that. They didn’t have a big enough house, they had no money, et cetera, et cetera. But I suspect…” She hesitated. “I suspect it was my uncle who put his foot down. I think maybe she had to plead to get him to agree to keep me. I always felt as if he resented me.”
Sounded like a hell of a childhood. Suzanne Chauvin might have been better off if they hadn’t kept her, Mark thought. Except then she would have had to live with the wrenching memory of not being wanted by her own relatives.
Looking again at the notes she’d spread on his desk, she said, “If I could have found out their adoptive names… The problem is, the attorney who handled the adoption is dead. He’s been dead for a long time. No one seems to know what happened to his files. I found his wife in a nursing home, but her memory is shaky and she says he never talked about work. She gave me the name of his secretary, but I couldn’t find her. Maybe the name was wrong. Maybe she died, too, or got married, or…” She trailed off, her discouragement plain in her voice.
“Did you add your name to the International Soundex Reunion Registry, in case one of them is looking for you?”
“Yes, right away. That is, three years ago.”
He frowned. “Surely your aunt and uncle were told something about the family or families that adopted your sister and brother.”
“They get…well, vague. ‘Just that they were nice people,’ my aunt said. She was sure that the adoptive father—maybe one of the adoptive fathers—was a doctor.” Ms. Chauvin gave another of those twisted smiles that did a poor job of hiding her hurt. “She offered me that tidbit like…like a bone to a dog. See? They had to be perfect if he was a doctor!”
He suggested gently, “It may be that she’s consoling herself, not you. As you say, she may have been dealing with guilt for twenty-five years. That one fact may be her touchstone. Her way of saying, ‘I did the right thing. He’s a doctor. Those children are better off with a father who’s a doctor than they would have been with us.’”
His client sat silent for a moment. Voice stricken, she said at last, “Yes. I didn’t think. You’re probably right.”
“I may need to talk to your aunt and uncle at some point. But first let me see how far I can get with what you already know.” He took an agency contract from the drawer and went over the provisions with her, making sure she understood his fees and watching her face carefully to be sure in his own mind that she wouldn’t be bankrupting herself to pay them.
She signed and pushed the contract across the desk to him. “May I ask how you got into this?” She waved her hand to encompass his office, his business, his life.
He gave her the severely edited answer. “I was a cop. A detective. But the hours were lousy for family life, and I realized that what I enjoyed was solving puzzles. So…”
“So you’re married and have children?” She seemed genuinely curious, mainly, he guessed, because she wanted to feel she knew him, that he was worthy of her trust.
“My wife died two and a half years ago. She had a bad heart.”
It was another short answer. He didn’t like to think about the choice Emily had made, and didn’t feel as if he had to bare himself to every client simply to make them feel better about having to reveal themselves to him.
More persistent than most, her voice gentle, Suzanne Chauvin nodded at the framed photo on his desk. “Is that your little boy?”
“Michael is five. He just started kindergarten.”
“He’s cute.” She seemed to tear her gaze from the photo with some reluctance.
Mark rose to signal that they were done. “Ms. Chauvin, I’ll keep you informed every step of the way. I promise. What you do with the information we uncover will be your choice.”
Standing, she asked, “You mean, I’ll be the one who contacts them when you find them?”
“If you prefer. If you decide the initial contact would be better made by a third party, I can do that for you. But let’s not worry about that until we get to it.”
“It might be a shock to have someone call you out of the blue and say, I’m your sister.”
Or, I’m your child’s real mother. His gaze strayed to his son’s smiling face.
Oh, yeah. That would be a real shock.
“I’ll be in touch, Ms. Chauvin.”
CHAPTER TWO
CARRIE ST. JOHN left her car parked in the circular driveway in front of her parents’ house. Although she’d grown up here at the crown of the hill in Magnolia, Seattle’s exclusive enclave, at twenty-six she had been away enough years now that she no longer thought of the elegant Georgian style brick house as home.
The front door opened even as she mounted the steps. Her mother, as beautiful and stylish as ever, came out smiling. “Sweetie, how nice to see you.”
Carrie bounced up the steps. “Hi, Mom!”
Her mother presented a cheek for a kiss.
“Your daffodils are gorgeous,” Carrie said.
“They are, aren’t they?” Her mother regarded the formal rose garden bounded by a perfectly trimmed boxwood hedge within the circle formed by the driveway. Brick paths bisected the beds filled with hybrid teas, not yet in bloom but cut often during the season to fill vases in the house. The paths and semicircle were perfectly aligned with the view over rooftops of the Puget Sound and downtown Seattle. Terra-cotta pots placed along the paths and at intersections brimmed with yellow and cream daffodils. They would be replaced, Carrie knew, with others when the tulips came in bloom.
Personally she would have underplanted the roses with perennials and runaway biannuals and annuals like violets and foxgloves and forget-me-nots, but her mother shuddered at the idea.
“The house is formal,” she always insisted. “The garden should be, too.”
Carrie suspected the real truth was that Mom hated the idea of plants romping free, popping up where they weren’t wanted, clambering onto paths. Mom liked order. Cottage gardens weren’t orderly.
To each her own, Carrie thought indulgently. Her mother undoubtedly missed her, but she must occasionally feel relief that she didn’t have to wonder in horror what mess lay behind her daughter’s closed bedroom door, or come down in the morning to a sink full of dirty dishes, or endure a dog shedding on the rugs and scratching the gleaming hardwood floors.
Carrie was more like her father. Although mostly orderly out of habit—and probably as a result of some nagging on Mom’s part—he tended to developed heaps of newspapers, books, notes and medical journals. Then he couldn’t find what he wanted and would mumble under his breath as he dug through various piles in search of whatever he sought. He had half a dozen pairs of reading glasses, too, because he could never find them, either. This way, he could usually locate a pair without too much trouble—sometimes by sitting on them, if he’d left them on a sofa cushion. Carrie had always imagined him living in a state of pleasant disorder, if Mom hadn’t been there to tidy up after him.
Carrie spared a thought for
