Clare frowned. “Are you saying that getting information about Cody’s prospective adoptive parents isn’t an important part of your job?”
Angela Dunkling let out an irritated snort. “Of course it is. Believe me, we have considerable information on the Burnses already. We don’t need to hear from everybody who goes to church with them about what a great couple they are.”
Clare tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. If the letters were so ineffective, why was she getting this call from a DSS caseworker? “Why not simply file the letters in with the other information you have, then? Why are you answering them?”
“Let’s not pussyfoot around this, okay? Your people are sending us letters, and they’re getting their state legislators and senators to send us letters, too. I don’t need some House Rep breathing down my neck over this just because some supporter of his has decided the Burnses would make ideal parents. It’s our job to determine what living arrangements will serve the best interest of the child. We’re still waiting on the police investigation to try to track down the biological parents of the child.”
“Parent. His mother is dead.”
“Father, then. The child can’t be cleared for adoption until we’ve made a final determination of his status vis-à-vis his father or living relatives.”
“So meanwhile, Cody spends his first formative year in a foster home instead of with his future parents?”
“Ms. Fergusson, he’s in a perfectly good home with a caring, experienced foster mom. I’ll give you her number and you can check her out yourself if you’re so concerned.” There was a pause, the faint sound of a Filofax flipping. “Deborah McDonald. 555-9385. Believe me, we’re not running orphanages out of Charles Dickens.” Ms. Dunkling sighed exasperatedly. “Do you have any idea how many prospective parents are out there looking for the Great White Baby? There are couples who’ve been on lists a lot longer than the Burnses. Why should they get to jump line?”
“Because Cody’s biological parents left a note saying so?”
“Forget it. Call off your hounds, Ms. Fergusson. We don’t need the additional headache and believe me, it’s not going to alter our final disposition in the case. If you want to help the Burnses, tell them to settle down and learn to work with the system instead of trying to manipulate it to serve their own purposes. And tell them to stop making unauthorized visits to Mrs. McDonald. They know the rules.”
“What—they’ve been just stopping by to see Cody? That’s a problem?”
“Yeah, it is a problem. As prospective adoptive parents, they shouldn’t be seeing the child without DSS supervision. Call Mrs. McDonald, she’ll tell you. Wednesday, Geoff Burns showed up without so much as a phone call at eight o’clock at night. Believe me, stunts like that aren’t going to help their application any.”
Clare rested a hand on her open calendar. “This past Wednesday? The eighth?” The night Darrell McWhorter was killed.
“Yeah. Why?”
“No reason. Yes, I’ll talk with them about that.”
“And you’ll stop the letters?”
Clare paused for a fraction of a second. “I’ll pass on your comments to my parishioners. I can only suggest, I can’t order them to do anything.”
The DSS caseworker grunted. “I’ll look forward to being able to get back to work without attempts at coercion, then.”
Clare rang off quickly. She tapped a finger on the square labeled “Wednesday, 8th.” Eight o’clock. Russ said they had told his officers they had been home all night. Perhaps Geoff Burns considered that to be the end of the workday and not the night? Maybe he stopped by Mrs. McDonald’s on his way home and hadn’t thought to mention it. Maybe he had driven straight home and spent the rest of the night watching TV with his wife. Maybe he had a passenger in his car when he visited Cody. Maybe he killed Darrell McWhorter, drove to Albany, rifled Katie’s room and returned to Millers Kill with no one the wiser.
Clare folded her arms against her desk and slid flat until her head was resting on her arms. Dear Lord. She closed her eyes. Please, please don’t let me have been wrong about them.
CHAPTER 20
Clare grimaced at the back of the eighteen-wheeler spraying dirty slush over her windshield. The plows had cleared the roads efficiently after Wednesday’s snowfall, but the same wet combination of grit and salt that gave her enough traction to navigate through the winding hills to Fort Henry had turned her car’s Scarlet Metallic Special Lacquer finish—for which she had paid an extra seven hundred dollars in the days when she was young and flush—into a drab sparrow color identical to every other car she passed. She wondered how Russ and his officers identified vehicles when they all looked as if they’d been spray-painted with industrial waste. He was right, she was going to have to get another car. She could almost hear the salt eating away at the undercarriage as she drove.
She glanced down at the directions Deborah McDonald had given her. “I’d be happy for you to come call, Reverend,” the foster mother had told her in their brief phone call. “All the ways I’ve had babies come into my care, and never by being dropped at a church doorstep. It’s a miracle you were there, that’s what I believe. A miracle.” Clare gripped her steering wheel more tightly and thumbed a spray of blue antifreeze across the windshield.
The McDonald’s vinyl-sided garrison looked as if it had been plucked from some densely populated suburb and capriciously planted on a windy hillside surrounded by pasturage. Two life-sized plastic snowmen flanking the front steps and a plyboard Santa-with-reindeer did nothing to ease the loneliness of the house, whose only neighbor was a dairy farm a half mile down the twisting road.
The woman who opened the door to Clare’s knock was like her home, a disconcerting blend of bare-bones plainness and cozy domesticity. Angular, unhandsome, with tightly permed hair and coffee colored eyes, wearing double-knit polyester pants and a sweatshirt decorated with puffy bears. Deborah McDonald smiled widely and took both Clare’s hands in her own.
“You must be the minister. I’m so glad to meet you. Come in, come in!” Her kitchen was country cute and immaculate. “I was saying to Keith, that’s my husband, that of all the babies I took in, there never was one left on the church steps. Thank goodness you were there. Take off your coat! Can I offer you some coffee? Hot cocoa? You have to tell me what to call you. Our minister goes by the name of Mr. Simms—we’re Church of Christ—but I know you folks may do differently. We have lady ministers, too, you know. Not here, of course, but other places. I seem to recall reading in the Evangel there was one in New Jersey.”
Clare accepted the proffered coffee. The geese marching around the rim reminded her of the mugs in Russ’s office. “Call me Clare. Please. I appreciate you seeing me, Mrs. McDonald.”
“Deborah, call me Deborah. All these years and ‘Mrs. McDonald’ still sounds like my mother-in-law, though she’s eighty and living up at the Infirmary now.” She tilted her head toward a bulletin board covered with photographs of infants, children, teens, and young adults. “After all the kids I’ve had, ‘Mom’ seems more natural than my own name.”
Clare examined the faces on the wall. “Looks like quite a crew. They must have kept you busy.”
Deborah laughed. “Still do. I make it my business to knit something for each one of my kids for Christmas. Hats, scarves, mittens, the like. I start in January. I’m down to just three more to go. Four, including Cody. I’m doing up a little hat for him.”
Clare, whose only craft accomplishment was refinishing furniture, almost missed the baby’s name while contemplating the scope of the foster mother’s gift-making project. Cody. Right. “Is the baby asleep?”