Butchers Hill (19 page)

"Really? Did things like that
truly happen to your ancestors?"

Tess shrugged. "We only have
Gramma Weinstein's word for it and she's never been
above a little embroidery. Especially if it's in the cause of
trying to get one of her grandchildren to eat liver."

"But you're not really
Jewish, right? Your last name is Monaghan."

"Judaism comes down through your
mother."

"Is that how it works?"
Jackie seemed genuinely curious. "I mean, if your father was
Weinstein and your mother was Monaghan, you wouldn't be
Jewish?"

"I'd be exactly what I
am, a nonbelieving mongrel, but I wouldn't qualify for
citizenship in Israel." Tess pulled her lips back in a
gum-baring grin. "Any seeds?"

"One, up near the pointy tooth.
No, other side. You got it."

"Let's go meet Willa
Mott."

H. L. Mencken, never a loose man with a
compliment, had described Carroll County as one of the most beautiful
places in Maryland. In some undeveloped pockets, you could still see
the soft hills and long, tapering views that had inspired him. The
older towns—Westminster, New Windsor, Union
Mills—had the nineteenth-century red brick houses, more like
the old German and Mennonite homesteads on the Pennsylvania side of the
Mason-Dixon line. It was a place out of a time. Then you rounded a
curve in the highway and found a seventies-ugly development hugging the
land like a family of jealous trolls, determined to keep anything
beautiful at bay.

Willa Mott lived in one of the oldest,
ugliest subdivisions south of Westminster. A faded sign in the front
yard advertised "Apple Orchard Daycare," but the
only tree Tess could see was an ailanthus that no one had tried to chop
down until it was too late. The bastard tree had struggled through a
crack near the driveway and was now a spindly twelve feet.

"The kids are watching a
video," Willa Mott said, opening the door before they were up
the walk. "So we have exactly eighty-eight minutes. Although
they sometimes like me to sing along with the hunchback."

It was hard to imagine Willa Mott singing,
or doing anything vaguely joyful. She looked just as Tess had imagined
her while listening to the taped testimony: a plain woman of little
distinction. She wore a denim skirt, polyester white blouse, and navy
cardigan. Her hair was a dull brown, her eyes a duller brown. The only
color in her face was her nose, red with a summer cold. She found a
tissue and blew the way children do, one side, then the other.

"Allergies," she said.
"The pollen count is 150 today."

"Is that high?" Tess
asked.

"Terribly. But I guess you
didn't come here to talk about my sinuses." She
squinted at Jackie. "I can't say as I remember you.
But I guess you've changed some, since back then. Do you
recognize me?"

"I think so. Maybe." But
Tess could tell Jackie was lying, especially to herself. In her
yearning, she was prone to say what she hoped was the right answer,
even if it wasn't true.

"Jackie came to the agency
thirteen years ago, under the name of Susan King. She would have been
just a teenager then, not much more than eighteen. Does that
help?"

"Not really. We saw a lot of young
girls. Gosh, is that real gold?"

Willa was looking at Jackie's
hands, clenched almost as if she was praying, and the watch on her left
wrist. Ornate, with diamond chips encircling the face, it was an
unusual piece, but not, in Tess's opinion, so unusual as to
distract from the topic at hand.

"This? Yes, I suppose it
is."

"I like old things like
that," Willa said. "There's an antique
pin in a consignment shop, down in Sykesville. I've had my
eye on it and as soon as I get a little bit ahead, I think
I'm going to get it. I thought maybe with my tax refund
check, but that always seems to be spent before it comes,
doesn't it?"

Tess looked around the small split-level
house. Life as a daycare center was hard on any home—juice
stains along the baseboard, sticky handprints on the wall, grimy
traffic patterns worn into the carpet were to be expected. But even
without the toddlers' decorating touches, Willa
Mott's house would have looked tired and run-down. Judging by
the noise, there were five, maybe six kids in the next room. Willa Mott
pulled down six hundred, maybe nine hundred dollars a week. Tess
didn't know exactly what daycare cost, come to think of it.
Not subsistence wages, but not a lot of money left over for antique
pins.

"When I called yesterday, Ms.
Mott, did I mention that it's customary to pay people for
their time? I mean, I understand we're keeping you from your
work and I wouldn't want you to think we didn't
value that."

"Miss Mott," Willa
corrected with a nervous laugh. "And goodness, I
don't think I could take money, not when I can't be
much help. Although—" she studied
Jackie's face. "You're thinner than you
were, aren't you? That's why I didn't
recognize you at first. You're so much thinner."

"Of course I'm
thinner," Jackie said. "I was pregnant when I came
to the agency."

"No, it's not just that.
Your face was fuller then, and you had big glasses, which you kind of
hid behind. You looked a lot older than you were, didn't you?
Yes, it's coming back to me now."

Tess remembered the photo that Jackie had
brought her when she thought Jackie was Mary Browne and the photo was
her missing sister, Susan King. Willa was right, or making an uncanny
guess. Jackie had been heavier as a teenager, and the weight had made
her look older than she was.

There was a loud thud in the next room, then
a childish wail. "Miss Mott! Miss Mott—Brady says I
look like Quasimodo."

"Chrissie looks like Quasimodo.
Chrissie looks like Quasimodo." All the children were
chanting it now.

"Excuse me," Willa said.
"I think I'll go give them some juice packs I have
in the big freezer, out in the garage. That might help to keep them
quiet."

As soon as she was gone, Jackie poked Tess
in the calf with the toe of her high heel.

"Give her some money."

"She said she didn't
want anything."

"She's full of shit.
Everyone needs money. You stopped at a cash machine on the way out
here. It's all part of my tab, right? Give her some
money."

Willa came back from the garage and passed
through the room with her arms full of juice packs. Distributing them
caused much whining and shouting, then another brief ruckus about who
had the best flavor. She ran back to the garage for another grape one.
Almost ten minutes had passed by the time she returned to the living
room.

"Yes, now I'm
remembering," Willa said, as if there had been no break in
their conversation at all. "There was something about the
father of your baby, too, something unusual there, but I
can't remember quite what it was."

"The father of my baby's
not important," Jackie said. "I know who the father
was. I want to know who adopted my girl."

Willa furrowed her brow and pressed her lips
together, making a great show of thinking hard. Tess half-expected her
to hunch forward, chin in hand, as if sculpted by Rodin. Eventually,
she did just that. Sighing, Tess pulled her billfold from her knapsack
and dropped a twenty-dollar bill in Willa Mott's lap.

"Oh goodness. I don't
want you to think I'm doing this for money." Tess
dropped another twenty, then a ten in Willa's lap. She
dropped her business card, while she was at it. Willa waited a beat, in
case any more bills were going to fall, then folded the ones that were
there and put them in the pocket of her cardigan, along with
Tess's business card. Preferably not the pocket with the
wadded-up tissues, Tess hoped, although she really didn't
care if Willa Mott ended up blowing her nose on a twenty.

"Really, I don't know so
very much. You had a baby girl, right? I think the adoptive father may
have been an executive at one of those plants out in Hunt Valley. Could
have been McCormick, Noxell, the quarry. One of those places. I
remember he made real good money. You had to make good money to adopt a
baby from us, it cost more'n ten thousand dollars. His wife
was a schoolteacher, but she was going to stay home when they got a
baby. The name was kinda common. Johnson or Johnston. They wanted a
girl, and they were going to name her Caitlin."

Jackie looked skeptical. "How did
you remember all that, all of a sudden?"

"Oh, I remember all the girls who
came through, to tell you the truth. It just takes a little time to jog
my memory is all, to hook up the face with the circumstances."

"If I took off this watch and
handed it to you, would you remember anything more?"

Willa Mott looked truly affronted.
"I'm grateful you compensated me for my time today,
but the money didn't have anything to do with my remembering.
It took me a minute there to connect you with the way you used to be,
that's all. You know, when you were fat."

"I was
not
fat." Jackie's teeth were gritted.

A child's shriek. "Miss
Mott! Miss Mott! Cal keeps poking me with his shoe."

"Am not," a
boy's voice retorted.

"You are! You are!"

"I guess I better go check on my
little ones," Willa Mott said. "Nice to meet you
both. If I remember anything else, I promise I'll call you
first thing. I've got your card right here."

With that, Willa Mott waded into the melee
in the next room, picking up the offending Cal by the collar of his
T-shirt the way a mother cat might grab her kitten by the scruff of the
neck, then turning off the video with the toe of her navy blue Ked.

"No more
Hunchback
,
until everyone in this room starts behaving," she proclaimed.
"This means all of you—Cal, Brady, Bobby, Chrissie,
and, yes you, Raffi."

Tess suppressed a laugh.

"What's so
funny?" Jackie asked. She seemed angry that Tess could find
anything to laugh at.

"Maybe it's a
coincidence, but every kid in the Apple Orchard Daycare Center is named
for someone in the Orioles' starting lineup from the year Cal
broke Lou Gehrig's record. Cal Ripken, Chris Hoiles, Rafael
Palmiero, Brady Anderson. It's got to be—that would
have been just about the time they would have been conceived."

"White folks are crazy,"
Jackie said with a snort.

They were almost back in Butchers Hill
before Jackie spoke again.

"You paid her too much."

"Excuse me?"

"That wasn't worth fifty
dollars, what she told us. You paid her too much and she thinks
we're suckers now. I bet she knows more than she's
telling."

"First you tell me to pay her,
then you say I paid her too much. But she did remember what you looked
like. That seemed genuine enough. I saw the photo, remember. You were
a…big girl. What was that stuff about the baby's
father, anyway?"

"Nothing." Jackie was
gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles looked like they
might pop out of her hands.

"No secrets, Jackie, and no lies.
That was our deal, remember?"

"Okay." Small sigh.
"My baby's father was white." Then,
before Tess could react in any way, "Don't look so
surprised."

"I'm not looking
anything. But you told me he was a boy from the neighborhood."

"There were white boys in my
neighborhood."

"I know. I know
Pigtown
."
Tess liked seeing Jackie squirm at the mention of her inelegantly named
old neighborhood. "I wonder why Willa thought that particular
detail was so memorable, though. The agency she worked for definitely
did biracial adoptions. I know that much from listening to the taped
testimony."

"What do you expect from some
Carroll County cracker? Forget about her. Where do we go from
here?"

"Got me. Looking for someone named
Caitlin Johnson-Johnston in metropolitan Baltimore is definitely
needle-in-the-haystack time."

"Well,
I
have an idea. Can you work tonight?"

"Sure."

"Meet me at your office at seven
tonight, and I'll show you how to do what I do for a living.
I'll even bring dinner."

"What are we going to
do?"

"I'll tell you when we
get to your office. You have one phone line, right? We can use my cell
phone, I guess. Not the cheapest way to go, but it will take too long
without it."

When they pulled up in front of
Tess's office, Martin Tull was waiting in his unmarked car.

"Gotta talk to you," he
said without preamble, then looked at Jackie behind the wheel of her
white Lexus. "Privately."

"Now?"

"Right now."

"That's okay,"
Jackie said, looking from Tull to Tess. "I'll see
you here at seven. It won't take more than fifteen minutes to
explain my idea to you."

Esskay jumped down from the sofa, stretching
as if bowing toward Mecca, then began her ritualistic treat dance. Tull
usually asked if he could give Esskay her bone, but today he barely
seemed to notice her. Tess found a biscuit in the cookie jar, one of
the homemade ones from a South Baltimore bakery, threw it to the dog,
and put her gun back in the wall safe.

"I thought you didn't
like to carry your weapon."

"Tyner felt I should, because of
the break-in."

"That's right, you had a
break-in over the weekend. Police report said nothing was taken,
though."

Tess decided not to ask why a homicide
detective knew about her little burglary. She hadn't filed a
police report, but the landlord might have. She hoped Tull
wasn't getting protective on her. That was all she needed,
yet another person fretting over her safety and well-being.
"You want a Coke? It's got caffeine at
least."

"Lots of bad things happening on
Butchers Hill these days. There was a fire in the neighborhood
yesterday afternoon," he said, ignoring her offer.
"Right around the corner from here."