The Lost Bird (14 page)

V
icky saw the newspaper headline as she pulled into the curb. A stack of newspapers slumped inside a white metal box on the sidewalk in front of her office building. She hurried over, one hand on her briefcase, the other digging through her bag for change, her eyes riveted on the large black type:
MOVIE STAR SEARCHES FOR FAMILY
.

She managed to extract a coin and feed it into the slot. A quick pull on the glass door and she had the newspaper in hand. Splashed below the headline was a photo of Sharon David striding along Main Street, past the hardware store, the café. There was the flash of long, dark legs in the slit of her skirt. Snapping the paper into a fold, Vicky hurried up the stairs and along the outside corridor. Her heels made a hollow, thumping sound on the wood. She pushed through her office door and crossed the small waiting room, throwing a little nod to Laola, who sat at the desk in the far corner, tapping the keyboard and cradling the phone against one shoulder.

In her private office, Vicky dropped the briefcase and bag on the desk and, sinking into her swivel chair, opened the newspaper. Her eyes moved quickly down
the column of print. A familiar story: girl staring in the mirror, wondering why she was different, longing for her real home. How moving when Sharon David had delivered the lines in her office. Vicky had wanted to cry.

She tossed the paper across the desk, sending the ball-shaped pen holder skittering to the floor. What a fool she was! Duped by a publicity stunt concocted in some Hollywood studio. Sharon David stars as Indian woman in
The Sky People.
Sharon David searches for real Indian family.

“A discreet inquiry!” Vicky said to the empty room, mimicking the movie star’s confidential tone. “None of the public’s business.”

“Who you talkin’ to?”

Vicky swung her chair around. Laola stood in the doorway, her expression shaded in bewilderment and curiosity. She glanced about the room as if she expected someone to pop up from one of the barrel-shaped chairs.

“We’ve been taken for a ride on a bucking bronco,” Vicky said, picking up the newspaper and waving it toward the young woman.

Laola walked over and set a small stack of papers on the desk. “Phone’s been ringing all morning. Reporters from Cheyenne, Casper, Denver. Some guy from CNN. You really think CNN . . . ?” The words trailed into a question.

“Sharon’s publicity people have obviously notified everybody,” Vicky said. A mixture of rage and helplessness surged through her. The article asked anyone with information about Sharon David’s natural parents to contact Vicky Holden, attorney-at-law. She pulled her briefcase over the newspaper, blocking out
the smiling, striding actress. A symbolic gesture that brought a small measure of satisfaction: she may have been played for a fool, but Sharon David would soon be out of her life.

The phone emitted an abrupt, jangling noise, and Laola turned and disappeared through the doorway. Vicky opened the desk drawer and withdrew the legal pad on which she had jotted down the telephone number of the dude ranch where the actress was staying. A simple phone call, and she could sever ties with her newest client. She would return the retainer fee.

She picked up the receiver, then hesitated, holding it in midair. Her practice had been busy lately, but fees came in slowly, usually on the installment plan, a few dollars every payday. She expected a settlement in Sam Eagle Hawk’s case, which would give her own accounts a much-needed infusion, but the agreement hadn’t been signed. It would be a while before she received her fee. She needed Sharon David’s check.

But so far she hadn’t earned it. She had Aunt Rose’s opinion and her own, but that was hardly enough to justify keeping the money. She would have to make a few more inquiries.

Slamming down the receiver, she turned her attention to the paper-clipped pages Laola had delivered. The settlement she intended to demand from the Custom Garage for Sam Eagle Hawk. She could imagine the opposing lawyers’ outrage: the garage would be bankrupt, forced to close its fifty-year-old doors. She knew the dance, had participated in the steps on behalf of her own clients. In less than an hour she had a meeting with the attorneys.

Just as she set the pages in her briefcase and snapped it shut, Laola reappeared in the doorway. “That anchorwoman
from Channel Two keeps calling.” The breathless voice again. “You know, Sue Causeman. She wants to know where she can find Sharon David. What am I s’pposed to tell all these reporters?”

Vicky got to her feet, swung her bag over one shoulder, and picked up the briefcase. “Tell them ‘no comment,’” she said, brushing past the secretary. In the outer office, she stopped and turned back. “Oh, and Laola, call the Grace Clinic. See if the director has a few minutes to see me this afternoon. Then call Luther Benson and ask him to meet me later.”

It was mid-afternoon when Vicky turned in to the parking lot of the Grace Clinic, a tan-brick building surrounded by a sweep of tree-studded, manicured lawn. Shadows lay over the walls, making the clinic seem cool and inviting after the heated meeting she’d just left. Lawyers for the garage owner had spent the night dreaming up new hoops for Sam Eagle Hawk to jump through, all unacceptable. She’d held firm for the settlement, and finally, reluctance seeping from them like blood from an opened wound, they’d agreed. In her briefcase on the seat beside her was the signed agreement.

Glancing in the rearview mirror, she patted her hair into place and touched up her lipstick. She’d called Laola from the lawyers’ offices and learned that both Dr. Roland Grace and Luther Benson could see her. Dr. Grace was expecting her at two o’clock. Ten minutes ago.

She slid out of the Bronco and hurried up the brick-lined sidewalk bisecting the lawn. A warm gust of wind caught at her suit skirt, molding it around her legs. Overhead the sky stretched as far as she could see, a smooth blue satin. Clouds rose over the mountains
like white smoke. A rush of cool air hit her as she opened the glass door and stepped into the clinic.

Rows of chairs in bright, cheery colors lined the waiting-room walls. There was only one patient: a woman seated in the middle of an empty row, looking as if she might deliver a baby at any moment. At her feet, a small boy was pushing a miniature truck across the carpet. An image flashed into Vicky’s mind, like a photograph superimposed on the woman and the boy: she, with another baby on the way, Lucas playing at her feet.

How often the memories came, unbidden and unwelcome, triggered by some ordinary scene. And with the memories, a sharp stab of regret that somehow things had not gone as she’d planned, not as she’d planned at all.

She crossed the reception room to the counter on the opposite wall. Behind sliding glass panels sat an attractive woman in her forties, Vicky guessed, with stylishly cut blond hair and thin brown eyebrows penciled above eyes as green as the blouse she was wearing. She had a pale complexion, but her face took on a yellowish cast under the fluorescent lights, like a bleached canvas soaking up color.

“May I help you?” The receptionist leaned toward the small opening between the glass panels.

Vicky said, “I’m here to see Dr. Grace. My secretary called earlier.”

“You’re the attorney, then?” The eyebrows shot up in surprise.

“Please let the doctor know I’m here.”

The woman was still staring. “I’m afraid Dr. Grace is with a patient. Perhaps I can be of help? I’m the business manager.”

“I’ll wait.” Vicky gave the woman an assuring smile. As she started toward a chair, the door next to the counter swung open. A young woman with a small bulge at her waist stepped into the lobby. A glance back, a grateful smile: “Thank you, Doctor.”

In the doorway behind her was a large man about fifty, wearing a white coat that hung loosely over his dark trousers and blue shirt. A red-printed tie was knotted sharply at the shirt collar. His forehead continued into a bald scalp that shone under the fluorescent light. His eyes seemed outsized and intense behind thick, pink-rimmed glasses. “Ms. Holden?” he said. Then, without waiting for a reply, “Do come in.”

Vicky followed him down a narrow carpeted corridor past partially open doors. She caught a glimpse of white-sheeted examining tables, silver footrests, a nurse smoothing white paper over one table. The acrid odor of iodine hung in the air.

At the far door, before the corridor jutted into a north wing, the doctor halted and, stepping back, ushered her into a small office. Bookcases faced each other from opposite walls—the same-sized books stacked together, as if they had been arranged by height rather than subject. The rolltop desk across the room was open, exposing cubbyholes filled with envelopes that extended over papers and file folders arranged on the surface. Next to the desk, a narrow window covered with a blue semitransparent shade diffused the sunlight and gave the office a faint blue cast.

The doctor motioned her to a dark leather chair. He took the old-fashioned wood chair in front of the desk and, leaning toward her, said, “What can I help you with?” There was a veiled sharpness to the words, as
if a visit from an attorney had put him on guard.

Vicky settled her bag on her lap. “One of my clients believes she may have been adopted from this area thirty-five years ago,” she began. “She may have been placed through a private adoption, perhaps handled by a private clinic.”

The doctor’s face broke into a smile of undisguised relief. He shifted his bulky frame, leaned back, and crossed one thick thigh over the other. “So Sharon David thinks she was adopted from the Grace Clinic!” He gave out a little guffaw. Then, in a low, confidential tone: “A beautiful woman. Tell me, what’s she really like?”

Vicky ignored the question. “I know that women from the reservation came to the clinic for prenatal care in the 1960s.”

“Still do,” the doctor said.

Vicky went on: “Can you tell me whether the clinic ever handled private adoptions?”

Behind the pink-rimmed glasses, the doctor’s eyes took on a harder look. He uncrossed his legs and sat up straight. “Not in the twenty years I’ve owned the clinic. What happened before that, well, I could hardly be responsible . . .” He raised both hands, palms up, as if appealing to some invisible authority. “Jeremiah Markham owned the clinic then. Got his start here, didn’t you know?”

Vicky gave a little nod, and the doctor hurried on, undisguised pride working through his voice. “Founded the clinic. Delivered babies for about a year around 1964 before moving to Los Angeles. Started a large clinic there and . . .” He paused a moment. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

Vicky found a pen and small pad in her bag. On a
blank page she scrawled the name Jeremiah Markham. Glancing up, she said, “Wasn’t that the year many Indian babies died?”

Dr. Grace shifted his weight sideways against one armrest. “I believe that year determined his career. He has never said so, of course, but”—he raised both hands again—“losing one baby after the other. Not knowing the cause. Waking up in the middle of the night asking yourself what you might have done differently.” The doctor glanced away a moment, as if to bring the enormity of what had happened into focus. “Jerry understood there was nothing he could have done. The water was seriously contaminated. But I believe the infant deaths at the clinic led him to devote his life to ensuring that every baby would have the chance of arriving safely in this world.”

“Are you saying babies were delivered here, at the clinic?” Vicky had assumed the women delivered at one of the local hospitals, as she had.

The doctor gave her a tolerant smile. “Jerry was ahead of his time by a decade. He preached natural childbirth before it was called natural childbirth. Offered a comprehensive program of nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, and mental preparation. Highly revolutionary at the time. Most hospitals didn’t want any part of it. So he opened his own hospital right here.” He nodded toward the north wing where the corridor had taken a sharp jog. “Women came to the clinic for classes during their pregnancies and delivered in the birthing rooms. As soon as the health officials determined the water was polluted, Jerry instructed patients to drink only bottled water. Unfortunately some women didn’t follow instructions.”

The doctor exhaled a long breath. “I always believed
Jerry felt he had to leave here. What he was doing was beneficial to mothers and babies. Yet, many babies died. There was a stigma, don’t you see? A dark spell cast over his revolutionary theories. Jerry had to start anew somewhere else, which he did in Los Angeles.”

Vicky was quiet. The doctor only confirmed what Aunt Rose had said about a time of lost babies and dashed hopes. A time when no Arapaho woman would have given up her child. Yet there could have been one lonely frightened woman who had decided to do just that. She said, “Do you know whether Dr. Markham ever arranged private adoptions?”

“For an Indian child?” The doctor’s eyebrows rose above the steel rims of his glasses. “You would have to ask him. He may have records from that period.” Reaching across the desk, he pushed a button on a small intercom. “Get me Jerry Markham’s number,” he barked. Still holding down the button, he brought his eyes back to Vicky’s. “Jerry hasn’t practiced in years. Too busy writing books and lecturing. But he still works as a consultant. We call him from time to time, when we have a difficult case.”

Static sputtered over the intercom, followed by the business manager’s eager voice reciting a telephone number. Vicky jotted it down, then slipped the pad and pen back into her bag and got to her feet. Dr. Grace stood up and extended a beefy hand.

“You’ve been very helpful,” Vicky said, her hand lost in the folds of the man’s palm.

“About Sharon David.” The doctor was smiling. “Perhaps you could arrange a dinner party?” he said.

Quid pro quo
, Vicky thought. “I’ll let Sharon know how helpful you’ve been,” she said, ignoring the request.
She retrieved her hand and escaped into the corridor.

As she stepped into the waiting room, the business manager pushed aside one of the glass panels and leaned forward. “Dr. Markham can be very hard to reach,” she said.