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

by Gillian Roberts

  So far, no one had had much good to say about the accused, not even in the standard media way of neighbors insisting that the killer “seemed like a nice ordinary guy.” Gavin had never been ordinary, had never blended into his surroundings. Maybe this woman would turn the tide.

  “I’d like her permission before I give her number out,” the volunteer said. “If you’d wait a minute or so…” She punched in numbers, then listened to the receiver for a long time before saying hello. To Billie’s relief, her mission was described as “investigating Tracy Lester’s death,” instead of “helping that murderous Riddock boy,” or some variation on that latter theme.

  The volunteer handed the phone over to Billie.

  “If you’re not police,” a determined voice on the other end said, “I’ll talk to you. I have already talked to them until I was out of breath and look what a big nothing that produced. Gavin did not kill Tracy.”

  Billie scarcely knew what to say. “When?” was all she came up with.

  Veronica suggested the next day, and gave directions.

  “In case,” Billie said, spelling out her name, and giving both her home and cell phone numbers. And then, with a final thank-you, she hung up, feeling as if she might have lucked into something.

  After thanking the volunteer and gladly leaving a donation, Billie headed for the car, filled with new optimism. She tried not to be overly excited, but Veronica Napoles sounded like an actual character witness.

  She stood for a moment at her car door and looked out to sea, which stretched flat and deceptively calm-looking out to infinity, hiding its nets, sharks, and secrets, revealing nothing. How sad for Gavin, who’d wanted to love the animals. He increasingly seemed a creature out of place, as vulnerable against mankind as these landlocked sea animals were.

  Seven

  Emma left the Wilsons in her office. She had to get out because she felt as if she were following a now-disappeared trail of crumbs. “It’s fairy-tale time in there,” she muttered.

  “What’s that?” Zack handed her the day’s mail, which looked predictably boring. “Did I hear you snarl about fairies?” He waited. “My mistake.” He gave a mock salute and turned his attention back to his desk.

  Handsome Zachary Park. She’d always been a sucker for good-looking charmers and age didn’t change that. Zachary made her smile, but she didn’t feel like smiling right now. She blew her nose instead. Fairies, indeed. “Those women are driving me insane,” she said. “Girl wants to find her birth mother. What she wants of her, I don’t know. But okay, it’s a job—except there’s nothing. I know we charged her a big fee, and promised nothing, but the fact is I find running in circles annoying as hell.”

  “She’s looking for her mother because she’s human,” he whispered. “I’ve heard something about some kind of bond? Mother and…how did it go? Mother and stranger? Mother and dog? Wait, I have it. Mother and child. Heard of it?”

  “Nitwit. I understand the urge, but she has a bond and it’s with that mother in there. She’s a fool to waste her money this way.”

  “Emma.” A smile played just below the surface of his skin. “Emma, you’re not worried about the money. You’re worried that you will find the mother, and it’ll be another horrible non-reunion. Another rejection. That this girl, stupid or not, is about to be hurt.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  He held his ground. “It’s not a crime to have emotions—no, make that to show them—even if only now and then. Say, once a fiscal quarter, maybe.”

  “Time to go back into the arena.” She toyed with the idea of giving this futile search to him. He’d been making sounds about training to be an investigator. But she knew he didn’t mean it. He was supposed to run the office using only one piece of his brain power and flex time to audition for theater and commercials and local film work. She didn’t know what had kept him back so far, whether drugs had caused the failures or failures, the drugs.

  He didn’t talk about it while he was here, on his day job. Not even with Billie—despite her having been a drama major in college—did he discuss what in less formal moments and settings, he called his “real life.” At least he didn’t within Emma’s hearing.

  In any case, he was clean, he was happy, he was optimistic again, and she wouldn’t mess with it. Besides, when he’d been gone from the office, there’d been constant chaos and nothing was where it was supposed to be.

  The outer door opened. Billie was back from wherever, waving, pointing at her watch, then darting into her cubicle as if in a dreadful rush when Emma was sure her actions were designed solely to avoid any interaction. For unfathomable reasons, the girl seemed uneasy around her.

  She returned to her own office, feeling condemned. The Wilsons looked grim and she wondered what, if anything, they’d said while she was gone. She looked at the mostly empty form on her desk. It wasn’t going to do much good for anyone. Almost every blank was still pristine. And that was after she’d asked and asked questions.

  She settled back down to work. And again faced the nothing. What did she have?

  No name.

  No city of birth.

  No birth certificate.

  No adoption papers.

  Lots of damp-eyed murmurs and memory failures.

  And two facts: A name—not the birth name, but a name. Heather Wilson. And a birth date. August 5, 1979.

  But she’d taken the money, and she was an honorable woman. Futile as this was, she would search.

  “How is it that you don’t know where the baby was or where she’d been born?” Emma asked Kay Wilson, not sure whether she’d asked it that way before.

  The woman incessantly realigned herself in minute increments—head shifting slightly to the side, as if her neck cricked, back straightening or arching, legs crossing. She was visibly and perpetually uncomfortable. “I wasn’t there,” Kay Wilson finally said. “I was ill, and Nowell said Dr. Smith had a baby for us, months before we’d expected, and so he had to go get her on his own. Dr. Smith understood. I don’t remember details. I had a fever and it was a…confusing time.”

  “He drove off? Flew away? What?” Emma asked.

  “Drove.”

  “And did he say how far, how long?”

  Kay Wilson’s hands clasped and unclasped.

  “How old was Heather when he brought her home?” Emma asked. She didn’t like this story, not at all. Didn’t sound right, a father-to-be driving off solo to bring back a newborn.

  “Just…” Kay Wilson shook her head again, and pulled a tissue out of a box on Emma’s desk. “Only…a few days. Whenever they let her out of the hospital.”

  “Did your husband stay with anybody while he was gone? That might help us locate the hospital.”

  Kay Wilson shook her head. “He didn’t stay. He wasn’t gone.”

  “You’re saying he went wherever and returned the same day?”

  “He came back home,” Kay Wilson said, then she frowned. “I was sick and he didn’t want to leave me in the first place, so I’m sure he came back home with the baby.”

  Heather slumped and looked sullen. Emma hardly blamed her. There could not be a less loving, interested, or excited retelling of how Kay Wilson came to be a mother. She’d shown not an iota of joy, excitement, or even nostalgia. But Emma wasn’t sure if it was from an absence of emotion or a desperate attempt to control an excess of emotion. After all, the girl she’d mothered since she was a few days old now referred to her as her “step-mother.”

  “Let’s try to be sure,” Emma said. “You were ill. So think: were you alone overnight? Did somebody come in to help you, make sure you were all right?”

  The woman’s eyes overflowed again. She looked around as if someone had called, then back at Emma again. “Nobody came to see if I was all right. Nowell was there.”

  “If you were so sick,” Heather said, spitting out each word, “how could you let a little new baby in your house? Didn’t you even care about making it sick? Making me
sick?”

  Her mother swiped at her eyes. “I—I didn’t hold you that night. I didn’t want to make you sick. I—I had things ready.”

  “What sort of illness was it, do you know?” Emma asked.

  “A…I felt…it was probably a sort of flu,” Kay said. “It’s hard to remember now. Fever is all I remember. A bad fever.”

  Emma suspected the malady had been depression, one that was still going on. She wondered if this woman had wanted a child at all, if Nowell had browbeaten her into it. Or had fathered a child she then had to raise.

  “Heather,” the woman whispered. “This isn’t a good idea.”

  “Let me decide that.” Heather’s voice was close to a growl.

  “This won’t make you happy.”

  “I’m an adult. This is money I earned, and I can decide what will or won’t—”

  “It won’t. I know how you are, always up and down and—”

  “See? There’s the entire problem right there,” Heather said, first looking pointedly at Emma, then glowering at her mother. “You don’t know me at all!”

  Emma had seen this particular roundelay. Had, in fact, been one half of it during Caroline’s adolescence. Well, hell, past that, too. They’d never moved beyond that. Those same words, just about, spit out, shrieked, said coldly, used as shield and defense. You don’t know me at all. Translation: There are no connections between us. None. And Emma was convinced that, just as was true for Caroline, nothing would make Heather happy or would stop either one of them from insisting that whatever quest caught her eye was the trick, the thing that would work.

  Emma cleared her throat. “Nowell, your husband—his name was Nowell Wilson, correct?”

  That terrified, about to run amok expression, then a nod. “Middle name?”

  “He didn’t have one.” The stern and tired face returned.

  “And from what part of California was he originally?”

  She swallowed again. “He wasn’t. He was born in New York City. He didn’t settle here till he was in his twenties. And I don’t mean here—I mean, in California. After Vietnam.”

  “He served?”

  She nodded.

  “Then moved to California, to the Bay Area?”

  She shook her head. “In…San Luis Obispo first, I think he said. Moved a lot.”

  Can you think of a way to make this more impossible? Emma wondered. But all she said out loud was, “Mrs. Wilson, when did you go to court, file the papers for the adoption?”

  “I didn’t. Nowell—The lawyer, actually, the lawyer did all of that. It was private, you see. Closed, if that’s the word. We didn’t know the natural mother, she didn’t know us, wasn’t supposed to. That’s how it was. This kind of thing”—she waved at the room, at Emma, at her daughter—“wasn’t supposed to ever happen.”

  “Did you know about her, however? Anything?”

  She tilted her head from side to side, as if literally rolling an idea back and forth across the base of her skull. “I feel so bad that I know so little, but somehow—you have to believe me—it seemed natural back then. Like we were the family, and we were all there was. It felt…right.”

  Emma nodded. “I understand. Did you know anything about the natural mother?”

  “Only that she was healthy. She had finished high school and some college. And she was a…a nice person. From a good family. That’s what we were told.” She cleared her throat. “Nowell, that is. That’s what he was told.”

  Kay Wilson didn’t sound convinced of it. Not even two decades later.

  “Then why’d you tell me I came from scum?” Heather demanded. “Which is true? What you told me or what you’re telling her?”

  “Please, dear,” Kay Wilson said. “Please.” She shook her head, back and forth and back and forth, but offered no explanation.

  “Fine,” Emma said. “Let’s get back to the house you lived in then. Where was it?”

  “Why do you need all these things I can’t remember? Can you remember every place you’ve rented? I can describe how it looked inside, but how does anybody remember every address or phone number? I wish Nowell were still alive—he’d remember.” She looked ready to sob again.

  “I know it was across the bay,” she continued. “In Berkeley. Does that help? If you need the address, though, I can’t…I don’t…a little house. Green. Near…a dry cleaners. And a bookstore. I know I should remember, but I’m not good with names.” She looked down at her lap, where her hands still twisted the life out of the shoulder straps of her purse.

  Every bit of this situation was a grueling, overwhelming exam for this woman, who so feared flunking it. “That’s all right,” Emma said. “I just wanted the name of the town, that’s all. And whether you owned the house.”

  “We rented.”

  No records there, then. She’d check the phone books for that year, see if that yielded up an address, although at the moment, she couldn’t think what she’d do with it.

  But that seemed it, all the information she’d been able to retrieve. That, and the birthdate of the baby who’d become Heather Wilson.

  She bid them adieu. Kay Wilson repeatedly apologized for her faulty memory and Emma reassured her that it didn’t matter, although of course it did.

  After they’d left, Emma calculated the round-trip distance a sane driver might make from Berkeley and back again, including a break along the way in which to acquire a family.

  A max of three hours each way? An exhausting day, a newborn to tend to en route—surely that was pushing it about as far as someone would go without sleeping over. She took out a ruler, arbitrarily declared a sixty mile per hour speed limit, averaged it out for the return trip with the infant, and made a circle on the map at about two hundred miles from San Francisco.

  Bless the Pacific for filling half the circle, because what was left was sufficiently daunting. From Mendocino north, east to the Nevada border, south to San Luis Obispo.

  Nowell Wilson had lived in San Luis Obispo. He’d have known people there, including the mysterious Dr. Smith. She’d search there first.

  But just to be sure, she would check all the births in the three-hour-drive area on that date Kay Wilson had given her.

  It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. What if he’d flown? Or stayed overnight? At least this way, she could exclude Los Angeles and San Diego Counties. And all the boys born on that date.

  She nonetheless wished she’d never accepted a cent from Heather Wilson. It was not only a bad case, a frustrating one, and a probably doomed one, but it was going to be a boring one to boot. She almost wished she felt sicker, really had the flu, so that she could ignore it while she was bedridden.

  Just her luck to be so damn healthy.

  Her mood, already low, sank into a sub-basement, and she turned to face her computer.

  “Excuse me?”

  That sweet voice that sounded as if it couldn’t utter a negative word set Emma’s inner ear aquiver. “What!” she said, swivelling around.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt,” Billie said. “I’m leaving now. I—”

  “Is there a problem?” Emma snapped. She couldn’t leave. She had to pay the bills and maintain this place and work with the helpless, hopeless Wilsons on this godawful fruitless search.

  “No,” Billie said, backing up. “I just thought—”

  “Don’t!” Oh, Christ, she hadn’t meant to be that loud. “I mean don’t for a minute think you have to tell me about every breath you take!”

  Billie almost seemed ready to say something, but she didn’t. She nodded, backed up and turned, waved to Zack, and left, closing the outer door more forcibly than was necessary.

  “I only meant,” Emma muttered as she tapped Heather’s birth date into the computer, “I only meant nobody has to report in to me every movement. This isn’t kindergarten. I trust her. How would it be if people had to tell me everything? It would be demeaning…but of course she won’t understand that. Too immature. Too sensi
tive. Too…she’ll think it means…something else.”

  Emma looked at the list of babies born in California on August 5, 1979. It was an effective argument for birth control and family planning.

  Who could blame her for being impatient with an employee now and then? Wouldn’t anybody be that way, faced with this?

  Eight

  She had no right to talk to her that way!

  It was a good thing Billie was en route to pick up Jesse, because only the reminder of children, and children at play, kept her from driving the enraged way she wanted to.

  This wasn’t road rage, it was Emma rage.

  What the hell was wrong with her? Billie surely hadn’t done anything warranting that head-chewing response. She had stopped to explain that she was leaving early because of Ivan and the flu, and if she’d gotten to say it, that might have infuriated Emma, or seemed unprofessional. But she hadn’t been given a chance. It didn’t seem to matter. Emma was perpetually pissed at her, or the world. Or both.

  She’d wanted to tell her about the Marine Mammal Center, and about the potential friend of Gavin’s. You’d think Emma would want to know. Would, in fact, have asked on her own. After all, it was Emma’s ass on the line with Michael Specht more than it was Billie’s, and it was Emma who had specifically asked to be kept informed.

  Near the party house, SUVs studded the curb like grommets on a seam. Billie always felt endangered near them, insufficiently protected from the behemoths by her aging Honda Civic.

  She parked as close as she could get to where balloons floated above a mailbox, and made her way into the entryway of the house; a spacious, skylighted expanse of terra-cotta tile, soaring ceilings, and bedlam as farewells and peace treaties were made. Despite the presence of a disheveled clown slumping toward a car, Billie gathered that the usual miseries had taken place. The first clue was the missing birthday boy who’d been sent to his room for punching his guests, one of whom still looked red-eyed.

  People thought birthing a child was the hard part, when it was nothing compared to the annual agony of celebrating the event.