Man of His Word

by Cynthia Reese

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  TWO WEEKS LATER, Kimberly was so frustrated she was ready to tie Daniel to his precious “thinking tree” until he was willing to tell her what he knew about Marissa’s birth mother.

  She sat at the lady’s secretary in the room Ma had given her, staring at her original list.

  People who might know something:

  EMTs who responded

  Police who responded

  Emergency room staff

  Newspaper reporter

  Former fire chief

  The person who took the picture of Daniel and Marissa

  Every single lead had been crossed off.

  Kimberly had combed through the old newspaper file copies until her fingers were blackened with ink the day before. The story that referenced “an unlicensed female juvenile driver” was little more than the lead paragraph on that week’s police blotter, and there was absolutely no mention of a baby.

  Not one word. It was if Marissa had never been born.

  How could that be? She knew reporters—reporters who worked both for the smaller papers in and around Atlanta and for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—and they would have never passed up a story as dramatic as an abandoned baby on the Fourth of July, at a fire station, no less.

  But this report implied that the girl was merely ill and had used the car as a means to get to help. It didn’t even explain why she hadn’t simply dialed 911.

  Maybe the town didn’t have 911 a dozen years ago?

  At any rate, the reporter was long gone, with no forwarding address, the former fire chief was on an extended vacation at Yosemite Park, with no contact information...and nobody at the hospital would talk to her.

  Not even good ol’ Pauline, Queen Bee of Information.

  Judge Malloy was taking his sweet time considering Kimberly’s pro se motion to release Marissa’s birth mother’s medical records. She’d called his office until it had gotten to the point where his assistant instantly recognized her voice and cut her off before she got past her greeting.

  “Sweetheart, he’ll call you the minute, the very minute, he makes his decision.”

  But minutes turned into hours, and hours turned into days, and days...

  Martina had called her yesterday, as well. Had she found out anything more? Had the judge ruled on her motion? Did she want to schedule the appointment?

  No, no and maybe.

  She thought again of the money it would cost to go to Indiana, not counting the medical expenses, which were higher there because the clinic and the doctor weren’t in-network with her insurance. She’d even spent a few precious hours arguing with the insurance company, begging them to give her a waiver.

  No, they said in their most official and final tone; Marissa had several in-network hem/oncs available to her. The second opinion wasn’t medically necessary, in their view, and they would not waive the out-of-network fee.

  They cheerfully added that she was always free to use any doctor of her choice—it would simply not be as “cost effective.”

  Maybe it was time to rip herself and Marissa from this warm cocoon and admit defeat. It was as plain as the nose on her face, and she might as well face facts and just deal with it.

  Kimberly was never going to win over the insurance company. She was never going to find out what was wrong with Marissa by sticking with the doctors they’d already seen. She was never going to convince Daniel to tell her what he knew...and nobody else would tell her anything until the judge agreed to let her access those files.

  The judge. Who, it turned out, was a dear old family friend and practically a surrogate father to Daniel after his dad had died in that fire.

  No wonder he was taking his sweet time.

  Frustration. It ate at the soul sometimes.

  Through the wall, she heard thumps and bumps as Marissa pulled on riding boots, shin guards and her helmet in preparation for her evening riding lesson. Kimberly’s stomach tightened. Was she making a mistake? Had she caved to guilt when she should have stood strong?

  But Daniel had been as good as his word. He and Maegan had picked a gentle gray mare that Maegan used for her least able clients. The riding lessons took place only after Daniel got home from the station, and didn’t take place at all if he had to work late—which was more frequent than Kimberly would have liked, she hated to confess.

  She enjoyed having him across the table from her. Liked seeing the connection between him and Marissa. Appreciated knowing there was someone else out there who cared about Marissa’s well-being. She’d ginned up the courage to watch one lesson from afar, without Marissa or Daniel or Maegan knowing. Daniel had hovered by Marissa’s side, as close and as careful as Kimberly would have been. And yet Marissa’s face had been wreathed in smiles, her self-confidence overflowing. She’d been attentive to what Maegan told her to do.

  She hadn’t seemed the least bit afraid. Kimberly, on the other hand, had been petrified.

  Ma had stood by Kimberly’s side and held her hand as they leaned against the back fence looking down into the hollow where Maegan kept her corral. Ma hadn’t said a word, not an I-told-you-so or it-will-get-better or any other mealymouthed platitude. As they’d turned to walk to the house, Kimberly asked, “How’d you know not to say anything?”

  Ma exhaled. “My older sister. She stood with me on my back porch the first day Daniel went to work with the fire department. She knew I was in a stark-raving panic, because it hadn’t been that many months since she’d been right there beside me in the Augusta burn unit. With Daniel’s dad. Oh, my. That was a hard day, seeing Daniel in that uniform, knowing he could be killed like his dad. Later, when Rob and Andrew followed their big brother, she stood with me again. And while she was alive—I lost her last year, you know—every big structure fire the boys were in, she’d stand with me, hold my hand. And just be there. That’s what you need. Someone to climb down in that hole with you and be willing to be there.”

  “Oh, Ma! Can I keep you? Will you adopt me?” Kimberly joked.

  The teasing question didn’t make Ma smile as Kimberly had intended. She stopped, turned to Kimberly and squeezed the hand that she still held. “I’d be proud to call you my daughter. I only hope I have the chance.”

  Ma refused to explain her cryptic comment, but Kimberly decided to accept it as a deep compliment.

  Now, in the fading pinkish light of yet another day gone with no further clue as to who Marissa’s birth mother was, Kimberly was left fingering the gold baby bracelet.

  “Who are you?” she whispered to the bracelet as if it was the girl herself. “Where are you? You loved her enough to give her this, to have this made, so that she would always know the name you wanted her to have. I am absolutely, pulverizingly certain that if you knew how much we needed you right now, you’d come forward. If only Daniel would give us that chance.”

  The tiny bracelet barely fit over three of Kimberly’s fingers. She recalled slipping it on Marissa’s wrist when she was still a baby, and it had seemed big and clunky back then.

  Now the links so deftly wrought in gold seemed incredibly delicate, the ID plate polished to a bright shine except for the carefully engraved name. A tiny tag at the bracelet’s catch proclaimed it twenty-four-karat gold.

  Funny how Kimberly had never noticed that, but then she seldom took out the bracelet, and she’d always assumed it was gold electroplate.

  But no. It was pure twenty-four-karat gold. She hefted the tiny wristlet, estimated its weight as at least an ounce despite its small size. In today’s market, an ounce of gold was worth nearly a thousand dollars.

  How would a sixteen-year-old girl afford that?

  The thought came like a lightning bolt out of the blue. With quick, trembling fingertips, she tapped a query into her phone’s browser: the price of gold in 2003.

  The answer popped up promptly.

  Three hundred sixty-three dollars was the average price.

  Whoa. Even if it wasn’t a thousand bucks, i
t was nearly four hundred. Still a pretty penny for a teenager to get hold of. How had Marissa’s birth mother done it?

  Maybe the better question, she thought with another flash of insight, is where?

  * * *

  ONCE MARISSA HAD heard that jewelry stores were on Kimberly’s list, wild horses—or even Maegan’s old gray mare—couldn’t keep her on the farm the next morning.

  “I love jewelry, Mom! You know I do! And this is my bracelet after all! But I don’t understand...why couldn’t I mention it to Daniel? He might have known some of the jewelers in town.”

  Exactly, thought Kimberly. For once I don’t want Daniel to have a head start and talk to the people I need information from.

  The first jewelry store was a chain that hadn’t even been open in 2003. But they had helpfully directed her to a downtown jeweler who’d “been in business forever,” the clerk had said.

  Kimberly felt as though she’d stepped back in time as she pushed through a slightly grimy door with faded metallic cursive proclaiming it to be Sullivan’s Fine Jewelry.

  A small bell jangled, echoing across the deserted store. The dim interior housed a U shape of glass display cases filled with twinkling gold and silver and diamonds. The right side was a trifle shorter to allow for a linen-covered table loaded down with various china plates. A closer look revealed discreet embossed cards declaring that various happy couples had chosen that particular pattern of formal china and flatware.

  With a leap of her heart, Kimberly realized that she’d also given up simple joys like picking out china and flatware when she’d decided against marriage.

  It had seemed infinitely sensible. She didn’t need a man to have a baby, not when the state was so eager to have foster parents that they would accept single women into the program. Back then, she’d been jaded and cynical about men—the only ones she’d known were the trash her mother had dragged home from bars and the callow college guys who had their minds on the short-term physical, not the long-term emotional aspects of a relationship.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to have it all? she thought now.

  “Hey, look, Mom! Here are some bracelets kind of like mine!”

  Marissa’s excitement pulled her back from her musing, one that she was ashamed to admit had Daniel lurking at the edges.

  “You’re right,” Kimberly agreed, coming closer to the slightly dusty revolving display case. The glass case creaked when she turned it to see all of the bracelets and tiny baby necklaces. Yes, the bracelet could well have come from here.

  A white-haired old man hobbled out on a quad-based walking stick, a watchmaker’s glass pushed up on his forehead. “How do you do. I’m Hiram Sullivan. Can I interest you in one of our baby bracelets or necklaces? I do free engraving with every purchase. That’s eighteen-karat gold that you’re looking at right there, mind you, but if you’d like something less expensive, I could show you our sterling silver. It’s quite appropriate.”

  Kimberly noticed the worn carpet beneath her feet. The entire jewelry store looked more than a little down at the heels, but in a genteel, can’t-be-bothered sort of fashion. It felt more inviting to her than the slick newer store in the mall.

  “We are interested in your baby bracelets, but not to buy one. We’re hoping you sold this one about a dozen years ago.” She briefly explained why they were interested as she handed over Marissa’s baby bracelet.

  The man promptly flipped down his watchmaker’s glass and carefully inspected the bracelet. “Ahem.” He looked up at her, the one eye strangely frog-like through the magnifying lens. “My eyes aren’t what they once were. Do you mind if I take this back to the light? You can step back with me if you’d like.”

  With that, he flipped up a section of the counter and opened a half door. Mr. Sullivan gestured for them to follow him. “Ordinarily I don’t let folks I don’t know back here...but you look like the honest type. If you cosh me over the head, be gentle,” he said with a wink.

  If the front of the store was slightly dusty, the back was a mishmash of organized chaos. Broken watch pieces were strung out over velvet-covered workbenches, while tiny jeweler’s tools and soldering equipment took up every nook and cranny of the custom-built racks. Clear plastic chests, the drawers crammed with tiny parts, stood dusty but at the ready. A vise held a man’s wedding band in worn, scratched gold.

  Now Mr. Sullivan pulled a goosenecked work light over another, bigger magnifying glass on its own stand and stuck the bracelet under it for his inspection. Kimberly and Marissa waited as he uttered a series of “ehs” and “hmms” and “tsks.”

  Then he held the bracelet up and nodded. “That’s my work, yes, ma’am. I’d recognize that engraving anywhere. That’s my own font. But that chain needs repairing. If you’d like, I can fix it for you. Won’t take two seconds.”

  “Well, sure,” she said. Maybe if she paid for a minor repair, he’d be more inclined to hunt up the information from the original sale. The shop’s dusty, keep-everything-forever appearance made it a good bet, at least to Kimberly’s way of thinking, that he still had a record of the sale.

  With a deft twist of a pair of needle-nose pliers, the old man adjusted the gold links. He handed the bracelet back to Kimberly. “That’s the problem with twenty-four-karat gold,” the jeweler observed. “It’s soft, so links can get stretched. If that catch chain had worked itself loose when the baby wore it, then, oops—that’s a thousand dollars gone in today’s market.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Pshaw. T’weren’t nothing. On the house.”

  “Are you sure? I’d be glad to pay for it,” Kimberly pressed.

  Hiram Sullivan shook his head. “Maybe one day you’ll come back and buy a graduation gift for your daughter here. I sell a lovely string of pearls that would be perfect for her.”

  Kimberly had to admire the man’s sales approach. Yes, she’d rather buy pearls from him than any of the Atlanta shops she’d ever been in.

  “Now what can I tell you about this here bracelet?” he asked.

  “Well...I know it was bought between July 4, 2003, and...hmm...August 15, 2003, because I was already teaching my classes when they called to let me know about Marissa,” Kimberly said. “And the social worker had the bracelet then. Do you... Is it possible that you still have bills of sale or receipts that far back?”

  Hiram Sullivan threw back his full head of white hair and laughed, his jeweler’s glass shaking along with his hint of a potbelly that stretched his starched white dress shirt. He fingered his bow tie. “Ma’am, my wife fusses at me because I still keep the very first receipt from our very first day—and that was in 1964. I only wish she was here today—I’ve always told her someday my pack-rat habits would come in handy. Pity she had to go get her hair fixed.”

  He hobbled along to a row of boxes that looked extremely similar to an old-fashioned library card catalog. “Back before the chain stores—and all their cheap imported jewelry—it was important for us to keep detailed records, because we had repeat customers and they’d bring the pieces in for repair. My wife came up with our system. Smart woman, she is. Like I said, pity she isn’t here.”

  He allowed gnarled fingers to glide over the stacks of drawers. A label in neat handwritten script stated 1964, with each subsequent column moving closer to the current date. She noticed that the script for 2015’s label was a good deal shakier than the earlier ones.

  “Ah, here we are. July, 2003, you say?” He didn’t look up as his fingers began painfully flipping through the index cards. “Engagement ring—sad, that couple is divorced now, didn’t even make it two years. Golden anniversary ring...lasted ten more years, and then died twenty-four hours apart, those folks did. Good people.” He muttered his way through a remarkable history of the people who had bought items twelve years ago. Kimberly held her breath, hoping he would be equally as informative about the person who had purchased that baby bracelet.

  She could imagine the day: a strawberry blond girl, feat
ures strangely obscured in Kimberly’s mind’s eye, scurrying into that careworn jewelry shop, hoping to be unnoticed, exchanging a messy wad of bills she had saved up over time for the baby bracelet. Maybe Hiram Sullivan would know her parents or even the girl herself.

  Girl. No, she’d be a woman now, twenty-eight. Had she gone to college? Gotten married? Did Marissa have a baby sister or brother out there somewhere?

  “Ah-ha! Here it is! And I have the satisfaction of telling my wife ‘I told you so.’ I don’t often get that pleasure, I might add.” There was a twinkle in the old jeweler’s eye.

  Kimberly’s heart thumped madly in her chest. She couldn’t help but glance Marissa’s way, and saw that she, too, was breathless with excitement.

  Hiram Sullivan put the card down and stared at it for a moment. “And that explains why I don’t remember selling the bracelet,” he murmured, tapping the card. “Had me worried, when I couldn’t recall it. Thought my memory was slipping, but no, my wife sold it, and the buyer left it to be engraved. Came by and picked it up a week later. You were right, my dear. It was bought in late July of 2003.”

  “By a girl? A teenage girl?” Kimberly prompted.

  He frowned. “Why, no.” He glanced again at the card and read it once more. “No, a young man, and one from a fine local family. Pity about his father. He was an excellent fire chief. Very sad the way he got killed in that warehouse fire. And then it turned out to be arson. They never caught the scoundrel who started it.”

  Kimberly’s mouth went dry. “Wh-who?” she stuttered.

  Hiram Sullivan handed her the card. There it was, in a feminine script in faded blue ink.

  The buyer was listed as one Daniel Monroe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DANIEL SCANNED THE meeting’s brief agenda. “Well, guys, that’s all I have. I tried to keep things short, because you know how I hate meetings. What about y’all? Anything on your mind?” He sent his gaze around the semicircle assembled in his cramped office: his fire captains and his brother Rob, the county’s arson investigator.

  A captain from another fire station shifted in his chair. “My guys are getting pretty restless, Dan...I mean, Chief.” He cast an apologetic grin toward Daniel. “All we’ve had for three weeks now have been pretty much minor calls, and not really much before that. Nothing big. You know what a superstitious lot firefighters can be.”