"Luther Beale told me there was a car and two shots, shots he didn't fire. Yet none of you mentioned the car, or any other gunshots. You all told the same exact story, with the same details. But Luther says Destiny and Treasure had already rounded the corner, and even Eldon's back was still to him when he started firing. You couldn't have all seen the same thing."
"He's a damn liar. We wouldn't do that, okay? We were a posse, we stuck together, we wouldn't abandon one of our own. We ran afterward, after Donnie was dead, because we were scared. Who wouldn't be? He was going to kill us, too."
"And there was no car?"
"No car, no second shooter, no O. J. Simpson, okay? That's why the old man's killing the rest of us, you know, because once we're all dead, there won't be anyone to contradict his sorry lies, and he wins. But he did it. He's just gonna have to learn to live with that, the way we had to live with Donnie's death and the way they broke us up, sending us to new families."
Sal grabbed his knapsack and began throwing in the items Tess had spread out on her desk. Tess let him have everything except the Kipling, which she hugged to her chest. She suspected it was the one thing he wouldn't leave the office without, and he did look anxious when he saw it in her hands.
"You don't see a lot of kids reading Kipling these days, although in my day, we had to memorize reams of it. But I guess Penfield is kind of old-fashioned."
"Gimme that. It's mine."
She flipped through the pages. The old color plates were quite beautiful, if a little worse for wear. There was the female of the species, so much more deadly than the male, the road to Mandalay and, of course, good old Gunga Din. "Merry Christmas, Love, Grandmere,'" was inscribed on the frontispiece. Tess guessed that faded, cursive inscription had not been written to Sal. Both the book and the handwriting were at least forty years older than he was.
"That's mine," he repeated, his voice a childish whine. "It's the first book I ever owned, it was a gift from Mr. Pearson. At Penfield, the poetry is all those modern guys, Kunitz and Cummings and Merwin and shit. I'd rather read this."
"I'm not sure I'd agree with your assessment of modern poets, but I am impressed if you read Kipling for pleasure. You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."
Sal looked at her sullenly, hand outstretched. Probably he thought it was a racial slur, non-PC at the very least, likening him to the faithful water boy. She handed him the book and he brushed its spine before putting it back in his knapsack, as if her touch had contaminated it in some way.
"How will you explain the cut on your head when you join up with your class at the aquarium?"
"I'll think of something," he said, shouldering his book bag, checking the brass fastener to make sure the Kipling was safe inside, then taking his shoe from the windowsill.
Tess had no doubt of that. It was all too clear that Sal Hawkings could think on or off his feet. She watched him go, his right topsider still squishing a bit.
Chapter 21
Uncle Donald worked fast when he had something to do. Tess and Jackie were instructed to meet him Monday morning at his office in the Department of Human Resources. The destination made Tess nostalgic, for the agency was housed in the old Hutzler's, once the city's grandest department store. Ten stories high, so full of things to buy and covet that it had a second building to the south to catch the overflow. Tess had bought her first makeup here, cutting school and taking the #10 bus downtown. By today's standards-department stores with grand pianos and marble floors and espresso bars-the old Hutzler's wouldn't seem quite so grand. But something caught in Tess's throat when she saw what it had been reduced to, just another state office building with flimsy walls and little warrens of offices.
"Let's take a walk," Uncle Donald said when he met them in the lobby, clipboard in hand.
Glancing at his watch, he led them to the Light Rail stop around the corner and sat on the benches, the ones designed so homeless people could never stretch out along their length.
"As soon as I started making inquiries, I was told there was a judge," Uncle Donald began. "He does this for a fee, usually."
"How much?" Jackie asked.
"Ten thousand dollars."
"I have that." And Jackie actually took out her check book and her Mont Blanc pen. No ordinary Bics for Jackie. Uncle Donald put his hand over hers before she could start filling it out. Tess could just imagine what she might have written there. Pay to the order of judge-so-and-so. Ten Thousand Dollars. For: just a little bribe.
"It's strictly a cash business, dear. Besides, I said he usually does this. When I told him of your situation, he said he can't help. See, all he can do is unseal the original birth certificate. But you know what's on that, right? And there's nothing that connects the original birth certificate with the second one issued."
"Another dead-end," Jackie said bitterly. "From everything I've learned, it sounds as if my daughter could find me pretty easily, but I'll never be able to find her."
The Light Rail train pulled up just then, half-empty as usual. A tall, broad-shouldered man with curly blond hair poking out from beneath the brim of a Yankees cap got off and sat down next to them, studying the sports pages of the New York Post. He wore a denim shirt, untucked, faded jeans and dirty-white Chuck Taylors. Normally, wearing a Yankee cap in Baltimore was akin to sporting a "kick me" sign, but it was hard to imagine anyone bothering this man. It wasn't just his size. He carried himself with an assurance as formidable as it was irritating to Tess. She disliked natural self-confidence, given how much she had to work at faking it.
"If you're headed to Camden Yards, you're about six blocks too far north," Tess told the man, put off by his invasion of their personal space. What kind of creep sat down right next to you when there were plenty of benches free? "If you're heading for Yankee Stadium, that's two hundred miles to the north."
"Believe me, I know where I can go when I want to watch some real baseball," the man said in a quiet voice, his eyes focused on the box scores. "The Yankees are only three back in the all-important loss column. Only three back in the loss column, five out of first place. You know baseball? You understand the significance of that?"
"We're sort of having a private conversation here, and it's not about baseball geekery."
"Donald, you might want to tell this woman who I am. Well, not who I am, but why I'm here."
"Tess, Miss Weir, call this gentleman Mr. Mole."
"What, are we playing Wind in the Willows all of a sudden?" Tess asked. "Dibs on being Mr. Toad."
Mr. Mole studied her, but not with the squinty, sun-averse gaze of his namesake. He had bright blue eyes, eyes that burned so bright they seemed freezing cold. He easily won the stare-down.
"Mr. Mole works in the Health Department," Uncle Donald said. "He has access to birth certificates, which are private under Maryland law. As I said, we know what's on the original birth certificate, because Jackie filled that out herself. What Mr. Mole proposes to do is go through all the birth certificates in the eighteen months following the birth of Jackie's daughter."
Tess didn't see how this would work any better than everything they had tried. "How can you match the new certificate to the old? At this point, we're not sure of any of the clues we started with-not the name, not the parents' names, not their location. For all we know, everything we were told was a lie, or just flat-out wrong."
"I don't need a name," Mr. Mole said. "I can immediately narrow my search to any certificate that has a different issue date than the date of birth. That's the tip-off, you see, it indicates there was an adoption. Otherwise, the two dates are the same."
"How broad a field of possibilities are we talking here?" Tess asked, still skeptical.