“Why?” Rachel said (the eternal why, as she’d come to think of it). “Was he that bad?”
“I never heard he was bad,” Ann Marie said with a minor slur and a sad grimace. She looked out through the screen at the stone-colored mist in the gray hills and spoke with a firm finality. “Honey, I only heard that he’d moved on.”
Her mother left everything to her in her will. It was less than Rachel would have imagined but more than she needed at twenty-one. If she lived frugally and invested wisely, she could conceivably live off her inheritance for ten years.
She found her mother’s two yearbooks in a locked drawer in her office—North Adams High School and Smith College. She’d received her master’s and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins (at twenty-nine, Rachel realized, Jesus), but the only record of that was the framed diplomas on the wall by the fireplace. She went through the yearbooks three times, forcing a snail’s pace upon herself each time. She found, in total, four pictures of her mother, two formal, two as part of a group. In the Smith yearbook she found no students named James because it was an all-girls school, but she did find two faculty members, neither of whom was the right age or had black hair. In the North Adams High School yearbook, she found six boys named James, two of whom could have been him—James McGuire and James Quinlan. It took her half an hour at the South Hadley Library computer to ascertain that James McGuire of North Adams had been paralyzed in a whitewater rafting accident while still in college; James Quinlan had majored in business administration at Wake Forest University and rarely left North Carolina, where he’d built a successful chain of teak furniture stores.
The summer before she sold the house, she visited Berkshire Security Associates and met with Brian Delacroix, a private investigator. He was only a few years older than she was and carried himself with the rangy ease of a jogger. They met in his second-story office suite in an industrial park in Chicopee. It was a shoebox of an office, just Brian and a desk, two computers, and a row of file cabinets. When she asked where the “associates” in the firm name were, Brian explained that he was that associate. The main offices were in Worcester. His Chicopee satellite was a franchise opportunity and he was just starting out. He offered to refer her to a more seasoned operative, but she really didn’t feel like climbing back in her car and schlepping all the way to Worcester, so she rolled the dice and told him why she’d come. Brian asked a few questions and wrote on a yellow legal pad and met her eyes often enough for her to feel a simple tenderness in his that seemed older than his years. He struck her as earnest and new enough at the business to still be honest, an opinion he validated two days later when he advised her not to hire him or anyone else for that matter. Brian told her he could take her case and probably bill her for at least forty hours of work before he came back with the same opinion he was offering now.
“You don’t have enough information to find this guy.”
“That’s why I’m hiring you.”
He shifted in his chair. “I did a little digging since our first meeting. Nothing big, nothing I’ll charge you for—”
“I’ll pay.”
“—but enough. If he was named Trevor or even, heck, Zachary, we might have a chance of tracking down a guy who taught at one of over two dozen institutions of higher learning in Massachusetts or Connecticut twenty years ago. But, Miss Childs, I ran a quick computer analysis for you and in the last twenty years, at the twenty-seven schools I identified as possibles, there have been seventy-three”—he nodded at her shocked reaction—“adjunct, fill-in, assistant, associate, and full professors named James. Some have lasted a semester, some less, and some have gone the other way and attained tenure.”
“Can you get employment records, pictures in the files?”
“I’m sure for some, maybe half. But if he’s not in that half—and how would you even identify him?—then we’d have to track down the other thirty-five Jameses who, if demographic trends in this country are an indicator, are flung across all fifty states, and find a way to get their pictures from twenty years ago. Then I wouldn’t be charging you for forty hours’ work. I’d be charging for four hundred. And still no guarantee we’d find this guy.”
She worked through her reactions—anxiety, rage, helplessness, which produced more rage, and finally stubborn anger at this prick for not wanting to do his job. Fine, she’d find someone who would.
He read that in her eyes and the way she gathered her purse to herself.
“If you go to someone else and they see you, a young woman who recently came into some money, they will milk you for that money and still come up empty. And that larceny, which is what it will be in my opinion, will be perfectly legal. Then you’ll be poor and fatherless.” He leaned forward and spoke softly. “Where were you born?”
She tilted her head toward the south-facing window. “Springfield.”
“Is there a hospital record?”
She nodded. “Father is listed as UNK.”
“But they were together then, Elizabeth and James.”
Another nod. “Once when she’d had a few drinks, she told me that the night she went into labor they were fighting and he was out of town. She had me and, because he wasn’t there, she refused to list him on the record out of spite.”
They sat in silence until she said, “So you won’t take my case?”
Brian Delacroix shook his head. “Let him go.”
She stood, her forearms quaking, and thanked him for his time.
She found photographs stashed all around the house—the nightstand in her mother’s bedroom, a box in the attic, filling a drawer in her mother’s office. A good eighty-five percent of them were of the two of them. Rachel was struck by how clearly love for her shone in her mother’s pale eyes, though, true to form, even in pictures, her mother’s love looked complicated, as if she were in the process of reconsidering it. The other fifteen percent of the pictures were of friends and colleagues in academia and publishing, most taken at holiday cocktail parties and early summer cookouts, two at a bar with people Rachel didn’t recognize but who were clearly academics.
None contained a man with dark wavy hair and an uncertain smile.