Under My Skin

by Jaye Maiman

  No. I had wanted to kill myself.

  The realization made me furious. I stomped into the den and plugged in my modem. I wanted to put this case behind me and get on with my life. I dialed an on-line database and accessed the criss-cross directory. I typed in the names of the couple who had adopted Daniel and Melanie Finnegan and began my search.

  Andrew Van Eyck and his wife had remained at the same address for nearly twenty years before dying in 1975 within three months of each other. Daniel, who had to be around eighteen years old at the time, remained in the family home for a short time. I pulled up a new Wilkes Barre address for him in 1976, then lost track of him the very next year. Melanie’s name never appeared in the listing at all.

  I ran a series of complex searches, but the trail for both children was stone cold. My best bet in such cases was to backtrack and gather additional data on the adoptive parents. A few phone calls and a mega on-line search tab later, I discovered that Andrew had served as pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church in a small town just outside Wilkes Barre for nearly nineteen years.

  It was nearly seven in the morning when I logged off. By then, my vision was blurred and my wrists aching. Still, I was feeling a lot better. I knew just where I intended to go this afternoon. With luck, I’d have a lead on the Finnegan twins by nightfall.

  Time for the masquerade. I checked my reflection in the hospital bathroom’s stainless steel mirror.

  Whadda doll, I sniveled silently.

  I had teased my short-cropped dark brown locks into a hairdo suitable for an Avon lady. The one dressy outfit I had packed was more corporate than country, but I had tried to soften the appearance with a scarf draped over my shoulders and inexpertly tied around my neck. No matter how hard I tried, the damn thing looked more like an oversized tie than a fashionable fichu. I smacked my lips, sneering at the taste of lipstick and the promise I had guiltily made last night to Dean. Any case that could reduce me to hairspray, lipstick, and mascara was not worth my time. Unfortunately, it was too late to back out.

  Dean was waiting in the hall outside his office. I checked my watch. I was five minutes late and he was already pacing like an expectant father. I straightened my navy tweed skirt and wiggled toward him. He glanced at me, frowned, studied his wristwatch, spat out a frustrated “Dammit,” then bolted into his office.

  With a start I realized that he hadn’t recognized me.

  I pushed the door open and blinked. Dean had exchanged the normal dirty-sock-gray fluorescent light fixture for halogen bulbs with maximum wattage. Unlike the rest of the hospital, which was painted the color of day-old grits, the office walls were whiter than Caribbean sand. His receptionist, clad in crisply ironed whites, stood up and questioned me with a voice that sounded mechanized.

  The room was so dazzlingly sterilized it somehow felt dirty. My voice was a squeak as I gave my name. Dominique Inez, as the aluminum nameplate announced, was Dean’s OFFICE MANAGER/PATIENT COORDINATOR. Her breasts were conical and at least four sizes too large for her body. She wagged a finger under my nose as she led me into the inner office, muttering pointedly about promptness and loyalty and New York manners. I tried to slam the door in her face but she was too fast. Instead I glided into a leather director’s chair and smiled daintily in Dean’s direction.

  He was perched on the edge of his desk, which was gunmetal gray and the size of a high-class coffin. A stethoscope jauntily tucked into the pocket of his white jacket, a blue cotton shirt neatly buttoned to his neck, his face so recently shaved I could almost smell the shaving cream—he was soap-opera perfect. He winked at me and started to say who I was or at least who I was pretending to be, but broke off when he caught the warning in my eyes.

  Opposite him, in a hunter-green leather sofa that had the sheen of butter, sat a young woman with raggedy, dirty blonde hair that hung down to her waist. I rose to shake her hand. She smiled shyly and offered me a limp, thin paw. Instead of the handshake I expected to give, I ended up tightly grasping her palm in mine, the blood in my veins stinging as her eyes filled. Shit, I thought. She’s just a baby.

  “It’s good to meet you, Caroline,” I said politely. Some damn maternal instinct I didn’t even know I had rose up in me like indigestion. She was in such obvious distress I wanted to burble over her and cradle her in my arms. I swallowed hard and sat back down, my eyes still riveted to a face so young that its features were still rounded and not entirely defined.

  “Caroline is doing very well, hon,” Dean said. I glanced his way. A grin was pasted on his face like wallpaper over cracked plaster. It barely masked the strain of the past few days. “So’s the baby. We’re expecting any day now, aren’t we?” He addressed Caroline, who barely nodded in response. “Do you have any questions for, uh,” he hesitated, then continued, “either of us?”

  Now that I was sitting here, with this child just a few feet away, the masquerade mutated into a nightmare. I can’t do this, I realized with a sinking sensation. Once again, I was going to let Dean down.

  Caroline shifted in her seat. She wore faded jeans, fashionably torn at the knees, and a tulip-littered maternity blouse that screamed hand-me-down. Her belly was large, but well cloaked. Right now she crossed her hands over her stomach like a woman twice her age and sighed. “She just kicked,” she said, sounding surprised. It was the first time she had spoken and her voice nailed me. A shaky treble, it curled around me and sucked me in.

  “Are you sure you want to give her up?” I asked impulsively. I felt Dean’s glare before I saw it.

  She zeroed in on me and nodded. Ignoring the heat spiking toward me from Dean’s end of the room, I continued, “Why do you want to do this?”

  The query made her pout and her eyebrows scrunch together. “I’m just fourteen. I’m not ready to be a mother.”

  Her statement, perfectly logical and honest, raised another question for me. “Where are your parents, honey?” I said, frightening myself by instinctively tagging on the word honey. Christ. It must be in the genes.

  She turned to Dean, who didn’t bother looking at me as he explained. “Her mother passed away during delivery, and her father died last year. She’s been living with her aunt.” Finally he made eye contact with me. “The woman’s fifty-five. The two of them don’t get along very well.”

  Got it.

  “And the boy?” I asked him.

  Caroline broke in. “Jason Boylston. He’s real cute. A football star. In high school. He’s good in science, too.”

  Great. I bet he also gets solid grades in Seduction 101.

  I stared at her and said nothing. How the hell did I get myself into this stew?

  “Sweetheart, maybe we should let Caroline ask us some questions.” Dean’s request sounded like a command. I bit my lip and scuffed my shoe against the chair leg.

  “You like children?” Caroline piped up suddenly.

  I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Yes, I do.”

  Did I really? Kids always remind me first of my sister Carol, then the accident. I couldn’t enumerate the times I had seen an adorable five-year-old girl and suddenly tasted ash on my tongue.

  “Would you let her smoke cigarettes?”

  My glance shot across the room. What kind of silly question was that? But Caroline’s expression was dead serious. “At what age?” I asked.

  She pondered a moment and then said defiantly, “Whenever she wanted to.”

  We gazed at each other and I suddenly felt as if I were on a witness stand. “No,” I answered gravely. “I would not. Children need love and discipline.”

  She tilted her head at me, obviously weighing my response, then nodded. All of a sudden she blurted,

  “I want to be a nurse..that’s what my mother was. I don’t wanna drop out of school.” One hand rubbed her belly thoughtfully. “She was a mistake, you know. But that doesn’t mean she should suffer too. Right?”

  It was my turn to bob my head.

  We chatted a little longer, each second making the acid ge
yser in my throat a little more virulent. When I could barely breathe anymore, Dean’s intercom crackled. The voice of Dominique, the dominatrix OFFICE MANAGER/PATIENT COORDINATOR, squealed from the box. “You’re needed in the delivery room, Dr. Flynn.”

  Apparently satisfied with my performance, he said, “Well, we’re finished here anyway. I’ll be right out.”

  Caroline and I fell silent as Dean the Doctor clipped on his beeper, dialed his call-forwarding service, and grabbed a chart from the cabinet behind his desk. “Duty calls,” he said lightly, then he kissed my cheek, whispered a heartfelt “Thank you” in my right ear, patted Caroline on the shoulder, and darted outside. I was left sitting alone with a vulnerable teenager and a horrible lie.

  I cleared my throat, rose and crossed to the sofa. “Do you have a few more minutes?” I asked as I lowered myself next to her.

  “Sure.” Her smile was genuine. I had the sense she trusted me, which made the scenario so much worse.

  “Promise me you’ll listen to what I’m about to say, okay? Even if you get mad. Can you do that?”

  Her smooth brow wrinkled with distrust. I wanted to kiss the furrows away but knew I couldn’t. I took a deep breath, then said, “I’m not who you think I am. I’m a friend of Dean’s—not his wife. Maggie, his wife, had a miscarriage recently and she was so depressed, she had to go away to be alone. But she and Dean want a child so badly, he asked me to meet you.”

  Her eyes narrowed further as I explained as much of the truth as I had to. At one point I feared that she was going to bolt away from me, but I pleaded with her to stay. We talked for an hour more, until Dominique kicked us out of the inner sanctum. By then, the truth had bonded us.

  We retreated to the hospital cafeteria for jelly donuts and Yoo-Hoos, where Caroline somehow managed to wring out of me the fact that I was not only a private detective but also “Laurel Carter,” author of countless Harbor Romance novels. Caroline was one of my biggest fans. She was pretty angry when I told her I didn’t plan to write a sequel to Love Conquest, but we were able to make amends. By the time we parted she had decided Dean must be okay if the two of us were friends, but she made me promise to make sure he and Maggie were good parents to her baby. We shook hands firmly, the pact between us authoritative and unambiguous.

  I walked her out to the parking lot and stared in amazement as she proceeded to unchain a three-speed bike. “You biked here?” I shouted at her bike. The temperature had risen, melting most of the snow, but many of the pine-shaded roads still glistened with unexpected patches of ice.

  She lifted her bulky down coat over her butt and mounted the bike, her swollen belly just inches from the handlebars. “I live less than a mile from here,” she said, as if that actually made sense.

  “Where’s your aunt?” I was turning shrill and didn’t give a shit.

  “Calm down, Robin. She’s working. No big deal.” She lifted a foot to a pedal and I dashed forward, jamming my toes against the front wheel.

  “I’ll drive you home.” It was an order and she knew it.

  Unexpectedly, she smiled. “Cool.” She hopped down and waited for my next command.

  I led her to my car, jammed the bike so that it was half inside and half dangling out the side window, and then pointed Caroline into the passenger seat. As I was starting the car, I heard her sniffle.

  “Thanks.” She gave me directions, then started playing distractedly with the glove compartment knob. “I really don’t want anything to happen to the baby. If I had wanted that, I could’ve had an abortion. But I didn’t.” She flashed me a sideways glance. “Not that I think an abortion’s sinful, or anything like that. It just wasn’t for me. Besides, Jason’s really smart. And his father’s a lawyer.” She patted her belly meaningfully. “The baby could end up being someone important, you know. We should at least give her a chance.” She shifted toward me, then asked suddenly, “You’re not interested in adopting, are you?”

  I almost skidded off the road. “Not right now. I’m just learning how to be in a relationship.”

  “Is he a nice guy?”

  All at once, the drive seemed way too long. Surely we had already passed the mile mark.

  “Well?” she said impatiently.

  Here goes...“She’s wonderful,” I said, taking a breath before continuing. “I’m gay.”

  The abrupt silence was unnerving. So was the way she fixated on the window crank. I made the turn into her driveway before she responded. “I never knew a lesbian before.”

  “Well, now you do.” I shifted into park and waited.

  She looked at me hard and I cringed. Now what? “You could still adopt, couldn’t you?”

  I released my breath. “It’s harder for us, but not impossible.”

  As she opened the door, she shook her head.

  “That’s not right. You’d make a good mother.”

  So would Caroline, I thought. One day.

  We exchanged phone numbers, shook hands, then laughed and hugged each other like old chums.

  I headed home to change into real clothes, but as the hospital again came into view I made other plans. I marched through the entrance, waving to Roy the guard the way the nurse before me had, then proceeded in the direction of Dean’s office. No one stopped me.

  Before I reached his door, I made a sharp left. If I remembered correctly, the records office was just down the hall from the bathroom. A minute later I was tapping on the door like a lady searching for a potty. No one answered. I tried the knob.

  The damn door was locked. I was appalled. After all, this was rural Pennsylvania, not New York City. Why did they need to lock doors here? I rummaged through my hardly-ever-used handbag for a lock pick. I made a selection from the kit my brother had given me and proceeded to jiggle the lock.

  I heard the footsteps a second too late.

  “What the hell are you doing?” A voice boomed at me from down the hall.

  I pocketed the pick and whirled around. It was Dean. He was dressed now in surgical greens, a face mask dangling on his chest. “You scared the wits out of me,” I said with welcome relief.

  He stomped over to where I was standing. “Were you just trying to break into the records room?”

  “Well — yes.”

  “Mind explaining why?” I didn’t like his self-righteous tone. After all, I had just participated in a highly unethical charade at his behest. I had no compunction about reminding him of that awful ruse. He cocked his head at me and smirked. “You got me. So at least tell me why.”

  I explained my theory about Noreen’s siblings. “If I’m right, then there’s a chance one of my suspects is related to her. I’m hoping the hospital records will provide me with family histories.”

  Dean cupped his hands over his nose and rubbed his face wearily. “I can’t let you in there, Robin. I’ve already pushed the rules of propriety way too far.”

  Principles can be so irritating. “Fine, Dean. Then you do it. You owe me. By the time Caroline and I said goodbye, she was ready to sign over her next five children to you.”

  His eyes lit up. “She agreed to sign the adoption papers?”

  I nodded, victory just a cheap deadbolt away.

  Five minutes later, Dean was inside the records room rifling through the designated files. While he was busy, I darted into the bathroom to scrub the makeup off my face. My skin smelled like Listerine by the time Dean exited from the room. Empty-handed.

  “Sorry, Rob. There are no records on either Fred or Camilla. And the file on Douglas didn’t provide any critical family information. I have to tell you I felt really cheap checking up on him like that. The guy’s been a good friend to me.”

  “Does he ever talk about his family?”

  “No.” He faltered. “All I know is that his parents are no longer alive and they were never really close. He left home when he was just a teen-ager. Went to medical school down in Mexico. He paid his way by acing in stupid B movies.” With a smirk, he added, “Teenage-werewolf
type crap.”

  “No siblings?” I asked, wondering at the same time why Douglas had lied about his acting career.

  “None that he’s ever mentioned to me. But, look, he’s no killer. Besides, your theory seems pretty far-fetched to me. I think you’ve got a lot more viable suspects, more than you can probably handle.”

  “Yeah. Well, maybe you’re right.”

  I wanted to ask him about Maggie’s background, but thought better of it. Instead I said, “Do you know if anyone in Telham drives a Bronco?”

  “Hell, Robin, half of the community owns Broncos. Matter of fact,” he said, hesitating for a spit second, “that’s what Noreen drove.”

  “Noreen?”

  Goddamn it. I had never checked her garage.

  “Thanks, Dean.”

  I hastily turned to leave but he stopped me with an impetuous shout. “Whoa! Man, that’s it.” He snapped his fingers. “I couldn’t figure out why you wanted me to check on the DeLucas, but I just got it.” He stared at me like I was Sherlock Holmes.

  “What are you talking about, Dean?”

  “The test results came in this morning. There was enough aconite in that sciatica tincture to kill a cow. You think Fred—”

  “I don’t know what I think,” I said impatiently, heading down the hall.

  He scrambled after me. “Will you call me as soon as you learn anything?”

  “Dean, I don’t have time to make pit stops to check in with you—”

  “Just tell me—does this investigation have anything to do with Maggie’s disappearance?”

  I closed my mouth. But not soon enough. “I thought so. Look, I have too much at risk here.” He scampered in front of me and walked backwards down the hall, talking at breakneck speed. “My wife. Caroline’s baby. Our future.” He patted his back pocket, then clucked his tongue. “Come back into my office. I’ll give you the keys to my Audi. It has a cellular phone. Please.”

  He folded his hands together as if in prayer. I would have done anything then just to shut him up. I followed him into the office and exchanged keys, but not promises.