Butchers Hill

by Laura Lippman

  Jackie was fiddling with her earring now, opening and closing the back with a loud snap, over and over again.

  "Are you an adoptee?" a woman called from the left side of the room.

  Adele smiled. "I'm a mother of three who works at the National Institutes of Health and felt I needed to do more with my time."

  Tess noticed the women in the group laughed at this, while the men looked blank.

  "Of course I was adopted," Adele said. "I knew that all my life, but I didn't start looking for my mother until I was in my thirties and had my own children. That's pretty common, by the way—a major life change jump-starting the process. I found my mother in a state nursing home in New York, sick with pneumonia from living on the streets for much of her life. She died a week later. Let me tell you, the only thing I ever regretted was not starting the search sooner. I might have had six months, a year, five years with her. I got a week. It was better than nothing."

  "Why don't you tell us how you found her?" This woman's question sounded rehearsed to Tess's ear.

  "Thank you, Terry. Terry's a plant, by the way, she's supposed to ask that question." Adele's manner was at once so breezy, yet so practiced, that Tess wondered if she could turn it on for anything. This crowd was eating out of her hand. She could have sold them Tupperware or lingerie, timeshares or those magnetic healing pads.

  "I did it the way you're going to find your parents. Start with whatever you know—the agency that arranged the adoption, any clues you can glean from the medical records to which adoptees are now entitled by law—thanks, in part, to groups like ours. Wheedle, beg, cajole. Get a first name. Get a home state. You'll be amazed at how far you can get."

  Tess, thinking of how hard it had been for her to get leads on four children whose names she actually knew, blurted out: "It's not that simple, finding people. You're making it sound too easy."

  The rest of the audience turned back, frowning at the skeptical stranger in their midst. But Adele just shrugged.

  "Of course it's hard. That's why we have this twenty-page booklet"—she held up a pamphlet with a peach cover and black plastic ring binders—"which is yours for the unbelievably low price of absolutely nothing. We also have Internet resources and a network of similar groups nationwide, for those of you who trace your parents to other states. Now, if all this help moves you to make a donation, large or small, so be it. Maryland Adoption Rights is a registered nonprofit, and your gifts are tax deductible. Any more questions?"

  A few eager hands shot up. "Generic ones, I mean, not about your specific cases." The hands went back down. "Then let's break up, freshen up our coffees, and grab some cookies. Our search consultants will set up at various spots throughout the room, so you can have confidential briefing sessions on how to start your searches. You may also want to talk to some of our folks about whether you're ready to start. But you're here, that's the first step."

  Jackie didn't move. Tess went over to the card table, refilled their cups, and filled a napkin with cookies. Pepperidge Farm and those French cookies, Lulus, Sumatra decaf and chocolate almond regular. Toto, I don't think we're in Baltimore anymore.

  Jackie ignored the coffee and the cookies. Around the room, the one-on-one sessions had started, and the air filled with a hushed, urgent buzz, but she showed no sign of moving from her spot. She was rocking slightly now, holding herself as if she were cold.

  Adele walked over and sat down in the chair on the other side of Jackie. Her blouse was half out of her skirt, she had cookie crumbs on one side of her mouth and she was stirring her coffee with a ballpoint. Tess had already been inclined to like her, but something about the Bic pen rattling around the paper cup clinched the deal.

  "Feeling a little skittish?"

  "No!" Jackie said. "It's just that…I'm different from the others here."

  "Because you're black?" Adele looked genuinely puzzled. Race wasn't supposed to be a factor, not in the Inter-faith Center, not in utopian Columbia. It was impolite to even remark on its existence.

  "You kept talking about looking for one's parents. I'm not looking for my mother. I was…I am…a mother."

  Adele picked up Jackie's hand. Tess was surprised that Jackie let a stranger touch her. She expected her to snatch her hand back and tuck it under her. But she let Adele hold her hand, while Adele talked to her in a soothing voice, so much softer now, but still as casual and light as it had been during the presentation.

  "You were a young one, weren't you? Sixteen? Seventeen?"

  "Eighteen," Tess answered when Jackie said nothing. "She's thirty-one now."

  "Well, you're right, we don't see as many mothers as we do kids. And we don't see a lot of mothers your age. But that's a good thing, see? Each year, the trail gets a little colder. Did you give birth here in Maryland?"

  Jackie nodded, staring into her lap.

  "Which part, which jurisdiction?"

  "Baltimore, in the city."

  "Did you go through a church agency, a private or the state?"

  "Private. It was a little office on Saratoga Street."

  "You remember a name?" Adele's voice had gotten softer and softer, as if Jackie were a scared, wounded animal she was trying to lure from a hiding place.

  "Something Alternatives."

  "Okay, Something Alternatives on Saratoga Street. Now I bet you don't think that sounds like much, but I'm going to call Jeff over, and you'll be surprised at what he does with a little piece of information like that." She addressed herself to Tess, as if Jackie were her ward. "Jeff knows Baltimore. I'm more oriented to the Washington suburbs."

  She walked over to a thin man with a narrow face and intense brown eyes. If Tess had been noticing such things these days, she would have thought him handsome, but she wasn't noticing such things. Adele and Jeff separated from the group, talking to each other in low, urgent voices. Tess thought she heard a muttered "Jesus Christ," then their voices dropped again. After several minutes, both walked over to where she and Jackie sat. Tess knew from their faces that things weren't quite so easy as Adele had thought.

  "It's kind of a good news, bad news situation," Jeff said. "Yes, I know the place. Family Planning Alternatives. It advertised in the yellow pages, pretending to offer a full range of services, from contraceptives to abortions. But they were funded by a radical anti-abortion group. They did some adoptions, but their real purpose was to scare women out of abortions by giving them a lot of misinformation. The state shut them down five years ago."

  "What does that mean for me?" Faced with a problem, Jackie was no longer passive. She was a self-made businesswoman again, impatient with all obstacles.

  "It means you can't do what we normally advise in this situation, which is to return to the agency and see if you can convince them to offer any leads," Adele said. "And since they've disbanded, it will be virtually impossible to find the people who worked there, much less the records. It's a setback, but it's not the end of the world."

  Tess extended her pinkie finger, so the nail was poking into the side of Jackie's thigh. She kept her nails quite short, but there was enough there to dig a little bit. Remember, that's what you have me for. I found you. I can find a lot of people who are hard to find.

  "So where do I start?" Jackie demanded. "If I can't begin with them, where do I begin?"

  "With your own memories," Jeff said. "Agencies often give a little information to mothers, to ease their minds. They've even been known to send out paperwork that reveals information they're not supposed to have. One of our clients got her birth mother's surname on a form the hospital routed to her by mistake."

  "They told me my baby's adopted father was a doctor," Jackie began hopefully.

  "Shit." Adele shook her head sorrowfully. "I'm sorry, honey, but they tell almost every girl that. It's one of the clichés of the trade."

  Jackie looked as if she might cry. Tess dug her nail a little harder into her leg, signaling her to gain control, to have a little faith in the person she was paying.
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  "This agency," Tess said. "When it went down, did it end with a bang or a whimper?"

  "What are you to her?" Adele asked. Not hostile, just a little curious. Tess wondered if she assumed they were lovers.

  "A friend," Jackie said, before Tess could reply. It was as good a cover story as any.

  "There were a few newspaper and television stories, nothing huge," Jeff said. "I think I've got a file on them back in my office. But there aren't any names that I recall. The clients were protected, the owners of the agency disappeared, along with all their files."

  "But I bet there was a little flurry of action down in Annapolis, right? Probably some attempt to draft legislation to prevent this from happening again. Some tearful testimony—distraught clients, maybe a repentant employee or two?"

  Jeff looked at Tess as if she were a psychic. "Yeah, that's exactly what happened, only the bill never made it out of committee. How could you know that?"

  "Because if some politician can't make a little hay out of someone else's tragedy, what's the point of being a politician?" Tess turned to Jackie. "They keep files on bill testimony, and who testifies, even if the bill goes nowhere. By tomorrow, we'll have a list of names to play with."

  "This is more than a scavenger hunt, you know," Adele said earnestly. "This isn't just about finding something and shouting ‘Eureka!' You're setting some up some mighty big dominoes, and you don't know how they're going to fall. You really should keep working with us."

  Jackie reached into her purse, took out her checkbook and a pen—a Mont Blanc, of course—and wrote Maryland Adoption Rights a check for $250. "Thank you for your assistance," she said. "I'll worry about those dominoes after they fall. Meanwhile—"

  Adele looked at her hopefully.

  "Could I get a receipt for that, for my tax records?"

  Chapter 13

  It was just after nine Tuesday morning when Tess left the highway and began working her way north on a narrow country road. The thirty-minute drive to Penfield School had passed quickly, thanks to the woman on the radio explaining a vast government conspiracy, in which all new cars were equipped with computer chips that would allow the federal government to shut them down anywhere, any time. Tess tried to figure out how this would work exactly. If the government disabled her car right now, for example, what would they do with it, or her?

  Talk radio, the more paranoid the better, was Tess's entertainment of choice as of late. The cacophony of voices was pretty good company. Unfortunately, the shows where the hosts really seethed were becoming harder to find, replaced by garden-variety blustering conservatives and apologetic liberals who hit the same notes over and over. At the other end of the dial, as well as the spectrum, earnest NPR was the high-fiber cereal of radio: Tess would start liking it, remember it was so good for her, and recoil.

  Now a caller was wondering if these new, smaller satellite dishes were really part of a government surveillance program. "Of course they are," the host assured him, going on to explain how pay-per-view events allowed the White House to bug your home. Tess was so engrossed in the details of this elaborate scheme that she almost missed the turnoff to the Penfield School.

  It was a balancing act, working for two clients. Jackie had assumed she would head straight to Annapolis this morning, but she had promised Beale to interview Salamon Hawkings. To arrange the meeting, she had called Penfield yesterday, telling the headmaster careful not-quite lies: She was an alumna from Washington College (absolutely true), she was interested in helping the school recruit a more diverse student body (true, not that she'd actually do anything about it), and she had heard Salamon Hawkings was a promising young student, an award-winning public speaker (true). The headmaster had hemmed and hawed, but finally agreed she could meet with Salamon this morning, during his study period.

  The plain wooden sign for the school was so small and discreet that she overshot the driveway and had to do a U-turn. The Penfield School, established 1888. It had been a church-run school then, intended for poor, young orphans. In terms of class and background, Salamon Hawkings was actually closer to Penfield's origins than most of the young men enrolled here today.

  The headmaster, Robert Freehley, met her in the hallway. Hello, Mr. Chips: Tall, thin, prematurely gray, tweedy, he might have come straight from Central Casting. The June mornings were cooler here in the country, Tess thought, but not so cool as to warrant a tweed jacket. With leather elbow patches yet.

  "They're waiting for you in the library," he said, leading her through corridors that didn't really look any different than most school buildings, yet Tess could still sense how much richer Penfield was than, say, Gwynn's Falls Middle School. Not to mention the Benjamin Banneker Academy. The differences were small, but telling: The display case, which ran heavily to lacrosse and soccer trophies, was made of oak and the items inside were obviously dusted on a regular basis. Furniture was well-worn, but in that thrifty WASP kind of way. And the building was cool, not just because it had central air conditioning, but because it was made of thick stone that held in the night air. Only the odors were the same from school to school, the smell of chalk dust and adolescent boys being pretty standard everywhere.

  Salamon Hawkings sat at the end of a long library table, his head bent over a book. The tables here actually had green-shaded lamps at each place, although the morning sun spilling through the wooden Venetian blinds made them unnecessary just now. A man in a seersucker suit sat next to him. A teacher? The librarian? He was vaguely familiar to Tess, a bland-faced man of thirty-five or so.

  "I'll leave you to your business," the headmaster said. He seemed a little nervous to Tess. Perhaps the man at the table was one of his trustees, or a rich alum.

  "Miss Monaghan?" The man stood, while Salamon never looked up, just kept reading. "I'm Chase Pearson."

  Tess reached for his hand, then realized he hadn't offered it. "Of course. You're in the governor's cabinet. The task force on children and youth, right?" And thinking of a run for lieutenant governor, depending on how the ticket shook out, according to her Uncle Donald's gossip. The Pearson family was rich in connections and blood, if not much else. His first name, Chase, was probably intended to remind people he was distantly related to Maryland's signer of the Declaration of Independence. Very distantly related.

  "I'm the special secretary for Adolescents and Children," he said, a little stuffily. Well, it must be disappointing for a politically ambitious man to find out someone didn't know his current title and couldn't recognize his face. "Before that, I headed the task force on young men and violence in Baltimore City, by special appointment of the mayor. People often confuse the two. But I'm here today as a Penfield alum—and as Sal Hawkings's guardian."

  The young man kept reading, as if they weren't even there. He probably had much practice in tuning out the world around him, Tess thought, a preternatural ability to concentrate. That was the talent that had gotten him here, as much as his oratorical skills.

  "Did the headmaster tell you about Washington College's interest in Salamon?"

  "Sal," he corrected, turning a page, still not looking up. "I go by Sal now."

  Chase Pearson smiled. Tess saw another problem facing the would-be candidate. His teeth were uneven and yellow, stained with nicotine and brown at the gum line. Good enough for lieutenant governor, but nothing better.

  "The headmaster told me what you had told him," Pearson said. "Yet when I called Chestertown yesterday, no one in admissions at Washington College had any idea what I was talking about."

  Damn. She knew she should have scheduled this meeting closer to her initial phone call. Even the best lies had a pretty short shelf life. "This recruitment program is through the Alumni Society. The college wouldn't necessarily know about it."

  "I don't think so," Pearson said, then picked up a single piece of paper from the library table. "Theresa Esther Monaghan, twenty-nine. Lives on Bond Street in Fells Point, in a building owned by her aunt, Katherine Helen Monaghan. Owns a
twelve-year-old Toyota which failed the state emissions test last year and has two outstanding parking tickets, one in Baltimore City, the other in Towson. Former employee of the Star newspaper. Now a licensed private investigator for Keyes Investigations. Owns a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson, for which she has a permit to carry."

  Tess had wondered what the world's databases had on her, and now she knew. Pearson must have used his government sources to pull this dossier together so quickly. Dorie could have gotten much more, but Pearson had done okay. For an amateur.

  He slid the piece of paper toward Salamon—Sal—who never lifted his eyes from his book. "By the way, Washington College was glad to have your new address, as they had lost track of you quite some time ago. You can look forward to a fund-raising solicitation quite soon. Although I have a sense you don't have a lot of discretionary income, not even for your beloved alma mater."

  "If Washington College wanted me to donate money, they should have steered me away from majoring in English," Tess said. "Okay, so I lied. Sort of. I represent someone who is familiar with the circumstances of the death of Sal's friend, Donnie Moore. This person, who prefers to remain anonymous, would like to help Sal and the others who witnessed his death."

  "You represent Luther Beale."

  Tess thought of her office door, loose and swinging in the summer breeze. But she couldn't imagine someone like Chase Pearson going to such extreme measures. He wouldn't have to. Maybe the state police had Beale under surveillance. Maybe another Penfield alum sat on the board of her bank, and knew whose checks she had deposited. Baltimore boards were lousy with Penfield grads.

  "There's no database in the world with that information. You have no way of knowing who I represent," she said, curious to see if he would contradict her.