Matthew Tucker and his adoptive parents are fictional, but the pain Matthew experienced—and Judd inflicted—reflects true facts and a true range of emotions associated with them, including shame. Perhaps the most famous baby snatcher in American history was Georgia Tann, a Tennessee social worker who took advantage of the lack of regulation around adoption in the early decades of the twentieth century and began selling children stolen from poor families for large sums of money to wealthy adoptive parents. Her clients included Hollywood legends, such as Lana Turner, June Allyson, and Joan Crawford. Most clients had no idea that the children she placed had not been voluntarily surrendered by their birth parents. In fact, Tann had a network of doctors, nurses, social workers, and judges who handled every phase of finding children—sometimes literally from the sidewalk—transporting them, falsifying documents, moving them between locations, placing them in homes, collecting fees, and legalizing the adoptions without ever verifying where the children came from or the status of the birth parents. Tann’s network was shut down in the mid-1940s, though she died of cancer before facing legal consequences.
Periodically, other stories emerge. I chose to set my story in the St. Louis area after reading about a woman who gave birth at a hospital in St. Louis and was told her infant had died, but she never saw the child and never received a death certificate. Fifty years later, DNA testing confirmed her child was still alive and had been adopted. This opened up a series of similar stories from other low-income women who gave birth at the same hospital, which had been closed for years by then. International examples occur as well. In a network in Spain, families paid a priest or nun installments on illegal adoption fees for children who never knew they were stolen and adopted, often offspring of young, unmarried mothers considered unfit by the Roman Catholic Church. Even some adoptions of these children that were technically legal had been coerced.
For so many families, adoption is a gift. That it should ever be a stolen gift is a travesty. No matter how our families are formed, may we treasure the life they give us and seek to honor them with righteousness and truth rather than be swallowed in shame.
Olivia Newport
2019
COMING MAY 2020
WHEN I MEET YOU
Book 3
Enjoy the following preview chapter.
CHAPTER ONE
Julian supposed she should be grateful he hadn’t gagged and blindfolded her when he intruded into her home office, snatched her, and stuffed her in the truck. She’d already been out for a morning run and wasn’t planning to spend all of Saturday afternoon working. Tidying up was all she had in mind. And then he burst in, and now she was strapped into the front seat without her phone as the truck rolled out of town.
She gripped the passenger door armrest. He clicked the power button to lock all the doors.
“Dad. You can tell me where we’re going.” Jillian cocked her head toward her father. “I’m hardly going to leap out of a moving vehicle on the highway.”
“Why do you demand to know every detail about everything?”
From behind the steering wheel of his pickup, which he’d been driving so long he talked about it like an old friend, Nolan grinned at Jillian with green eyes that mirrored hers. Spring mountain sunlight bounced off his pupils, and he reached in the console for his dark glasses and set them on his face. In his midfifties, he still had a fit, youthful figure. Rediscovering skiing over the winter, after a long hiatus, had suited him.
“And why do you insist on doing everything by the seat of your pants?” Jillian raised both hands to draw her long, dark waves under control behind her neck. He hadn’t given her a chance to grab a band or clip before leaving the house, a circumstance she was likely to regret if there was any wind once they were out of the truck at their mystery destination.
Her retort was halfhearted. Who could complain about a Saturday afternoon drive on a day like this? The rainy mid-April week seemed to be behind them, the bounty from the sky having nourished the earth and coaxed forth undulating ripe, burgeoning greens of the season. They were barely out of Canyon Mines, so the mountains still cradled them, and light radiated like a mammoth burning flare across the view. Immaculate snow lingered on the shoulders of the Rockies, and the vistas, as they did on so many days when she paused from her work to raise her eyes to the dazzling Colorado terrain, tugged at her spirit.
“I promise you’ll like it,” Nolan said. “You have to admit I know you well.”
“The people stipulate to that point, Your Honor.”
“Someday I might give up lawyering and become a judge, and you’ll really have to use that title with me.”
“And I would do so proudly,” Jillian said. “Now let’s see. Heading east. Probably Denver.” Unless they would turn north to her Duffy grandparents’ home once they got to I-25.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“So it is Denver.”
“You think you’re so smart.”
“I am smart.”
“The court stipulates to that point.”
“What’s going on in Denver that we need to go today?”
“A museum. You like museums. And you’ve never been to this one.”
“Why not? Did I have a deprived childhood?”
“Hardly. I always let you bring home souvenirs, and you’ll get a doozy today.”
“Okay, you’ve got me curious.”
“Good. You need to get out more.”
“We’re both going to St. Louis in a few weeks for Tucker and Laurie Beth’s wedding,” she pointed out.
“And we’ll have a spectacular time,” Nolan said, “but we have our own great city right here with history and culture and all the good stuff. You liked it when you went to college.”
“I still do. I just haven’t had a lot of reason to come down.”
“Well, today you do.” Nolan merged into a faster lane and accelerated.
“I have a feeling there’s a story here,” Jillian said.
With her dad, there was always a story. People liked to talk to Nolan. He was one of those people who made friends wherever he went and stuck in people’s minds. In his work as a family law attorney and legal mediator, he met a lot of people other than his clients, but he could still drop into a random coffee shop or a hardware store and come out having met four new people—and probably would talk with them long enough to find a common connection with at least one. Shops, parties, sporting events, business meetings. People remembered Nolan Duffy. He thrived on it. Not Jillian. She inherited some sort of recessive introvert gene—and another one for preferring a well-ordered life.
“The curator called me,” Nolan said.
“And how do you know a museum curator?”
He shrugged. “We had coffee once.”
That meant Nolan had chatted with the curator in the line ordering coffee or something else equally ordinary and forgettable to most people.
“And?” Jillian said.
“And he has a situation he thinks may require legal attention. Or at least he’d like a legal opinion about the advisability of legal representation around matters of liability and financial consequence.”
“Now that’s legal speak if ever I’ve heard it.”
“Do not mock my profession, young lady.”
“Never!” Jillian laughed. “What does this have to do with me? Or a souvenir? Is this all just an excuse to get me out of the house?”
“What if it is? It’s a fine day for a drive, and I enjoy your company.”
“You don’t have to charm me. I already love you.”
“Oh, right.”
“It’s Saturday. And you’ll be in Denver on Monday. Why the special trip?”
“Because I wanted to bring you along, obviously.”
“Dad.”
Nolan checked his mirrors and changed lanes again. They clearly were headed to Denver now.
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “It’s not much. Years ago—decades, I think—the museum rece
ived a trunk that was abandoned at Union Station.”
“Decades?”
He nodded. “The curator is relatively recent, but the museum is about fifty years old. He’s not at all sure of the story, but from what he can tell, the trunk arrived at Union Station over a hundred years ago and somehow was separated from its owner.”
“Surely the railroad would have had a procedure for unclaimed luggage.”
“We don’t know what happened, Jilly.”
“How did the museum get the trunk?”
“I don’t know that either. He didn’t say. I’m not sure he knows. It’s not a large museum. It’s one of those places where a historic home in a notable neighborhood has been converted to a museum, and gradually they collect pieces that might have been authentic to the period. My guess is that they ended up with the trunk that way.”
“Union Station wouldn’t just give away lost luggage.”
“Not at the time, no. Perhaps never, officially. But at some point, someone took possession of it. Maybe after a while someone just thought it was in the way. Rich, the curator, discovered it just a few days ago while he was overseeing an effort to clean out and organize some overcrowded storage space in the house’s basement. There’s no record of the item being logged into the collection of the museum, yet there it is.”
“Very irregular.”
“Yep.”
“Somebody must have had it in between. Whoever’s hands it ended up in after Union Station got tired of it and dumped it on the museum because the thrift store didn’t want it. It’s probably been painted and full of junk while somebody used it as a coffee table after finding it at a flea market.”
“Nope. It’s the real deal. Rich brought in a locksmith to pick the locks as carefully as possible to preserve the integrity of the trunk,” Nolan said.
Jillian’s jaw dropped. “You mean it hadn’t been opened before this? In a hundred years?”
“As I understand it, that seems to be the case.”
“They didn’t find a body, did they?”
Nolan laughed. “I’m pretty sure Rich would have recognized that as a legal matter without requiring my opinion.”
“Then?”
“The usual personal items,” Nolan said, “along with a considerable stack of business records from a company in Ohio. Financial records.”
“Enter the legal questions.”
“Maybe or maybe not.”
“It is a curious question why someone travels from Ohio to Colorado with a trunk full of business financial records and then abandons them.”
Nolan wiggled one eyebrow. “See? Isn’t this better than cleaning your office?”
“Just tidying.” Jillian turned up her palms. “But my piles can wait.”
“As a historian, Rich is intrigued. But he is also concerned about the museum having custody of these records. He’s wondering whether there might be legal liability without due provenance of the alleged donation. And then there’s also the issue of the financial documents—what they might mean for whoever could have benefited by how the matters they represent were or were not resolved.”
“But you said it was over a hundred years ago,” Jillian said. “Can you really figure that out now?”
Nolan nodded. “These are all questions I’d have to look into. My instinct is that Rich wants to dot every i and cross every t but that there won’t be any legality to pursue.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“Not until we see what he has.”
They weren’t far from Denver now. In a few minutes, Nolan exited the highway and began a series of turns along surface streets taking them through downtown.
“What’s this place called?” Jillian asked.
“Owens House Museum.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Me neither, until I met Rich. But from what I understand, it’s just a turn-of-the-century house.”
“Denver has a lot of those.”
“That they do.”
Nolan pulled up in front of the house and put the truck in PARK. Jillian considered the structure as they got out.
“Considering what this neighborhood was like a hundred years ago,” she said, “this house is fairly modest.”
“I agree,” Nolan said. “No wonder I couldn’t place it. It must have been an ordinary family’s home, not the mansion of a silver mine millionaire.”
“I wonder how it came to be a museum then.”
“I’m sure Rich will tell you if you want to ask.”
Jillian pivoted in a circle. “And how did it survive all the demolition and modernizing in the immediate neighborhood?”
“You have an inquisitive mind,” Nolan said. “Now let’s go see a man about a trunk.”
Side by side, they proceeded past the sign that welcomed visitors to the Owens House Museum and up the wide walk at a pace that allowed absorbing the details. The sandstone house, built in the Queen Anne style popular in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, was a simple two-story home in contrast to some of the three- and four-story homes of the era popular among Denver’s wealthiest. With a downtown location, it likely never had much of a lawn, but the carriage house set back from the street suggested that it supported at least one pair of horses with space for a full-sized carriage, a service cart, and living quarters for liverymen above. The house itself boasted the requisite rounded tower, steeply pitched roof, twin chimneys, and generous windows of Queen Anne architecture.
“This house could be in Canyon Mines,” Jillian said.
“It’s certainly the right era.” They went up the front steps, and Nolan pushed the front door open. A young man at a welcome desk looked up expectantly, and Nolan asked for the curator.
“They’ve done an amazing job with the restoration,” Jillian said while they waited. “The woodwork is gorgeous. Nia and Leo would love to see this. Even Veronica and Luke.” The Dunstons had undertaken an ambitious renovation of a sprawling Victorian home and opened a bed and breakfast in Canyon Mines, and the O’Reillys ran the Victorium Emporium because Veronica was enthralled with all things Victorian.
“I’m sure they have some brochures you could take to Nia,” Nolan said. “Here’s Rich now.”
“Thank you for coming.” Rich offered a handshake.
“This is my daughter, Jillian Parisi-Duffy.”
“I’m glad to meet you,” Jillian said. “Your museum is very inviting.”
“We have the standard drawing room, music room, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor,” Rich said, “and offices in the back. Bedrooms and attic upstairs. And of course the basement, which is what has brought you here today.”
“Are we going downstairs?” Nolan asked.
Rich shook his head. “I have the piece in my office. We’ve taken the liberty of cleaning it up a little bit.”
Nolan rubbed his palms together. “Then let’s have a look at it.”
They followed Rich through the house, bypassing a tour in progress and slipping past a red-lettered NO ENTRANCE sign to an area behind the kitchen that originally might have been a back porch and was enclosed at a later stage. Rich opened the door to his unassuming office. Centered in the space between the door and his desk stood a steamer trunk whose grand presence beckoned to the most profound calling of Jillian’s work. Her breath stopped, and the pulse at her temples magnified.
“Can I touch it?” she blurted out.
Nolan smiled.
Rich nodded. “The gloves are on the desk.”
“Of course.” Jillian donned the pair of white gloves that would keep her oils off the antique piece and ran her hands around the upright form of the wardrobe style steamer. “Did my dad tell you what I do for a living?”
“Genealogist. I can imagine you have special appreciation for what you’re looking at and the story it might tell in the hands of the family.”
“I don’t usually get to look at the past quite so directly,” Jillian said. “It’s stunning.”
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The stenciled blue beryl and muted gold canvas was far more captivating than the brown or green metal trunk Jillian had mentally prepared for. This was sheer enchantment, artistry created and selected with care. And monogrammed. Someone’s story.
“It doesn’t have many stickers,” Jillian observed.
“I noticed that too,” Rich said. “It might have been used for regional rail travel, but it was a steamer trunk only in name. This trunk was never on the water. I would stake my reputation on it.”
“But my dad said you think it came from Ohio. Colorado is not regional to Ohio.”
“Perhaps we should have a look at the papers you mentioned,” Nolan said. “Are they still in the trunk?”
“Yes,” Rich said. “It seemed the safest place to leave them.”
“May I?” Jillian couldn’t help herself. Although the steamer had been opened at least once—and occasioned Rich’s call to her father—she hadn’t opened it. The moment would be exquisite, a first look not just at census records or overlooked birth certificates or a chain of addresses tracking an individual’s movements from fifty years ago, but at abandoned personal possessions that had been sealed away for over a century until a locksmith’s delicate touch unlocked them two days ago.
But why?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olivia Newport’s novels blend the truths of where we find ourselves now with insights into what carried us in the past. Enjoying life with her husband and nearby grown children, she chases joy in stunning Colorado at the foot of Pikes Peak.
In the Cradle Lies Page 27