Sammie shook her head. “I checked everything six ways toward the middle. The only Abraham Fuller I came up that fitted the approximate date of birth was a kid I found in the town clerk’s records.”
I stared at her for a moment. “What kid?”
Sammie tugged at a strand of her hair. “I was looking through the birth certificates. For a second, I thought I’d hit the jackpot, but it turned out that Abraham Fuller had only lived a few days.”
“You think that’s our boy?” Brandt asked softly.
I began pacing the small room excitedly, using the two of them as a sounding board to the revelation that was burning brighter and brighter in my mind. “It’s one of the ways you can establish a new identity, especially in rural areas, where few people bother checking into details.
“You find the grave or death certificate of an infant, assume his name, and put in a request at the town clerk’s or wherever for a new birth certificate, claiming you lost yours. The clerk looks up the birth certificate on her rolls, which are kept separate from death records, issues a duplicate, and bingo-you’re on your way to establishing a new identity.”
“But I checked everywhere else,” Sammie protested, “Abraham Fuller never did establish an identity. Besides, what’s all that got to do with Susan Pendergast?”
I bolted for the door, Sammie’s exasperated question ringing like a confirmation in my ears. “Because,” I said on the threshold, “if Fuller took on a false identity using that method, then Susan Pendergast probably did, too.”
I strode out into the squad room and toward the exit, Brandt and Sammie hard on my heels, both of them now sharing my impatience to explore this new avenue.
As we moved rapidly down the hall toward the town clerk’s office, I addressed the other part of Sammie’s question. “I don’t know why Fuller never went beyond just taking on a false name, but assuming he was wounded just after coming to this area, I’d guess he became so traumatized, he completely withdrew from life, which made a new identity irrelevant.”
The young woman behind the town clerk’s counter stared open-mouthed as we marched by her to where the record books were kept in a back room. I handed out several of the large, heavy volumes to both of them.
Sammie was still perplexed. “What do we look for?”
“Those are death records from the 1940s. Eventually, we should compare them to something like the Department of Motor Vehicle records, see if we can locate a living, licensed driver who should have died fifty years ago. But right now, let’s just look for anything that might ring a bell.”
We moved quickly, spurred on by our hopes that we’d finally cracked the enigma-and that a single name might provide us with the answers we’d been seeking.
It finally did, but with none of the joy I’d been anticipating. For the second time in fifteen minutes, a name leapt out at me with the power of pure revelation. But this time, instead of the excitement of having my efforts rewarded, I felt only the frustration and anger at having been duped, almost from the start of this investigation. The name neatly penned on the page before me resounded with its owner’s self-confidence and daring. Susan Pendergast had used Gail as a way to meet me, then had used my own prejudices to buy herself time.
I slammed the book down on the table in disgust, causing Tony Brandt to come over and glance down at the page. “I’ll be damned.” Sammie looked up from her own scrutiny. “What did you find?”
“Wilhelmina Lucas-Billie for short.”
30
I sat alone in the office on the top floor of the Whipple Street house that Susan Pendergast, as Billie Lucas, had lived in and worked out of for the past twenty-odd years, conducting pottery classes, doing charts, and generally playing the expected role of the socially conscious, liberated woman she’d painted herself to be.
It was late-past ten o’clock. For the past five hours, we’d been combing the building for signs of where she might have vanished, for vanished she had. According to the friends and colleagues we’d contacted so far, she’d left in the middle of a meeting several days ago, purportedly to use the phone.
It was the completeness of her disappearance that nagged me the most. By now, we had poked into every square inch of the building. We had found bankbooks, business records, tax papers, personal correspondence, even love letters. In her bathroom and bedroom, everything was still in place, from her underwear to her toothbrush. Her car was still parked by the side of the house.
I had detectives and patrol units all over town interviewing people, rousting judges for warrants, going over phone and bank records, and analyzing the papers we’d found here. Photos and descriptions of her had been circulated all over the state, and to police departments, sheriff ’s offices, and state law-enforcement agencies beyond our borders. But somewhere in my gut, I knew it would all be for nothing, because I knew that it wasn’t the police that had kept Susan’s survival instincts sharp over the years-and would drive her now to burrow deep underground-but the threat of Shattuck’s revenge.
Without a single shred of evidence, I was convinced Susan Pendergast was acting out the nightmare she’d kept bottled up inside her for two and a half decades. She was the last of three fugitives. After Abraham Fuller had died and David’s bones were disinterred, she must have known her own anonymity was doomed, and her life become forfeit.
The question was, where was she now? From the time I’d arrived back in Brattleboro, I’d felt like a racehorse striving for the finish, trying to beat out a shadowy, unseen competitor. But now that I knew Susan was scared and running, how could I keep myself at the head of a race that had suddenly changed from a mad sprint to one of careful strategy?
I was sitting at the same desk I’d seen Billie typing at the first time we’d met. The lights were off now, and only the reflected glow from the streetlamps outside revealed the vague details of the room. Downstairs, I could still hear people moving about, checking and rechecking the contents of the house, frustrated that the policeman’s adage that nobody vanishes without a trace was proving to have an exception.
There was a knock at the door, and J. P. Tyler, who was heading up the search of the house, stuck his head in. “Anyone here?”
“Yeah.”
He stepped inside, wisely leaving the lights off. He knew my moods. “We found a hiding place, kind of like Fuller’s. Two M-16s and several boxes of ammunition, all.223 LC 67 stock.”
“That it?”
“There’s a small fortune in cash, too, the stolen chart, and a book.”
“The Scarlet Letter?”
“Yeah. I was going to box it up for the Waterbury lab, but I thought you might like to take a look first.”
I switched on the desk lamp and he walked forward, gingerly carrying a paperback hanging from a wire like a small piece of laundry from a clothesline, preserving whatever fingerprints it might have on it.
He laid it carefully on the desk. I saw the title on the spine was roughly circled in a rusty brown-the dried blood from Fuller’s pricked finger, just as it was on the photograph I’d seen.
“The inside cover,” Tyler indicated.
I used my pen to pry back the front of the book. On the inside, also scrawled in brown, was the message: “I burned it-Love.”
“I checked the rest of the hiding place; there’s nothing else-at least nothing obvious.”
I nodded and let the cover fall back. “Does it look like anything was removed recently?”
He picked up the book again. “It’s hard to tell, of course, but I don’t think so.”
“How much money?”
“Something like a half-million, all in hundreds.”
“Okay, J.P.-thanks.”
He retired and I switched the light back off, remembering the fresh ashes and the match we’d found in Fuller’s wood stove.