Virtually Harmless

by P. D. Workman

  “If they thought something might have happened to her, do you think they’d talk to you?”

  “Depends on what they thought happened. Did she leave town? Have medical problems following the delivery? If she hiked in and out of the hills after giving birth, she could be pretty sick. But she hasn’t shown up in the morgue or hospital.”

  “Well, that’s good…”

  “Or is she holed up somewhere with a boyfriend? Just staying out of sight while she recovers and waits for the commotion to die down?”

  Micah nodded to herself. “Okay. Well, let me know if you find anything… I appreciate you keeping me informed.”

  “Sure.”

  Micah said goodbye and tapped the phone to end the call. She swiveled her chair toward the door, deciding it was time to get her morning coffee, and found VP Amy Bradshaw standing in the doorway. Micah half-rose out of her seat, then stopped, trying to analyze Amy’s expression and body language. She was not happy about something.

  “Uh… Amy. I didn’t know you were there.”

  “Clearly not.” Amy’s voice was tight. “What are you doing?”

  “I was… talking to the deputy on the Mama Doe case. The mother of the abandoned baby. We ran her DNA and I did composites—”

  “Why would you be talking to him?”

  “Just seeing what his progress was on finding her. We have a name to go with the face, and it’s a pretty good match, but he’ll need to get a direct DNA comparison to verify—”

  “That’s a police matter.”

  “Well, yes.” Obviously. That’s why she had been talking to the police about it.

  “You were already told, were you not, that your involvement with this file has ceased. You do not need to do anything else at this point. Let the police do their part.”

  “I told Aaron… until there is a DNA match, the file is still open. I frequently add new pictures to a file down the line. Tweak the hairstyle or accessories, take into account any new information that the police have discovered. There are often things that can be done to keep it fresh, make it more likely that people will see and recognize the subject.”

  “Which you do not need to do. You’ve already found the mother. As I said, it’s a police matter now.”

  Micah hesitated. She was getting the feeling that it didn’t matter what she said, they were going to keep hammering away at her, telling her to spend her time on the active cases, until she finally broke down and agreed.

  Was it a budget thing? They had probably already lost money on the file, testing out new technology. But that would bring them more business in the future. They would make it back easily. But they didn’t want Micah spending more time on it when it should be spent elsewhere. What was the point in drawing more pictures when they probably already had the subject? Or talking to the police?

  “Sorry,” she said finally. “I won’t make any more calls on company time.”

  Amy rolled her eyes and shook her head. “It’s not just company time. You’ve been told to stay off the case.”

  Her final words were slow and deliberate like each one had a period after it.

  “Okay.”

  Amy’s face relaxed. Her shoulders eased down. “Thank you, Micah. I knew we could count on you.”

  Micah nodded jerkily. She wasn’t a liar, but it was clear that no other answer would be accepted. She would have to think about whether she was willing to let the Sweetgrass Hills file go cold. She prided herself on being an honest and forthright person, and the pretense disturbed her.

  Amy nodded toward Micah’s inbox. “Looks like you’ve got plenty to do to keep yourself busy,” she observed.

  “Yes. I’ll get to work on the next file.”

  Amy turned and walked away from the door. Micah got up to get that coffee. She needed it more than ever. As she made her way across the lab, Chastity saw her and made a motion to attract her attention.

  “I’ve got that Lazarus for you, Micah.”

  Micah gave a quick shake of her head. Amy turned to look at Chastity.

  “A Lazarus?” she repeated. “What’s that?”

  Chastity looked at Micah. She looked back at the vice president. “It’s a constructed DNA profile. Let’s say that you wanted to know your grandfather’s DNA profile so that you could find out more about his genealogy and heritage. But he’s dead, and no one is going to exhume the body to get a DNA sample for genealogical research.”

  Amy nodded, interested.

  “So instead, you get the DNA of everyone you can who is related to him. His children and grandchildren, brothers and sisters, whoever you can get a DNA sample from. And then the computer generates as much of his DNA profile as it can based on those relationships.”

  “You can do that?”

  “It’s not perfect, and you won’t get his full genome, but you can get pretty close if you have a bunch of relatives. You know, if all of his kids have blue eyes, you know that he had blue eyes. You’re ‘resurrecting’ his DNA. Hence the name, Lazarus.”

  “Fascinating.” Chastity blinked a few times. She glanced back at Micah one more time, still a few feet away, waiting for the VP to get out of the way so that she could feel free to get her cup of coffee. Amy gave a forced smile and moved on.

  Micah went into the kitchenette without looking at Chastity. She waited a few minutes longer than was necessary for the machine to brew her one cup of coffee, breathing slowly and trying to achieve a meditative state. Once calm, she walked back into the lab. She checked out the position of Aaron Kwong’s door—shut, which meant that he was out—made sure that Amy Bradshaw was really gone and there was no one else from the upper echelons around, then went to Chastity’s lab bench.

  “What’s going on?” Chastity demanded. “You’re as white as a sheet. Is Bradshaw getting on your case?”

  “She and Aaron have told me to close the Mama Doe file. I was afraid…”

  “That I’d say the Lazarus was Papa Doe.”

  “Yeah. How did you catalog it?”

  “It’s on the Sweetgrass Doe file.”

  “Can you move it? Open a new file for me. Call it… Baby Thompson-Smith.” Micah borrowed the name from her friend Sara, mentally apologizing to her.

  Chastity looked uncertain about the fiction. She didn’t like it.

  “If they think I’m still working on the file after they asked me to stop, I’m going to be in trouble,” Micah told her. “But I don’t want to delete the profile. We might need it in the future. I’ll hang on to it, see what happens.”

  “Baby Thompson-Smith?” Chastity repeated, her eyes slits as she considered it. “Who’s that?”

  “It’s no one. I just made it up.”

  Chastity turned to her computer. Micah pretended to be blowing on her coffee, puffing out her breath and trying to relax. She wasn’t sure why everyone was so uptight about the Sweetgrass file, but she didn’t intend to attract any more negative attention.

  Chapter Twenty

  Micah tried to psych herself up for dinner at her parents’ house. She always felt guilty about not wanting to visit. But they had little in common and she often ended up feeling stressed out and awkward, even when she knew they were all trying to make it nice.

  She did not doubt that Marianna and Cole loved her. The way they behaved toward her confirmed this fact. She was more ambivalent about her feelings toward them. She was pretty sure that what she felt was love or at least strong loyalty, but she felt like it was too lukewarm. Micah had always had problems with relationships and couldn’t help wondering what was wrong with her.

  It had been a relief when she had found out some of the details of her origins and realized that she hadn’t been born to them and didn’t have a genetic connection. At least there was some explanation for why she felt like a foreigner in her own family. But as she got older, her difficulty with them became more of a puzzle than ever. She learned about parent-child bonding and the types of events that could disrupt it, and couldn’t find an exp
lanation for her awkwardness with her parents. She had gone to them as an infant, a newborn, and had never had a significant separation or trauma. It was the ideal situation, a newborn put into a loving family of the same ethnicity, no neglect or learning disabilities, no disruptions in her childhood. So why?

  She didn’t want to leave the cat alone. She should have been home with her. But she knew that was a symptom of her desire to stay home, rather than a cause. The cat was fine when she went to work every day. Meow was happy to see Micah when she got home, but Micah could see no signs that she experienced any distress with Micah leaving her for a few hours. She didn’t make any big messes, refuse to use her litterbox, or climb the curtains. Micah would come home and find Meow sleeping peacefully in her corner of the couch. They would have some cuddles, eat, and the cat would snooze on her lap while she did desk work or would tempt her to play for a few minutes with a toy mouse, ball, or the furry thing on the end of a fishing-pole type toy. After playing rambunctiously for a while, Meow would once again lie down for a nap and Micah would get back to drawing or studying.

  Micah sighed, said goodbye to the kitten, and left, locking the door behind her.

  The street was already dark. She should have headed out a little earlier, but Marianna would never criticize Micah for being late. She would just be happy that Micah had shown up. Cole might glower, but he too would let it go. Micah had begged off too many times before, saying she had work, wasn’t feeling well, or was going to bed early. Or she had gotten wrapped up in a project and forgotten she was supposed to be going anywhere until one of them called her. She would never be late or forget about an appointment with someone else, but her parents… that was a different story.

  “Oh, you’re here,” Marianna said cheerfully, giving Micah a big smile. “We were just about to eat. Let me take your coat,” Marianna wrangled it off of Micah, “and tell me how your week has been!”

  Micah let herself be swept into the dining room. Cole was seated at the table and he raised his hand in a brief wave. “’Bout time you got here.”

  Micah nodded, smiling wryly at Marianna’s flustered admonition, telling Cole to behave himself. She looked over the offerings on the table, decided it was better than usual, and sat down.

  “Sorry, I should have left earlier. I hope you didn’t wait.”

  “We’ve learned not to wait for you,” Cole told her.

  “Good.”

  “I never know whether to call you or not,” Marianna contributed. “I don’t want to distract you if you’re on the road, especially if it’s icy…” She looked worriedly toward the window, where they could see gentle flakes of snow coming down in the beam of the streetlight. “But I wouldn’t want you to miss out just because you lost track of time!”

  “You could send me a text. I don’t read them while I’m driving, but if I’m working, I’ll check.”

  Marianna wrinkled her nose. “Texting…”

  “Then get Dad to text,” Micah told her. Cole was a little more comfortable with technology than Marianna was and Micah knew he texted with some of his old work buddies.

  They sat down to eat. Marianna said grace. As she was the only member of the family who cared about it, she was the permanent designee.

  “So, how has work been?” Marianna inquired, digging into her mashed potatoes with vigor.

  Micah looked up, assessing their expressions. “Been putting a lot of work into the Sweetgrass Doe case. But I don’t think you want to hear about that.”

  The two of them exchanged glances.

  “It’s not that we don’t want to hear about it,” Marianna waffled. “It’s just that…”

  “It makes you uncomfortable,” Micah summarized. “You’re afraid that one day I’m going to track down my biological family.”

  There was silence around the table. The wall clock ticked loudly. Cole’s fork scraped his plate, but Marianna had stopped eating.

  “You must have thought about it,” Cole said finally. “You work all the time with DNA, matching people up with faces and helping the police to figure out their identities. With the skills that you have, it wouldn’t be hard for you to find her. Your birth mom.”

  “That depends on a lot of things,” Micah temporized. “There are a lot of variables. If her DNA isn’t in the system, she’s moved away from the area, changed her name and doesn’t have an electronic footprint, it would be a lot harder.” But not necessarily impossible. Micah did possess a lot of skills. “But I’m not searching for her.”

  “But you must want to know,” Marianna said. “They say that adopted children always want to know where they came from, where they inherited different traits. Is it because of us? You think we would be upset by it?”

  Micah raised one eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “You make it sound like we’re jealous people. Like… we want to keep you for ourselves.”

  Micah shrugged. “Isn’t that natural? Don’t all parents want to keep their children safe? Keep them from possible pain?”

  “We’re not jealous,” Marianna mumbled, putting a big bite of potatoes in her mouth and turning away from Micah slightly as she chewed.

  “I know you’re not,” Micah agreed. “And I’ve never tried to find her. She abandoned me. She obviously didn’t want me to be a part of her life.”

  “It was just too much for her,” Marianna said in an over-emotional voice. “Taking care of a baby is not that easy. And knowing that you need to provide for that child for twenty years… be there for the rest of her life… that’s just too much for some people. We don’t know why she decided to give you up, because she did it the way she did, but if you listen to people’s stories about why they made the choice to give a child up for adoption… it’s never an easy choice for them.”

  Micah thought about Trisha Madro. Was Trisha Sweetie’s mother? And if so, where had she gone? How hard had it been for her to leave her baby exposed in the mountains and to run away?

  “Abandonment isn’t the same as adoption,” she told her parents. “Someone who gives her child up for adoption, at least she’s made a plan. She does what she can to make sure that the child is taken care of. Someone who abandons her child… that’s different. She doesn’t know what could happen. She doesn’t care if the baby dies. Women who leave their babies in toilets, or garbage cans, or in the mountains, exposed to cold and predators, that’s not a loving choice. That’s the opposite of taking responsibility for your child’s welfare. That’s just being selfish.”

  “You never know what’s in someone else’s heart,” Marianna cautioned. “When you make judgments about someone else like that—”

  “Dad agrees with me, don’t you, Dad?”

  Cole shifted uncomfortably, looking from his daughter to his wife and then staring down at his plate.

  “I wouldn’t say that all mothers who abandon their children are selfish,” he said slowly. “Some of them are mentally ill.”

  “Oh, and that excuses it.”

  Even as Micah said it, she felt a pain in her chest for Trisha Madro and the sad life she had lived. If Trisha’s traumatic upbringing made her unable to bond with a child, then was it her fault she acted in her own self-interest instead of the infant’s? She hadn’t chosen to be raised the way she had been. Who knew what was in her heart? What had she been thinking when she left her baby alone in the cold, dark night?

  “Maybe we should change the subject,” Marianna said worriedly. “This isn’t helping anyone.”

  Micah shrugged dramatically. “That’s what I’ve been working on this week. You asked. But now… they want me to stop working the file, so I guess I’m on to other things.”

  “Who doesn’t want you to work on it?” Cole asked, eyebrows moving down in a scowl.

  “The powers-that-be. I’ve been told to close the file and not waste my time on it. Even though that’s not the way it works. It’s like a police file. You don’t close it until it’s solved.”

  “Then… you should
keep working on it.”

  Micah smiled in appreciation at the gruff retired cop’s viewpoint. “I will,” she agreed. “I just won’t tell anyone.”

  ❋

  The awkward meal over, a couple of hours chalked up to time with her parents, meeting her quota of parent time for the week, Micah said her goodbyes and headed home.

  She had never talked openly with her parents about her biological mother, about the possibility of tracking her down either through online registries or DNA. It had always been a forbidden topic, even with her choice of work.

  “Families,” Micah muttered to herself, shaking her head.

  She parked her car and got out, heading up the sidewalk to the front door. She got halfway up the walkway and stopped.

  It had been snowing since she had left, just lightly, and her sidewalk was covered with snow.

  Only it wasn’t even.

  There was a clear line of footprints running from the sidewalk to the front door. They had been partially filled in, but were still discernible.

  Just one set of footprints. Not someone delivering flyers, walking up her sidewalk and then back again.

  She stood there for a few minutes, staring at her house. She looked at the door. It was firmly shut. The windows. No stirring of the curtains. No shadows that shouldn’t have been there.

  No sign that the house might be occupied, except for that line of footprints.

  Micah shivered. She was bundled warmly against the cold front, but the goosebumps that crept up her spine were not from the cold.

  She walked back to her car, got in, and locked the doors.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Micah stayed in her car, engine running and heater blowing until the police got there. She got out, face warm with embarrassment, and stared at the first cop’s feet, unable to meet his eyes.

  “I don’t want to be accused of making a frivolous call,” she said. “I don’t normally panic over nothing. But you can see… there are footprints going up to my house, and none coming back. I’m afraid… someone might be in there.”