Ed King (45 page)

“I actually have them on another line right now. Put you on hold? Conference call?”

“I’ll do the talking,” said Ed.

Ed couldn’t buy DNA Reunion on the phone. Its CEO, who sounded like an arrogant punk, said, “I’m happy to discuss it in person, tomorrow. I’ll fly to you, we’ll sit down and talk,” to which Ed replied, “That’s too late. My offer’s off the table if you don’t take it now, so tell me what you want to do.”

“Then your offer’s off the table.”

“That’s right,” said Ed.

“So far,” said the CEO of DNA Reunion, “everything about this is highly unorthodox. Usually we collect the samples and do the profiles; in
your case we accepted a profile done by Pythia. Usually we require a name attached to samples, whereas in your case we agreed to anonymity. The whole thing’s irregular. I don’t know what to say. I wish this episode had never gotten started. But, look, I need you to do what everybody else does. Attach a name to the profile you sent. Provide contact information. If the other party still wants to reunite, I’ll release names and contact information to you both simultaneously.”

“The name you want is Tobias Dahl,” lied Ed. “This is about a Tobias Dahl.” Tobias—Toby—was one of Ed’s lieutenants. Toby was also an amateur thespian and the titular commandant of an in-house improv troupe known as Always Pythy. Toby was a longtime Building One fixture with lightweight administrative responsibilities. Ed thought Toby would be up to the job of preventing the appearance of a tabloid story headed
SEARCH KING IS MY LONG-LOST HALF-BROTHER!
“tdahl@pmail,” said Ed, then recited two phone numbers and added, “Whatever we paid you to ASAP Toby’s cross-check, we’ll pay that again if you’ll ASAP from here. In other words, call the other party immediately, and get back to us in the next five minutes.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said the arrogant punk. “But right now I’m sort of a little bit busy running a major company.”

Ed hung up, said “Whatever” to the room, and called Toby at home. “Tobe,” he said. “You flooded over there? Listen, I’ve got you involved in something. You with me, Toby? You ready for this? It’s a role-playing thing I need you to do. In a few minutes here, you’re going to get a call from a company calling itself DNA Reunion. They’ll give you the name of a half-sibling you’ve never met and didn’t even know about before this phone call. Your job is to call this newly discovered half-sib and pretend you’ve just found out you were adopted. Got that? Following that? You’ve also just found out that the two of you have the same birth father. The same dad, you and your half-sib. So what I need you to do is to milk this person for your father’s name, you got that, Toby? His name—that’s what I want. Plus, probe for other information while you’re at it. Play your role, you’re good at this stuff. I want you to get me his name.”

“Happy to help,” said Toby. “Guess what, Mr. King? I have another call. This could be them. It is them. Should I take it? I should take it, right?”

“Yes. But, Toby, make it a conference call. And don’t let them know I’m here.”

There was a click, and then Toby said, “Toby.”

“Tobias Dahl?” A woman’s voice, excited. A little throaty, phlegm-inflected. A bass note. Someone with a cough.

“This is Toby.”

“Oh my God.” The voice deepened on “God.” “My God, my God! Tobias—I’m your sister!”

“Oh my
God
,” answered Toby, smoothly. “This is so weird. I can’t believe this. How are you? No, wait—
who
are you?”

“I’m Chris Shepard. My name’s Chris Shepard. My God, it’s so good to meet you!”

“Even just on the phone,” said Toby. “Just to hear your voice like this. I mean it’s …” Toby paused, as if searching for a phrase. “It’s totally, completely unbelievable!”

“Just to hear
your
voice. Which is sort of like my voice. Where are you, anyway. Can I ask?”

“I’m right here, near Seattle—have you been to Seattle?”

“And I’m speaking to you from my home in Ann Arbor. But you know what?” Chris Shepard said. “This is starting to clear up a little, because I lived in Seattle growing up.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

“Weird,” said Toby. “We’re pretty flooded right now. You’ve probably seen us on the news.”

Already, Ed had pythed Chris Shepard, and come up with a half-dozen social-networking possibilities, a CompGlobal business listing, an online-scam posting, a patent abstract, and a mortgage broker. He wished Toby Dahl would cut to the chase. Toby was overrelishing his role instead of moving things urgently forward. He lacked urgency. He was having too much fun.

“It’s
really
weird,” Chris Shepard said. “I totally, totally wasn’t expecting this. I’m, like, pinching myself. A half-brother.”

“I know. I know. We live in a great age. DNA Reunion is great.”

“They’re
great
,” said Chris Shepard, with more raw, throaty emphasis. “What a crazy world. What a
crazy
world. What a crazy, crazy, mixed-up, crazy world.”

“Absolutely,” said Toby, genially.

“I gotta back up,” Chris Shepard said. “I gotta tell you something, backing up. It’s this—when I did this DNA Reunion thing, I had no idea I had a half-brother. It wasn’t like I was looking for a half-brother. Don’t take that wrong—I’m
so
glad I found you. This opens up a whole new universe! But what I was doing, my brother, Barrett—Barrett had a daughter he didn’t raise. He and the mom went separate ways. And since Barrett died in ’89, his daughter wasn’t going to find him if she got curious about her father. You get it? That was my motive with the DNA Reunion move. To connect with this niece, in case she ever wanted to connect with her father’s side of the family. I’m sorry if I sound like a commercial right now, but DNA
Reunion
.”

“DNA Reunion,” said Toby. “So you thought you might reconnect with this niece, but instead, out of the blue, you got Toby Dahl. You didn’t know you had a half-brother?”

“Toby?”

“They call me Toby. Chris?”

“Call me Chris.”

Ed was exasperated. “Chris Shepard Ann Arbor” had yielded next to nothing, just lists of names that included “Chris” and “Shepard,” but never the two of them usefully conjoined. He sent a text to Toby:
gt on w/it
. “Chris,” said Toby, “I’m sorry about your brother. My half-brother. He died in 1989?”

“Yes. Tragically. Terrible depressions.
Horrible
depressions. I hope I’m not scaring you with the thought that that’s genetic. He was barely in his thirties. It was suicide.”

“I’m sorry about that. I’m really, really sorry.”

“I have the feeling you understand me between the lines, Toby.”

“Yes, I do. I can see already, we speak the same language. Isn’t this weird? Our minds work the same way. It’s very, very sad. I’m sorry. It’s tragic. Now, what about you? You have kids?”

“I have three. One from a first marriage. The other two came in a package with my husband.” Chris Shepard emitted a low, humming stutter, as if assenting to something she herself had just said. “They’re all very nice,” she said.

“That’s so wonderful,” Toby answered. “Three kids. Wow! Uh, so ‘Shepard’—is that your maiden name?”

“No, no, no. My ex’s name. I kept it for my daughter. She’s a Shepard, so I’m a Shepard.”

“In Ann Arbor.”

“A Shepard in Ann Arbor, that’s me, yes. But actually my mother is still in Seattle. Technically, not Seattle. Technically, Bellevue. With an unbelievable third husband. I didn’t see it coming, it’s unbelievably her third husband. One of those late-in-life companionship marriages. His name’s McElvoy, he folds the towels and so forth. But, oh, how I wish I could tell you who
your
mom was! I’m sure that’s what brought you to DNA Reunion. You weren’t looking for me, but you found me—it’s great! So what can I tell you? Digging something out of my hat. Hmmm … nothing, I can’t tell you anything. I’m a total waste of time! I know that. I know. I can tell you our dad was a terrible philanderer. Our dad thought he was a huge Don Juan. So I don’t know … you know … anything specific. I’m so useless. But what a surprise. What a big, huge surprise this is!”

Ed found images of a bikini-clad Chris Shepard who had a flat brown belly and a ring through her navel. Probably not the Chris Shepard of the raspy voice, who would have been born in the fifties or sixties. The beach belle Chris Shepard was born in ’97. And there were neither two husbands nor three children in her bio. Chris Shepard the younger was a model and an actress. Great tits, long legs. Ed looked at images of Chris the younger while Toby, in his breezy way, toyed with Chris the elder. “Everyone called me Tobe,” he said. “Or Toad sometimes. My dad called me Toad. So your last name was?”

“Cousins. My maiden name is Cousins. Your dad was Walter Cousins. An actuary. Where you are. Where I grew up. He died in 1979, in an automobile accident.”

With that, Ed’s attention to their conversation failed. Because Walter Cousins was a name he’d never forgotten, a name that showed up in his thoughts uninvited. Walter Cousins was the man Ed had killed in a fit of adolescent road rage. But how could that be? Walter Cousins was his
father
? Could this be a different Walter Cousins, who’d died in a different automobile accident? There had to be a mistake somewhere. Maybe Chris Shepard was adopted, too! Maybe she only
thought
Walter Cousins was her father. Maybe they both had some other father that neither of them yet knew anything about. Maybe … But Ed couldn’t think of more maybes and instead milked desperately the maybes at
hand for whatever thin hope they were worth. After all, if he’d been left on a doorstep, wasn’t there a small probability, maybe even a significant probability, that Chris Shepard had been left on one, too? Maybe Chris had been left on a doorstep but didn’t know it yet—that had to be the explanation. Maybe she and Ed were both the issue of serial foundling producers. Because otherwise—killing your own father? Was he dreaming right now? Had he really killed his father? Ed felt panic weakening his limbs. “What is going
on
?” he thought. “What’s happening to me? Why is this happening? This can’t be happening. I killed my father? I didn’t kill my father. There’s something wrong. Something’s out of synch with reality. Is someone playing a game with me? Someone wants to sabotage me! No, that’s insane. That’s a movie plot. Conspiracies, enemies, that’s not the explanation. Could I engage in a more ridiculous line of thought? What am I doing? I’m grasping at straws. Because I don’t want to accept reality. But that’s because reality is impossible. I killed my father? I didn’t kill my father! I actually, really killed my own father! Unless this Shepard is a foundling, too. Please, please! This can’t
be
.”

Toby Dahl was still talking. “… parents, as far as I’m concerned. My dad was a character. He sold boats, he was a yacht broker. My mom’s still alive, like your mom—women last longer. She had this bead shop, before that vintage clothing, before that antiques, before that …”

Ed seethed. He pythed “McElvoy Bellevue WA” and got a urologist and a personal trainer up top before adding “phone” to the search field. Nothing, so he entered “Bellevue phone book” and, after a White Pages search, got Reginald McElvoy—there were no other McElvoys—an address, a phone number, and a map.

“… but probably better at midlife, when you’re equipped,” Walter Cousins’s daughter was saying. “Although I’m sure it’s … ”

Ed pythed Reginald McElvoy. A family tree indicating he was born in 1851, a Reginald McElvoy listed as a student in 1934 at a school in Auckland. Or maybe it was spelled MacElvoy, except that didn’t yield a Reginald, or … But there were probably a lot of ways to spell this name, redolent as it was of clans, heavy drinking, and damp air. Pythia could be counted on to meet spelling variations with creativity, because it employed a supple algorithm Ed himself had made revisions on, so there was no need to plug the search field full of spellings. Besides, what would
be the point? He already had a phone number for what was in all probability the former Mrs. Walter Cousins—he could cut to the chase just by making a call. Where the daughter had only generalities—Don Juan—the mother, the wife, the betrayed party, the widow, that person might have specifics.

He called. Two people picked up. There ensued a brief, unwinnable battle against the suspicion that Ed was a solicitor who’d penetrated a porous firewall. Ed assumed it was Reginald McElvoy and the former Mrs. Cousins energetically accosting him on separate lines, though they would not identify themselves. The male voice, bravely fluid, concluded with “I know what you’re up to. Don’t call us again. Take us off your list,” and then the female voice, similarly intrepid, said—not to Ed but to her ally in pushing back affliction—“This is not supposed to happen,” before both of them hung up.

So Ed was stopped, momentarily, by a down-to-earth privacy concern. The information he required was guarded by senior citizens who didn’t take calls from strangers. If their tag-team phone defense was any clue, they had a no solicitors sign on their stoop, backed by a Doberman with a tendency to lunge. How could the McElvoys be made to yield? They both had multiple antennae up and were stalwart defenders of their nest, an instinct, thought Ed, that calcifies in one’s golden years, with its beepers, peepholes, door chains, and double window latches. He wanted to laugh. After everything he’d done, he was caught in the net of the National Do Not Call Registry, which Pythia had supported in order to deflect attention from its own myriad invasions. Unless you were an old-school hick, a willful geriatric, a Luddite, or the Google guys, Pythia was already in your house.

But how to get in the McElvoys’ house? All Ed wanted to do was ask the former Mrs. Cousins if she knew whom her ex had gotten pregnant, besides her. Was that a solicitation? Technically—but now Ed thought of something.

He called Toby on a second line. “Tobe,” he said. “You’re doing great with this. You should get an Oscar. But what I need you to do A-sap is ask this Chris Shepard person to call her mother. Tell Shepard you’re going to hang up and that she should call her mother
immediately
with the message that you, Toby Dahl, are about to call her—you, Toby Dahl, Shepard’s half-brother, are very eager to talk to Mrs. McElvoy-Cousins and
will be calling her in just a few minutes. You get it? We want Shepard to make a pave-the-way, introductory phone call for us.”