Search Angel

by Mark Nykanen

Genres: Female Sleuths

Synopsis

A riveting suspense thriller about the reuniting of birth mothers with their adopted children and the madman who preys on them After two highly praised psychological thrillers, Mark Nykanen returns with his most spellbinding story yet. Suzanne Trayle is a 'Search Angel' whose success in tracking down and reuniting birth mothers with their adopted children has earned her national fame. Known as 'The Orphan's Private Eye,' Suzanne has reunited thousands of mothers with their children, but has failed to find the son she put up for adoption thirty years ago.

Release date: May 1, 2006

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

PROLOGUE

PAUL SIMON’S SONG is in my head. The one about the mother and child reunion. Nothing new in that. I could probably sing it in my sleep. In fact, I probably have.

It’s a beautiful day. They were calling for rain, but there’s not a cloud in the sky. There’ll be plenty of rain soon enough. It’s already October. I tracked Katie down in August, but it took me a while to work all this out. When I first came up here, the lawns and trees were green. Now I’m looking at leaves as big as my hands all over the sidewalk.

She lives on a pretty street. It could have come straight out of a Frank Capra film. There’s actually a white picket fence on my left. Not hers, but it’s nice anyway, and I can’t help running my hand over it.

In some ways I feel I already know Katie Wilkins. I’ve seen her from a distance, and even photographed her with a telephoto lens. I’m good at the sneaky shot. And she’s a great subject, really cute. Everything about her is cute: her hair, figure, clothes. She’s cute like Katie Couric’s cute. The same kind of look. It’s easy to see why this Katie got “in trouble” in her teens. Why she could still get in trouble.

I’ve done my homework on her. She’s single, no kids, lives alone. It’s better this way, for her and for me. There’s not going to be some husband standing there all bug-eyed, or kids asking a bunch of stupid questions.

When I spot the house, the one I’ve driven past nine times, it’s all I can do to keep from running up and pounding on the door. That’s what anticipation does to you. It builds and builds and builds until it’s ready to explode.

But I’m not going to make a spectacle of myself. The neighborhood’s too quiet. I’ve walked three blocks from my car and hardly seen anyone. Not a single kid. She sure hasn’t surrounded herself with what she never wanted.

I can’t help wondering if she’s going to see herself when she sees me. The same nose, maybe? Or mouth, eyes? Her own reflection in my features? It’s not unusual for birth mothers to notice this stuff right away.

Three steps up and I’m on the porch. The doorbell sounds unfriendly, shrill, as if it can’t decide if it’s a bell or a buzzer.

She opens the door. This is the moment, the one I’ve been waiting for.

“Hi, Mom.” I let those two words linger as her brow knits a thousand questions. Then, with her lips quivering and threatening to slice the silence, I say, “I’m your son.”

“I don’t have a son.”

Her immediate denial makes her look ugly. A better man, a less bitter one, might feel devastated; but I’ve searched and planned and rehearsed this over and over, and I’m not going to be denied.

I force a smile, and my words come more easily than I might have imagined.

“Yes, you do. You had me thirty-two years ago at St. Vincent’s in Cincinnati.”

She all but doubles over, her hands gripping her gut. It’s as if the memory of labor is ripping her apart. She knows she’s not lying her way out of this one. I’ve got the details. She may have lied to lovers, to the husband she had for three years, but she can’t lie to me.

“Look, I know it’s a shock, but I had to see you. I had to. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and I haven’t told anyone anything about you. If you want, I’ll go away and never come back. You’ll never have to see me again.”

She shakes her head, a little less uncertain.

“No, come in. Come in.”

She closes the door behind me and raises a hand as fluttery as the notes of a flute. It takes me a second to see that she’s gesturing to a sofa where she wants me to sit. But I don’t want to sit down. She’s the one who sits, flattening her pants with her palms as if she’s straightening the memory of a skirt.

“I knew this would happen one day. How did you find me?”

“I followed my heart,” I tell her, “and it led me here.”

She starts to cry. I hear the word sorry, then “I’m so sorry.” She says something else, too, but I can’t make it out.

I use the breakdown to put my arms around her and raise her to her feet. She reaches up to be hugged, comforted. I indulge her for a few seconds before I begin to lead her to the back of the house.

We take only three short steps before she freezes.

“What are you doing?” That look is back, the one she gave me when she tried to deny her own motherhood.

“I’m taking you back there so you can lie down.”

“I don’t want to lie down.” Her eyes narrow and dart to the front door, and I wonder if she’s going to try to run.

“Sure you do. It’s okay. Relax a little.”

I reach into my jacket and show her the knife. I let her see it up close. I tell her not to say a word, not even to think about screaming. Or running. The blade speaks, too. Volumes. It has the shape of a wiggling snake. It’s like a dagger out of The Arabian Nights. Form does follow function, especially in matters of the flesh.

I nick one of her belt loops. Just that quick it’s in two, the ends sprouting loose threads. I nick another one. Her eyes are plenty wide now. She backs against the wall. Here comes the best part. I bring the blade down the front of her blouse, popping buttons off like grapes. They clatter on the tile. They sound loud to me, but I bet they sound even louder to her.

She’s trembling. “Who are you?”

I shake my head. “You tried to deny me once before, Mom. Don’t do it again. That hurts.”

I point my blade down the hall. She backs along the wall, afraid to look away. That’s okay, I like the eye contact when I remind her of the details: “St. Vincent’s, the fifteenth of May. Ten-twenty in the morning. Eight and a half hours of labor.”

She begins to sob. She’s a slave to memory. Aren’t we all?

The first door opens to her bedroom. I herd her inside and tell her to take off her clothes. When she starts to say no, I slice open the front of her pants. I can see her white underpants, white like her skin, the secret skin that hides her womb. Then I see a little button of blood. I’ve nicked her. Didn’t mean to, but the effect, if nothing else, is undeniable. She disrobes, defeated. She discards her clothes as if they no longer belong to her.

I take mine off, too, but fold them carefully and lay them on a dressing table. You could look at her clothes and mine, and they’d tell you the whole story. They’d even tell you the ending.

She weeps and shakes and tries to pull her hand away, but I’m very persuasive, and I’ve had lots of practice. Lots of mothers. I adopt a new one whenever I feel the urge. And I’m feeling it right now. I’ve felt it for months, ever since I saw Katie’s name on the registry of birth mothers. Katie Wilkins: Does a name get any more American than that? Then I saw her picture, and I knew she’d like nothing more than to meet me. They always want to meet their son.

Sometimes my moms shower me with kisses. Sometimes they deny that I ever existed. And sometimes they cry. But they always end up doing exactly what I want them to do. Just like Katie.

She’s getting better at taking instructions, even in this, the most intimate of arts.

I whisper in her ear. I tell her I’ve missed her, missed her more than she’ll ever know. But she doesn’t respond, and I realize she can’t talk. She is, to put it simply, insane in these her final moments. It’s like nothing belongs to her.

Nothing does. Not anymore. Not even her son.



1

A BED OF NETTLES, this business of telling secrets, and Suzanne found herself tossing and turning on it as they began their approach to Chicago. The landing gear lowered, and she realized the shudder that radiated from the wings to her window seat could just as easily have arisen from her body: She was on the verge of making the most painful confession of her life to the biggest and most important audience she was ever likely to face.

She spotted the blue-capped, blank-faced chauffeur with the “Suzanne Trayle” sign standing just outside the security checkpoint and had to fight an impulse to walk right past him to the nearest ticket counter for a return flight home to Oregon. She’d come to Chi-town to give the keynote address to the annual conference of the American Adoption Congress, but after reviewing her speech for the umpteenth time on the plane, she felt as keyed up as a long-suffering understudy about to take the stage for her first real performance.

The convention organizer had told her that they wanted her to speak about opening adoption records. Suzanne had been so flattered—and had agreed so quickly—that the personal implications hadn’t been immediately apparent: How can you talk about opening adoption records if you’re not willing to be open yourself?

So she’d resolved to come out of adoption’s darkest closet, a decision that had been much easier to reach when she was still about two thousand miles from the podium. As she wound down the Chicago lakefront, peering through the smoky windows of a limousine at the whitecaps surging to the shore, her uneasiness prompted assurances that by nine o’clock it would all be over; but then she recalled how many times she’d used this tired—and ineffective—gambit to try to weasel her way through a pending crisis.

And it’s not going to be over. Don’t kid yourself. It’ll just be starting.

Red, white, and blue pennants snapped in the breeze as they pulled up to the City Center Complex, an unimaginative name for an uninspired-looking convention hall and hotel.

The driver hustled around the stretch to get her door, and she managed a smile as she remembered a famous photographer saying that the outdoors was what you had to pass through to get from your cab to your hotel. But these were tonier times for Suzanne, and the cab had turned into a limo.

Before she made it to the reception desk, a short man with freckles all over his bald head intercepted her.

“I’m Douglas Jenks, and I’m so glad to see you.” His smile burned as bright as those spots on his polished pate.

“It’s good to meet you, too.”

The convention organizer. She shook his hand, as cool and limp as raw salmon—and so at odds with his animated face—and thanked him for the invitation.

“No, don’t thank me. Do not thank us for one second. We want to thank you for coming. This is so great having you here. And the timing with that story in People? It couldn’t have been better. Like you planned it. The—”

“I didn’t, really.”

He went on undeterred. “. . . ballroom is absolutely packed. We’re sold out, and we’ve had to clear out some chairs in the back so we can make room for the overflow. Lots of TV, too,” he added with even more delight.

Suzanne barely had time to consider the gratifying—and intimidating—size of the audience before he was reminding her of his invitation to join him for dinner.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I have to beg off. I really need some time to get ready.” The truth? She didn’t think she could hold down dinner.

“Okay,” he said slowly, drawing out both syllables skeptically. “Well, we do want you at your best. You’re feeling all right, aren’t you?” He frowned, and in an instant fleshy cornrows traveled up his brow and the front half of his spotted scalp.

“I’m fine. Don’t worry.” Suzanne touched his arm reassuringly. “I just need to get settled from the plane ride.”

She edged toward the reception desk and handed a credit card to the young man waiting to check her in. The Congress was hosting her, but there were always incidentals to pay for.

“All right. Come down when you’re ready. We’ll be waiting. Ciao-ciao.”

As he turned away she had to stifle a laugh because with that silly good-bye, and his orange spots, he suddenly reminded her of Morris the cat in those old commercials.

She just managed to bite her lip—pain the moment’s preferred antidote—when he executed a spirited and surprisingly graceful spin to wheel back around.

“Sorry, almost forgot.” He dug through a three-ring binder and pulled out a note. “A distinguished-looking man with silver hair gave me this earlier and asked me to give it to you.”

One glimpse at the crisp penmanship confirmed that it was, indeed, from Burton. But distinguished-looking? Silver hair? She’d always thought of it as gray. He’d made her husband sound like a Supreme Court Justice, which he definitely wasn’t. Not yet anyway. Try administrative law judge for the Oregon Construction Contractors Board. He’d applied for a circuit court judge pro tem position, but was still waiting for the governor to promote him to the bench. Despite his steroidal ambition with the gavel—or maybe, now that she thought of it, because of it—His Honor had suffered a serious lapse in judgment in following her here. Hardly the first such lapse, and far from the worst, but can’t an estranged husband stay estranged? At least for a while?

The note proved blessedly brief: “Good luck, sweetheart. I’m with you.”

But not brief enough to keep her from seeing that he could have chosen his words more carefully, too, made them less susceptible to sarcasm. I’m with you. Where were you a few months ago? And where are you now?

A quick, furtive look around the lobby assured her that he wasn’t haunting its remote corners. Thank God for small favors.

She took the key card from the receptionist and handed it to the bellman.

They stepped off the elevator on the sixteenth floor, and she trailed him to a plummy suite with a large bedroom. Nice. The Congress was treating her well.

She heard the bellman opening the drapes and turned to take in a view of Lake Michigan as wide as the horizon itself.

Two weeks ago clocks were set back an hour, and though it was still early evening, the blackening sky, with its gray filaments of cloud, looked like an eerie reflection of the dark, windswept water.

A chill prickled her arms, and as she rubbed them, the bellman, more alert than most, pointed out the thermostat. He turned it up, and as he left she handed him a five.

She unzipped her laptop case and reviewed her speech, double-checking the most painfully revealing lines.

The words she’d written over the past few weeks left her stomach feeling as if she’d never left the elevator, and more glad than ever that she’d declined the invitation to dinner. Hardly tempted in any case by the morel-stuffed mahi-mahi that was, at this very moment, taking its final bow on terra firma.

The bellman had hung her garment bag in a closet with a full-length mirror on the door. After slipping on a cerulean blue dress that highlighted her eyes, she gave herself a once-over, fluffed her honey-colored hair, which promptly deflated in palpable protest, and called it good.

Not quite. In deference to the harsh lights that seemed to bear down on every podium she’d ever commanded, she reluctantly applied mascara, lip gloss, and enough blush to enliven her pallid Portland complexion. About as much as she’d concede to the dogs of demeanor. But she’d learned the hard way that when you went before your public, you really did ignore your appearance at your own peril. That hideous photograph of her in People? Taken at a speech she’d given in Orlando two months ago. All the proof—and impetus—she’d ever need to primp.

She returned to her laptop, checking the time on the screen. Fifteen minutes and counting. One more look at the speech, even though she’d committed every last pause to memory.

Second thoughts? “Try third and fourth ones, too,” she murmured. But you’re not turning back now.

The title sounded simple enough, “Opening Records in the Era of Open Adoption,” but simplicity in all guises is pure deception—ask any magician worth his wand—and this surely proved true in the scroll of words her eyes now scanned.

Minutes later she made the trip back down the elevator and glanced in the ballroom as she headed to the backstage entrance. Packed! Camera crews choked the aisles, including one from 60 Minutes and another from Dateline NBC. Both shows had been hounding her for interviews. Ed Bradley himself had called, not some assistant to the assistant producer. She’d liked his manner on the phone, very smooth, yet chummy, but supposed that every reporter had learned to give good phone, a skill as necessary to their success as it was to the practitioners of another, more bluntly seductive art. He was so good she’d almost asked him what he was wearing.

All the attention was a sign, she supposed, that she was truly emerging into national prominence and mainstream interest, coming as it did only three weeks after that cover story in People. The headline? “The Orphans’ Private Eye,” a gussied-up way of overstating the humdrum nature of her work, which typically entailed hours of web searches and visits to the dustiest removes of distant libraries. She had allowed to the reporter that occasionally she did the work of an actual gumshoe—surveillance, interviews, impersonation—and evidently that had been enough to earn her the colorful sobriquet. But danger, the kind often associated with PIs? Not a bit. Her world was no more noirish than a cheese blintz.

The initial blip of publicity had occurred two years ago right here in Chicago when she’d appeared on Oprah; but she’d shared that hour with birth mothers and their children and had been featured only briefly, which had been fine with her. But 60 Minutes, People, Dateline NBC? This was a whole new level of fame, and she wasn’t sure it was good for the open adoption movement to be wedded so closely to one person, even if that person happened to be her.

“Like I said, SRO,” the conference organizer startled her as she sat backstage. “They’re standing all the way clear to the back of the ballroom.”

“Great.” But her stomach swirled even more over the great number of ears that would soon be listening.

She parted the curtain to take a peek and picked out Burton in less than five seconds. Sitting erect, as if still in his hearing room. Red regimental tie. Bold for Burton. (Never “Burt,” unless she wanted to goad him. Sometimes “Burty-boy” in bed, but that seemed like a long time ago.)

At the table right behind him sat Ami, French for dear friend, which surely she was, in addition to having become her trusted assistant.

The spry young woman had knocked on Suzanne’s door when she was nineteen and in need of help searching for her mother. She’d been a student with no money, save the dribble of student loans on which she subsisted. But she’d insisted on paying for the search by helping out in the office.

They’d found her mother seven months later, homeless and strung out on meth near the docks of Port Angeles, Washington. Bunny was one of the lucky ones—the meth had broken her spirit, but not her mind. Not yet. Still one day at a time for her. Always would be. She huddled next to her daughter, their shoulders almost touching as they finished dinner.

Ami had never stopped helping out in the office. She now had her master’s in social work and had become indispensable and irreplaceable to Suzanne, which was a whole lot more than could be said for Administrative Law Judge Burton Trayle.

The chandeliers dimmed, and even the clatter of plates and utensils softened, as if the light switch controlled the ambient noise level, too.

“We have with us this evening as our keynote speaker a woman all of you know.”

The curtain had opened, and the conference chair, an older woman as elegant and sparkling as a formal gown, was speaking from the podium.

“Many of you have met Suzanne Trayle in person. Some of you owe your reunions to her perseverance, and all of you have seen her on television and read the wonderful stories that have been written about her . . .”

Applause interrupted the chair, and she stepped back to let it build.

“Thank you. I’m sure Suzanne appreciates that. No one has done more to bring the emotionally charged issues of adoption into the mainstream of American attention, because Suzanne is not just a first-rate search angel, she’s a powerful advocate for opening adoption records.”

Amid the cheers, Suzanne heard Burton’s telltale whistle, odd in a man otherwise so mannered. It was an ear-splitting screech that would have startled even the stream of scam artists and miscreants who flowed through his courtroom, had he ever been taken with an uncontrollable urge to issue it in such a staid setting.

“As many of you know,” the chair said in a clear voice that rose above the fading clamor, “Suzanne’s searches have resulted in more than a thousand reunions between birth mothers and adoptees, and she found all of them in the past decade alone.”

This too brought expected applause, though thankfully not another of Burton’s whistles.

“Tonight we’re here to listen to Suzanne’s wise words, but first let’s honor her great success by giving this most amazing search angel the reception she so richly deserves.”

They rose to their feet as Suzanne approached the podium. She received the light embrace of the chairwoman, and placed her laptop on a table to her right. Tonight it would prove more prop than tool.

She looked up with a smile that granted breadth to her oval face, crinkling her high forehead and cracking, as genuine smiles will, the shell that people wear.

Suzanne gestured for them to sit, saying, “Please, you’re embarrassing me. Down—down.”

When they were seated she looked at them slyly, arched her eyebrows, and said, “Aren’t we the lucky ones? As adoptees, we can’t get arrested for marrying our first cousins. We can’t even get arrested for marrying our sister or brother, for that matter.”

The audience hooted. They understood, as a casual observer might not, that Suzanne was playing to the fear that so many of them had suffered when they’d selected a mate: Was their intended related? Was a blood link hiding in the secrecy of conception?

She recognized the generosity of the laughter and was a savvy enough speaker to not let it linger. She was in performance mode, and even the concerns she’d had over the most revealing parts of her speech had receded, as tides often do before a flood.

“The other day I read that the biggest problem with being an adoptee is that it’s like showing up for a mystery movie five minutes late.”

More knowing laughter.

“But it’s getting easier to figure out the beginning of each of our movies, isn’t it? Not easy, mind you, but easier. County and state records are going online. The same is true for newspapers. Hospitals are getting better about responding to e-mail,” she said as she removed a disk from her laptop. “It’s not like the old days when we’d have to write them and plead and wait . . . and wait. Remember that?”

A collective groan assured her that they did.

“We can go online and do a lot of our work with the help of a simple disk. Not sexy. Not a lot of sizzle, but it works.” She held up the one she’d just taken out of her computer. “This contains most of my records. I leave a backup at home and work on the road. Every one of you can do the same thing. I urge you to attend my workshop tomorrow, ‘Seeking Love, Finding the Link,’ because that’s what it’s all about. I urge you to put me out of business because . . .”—and here she paused long enough to hear a single utensil slip to a plate—“when I’m no longer in business, that’ll mean the closed adoption system, with all its secret records, has closed down for good. That’ll mean it’s dead, which is the destiny it deserves.”

This line was intended to rouse them, and it didn’t disappoint. When the wave of approbation finally broke, Suzanne placed the disk aside and offered updates on the states that had moved toward opening adoption records, where adult adoptees could determine the identity of their birth parents. But she pointedly reminded her audience that it was still far simpler to list the few states where records were open and available to them than it was to run down all the states that continued to stonewall adoptees, treating them as wards who had to be protected from the most basic of all truths—their birth.

She paused to take a sip of water, then looked out at the crowd.

“But tonight I want to talk to you about a deeply personal matter that I’ve avoided for a long time. It’s a subject I couldn’t bring myself to talk about until recently.”

Her eyes took in Burton, who sat forward, looking worried, and Ami, who nodded at her with a wariness Suzanne had never before seen in her assistant.

“As many of you know, I’m an adoptee. I was left on the steps of a firehouse in Los Angeles on January 16, 1958. I was only a few hours old. No note. No apologies. No clues. Only a thin white blanket and the cardboard box I was left in.

“The State of California assumed custody of me, and I lived in a state-run orphanage for the next five months until I was adopted by my absolutely wonderful parents. I’m as indebted to them as I am to life itself.

“These facts are all public, but my life hasn’t been the open book I’ve pretended it to be. I’ve kept one chapter tightly sealed for all these years: I’m not just an adoptee, I’m also a birth mother.”

Ami looked up, no longer wary but startled; Burton raised his hand to his chin. He knew this, of course, and all the facts that followed.

“At age fourteen—yes, fourteen—I became pregnant with my son. Like so many other young women adoptees, I’d sought the only connection I could to my lost and presumably ‘loose’ birth mother. It wasn’t a conscious decision—nothing of that nature is ever conscious at that age—but the desire for a connection to my birth mother was real, and no matter how pathetic it seems now, it resulted in the beautiful baby boy I had thirty-two years ago when I was still a child myself.

“I gave my son to the closed adoption system, and in one way or another I’ve been searching for him ever since.”

Her throat thickened, and she heard a chair move, bodies shift positions, and noticed how intently her audience was staring at her.

“I gave up my son because I was told that having a baby out of wedlock would violate every sense of common decency. In other words, I was shamed into giving up my son. Shamed. I was told, in effect, that I could keep my baby and raise him in shame, or I could give him up and give us both a good life.

“Giving up my baby to the closed adoption system did not give me a good life. It’s given me countless hours of agony; and as an adoptee who’s never known her own mother, I can’t believe my son is better off for not knowing me.”

She gripped the sides of the podium.

“‘Give up your baby, or live in shame.’ Up until about twenty years ago, when the open adoption movement began to take hold, that’s what most birth mothers were forced to hear. And let’s not overlook the unpleasant but very real fact that in spite of these gains, it still goes on: Every year thousands of young women in this country sign over their babies to the closed adoption system. But great progress has been made: More than half of all adoptions in the United States are now open, so those children will always know who their birth parents are, and their birth parents will always know who’s raising them. This is a healthy and critical development, but what about the millions of birth mothers who gave up their babies in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s? And what about their children, now in their thirties, forties, and fifties?

“These are the adult adoptees who are still denied access to their birth records in most states; and not a single state perm. . .