“Records secret. When a baby is born, get adopted. New certificate come in and no mention of St. Helen. You see?”
Bosch wasn’t sure if he was tracking what she was trying to tell him. He knew there were all kinds of privacy laws protecting adoption records.
“You’re saying they don’t file the birth certificate until after the adoption?” he asked.
“Exactly,” Flora said.
“And it only has the names of the new parents on it?”
“Uh-huh. True.”
“And the baby’s new name?”
Flora nodded.
“What about the hospital? They lie about that?”
“They say home birth.”
In frustration Bosch slapped his hands down flat on the counter.
“So there is no way I can find out who her child was?”
“I’m sorry, Harry. Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad, Flora. At least not at you.”
“You good detective, Harry Bosch. You figure it out.”
“Yeah, Flora. I’ll figure it out.”
Hands still on the counter, Bosch leaned down and tried to think. There had to be a way to find the child. He thought about going to St. Helen’s. It might be his only shot. He then thought of something else and looked back up at Flora.
“Harry, I never see you this way,” she said.
“I know, Flora,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like dead ends. Can you bring me the reels with births in January and February 1951, please?”
“You sure? You got a lot a births in two month.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Okay, then.”
Flora disappeared again and Bosch went back to the microfilm cubicle to wait. Checking his watch, he realized that it was likely he would be looking through microfilm until the office closed at 5:00. He would then face a brutal rush-hour drive through the heart of downtown and up into Hollywood to get home, a slog that could take two hours. Since he was closer to Orange County than home, he decided to text his daughter on the off chance she’d have time for dinner away from the Chapman University student cafeteria.
Mads, I’m in Norwalk on a case. I could come down for dinner if you have time.
She texted back right away.
Where is Norwalk?
Down near you. I could pick you up at 5:30 and have you back doing homework by 7. What do you say?
Her decision did not come quickly and he knew she was probably weighing her options. She was in her second year, and social and school demands on her time had grown exponentially from the previous year, resulting in Bosch seeing her less and less. It was a development that occasionally left him feeling sad and alone, but delighted for her at most other times. He knew that this would be one of the nights he would feel gloomy if he didn’t get to see her. The story of Vibiana Duarte, what little he knew of it, depressed him. She had been just a few years younger than his own daughter and what happened to her was a reminder that life is not always fair—even to the innocent.
While he was waiting for his daughter’s decision Flora came out with two reels of microfilm for him. He put his phone down on the table next to the machine and spooled the reel marked January 1951. He started wading through hundreds of birth records, checking the hospital line on each and printing out every certificate recorded as a home birth.
Ninety minutes later Bosch stopped at February 20, 1951, having extended his search a week past Vibiana’s death to account for the delay in the filing of a birth certificate under the names of the new parents. He had printed out sixty-seven birth certificates in which there was a home birth and the child’s race was listed as either Latino or white. He had no photo of Vibiana Duarte and he did not know how dark or light her complexion had been. He could not rule out the possibility that her baby was adopted as white, even if just to match the race of the adoptive parents.
As he squared up the stack of printouts he realized he had forgotten about dinner with his daughter. He grabbed his phone and saw that he had missed her final text on his offer. It had come in more than an hour earlier and she had accepted, as long as they were finished eating and she was back studying by 7:30. This year she was sharing a house with three other girls a few blocks from campus. Bosch checked his watch and saw he’d been correct in predicting he would finish up as the records office was closing. He shot a quick text to Maddie saying he was heading her way.
Bosch brought the microfilm copies to the counter and asked Flora what he owed for sixty-seven birth certificates.
“You law enforcement,” she said. “No charge.”
“Yeah, but I’m not saying that, Flora,” he said. “This is private.”
Again he refused to play the San Fernando card where it was not necessary. He had no choice when it came to running names through law enforcement databases, but this was different. If he accepted free copies under false pretenses, then there would be financial gain to his bending the rules and the blowback could be extreme. He pulled out his wallet.
“Then you pay five dollar for every copy,” Flora said.
The price shocked him, even though he had made ten thousand dollars that very morning. It must have shown on his face. Flora smiled.
“You see?” she said. “You are law enforcement.”
“No, Flora, I’m not,” Bosch said. “Can I pay with a credit card?”
“No, you pay cash.”
Bosch frowned and looked through his billfold to get the secreted hundred-dollar bill he always carried for emergencies. He combined it with the cash he carried in a fold in his pocket and made the $335 copy bill with six bucks left over. He asked for a receipt even though he didn’t think he would be filing an expense report with Vance.
He waved the stack of printouts as a farewell and thank-you to Flora and left the office. A few minutes later he was in his car, lining up to get out of the parking lot with everybody else leaving the government building at five o’clock sharp. He put the CD player on and switched things up a bit, listening to the latest album from Grace Kelly, the saxophonist. She was one of the few jazz musicians his daughter liked and appreciated. He wanted to have the disc playing in the car in case Maddie chose a restaurant they had to drive to.
But instead his daughter chose a place in the Old Towne circle that was walking distance from her house on Palm Avenue. Along the way she explained how much happier she was renting a house with three girls than she’d been sharing a two-room, one-bathroom dorm, as she did her freshman year. She was also much closer to the satellite campus where the psychology school was located. All in all, life seemed good for her, but Bosch worried about security at the private house. There was no campus police patrol. The four girls were left on their own in the jurisdiction of the City of Orange Police Department. The drop-off in response time between the campus and the municipal law enforcement was minutes, not seconds, and that bothered Bosch too.
The restaurant was a pizza joint where they stood in line to each order a customized pie that they took to their table hot from the oven. Sitting across from her, Bosch was distracted by the neon-pink highlights accenting his daughter’s hair. Finally he asked why she had gone and done that to herself.
“Solidarity,” she said. “I have a friend whose mom has breast cancer.”
Bosch didn’t get the connection and she easily read him.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “October is breast cancer awareness month, Dad. You should know that.”
“Oh, yeah, right. I forgot.”
He had recently seen on TV some football players from the Los Angeles Rams wearing some pink equipment. Now he understood. And while it made him happy that Maddie had dyed her hair for a good cause, he was also secretly pleased that it was probably only a temporary thing. In a few weeks the month would be over.
Maddie ate exactly half of her pizza and put the other half in a cardboard to-go box, explaining that the remainder would serve as breakfast.
“So what case are you on?” she asked when they wer
e walking back down Palm to her house.
“How do you know I’m on a case?” he asked.
“You said in your text, plus you’re wearing a suit. Don’t be so paranoid. You’re like a secret agent or something.”
“I forgot. It’s just an heir-hunting case.”
“‘Air hunting’? What is that?”
“Heir like in heir to the throne.”
“Oh, got it.”
“I’m trying to find out if an old man up in Pasadena with a lot of money has an heir out there that he can give it all to when he dies.”
“Wow, cool. Did you find anybody yet?”
“Well, I have sixty-seven possibilities at the moment. That’s what I was doing in Norwalk. Looking at birth records.”
“Cool.”
He didn’t want to tell her about what happened to Vibiana Duarte.
“But you can’t tell anyone about this, Mads. It’s top secret, whether I’m a secret agent or not.”
“Like, who am I going to tell?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t want you putting it out there on MyFace or SnapCat or something.”
“Funny, Dad, but my generation is visual. We don’t tell people what other people are doing. We show what we’re doing. We put up photos. So you don’t need to worry.”
“Good.”
Once back at the house, he asked if he could come in to check the locks and other security measures. With the landlord’s permission he had added extra locks on all doors and windows back in September. He checked everything and couldn’t avoid thoughts of the Screen Cutter as he moved about the house. He finally stepped into the small backyard to make sure the wooden fence that ran the perimeter was locked from the inside. He saw that Maddie had done as he had advised and bought a dog bowl for the back step even though the girls didn’t have a dog and the landlord didn’t allow it.
Everything seemed in order and he reminded his daughter once again not to sleep with any windows open. He then hugged her and kissed the top of her head before leaving.
“Make sure there’s water in the dog bowl,” he said.
“Right now it’s dry.”
“Yes, Dad,” she said in that tone she had.
“Otherwise it doesn’t sell it.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“Good. I’ll pick up a couple Beware of Dog signs at Home Depot and bring them down next time.”
“Dad.”
“Okay, I’m going.”
He gave her another hug and headed back to his car. He had not seen any of the roommates during his brief stop-off. He wondered about this but didn’t ask for fear Maddie would accuse him of invading the privacy of the other girls. She had already told him once before that his questions about them bordered on being creepy.
Once he got in the car he wrote a note to himself about the Beware of Dog signs and then put the key into the ignition.
The traffic had thinned by the time he headed north for home. He felt good about the accomplishments of the day, including having dinner with his daughter. The next morning he would work on narrowing the search for Vibiana Duarte and Whitney Vance’s child. The child’s name had to be somewhere in the stack of birth certificates on the seat next to him.
There was something comforting about making progress on the Vance case, but a low-grade dread was building inside of him about the Screen Cutter. Something told him that the stalking rapist was watching another victim and preparing for his next assault. There was a clock ticking up in San Fernando. He was sure of it.
9
In the morning Bosch made coffee and had it out on the rear deck, where he sat at the picnic table with the copies of the birth certificates he had printed the day before. He studied the names and dates on the documents but quickly came to the conclusion that he had nothing with which to narrow the focus. None of the certificates were dated in a timely way. Each was issued at least three days after the birth and this precluded him from looking at delayed issuance as an indicator of adoption. He decided his best bet was to somehow go through St. Helen’s.
He knew this would be a difficult path. Privacy laws governing adoptions were difficult to break through, even with a badge and authority. He considered calling his client Vance and asking if he wanted to get a lawyer involved in a request to open up the adoption records regarding the child born to Vibiana Duarte but he decided it was a nonstarter. That move would most likely announce Vance’s plans to the world and he had been vehement about secrecy.
Bosch remembered the Times story on St. Helen’s and went inside to get his laptop so he could finish reading it. He brought the stack of birth certificates inside so they wouldn’t blow away and paper the canyon below his house.
The Times story recounted the transformation of St. Helen’s from a place where mother and child were quickly separated when adoption occurred, to a place in more recent decades where many mothers kept their children after birth and were counseled on returning to society with them. The social stigma of unwed pregnancy in the 1950s gave way to the acceptance of the 1990s, and St. Helen’s had a number of successful programs designed to keep fledgling families together.
The story then branched out to a section containing quotes from women who had been clients of St. Helen’s saying how their lives were saved by the maternity center that took them in when they were banished in embarrassment by their own families. There were no negative voices here. No interviews with women who felt betrayed by a society that literally snatched their children away from them and gave them to strangers.
The final anecdote of the story drew Bosch’s rapt attention as he realized it gave his investigation a new angle. It began with a number of quotes from a seventy-two-year-old woman who had come to St. Helen’s in 1950 to bear a child and then stayed for the next fifty years.
Abigail Turnbull was only fourteen when she was left with a suitcase on the front steps of St. Helen’s. She was three months pregnant and this deeply humiliated her fervently religious parents. They abandoned her. Her boyfriend abandoned her. And she had nowhere else to go.
She had her child at St. Helen’s and gave her up for adoption, spending less than an hour with the infant girl in her arms. But she had nowhere to go afterward. No one in her family wanted her back. She was allowed to stay on at St. Helen’s and was given menial jobs like mopping floors and doing laundry. Over the years, however, she attended night school and eventually earned both high school and college degrees. She became a social worker at St. Helen’s, counseling those who had been in her position and staying until her retirement, a half century in all.
Turnbull gave the keynote speech at the one-hundred-year celebration and in it she recounted a story that she said showed how her dedication to St. Helen’s paid off in immeasurable ways.
“One day I was in the staff lounge and one of our girls came in with a message that there was a woman at the entrance lobby who had come because she was tracing her own adoption. She wanted answers about where she had come from. Her parents had told her she was born here at St. Helen’s. So I met with her and right away a strange feeling came over me. It was her voice, her eyes—I felt as though I knew her. I asked her what her birthday was and she said April 9, 1950, and then I knew, I knew she was my child. I put my arms around her and everything went away. All my pain, every regret I ever had. And I knew it was a miracle and that was why God had kept me at St. Helen’s.”
The Times report ended with Turnbull introducing her daughter, who was in attendance, and described how Turnbull’s speech had left not a dry eye in the house.
“Jackpot,” Bosch whispered as he finished reading.
Bosch knew he had to speak to Turnbull. As he wrote her name down he hoped that she was still alive eight years after the Times story was published. That would make her eighty years old.
He thought about the best way to get to her quickly and started by putting her name into the search engine on his laptop. He got several hits on pay-to-enter search sites but he knew most of
these were bait-and-switch jobs. There was an Abigail Turnbull on LinkedIn, the business-oriented social-networking site, but Bosch doubted it was the octogenarian he was looking for. Finally he decided to put the digital world aside and try what his daughter called social engineering. He pulled up the website for St. Helen’s, got the phone number, and punched it into his phone. A woman answered after three rings.
“St. Helen’s, how can we help you?”
“Uh, yes, hello,” Bosch started, hoping to sound like a nervous caller. “Can I please speak to Abigail Turnbull? I mean, if she’s still there.”
“Oh, honey, she hasn’t been here in years.”
“Oh, no! I mean, is she—do you know if she is still alive? I know she must be very old now.”
“I believe she is still with us. She retired a long time ago, but she didn’t die. I think Abby will outlive us all.”
Bosch felt a glimmer of hope that he would be able to find her. He pressed on.
“I saw her at the anniversary party. My mother and I spoke to her then.”
“That was eight years ago. Who, may I ask, is calling, and what is this regarding?”
“Uh, my name is Dale. I was born at St. Helen’s. My mother always spoke of Abigail Turnbull as being such a friend and taking such good care of her during her time there. Like I said, I got to finally meet her when we went back for the anniversary.”
“How can I help you, Dale?”
“Well, it’s sad, actually. My mother just passed and she had a message she wanted me to give to Abigail. I also wanted to tell her when the services were in case she wanted to attend. I have a card. Do you know what would be the best way for me to get it to her?”
“You could send it here addressed to her in care of St. Helen’s. We’ll make sure she gets it.”
“Yes, I know I could do that but I’m afraid it might take too long. You know, going through a third party. She might not get it until after the services this Sunday.”
There was a pause, and then:
“Hold on and let me see what we can do.”
The connection went silent and Bosch waited. He thought he had played it just about right. Two minutes later the voice came back on the line.
The Wrong Side of Goodbye (Harry Bosch Series) Page 7