Darcy opened her mouth, probably to tell me she hadn’t, and then seemed to think better of it. “I was going to say no,” she told me. “I’d just gotten divorced when I moved here. I wasn’t interested in getting involved with anyone again. But there was this guy who came into the law firm—a client of your brother’s—and he asked me out. I said no, but he asked again when he came back the next week. And then he called and asked.”
“That’s a little creepy.”
“He seemed nice enough,” Darcy said. “But I told him that I’d just gotten divorced and wasn’t ready to be in another relationship again so soon. He backed right off.”
It probably hadn’t been him, then. Although I’d keep him in reserve. “Anyone else?”
“Not until recently,” Darcy said. “One of Sheriff Satterfield’s deputies asked me out in the spring. Cletus Johnson.”
“No kidding?” Cletus had been married to Marquita Johnson, until she left him with a couple of kids and moved up to Nashville to act as a live-in nurse for Rafe’s grandmother. A couple of months after that, Marquita had been killed. Cletus had blamed Rafe, of course, and with cause, as it turned out. Rafe hadn’t killed her, nor wanted her dead, but the fact that he was who he was, had contributed to her death.
“Did you go?” I asked curiously.
“I didn’t see the harm in it. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Widower. Cop. Upstanding citizen.”
Well, yes. I guess he ticked all those boxes. And I didn’t really have anything against the man, other than that he didn’t like Rafe much. But then, it was hard to blame him for that.
“Are you going to see him again?”
Darcy arched her brows, and I made a face. “I know, I know. None of my business.” It had nothing to do with what she’d asked my help for. “It couldn’t have been him sending you the clipping anyway. Two-and-a-half years ago, he was happily married to Marquita.”
Or married to her, at any rate. How happily, only Cletus would be able to tell us. Just because I had disliked her—and the feeling had been mutual—didn’t mean her husband hadn’t loved her. When she died, interspersed with the anger toward Rafe, Cletus had certainly seemed to grieve.
“I’m not sure,” Darcy answered my question. “I liked him well enough. But in this case, I’m not sure he’s ready to move on. Like your brother, he lost his wife last fall. And like your brother, he has two small children.” She shrugged. “We had a nice time. At least I did. But he hasn’t asked me out again.”
A pretty sure sign that he either wasn’t interested or wasn’t ready. And since it wasn’t any of my business anyway, I abandoned the subject of Cletus Johnson. “Who was the other guy? The one who kept asking you out? How did he take it when you told him you didn’t want to get involved with him?”
“Fairly well,” Darcy said. “I think he understood that it wasn’t him. I didn’t want to be involved with anyone.”
“Have you seen him since?”
She shrugged. “On and off. He came into the office once or twice more, and was polite but distant. And I think he’s involved with someone else now. I saw him at the Café on the Square sometime this spring, with a woman.”
“Good for him. But at the time, he might have sent you the clipping, if he knew about you. Name?”
She gave it to me. It wasn’t a name I recognized. “I’ll have to ask Dix about him. Does my brother know the two of you went out?”
In most businesses, personal involvement with the client is frowned upon.
Darcy pressed her lips together as she nodded. “The first time he asked me out, I told him I couldn’t go out with a client. He just nodded and left. And the next time he came in, he asked Dix if it was OK for him to ask me out. Dix said I could go out with anyone I wanted.”
“And you went out once, and you told him you weren’t ready to get involved with anyone since your divorce was too fresh.”
Darcy nodded. “He left me alone after that. I haven’t talked to him for two years.”
So if he had been responsible for getting Darcy here, he’d been remarkably willing to stop pursuing her once she was here.
“And that’s it? You haven’t gone out with anyone else? Nobody’s been weirdly insistent on having a relationship with you?”
She shook her head. “It was probably Lew. Or his new squeeze. Or one of my friends in Birmingham, who just didn’t want to admit it.”
Maybe so. We’d probably never know, anyway, so there was no sense in spending any more time talking about it. I accelerated and zoomed up the interstate in the direction of Nashville.
We arrived at police headquarters on James Robertson Parkway with a few minutes to spare. By the time we’d parked and made our way into the building and through security, Grimaldi was waiting. “Good to see you again,” she told Darcy.
I arched my brows.
“We talked a bit at your wedding,” Darcy said.
Of course. They’d both been there. Grimaldi as my maid of honor, and Darcy as one of the guests. I remembered her sitting on a folding chair next to Audrey, my mother’s best friend, in the tent on the lawn beside the mansion during the ceremony. They must have compared notes during the reception.
At any rate, they knew one another and I didn’t need to perform the introductions.
“We really appreciate your doing this,” I told Grimaldi as she led us down the hall toward the elevators. “We realize that this is a long shot, but we may as well try. Just in case we get lucky.”
Grimaldi nodded. “It never hurts to try. I’ve got you set up in the small conference room on the second floor.” The elevator doors parted, and she stepped inside. We followed. “My office is just down the hall,” she added. I guess for Darcy’s benefit, since I already knew that. “If I get a call, I’ll have to leave, but otherwise I’ll be nearby, if you need anything.”
The doors closed, and we headed up.
“I’ve done this before,” I said. “I’m sure we can manage.”
Grimaldi didn’t respond to that, just stood with her hands in the pockets of her suit and watched the number 1 above the door become a number 2. The elevator stopped again, and the doors opened. We exited into the hallway.
“We’ve arranged to meet Alexandra Puckett for lunch at one,” I told Grimaldi as we stopped in front of the door to the conference room and she unlocked it. “You’re welcome to join us if you haven’t caught a case by then.”
“I might do that.” She pushed the door open and gestured us in. “You should have plenty to keep yourselves busy here until then.”
Yes, indeed. The table was piled high with record boxes. Ten, twelve, twenty of them, on the table top and stacked on the floor.
My jaw dropped. “That’s a lot.”
“They’ve been in operation a lot of years,” Grimaldi said, waving us in and closing the door behind us. “There’s been a lot of babies born at St. Jerome’s Hospital in the past three or four decades.”
Yes, indeed.
She added, “Since you know roughly the time frame you’re looking for, it shouldn’t be too onerous, though. Most of the records are grouped by year, and chances are you’ll only need to go through a year, year-and-a-half at the most. Start with Darcy’s birthday—the one you know about—and go forward and back from there.”
Right.
I took a deep breath, rolled up my metaphorical sleeves—I was wearing a sleeveless sundress—and headed for the table. Grimaldi headed for the door. She was almost there when she did a Colombo and turned around.
“Have you heard from your husband today?”
Oh, God. “No,” I said, fumbling for my phone to look for call or text I knew hadn’t come in. “Should I have?”
Who was I kidding? Of course I should have. He’d called before eight yesterday morning. Now it was after ten.
Grimaldi watched me turn pale. “Relax,” she told me. “I don’t know that anything’s happened to him.”
It wasn’t enough to make me relax, but
it did take a little of the weight off. “Are you sure?”
“Someone would have let you know. Mr. Craig is involved in this operation on the TBI’s side. He’d know to call you.”
Wendell Craig had been Rafe’s handler back in the undercover days, and Rafe’s supervisor at the TBI since he started working there legitimately. And yes, Wendell would know to call me if something happened to Rafe, and he would know how to get in touch with me, too. A little more of that weight lifted. “So what are you saying?”
“I had a call in to one of the guys in the gang unit,” Grimaldi said. “They were coordinating with the TBI. He told me things didn’t go according to plan last night.”
Uh-oh. Visions of everything from a bloodbath to the meth lab next door to the duplex blowing up and taking Rafe with it, danced through my head.
“I thought maybe you knew something more,” Grimaldi said.
I shook my head. “He hasn’t been in touch yet today. I figured that meant there was a lot of cleanup to do after the operation.”
And suddenly the concept of cleanup had more sinister connotations than before. I’d pictured administrative loose ends. Now I imagined body parts needing identifying and crime scenes having to be fumigated.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Grimaldi said. “He’ll call when he’s ready.”
I hoped so. I really did. And although my fingers were itching to call him, to assure myself he was alive and in one piece, I dropped the phone back into my purse and went to work on the adoption records.
Eight
“Did you always live in Mobile?” I asked Darcy after Grimaldi had left the room. “Did you move around at all?”
“I don’t remember moving,” Darcy said. “Why?”
Chances were, her parents couldn’t have passed her off as more than a month or two younger or older than she was at first. Babies change so much during their first year, that for them to show up with a six-month-old, trying to pass it off as a newborn, would have been practically impossible.
That was if they’d adopted her as a newborn, of course. David had barely been out of his mother’s womb before he’d been whisked off and given to the Flannerys, but Marley’s son Oliver had been several months old, and stolen out of the baby carriage on her back deck.
“There are pictures of me as a baby,” Darcy said. “With my mother and father. They had me when I was very little. And the letter said they adopted me when I was a newborn.”
Good. At least we could be sure they hadn’t shaved a year or more off her age—or added it—somewhere along the line. That wouldn’t have been possible if she’d grown up with the same neighbors and friends her whole life. And if her parents had told the truth about adopting her shortly after birth, we had our baseline of the day and month listed on Darcy’s birth certificate.
Even with that, there were a lot of records. St. Jerome’s Hospital had been a place for young pregnant women without many options to go, and a lot of them had. A staggering number of birth certificates listed no father for the baby, just the mother’s name.
“Were all these babies adopted?” Darcy wanted to know after a few minutes of looking through the records.
I shook my head. “I doubt it. Some of the girls probably kept their babies. And I’m sure not all of them were single, either. I’m sure there were plenty of married women with husbands who came to St. Jerome’s, as well.”
“Here’s a baby born on what my birth certificate says is my birthday.”
I leaned closer. “A girl?”
“Obviously,” Darcy said. “Or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. Are you sure you don’t want to call your husband and make sure he’s OK?”
“I’m positive. He’ll call when he’s ready. Let me see.”
She passed over the file, and I looked at it. “Hmm. Yes. Maybe.”
One Laurissa Carter had given birth to a baby girl. According to the records, Laurissa had been only seventeen.
Like Alexandra Puckett, my mind supplied. I shushed it. Alexandra had options. She wouldn’t end up somewhere like St. Jerome’s because she didn’t know what else to do.
“The police did investigate these cases. I wonder if they traced Laurissa’s baby.” If they had, it should be in the file.
I flipped over a few pages. Yes, there it was. Adopted by a couple in Chattanooga. The girl—woman, now—was thirty-four, and working in social services. Laurissa, meanwhile, had passed on. Drug overdose at twenty-four. No way to know whether losing her baby had contributed to that, or whether she’d given up the baby willingly, since she was already headed down that road and didn’t want to be saddled with a kid.
“Not you,” I told Darcy. “Keep looking.”
We kept looking. And kept eliminating.
“Here’s one,” Darcy said. “Born two days before my birth certificate date. No record of placement. No record of the mother after she left the hospital.”
“Let me see.” We put our heads together over the file.
The mother’s name was Ora Sweet. Twenty-six years old. Thirty-four years ago, she’d lived on Water Street in Columbia.
I glanced at Darcy. “Do you know where Water Street is? Is there a Water Street in Columbia?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t lived there that long.”
I’d lived twenty minutes away for two thirds of my life. I’d gone to high school in Columbia. If anyone should know, it should be me.
“Most towns have a Water Street, right?” Even Sweetwater. And even if the only water in town is the tiny tributary of the Duck River that runs through the Bog—or Mallard Meadows now—where Old Jim Collier drowned the year Rafe was twelve.
Not that Columbia boasts a lot more water. Just a lot of tiny creeks that flow into the Duck.
“The combination of the last name Sweet with an address on Water Street is interesting,” I said.
Darcy looked at it again. “I didn’t think of that.”
And it might not mean anything at all. But as Rafe had said, when pretending to be someone you’re not, it’s always easier to pick a name you’ll remember to answer to. One similar to your own. And—if you have to think fast—it’s easy come up with information close to your own. Like Sweet instead of your real last name, and Water Street instead of your real address.
If you lived in Sweetwater, anyway.
Was Ora her real name, or had she made that up, too?
The folder had very little information beyond the original birth certificate. The Metro Nashville police had contacted the Columbia Police back in December, and asked them to dig up what they could on Ora Sweet. There was a report in the file, signed by one Officer Lupe Vasquez, that there was no street number on Water Street matching the one Ora had given in the records, and no one currently on Water Street had any knowledge of the Sweet family, or of Ora.
“I know Lupe Vasquez,” I said. “Sort of.”
Darcy arched her brows, and I added, “There were a couple of murders at my high school reunion in May. She responded to the first 911 call.” And had handled my vapors and nausea quite well, considering. “I liked her. And more importantly, she seemed competent. Maybe we can talk to her when we get back down there later.”
“About what?” Darcy wanted to know.
“Not sure. But maybe there’s something she noticed that isn’t in the report.”
We put Ora Sweet aside, and moved on to the next file. And the next. Thirty minutes later, another possible biological mother turned up, a single teenager, this one from right here in Nashville.
“Rhonda Fallon,” I read. “Eighteen years old. Baby girl, seven pounds, four ounces, born three days after the date on your birth certificate. No father listed.”
“There are more papers behind this one,” Darcy pointed out, flicked them with her finger-nail. It was painted an elegant watermelon color, gorgeous with her almond skin.
I turned the original birth certificate over to peer at the next piece of paper.
“Looks like the police track
ed her down last year, but she had no idea what happened to the baby.” I turned over the police report. “Never mind. The police found her. Has her own family now, and lives in Paducah. Not you.”
Darcy sighed. We went back to work.
In the end, we finished before lunch, and with just Ora Sweet as a possible birth mother for Darcy. Something about her just rang my bell. Her address, in Columbia; twenty minutes from Sweetwater. Her name, which sounded fake. And the fact that someone from Sweetwater had sent that clipping of a job opening to Darcy in Birmingham, and brought her to Sweetwater.
We had no proof, though. We didn’t find a record of Darcy’s adoption. There were no paperwork with her parents’ names on it, or anyone else whose names Darcy recognized.
“I probably wasn’t even born there,” she grumbled, as she bundled files together and put them back into the boxes.
“Maybe not.” I was using the copier in the corner to copy the few pieces of paper from Ora Sweet’s folder. “We knew it was a long shot, coming here. But there is this one possibility we should follow up on.”
“How?” Darcy wanted to know. “She obviously used a fake name. The Columbia Police tried to find the address and couldn’t. There’s no information about what happened to the baby. How are we going to follow up?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I admitted, as my phone rang, “but I’ll figure something out. I just have to give it a little bit of thought. Hello?”
The number was unfamiliar. The voice wasn’t.
“The shit hit the fan in a very big way last night,” my husband informed me. “I’m not gonna make it to lunch. Sorry.”
“That’s all right.” I was quite used to this happening, actually. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. A couple of guys we were hoping to catch last night caught on that something was going on, and now they’re in the wind.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, while over at the table, Darcy kept cleaning up.
“Me, too.” He sounded tired, like he hadn’t slept at all. “The good thing is, nobody got hurt.”
Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12) Page 9