me, so I’ll say you made it up. You’d say you didn’t, I’d say you did. It would be a classic case of ‘he said, she said.’”
“Second, you have no proof. Without me backing you up, you’d need some kind of evidence to go on the air with the stuff I’m going to tell you. You might eventually track down enough evidence, but that would take time. It certainly wouldn’t happen before the election. Again, without proof, it’s just your word against mine.”
Then—just for emphasis, I guess—he repeated the third and most obvious reason.
“The biggest thing here is your daughter, Clare. I’ll tell you where to find your daughter. But I won’t do that until after the election. And only if you keep your word to me. If you don’t, you’ll never see her or know what happened to her. That’s the quid pro quo here, Carlson. Your daughter for your story. Do we have a deal?”
I know what you’re probably thinking about me right now. How could this woman—who knew that her own child had been kidnapped—have kept on covering this horrible tragedy just like any other story? How could she accept a Pulitzer Prize—the highest award in journalism—and use it to catapult to journalistic fame on the back of her missing daughter?
These were all legitimate questions.
I’ve asked them of myself many times over the years.
The best answer I can tell you is that it was the only way I knew how to deal with what happened to Lucy. I’ve always thrown myself totally into my work—the same way as I do now with my obsession each day over breaking news—as a solution for the problems in my life. And so that’s what I did with Lucy. I just kept covering the story like a journalist so that I didn’t have to deal with the pain and the reality of what had happened. All I had to do was keep filing stories on deadline and getting on the front page. It almost became just another story. Almost.
At some point, I even began to think that the Pulitzer I won was a sort of consolation prize for me. Sure, I had lost a daughter. But fate had rewarded me with this Pulitzer because of that. My daughter in return for fame and acclaim as a journalist—that was the trade-off. And I was good with that. For a long time, anyway. At least that’s what I told myself, until all this happened.
But now I had to make a decision.
There’s a scene in the movie All the President’s Men when Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford interview a Nixon campaign committee official named Hugh Sloan. Sloan’s one of the good guys of Watergate, a man of integrity and conscience caught up in the scandal. They ask him about the distribution of illegal campaign funds from Attorney Gener
al John Mitchell.
“How did that go?” Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein character asks.
“Badly,” Sloan replies.
Well, that’s how I felt right now.
This was a bad deal. It ran against everything I believed in and had dedicated my life to and taught others to believe in, too. It was an abandonment of the journalistic principles I always held so dear. If I did this, I would never be the same journalist—or the same person—that I was before.
Of course, Grayson was wrong about a couple of his assumptions.
First, even if he denied ever talking to me, there would be a big scandal if I broadcast the story. Enough to ruin his chances to be elected. That’s the thing about scandals involving politicians—people always want to believe the worst. Even if there’s no proof, they assume a politician is guilty. There was no doubt in my mind that if I ran with this story, it would cost Grayson the election.
Second, I did have proof. Before coming to the meeting, I’d set up a sophisticated taping device we sometimes used at the station to surreptitiously record these kinds of interviews. It was running right now in my purse, taking down everything we said. All I had to do was play that on the air, and he’d be finished.
He was right about the third reason though.
Lucy.
If I sat on this story, at least until after Election Day, he promised to tell me how to find my daughter. The daughter I thought was dead. The daughter I’d lost twice—once the day she was born, and again when she was eleven years old. The daughter that was still out there somewhere for me, if I wanted her.
I thought back again to all those hollow-sounding speeches I made to young reporters about honesty and integrity and moral standards for a journalist.
That’s been my mantra to reporters for a lot of years. The “what breed?” story and The Woodstein Maneuver question. I ask the new reporters to put themselves in Woodward and Bernstein’s place and think about what they would do if offered a bribe—a huge amount of money—to cover up Watergate, the greatest investigative journalism story of our time. Only a few reporters ask the key question: “How much money?” they want to know. But those are the ones I worry about most. Because there is no compromise, no extenuating circumstances that ever make it right for a journalist to cross that line. And once they do, I warn them, they can never go back.