“Yeah, let me bounce some stuff off you.” Sheri was back at her desk, and he motioned for her to come in too. When she did, David continued. “Lisa Lamont was born on May 2, 2003, in Ely, at the local hospital,” David said.
“So she’s eighteen now and suddenly has a medical condition related to her parents?” Elizabeth asked.
“That’s what she says. We have no reason not to believe her, but we need to keep in mind adopted kids, or adults, can be curious about who their real parents are, why they gave them up for adoption, and what they look like. We find very few actually want to meet with their biological parents when we locate them. They just had to know something about them. Others have met their parents, but they don’t really feel any kinship with them. They weren’t raised by them, don’t have any real shared memories, and often have a different social and economic status. Sometimes, they form a bond with the birth parents, but in our experience, that’s rare.”
“Okay, so what you’re thinking is that she’s just curious about them and doesn’t have any health issue?” Sheri asked.
“It’s a possibility, that’s all. Just something to keep in mind. Either way, we’ll certainly try to find them as quickly as we can. There’s nothing in the laws that says we can’t locate the biological parents, even if they hadn’t intended for the adopted child to learn who they are.”
Sheri said, “Instagram! We need to check that, Twitter, Facebook, anywhere that the birth parents might have been on to see if we can locate them that way.”
He nodded, then gave them the basics on how to track down possible information about the birth parents through the databases they were tapped into, though Sheri was right. These days, social media was the easiest way to get started.
They got right to work, and David did too. While David was doing research on the biological parents’ case, Elizabeth and Sheri moved over to another computer and were looking into other databases to try to dig up something they could learn about the parents. He was glad they were really getting into the super-sleuthing business with him and his partners.
“Oh, here, what do you think?” Elizabeth asked. “A Reese Riley gave birth to a baby girl on that date. There were three baby girls born at the same time, but Reese didn’t list a father.”
“Yeah, that’s a good possibility,” Sheri said. “Let me write that one down.”
Their eagerness made David happy. He left his desk to see what else they had learned.
“What do you think?” Elizabeth asked him. She showed him a post.
“Is that Reese Riley?” he asked.
“Yup. And check out the one daughter there.”
He peered closely at the picture of a girl, younger than their client, but a spitting image of the picture Lisa Lemont had sent them of herself. He looked at the woman with her, clearly her mother. The resemblance seemed to be more than a coincidence.
“Yeah, that could be her mother. Looks like she goes by Reese Matthews now.” He returned to his desk and began checking in his databases again, using the information Elizabeth had found on Facebook. Location: Denver, Colorado. Loved skiing and mountain climbing. Had three girls and sold online cosmetics. Her husband was a lawyer.
They seemed to be well off, so he wondered why the parents, if they were the client’s parents, had given her up for adoption. There was no mention of any health conditions either the husband or wife had; as often as she posted, he figured she would have mentioned it.
No mention of giving a baby up for adoption, but he wouldn’t have expected that. If this was her, she’d have been a teenager when she’d gotten pregnant. She looked young for being the mother of an eighteen-year-old.
Sheri had been busy looking at her own screen, and jumped up. “I have it! This woman, Reese, uh, Matthews now, left high school early. Before her junior year,” Sheri said.
“Homeschooled?” Elizabeth asked.
“No, she posted about a private school,” Sheri said.
David rubbed his chin. “What if she was forced to give up the baby? Parents, the school, people around her could have convinced her she didn’t want to keep the baby because of her age. Especially if she didn’t have support. It happened all the time. Still happens.”
Sheri piped up again. “Okay, looks like she has a brother.”
They looked up the brother on Facebook. Elizabeth said, “I wonder if she had a falling-out with her family.” She pointed at the brother’s profile. “He has pictures of himself with his parents several times for different occasions, birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving.” She pointed at Reese’s screen next. “While she only features pictures of her own family during all the holidays and for birthdays. They all live in Denver, so it’s not like it’s too far to visit.”
“Okay, so that could be a good clue,” David said. “Are the parents online? Do the parents say anything about family?”
“Hang on,” Sheri said, tapping away on her keyboard. Her mouth pursed in concentration as her eyes moved across the screen. “Okay. The mom has a page. She doesn’t post much, but seems like they…” Her eyes moved again. “Yeah, she only posts about the son and his family and about themselves. Nothing about the daughter and her family. Nothing about their three granddaughters.”
“I want to call her adoptive parents and see what they can tell us about her parents—if they know anything. I’ll check with our client first to make sure it’s okay, even though she said I could contact them. She might have changed her mind,” David said.
He went back to his office and placed the call. “We might have found your birth mother, but we need to do some more digging to make sure. I want to speak to your adoptive parents to see if they might remember anything that would give us another clue about it.”
Their client was silent for so long, David suspected she hadn’t told them.
“If that’s okay with you,” he said.
She finally said, “Can’t you just give me the name of the woman you found?”
“I’m sorry, no. We haven’t verified anything definitively yet. But I know time is critical, since you need information for medical reasons.”
Another long pause.
He sighed. “If this isn’t for medical reasons, and you just want to learn about your mother, I understand.”
Her heard a sniff on the other end of the line. “I only recently found out, you know?” she said. “That I was even adopted. I mean, I’ve wondered. For a long time, actually. My brother once said I don’t look like anyone else in the family. His comment stayed with me for years. When I finally confronted my mom about it, she seemed shocked, but…yeah. She told me I was.” There was another long pause, and David let her have the time. “I got angry. I felt lied to, and I felt… I don’t know. We didn’t talk, my parents and I, for a while. And things aren’t too good now either, but I have to know. I just need to. That’s all. For me. And for my baby.”