A Cold Dark Place

by Gregg Olsen

  “David’s at the hospital.” Dani closed the door. “The kids came and went. Coffee? A soda?”

  “This isn’t a social call.”

  “Can’t we just get along?”

  “Get along? I couldn’t care less about getting along. I want to find my daughter. She was here. Now where did she go?”

  Dani frowned and for a second Emily thought she’d rolled her eyes in annoyance. “I thought we were past that.”

  “Dani, don’t mess with me. I’m a mother, and I also carry a gun.”

  Dani led Emily into the kitchen. The stainless gleamed. A set of chef knives stuck in an oak butcher block. “Are you threatening me?” Her eyes were filled with what Emily was sure was an exaggerated affect of terror.

  Emily turned her anger down a notch. She’d pushed too hard. “No, I’m sorry. I just want to find Jenna.”

  “Okay. I’m not a mother yet, but I get that. Mineral water?”

  “No thanks.” Enough with the refreshments! Where’s Jenna? “Where are the kids?”

  “I think they went to the library or something. Maybe an Internet café. They had that car, the one from Jenna’s friend. They were full of questions about Angel’s Nest. David told them what he remembered.”

  “Are they staying here with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you expect them back later.”

  Dani nodded.

  Emily glanced down at Dani’s bulge. Anger had given way to worry. “I guess Jenna found out about your baby.”

  Dani turned away and opened and poured a San Pellegrino. “I thought you would have told her about it.”

  “You asked me not to,” Emily said. “You and David wanted to break the news yourself.”

  “I know I—we—said that, but I thought for sure you’d let the cat out of the bag. I would have.”

  “Good to know,” Emily said. “It was on my mind, but I just never found the time.”

  “Well, she knows.”

  “How’d she take it?” Emily asked, though she hated any assessment coming from Dani.

  “She’s angry. She’ll get over it.” The remark was so glib, so unaware of how a teenage girl would deal with the realities that her father, her idol, had impregnated another woman—before marriage.

  Emily couldn’t let it go. “Look, Dani, you and I don’t need to be friends. We don’t have to spend any time together whatsoever. I’ll probably never see you again—except at my daughter’s wedding.”

  Dani set her glass down and looked out at Lake Washington. The water was ice blue. She shook her head slightly, looking wounded. “I don’t know why you hate me so much.”

  God, you’re better than I thought. David’s in for a wonderful life with you.

  “I don’t hate you,” said Emily. “But I don’t imagine I’ll ever have warm feelings toward you. That’s just the way it is.”

  “I’m sure all of this is hard for you.” Dan had let a softer tone into her voice.

  I don’t want your sympathy. I used to babysit kids older than you.

  “Thanks,” Emily said, stiffening as she set aside the urge to shove a pregnant woman.

  She started for the door, planning to find David at the hospital. Suddenly she noticed that the house was decorated in a kind of spare, contemporary way, with stark, simple lines and a lot of leather and chrome. David hated contemporary furnishings. She allowed a slight smile to come to her face.

  Good. He’s getting everything he never wanted.

  On her way to the car, she tried to calm down. At some point, Emily knew she could never really forgive David for the affair. She wanted to. Even though the marriage was “irretrievably broken” as the lawyers said, she knew they were connected forever. Although they’d be apart, they had a little girl to raise and love. It hurt so deeply that they would not do that together. Her vision for her life had been the same one she’d grown up with in Cherrystone. Two parents. A stable home. A place where birthdays would be celebrated. Holidays observed. Memories made together as a family. But that was all fractured when he betrayed her with a student nurse.

  “She meant nothing,” he had said at first. “I screwed up.”

  As Emily’s anger grew, his story changed. Soon after the impetus for the affair belonged to her. “You weren’t there for me.”

  To some degree, he’d had a point. That crushed her. Playing a role in the disintegration of her family was almost impossible to bear. The only joy she could allow herself was when she learned that he’d cheated on his girlfriend with a young office assistant, Dani. Once a cheater, always a cheater.

  As Emily slid behind the wheel, Dani called out, “Emily, I really do want us to be friends.” Her voice was intentionally loud enough for her well-heeled neighbors to pick up on her troubles. Dani liked a little drama, it seemed.

  Emily pretended not to hear. She just slammed the car door shut. There was no need to fan the flames, and nothing out of her mouth would seem anything but venomous. She glanced over her shoulder as she backed out. Dani was there by the front door, holding her mineral water, and looking either sad or mad. It was hard to say.

  Her phone rang as she pulled away. It was Olga’s number.

  “Hi there,” Olga said, her voice cheerful. “I’ve got something for you. I set up a dinner date for you.”

  For a moment it flashed through Emily’s mind that she’d probably talked too much about not having found a decent man. She was like bloody chum tossed in a shark cage. Desperation must have oozed from every pore.

  “A dinner date,” she said, sighing. “I don’t know . . .”

  Olga laughed. “Not that kind of a date, my dear. A date with Tina Winston. You’re seeing her at Embers on Stewart downtown.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes. Tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes. And one more thing.”

  Emily hung on Olga’s words. This is going to be big. Olga knows something.

  “Order the fish.”

  Saturday, 4:42 P.M., Seattle

  Nick Martin and Jenna Kenyon stood outside 1225 Stone Way and looked up at the four-story red brick building with green awnings that looked like eyebrows over the street level windows. It was an edifice with a past. Several in fact. At the turn of the previous century, it was the home of the Seattle Bulletin and its considerable printing operations. Today, an old letter press with brass fittings gleamed like a museum piece in the front lobby. After the paper folded, it became apartments, then offices, and now it had gone condo. It was its incarnation as an office building that interested the teenagers standing before it.

  That’s when it had been the home to Angel’s Nest, an adoption agency.

  “I guess this is where I came from,” he said.

  Jenna, still angry at her father about keeping Dani’s pregnancy secret, stood quietly before saying, “Let’s go to the library.”

  Her father had said that Angel’s Nest had been in the news in the early 1980s. He had rounds to conduct “or I’d go with you.”

  Jenna saw that as just another lie. When she pleaded to let her and Nick try to find out a little information before turning themselves in, she lied, too.

  “Dad, we’ll go to the police this afternoon. All of us. When you get back from hospital rounds.”

  David Kenyon took the bait then. Too easily, she thought. Jenna knew that he had already crossed over that invisible line between new family and old. He didn’t care about her. Maybe Dani wouldn’t let him care. She was pregnant. She was young. She held all the cards.

  “I promise, Dad. See you later,” she said.

  “Okay, later then,” he said

  Much later, Dad. Like never, she thought.

  The basement of the Sullivan Library on the campus of the University of Washington is one of those cavernous spaces where footsteps echo like thunder. After negotiating a labyrinth of shelving, Nick Martin and Jenna Kenyon spoke with a librarian in the research periodicals department, a cheerful man of
about fifty with a soup-strainer moustache who agreed that it was silly that no newspapers of the 1980s were yet archived in a searchable electronic format.

  “If it didn’t happen after 1992,” he said with a wink, “it just flat didn’t happen. Writing a paper?”

  “Yes,” Jenna said, “We’re from West Seattle High and our teacher sent us here. We’re doing a team project.” She was proud of her quick response and Nick shot her a quick glance indicating he, too, was impressed.

  The librarian smiled. “What’s the subject? We have an excellent reader’s guide to our periodical collections.”

  “Angel’s Nest,” Nick said, testing the notoriety of the name.

  The man didn’t flinch. “Oh, that one. Should be interesting.”

  He directed them to a massive row of gunmetal-gray cabinets, and they searched under Adoption, Seattle Scandals, and Criminal Cases of Puget Sound. After twenty minutes of digging, they only found only one scrap of ephemera on the subject.

  It was a postcard mailed to college campuses in the 1970s. It showed a picture of a pregnant young woman, sitting on a swing in a playground. Underneath her name it carried the words: “Make a Future. Make a Family. Give Your Baby to Angel’s Nest.”

  “That’s creepy,” Jenna said. “The girl looks like she wants to jump off that swing, ditch the baby, and get back to class.”

  Nick didn’t know what to make of it. “Why didn’t she just get an abortion when she could?”

  “Times have changed,” said the librarian, still hovering nearby. “You two are bound to find more info on the microfiche rolls of the paper.” He jotted down some suggested dates and pointed to the south end of the building. “If you have any trouble working the equipment, let me know.”

  Nick had threaded the first tape and began to spool through the images of the 1980s as presented in the pages of the Seattle Times. Jenna pulled up a chair and retrieved a pad and pen from her purse.

  “I think this is the part where they play some cheesy electronica,” she said.

  Nick glanced over at her, a blank look on his face. He didn’t have a clue about what she was talking about.

  “You know, as we zip through the pages, a loud instrumental track plays,” she said. “God, Nick, like CSI, don’t you ever watch TV?”

  Nick grinned. It was the first time Jenna had seen him smile in days. Since it happened. For a fleeting moment, it gave her just a little hope. We’ll be okay. We’ll all be okay.

  Jenna put her hand on Nick’s shoulder as the grainy images of the microfiche flew through the reader. Every once in a while, she’d drop a quarter into the coin box and push the button. A slightly damp photocopy of the worst possible quality came from the printer. Headlines were gray instead of black. Photos were milky. One headline, despite its ghostly shading, screamed for attention:

  ADOPTION COORDINATOR: “NO IDEA WHAT WILSON WAS DOING”

  It was accompanied by an artist’s sketch of a plump woman with long dark hair. She was in the witness box testifying. The caption read: Defense lawyers tried to discredit Bonnie Jeffries by questioning her about her pen-pal friendship with noted serial killer Dylan Walker.

  Saturday afternoon, Ogden, Utah

  It was the smell coming from 4242 Foster Avenue in Ogden, Utah, that finally got local police inside the beautiful home with the tall paneled doors. It wasn’t the pile of newspapers on the stoop, or the concerns of a fourteen-year-old paper delivery kid. Just the fetid stink that cops knew immediately as the scent of decomposing human flesh. Maggie and Jim Chapman, and their daughter, Misty, a freshman at BYU, were found in a back bedroom, bound, gagged, and strangled to death. The cord from a miniblind from the laundry room had been used to asphyxiate the daughter. Mrs. Chapman had been strangled with a phone cord, and it appeared that Mr. Chapman had died from the pressure of his own necktie. The autopsy conducted by the medical examiner’s office downtown would make the determination, of course.

  The Salt Lake City Tribune ran the story on the front page. The article was picked up by the Associated Press and dispatched across the country:

  PARENTS, GIRL, SLAIN BY INTRUDER IN OGDEN

  CNN ran a video version the next day, flashing images of the murder house and the neighborhood. One viewer in Seattle paid particular attention, satisfied that the mission had been accomplished.

  There was Ogden, Des Moines, the Cherrystone screwup, and the last one close to home.

  Armed with their stack of damp microfiche printouts and a genuine need to get away from the Johnny-on-the-spot research librarian, Jenna and Nick retreated from the basement and found a quiet corner and some soft upholstered chairs on the third floor. A trio of engineering students studied for a test nearby. Otherwise, they were alone.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Jenna whispered.

  Nick divided the copies in half and handed a stack to Jenna. “I’m not the detective’s daughter.”

  “Thanks,” she said, her tone anything but thankful.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Really. I guess we’re just looking for whatever we can find about Angel’s Nest.”

  As they worked their way through the material, they learned that the agency had a sterling record for its first decade or so back in the 1960s. Randall Wilson had helped reinvent the whole concept of adoption. At least, according to one article, prior to Wilson agencies were often viewed as shameful dumping grounds for unwanted babies. Wilson’s brilliance was marketing. Through ads on TV, he was able to turn that thinking on its ear, and make an unplanned pregnancy something positive and heartwarming. Wilson, a genial fellow of forty, saw adoption as “a golden opportunity to build new families.” Instead of selling the idea of taking in an unwanted baby, he sold hard to the birth mothers, making them feel like cherished heroines instead of shameful losers.

  A photo of Wilson showed him outside the building on Stone Way. He had his arms crossed over his chest and a broad smile on his face. “No child is really unwanted,” says Wilson. “They just need to find their way into the right family. That’s my job.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Nick asked. “I mean, I’m adopted. My parents wanted me.”

  Jenna looked up from the papers. “You’re a guy. You wouldn’t get it. But back when our parents were young, getting pregnant out of marriage was the biggest sin of all. Not like today when every movie star has a baby without ever getting a husband. In the 1960s women actually went away and hid out until their babies came.”

  “So?” Nick pushed his chair back from the table. “Big deal.”

  The remark surprised Jenna. “So? This was huge. Wilson was one of the first to turn that thinking around, I guess. He helped promote the idea that having a baby and giving it to someone else was a great gift.”

  Nick shook it off. He put his head down and kneaded his eyes with the palms of his hands. He seemed exhausted and hurt. But he wasn’t about to cry in front of Jenna again.

  “When I was a kid, my mom and dad told me I was adopted,” he said. “They said that they had ‘chosen’ me. I guess that was good enough for me. I never thought of myself as a bastard or anything like that.”

  “I’d hope not.” Jenna continued scanning the page in front of her. “But what if it wasn’t good enough for your birth mother or father?”

  Riffling through the stacks of news stories quickly, the headlines told the story. By the 1980s, the agency was buying babies from shady operators overseas and selling them to rich, childless couples. There were also hints in the story that they were also buying babies from girls here in the United States and selling them in quickie private adoptions.

  Randall Wilson had been tried and found guilty. The agency had been shut down. And apparently the star witness against him had been an employee of Angel’s Nest, Bonnie Jeffries.

  “I’ve read enough,” said Nick. “We can get the fine print later. You have that calling card?”

  Jenna pulled it from her purse.

  “Let
’s call your mom’s boyfriend. He’s the only one who knows anything.”

  “Good idea,” Jenna said. “But he’s not the only one. I’d say one of these two might know something.” She tapped the top page of her stack of clippings with the eraser end of a pencil: first the photo of Randall Wilson, and next the courtroom artist’s image of Bonnie Jeffries.

  “Okay,” he said. “They’re next.”

  She had McConnell’s office phone number on her speed dial, from when he and her mom had been dating, and she gave it to Nick. They walked past the three engineering students, sullen and bored in their studies, and found a bank of pay phones, relics of the pre-cellular era.

  Nick dialed and a law office administrative assistant answered.

  “I need to talk with Cary. It’s urgent,” Nick said, doing his best approximation of mature and demanding. He’d hoped his voice carried even a hint that he was a money-paying client. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to be.

  “Mr. McConnell is away on business,” she answered. “Can I take a message?”

  “When will he be back?”

  “He’s on the coast,” the young woman said, employing the term those east of the Cascade Range used for the entire region west of the mountains.

  “This is important. I’m working on the Angel’s Nest situation. I need to talk to Cary.”

  “Who’s calling?” she asked.

  Nick offered the only name that popped into his head—it came from the news clippings. “This is Randall Wilson,” he said. He was sure he didn’t sound anything like Randall Wilson. Randall Wilson would be nearly seventy by now. But given the circumstances, and the lack of any real plan for his call, it was the best he could do.

  The young woman apparently heard the hesitation in his voice.

  “Just who is this and what do you need?”

  “I . . . I . . .” Scared and feeling a little stupid, Nick abruptly hung up.