GUNNED (7 page)

Annie and I got out of the car and made our way up the brick path to the front door. I rang the bell, but didn’t hear any sounds from within.

“There’s a car in the driveway.” Annie nodded at an older model Chevy.

I heard voices and followed the path around to the side of the garage. The voices were coming from the backyard, and we made our way along the side of the house to a spacious area.

“Hello,” I called out loudly as I came around the side. No need to sneak up on a man who owns a gun. Two people I assumed were the Jamisons were on their knees digging in flower beds. “I’m sorry to bother you. I rang the bell and then heard your voices back here.”

The man stood up and wiped his hands on his jeans.  He was tall and good looking with brown hair going gray. “That was me. I yelled at Shelley to toss me some tape to tie this vine up. Can I help you?”

“I’m Alex Harris and this is my friend Annie. We were just over at your daughter’s apartment and she told us about her visit with Mr. Spiegel.”

The Jamisons exchanged an odd look.

“You know who I’m talking about?” I asked.

“What exactly is your interest in our daughter?” an obviously cautious Mr. Jamison asked.

I gave a quick glance to the ground where he had his gardening tools and didn’t see anything resembling a gun.

Once again I told the entire story of how Sheldon Spiegel came to my office, how I had to identify his body, and how his wife showed up.

“So, you really have no interest at all about the outcome,” Mrs. Jamison said. She was exactly as Christine described.

“None at all. My only interest is why the man was killed. I don’t care about the DNA and who may or may not be the Spiegels’ biological child. My husband is also the detective on the case,” I quickly added because I had the feeling I was about to be asked to leave. “I’ve been helping him on this case, well, because of how Mr. Spiegel contacted me and then I identified him after they found his body. All I want to do is assure my assistant that Mr. Spiegel is not her father.”

Shelley and Jeff Jamison looked at each other again, clearly trying to gauge whether they should talk with me, which meant that they probably had a story to tell and I wanted to hear it.

Annie gave me an almost imperceptible smile. I hoped she was impressed with my deceiving skills rather than appalled at how easy it was for me to lie.

“Your daughter told us that you never spoke with Mr. Spiegel.”

Shelley stood up and brushed the dirt off her hands. “That’s not entirely true. He came here, shortly after talking with Christine. He tried to convince us that we needed to have a DNA test done. He said he was almost certain Christine was his daughter.”

“I told him to get the hell out,” Jeff Jamison said, his face turning red with anger. “I told him if he didn’t leave I would call the police. The man was acting crazy. He finally left and that was that.”

“Why didn’t you tell Christine that you spoke with Mr. Spiegel?” I asked the Jamisons.

Shelley heaved a big sigh. “Because we don’t want her to start asking questions. And then we saw on the news that he was murdered, so what was the point. Look,” she turned to her husband. “Ms. Harris found us and her husband is a police detective, which means he’s going to eventually turn up here. Maybe if we tell her everything,” she turned to me again. “Maybe, Ms. Harris, you can just tell your husband what we tell you and that will be it.”

I knew for a fact it didn’t work that way. Whatever I told John, he would most certainly have to check out for himself right after he told Annie and me to stay out of his investigation. But I wasn’t about to tell Shelley Jamison that.

“Of course. I’d be happy to relay whatever information you have to my husband,” I said with a warm smile. “And please, call me Alex.”

Annie and I followed the Jamisons into their modest home and settled in the living room on a worn, but very comfortable sofa covered in a floral slip cover.

“Coffee? Tea?” Shelley asked.

“I would love a tea,” I said. It was getting late and Annie and I still had not had any lunch.

Annie smiled up at Mrs. Jamison. “Yes, tea for me also.”

I asked to use the restroom and then joined Annie on the sofa while the Jamisons retreated to the kitchen. Annie turned to me.

“Is it true that you can just give the police information and they take your word?” she asked in a low voice, tinged with awe.

I shook my head. “No. I’m not telling John anything. He wouldn’t believe me anyway. The police will definitely show up here at some point, I just hope it’s not while we’re enjoying our tea. But sometimes you have to tell little white lies to get your foot in the door, so to speak.” At least that was the little white lie I told myself to justify telling little white lies to others.

“You’re very good at this,” Annie said. “I feel like we’re making some progress, and that these people definitely have some information that might help us.”

Shelley and Jeff Jamison came back into the room and placed our two tea mugs on the table along with a plate of coffee cake. Jeff went back to the kitchen and returned with mugs for Shelley and himself.

“Help yourself. I just made it this morning. By the way, I’m Shelley, and my husband is Jeff.”

I took a bite of cake, trying not to inhale it, as I was so hungry. Breakfast with Shirley seemed a long time ago. I put my plate down and looked at Shelley. “You seem to have some information about Mr. Spiegel. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

Shirley and Jeff sat down in two wing chairs across from the sofa. Shirley looked down and clasped her hands together.

“It started a long time ago. When we first got married, I had several miscarriages. We thought about giving up. I mean, we were happy together and I have nieces and nephews, so who cares, but then this young woman came into the insurance agency where I worked as an office manager. I still do the same work but for a different company, and Jeff’s a truck driver for a recycle waste company. Anyway, this young woman had several strikes against her and she couldn’t find an insurance company that would cover her car. We couldn’t either, but she was pregnant and didn’t want the baby, so she and I started talking and one thing led to another. I discussed it with Jeff and he thought it was a good idea for us to try and adopt the baby. The young woman didn’t have any family, well, except for some drug addicted mother and a dead beat ex-boyfriend. The baby’s father. She seemed happy for us to take the baby. So that’s why we were at the hospital then. Not because I was delivering Christine, but to be there for the birth mother.”

“Well, then you’re certain Christine is the baby you adopted,” I said, wondering why they seemed so nervous.

“There’s more,” Shelley continued. “On the same day Christine was born five other baby girls were born. They all had similar coloring, but a couple of them had the same dark hair and dark eyes. You saw Christine. She has dimples. But when we first held our daughter, we didn’t see any dimples. She was in the hospital for several days and I never noticed them. Then we brought her home and all of a sudden she had these dimples.”

“So we got to thinking,” Jeff continued, “that maybe they gave us one of the other babies by mistake, you know? For us, we were adopting, and all we wanted was a baby, but we’re good people. We didn’t want a child that belonged to someone else.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.

Shelley’s eyes glistened with tears. I watched as one slipped down her cheek. “It was really touch-and-go with the birth mother and that boyfriend of hers. She kept changing her mind, mostly because he was trying to get her to ask us for money. And her mother, the drug addict, also kept asking for money. We didn’t have money. We paid for her health care, and a few things, but that was all. I was afraid if we made a fuss and the hospital wanted to do a bunch of tests, that the birth mother, MaryAnn, that was her name, that MaryAnn would just say forget it and keep the baby for herself, or that her mother would start causing more trouble and ask for more money, so we kept quiet.”

“Shelley, I’m a nurse in Belgium where I live. And dimples can show up at any time,” Annie said in a clear attempt to reassure Mr. and Mrs. Jamison.

“That’s what we read and that’s what we told each other all these years. We kind of put it out of our minds. And then that man showed up saying Christine was his daughter and we thought, my God, we were right all along. Christine
was
accidently switched.” Jeff shook his head and reached out and took his wife’s hand. “We told him to get out because we don’t want to know. She’s our daughter and that’s all there is to it. Maybe her DNA would have matched his, I don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t going to be a match with either one of us.”

“And then there’s Hunter,” Shelley said.

“Hunter?” Had I missed something? Maybe Hunter was their son.

“Hunter is Christine’s fiancé.” Jeff made a sour face. “Hunter Wentworth.”

“What kind of a name is Hunter? It’s a rich name, that’s what it is, and if Hunter found out that Christine’s real mother was some drug addict, he’d dump her like that!” Shelley snapped her fingers together. “We’re still trying to figure out what she sees in him, but she loves him. He comes from some prominent family in Branford. Technology of some sort. And he doesn’t work for the family business, by the way. That should tell you something about his family. They don’t think their own son is good enough to work for their business, so what would they think of our daughter if they found out she was adopted? And they weren’t thrilled to meet us. But love is love, and Christine loves Hunter and he seems to love her.”

And major bucks is hard to resist. There I was judging. The money probably meant nothing to Christine. Maybe she really did love Hunter.

“Does Hunter know about Mr. Spiegel?” I asked.

Shelley pushed her dark hair off her cheek where it had adhered to a tear. “After she called us, she said she was going to call Hunter. I told her not to upset him, but the truth is I didn’t want her to give him any more reasons to call off the wedding.”

“More reason?” Annie said.

“I’m Jewish. Jeff’s not, but I am and I’m not sure the Wentworths, who evidently have family who came over on the Mayflower, were thrilled with the idea of Jewish grandkids. So you can imagine what they would do if they found out her real parents were named Spiegel, and that the father was murdered.”

“And I’m a truck driver. Another strike against us.”

“We’ve also never told our daughter she was adopted. Once the papers were completed, a new birth certificate with our names was issued, so she’s never known the truth. I know, we should have told her, but we were afraid she’d want to find her birth mother.” Shelley took a sip of her tea and then continued. “Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t afraid of her meeting MaryAnn and knowing her true origins. I was afraid if she really started poking around it would come to light that we got the wrong baby. So you see, we had to keep quiet. And now with Hunter and his family in the picture, it’s just another reason to let sleeping dogs lie.”

“This Hunter does not sound like a worthy husband.” Annie said, echoing exactly what I was thinking.

“He’s not. But he’s who our daughter wants and she’s worked hard to put herself through school. Has a good job, a nice apartment. As parents you have to put aside your feelings. We would do anything for Christine.” Shelley gave me a small smile.

Anything? I had to wonder if that included murder.

Annie and I left the Jamison home having partaken of two slices of cake each. Suddenly I wasn’t in the mood for any lunch, and besides, the guys were taking us out to dinner, so maybe it was better off that we just had a light lunch of tea and some of the best coffee cake I ever had.

The next person on the list Shirley had sent us was a woman named Mandy Aiello. Shirley had given us her home address and that of her mother, but Mandy was the proprietor of a new chocolate shop in New Haven, according to Shirley’s notes, and I thought that was probably the best place to reach her. Besides, it was a chocolate shop, so even if Mandy was gone for the day, I was pretty sure I could find something there so as not to have made the trip for nothing. In hindsight, we probably should have stopped at Mandy’s while we were in New Haven visiting Christine Jamison, but we had to pass through again on our way back to Indian Cove anyway.

“So tell me what we know so far,” I asked Annie.

Annie stared out the window for a few seconds. “
Bon
. It is very apparent that these parents would do anything for their child. And I think all these years they have lived with the fear that someone would find out they received the wrong child and Christine would be taken away.”

“Okay, but Christine isn’t a child anymore,” I pointed out. “Even if she was the wrong baby, time has passed. She is the Jamisons’ daughter now. Nothing will change that. And let’s not forget, maybe she is exactly who they thought. There’s a good chance that she is MaryAnn’s baby, the exact baby they expected to take home.”

“This is true, Alex, but because they had doubt that they received the correct child upon leaving the hospital, is there not a possibly that they could be charged with a crime? That would be enough to frighten them all these years to keep their secret quiet. And along comes a man, Mr. Spiegel, who may very well upset the balance they have achieved. The adoption, a chance of the wrong child. It would all come out.”

I nodded. Annie had a point.

“And then there is that Hunter person. A strange name for a man, no?”

I smiled. “Hunter Wentworth. Probably has a numeral after his name, like Hunter Wentworth the eighth.”

“One thing is certain,” Annie said, “with all the people we speak with, it just adds more to the list. Now I think we must also find Hunter and maybe his family.”

“And we need to find someone at the hospital who worked there when all these baby girls were born.”