Butchers Hill (18 page)

"Penfield is on private property.
Sal will be staying here this summer, taking extra credits in math and
science to help him catch up. As a courtesy, I'm going to ask
that you not return here, and that you never attempt to contact Sal
again. If you don't honor my request, I can make it official
and obtain a restraining order."

"A restraining order? What do you
think I'm going to do? Sit on him and stuff dollar bills in
his pocket?"

"Sal is my ward, I am responsible
for him. You're not the first disreputable person who has
tried to dredge up his past. When Beale was released from prison two
months ago, we actually received calls from some tabloid television
show, which wanted to stage a ‘reunion.'
Disgusting. They offered us money, too. Well, I'm determined
that Sal's life will not be lived under the shadow of what
happened five years ago."

Tess looked at the well-furnished library,
at Sal Hawkings in his navy blazer, khakis, and blue Oxford cloth
shirt. She thought of Treasure, his face streaked with lemon pie,
squatting in a vacant house. "Sal would seem to be the one
kid from Butchers Hill who's done pretty damn well for
himself. Why aren't Treasure and Destiny enrolled at
Penfield? Or Eldon? How come Sal's the only one deserving of
your solicitous care?"

"I'm here because
I'm
smart
,"
Sal said, slapping his book shut. "The others were dumb
motherfuckers, but I knew enough to want to get out, even if it meant
going to a sorry-ass school like this. Now excuse me, but second period
is about to begin. I don't have time for shit I
don't get graded on."

He left the room, taking the Kipling with
him.

"You see?" Pearson said.
"Any mention of Luther Beale sets him off. Trauma like that
never goes away. Now please leave and be prepared to be arrested if you
come back."

As it often happened, Tess was in her car
and well on her way to Annapolis before she realized what she should
have said in reply.
It wasn't
Beale's name that upset Sal, or even Donnie
Moore's. It was the mention of the other children, Treasure,
Destiny, and Eldon
.

The legislature was long out of session, but
Annapolis was busy, swarming with tourists drawn by its over-the-top
quaintness. Apparently, the Gap and Banana Republic became much more
exotic when fronting on narrow, cobblestone streets. Tess pulled into
the public garage off Main Street, although it always hurt her to pay
for parking—hence, those two tickets—and walked up
the hill to the Senate office building.

She had never covered the General Assembly
as a reporter, but she knew the basic civics lesson of how a bill
became law. Jeff from Adoption Rights had told her that the failed bill
targeting operations such as Family Planning Alternatives was Senate
Bill 319, offered by a senator from Carroll County, a once-rural area
now considered part of the Baltimore metro area. Tess had found it odd
someone from outside the city had sponsored the bill, especially an old
pro-lifer like this senator. There must be a wounded constituent
somewhere in the mix. If the committee files proved useless, she could
always check with the senator's office and see what kind of
material he had kept. But changing the law apparently hadn't
been all that important to the senator. Over the past five years, he
had never attempted to reintroduce the bill.

Tess walked into the empty Senate building
and climbed the broad double staircase to the third floor. The
secretary who handed Tess the file seemed almost grateful for any
distraction.

"What are you trying to find,
anyway?" she asked.

"Looking for some folks who
testified on this bill, see if they can give me any leads on the
adoption agency that inspired it all." Tess pulled out the
sign-in sheet that was put out before each hearing. In order to
testify, one had to sign in. The list for SB 319 had just five names:
the senator himself, someone from the Department of Human Resources,
the state agency that oversaw all adoptions, a couple, Mr. and Mrs.
John Wilson of Baltimore, and a woman, Willa Mott. The senator and DHR
had filed written versions of their testimony, but there was nothing in
the file from the Wilsons or Willa Mott.

"Is this everything?"
Tess asked.

"If that's all there is,
that's all there is. You know, I've been in this
office for ten years and I've got a good memory for most of
the controversial stuff that comes through, but I don't
remember this one
at all
.
What's the big deal?"

"No big deal, but I'd
like to find the people who testified. I just wish I knew what they
said, or where they fit into the whole debate."

The secretary shrugged.
"There's always the tapes."

"Tapes?"

"Senate records every committee
hearing. If you know the date and the time—and it's
right there, so you do—you can go over to Legislative
Reference and listen on a pair of headsets, just like it was an old
radio show. Only even more boring, if you know what I mean."

"Can I do that right
now?"

"Sure. But I feel sorry for
someone who can't think of something better to do on a nice
June day than listen to one of our hearings. Whyn't you go
down to the dock, have a meal at one of the seafood places?
There's this one place that serves the best crab dip. And if
you're on expense account, the Cafe Normandy does a real good
rockfish."

Tess, trying not to shudder too visibly at
the idea of crab dip or rockfish, thanked the woman and headed across
the street to Legislative Reference.

Although tempted to fast-forward through the
testimony, she listened dutifully to the entire tape. The
senator's dull, rambling introduction, with all its little
formalities, the agency's defensive posturing—DHR
didn't seem to have anything against the bill, it just wanted
to make clear it was not to blame for aberrations such as Family
Planning Alternatives.

The law itself, as described, was trivial,
requiring that such services disclose in their advertising whether they
provided abortions. The pro-lifer senator seemed to be trying a
preemptive strike, offering a weak, ineffective bill that would keep
the government from scrutinizing other agencies that might be pulling
the kind of bait-and-switch Family Planning Alternatives had tried:
luring women in with promises of abortions, then using all sorts of
propaganda to talk them out of the procedure. (One woman, for example,
had been told an abortion halved her probability of ever becoming
pregnant again and increased her risk of gynecological cancers tenfold.)

The testimony droned on and on. Tess almost
nodded off, then the tenor of the voices changed and she snapped to,
rewinding the tape.

The Wilsons were a couple who had started an
adoption through Family Planning, then broken off the relationship
because they had been disturbed by a worker's offer of a
steep discount if they would take a biracial, disabled child.
"It was like she was running a tag sale, wasn't it,
Mike?" the woman appealed to her husband.
"‘Would you take a baby like that if we knocked a
thousand dollars off the fees? How about two thousand? What if the baby
isn't disabled, just biracial?'"

Again, Tess stopped the tape and played it
back. Yes, the woman definitely said Mike, despite the fact that she
and her husband had signed in as Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson. Unless the
woman tripped up again on the tape, and gave their full names or
hometown, finding them would be impossible.

Willa Mott, according to her testimony, had
been a worker at the agency for ten years and now ran a day-care center
in Westminster, the senator's home county. Bingo! Tess
thought, writing down the name. Assuming the woman hadn't
moved out of state, she'd be easy enough to find, with a name
like that. In a nervous, thin voice that suited her spinsterish name,
she described the scare tactics her former employers had used, and how
she had finally leaked the story to a local television station. A
clerical worker, she had sat in on most of the interviews and seen the
files on every client.

"Why did you wait so long before
telling anyone what was happening?" one of the committee
members asked.

Willa Mott stuttered from nervousness.
"I myself do not believe in abortion, because of my religious
pr-pr-pr-principles. I thought it was right to counsel young women
against it. But I began to see that they were hurting the women who
came in, and some of them just went someplace else, anyway. It
didn't seem Christian to me, what they were doing. I and one
of the clients called a television reporter. I didn't go on
camera—they shot me in the dark, with one of those machines
that makes your voice sound funny. But before the report even aired, my
supervisors closed the office and disappeared. I showed up for work one
day and the place was locked."

Another senator, a woman, asked a question:
"The adoptions they arranged—were those legal and
aboveboard?"

"Oh my goodness, yes. If they
could have just kept doing that, without trying to coerce the women who
came to see them, I would have been proud to work there. But they had a
cause, you know? They honestly believed in what they were
doing."

The testimony ended there and before Tess
knew it, she was listening to a debate over a different bill, something
about the state's private adoption laws. She turned her
headset in and walked outside, blinking in the bright sun on Lawyers
Mall, the square at the center of the State House complex. Tourists
were gathered around the statue of Thurgood Marshall, snapping
pictures, posing alongside the bronze version of the Supreme Court
justice as if he were one of those life-size cutouts of the president
or a popular sports figure.

Marshall was a relatively new addition to
the State House grounds, added as a way of soothing the hard feelings
engendered by a statue of the other Marylander to sit on the Supreme
Court, Roger Taney. Taney's claim to fame, alas, was that he
had written the Dred Scott slave decision, helping the nation set
course for the Civil War. Inevitably, people in the bury-the-past
nineties had wanted to tear Taney's statue down, as if that
would make everything better. The state, in a rare burst of
Solomon-like wisdom, had countered by adding Marshall's
likeness. The compromise had worked in ways few imagined. For while
Marshall stood in this open square, literally embraced by tourists,
Roger Taney sat high on a hill on the other side of the State House
lonely and ignored.

Back in her car, Tess turned on the radio
and punched the buttons until she found a man talking about the media
conspiracy to conceal some Washington scandal. It was a liberal media
conspiracy, of course, an allegation that always made Tess smile. The
media was one of the most conservative forces she knew.

A traffic announcer broke in, warning of a
back-up along the streets west of her office. A rowhouse fire had
Fayette and Pratt blocked, traffic snarled in every direction. She
would have to swing to the east, approaching the city through the Fort
McHenry tunnel, although the tunnel always made her claustrophobic and
she resented tolls almost as much as she resented paid parking. But
most of all, she hated the idea of all that water beyond the
white-tiled walls, hated the moment when the radio went out, leaving
her alone in her car, without even the nattering voice of a conspiracy
buff to keep her company.

Maybe she should call in to one of the talk
shows before she hit the tunnel, share her revelation about the two
Supreme Court justices. Most of the shows were desperate enough for
callers that they paid for cell phone calls. But she didn't
want to talk to some pompous baritone. Tess realized she had been
speaking to Jackie in her head about the two statues, imagining what
they might talk about when they drove to Westminster looking for Willa
Mott. She had always done this, putting away anecdotes she knew would
amuse someone close to her, looking forward to the chance to provoke
Tyner, make Kitty laugh.

Only Jackie wasn't a friend, she
reminded herself, merely a client. Once Tess found her daughter,
she'd be gone.

"D
oesn't
Carroll County still have an active chapter of the KKK?"
Jackie asked, looking nervously around the bagel shop where she and
Tess had stopped, killing time before their 10 a.m. appointment with
Willa Mott.

"Uh-huh. In fact,
they've got a recruiting flier up on the wall over
there," Tess said, pointing with her chin toward the bulletin
board. "I've heard it's a great way to
meet men. Want me to write down the number?"

"You know, some things are not
funny."

"I'll concede that if
you'll concede some things
are
."

Jackie broke off a piece of her bagel, then
looked at it as if she couldn't remember what she was
supposed to do with it. She wasn't quite as tense and nervous
as she had been at the Adoption Rights meeting, but she was definitely
rattled. Was it possible to want something so much that it scared you?

"Remind me to check my teeth in
the rearview mirror before we head out," Tess said.
"I don't want to interview someone with poppy seeds
in my teeth."

"You should have ordered something
without seeds, then." Oh so prim.

"What, like that banana nut thing
with
blueberry
cream
cheese you're toying with? I have news for you, Jackie. That
is not a bagel. If the local KKK came in here right now,
they'd take one look at what you're eating and say,
‘At least she's a Gentile.' Then
they'd drag me out of here by the braid like the cossacks who
used to come calling in my great-grandmother's
village."