Bloodline (22 page)

P
robate court in Belfast was in a big room at the end of a long dark corridor in a gray sandstone building that, as I stood on the granite steps, seemed bleak and forbidding and cold.

This was in the morning, Thursday, and the town was bustling, with people and cars moving under a chill drizzle. As I stood there on the steps, lawyers stepped past me in their suits and trench coats, their little black shoes tapping on the stone officiously. I let several of them pass, then followed, with the boom of the closing of the big oak door echoing through the hallway around me.

The building probably dated to the 1870s or 1880s, a time when institutions like the courts were respected and even feared. This was less true today, and our courts were built with all the formal dignity of a dentist's waiting room. This flaccid excuse for architecture probably contributed to the increase in crime and general mayhem, as nobody was intimidated by cheap carpeting and a judge's bench built out of plywood.

But the court building in Belfast was imposing, and I felt like a school kid on a field trip to an old and venerable museum. I walked down the corridor reading the hand-painted signs over the glass
transoms. There was the clerk of courts, the district attorney, the county commissioners. At the end of the corridor, I turned right and passed several unmarked doors. A white-haired security guard came out of one and I could hear water running from within. He nodded and I asked him where probate court was, and he pointed straight ahead.

It was a big room with a tall wooden counter that fenced the public off from the clerks. There were four of them, and they sat at big desks positioned here and there around the room, among the shelves and cabinets. The clerks were all women, and when I stepped to the counter, they all looked up.

“Hi,” I said, and waited.

They looked at me and then at each other, and finally one of them, a dark-haired woman in her late thirties, got up and approached the counter.

“Can I help you?” she said, businesslike but pleasant.

“I hope so,” I said. “I need information about adoption.”

“Well, this is the place where it's done. The legal part, anyway,” the woman said. “What kind of questions do you have?”

I hesitated. I could see that all the other clerks were listening. When I glanced at them, they looked away.

“I just need to know how it works,” I said. “What's involved?”

“Well, it's kind of a big topic. I don't mean to be difficult.”

“Just the basics, then.”

She put her elbows on the counter and clasped her hands. On the left hand was a small diamond and wedding band. Her blouse was cream, and she was wearing a big flower pin that looked like a child might have made it in school. She had an upturned nose and was more pert than pretty. But she had a warm smile and an easy confidence that made me think I could like her a lot. She probably had nice kids.

“Have you been to an agency?” the woman asked.

“No, I haven't,” I said. “I've only been here.”

She smiled, as if she thought that sweet.

“Well, let's see. In Maine—and the rules differ from state to state—there are three kinds of adoptions, basically. There's what we call a private placement. That means the parent, usually the mother, just picks somebody. Usually a relative or a friend or somebody like that.”

“So they just walk in and sign something and that's it?”

“Pretty much. But that's for, like, when a very young girl has a child and say, her older sister wants to raise it. Or her mother, even. We've had that.”

“I imagine you've seen all kinds of things,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. It takes all kinds, and we see 'em all. So anyway, then there's the independent placement. A lawyer or a doctor or maybe a minister handles the adoption for the natural parent.”

“Just to help out?”

“More or less. A girl in the church has a baby. She wants to give it up, so the minister finds somebody to adopt it. Saves the mother from having to do it herself. We don't see that all that much.”

“What do you see?”

“Agencies, a lot of the time. You know, where the mother goes and has all the couples to choose from and they go through the whole selection thing.”

“That's where you have couples who wait five years and all that?”

“Right.”

“Well, what about these other people. What did you call it?”

“Independent or private,” she said.

“Yeah. How do they rate? They don't wait five years for the kid in the next pew to have a baby.”

The woman smiled.

“No. They just know somebody.”

“And these other people wait for years and years?”

“And sometimes they never get a baby at all.”

“Just never get picked?”

“Right. You know those ads you see in the paper—the ones where the loving couple wants to give your child a good home and all that?”

“Yeah.”

She gave me that gentle smile again.

“That's what that's all about. People just putting their name out there. Hoping they'll get lucky.”

“Must be tough odds,” I said.

“Very. There are many more parents than babies.”

I thought for a moment. The women in the background were talking about how much they loved their microwave ovens. They could talk about ovens and type at the same time. I wondered if they ever screwed up and legally changed somebody's name to “casserole” or something.

“Do they do it in the parents' home county?” I asked. “I mean, the natural parents.”

“That's customary. The judge can make an exception, but it would be unusual.”

“Do you get a lot of them here?” I said.

“Oh, I don't know. It's a steady stream. Not hundreds or anything.”

“Enough so you remember the names of the people.”

“I might, but it's all confidential. You don't have to worry about anything ever leaving this office.”

She smiled reassuringly. I smiled back and felt a twinge of regret at what I was about to do.

“You know,” the nice woman said, “you and your wife can go to an agency and get lots of information. We just handle the legal part. I can give you some documents.”

She handed me some forms which I glanced at. One said
AFFIDAVIT OF MOTHER OF ILLEGITIMATE CHILD. Another said WAIVER OF NOTICE OF ADOPTION BY FATHER. A third said SURRENDER AND RELEASE OF CHILD FOR ADOPTION.

“This is it?” I said.

“Well, the judge has to approve it.”

I looked at the papers some more. Thought for a moment, then looked the nice woman in the eye, watched her expression.

“I know a woman who gave up a baby for adoption,” I said. “Her name was Missy Hewett.”

There wasn't even a flicker of recognition.

“As I said, all of this is confidential,” the woman said. I decided to try one more time.

“Missy Hewett. Seventeen, eighteen. Gave up a little girl. Newborn.”

The woman looked at me blankly. Behind her, the clerks had stopped talking and were staring, instead.

“She's dead,” I said. “She was killed this week in Portland.”

The nice woman frowned, as if she'd just read about a plane crash in some foreign country.

“That's too bad,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “She was a nice girl.”

And if she'd gone through normal channels for her adoption, it hadn't been here.

The nice woman wasn't quite as helpful after that. She stood silently and waited as I looked the documents over. The other women
were quiet, too. I shuffled the papers. The silence in the room was building.

“So this is all you have to do?” I asked.

“That's right,” the nice woman said, a few degrees cooler.

“But before you get to this point, everything is all set up? Having the child to adopt and all that?”

“Right.”

“And the judge reviews all this stuff and approves the adoption?”

“If everything is in order,” the woman said.

“And that's it?”

“More or less.”

“What if things don't work out?”

“In what way?”

“What if the natural father shows up later? Or the mother—the natural mother, birth mother, or whatever—changes her mind?”

The woman thought for a moment. I got the impression she was considering whether to go to the trouble of answering any more questions for a guy who wasn't what he had seemed and was playing some sort of game. I could have told her it wasn't a game, but she wouldn't have believed me.

“Once the adoption is approved, even once the natural parents sign those documents you have there, it's hard to undo an adoption,” the woman said, slowly and begrudgingly. The women behind her were giving me the evil eye.

“You have to go to court and fight it out?”

“Unless you've left some sort of cushion of time before the papers are filed or something.”

“That done often?”

“Not really.”

I thought for a second but couldn't think of any other questions. The nice woman stood and stared at me. I smiled. She didn't.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You're welcome.”

She started to turn away and then turned back.

“You never told me your name,” she said.

“Oh, sorry. It's Jack McMorrow.”

“What are you? A private detective?”

“No,” I said. “Not exactly.”

She interrupted before I could explain further.

“Well, let me ask you something, Mr. McMorrow,” the nice woman said. “You don't even have a wife, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Hard to believe, isn't it?”

“Stranger things have happened,” she said, as she turned away. “I'm sure.”

So Missy Hewett hadn't had her adoption approved in Belfast, the county seat. If she had, if the court clerk had even known her only on paper, there would have been some reaction, a flinch or a flicker. The nice woman hadn't even blinked. She had never heard of Missy Hewett.

Then where had she had the adoption approved? Was there an agency involved? If not, how had Missy hooked up with a private party to place her baby? Church? I didn't get the impression that she went to church, though I could have been wrong. Just somebody she knew? No, there was a piece missing here. Who had Missy Hewett's baby?

I thought about it as I drove home, winding the truck through back roads northwest toward Prosperity. The chill drizzle had changed
to a steady rain and I turned the heat on in the truck. Even with the foliage nearing its peak, it was a dreary day. The farmhouses along the way seemed shabby, the trailers with their broken-down cars even more forlorn. It was one of those days when all existence seemed grim and shabby, where there seemed to be little joy, little beauty, just people struggling to make some sort of life on the edge of these unforgiving hills. I could feel my mood sinking, feel the ultimate hopelessness of Missy's life seeping into mine. Down, down I went, headed for an afternoon I knew I'd spend staring out at the rain and mulling over Missy, this mess of a story I'd signed on for, and the growing predicament that was my solitary life.

No such luck.

There were two unmarked police cars in the driveway when I pulled up. One was Poole's brown Chevy. The other was dark blue, also a Chevy, with the telltale antenna on the back trunk lid. I stopped on the edge of the road in front of the house and turned off the motor. Two cops got out of the blue car. It was Poole and Parker, from the state police.

They stood by the police car in the rain and looked serious and somber.

“Mr. McMorrow,” Poole said, as I approached.

Parker just nodded.

“Boys,” I said. “How 'bout a cup of coffee?”

They followed me inside. I took off my brown hunting jacket and hung it on the hook. They stood near the door as I filled the kettle and put it on the stove.

“Come on in,” I said. “No need to stand over there.”

They moved to the big table but still stood. I decided to stand, too. We all stood there for a minute, like shy boys at the eighth-grade dance. Finally I broke the ice.

“So what's up?” I said.

Poole was standing there with his hands in his pockets. He glanced at me, then looked to Parker. The kettle started to hiss like a snake and I went over and gave it a jiggle. Parker waited until I came back and then he looked me right in the eyes.

“It's Missy Hewett, Mr. McMorrow,” he said. “We got the results of the postmortem.”

Parker watched me and Poole did, too. They were doing to me what I'd just done to the nice woman at the court: watching for a reaction.

“She wasn't killed in an accident,” Parker said evenly. “She died of asphyxiation.”

“She suffocated?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Deliberately? As in somebody did it?”

“Right,” Parker said, the faintest edge coming into his voice. “Deliberately. Somebody murdered the kid.”

“Hmm,” I said.

They looked at me. I looked at them. Poole the Scout leader, Parker the big ex-jock.

“That's too bad. Really too bad.”

“Yeah, it is,” Parker said.

“She didn't deserve that.”

“Probably not.”

The kettle was rattling.

“You still want coffee?”

“Sure,” Parker said, giving the change in his pocket a jingle. “We got time.”

I went to the counter and pulled three mugs out of the jumble of dishes next to the sink. A spoon fell out of the jumble onto the floor and I picked it up and put it back in the sink. I found three other spoons and put them on the table with instant coffee and the sugar. The milk I had to get from the refrigerator.

They stood. I poured.

When we'd taken our positions again, now with mugs in hand, I again had to initiate the conversation. These guys would be hell at a cocktail party.