by Ninie Hammon
"So we're where we started — trying to find the connection," Dobbs said. He paused. "We could be in Summerville in an hour or so."
"From here to Ohio — in an hour?" Clearly, geography was not Bailey's strong suit.
"It's just on the other side of the river," Dobbs said as he fiddled with his phone, mumbling, "Whitfield … Summerville, Ohio."
"No mountain roads," T.J. put in. "Most of Ohio's flat as a boot-stomped toad."
"There's no phone for the parents," Dobbs said. "But if they were in their fifties, say, eighteen years ago, chances are they're dead now. And we don't know for sure they even lived in the same town as the aunt."
"Might as well give 'Mattingly' a shot," T.J. suggested.
Dobbs googled Ellen Mattingly in Summerville, Ohio and found nothing. Then he called AT&T information — which operated land lines in Ohio — and got a hit.
"Would you please connect me to that number," he said, and put the phone on speaker so T.J. and Bailey could hear.
The phone rang three times before a voice answered.
"Hello."
"I'm looking for Ellen Mattingly—"
"Whatever you're selling, I don't want none!" Click!
"That went well," T.J. said.
Dobbs was undeterred.
"Let me see if I can grease the skids."
Five minutes and a promised $250 later, Ellen Mattingly had agreed to talk to them.
"No hundred-dollar bills," she told Dobbs. "There's too many of them that's counterfeit. I seen a notice when I was buying cat food that they wouldn't take no hundreds."
They drove across featureless Ohio countryside, a few sprinklings of houses, but mostly just green fields of corn or grain sorghum maybe, stitched at the horizon to a cloudless denim sky. T.J. could tell Bailey's car sickness had settled down soon's she got out of the mountains.
Ellen Mattingly's house was not easy to find even with a GPS. The road leading to it was unnamed, or if there had been a sign, it was gone now. And the lane leading to that road was not named either. The house was a double-wide trailer that had a permanent affixed porch and an addition of some kind of room on the far end. A ramshackle barn sat out back, but clearly this wasn't a working farm and hadn't been in decades.
The woman who came to the door when they knocked was short, almost as wide as she was tall, wearing one of those shapeless shifts the morbidly obese wore because clothing constricted.
"You the people called me, said you'd pay me two-hundred-fifty dollars if I'd tell you about Caitlyn?" she asked, without opening the storm door.
"Yes, ma'am," Dobbs said.
"Lemme see the money."
Dobbs pulled from his billfold five fifty-dollar bills he'd retrieved from an ATM machine in a convenience store on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River bridge.
"No hundreds, right?"
She opened the door wide enough to snatch the money out of his hand and counted it twice, holding each bill up to the light as she did so. Then she stepped back and said, "You can come on inside, but the place is a bit off a mess. I wasn't 'pecting no company."
A bit of a mess. Oh, my … yes, indeedy, it was that. Ellen Mattingly was a certifiable "cat lady." T.J. saw at least a dozen of them in one glance around the dim room. And from the stink of cat pee, there were likely another dozen somewhere he couldn't see.
A hoarder, too. Newspapers, magazines, boxes and unidentifiable junk was stacked everywhere, leaving a space barely wide enough to walk through and nowhere at all to sit. But the woman didn't offer them a seat anyway so the three of them stood while she eased herself down into a recliner that had taken on her shape over the years and fit her like a comfortable slipper.
As soon as she sat down, a white cat, a tabby and what looked like a calico with only one eye immediately hopped into her lap. She petted them as she spoke.
"Why you want to know 'bout Caitlyn?" she asked. "What business you got with her after all these years?"
"What happened to her after she was released from Crenshaw County Hospital?" T.J. asked, intentionally brusque. He saw no reason to come up with a plausible excuse, given that they weren't asking for information. They were buying it. The woman eyed them, then apparently reached the same conclusion because she shrugged.
"My oldest sister Dolores was Caitlyn's grandmother — her boy David's little girl," she said. "When Caitlyn was little, she come over to my house a couple of times, played in the creek out back. Cute little thing with that blonde hair."
She paused and noticed the stern looks all around and went on with her story. "Anyway, I went with Dolores and Frank to see Caitlyn after the accident. They brought home a little sack of Caitlyn's things that'd come from the wreck, toys and things — a teddy bear, I think. And, of course, they had to claim David and Susan's bodies to bring 'em home to bury."
The woman gestured out the front door.
"You go down that road another mile and you can find the Whitfield family cemetery. It's mostly overgrown with weeds now but that's where David and Susan's buried. And David's baby brother, who died of the flu when he was two. His grave's there, too. Dolores lost both her boys. Frank had a stroke about a year after the accident, but you ask me I b'lieve he just couldn't live with what had happened to his boy. After they lost Luke so young, they doted on David. And Caitlyn was their only grandchild, of course, so it was hard for them. Dolores got cancer about five years after that and she had it awful bad. Why she—"
"Can we stick to the point here?" T.J. said. "Where did Caitlyn go after she left the hospital?"
"You don't have to get all huffy 'bout it. You said you wanted to know 'bout that little girl and I'm just telling you about her people is all." She paused. "So, after the hospital, Dolores and Frank put her in a private sanitarium — I think that's what you call it. Stonybrook Manor in Plainfield. But she wasn't there very long.
"She died." It was the first time Bailey had spoken since they arrived and it was a statement, not a question.
"Nope, they closed the place down. I only went there a couple of times, but I thought then it wasn't nowhere I'd want my kin."
She moved the calico cat to the side to make room for a scrawny black cat that was sitting at her feet and it leapt into her lap with the others.
"That place was all Dolores and Frank could afford, though. There ought to have been some insurance money from David and Susan, him being an accountant in Charleston and all, made good money so I heard. But if there was money, Dolores and Frank never seen none of it. They put Caitlyn in Stonybrook, it being cheap and close by, but Caitlyn hadn't been there oh, a month or two, wasn't that long, when somebody died, one of the patients. They had a lot of people like her there, vegetables, couldn't do nothing for themselves, but I don't think it was one of them. Anyway, his family got all up in arms about it, demanded an investigation, and then they come down there and seen all kinda violations — they had to a'been paying off the inspectors, 'cause any fool could see how filthy that place was."
T.J. thought about the pot calling the kettle black, but kept his mouth shut.
"They was roaches everywhere, and patients smelled like they'd messed themselves and was a'layin' in it. Things like that. They shut the place down on the spot and they sent all the patients somewhere else."
"Where did they send Caitlyn?"
"Like I said, Frank and Dolores didn't have much and they couldn't afford no place any better than Stonybrook, so Caitlyn was declared a ward of the state of West Virginia, her being from there and all, and they hauled her up to the state mental hospital, some woman's name, Margaret something. It's in Huntington."
"Margaret Mitchell-Bateman Hospital," Dobbs said. "I've been there."
"How long was she there?" Bailey asked.
"I don't rightly know. I never went there to see her. It was too far and what was the point? Going to visit her so you could look at her laying in the bed staring at the ceiling? She didn't know nobody, never said a word, didn't respond to nothing.
I think maybe that's what killed Frank, seeing the little thing like that."
"But she was there as long as her grandparents lived?" Dobbs asked.
"Best as I recollect. They never said nothing about movin' her."
"Were you ever notified that she had died?" T.J. asked.
"No, didn't nobody tell me nothing. After her grandparents died, I'd a'been her next of kin I s'pose, wasn't nobody else, but I don't know that anybody ever knew that or wrote it down in some record or other."
She put the black cat that had jumped into her lap back down on the floor so she could pick up a fat, brown one.
"You just want some attention, too, don't you, Posie?" she crooned to the cat. "Well, you can sit right here with me."
"So you don't know how long Caitlyn was in the hospital in Huntington or what happened to her there," T.J. prodded.
"Well, I don't imagine she was there too long. They told us at Stonybrook that them people in … what did they call it … a persistent vegetative state, they don't live long, three or four years maybe, but not long. They said that after a while, their organs just start to shut down and they're gone."
Though they asked a handful more questions, Ellen Mattingly provided no more information that was valuable, and they were all grateful to leave the "cat house" as soon as they could.
Dobbs said he'd drive back to Shadow Rock and Bailey simply handed him the car keys without comment and got into the back seat. She looked exhausted. As they drove out across the flat Ohio countryside, Bailey closed her eyes, leaned her head back and rubbed her temples.
"So now we know that in the fall of 1997, a little girl named Caitlyn Whitfield was admitted to the Margaret Mitchell-Bateman Hospital in Huntington in a persistent vegetative state." She opened her eyes. "Now what? Do you think the hospital will tell us anything about her? I know her medical history would be private, but do you think they would at least tell us the dates she was there, when she died?"
Dobbs held up his hand. "I say we're done digging."
"But Dobbs, we have to find out—"
"I didn't say we should give up. I said we should stop digging. I decided while I was listening to that woman prattle on — I'm going to hire a private investigator. Those guys know how to get information that we'd never find out for ourselves. I'll pay somebody to track that child down."
Chapter Twenty
When Brice turned his cruiser onto the street where Norman and Jeanette Campbell lived, he couldn't pull up in front of their house, had to look for a place to park farther down the street. Friends and family had obviously turned out in force to be supportive.
A woman Brice had seen at the school with the Campbells the day of Riley's disappearance answered the door.
"I have some questions I'd like to ask Mr. and Mrs. Campbell," he told her.
"I'm Francine Ferrigliano," said the woman, who had a pleasant, easily forgettable face. "My husband Tony and I live next door. Norm and Jeanette are in the dining room with the other officers."
Seated around the dining room table with the Campbells were two FBI agents, Ashok Arya and Nikki Trimboli, operating sound equipment to record and trace telephone calls made to the residence.
Norm Campbell was a slender man with a neatly trimmed beard going to gray and dark-rimmed glasses. His brown hair was streaked in gray, too, but Brice didn't think he was as old as the gray would make it seem. If he was, then he and his wife had had their first child late in life.
Jeanette was what appeared to be a natural redhead. Brice could usually pick out the ones whose red came from a box, could tell by their complexion. He hadn't been the only redhead in his family and Jeanette reminded him a little of his Aunt Myra, whose hair had been described to him as a child as "strawberry blonde." Which made no sense, since there was nothing about the color of her hair that looked like strawberries.
Jeanette's features were attractive and perhaps under normal circumstances he would have thought she was pretty. Now, the lines around her mouth had deepened, and dark circles formed half-moon crescents under her eyes.
Francine sat down at the table on the other side of Jeanette.
"I am sure you've heard by now," Brice told them without preamble. "A little girl is missing; she disappeared from Meadows Park this afternoon."
"We heard," said Francine and put her arm around Jeanette Campbell's shoulders. "What does that mean?"
Jeanette put her head in her hands and whispered, "It's not her, then."
Brice and the two FBI agents were instantly alert.
"Not who?" Brice asked.
She shot a look at her husband Brice didn't like at all. It was an oops-we-got-caught-you-wanna-tell-him-or-should-I look.
"Not …" Jeanette Campbell began, then fell silent.
"Mrs. Campbell, if you know something about this case that you're not telling us, you need to get real," Agent Trimboli said. She had a hard edge, came off hostile. "As in right now!" Needlessly confrontative wasn't the right tone here.
Jeanette looked at her husband, and then put her head in her hands and began to cry, choking out words through her tears.
"Riley's … Riley's … adopted."
The neighbors looked as surprised as did Brice and the two FBI agents.
"Adopted?" Arya and Trimboli spoke in unison.
"What?" The word burst out of Brice's throat and then he grabbed hold of himself. When he spoke again, his voice was so cold and sharp you could have used it to filet a fish. "Why didn't you tell us that in the beginning?"
The husband put his hands out in a placating gesture. His wife continued to cry on her neighbor's shoulder.
"Nobody knew. Nobody." He said the words softly, looking around, not wanting anyone beyond the room to hear. Like he still wanted to keep the whole thing a secret! "Not even my parents." He paused. "Especially not my parents.”
"Tell us everything, Mr. Campbell," Agent Trimboli said. "All of it. Now is no time to be concerned about keeping family secrets."
Though he said, "Alright, alright," Norm Campbell still looked around and spoke softly.
"My parents … the Campbell family name … it really matters to them, tracing their ancestry back to the 1600s. They were living in London when we told them Jeanette was pregnant. We'd tried before and they were so anxious to have a grandchild."
He stopped, and his wife continued, her voice tear-clotted.
"When I miscarried — for the third time — we were devastated. It was the first time we ever considered adoption, but we wanted to break that to them in person. To explain it."
"And then it all happened so fast," Norm Campbell said. "We'd hired the best private adoption attorney in Savannah and he said he had a girl who wanted to give her baby away … and she was due about the same time Jeanette had been due. So we …"
Decided to lie to and deceive everyone in your life, Brice wanted to say, but didn't.
"It all worked out and there was no reason my parents had to know. Certainly, we love Riley as much as we do his little sister, Holly, who is our own biological child. But my mother and father — particularly, my father — they never would have."
"I want every speck of information you have about that adoption," Agent Trimboli said. Brice saw Agent Arya on his cellphone and knew he was relaying this bit of information to Nakamura. "The name of the attorney, the adoption papers. What do you know about the mother?"
"Nothing. The attorney showed us a picture, but he wouldn't let us keep it. She was a beautiful young girl. He said she was in college and having a baby would ruin her career plans, so …"
"What did it cost?" Trimboli asked.
"The adoption?"
"All of it," Arya said, putting his phone back in his pocket. "What did you pay this man?"
"Fifty thousand dollars."
Francine Ferrigliano gasped audibly.
"Mr. Campbell," Brice's words were measured, "did you ever stop to consider that this attorney might not have been telling you the whole story? A college s
tudent? Seriously?"
"She wasn't some druggie, if that's what you're implying." Norm Campbell was indignant. "Riley was in perfect health. We had him examined by our own pediatrician and he said the baby was … flawless. Absolutely perfect."
"Have you ever heard of a black market for babies?" Trimboli said, her voice as icy as an Arctic winter.
The man's face turned white but he said nothing.
"There is such a thing, you know, babies for sale," Brice said. "Do you honestly think the birth mother's medical bills and your attorney fees totaled fifty thousand dollars?"
Norm Campbell's face grew tight.
"We would have paid twice that, three times that … for our son. He is our son. Legally adopted. Ours."
"And if you'd told us the truth in the beginning, we might have been looking for him in other places," Arya said.
"There's no way … the mother doesn't know who we are. She couldn't possibly trace us, find us. The attorney said—"
"Like I said, Mr. Campbell, we need every speck of information you have about the attorney and the adoption," Trimboli said.
"The file is downstairs in my office, in the safe." He merely looked at her, almost defiant. The look she gave in return sent him scurrying out of the room.
Jeanette Campbell's teary voice filled the silence that followed.
"You think it's the same person, don't you? The same person who took my Riley took that little girl." She paused, drew a shaky breath. "What does that mean?"
"We don't know that, Mrs. Campbell, but it is a reasonable assumption. At least it was until …" Brice didn't finish the sentence, just looked toward the door where Norm Campbell had exited.
"If someone, some … if a person takes a child and then two days later takes another one, what does that mean for the first child? Why would they take two, unless the first …?"
Jeanette put her head in her hands and this time began to sob.
"Who was the child from the park?" asked Francine Ferrigliano.
"Her name is Christi Strickland," Brice said. "She's eleven years old, in the fifth grade at Madison Elementary School. Do any of you know her?"
