Whatever Doesn't Kill You (An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery Book 2)

by Gillian Roberts

  “You like lies? You like mothers lying to their children? You think that helps children grow up?” Emma had asked, knowing that had she lied, those lies would be the subject of Caroline’s lament. “I don’t lie,” she’d said. “I never lie and I’m proud of it. Besides, why should your father’s ways ruin your chances with men? I’m the one he cheated on and I’m the one whose money he gambled away so if anybody should be afraid, it’s me, but I have a perfectly fine relationship with a man.”

  This girl here, this Heather, had a Caroline-like look of wanting to find the single reason—outside herself—for whatever she lacked. Now, she’d undoubtedly decided that her birth mother was someone wonderful and exceptional who could transfer her secrets of perpetual joy to the daughter she’d given up long ago.

  But the sign outside Emma’s office didn’t say “God.” Didn’t even say “Goddamned Psychologist.” It said “Private Investigations.”

  Emma wouldn’t take a case if she thought it was for purposes of stalking, harassing, or endangering somebody. Otherwise, here she was, legwoman for all the sad searchers who had the cash to hire her.

  And, frankly, Emma had enough problems. Why discourage business when those Internet searchers were pulling enough away from her already? That was it, she wasn’t saying another negative word. On with the search, and in with the money.

  “I don’t know anything about myself,” Heather wailed. “My—she—won’t say. Make her tell me!”

  “Now you know that’s not how it works,” Emma said.

  Kay Wilson breathed raggedly and pressed her handkerchief against her eyes, holding it there. “I don’t want her to be hurt,” she said. “That’s all. I don’t want her to be hurt.” She breathed deeply, and put her hands and the handkerchief back in her lap. “I wish…I wish she’d think of me as her mother—or call me her mother the way she always did. But I don’t know enough to be very helpful and she’s just going to get angry again about it.” She fiddled with the strap of her purse, which sat on her lap.

  “Since we’re apparently going to give it a try,” Emma said, “let’s see what information you do have.” She pulled a clipboard holding a tablet and pen closer and nodded at the other woman.

  “But it’s next to…okay. My husband—my late husband Nowell—arranged for this through a physician, a Dr. Smith. You see? That was his name and I don’t know his first name, either. I was ill right around then. We wanted a child and nothing was happening, and then this opportunity arose, very quickly, very hush-hush. Somebody told somebody else who told Nowell. A girl baby had been born and whoever was supposed to adopt it didn’t want her. Wanted a boy instead.”

  They hadn’t even begun yet, Emma thought, and Heather was already getting bad news. Rejected at birth because she was female.

  “I didn’t ask for information,” Kay Wilson said. “We knew the mother was healthy, that was all, and that was enough. Perhaps I didn’t want to know. I wanted this to be our baby. Period.” She looked quickly at her daughter, and then at Emma, head held high with dignity, despite her bright red nose and watery eyes.

  “Were you in California at the time?” Emma asked.

  Kay nodded. “In Berkeley.”

  “Did the adoption take place there, too?”

  Kay Wilson shook her head. “We moved a whole lot. I can’t remember where.”

  “I guess I have to ask: Do you know the birth mother or father’s name?” She knew what the response would be, but just in case. Kay Wilson again shook her head.

  “How did you discover that you were adopted?” Emma asked Heather. “How did all this come about?”

  “She slipped up,” Heather said. “She was really angry with me about…well, doesn’t matter.”

  Emma watched Kay Wilson while her daughter spoke. The woman looked fragile, as if one tap from her daughter would shatter her. Emma did not like getting emotionally involved with clients, but this mother’s sorrow was getting to her. She cleared her throat and pushed down the emotion.

  “She never drinks,” Heather said. “Not in a way that would make you say she drinks. But that day, she had bronchitis and she had brandy because it helped her. And I—we—we don’t always get along, but this time she found out that I hadn’t been going to school.” She shrugged after she said it, still diffusing the seriousness her mother had seen in the act.

  “She’s supposed to be at community college,” Kay Wilson said. “And then, she could transfer to a four-year.”

  Heather shrugged. “I had my reasons, but she didn’t ask them, and then there was all this about my boyfriend. Because I’d loaned him money.”

  “He had a record. Drugs, and—”

  Heather glared at her mother, then went back to her normal voice. “This is stupid. We’re not together anymore, but we were then, and she hated him.”

  Was this girl an idiot? Any mother who cared would hate a lout like that.

  “And she got all red and started crying and said I was no good and never would be, and she should have known it all along, given what I’d come from.”

  Kay Wilson was openly crying now, shaking her head, as if attempting to rewind time itself, take back whatever she’d said to her daughter.

  “And I said something about how I’d come from her so why was she talking that way about her own self, and she looked so—” Heather stopped, and cleared her throat. “She didn’t know what to say. She got all…and I knew. Like that, I knew, that what she’d meant was that I hadn’t come from her. I said who gave birth to me, then, and she got that look on her again. Frozen or something. Then she said I was crazy and it was just an expression and she hadn’t meant it, but I knew. So eventually, she said I was right. So now, I need to know. It’s my right to know.”

  Now, Emma felt a rush of pity for the girl. She was annoying and not overly bright, but by her own measure, she had been gravely wounded, cut afloat from humanity by her mother’s accidental revelation. The pity was for the futility of her quest, for the mooring and connection she expected to find despite the odds.

  “I thought I was doing the right thing,” Kay Wilson said in a teary voice. “I thought…” She shook her head and looked too tired to say any more.

  “I realize you don’t have much information, but whatever you have, I’ll need,” Emma said. “Perhaps you can think of some things that could help, Mrs. Wilson. Things like what city your husband visited in order to get the baby, or canceled checks to a physician, anything that might narrow the search.” Narrow was an understatement indeed. Given so little, the search was as wide as all outdoors. Or at least as large as California, for she hadn’t said he went out of state, thank God. So it was now tightly narrowed to everyone who’d been in the state—or come to it perhaps to secretly deliver a child—twenty years ago. Super. “And you need to understand that the odds…”

  “I understand.” Heather’s hands were fisted, holding tight.

  Emma knew she did not understand at all. She didn’t understand how futile this probably would be, and how expensive both monetarily and emotionally. And most of all, she did not understand that in all probability what she was asking for was trouble and heartache.

  “Then it’s a go,” Emma said. “Let’s see where we are.”

  Six

  Five seconds off the freeway, Billie felt in another world as she drove into the headlands rising out of San Francisco Bay.

  She waited for the light to signal her turn in the one-way tunnel that burrowed through the side of the mountain. A five-minute wait, they said, but it always felt much longer. Finally she was in and through the narrow gray passageway and out into the post-rain fluorescent green hills.

  She drove on Bunker Road, its name the heritage of the military bases that had been at each “corner” of the Golden Gate during WW II. The abandoned Nike missile sites added a melancholy historic punctuation to the landscape, and in fact, the rescue center itself was on a former missile site.

  A nice bit of recycling, Billie thought. />
  The center was set in a bowl of hills from which Billie, parking her car, could see the ocean but the patients behind the fencing could not. She wondered if they smelled it, heard it, and sensed it still. Surely, they were homesick for it.

  She paused at an information booth and picked up a leaflet, walked by the large “FROM RESCUE TO RELEASE” posters near the entry, glancing at their explanations of what the center did, and moved to where visitors could observe the front row of holding pens. Each cement-floored space held a ramped round tub in its center, a tiny above-ground swimming pool for two or three sea mammals. Whiteboards on the surrounding fence gave each patient’s name, condition, and where he was found.

  She stood in front of a pen containing elephant seals that had been, according to the notes on its whiteboard, emaciated when rescued. Now they looked plump and were vociferous, filling the air with a hoarse sound, combining a bark and a crow. Their flippers fascinated her; each ended with five nails, as if a hand were slipping out of a flipper-shaped glove. Next pen over, a sea lion had a healing slash mark around his throat—“harassed by humans,” his sign said.

  A young woman in rubber boots, yellow gloves, and a flannel shirt-jacket hosed down a pen, silently regarding the sea lions who had clustered inside the pool when she approached. Finished, she backed out and locked up.

  She waved acknowledgment at Billie, who was the only visitor at the moment. One of the sea lions descended the ramp and barked in her direction.

  “Some asshole shot him,” the woman said. “It makes me crazy, even thinking of the kind of person who’d…You volunteering?”

  “Visiting,” Billie said.

  “Shame—you just missed a release. It’s a trip watching the guys get put on a truck.”

  “Where are they taking them?”

  “This group was going down the coast, I think. Where there’s a colony.” She smiled at Billie and half turned away. “Look around, enjoy yourself. I’ve got to get back to a mentally ill harbor seal. I call him Huck Finned.”

  “How do you know if a harbor seal’s crazy?”

  “Well, let’s say he’s not sick but he’s one confused fellow. He was found at the freeway entrance in Greenbrae, sitting on the on-ramp. Apparently, he ran away to see the world. He must have gone for a long swim through the waterways and then the tide went out and he was stranded in the middle of a housing development. But he’s got guts. Hauled himself up onto dry land and started out for wherever. Which was ultimately the freeway entrance.”

  “Lucky he wasn’t killed.”

  The volunteer nodded. “Or that a lot of people weren’t, too, in a pileup—few things make you slam your brakes like seeing a sea lion on the freeway. We talk about sharing this space, but we assume wild animals understand the laws of human civilization and will keep behind the lines we’ve drawn.”

  “And what happens next?”

  “Once we’re sure he’s fine, he’ll be taken out to Point Reyes where his mother will send him to his room and make him promise to never do it again. And,” her voice grew more solemn, “hope his sense of direction isn’t screwed up. Remember Humphrey the whale? We had to get him out of San Francisco Bay twice.” She pulled off a yellow glove. “By the way, I’m Sarah. I volunteer here.”

  Billie introduced herself. “Actually, I’m looking for information about a volunteer. Do you have a minute?”

  Sarah laughed. “Last I heard, there were eight hundred of us. We’re here twenty-four–seven, you understand. This is a hospital.”

  “His name is Gavin Riddock.” Billie hoped that somehow Sarah had not picked up a newspaper or turned on the TV news in the past month.

  “Sounds familiar.” Sarah moved her head as if to get a new view of Billie. “Can I ask why you’re looking for information?”

  “I’m working with an attorney who needs the information.”

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  “An investigator.”

  “Doing legwork for a lawyer here?” Sarah’s brow creased and she was silent, her expression one of deep concentration. Then she looked up. “Gavin Riddock! The guy who killed—”

  “Who’s accused of killing—”

  “Of course.” Sarah’s voice had lost its animation. “I don’t know him. You might ask the woman in the visitors’ center out there. She’s been here a long while, and knows lots more people than I do. Or knows who would know.”

  She pointed toward the exit. That was indeed where the visitors’ center was, but Sarah’s gesture also suggested that Billie should get the hell out.

  Billie wanted to spend more time watching, but she reminded herself she had a different purpose. “Thanks,” she said.

  Sarah, en route to the bank of pens behind the ones Billie could see, turned around. “I have to ask. I know it’s a job and I know about everyone’s right to the best defense, but don’t you feel bad about what you’re doing?”

  “Me?” Billie pointed at her chest, knowing how stupidly she was behaving. The girl wasn’t addressing the animals.

  “Working to defend somebody like that.”

  “Somebody like what?”

  “Like a murderer!”

  “He’s accused,” Billie said. “We don’t know if he actually—”

  “Oh, please. The Riddocks.” She shook her head, puffed air out of her mouth. “Do whatever you feel like and to hell with the peons.”

  “I don’t think this— He’s entitled to the best possible—”

  “I know that. And I guess I even believe it, but it kills me to think that you’d—I mean I’m one of eight hundred people trying to save animals. From us, because we shoot them, or we murder them if parts of them seem valuable. Or we pull them out of their habitat and collect them if we think they’re rare or precious or pretty. Or we trap them in our garbage. What is wrong with people? How can you expect me to sympathize with—” She put a yellow-gloved hand up. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…but you can’t spend all your time trying to heal victims—human or otherwise—and then get misty-eyed about somebody who bashes in a woman’s head!”

  Billie wasn’t sure how they’d leaped from sea lions on the freeway to Gavin Riddock. “Really,” she said. “You aren’t giving him a fair—”

  “All this legwork and energy and money for what? To try and save a mess who obviously has no sense of right and wrong. Like the person who shot that sea lion—you’d find ways to defend him.” She shrugged. “Well, hell. It’s your job.” With another shake of her head and arm, shaking off Billie it appeared, she turned and went back to work, lifting and tossing a hose into an enclosure.

  Billie went to the visitors’ center. The door was open and a middle-aged woman with cropped gray hair sat in its small space, playing solitaire on a computer. She looked up, smiling, when Billie said “Hello,” then stood and came outside. “How can I help you? Have you toured the facility yet? Can I tell you anything about us?”

  Billie paused a moment, afraid of another outburst. Then in the most efficient and unemotional voice she could summon, she introduced herself and repeated her mission. “I realize you have lots of volunteers, but if you know this person, or could tell me who might, it would be a help. His name is Gavin Riddock.” The muscles of her upper back and neck pulled tight.

  The woman’s mouth tightened. “The one who killed Tracy Lester.”

  “Who is accused of—”

  The woman’s posture changed subtly, and Billie was reminded of animals poised to fight or flee. “Naturally, when we heard…people talked about it, about him. Horrifying. And he seemed…not normal, but not violent.”

  “He has no history of violence,” Billie said softly.

  “Until now, maybe,” the woman snapped. “Murder’s sufficiently violent. He’s written himself a new history. You know, Tracy Lester was here, too. Came with Gavin one day when I was here. I spoke with her. Such a nice young woman, but very emotional. She cried when she saw a sea lion humans had hurt. She said she had only just then realized
how horribly people treated animals. And that it mattered.”

  “About Gavin Riddock,” Billie prompted.

  “Well, of course, when we heard…” She leaned against the wall of the small white structure. “People talked, went back and checked about him…”

  “He did work here, didn’t he? I mean volunteer?”

  “For a while.” She put her hand up to the side of her face, her little finger pressed against her lips. As if she were silencing herself, Billie thought.

  Below them, in the distance, the Pacific glinted in the clear winter sunshine. Behind them, a patient barked.

  The volunteer’s expression softened. “He was asked to leave. It’s rather sad.”

  “How so?” Being booted out sounded bad, not sad.

  “He didn’t truly get it that those are wild animals. And even more important, they have to stay wild. This isn’t a petting zoo, it’s a rehab center. We don’t talk to them. We don’t touch them, except as medically needed. We keep them with others of their kind, so that they socialize with them, not with us. The goal is to get them back to sea, with their own species, in their real lives, as nature intended. We’re only a way station.”

  “And Gavin?” Billie prompted.

  “Oh, yes. Sorry. I was lecturing, wasn’t I? Force of habit. What people said was that Gavin couldn’t resist befriending the patients. He got it that petting them was dangerous—they are wild animals and they bite. But he couldn’t resist talking to them, hanging out near their pens. We had a volunteer back then, Veronica Napoles. She’d gotten him to come up here, and she tried to work with him, but, well…”

  “Does she still volunteer?” If she’d brought him here, she must think well of him, Billie decided. Or had. Even if he didn’t make the cut because of over-affection.

  “Not anymore,” the woman said. “She’s a rancher now out in West Marin. Raising llamas. A bit of a trek to get here, I suppose.”

  “Could I—Is there some way I could speak with her, then?” Why wasn’t she on the list of contacts?