The Darkest Corners (26 page)

I need someone else to look at the photo. Someone who will tell me I'm certifiably batshit for even thinking that Macy Stevens is my sister.

Gram doesn't pick up the house phone, even though I call twice. A quick glance at the time sends a sliver of panic through me. It's almost nine. Gram never goes out this late.

I try her cell phone, and I'm as surprised when she picks up as she is to hear from me.

“Tessa?”

“I called the house twice,” I say.

“I went for a walk,” Gram says, crabby like she gets when I do my worrying thing. This time, I don't give her my usual speech, which is that stories where the woman goes for a walk alone at night end with her waking up chained to a water heater in some creep's basement.

This time, I say, “You need to tell me who Joslin's father is.”

Gram wheezes. I imagine the humid Florida air choking her, slowing her heart to a stop. “I told you, Tess—”

“You
lied.
” Something is unwinding within me, turning my insides into a mess of live wires. I'm a pile of dynamite waiting for someone to say the wrong thing. “I'm goddamn sick of being lied to.”

“Lied?”
Gram sounds angry. “The only person who's lied to you is your mother, Tessa. She kept you from me. I've never even met my other granddaughter.”

She's not your granddaughter.
I can't say it. Won't say it. Gram will think that being in Fayette has pushed me over the edge.

And if I say it out loud—that I think Joslin is a kidnapped girl—it means I think that she's not really my sister. Even after all she's done—the lies, running away, not coming back for me—I would still feel like I'm betraying her.

I blurt out the first thing that pops into my mind. “I have a birth certificate, right?”

“What? Of course you do. You needed it to get your driver's license. Remember?”

Vaguely. Gram took care of the paperwork since I was so nervous that I wound up failing the driver's test twice. But then,
of course
I have a birth certificate. I was born in Fayette, on December 18. It was snowing that morning. Even my father remembers, when by his own admission most of his days after 1994 were spent in a Jameson haze.

But what about Joslin? There's no way that she has a birth certificate if she's really Macy Stevens.

Did Joslin find out? She must have, and that was why she left. But why wouldn't she have contacted the Stevens family?
Hi, I'm your dead granddaughter. Today
show reunion, that kind of thing. As far as anyone knows, Macy Stevens is a heap of baby bones, forever the grinning two-year-old with a plush frog.

“Tessa, what's this about? What's wrong?” Gram sounds panicked. I breathe in through my nose.

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing is wrong. I just…I need to prove that Glenn wasn't Joslin's father, in case she comes back and wants his money. I can't find her birth certificate without her father's name.”

Gram chews on this; she must hear the lie in my voice. My father died without a pot to piss in.

“Tessa,” she begins. “I've only ever kept things from you to save you pain you don't need.”

“Gram. Please tell me his name.”

“Alan Kirkpatrick,” Gram sighs. “I never liked him. Some people just aren't good, Tessa, and I knew any kid of his and Annette's would be the same.”

There's the sound of a siren, but it's on Gram's end, not mine. Her voice gets shaky. “I never looked that hard for your sister because I was afraid of what I'd find.”

She has no idea. I can hear it in her voice.

It means that Gram wasn't in on it, the twisted string of events that lead to my mother and father raising a stolen child as their own.

I hate myself for even considering it.

Rick comes back inside. Tells me that Maggie called, and they're seeing Callie right away in the emergency room. The police have already sent out officers to pick up Daryl Kouchinsky. I nod, throw in an “Oh, okay” here and there. As soon as he sighs and heads into the family room, I call Callie.

Voice mail. I hang up without leaving a message, wondering at what point I decided I was going to tell Callie about my sister and Macy Stevens. I have no reason to think she'll actually believe me, and I realize that not many people would. Decker, maybe.

Maybe the FBI agent who called me earlier to scold me for dialing the Stevens. Don't they have to follow up on all the tips they get, even if it's one as far-fetched as an eighteen-year-old who thinks the sister she hasn't seen in ten years is Macy Stevens? The sister I don't even have a picture of.

I go upstairs and shut myself in the guest room, and I stay there even when I hear the front door open after midnight, and then footsteps on the stairs. There's murmuring. Someone flips the light in the hallway on. Off. Someone uses the bathroom.

My door creaks open. I squeeze my eyes shut and throw in a twitch for good measure. I'm a pro at pretending to be asleep. On those nights when my father brought me to the Boathouse with him, I'd lie in the backseat on the way home, acting like I was out cold so he'd carry me into the house.

Maggie doesn't flip my light on. She sits on the edge of my bed.

“I wish you'd been here,” she whispers. “All these years…Everything would be different if she'd had you.”

I can't tell if she knows I'm awake, or if she's saying it only because she believes I'm asleep.

I don't go to sleep after she leaves. And neither does Callie. In my head, we're playing a game: who can stay up the longest. I hear her padding around her room, the rolling of her desk chair against the hardwood, until I slip into nothingness sometime after four.

I wake up to knocking. Callie steps into my room, holding her laptop. I sit up.

Her hair is down, a mess of unspun silk. The sun catches on three different shades of blond. Callie has always been one of those girls who can simply wake up and be beautiful. It makes the purple bruises on her neck all the more noticeable.

She touches her throat, catching me staring. “Is it that bad?”

Her voice sounds like it's scraping the side of a tin can. She winces.

I pull my knees up to my chest. “Are you—”

“It's fine.” Callie sits on the bed with me, and not on the rocking chair like she usually does. “I have a really small concussion, so of course my mom is freaking.”

“Daryl Kouchinsky tried to choke you. I think you can give her a pass this time.”

The corners of Callie's mouth twitch. Her smile fades before it fully forms. “They picked him up for a DWI. They're holding him for that until I decide whether to press charges.”

“Decide?”

Callie shifts so she's sitting butterfly-style, the bottoms of her feet touching. Her knees bounce. “You saw what he did to Katie just for talking to me. I'm only gonna make it worse for her. I'll get a restraining order.” She lifts her eyes to meet mine. “I don't think it's him anymore.”

“Me neither.” Pam said Captain was average height. No one in her right frame of mind would describe Daryl Kouchinsky as average. He's the type of man who has to duck to pass through a doorframe.

“Anyway.” Callie sighs. She opens her laptop and turns the screen toward me. “I did this last night.”

I'm looking at a page on Connect for Sasha, a twenty-year-old happy to offer her services to gentlemen in Fayette and Westmoreland Counties. Willing to travel farther.

Sasha was an American Girl doll Callie had when we were little. Not one of the cool dolls from a different period in history with her own set of chapter books, but one of the dolls custom-made to look just like you. Sasha even had soccer and twirling uniforms like Callie's.

“Nice name,” I tell Callie as she scrolls down the page. My heart flip-flops. There's an over-the-shoulder mirror-selfie of a girl. She's in a bikini bottom, long blond hair spilling down her back. I recognize Callie's cell phone case—it's mint green with the outline of a dandelion, the flower's seeds scattered by an invisible breath.

“I left my face out,” Callie says. “On all of the pages of the other girls I visited, no one shows their face. There are a ton of other sites too—it's pretty gross how many, actually—so I posted on all of them.”

I have to look away. “I don't like this. I don't think we should do it.”

Callie closes her laptop. “You know we wouldn't even consider it if there was any other way.”

I swallow. “So what next?”

“We wait,” she says. “And see if he's interested.”

I tell Callie I might have a lead on Joslin, so she'll give me the van keys while Maggie and Rick are out. Callie wants to come with me, but I remind her that Maggie will flip her shit if she catches Callie out of bed.

My first stop is the library computer room. I enter in the number from Callie's card, and a gray box pops up with an hour timer for my Internet session.

I search
birth certificates
and get a hit for an archive site that boasts more than 4.6 billion records in its database. To test whether or not it works, I type in my mother's maiden name: Annette Mowdy. Place of birth: Florida.

2 records found.
I can't view the full image of the scanned birth certificate without a paid membership, but it looks legit to me.

I search for Joslin Mowdy in Pennsylvania.

No records found.

I try Joslin Kirkpatrick, and when I get nothing, Joslin Lowell, even though my sister didn't take my father's last name until she was a few years old.

No records found.

I slip a finger through the hole in the knee of my jeans. This has to be a mistake. Or my mother lied about where Joslin was born; the story was that she left Joslin's father, moved to Pennsylvania, had a baby, met Glenn Lowell when the baby turned two, and Glenn and my mother married a year later.

But there are no birth records for a Joslin Mowdy or Joslin Kirkpatrick anywhere in the United States. The search engine asks if I meant
Justine Mowdy
or
Jason Kirkpatrick.

I click out of the website. I glance over my shoulder, paranoid someone's realized I don't live here and is going to bust me for using Callie's card. But the people sitting at the computers around me are slack-faced zombies in front of their screens. I hope I don't look like that.

I do another search on Macy Stevens, browsing through a photo album
People
magazine posted five years ago. It seems as if she captivates people, still. Macy Stevens is America's Baby. The public wants answers as badly as her family does.

The thought that she strolled into the Fayette County Penitentiary last week as twenty-six-year-old Brandy Butler is insane.

I skim the article. One quote sticks out to me:
In a 2004 interview with Cynthia Chan, Robin and Bernie Stevens stated that they believe their granddaughter is still alive, and may have been sold on the adoption black market. Law enforcement has said they will continue to follow up on all possible sightings of Macy but cautioned that the trafficking of babies in the United States is extremely rare.

Cynthia Chan hosted
This Evening
on NBC before Diane Sawyer or someone else booted her from the spot. Gram watched her sometimes; Chan was a coiffed, monotone woman who nodded from her leather chair as her guests cried.

I find her interview with the Stevens family on YouTube and plug my earbuds into the computer. The video is forty minutes long. I skim the beginning, which seems to consist largely of Amanda's parents proclaiming Amanda's innocence.

Amanda got pregnant at nineteen. The baby's father was killed in a motorcycle accident. Amanda had a tough life. But she loved Macy and would never have hurt her.

At the twenty-minute mark, Cynthia Chan asks the Stevens what they think happened to their granddaughter.