The Darkest Corners

by Kara Thomas

  I blurt out the first thing that pops into my mind. “I have a birth certificate, right?”

  “What? Of course you do. You needed it to get your driver’s license. Remember?”

  Vaguely. Gram took care of the paperwork since I was so nervous that I wound up failing the driver’s test twice. But then, of course I have a birth certificate. I was born in Fayette, on December 18. It was snowing that morning. Even my father remembers, when by his own admission most of his days after 1994 were spent in a Jameson haze.

  But what about Joslin? There’s no way that she has a birth certificate if she’s really Macy Stevens.

  Did Joslin find out? She must have, and that was why she left. But why wouldn’t she have contacted the Stevens family? Hi, I’m your dead granddaughter. Today show reunion, that kind of thing. As far as anyone knows, Macy Stevens is a heap of baby bones, forever the grinning two-year-old with a plush frog.

  “Tessa, what’s this about? What’s wrong?” Gram sounds panicked. I breathe in through my nose.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Nothing is wrong. I just…I need to prove that Glenn wasn’t Joslin’s father, in case she comes back and wants his money. I can’t find her birth certificate without her father’s name.”

  Gram chews on this; she must hear the lie in my voice. My father died without a pot to piss in.

  “Tessa,” she begins. “I’ve only ever kept things from you to save you pain you don’t need.”

  “Gram. Please tell me his name.”

  “Alan Kirkpatrick,” Gram sighs. “I never liked him. Some people just aren’t good, Tessa, and I knew any kid of his and Annette’s would be the same.”

  There’s the sound of a siren, but it’s on Gram’s end, not mine. Her voice gets shaky. “I never looked that hard for your sister because I was afraid of what I’d find.”

  She has no idea. I can hear it in her voice.

  It means that Gram wasn’t in on it, the twisted string of events that lead to my mother and father raising a stolen child as their own.

  I hate myself for even considering it.

  •••

  Rick comes back inside. Tells me that Maggie called, and they’re seeing Callie right away in the emergency room. The police have already sent out officers to pick up Daryl Kouchinsky. I nod, throw in an “Oh, okay” here and there. As soon as he sighs and heads into the family room, I call Callie.

  Voice mail. I hang up without leaving a message, wondering at what point I decided I was going to tell Callie about my sister and Macy Stevens. I have no reason to think she’ll actually believe me, and I realize that not many people would. Decker, maybe.

  Maybe the FBI agent who called me earlier to scold me for dialing the Stevens. Don’t they have to follow up on all the tips they get, even if it’s one as far-fetched as an eighteen-year-old who thinks the sister she hasn’t seen in ten years is Macy Stevens? The sister I don’t even have a picture of.

  I go upstairs and shut myself in the guest room, and I stay there even when I hear the front door open after midnight, and then footsteps on the stairs. There’s murmuring. Someone flips the light in the hallway on. Off. Someone uses the bathroom.

  My door creaks open. I squeeze my eyes shut and throw in a twitch for good measure. I’m a pro at pretending to be asleep. On those nights when my father brought me to the Boathouse with him, I’d lie in the backseat on the way home, acting like I was out cold so he’d carry me into the house.

  Maggie doesn’t flip my light on. She sits on the edge of my bed.

  “I wish you’d been here,” she whispers. “All these years…Everything would be different if she’d had you.”

  I can’t tell if she knows I’m awake, or if she’s saying it only because she believes I’m asleep.

  I don’t go to sleep after she leaves. And neither does Callie. In my head, we’re playing a game: who can stay up the longest. I hear her padding around her room, the rolling of her desk chair against the hardwood, until I slip into nothingness sometime after four.

  •••

  I wake up to knocking. Callie steps into my room, holding her laptop. I sit up.

  Her hair is down, a mess of unspun silk. The sun catches on three different shades of blond. Callie has always been one of those girls who can simply wake up and be beautiful. It makes the purple bruises on her neck all the more noticeable.

  She touches her throat, catching me staring. “Is it that bad?”

  Her voice sounds like it’s scraping the side of a tin can. She winces.

  I pull my knees up to my chest. “Are you—”

  “It’s fine.” Callie sits on the bed with me, and not on the rocking chair like she usually does. “I have a really small concussion, so of course my mom is freaking.”

  “Daryl Kouchinsky tried to choke you. I think you can give her a pass this time.”

  The corners of Callie’s mouth twitch. Her smile fades before it fully forms. “They picked him up for a DWI. They’re holding him for that until I decide whether to press charges.”

  “Decide?”

  Callie shifts so she’s sitting butterfly-style, the bottoms of her feet touching. Her knees bounce. “You saw what he did to Katie just for talking to me. I’m only gonna make it worse for her. I’ll get a restraining order.” She lifts her eyes to meet mine. “I don’t think it’s him anymore.”

  “Me neither.” Pam said Captain was average height. No one in her right frame of mind would describe Daryl Kouchinsky as average. He’s the type of man who has to duck to pass through a doorframe.

  “Anyway.” Callie sighs. She opens her laptop and turns the screen toward me. “I did this last night.”

  I’m looking at a page on Connect for Sasha, a twenty-year-old happy to offer her services to gentlemen in Fayette and Westmoreland Counties. Willing to travel farther.

  Sasha was an American Girl doll Callie had when we were little. Not one of the cool dolls from a different period in history with her own set of chapter books, but one of the dolls custom-made to look just like you. Sasha even had soccer and twirling uniforms like Callie’s.

  “Nice name,” I tell Callie as she scrolls down the page. My heart flip-flops. There’s an over-the-shoulder mirror-selfie of a girl. She’s in a bikini bottom, long blond hair spilling down her back. I recognize Callie’s cell phone case—it’s mint green with the outline of a dandelion, the flower’s seeds scattered by an invisible breath.

  “I left my face out,” Callie says. “On all of the pages of the other girls I visited, no one shows their face. There are a ton of other sites too—it’s pretty gross how many, actually—so I posted on all of them.”

  I have to look away. “I don’t like this. I don’t think we should do it.”

  Callie closes her laptop. “You know we wouldn’t even consider it if there was any other way.”

  I swallow. “So what next?”

  “We wait,” she says. “And see if he’s interested.”

  •••

  I tell Callie I might have a lead on Joslin, so she’ll give me the van keys while Maggie and Rick are out. Callie wants to come with me, but I remind her that Maggie will flip her shit if she catches Callie out of bed.

  My first stop is the library computer room. I enter in the number from Callie’s card, and a gray box pops up with an hour timer for my Internet session.

  I search birth certificates and get a hit for an archive site that boasts more than 4.6 billion records in its database. To test whether or not it works, I type in my mother’s maiden name: Annette Mowdy. Place of birth: Florida.

  2 records found. I can’t view the full image of the scanned birth certificate without a paid membership, but it looks legit to me.

  I search for Joslin Mowdy in Pennsylvania.

  No records found.

  I try Joslin Kirkpatrick, and when I get nothing, Joslin Lowell, even though my sister didn’t take my father’s last name until she was a few years old.

  No records found.

  I sl
ip a finger through the hole in the knee of my jeans. This has to be a mistake. Or my mother lied about where Joslin was born; the story was that she left Joslin’s father, moved to Pennsylvania, had a baby, met Glenn Lowell when the baby turned two, and Glenn and my mother married a year later.

  But there are no birth records for a Joslin Mowdy or Joslin Kirkpatrick anywhere in the United States. The search engine asks if I meant Justine Mowdy or Jason Kirkpatrick.

  I click out of the website. I glance over my shoulder, paranoid someone’s realized I don’t live here and is going to bust me for using Callie’s card. But the people sitting at the computers around me are slack-faced zombies in front of their screens. I hope I don’t look like that.

  I do another search on Macy Stevens, browsing through a photo album People magazine posted five years ago. It seems as if she captivates people, still. Macy Stevens is America’s Baby. The public wants answers as badly as her family does.

  The thought that she strolled into the Fayette County Penitentiary last week as twenty-six-year-old Brandy Butler is insane.

  I skim the article. One quote sticks out to me: In a 2004 interview with Cynthia Chan, Robin and Bernie Stevens stated that they believe their granddaughter is still alive, and may have been sold on the adoption black market. Law enforcement has said they will continue to follow up on all possible sightings of Macy but cautioned that the trafficking of babies in the United States is extremely rare.

  Cynthia Chan hosted This Evening on NBC before Diane Sawyer or someone else booted her from the spot. Gram watched her sometimes; Chan was a coiffed, monotone woman who nodded from her leather chair as her guests cried.

  I find her interview with the Stevens family on YouTube and plug my earbuds into the computer. The video is forty minutes long. I skim the beginning, which seems to consist largely of Amanda’s parents proclaiming Amanda’s innocence.

  Amanda got pregnant at nineteen. The baby’s father was killed in a motorcycle accident. Amanda had a tough life. But she loved Macy and would never have hurt her.

  At the twenty-minute mark, Cynthia Chan asks the Stevens what they think happened to their granddaughter.

  “I think she was sold,” Robin Stevens says, with all the gall of a woman who gets an idea into her head, and damn it if she’s going to back down from it until she sees proof otherwise. I’m thrown. It reminds me of Joslin. In the back of my head, I hear my father’s muttering.

  Stubborn brat. Takes after her mother.

  On my screen, Robin Stevens dabs her eyes with a handkerchief. Even sitting, she’s half the size of her husband. Her hair is bobbed and dyed the color of cherry cola. She adjusts her black cat’s-eye glasses. “Macy was a beautiful, healthy little girl. Do you know how much they’d pay for a healthy white baby on the black market?”

  The video starts to buffer. I exit the screen. I’ve heard all that I need to hear anyway.

  •••

  Wanda doesn’t look surprised to see me. She sets down a sheath of paper and sighs, a heavy one that uses her whole body.

  “Me again,” I say.

  “Honey, I don’t know if I can help you.” Wanda looks guilty, and I know she must have gotten my message and chosen not to respond.

  I lean into the edge of the counter. “It’s important. I found something in my father’s things. I think he knew something about a missing girl.”

  Wanda swivels in her chair. Yells over her shoulder. “Bill, I’m taking my lunch now.”

  She stands up. I move toward the security grate.

  “No, you stay right there,” Wanda grumbles.

  She meets me on the other side of the glass and motions for me to follow her outside. Off to the side of the building, there’s an employee courtyard. Two long picnic tables where three guards eat from plastic trays.

  Wanda and I sit at the unoccupied table. I notice she didn’t bring her lunch.

  “Is this about Macy Stevens?” she asks.

  Something in me deflates. “I found a phone number. I called it, and something really weird happened. An FBI agent called me back and said the number was a hotline for a missing baby.”

  I expect Wanda to look surprised, maybe to ask me to go on. Instead, she sighs.

  “Your father tried to extort the family of a famous missing child,” she says. “And he wasn’t the first. Over the years, at least half a dozen inmates said they killed that little girl, Macy Stevens.”

  I blink.

  “False confessions,” Wanda explains. “They’re serving life sentences, they get bored. Claim to know something about a high-profile murder, then say they know where the body is just to send police on a wild-goose chase and draw attention to themselves. Happens all the time.”

  “That doesn’t sound like my father,” I say. “He wasn’t even in jail for murder. What if he really knew something?”

  “He called the tip line saying he’d tell them where Macy is,” Wanda says, “but only if they gave him the reward money first.”

  “And he never said anything more about it?”

  Wanda shakes her head.

  And there it is. The one thing I never thought could break me has left its first fissure.

  Proof that my father was a piece of shit until the very end.

  As I turn onto Main Street, my phone begins to buzz in my pocket. The last thing I need is a ticket for talking on my phone, and there’s nowhere to pull over on Main Street unless I do a risky parallel park. And damned if I’m going to let accidentally totaling Maggie’s van be the thing that gets me sent back to Florida.

  My phone stops ringing, and panic claws at me. If it’s her, and I miss her, I may not be able to get her again.

  My mother.

  I squeeze into a spot in the post office parking lot just as my phone rings again. I dig it out of my pocket. It’s Callie.

  “Where are you?” Her voice is raspy, but better than it was yesterday. “I’ve been calling you.”

  “Yeah, I realize that.” My heart is still pounding. I’m annoyed at Callie just for being Callie and not Annette. Until she says, “You have to come back. I think he messaged me.”

  •••

  When I get back to the house, Callie is sitting cross-legged on her bed, laptop resting in front of her.

  “He didn’t ask to meet up or anything.” The words come out of her in a single breath. “But his username—”

  I plop down on the bed and turn the laptop to me.

  Private message from cpt818:

  What’s a nice girl like you doing on a site like this?

  I look over at Callie. “CPT could just be fake initials or something to throw people off.”

  “Look at his picture.” She points to the screen.

  The profile picture is a man in a black hat and aviators. He’s pointing a long-barreled shotgun at the camera. “This looks like a screenshot from a movie,” I say.

  “Cool Hand Luke,” Callie says, excited. “That’s Captain, the bad guy in Cool Hand Luke.”

  I look at Callie. “You’ve seen Cool Hand Luke?”

  She shakes her head. “I emailed it to Ryan at work, and he recognized it. I told you he would be useful.”

  I ignore that. “What are you going to say to him?” The blood pounds in my ears. This could be him. The Monster.

  Callie thinks for a second before she types: What makes you think I’m a nice girl?

  Captain doesn’t respond. The icon in the corner says he’s signed off. She covers her mouth.

  “Shit,” Callie says through her fingers. “What did I do wrong?”

  I get up and pace around Callie’s room. Shit is right. I want to throw something, lean out her window, and scream Shit, shit, shit!

  We had the son of a bitch. We had him, and we lost him.

  •••

  The next morning, Callie insists that she’s feeling better and up for the shopping trip to the Briarwood Outlets that she and Maggie have been talking about. I’m too defeated about our failed plan to
lure Captain that I don’t even fight when Maggie suggests I come along.

  At Pottery Barn, Callie picks out navy-and-white sheets for her dorm room. We pass by Old Navy, where a sign in the window advertises two pairs of shorts for twenty dollars.

  Maggie’s face lights up. “Oh, I could use a pair.”

  Callie rolls her eyes, but Maggie drags us inside, to a table of shorts in every color you can think of.

  “I only need one pair,” she says, rifling through the stack. Callie stands in the corner on her phone, yawning. Maggie finds a pair of shorts in my size and thrusts them at me. “Why don’t you try these on? Shame not to take advantage of such a good deal.”

  I know she just wants to buy me a pair of shorts so I’ll stop sweating my ass off in the jeans I packed.

  “Thanks,” I say. I disappear into the dressing room with the shorts. I slip them on and check myself out in the mirror. My legs are pale, but I’ve picked up a couple more freckles on my nose from all the time I’ve been spending out in the sun. My hair falls in waves around my face, instead of being the crown of frizz I have to combat every day in Florida.

  From the outside, it looks like being in Fayette has been good for me.

  The handle of my door jiggles, and I jump back, feeling violated even though I’m dressed. Callie steps into the dressing room, her eyes frantic.

  “Look.” She shoves her phone into my face.

  She’s on Connect, her private message box pulled up.

  Got any plans tonight, sweetheart? —CPTN

  “Holy shit,” I say.

  There’s a knock at the door. “How do they fit, Tess?” It’s Maggie.

  “Fine,” I croak out. “Think I’ll get them.”

  When Maggie pads away, Callie starts typing a response to Captain. I grab her fingers.

  “What are you doing?” I hiss.

  Callie shrugs away from me. “I have to respond. He’ll suspect something’s up if I disappear.”

  “Can’t you ask him more about himself? Something we can use to figure out who he is?” I ask. Suddenly there’s not enough air in the dressing room.

  “If he’s the Monster, he’s too smart for that,” Callie whispers. “You know we have to do this.”