Tell Me Who I Am

by Marcia Muller

  Tell Me Who I Am

  A Sharon McCone Short Story

  Marcia Muller

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  Tell me who I am.

  Those were the first words Debra Judson said to me. “Tell me who I am.”

  As I motioned her toward one of the clients’ chairs, I studied her. Thin, stringy blond hair; no makeup on her round face; a trifle overweight for her five-and-a-half-foot frame, but not obese; ripped, tattered jeans and a rumpled pink blouse with two buttons missing. But that’s the style for twentysomethings here in San Francisco’s tech-savvy canyons South of Market. To the casual observer she might have seemed to be unclean and smell bad. But no, her face was recently scrubbed and a faint gardenia scent drifted around her.

  “I guess I arrived at the right time, getting right in to see the boss lady,” she said without making eye contact.

  She had a faint regional accent—Midwestern, maybe.

  I didn’t want to tell her that she’d gotten in to see me because business was so slow that the “boss lady” was terminally bored and had been dozing on her couch. My husband and partner, Hy Ripinsky, who handles more of McCone & Ripinsky International’s far-flung cases, had been in Asia for a week, so I didn’t even have him in the office next door to divert me.

  Ted Smalley, our office manager, who calls himself the Grand Poobah and shares a friendship with me that goes back to the Stone Age, had actually told me the other day that I needed to get a life. No, I’d insisted, what I needed to get was a case. Something I could really get involved with. Was that what this raggedy young woman was bringing to me?

  “You identified yourself as Debra Judson,” I said to the prospective client. “Isn’t that who you are?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ve had that name all my life. I’ve got a Social Security number too. High school diploma, job résumé, letters of recommendation from past employers. But something’s missing—my identity.”

  “True identity?”

  “Right.”

  “Who recommended you to M&R?”

  “Nobody. A couple of years ago I read a human interest feature about you—how you found out you were adopted and tracked down your real parents. I thought maybe you could help me do the same.”

  I hesitated, studying her.

  “Ms. McCone, if you’re not interested, I can pick another firm just as easy. I guess you think I can’t afford you. I know I don’t look too great on account of the airline losing my luggage when I flew in last night from Michigan. But I’ve got plenty of money—”

  “It’s not about money, and I am interested. Tell me your story.” I motioned her to one of the chairs in the grouping by the high bay-view windows and took one opposite her.

  She relaxed visibly, but still wouldn’t make eye contact. “It all started two weeks ago. In Westland, Michigan, where I was raised. My dad, Dennis Judson, died three years ago in an auto accident, but Mom—her name was Marla—and I were doing fine. She had a good job as a business analyst with Ford, and I was learning the ropes so I could get on there too. Then, one day she came home with what she called one of her sick headaches, and when I checked on her the next morning, she was gone. A stroke, the doctor said.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Now she did look me straight in the eyes; hers were gray-green, suffused with coppery flares of anger. “Sorry?” she said. “You didn’t even know her. You don’t even know me.”

  “It was a conventional, reflexive comment. Go on, please.”

  She wriggled uncomfortably in the chair. “Okay, the house was a rental, and the landlord wanted me out so he could charge more, and he could evict me because we’d lived there so long we’d never thought we needed to renew the lease. And he wanted me out fast. Quick evictions are happening all the time now.”

  “How much time did he give you?”

  “A week.”

  “I’m not familiar with Michigan law, but I have a friend—”

  “Screw it. I’m through with that house and with Michigan too. So, anyway, I packed some of my stuff up in my car, got rid of the rest. And in the back of Mom’s closet off her bedroom, I found this box.” She pulled it from the tote bag she’d set on the floor beside the chair. It was a small box, about the size replacement checks from your bank come in.

  But, as I remembered all too vividly, the size of those life-altering boxes doesn’t matter.

  Years before, when my father died, his will had stipulated that I be the one to clear out his possessions from the famed McCone garage—a structure so crammed with junk that no car had fit there in at least twenty years. Pa had probably been depending on my nosy inclinations when he wrote the will, because there I’d uncovered a box containing all sorts of official documents—including my own adoption papers. For all my life I’d been a dark, strong-featured child in a family of blond Scotch-Irish siblings; my parents had told me I was a “throwback” to distant Indian relatives. But something about that explanation had never felt right. There was just enough information in those papers to allow me to locate my birth parents and other relatives, as well as tell me I was a full-blooded member of the Shoshone tribe. Now I had two families whom I liked and connected with on a more or less regular basis. But not all such boxes contain pleasurable information.

  “May I open this?” I asked Debra Judson as she handed hers to me.

  “Please do.”

  It contained the usual items parents save: a certificate from Sparrow Lake Hospital in Colusa County, California, giving the birth date of a female child named Pamela Stanton as twenty-two years ago last August 17, parents Rodney and Carol Stanton. A few photographs of a crawling infant and a toddling preschooler, smiling in all of them. And a number of news clippings from a paper called the Colusa Express, yellowed and tattered as if they’d been unfolded and read many times.

  When I came to the clippings I looked up at Debra Judson and she nodded for me to go on reading.

  SPARROW LAKE TODDLER MISSING

  SEARCH FOR STANTON TODDLER INTENSIFIED

  UNSEASONAL RAIN HAMPERS SEARCH FOR CHILD

  SEARCH FOR MISSING STANTON CHILD SCALED BACK

  PAMELA STANTON FEARED DEAD

  There were other items, the usual notices that a child has disappeared and the authorities are still searching for her or him, but which essentially mean that they believe the victim is dead and that the case has been back-burnered.

  “That birth date on the certificate,” Debra Judson said, “is not mine. Neither is the name of the hospital nor those of my parents.” She reached into her tote bag. “These documents, which have been available to me my whole life, state who I am.”

  She handed me a manila envelope. In it was her birth certificate, showing she’d been born to Dennis and Marla Judson twenty-two years ago at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. There were also photographs showing a child as she matured to a teenager and then to a young woman. Report cards from schools in the city of her birth. Clippings attesting to her proficiency in soccer at Dondero High School. A high school diploma; she’d graduated with honors, and the seals and ribbons indicating her excellence were still att
ached, if a bit faded. There were letters and postcards, presumably from friends and relatives, boyfriends too. And two acceptances from small but excellent state colleges.

  She saw me studying the acceptance notices. “I didn’t get to go. They came about the time Dad was killed. Mom needed me.”

  “All these papers indicate you had a fairly happy, successful life until your parents died.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “And you say that you’ve been left financially secure.”

  “I have.”

  “Then why not let go of this other information? For all you know, it may have nothing to do with you.”

  “Do you really think so, Ms. McCone?”

  The odd, coppery flares of anger in her eyes were stronger now. I met them with my own gaze, felt an anger that I’d thought I’d years ago put to rest.

  “Do you think so?” she repeated.

  “…No, I don’t.”

  Our mutual anger was understandable. When you enter adulthood thinking you’re a unique person with your own unique history, and all of that individuality is suddenly in jeopardy, you feel as if you’re sinking into quicksand. Nothing to grab on to, no solid ground to rest upon, no one to extend a hand and drag you to safety. For me, my investigator’s skills had provided aid and comfort; now, perhaps, they might do the same for Debra.

  I gave my secretary—one in a sequence of many short-lived employees—the clippings for copying. Then I asked Debra Judson for photographs of her parents; she was prepared for the request, had already had extras made. After she signed a contract and provided a retainer, I sent her back to her hotel—the Stanford Court, proving she hadn’t been left badly off—and read the clippings carefully. Then I turned to the computer.

  The websites I visited fleshed out the story of the Stanton child that had been skimpily covered in the print media. She’d had six older siblings—four boys and two girls, their ages ranging from four to thirteen. Their father, Rodney, worked as a caretaker in a mobile home park near Sparrow Lake in exchange for the rent on their space; their mother, Carol, was a part-time convenience store clerk and occasional waitress, but her poor health and pregnancies—she’d also had two miscarriages after Pamela was born—prevented her from taking regular jobs. The Stantons were described by neighbors who seemed genuinely fond of them as good parents, even though stressed and desperately poor. Abuse was never hinted at.

  On the day over twenty years ago when Pamela disappeared it had rained hard—one of those sudden deluges that used to happen in the pre-drought years of our state. The wet ground should have made it easier to track a child who might have wandered outdoors at the wrong moment, become disoriented or panicked. But the rural sheriff’s department—not summoned until dinnertime, when the mother realized her youngest was missing—could identify no footprints or other telltale traces in the gathering dusk. And by first light the next day, a second storm had obliterated any other possible traces.

  Where had Pamela’s parents been that day? Rodney had driven Carol to a nearby mobile-health unit for tests on her thyroid. Their eldest, thirteen-year-old Jackson, was deputized to look after the younger children, but uncharacteristically he’d gone off with his friends and left the other kids alone. It was a mistake that apparently haunted Jackson to this very day: he’d begun drinking heavily at fourteen and twice attempted suicide.

  The Stantons blamed Jackson for shirking his familial duties, but in actuality they’d put too much responsibility on a young teenager. Had put too much trust in the rest of their brood to obey the rules. Of course the press had labeled the parents with all the sins of our judgmental society, including caring more about themselves and Carol’s perilous health than their children, and being too poor to hire a babysitter. In the face of this castigation, the family had fled farther into the wilderness—northeast to Lassen County on the California/Nevada border—and then scattered.

  I’d need to locate as many of them as I could, probe more into the events of that rainy day. In the meantime, I’d have one of my research staff verify the two sets of documents my client had provided.

  The Stanton documents turned out to be originals. But the Judson documents proved false. Debra’s birth certificate was in reality that of a child who had died two days after her birth at the Michigan hospital; it had been requested from the state nearly two years after the baby’s death. It reminded me of the decades-old ploy for obtaining false identification, generally used by college students to verify that they were old enough to drink alcoholic beverages. But it could be used for major crimes as well.

  The first crime that occurred to me was kidnapping. There had been no hint about kidnapping in the rural press: the child was pretty, but the family dirt-poor. No calls had come to the local bar through which they routed their infrequent phone messages; no ransom note had ever arrived. It seemed highly unlikely that Pamela Stanton had been snatched by anyone who preyed on kids for sex or porn. There was no indication that Debra Judson had been molested; she’d described a normal, happy childhood.

  I went down the hall to the office of Craig Morland, a former FBI agent who had been lured away from the Bureau by another of my operatives, Adah Joslyn, now his wife.

  “Twenty years ago if a child disappeared in a rural county here, would the FBI be called in?” I asked him.

  “Probably not, unless there was clear evidence of a kidnapping, such as a ransom demand or an eyewitness to the abduction.”

  Nothing of the sort had been mentioned.

  “Could you check with your contacts at the Bureau?” I gave him the specifics.

  “Shouldn’t take long.”

  Fifteen minutes later he came to my office. “My contacts couldn’t find anything in the available files. The disappearance must’ve been handled by local law enforcement.”

  Okay, what about another form of kidnapping: a couple desperately seeking a child—and God knows there are many—picking up a youngster from the street, a park, wherever, and claiming her or him as their own? The child, like Pamela, would be too young to remember any prior life, easily lulled by love and care.

  I buzzed Mick Savage, my nephew and computer genius, and explained about the case, asked that he run a background check on the Judsons. Even if they were upstanding citizens, the fact didn’t necessarily absolve them of having taken the child. But an unresolved twenty-year-old crime is a very cold case. I’d solved cold cases before; maybe I’d get lucky again. Anyway, I’d give it my best shot.

  Once I’d gathered and studied all the background data available, the next step in my investigation was on-site interviews with those who had witnessed or otherwise been involved in the pertinent events. After calling Debra Judson for authorization of the additional expense, I set out at dawn the next morning in Hy’s and my Cessna 170B for Sparrow Lake.

  Colusa County is sparsely populated, located in the Central Valley northwest of Sacramento. The general aviation airport is three miles south of the town of Colusa, and I’d arranged with a ride-service company similar to Uber that the agency uses throughout the state to pick me up and supply a car I could use on my drive seventeen miles to Sparrow Lake, near the northeastern county line.

  The lake itself was picture-postcard material, surrounded by tall old pines through which rustic cabins on the shoreline could be glimpsed. The town itself looked like a set from an old Western movie—an old and neglected one. False-fronted buildings, their paint blistered and peeling; decaying wooden sidewalks; cars and trucks parked helter-skelter at angles to the edges of a potholed main street. As I drove along I noted two saloons that were obviously tricked up for tourists but didn’t appear to be doing much business; a Wells Fargo bank; a small grocery; a hardware store; and an office calling itself the Sparrow Sun. Newspaper?

  Possibly. Good place to start.

  The office contained two desks, only one occupied. A woman sat there, pushing her fingers through her short dark hair. She looked up from a page she was penciling and said, “You
want to place an ad? I can be with you in a second.”

  “Thanks.” I moved around the waiting area, examining the framed clippings that were posted on the walls. A few were from the Colusa Express and concerned the missing Stanton child.

  The woman behind the desk slapped the copy she’d been editing into an out-box and came over to me. “Tricia Prine,” she said, extending a hand. “Editor and owner.”

  I introduced myself, told her why I was there.

  “That story.” She motioned me to a chair beside her desk and sat back down. “Every few years we get somebody nosing around here about it. Nothing ever comes of it.”

  “What my client has found may constitute a break in the case.” I studied Prine: she was in her mid- to late twenties, too young to have any true memories of the Stanton disappearance. “Did you live here then?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “We…I only moved here five years ago. My husband Ned and I bought this piece-of-shit newspaper with these stereotypical dreams about being award-winning country muckrakers. Sort of like the Point Reyes Light people, you know? Only there wasn’t any muck to rake, and after a while Ned got fed up and moved back to LA. Now he’s with the Times there and building a great career. And I’m…just here.” She gestured around weakly.

  “You get the paper in the divorce settlement?”

  “Oh, yeah. He was fair about all our assets, such as they were. He just wanted out. I don’t blame him. Your dreams can only stretch so far.”

  I like women—and men—who don’t want to put the blame for their out-of-control lives on others. And I liked Tricia Prine.

  I said, “Let’s see if you and I can develop a story that’ll put some life into this old rag.”

  Tricia and I went over the details we had on the Stanton family. Jackson, the brother who had been told to watch his siblings, had returned to the area and was living in an isolated cabin near the lake.