Beautiful Lies

twenty

The next morning, he made me Sunday breakfast, pancakes with strawberry jam since he was out of syrup, and rich, strong cups of coffee. We ate in bed and I filled him in on the day before. It didn’t seem possible that it hadn’t even been forty-eight hours since I’d watched Christian Luna die. I told him about Detective Salvo, Madame Maria, and what I’d found at the library.

“Detective Salvo’s partner came to have a little chat with me and wound up taking me down to the Ninth Precinct,” Jake said. “I wasn’t as cooperative as you were, I guess. But they had to let me go after a couple of hours. I had the feeling they would have liked to hold on to me longer. Anyway, they impounded my car.”

“He told me they’d talked to you.”

“When?”

“I called Salvo to tell him about the missing kids in Hackettstown.”

“Why did you do that?” he asked, and for a second I thought I heard something more than curiosity in his voice. Was it worry?

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, considering the answer. I wasn’t really sure myself. “I felt like I needed an ally.” Then I added, “I wasn’t sure who I could trust.”

He nodded. “I know,” he said quietly. “I’d lied to you. You weren’t sure you could trust me. I’m sorry for that.”

I shook my head dismissively. It didn’t matter anymore.

“What did he say? About the kids?” Jake asked after another minute.

“Nothing. Just told me he’d look into it, I think more to placate me than anything. Told me to give up my new career as private investigator and come home.”

“That’s not bad advice.”

I rolled my eyes at him.

“Jake,” I said after some more coffee and a few bites of pancake. “What happened when you tried to look for your family?”

I wasn’t sure if this was an okay question to ask, but I was operating under a new policy of saying exactly what I was thinking, and it had been nagging at me since we’d made love the night before. He’d fallen asleep and I’d lain awake thinking about what he’d told me earlier. I remembered what Detective Salvo had said, his exact words that Jake had been “abandoned into the system.” Jake had told me that he remembered his mother, nothing more.

He stopped chewing and didn’t look at me right away. He shrugged. “I looked more or less nonstop from the time I got my PI license up until Arnie died. Like I said, it was one of his big things. He thought I needed to solve the mystery of my past before I could build a future. Maybe, if I’m honest with myself, it’s the whole reason I became a PI.”

“And…”

“I’m not much closer than I was five years ago,” he said with a shrug. He cleared our empty plates off the bed and took them into the kitchen. I let him go and didn’t follow, in case he was looking for some space from the question. He came back and sat beside me and continued.

“They say she left me without any documents, no birth certificate, no vaccination records. If I told you I didn’t believe that, that I remembered being loved by the woman whose face I still see in my mind, that I don’t believe I was abandoned like that, would you think it was just a little kid’s fantasy?”

I shook my head. His eyes were bright and he was looking at me hard. I could see that it was important to him that I give him my faith. And I could do that honestly. “I wouldn’t think that, no. I’d tell you to follow your gut. Sometimes it’s the only thing we can trust.”

He nodded and looked away from me. “Arnie did a lot for me on the sly. That’s how I got access to my juvenile record, could see how they labeled me early on in the system that made me undesirable to couples looking to adopt. Not that the odds were good, anyway. I was too old; people want infants.”

“Where were you found?” I asked, thinking that would be a logical place to start the search.

“There’s no record of that,” he said. “My intake file was lost.”

It seemed pretty grim—no parent names, no birth records. I thought of his password, “quidam.” It made sense to me now.

“Anyway,” he said, slapping his hands down on his legs as he stood. “This is my ongoing crusade and we have more pressing things to worry about right now, mainly your ongoing crusade.” He was working hard at lightening the mood. It wasn’t really working, sorry to say.

“Our crusades are eerily similar,” I noted, trying and failing to keep the sadness out of my voice.

“Indeed they are,” he agreed. “Except people I talk to aren’t being assassinated and I’m not being menaced by a skinhead.”

We laughed then. Like people laugh at funerals, letting off some steam, aware that there’s nothing to laugh about at all.

Jake and I spent the rest of the day trying to locate the parents of the missing children in Hackettstown, using the same story I’d used to get Madame Maria to talk to me. I sat on Jake’s couch with a Morris County phone book, one in a collection of phone books he had in his closet for his work as a PI, and his telephone. He sat at his computer and used the Internet, called on some of his police contacts using his cell phone. By the end of the day, we’d learned through family members and newspaper and police reports that except for one, they were all dead.

Jake was able to find much of the information we sought on the Internet archives of a couple of different Jersey papers, the Record and the Star-Ledger.

Sheila Murray, mother of Pamela, who was nine months old when she was abducted, died in 1975 in a DUI wreck for which she was responsible. Three years after the unsolved abduction of her only child, she ran a red light and collided with another vehicle carrying three teenage girls, all of whom also died at the scene. According to articles written after Pamela was snatched from her crib while Sheila slept, Sheila apparently hadn’t been sure of Pamela’s paternity and was raising the child alone.

“Dead end,” said Jake after we’d exhausted both papers of their articles on Sheila and Pamela Murray.

“Literally,” I said.

Michael Reynolds, father of Charlie, who was three when he went missing, had been left to raise his son alone when his wife, Adele, died from injuries incurred in a fight at a local bar. The article we found in the Record reported that the family was survived by Adele’s mother, Linda McNaughton. When there was no listing in the phone book, a quick search in the online phone directory located a telephone number for the woman, who still lived in the same town.

In a terse, uncomfortable conversation with Linda McNaughton, I learned that Michael Reynolds was a heroin addict who died less than a year after Charlie was kidnapped from their one-bedroom apartment.

Ms. McNaughton said something chilling during my conversation with her, something that stayed with me for the rest of the day, long after our conversation had ended. “She was my daughter, may she rest in peace, and I loved her,” she said. “But she never wanted that boy. Tried to give him up a couple days after he was born, but she went back for him. Couldn’t take the guilt. And Michael, he never wanted anything but the needle. You ask me, alive or dead, the kid’s probably better off.”

Jake was staring at the computer screen as I ended my call with her.

“Anything?” he asked absently, not taking his eyes off the screen.

I told him what she’d said. He didn’t respond, just kept tapping his right finger on the mouse, scrolling through an article I couldn’t see from my place on the couch.

“Doesn’t it seem odd that all these people are dead?” I asked.

“It’s very odd,” he agreed, seeming distracted by his computer screen.

“Look at this,” he said. I walked over to him to read over his shoulder.

Marjorie Mathers, mother of Brian, age three when he disappeared from his bed in the middle of the night, was currently serving a life sentence for the murder of her husband. She’d killed him three weeks after Brian had gone missing. They’d been entrenched in a vicious custody battle over their child, and she claimed that he’d hired men to abduct him. Her lawyers claimed that she was half-mad over her missing boy and that, in combination with suffering years of abuse from her husband, was teetering on the edge of sanity. They said that she hadn’t meant to kill him but had gone to accuse him of abducting Brian to punish her for leaving him. The gun, she claimed, had accidentally discharged in the struggle. But evidence supported the prosecutors’ claim that she’d shot him in the back while he slept. She would be eligible for parole in the year 2020.

“Well, let’s see if we can find a way to talk to this woman,” I suggested.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Ridley,” said Jake, swiveling around to look at me.

“Why?”

“Because she’s obviously a nutcase.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Um, because she murdered her husband?”

I shrugged and moved back over to the couch. “Just because she killed someone doesn’t mean she doesn’t have information that might be helpful. She’s the only parent alive.”

Jake sighed. “I just think it’s irresponsible at this point to dredge up the past for this woman without more pointed questions. It’s going to be a painful conversation, if she agrees to see us at all. The woman is spending the rest of her life in prison; her son was abducted and never found. Try to imagine that. Do you really want to cause her more pain?”

He was right. And I felt like a shit, someone so selfishly in pursuit of my own answers that I’d lost compassion for someone else’s suffering.

“Then where do we go from here?”

“I don’t know,” answered Jake.

Around eight o’clock, Jake went out to get us some dinner and I sat flipping though my notebook trying to figure out why it had seemed so important to me to find these people. What had I hoped to learn? Where did I expect it to lead me? I thought about what Linda McNaughton had said. I flipped through the pages of my notes, found her number, and dialed again.

“Ms. McNaughton?” I said when she picked up.

“Yes,” she said, fatigue and annoyance creeping into her tone as she recognized my voice.

“This is Ridley Jones. I’m so sorry to bother you again, but I had another question about something you said.”

She sighed. I heard the click and hiss of a butane lighter and she inhaled sharply. “This is not easy for me, Miss.”

“I know and I’m sorry,” I said as gently as I could, remembering Jake’s words. “But please, just one more thing.”

“What is it?”

“You said that your daughter tried to give Charlie up after he was born.”

“That’s right,” she said, sounding defensive. “I tried to stop her. But we were all struggling financially. She thought it would be best for him.”

“So…she took him to an adoption agency?”

“No,” she said, and another sharp inhale was followed by a long pause. “You have to understand, with Michael being an addict and all, she didn’t think they’d be good parents.”

“I understand,” I said. “But where did she take Charlie?”

“She…left him at one of those places.”

“What places?” I asked. My blood was thrumming in my ears.

“One of those places that take your baby, no questions asked. You know, they don’t want people to leave their babies in a Dumpster, so you can drop them, ring a bell, and take off. You have three days or something to go back if you change your mind.”

“Ms. McNaughton,” I said, “did she take Charlie to a Project Rescue facility?”

“Yes, that was it. That’s what it was called. But like I said, she went back and got him. They were kind to her, gave her some counseling. She felt better after talking to them, like she could handle being a mother to Charlie. But you ask me, he knew she didn’t really want him. Colicky like you read about, screamed his head off night and day.”

But I barely heard the rest. All I could think about was Ace and what he had said to me that night. Ask Dad about Uncle Max and his pet projects.

I thanked her and hung up the phone. What did it mean? I had no idea. But I kept flashing on the brochures Dad had given me, seeing the images of the cold, filthy Dumpster and the warm blanketed arms of the nurse.

A thought danced through my mind, one that I immediately pushed aside as preposterous. But it kept pirouetting back and forth and I was unable to still it.

“What’s wrong?” said Jake, entering the room with aromatic bags of Chinese food from Young Chow’s. We were just out of range of their delivery service, but Jake and I both agreed they had the best garlic prawns in the East Village, well worth the walk.

“Nothing,” I lied. “I’m just zoning out. I feel pretty wiped.”

“I bet,” he answered, looking at me. I think he knew I was holding something back, but he let it go. I wasn’t ready to tell him what I was thinking. Hell, I wasn’t even ready to think it.

“Find anything else out?” he said, nudging a little, I thought.

“No. Nothing.” I rose and walked over to the table, started unpacking the takeout containers.

He walked into the kitchen and after a few moments returned with plates, silverware, napkins, and, under his arm, a bottle of white wine.

“Let’s eat,” he said, pulling out a chair for me. “Everything seems better after a good meal and a good bottle of wine.”

I smiled at him, hoping he was right.