Bloodline (34 page)

It was another blind alley, an unmarked door. I didn't know if I'd step into an elevator shaft or be invited to tea. When it came down to it, I didn't know if it was Missy's baby. I wouldn't know until I asked.

The stout went down too quickly. I left money on the phone book and, leaving the waitress to her grief, went back to the truck.

Benefit was maybe a half-mile away, running along the edge of what was called College Hill. The houses were close together, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, graceful and imposing and very expensive. The nicer ones required family money. Four-thirty-nine was one of those.

It was a brick row house sort of thing, except double wide with an arched brick wall in the center, leading to a private courtyard. The front door was Georgian and stately, painted a dark red, with simple windows along each side and a graceful fan up above. I pulled up across the street in front of a no-parking sign and shut off the motor.

The lights were on upstairs and down and there was a new Volvo station wagon parked in the courtyard. I sat and watched and a figure passed one of the upstairs windows. It passed again and I could see that it was a woman. If she started to get undressed, I was out of there.

I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and saw that I still looked like an escapee from a Siberian labor camp. My eye was half-closed and
the skin around it was yellowing. There was stubble growing around my cuts and scrapes like brush around a clear-cut forest. Maybe I wouldn't have to say anything to the Flanagans. Maybe they'd just beg for mercy.

The woman appeared at the window again and this time I could see she was holding a baby. I took a deep breath, got out of the truck, and walked to the door.

Beside the door was a knob. I pulled it and some sort of antique bell jangled inside the house like something on an ice-cream truck. I waited. There were steps. The brass lamps beside the big red door flashed on like headlights. The door swung open.

It was a man, in jeans and a sweater. He was maybe forty, tall and bearded and lean like a runner. I took one look at him and knew he'd been warned. His face was too taut, his expression too stern, and in his eyes there was no curiosity about why a ratty-looking stranger was standing on his front step.

He knew.

“Mr. Flanagan?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, his voice hard and flat.

“I'm Jack McMorrow. I'm a writer and I'm from Maine, and—this sounds sort of crazy, I know—I need to talk to you.”

“About what?” Flanagan asked.

He wasn't puzzled. Wasn't wondering what the hell this guy wanted. Wasn't ready to call the cops.

I played along. He did, too.

“It's about your baby. I know this sounds strange, and please don't get the wrong idea, but I just need to talk to you about her. There's no problem. Really. And I don't want to make any trouble for your family. I just need some information. For my own sake. Really. I'm not a crank. I'm really not.”

He stood there and stared and said nothing. I could hear classical music playing inside the house. A car went by. I waited.

“You've got a minute,” Flanagan said. “The clock's ticking.”

“I think I knew the mother—the biological mother, I mean—of your baby. Her name was Missy Hewett, and I met her while researching a magazine story on teenage mothers. This is all just in the last couple weeks. So Missy—she was a student at the University of Southern Maine—she was killed this week. They thought she'd been hit by a car in Portland, but it turned out she was dead before that. Suffocated.”

For the first time I thought I got a reaction.

“And Missy's phone bill shows she called this house. Twice. This would have been late August. The baby would have been a couple of months old. Roughly.”

“So the police in Maine are investigating this woman's death?” Flanagan said suddenly.

“Yes.”

“Then why aren't they asking these questions?”

“They may be soon.”

“Why are you involved? Are you doing an article about this woman's murder, if that's what it is?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm just trying to piece things together.”

“For what purpose?”

“I'm not sure.”

“If it's some sort of extortion, then I'll tell you right now, you won't get a cent.”

“I don't want money,” I said. “I just want to know what happened.”

“Well, just so you understand,” Flanagan said, suddenly pointing his finger at me, his voice louder, more tremulous, “I don't know
anything about this woman. But I do know that I won't let anybody hurt our baby or my family. I won't let you.”

“I don't want to hurt your family. I told you that.”

“I won't let you. You understand that? I will do whatever it takes to protect this family. I will—”

He paused and turned and looked up the stairs. There were footsteps and then a long print skirt came into view, coming down. Then a blouse, then a very beautiful red-haired woman.

“Honey, what is it?” she said.

“Nothing. There's someone here. A Mr. McMorrow. He's—”

“He's here? My God, the son of a bitch.”

She took four steps toward me and pointed her finger in my face, too.

“Who do you think you are? Who the hell do you think you are? Coming into this house and questioning us. Well, I'll tell you right now, you are not going to take our little girl away from us.”

“I have no intention of doing that.”

“Then why are you here? How did you find us?”

I didn't say anything.

“No, I want an answer. How did you find this house? How dare you come and stand on our doorstep and ask us about our family? How dare you? Now, how did you find us?”

“Missy Hewett called you.”

“And that was enough for you, you son of a bitch, you creep, coming in here. We were told we might be hearing from you. Fran, how much does he want?”

“I don't want anything,” I said.

“Write him a check and—”

“Mrs. Flanagan,” I said, louder. “I don't want anything. Nothing. I came here because I need to know more about Missy Hewett and the adoption. That's all. All I want to know is why Missy called.”

“What business is that of yours?” the woman said.

“I was working with her. For a story about teenage mothers and how they live. Right in the middle of that, somebody killed her. I need to know why. I need to know if it was related to what I was working on. And if she was calling you—”

“I fail to see how—” Flanagan began.

“That has nothing to do with us,” his wife said, her cheeks rouged with anger. “Or our daughter. And I'll tell you—that little baby is our life. She's more than our life. She is … She's everything. I don't know about this girl. If what you say is true, I'm sorry for her. But let me tell you right now: If you try to do anything to take our daughter away from us, I will kill you, you son of a bitch. Do you understand, you fucking son of a bitch?”

“Courtney!” Flanagan blurted.

“I don't care, Fran. We waited so long. She's ours. She's our baby. Do you have children?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you can't understand, can you? You can't know what we're talking about.”

“I think I understand.”

“No, you don't. You can't. Until you have children, you have no idea. If you did, you wouldn't be here trying to destroy our lives. How can you live with yourself? Do you enjoy hurting people? Hurting innocent children?”

“I'm not—”

There was crying from deeper inside the house, first faint, then louder. I heard the tap of footsteps, then a door opened and the crying was right there, and then a young woman appeared, younger than Missy, with a baby in her arms. The cries came in deep, heaving gasps.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Flanagan,” the girl said, her accent very Irish. “I just can't get her to settle.”

Courtney Flanagan, who had just threatened to kill me, swept the baby from the girl's arms in a smooth, instinctive motion. The girl stood there, awaiting orders, I supposed. Courtney Flanagan seemed to have forgotten her as she rocked the little dark-haired baby, Missy's baby, on her shoulder.

The crying subsided into tiny sobs, like faint hiccups.

“Sorry, Mrs. Flanagan,” the Irish girl said again.

“It's okay, Megan,” said Fran Flanagan, who, like me, had become a mere spectator to this display of the power of a mother's love. “You can go back upstairs.”

When the girl had gone, Courtney Flanagan looked at me. Her eyes were pale blue and they were filled with tears. The baby's hiccups were fainter.

“Nobody hurts her,” she said, her voice breaking. “Nobody takes her. I meant what I said.”

She turned and went up the stairs in a swish of skirt. Fran Flanagan and I were left alone, and there was a strange silence, almost like a vacuum, in which we both stood. And then it was over.

“If you come here again, I'll call the police,” Flanagan said. “If you contact me or my wife in any other way, I'll take legal action. You will not threaten this family.”

And he swung the big door shut.

30

I
left because I didn't want to get rousted by the Providence cops, but I didn't go far: down two blocks and over one, where I parked in the shadows under an old maple tree and shut off the motor.

And sat there feeling a little sick.

Whatever else was going on here, the feeling the Flanagans had for their baby was real. I could see it in Fran Flanagan's eyes. I could feel it emanating from his wife's body, like a sound wave. They were living for that kid. And they would kill for that kid.

But had they already?

Courtney Flanagan, with her fashion-magazine looks, would claw my heart out and eat it if it meant keeping Missy's baby. Had she done that to Missy? Had the Flanagans heard that this little girl from Maine was going to burst the bubble of their new family? Had they decided the little girl had to go?

But Courtney Flanagan had most clearly and succinctly threatened to kill me. Would somebody who had committed murder, and thus far gotten away with it, threaten to kill somebody else? It didn't make sense, but then, the Flanagans weren't operating sensibly when
it came to the baby. They were very much afraid. And fear made people do strange things.

What if Missy had called them and tried to back out on the adoption? What if she'd asked for a meeting and the Flanagans had been unable to persuade her to let things stand? What if they'd offered her money? What if they'd offered her more money?

What if she'd said no?

So how could it have come off? A meeting. Things get heated. Missy wants the baby back and does what—threatens to go to court? Threatens to have the baby put in a foster home until the matter is resolved? They argue, and one of the Flanagans knocks Missy down and puts a pillow over her face. Holds it there until she stops moving and the problem goes away. The adoption is final.

But then, what to do with her? Stick some shorts and Nikes on her and dump her in the road. Do it in the middle of the night, and by the time they find her, the Flanagans are back in the big brick house, listening to Mozart and rocking their baby to sleep.

It could have happened that way, but I was having trouble picturing it. Would Courtney Flanagan venture out of her East Side fortress to confront Missy? Or would she lock herself in her room with her precious baby girl and send lawyers to take care of the matter? This was a woman who had an Irish au pair on duty, probably before the baby even arrived. Who had money and the power that goes along with it.

Courtney Flanagan did not do diapers. Would she get her hands dirty by killing an innocent woman?

No, I just couldn't see it. What I
could
picture was a guy and his wife who, if they were innocent of everything except trying to protect their adopted child from me, had a right to think I was slime. Sometimes I wondered myself, but there was no turning back now.

I ate on Thayer Street, wolfing down a spinach calzone at a vegetarian place next to the café where I'd had the Oat Sheaf Stout. This time I tried an Anchor Steam Ale, from the West Coast. The ale was better than the calzone, which contained a mysterious herb that made it taste faintly of soap. I washed it down with the ale and ordered another from a young woman who was dressed in skirts and shawls. She looked like a refugee but probably had a trust fund.

And a grandfather who was spinning in his grave.

I was weary already and the ale was threatening to anchor me to the seat. I'd wait until closing and ask the young woman to take me home to her camp. One refugee to another.

But I drank the second beer and then roused myself and left, walking down the street in the cool night air. Kids were out in force, lining up in front of an artsy movie theater, streaming into a neon-lit bar on the corner. It was time for me to get out.