Beautiful Lies (23 page)

She looked at me and I saw a cautious happiness in her face. It made me feel guilty. “I hope so, too,” she said, and clasped her hands together as if in prayer.

I got up and took her hand, thanked her for her help. I promised to return her photograph and not to leave her only with questions. She stood at the door and held her hand up in a wave as I got into the Jeep and pulled up the gravel drive toward the highway. I was thinking that hope is not always a gift.

As I pulled onto Route 206, in the rearview mirror I saw a black 1969 Firebird with tinted windows approaching. My heart did a little dance and I pulled over to the side of the road, expecting to see the car pull up behind me. But it didn’t. It passed by, the engine revving as it did. Relief and disappointment duked it out in my chest. As I watched the car disappear around the next turn, I remembered then that Jake had said the police had impounded his car. I wasn’t ready to face him anyway, not with these new suspicions tugging at my pants leg. If he already knew about the other missing kids, then that meant he knew about Jessie Stone. He’d known before he even met me. I tried to think about what that might mean, and a thick curtain came down in my mind. I didn’t want to deal with it.

I pulled back onto the highway and drove toward Skully’s Mountain, on my way back to Hackettstown. In the absence of any better ideas, I thought I’d head to the clinic where Teresa Stone had taken Jessie. What was I going to do there? I didn’t really know. I was going to have to get creative. I was operating under a faith that the universe conspires to reveal the truth, that lies are unstable elements that tend toward breaking down.

The sky above me had gone a moody gray black, threatening snow. As I moved under a canopy of trees, it grew dark enough that I had to turn my headlights on. I drove through a small town center and turned off the main drag onto a smaller road that wound up Skully’s Mountain. It was a dark, narrow pass, and as I pulled over a small one-lane bridge at the base of a steep incline, I saw that it was edged only by a wooden guardrail protecting against a drop into a wide rushing river.

That was when I saw the Firebird again in my rearview mirror. How it had wound up behind me, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t make out the form of the driver, but something went dark and cold inside me. I put my foot down hard on the gas and the Jeep burned a little rubber as I took off up the incline.

But the Jeep couldn’t compete with the muscle of a Firebird. In a second, it was on top of me, its high beams reflecting blindingly in my mirrors. I felt a heavy thud as the car rammed me from behind. In the movies, when people get hit from behind, it never seems to be especially jarring. It felt to me like the earth below my car had shifted, as my head knocked forward and then snapped back hard. I was jolted and involuntarily let go of the wheel for a second. The Jeep veered sickenly toward the edge before I could grab the wheel again. I overcorrected and wound up swerving to the other lane and just pulled back as another car came around the bend, its horn wailing in alarm as it flew past.

Mortal terror slows everything down and I felt like I was in a time warp as the Firebird rammed me again. All I could hear was the sound of my own ragged breathing as we came up on the next hairpin turn. I pushed my foot down on the gas but the Firebird was too fast; it came up on me again harder than before. Tears sprang to my eyes, casting the road in a wet blur.

“Stop it!” I screamed at no one.

Another jolt sent the Jeep swerving into the oncoming lane. I hit the mountainside guardrail and saw sparks fly as the Jeep bounced off it. The Firebird pulled up quickly beside me so that I couldn’t get back over. I looked over and saw nothing but the tinted black window. Suddenly anger cleared the fog of fear that was clouding my brain. I didn’t know who was driving that car and I didn’t care. I turned the wheel sharply, slamming the side of the Jeep hard into the Firebird. They don’t call them muscle cars for nothing; it felt like I’d hit a stone wall. The car swerved a bit but held its ground. I was really pissed then. I slammed it again, harder, not caring if I took us both over the side of the mountain. We drove like that, racing, the chassis of our vehicles joined in a horrible screech of metal on metal. Then I saw the glow of approaching headlights just past the curve.

The Firebird wouldn’t give ground. I leaned on my horn, hoping to alert the oncoming driver that I was in his path. I knew if I slammed on my brakes on a curve like this, I’d flip the Jeep or still wind up in a head-on collision with the approaching car because I wouldn’t have time to get back over to the right side. I leaned on my horn again, praying that the driver heard me and would slow, but just then the Firebird gunned its engine and took off. I jerked the wheel and moved back into the right-hand lane, I swear, two seconds before a red Dodge truck came fast around the corner. The truck flew past me, an angry horn reprimanding me for my careless driving. I watched as the Firebird disappeared around the next curve.

I slammed on the breaks and sat there, my hands gripping the wheel, my teeth gritted, every muscle in my body on fire with adrenaline. I was shaking uncontrollably. I wept into the steering wheel until I saw a car approaching from behind. Then I drove shakily up the rest of the mountain and when I got to the other side pulled into a Burger King drive-through and got myself a chocolate milkshake and fries. Having almost been murdered on a mountain road, very possibly by the man I’d been recently sleeping with, I figured I owed it to myself. I sat in the parking lot quaking, crying, and shoving greasy French fries into my mouth as fast as I could without choking myself.

The thoughts in my brain were spinning. I found that I couldn’t really process what had just happened to me, what I was supposed to do next. I wasn’t able to identify the driver of the car, but it had to be Jake’s car. Had it been him at the wheel? Why would he want to hurt me? If not him, then who? How did they get his car? And over and over the same question: Why was any of this happening? As I sat sipping the milkshake, still shaking, that horrible feeling of aloneness settled in the marrow of my bones. But I’d stopped crying. I was beyond that now. I was out of tears.

When you discover that the foundation of your life has been constructed over a sinkhole and every wall has begun to crumble, what do you do? Where do you go? My mind drifted as thoughts that had no relevance to the moment presented themselves for consideration, as if to give my frazzled brain a little recovery time. For some reason, I thought about my mother.

Back in the years after I graduated from college, I took the 4/5 train every Wednesday and Friday to attend a yoga class on the Upper East Side. It was at a hideous time, six to seven-thirty in the morning, but I found that, if I could make it, it significantly improved the quality and productivity of my day. On a particularly cold February morning, I walked to Fourteenth Street in the early darkness and descended into the Union Square subway station. Still half asleep when the train arrived, I got on and sat down. The train paused in the station and I looked out the window. Fluttering there was a monarch butterfly. It seemed to hover beside the window as I stared at it in wonder. I thought, How could it be here, in this dark, underground place in winter? How could it survive in the cold? But there it was. I looked around the train to see if any of the other passengers noticed, but they were all dozing or reading. They all missed it, this tiny miracle. And when I looked back, it was gone. The doors closed and the train pulled from the station.

It occurred to me, not then but now as I sat in the parking lot in the likely totaled Jeep, that that was how I loved my mother. Behind glass in a train that was always leaving the station. My mother was someone you admired for her beauty, for her charm, for the strength of her character. But like that monarch butterfly, she was ultimately distant and elusive. Something to be glimpsed but not held. It might have been different if she hadn’t lost Ace. Because I think we all knew on some level that he was her one true love and that when he abandoned her, she never quite recovered. That for all the fire and conflict in their relationship, she adored him. There was a light that shone from within her when she looked at my brother. When he’d gone, the stage went dark. And we were all left to fumble around, finding new roles in her production.

I guess I hated her a little for that, as much as I loved her. In my most secret heart I always believed that if she could have chosen to lose one of us, it would have been me, that she would have traded me to have Ace back in a heartbeat. Maybe it wasn’t true, but I believed that through most of my adolescence and into adulthood.

Anyway, life doesn’t work like that. You can’t make trades. Or so I thought.

twenty-five

The damage was extensive. I could tell by the way drivers were passing me in the lot, giving me a wide berth and craning their necks to look back at me, that the Jeep was really looking bad. I got out of the vehicle and walked around it. It looked as though it had narrowly escaped the compactor, both the passenger and driver side severely scratched and dented where it had alternately hit the Firebird and the mountainside guardrail. I was glad that I’d invested in the extra insurance.

I suppose I should have called the police, or maybe even driven to the nearest police station and given up this quest. I mean, clearly that was the message, right? If that driver had wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have pulled off at the last minute, allowing me to return to the proper lane and avoid the collision with the oncoming car. The intention was to terrorize me, to scare me off my errand, and I
was
terrorized. But I was also angry, angrier than I had ever been in my life. And more determined than ever to find out what was happening to me.

The other big question at this point was: What was I doing exactly? Remember, this all started because I felt the need to leap in front of an oncoming van to save a child who’d wandered into its path. That act had set into action a series of events that led me to question my identity. But now I also found myself driven to know what had happened to the other children who went missing the same year as Jessie Amelia Stone. Sometime after I’d finished my milkshake and before I’d finished my fries, I’d made a decision. You know how in the safety instructions on an aircraft they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before you offer assistance to anyone else? It was like that. I couldn’t answer the question of what happened to Charlie, Pamela, or Brian until I knew what happened to
Ridley.
And because of the events of my recent life, I had to know more about
Jessie
to figure that out. So I started the car and continued to drive to the clinic to which Maria Cacciatore told me Teresa had taken Jessie, the Little Angels Children’s Health Clinic. I thought of a few different lies I might tell that could get me access to her files, if they even still existed. But in the end, the truth was the key.

As I walked through the automatic doors, I noticed a Project Rescue sticker on the glass. Its logo was the impression of a pair of cradling arms, the image of an infant nestled there, below which it read,
This Is a Safe Haven.
Quite a coincidence. I remembered how Detective Salvo didn’t like coincidence. I decided I was with him on that one.

“I need to see the person in charge,” I told the young man who sat at the reception desk. He was cute, with a round, earnest face and just the hint of stubble on his jaw.

“You mean, like in charge of all the doctors?”

“No. In charge of the whole place. In charge of the files.”

“Oh, you need your medical records.”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“You just need to see that lady over there and she can help you.” He pointed over toward a humorless-looking old woman manning a giant desk. I could see immediately that I wasn’t going to get anywhere with her.

“It’s not going to be easy that way. I don’t have any identification.”

He looked at me grimly and started to shake his head. “Uh…”

“Can you just get me the person in charge? Please,” I said, offering him my sweetest smile. He smiled back. It is my opinion that as a reasonably attractive young woman, you can talk your way into almost anything. Maybe I’m right. Or maybe it’s just the confidence that gets me what I want. Either way, I needed something to work today.

“Okay,” he said, giving me a conspiratorial look. “Have a seat.”

I waited a while, flipping through an old copy of
Parenting
magazine. The debate on spanking is alive and well, as is the new debate over vaccinations. I vote no on spanking, yes on vaccines. Why did people even
want
kids, considering all the ways you can screw them up?

“Can I help you?” A warm baritone broke into my thoughts. I looked up to see an extremely large black man with a shining bald head and gold wire-rimmed spectacles. There was the lightest dusting of gray in the stubble on his jaw. He wore a physician’s white jacket over a royal blue oxford and a tie with an Escher-type print of the Grateful Dead Dancing Bears. I stood and offered my hand, which he clamped in his gigantic bear claw. He held on to my hand for a second.

“Do I know you?” he said, looking at me with a cocked head.

“I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” he said, a wide grin splitting his face. When I first saw him, I put him in his late fifties. That megawatt smile shaved about fifteen years off his face. “You’re the one that saved that kid. Amazing. Good work.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s me,” I said, smiling back. “Ridley Jones. Thanks.”

“Dr. Jonathon Hauser.” He kept smiling and nodding for a second. Then: “What can I do for you, Ridley?”

“Is there someplace we can talk? It’s kind of a long story.”

He looked at me, his brow wrinkling in benevolent curiosity. “Sure,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Come with me.”

We sat in his plain but neat and well-lit office and I told him the whole story, omitting anything questionable or illegal, which basically eliminated all mention of Jake. I also didn’t tell him about the whole getting run off the road by a mysterious driver in a ’69 Firebird thing. My hope with the good doctor was that his Dancing Bear tie communicated a kind of hippie, rule-breaking center. That he might be the type of person who would be willing to sidestep regulations in the interest of justice.

“That’s a hell of a story, Ridley,” he said quietly when I’d finished. “But without proof of your identity, I’m sure you realize that I can’t release Jessie’s records.”

“But you think you might have them here?”

“We do have them. And I know this because about a year ago a young man, a private investigator, was here asking for the same thing. Said he’d been hired to revisit some cold cases, children who’d gone missing back in the seventies. Jessie Amelia Stone was one of those kids. We dug up the records, which were still in the basement of this building.”

Jake had been here, too. I guess I wasn’t really that surprised.

“Were the other children patients at this clinic?” I asked, trying to stay focused.

“I’m not able to reveal that information,” he said, leaning forward. “Of course, had I never heard of them, I’d be able to tell you
that.
”

I nodded my understanding. “Did the investigator gain access to any of those files?”

“As much as I would have liked to help him, I told him that he’d need a court order to have those files released.”

“And?”

“And I never heard from him again.”

I sighed and leaned back in the chair. I hadn’t realized but I’d been sliding forward toward him, my shoulders tensing. I felt like you feel at the DMV, powerless against a system as unyielding as a stone wall, forced to play by the rules or not play at all. I appealed to that Dancing Bear center.

“Dr. Hauser, I’m
not
a private investigator. And there’s a possibility that I may actually
be
one of those children. Isn’t there anything you can do?”

He looked down at the leather blotter on his desk and I could hear him release a breath. “What do you even hope to find in these records? How is seeing them going to answer any of your questions?”

I shrugged and said truthfully, “I don’t know. But I can’t think of any other place to go from here.”

He looked at me for a long moment, his hands steepled in front of his face. He gave his head a little shake and stood up. “Give me a second, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. And he left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

I stared at the wall behind his desk. Degrees, photographs, and newspaper clippings hung against the dark faux-wood paneling. I got up and walked behind his desk to take a closer look. An undergraduate degree from Rutgers University caught my eye. Class of ’62, the same year my father graduated from college before going on to medical school. I gazed over the other myriad degrees and awards. Another caught my eye; it was a plaque from Project Rescue awarded to Little Angels for their “Excellence in the Care and Service to Children.” I remembered the decal I had seen on the clinic’s doors and for a second some bells started ringing in my mind. Little Angels Health Clinic—had I heard that name before Maria Cacciatore told me about it? I went back to the chair and sat down, racked my brain, and came up with nothing.

The doctor entered the room again and he had a file in his hand.

“Listen, Ridley. I’m a medical professional bound by very strict rules and regulations. Any violation of those rules could cost me my career. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said, still turning the clinic name around in my mind.

“That said,” he went on, “I helped that investigator and I’ll help you. I’ll tell you what I told him, at least.”

I leaned toward him, offered a grateful smile.

“The investigator, his name was Jake, was also a child of the welfare system and his mentor, Arnie Coel, was a good friend of mine,” he said. “Aside from the investigation, he had his own reasons for wanting to know what happened to those kids.” He released a sigh here.

“As much as I’d like to, I really can’t tell you what’s in these files,” he said, “but I happen to know that the doctor who attended Jessie Stone is still practicing in New Jersey. He’s close to retirement, but he might be willing to talk to you. You may even convince him to petition the Medical Association to release this file. Since Jessie was his patient, he’s the only one that can really do that for you.”

I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be any help, but I guessed it was better than nothing.

“His name is Dr. Benjamin Jones. I’ll give you the number for his private practice.” He chuckled a bit then. “Quite a coincidence, you having the same last name. But I guess it happens to you all the time.”

Dr. Benjamin Jones. My father.

I heard the distant beat of drums and the room seemed to darken and spin. I was afraid that I might be sick in his office. “Yeah,” I said, the fakest smile I have ever worn threatening to shatter like glass. “Happens all the time.”