Kindred Spirits (25 page)

Annie sighed. “Only because you’re a fellow librarian.” She nodded. “But please don’t forget to bring it back. Not like they’re issuing any more 1980
Bugles
.”

Beth practically flew out the door, clutching the yearbook to her chest like a treasure, as if it were more valuable than the Holy Grail.

The bell to the Andersson law office tinkled as Mary Kay and Carol let themselves into a small lobby with weathered red carpet and framed maps of various local points of interest. It smelled of musty journals, as law offices should, and dampness from the creek that ran behind Main Street. It was very quaint with its old-fashioned charm.

“May I help you?” A frazzled woman looked up from a desk piled high with manila folders. Also quaint, Carol thought, considering how every last letter, memo, and file was digitally converted at Deloutte Watkins. It was like stumbling into a law office circa 1954, right down to the tarnished brass nameplate: JEANINE DECARLO.

“Hello, Jeanine. I’m Carol Goodworthy, an attorney with Deloutte Watkins in New York City.” Carol handed her a card. “And this is my, um, associate, Mary Kay LeBlanc.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mary Kay said, extending her hand.

“I wonder if we might have a brief word with Douglass Andersson Junior.”

Jeanine pinched the card between her fingers as she rotated on her chair. “And this is regarding? . . .” she asked, eyes wide with suspicion.

Carol said, “It’s confidential.”

“I see.” Jeanine carefully punched #1 on her desk phone. “There’s a”—she glanced at the card—“Carol Goodworthy from a firm called Deloutte Watkins in New York City here to see you. She says it’s confidential. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. OK, I’ll tell her.” Jeanine returned Carol’s card. “Unfortunately, you’ve caught Mr. Andersson at a bad time and he can’t see you today. But if you make an appointment for next week, I’m sure he can fit you in.”

“Jeanine,” Carol said gently, “this won’t take long. Please.”

“There’s nothing I can do, Ms. Goodworthy. When the boss says he can’t be disturbed, the boss can’t be disturbed.”

“Look, I have no intention of going all the way back to New York and then returning in a week. So, how about you look the other way while I poke my head into his office. You can pretend I snuck in.”

Jeanine said, “I think your friend beat you to the punch.” She nodded to her left, where Mary Kay was sauntering into Douglass Andersson Jr.’s office like she owned the place.

“Thank you,”
Carol mouthed, joining Mary Kay and closing the door behind them.

Douglass Andersson wore his dark hair, graying at the temples, in a stylized helmet and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows. The firm grip of his handshake was manly, businesslike. He smiled broadly, as if not only had he been expecting them but had been eagerly anticipating their visit all morning.

“Guess you gals done flushed me out,” he said, hitching up his pants. “I thought I could hide and get some work finished, but Mary Kay just walked right in and introduced herself.” He winked to show they were pals nonetheless.

Mary Kay said, “I’m sorry. Carol was talking to your receptionist and I just started wandering, peeking in doors. Should we leave?”

“That depends. How long are we talking, here?”

“Five minutes, tops,” Carol said. “Trust me, I know how annoying it is to be interrupted in the middle of the day.”

He motioned for them to have a seat. Carol took in the plaques on the wall. Pitt Law School. Member Pennsylvania Bar Association. President, Pennsylvania Young Lawyers Association. A citation from the Rotarians. Another from the Special Olympics. Two from the Democratic Party and one highly valued, front-and-center plaque proclaiming adoration of the local steelworkers.

There was also a formal family photo taken on the wraparound porch of a stately Victorian home: a blond woman holding a toddler in an adorable striped shirt and shorts. Three other boys, ranging from college age to preteen, flanked her protectively, the de rigueur golden Lab at their feet. Douglass Andersson towered behind them, one hand on the shoulder of his wife, the other on the shoulder of his firstborn.
Pater familias.

“So I assume you’re here about Lynne Swann’s baby,” he said bluntly, rocking back in his chair.

“You got it. Dr. Dorfman called this morning and mentioned you’d spoken,” Carol said. “But we wanted to hear what you had to say, considering you’re the lawyer and he’s just. . . a doctor.”

“I’m a doctor, too. So are you. Doctors of jurisprudence.”

She laughed like this was a new one. “I never thought of that before.” She had. Every lawyer has. “About Lynne’s file. . .”

He rocked forward and linked his hands earnestly. “Let me cut to the chase, Carol. The law doesn’t permit release of her file, and to be perfectly frank, records that old . . . I wouldn’t even know where to begin the search. We had a flood in our basement a few years back that wiped out most of our older papers.”

Carol offered another suggestion. “Perhaps, if you have a way of contacting the adoptive parents, you could give them a call for us. We have a letter for Lynne’s daughter and that’s all we need to do, deliver the letter. You wouldn’t be violating your code of ethics since you’re acting on behalf of your father, who was their lawyer.”

He rubbed his chin. “I can’t make any promises, but why don’t you give me the letter and I’ll try.”

Carol thought,
No dice
. “Stupidly, I left the letter with our friend who’s not with us. I’d have to make a return trip. However, if I knew for certain that you’d spoken to the parents. . .”

“Like I said. The adoption file—if we had one stored in the basement—is lost. The best I can do is keep your letter on record and should the adoptive parents happen to contact us, though I can’t for the life of me reason why they would, I’ll willingly share what Lynne wrote.”

That would never do, especially since Doug was right—the chances of the parents contacting his law office were slim.

Mary Kay crossed her legs and tried a different tack. “Dr. Dorfman says you went to school with Lynne.”

“I dimly remember her. In all fairness, it was a big regional high school. More than seven hundred kids in our class.” He frowned. “Shame what happened. If my wife got sick and died, well, you might say I don’t know how I’d go on. She’s my everything. Not to mention what it’d do to our boys.”

Carol gestured to the photo. “Is that your family?”

“They’re two years older now.” He rubbed a smudge off the glass. “I should probably get a new one.”

“Thinking back,” Mary Kay said, “is there anyone who might have hung out with Lynne senior year you might know? A good friend? A boyfriend?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry to be shooting blanks here, but I didn’t even know Lynne Swann well enough to say hello. Her friends were into drama and art. I was into tennis and debating. Our paths just simply wouldn’t have crossed.” He got up and went to the door. “I wish I could be more help. What you two are doing is yeoman’s work. But my hands are tied and, you know, we’re talking about thirty years gone by.”

He opened it and smiled. “Five minutes.”

Carol and Mary Kay thanked him for his time—even if it led them right into a wall.

“How’d it go?” Jeanine asked as Doug Andersson closed his office door behind them.

“Disappointing,” Carol said. “To say the least.”

“There was a woman in here a few minutes ago looking for you. She was very excited, but then she got a call she had to take outside.”

Must have been Beth. They went out and found her leaning against the bumper of the Highlander deep in conversation. When they got closer, she covered the mouthpiece on her cell and said, “I have big news,” and handed them an old high school yearbook. Into the phone she said, “Hold on, Marc. I’ll call you right back.”

“How’s your dad?” Mary Kay asked.

“He’s OK, considering.” She shrugged off her worry. “We have some big decisions to make, I think, but according to Marc the doctors are very optimistic. Anyway, look at this.” She opened the yearbook, showing them what she’d found while in the Calais Public Library. Carol and Mary Kay were stunned.

Not to mention pissed.

“He lied to us.” Mary Kay tapped the photo of Doug and Lynne at the prom in matching powder-blue formal wear. “Out-and-out lied.”

Beth said, “Don’t tell me he denied dating her.”

“He denied ever speaking to her,” Carol said, adding that his exact words were that he wouldn’t have known her to say hello.

“What a jerk,” Beth said, indignant.

“There’s only one reason why he would lie about something as innocent as whether they dated in high school,” Mary Kay said. “Because he’s the father and he’s covering his rear.”

“Right,” Carol agreed. “What I don’t get is why Lynne wouldn’t have just told us he was the father? That would have saved us so much aggravation.”

“Because she’s protecting him,” Beth said sadly. “Because maybe she might have loved him once upon a time and she doesn’t want us coming in and ruining his life.”

“Wow.” Mary Kay slung her purse over her shoulder and clasped her hands. “Now what do we do? Abide by Lynne’s wishes and pretend he’s not the father or show him the yearbook?”

“We do what will help us find Julia,” Carol said. “We show him the yearbook.”

This time, they didn’t even bother asking Jeanine if he was in. They knew the answer. As Beth went back to her phone call with Marc, Mary Kay and Carol marched past Jeanine’s desk and opened the door to Doug’s office.

He was sitting there, hands in his lap, staring out the window. Some pressing workload indeed, Carol thought.

“Mr. Andersson?” she said.

He swiveled his chair so his back was to them and said rather testily, “I thought our five minutes were up.”

Carol dropped the yearbook onto his desk. “I thought you didn’t know Lynne to say hello.”

He kept his back to them.

“Let’s see. Here you are in the 1980 high school yearbook as Macbeth and Lynne as Lady Macbeth,” she said, though Andersson refused to look. “All those practices and you never recognized her, huh?”

She flipped to another photo. “And here are you two on the yearbook staff. And here you are hanging out on the school lawn, knee to knee.”

“What’s your point?” he said angrily.

Carol closed the book. “The reason why Eunice Swann hired your father to arrange the adoption of her grandchild was not happenstance. Your father had a personal interest, didn’t he?”

“I think you’re making some pretty wild assumptions based on a couple of yearbook photos.” But he didn’t deny it.

“If you were so close, as it appears here.” She opened the book again. “How about you give me the name of one other guy in your high school who might have been the father of her baby so we can look him up.”

“I can’t possibly think back that far.”

Carol let Mary Kay take over as she randomly found a page and read off names. “Could the father be Bill Danish?” Mary Kay asked. “Thomas Detcko? Vinnie D’Mazilla? Or maybe it was. . .”

“OK, OK.” He rotated toward them, his head down. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to tell us who adopted Lynne’s baby,” Carol said. “That’s all we ask.”

“And I told you that I’d love to help, but I can’t.”

“Why not?” Mary Kay asked. “Didn’t you love Lynne? Don’t you care that the only thing she wanted before she died was to find her daughter?”

“Of course, I did . . . I do. But in a small, conservative town where reputation is everything, I cannot take the risk of people finding out that I fathered a child out of wedlock.” He clenched his jaw. There. He’d said it.

Mary Kay gestured to the framed photo. “I assume local people includes your lovely wife. Surely she has no idea of your love child.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You’re right,” Carol said, two hands on the desk and leaning forward. “We wouldn’t. For Lynne’s sake.”

“What do you mean,” he asked, “you wouldn’t tell my wife for Lynne’s sake?”

“In her letter to us, Lynne never mentioned your name,” Carol said as Douglass listened intently. “She didn’t leave you out to hurt you, but to protect you. It would have been far easier to tell us to hunt down that S.O.B. Doug Andersson and force you to find her baby. Hell, she could have done that herself.”

He bowed his head again, his bluff called, his cards poorly played. “OK, here’s what happened. Actually, Lynne and I have been in contact.”

Carol sighed deeply. Finally, they were getting somewhere.

“We reconnected a few years ago through Facebook. You have no idea what effect it had on me when she wrote that she was dying. Lynne was always so . . . full of life. So vivacious.” He smiled to himself. “I asked her to marry me when she told me she was pregnant, but she didn’t want to be stuck here in Calais. She wanted to get out of this mud hole. I could have given her the world if she’d let me. Nice house over on the Hill District. Security. But there was no stopping her. No matter how hard I tried, there was no way I could get her to stay.”