Bloodline (33 page)

I didn't know what stake Gary Putnam would have had in her adoption going smoothly. I didn't know if he had just steered Missy
in the right direction. If that were the case, she might have come back to him for advice about how to undo what she'd done. What had he told her? Had he told anyone else? Had Putnam gone to the cops?

Undoubtedly, Missy's murder had been reported in the
Portland Press Herald
. Portland was a safe-enough city that the killing of a college girl was very big news. It must have been page one, maybe above the fold, at least the first day. Putnam must have read the stories. How could he have not come forward?

I needed to know, but would Poole tell me? Maybe all I could hope for was to tell him face-to-face and watch his reaction. And hope I read it right.

And now Putnam knew I knew, assuming he communicated with his daughter at all. He knew my name and what I did. He had my phone number, which meant he knew where to reach me. If he called, what would he say? If he didn't call, what did that mean?

Sitting there at the long bench, I unbuttoned my shirt pocket and took out Missy's phone bill and unfolded it. There on the list were the calls to Putnam's office. Then the calls to the office stopped and were replaced by the calls to Putnam's house, as if he had said, “Listen. You really shouldn't be calling me here. Why don't you call me at home.”

Those calls had been placed in May and early June, before the baby was due. After mid-June, the calls to Putnam had stopped. The last week of August, there were the calls to Rhode Island.

Missy getting cold feet? Missy calling to hear the sound of her baby crying?

The guy with the earrings looked up from his magazine, saw that my pint was nearly empty, and drifted over.

“Another one?” he said, already reaching for my glass.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I'm driving.”

“Back to work?”

“Yeah. In Rhode Island.”

“What do you do there?”

“That's a good question,” I said. I put a five on the table and left.

I figured I needed a plan, so as I drove I tried to come up with one. By the time I got to the ramp for the interstate, I had it all figured out: I'd go to Brown University and see what happened.

It wasn't much, but I had three hours to refine it.

The drive was a straight shot, one hundred eighty miles in the southbound lane. Highlights of the trip included the Kennebunk Burger King, not far from the summer house of former president George H. W. Bush. I got tea and French fries from the drive-through window and asked the girl behind the sliding glass if the president ate there.

“Which president?” she said.

From there it was twenty miles of straight-shot highway with spruce walls on each side. The tea kept me going until things opened up near the New Hampshire border, and then the highway rose to cross the bridge between Kittery, Maine, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The bridge arched high over the Piscataqua River, and I slowed to take in the view—the river meandering inland, the flare of autumn foliage, the town of Portsmouth, all steeples and roofs, arranged in a colonial jumble—but a tractor-trailer nearly rear-ended my truck. They should have a special lane for drivers with a highly refined sense of aesthetics.

The blast from the air horn kept me awake through New Hampshire, where the highway widened and people drove faster. I was
approaching the cities, where everything was imbued with a false sense of urgency. Putt-putting along in the little truck, with cars and trucks passing me like a rock in a stream, I felt like Thoreau returning to the city from a long weekend at Walden Pond.

For the rest of the trip, the feeling grew. North of Boston, I followed the narrow two-lane chute past liquor stores, video palaces, and nightclubs where women danced in G-strings. By the time I hit the city, winding along Route 3 between the high-rise downtown offices, I felt like a trapper back from the frontier. I'd been away from the city for less than two years, and already I felt like an alien.

Jack McMorrow of New York City, or Jack McMorrow of Prosperity, Maine? Would the real Jack McMorrow please stand up? I was pretty sure I knew which one he was. More sure by the minute.

Unlike New York, Boston didn't go on forever. Downtown Boston suddenly vanished and I was on the wide-open highway again, staring into the backyards of people who, for some absolutely inexplicable reason, had chosen to buy new homes with a breathtaking view of the breakdown lane. Their kids probably sold lemonade over the fence to stranded travelers.

The highway left the Boston suburbs behind, and for ten or fifteen minutes I was in the country again, with woods and farms that had been overlooked in the rush to turn every available acre into a shopping mall. There was a sign that said
PROVIDENCE, FIFTEEN MILES
, and then there were a few houses, then a few more houses, and then expanses of old brick factories and a sprawling railroad yard, separated from the highway by a wire fence. When the Providence skyline swung into view, it all came rushing back.

I'd worked here for nine months, doing the police beat for the
Providence Journal
. This had been during my newspaper-hopping
days, when I was young and ambitious and rootless and could pack up and move in an hour. Some things changed. Some things didn't.

I swung off of one interstate and on to another, crossing the industrial river at the head of Narragansett Bay and heading for the city's East Side and Brown University. Brown sprawled across a plateau overlooking the downtown, which had been built on what was once marshland along the Providence River. But that was a long time ago, an irrelevant piece of trivia to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Dominicans, and others who flocked to Providence now, two centuries after Roger Williams had come to get a break from those dreary Puritans. The immigrants who walked the streets now just wanted a break from dreary and hopeless poverty. In places like Providence, sometimes they got lucky. Sometimes they didn't.

My job had been to cover the unlucky ones. Mostly they were shot and stabbed. Sometimes they were dead. Half of them died before they could even learn to speak English. Some of the dead, lying in pools of blood in the gutter outside some neighborhood bar, were just kids.

I didn't sleep well in Providence. I dreamed of their dark eyes, staring but unseeing. Their mothers, kneeling in the blood, shrieking in their grief.

But where I was going they slept fine, protected by the invisible wall of the old money and new power of the Ivy League. It was an empire, this university overlooking the rest of the city. The campus was old and stately and beautiful, surviving wars and economic collapses. It went on for block after block, and it seemed odd that somewhere in one of these buildings was somebody who had talked to Missy Hewett. Odder still was the idea that somewhere not far from here, but very far from Waldo County, Maine, was Missy Hewett's child.

I drove up Wickenden, through Fox Point, which used to be a Portuguese neighborhood, but had been gradually taken over by students, who had the distinct advantage of being willing to pay exorbitant rents. Fox Point gave way to the Brown campus, with old brick dorms shaded by elms, new research buildings towering above it all. I circled a couple of times, then parked by a big quadrangle bounded by granite pillars and big iron gates.

Kids were coming and going, carrying backpacks, riding bicycles. It was after four-thirty and everyone seemed in a hurry. Medical school awaited. Law school beckoned. I got out of the truck and stretched my legs.

My plan was to find the classics department, which Missy had called once. Once I found it, I would decide what to do next. It wasn't much of a plan, but that was my little secret.

I walked across the quadrangle toward one of the brick buildings, feeling conspicuously empty-handed. I should have grabbed the Toyota owner's manual, just to have a book to carry, but it was too late, so I just stuck my hands in my pockets and walked. It was getting dark and cold and late, and I was afraid that the classics people would have locked up for the weekend. Or didn't classics people cut out early?

My first thought had been that there might be one of those campus maps, the ones behind glass cases with the little arrow that says
YOU ARE HERE
. But this was Brown University. Apparently it was assumed that if you were here, you knew where
here
was.

So I couldn't find a map, and was reduced to what I did best: ferreting information out of strangers. A dubious skill, when you thought about it. I tried not to.

The first person I approached was a young woman dressed all in black, as if in mourning for having to attend one of the best universities
in the country. I smiled pleasantly and tried not to look too much like a molester. She didn't smile back but she didn't run, either.

I asked if she could direct me to the office of the classics department.

“Oh,” she said, thinking. “I know I've seen it. I'm biochem.”

No wonder she was in mourning, I thought. She's trying to find a cure for cancer.

But she couldn't locate the classics department, nor could the next kid I asked, a long-haired guy in ripped jeans and black Converse high-tops who looked like he should be playing guitar in a bar band downtown. He said he was in med school. I felt old.

But time was running out and I was getting desperate. If the office was closed and tomorrow was Saturday, my trip would be wasted, though it would still be tax-deductible. And chances would be a little greater that I'd be filing my return from prison.

Finally, I stopped an older professorial-looking man, who was walking with an older professorial-looking woman. The man turned and pointed to the other end of the quadrangle and told me to cut between the buildings, and the door would be in the second building on the left. Which I did. And it was.

The door was open and the lights were on. There was a bulletin board in the hallway where opportunities were posted for classics majors, mostly in other classics departments. Harvard. Dartmouth. Berkeley. The world of academia, a private club. It was too late for me to get in, unless I used the service entrance.

I kept walking and passed an open door. Inside, a computer printer was squawking and a man was talking on the phone. He didn't look up.

All of the other doors on the floor were closed. I went the length of the hallway, examining each one. They were faculty offices, some singles, some doubles. I pushed aside the notes from students and copied the name of each professor, including the one on the phone. Then I found the stairwell and went up.

The second floor resembled the first, but only two of the doors had names. I wrote those in my notebook and went up one more flight. When I came out of the stairwell, I startled an older woman pushing a vacuum cleaner.

“May I help you?” she said sternly.

I glanced at my list.

“Classics?”

“French,” she said. “Classics is downstairs. But you can leave the packages on the first floor.”

“Oh, merci,”
I said.
“Je suis très fatigué.”

“You think you're tired? You ought to try cleaning this entire building every week.”

I wondered if the janitor on the first floor spoke Greek.

29

A
couple of blocks east was Thayer Street, an avenue with shops and cafés. I parked on the street and walked until I found a quiet-looking place that had tables set up on an enclosed porch. The door to the porch was on the sidewalk, and I went in and waited for somebody to seat me. The waitress, another young woman dressed all in black, took me to a table by the window. I wondered if they'd all gone to the same wake.

The waitress left and came back and I asked what brands of beer they served. She recited for a minute or two and I ordered an Oat Sheaf Stout, from England. And a phone book. From Providence.

I had eight names. The phone number I'd brought from home. BYOC. Bring your own clue.

After the waitress had delivered and gone, I sipped the stout and flipped through the book. Most of the members of the classics department lived right in the city. Four out of the first five lived on the East Side, and probably bicycled to work wearing berets. The sixth number matched mine, the one on Missy's phone bill. Just like that.

I wondered if Philip Marlowe was hiring.

His name was Francis X. Flanagan, a name that seemed odd for a classics guy. But then maybe he started with James Joyce and worked
his way back to the source. Then again, with a name like that, he simply could have been educated by Jesuits. Jesuits took their classics seriously.

Flanagan lived on Benefit Street, number 439, which was bicycling distance, too. I didn't know if he wore a beret. I did know he had a wife because I'd tried to sell her windows. And awakened her baby.

I closed the phone book, drank my stout slowly, and tried to figure out what I would say to the Flanagans. Tell them I knew the mother of their child. That she was a nice kid, but she was dead. Maybe they'd be glad to hear it. Maybe they already knew.