“Maybe it will be easier to tell Bryant about your past if you have some answers about where you came from.”
“I’m not ready for that.”
“Then maybe you’re not ready for marriage. Spouses shouldn’t keep secrets this big from each other. Don’t you think it’s time you found out about your birth parents?”
She didn’t then.
But she’d changed her mind this fall, after an unsettling incident she’s kept to herself.
It was probably nothing. Still, she’d spit into the test tube and mailed the test away. The results should be back any day now.
She has no intention of reuniting with her biological parents, but she wants to know whatever happened to them, for her own peace of mind, and her future children’s.
Clumsily maneuvering the tree to the door in its stand, she feels water slop onto the hardwood. It’s all right. She’ll clean it up. She just wants the damned thing out.
She drags it onto the porch. A foggy evening is pushing in. She shivers in the chill, goose bumps prickling her skin like pine needles poking through her sweater.
It’s because she was thinking about her past. She needs to stop. A new year is underway. She’s a newlywed, settled in a charming neighborhood filled with large trees and cozy houses populated with young couples and families.
She just needs to get rid of this damned—
Poised to drag the tree down the steps, she sees someone standing just beyond the streetlamp’s glow.
She peers at the shadow and it—he—watches her in return.
She drops the tree onto the porch, hurries back inside, and closes the door. The dog ambles over.
“It’s all right, don’t worry. We’re safe.”
Briana wags her tail. She’d probably wag it at an armed intruder, so grateful is she to have a home and family after having been abandoned by her previous owner.
I know how you feel, sweetie.
Bryant had wanted to buy a purebred, but she’d talked him into a shelter pet. Now he wants to go back to find a male companion for Briana.
“She seems lonely, doesn’t she?” he’d asked last night, packing for his business trip as Briana lay watching with her nose on her paws. “We need to save another dog.”
“We can’t save all the dogs, Bry.”
“I know, but . . . just one more. We can call it, uh . . . some other combination of our names.”
“Like what? Li-an?”
“For a guy dog? No way. Maybe our last name and your maiden name . . .”
“Ford and Tucker? Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Their laughter echoes in her head now as she stares out into the dusk, wishing her husband were here.
When this happened in the fall, she’d chalked it up to her imagination.
Now Liliana turns the dead bolt with a trembling hand, certain someone is out there watching her . . . again.
Amelia has spent her career warning her clients that the answers they find might not be the ones they’d hoped for or expected. Though her work sometimes leads to happy reunions, it just as often leads to disappointment, or devastation. Sometimes, she senses which it will be even before she starts her research.
That hadn’t been the case with Stockton Barnes. Not in the beginning, when he was just another client, and she was caught up in her own personal drama. Not until the photographic resemblance had convinced her she’d found his biological child.
Guess my clients aren’t the only ones who see what they want to see.
The revelation that the little girl abandoned at the mall may not have been his biological child changes Barnes’s relationship to the case, but they still need to find out what happened to her, and what Cynthia Randall had to do with it.
“When did you last see Bobby’s daughter Charisse?” she asks Cynthia, and there’s a subtle shift in her demeanor.
“Right after he left for rehab.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know . . . late ’80s? Why aren’t you asking him about her? She’s his kid, not mine.”
Barnes speaks at last. “We did ask him! That’s why we’re here. Bobby told us you and Delia had a falling-out on Thanksgiving in 1990. Do you remember that?”
“I had a lot of arguments with Delia. She liked to show up here like she was part of the family. She wasn’t.”
“But her daughter was,” Amelia points out. “Did she have regular visitations with her father?”
“One weekend a month until Bobby went to rehab. By the time he got back, Delia had cut him out of her life, and the kid’s. Can’t say I blame her. I wised up and did the same thing.”
“What did he say about the estrangement with Delia and Charisse?” Barnes asks.
“Not a word. I’d told him I didn’t ever want to hear her name again, and he never mentioned it. But it wasn’t hard to figure out, since I never saw Delia or Charisse again after that Thanksgiving.”
“You just said you did.”
“Did I?”
Barnes flips back a page in his notebook. “You said you saw her right after Bobby left for rehab.”
“Then I guess I did. Delia probably showed up to dump her off with me on Bobby’s weekend.”
“Probably?”
“It’s not easy to remember the stuff you spent the last twenty or thirty years trying to forget. I had a lot going on back then, raising my daughter with Bobby out of the picture, and working two jobs.”
“Where were you working?”
“I was a teller at the Bank of New England. But they’re long gone,” she adds, seeing Barnes writing it down. “They went belly-up a year later. Seized by the FDIC in the banking crisis a year later.”
“What about your other job?”
“I was a security guard.”
“At the shelter?” Amelia asks when she doesn’t elaborate.
“Nah, I’ve worked security at a lot of places.”
“Where were you in December 1990?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Bobby says you were working at the Chapel Square Mall,” Barnes informs her. “And while he was gone, Delia and Charisse disappeared.”
“What do you mean they disappeared?”
“They moved out of Brooklyn and no one ever heard from them again,” Amelia says, though they’re not entirely certain that’s the case.
“Delia was an addict. If she disappeared, she probably OD’d on some street. That’s what Bobby always said was going to happen.”
Amelia and Barnes had considered that while driving to Bridgeport. He’d called a colleague back in New York and asked her to pull records for unidentified female DRTs fitting her description in late November and December 1990.
“DRTs?” Amelia had asked, and he’d explained that it’s police jargon for dead right there, and that there were plenty of them back in the height of New York’s crack epidemic.
“If Delia Montague OD’d, where’s her little girl?” Barnes asks Cynthia.
“How would I know if Bobby doesn’t? They were living with one of his cousins. You should ask—”
“She’s dead, Cynthia.”