Investigators had made no arrests as of Tuesday night, Meadows said. He urged the public to come forward with tips about the shooting on Eulalia Road, just south of Peachtree Road in northeast Atlanta.
Jessica bit her lip. “You said you needed this for personal reasons. Did you know them?”
I had a hard lump in my throat. “They were my parents.”
She jerked around in her chair and stared at me in horror. “Your parents?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus Christ. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. I mean, obviously, it’s not okay. But I was really young. I don’t remember it.” I coughed. “I grew up somewhere else and only just found out about all this, to be honest. Long, strange story.”
“Jesus.”
“Anyway.” I avoided her gaze. “Anyway, I wanted to see what had been written about them. Could you print me a copy of that?”
“Sure.”
“And check for the other articles?”
She found all four of the stories that mentioned my birth parents. The next day, November 8, 1979, a follow-up story had appeared. It divulged no new details on the police investigation. But the reporter had done some digging and learned that the Smiths had been college sweethearts in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and had been the parents of a three-year-old daughter. No mention of her name, or what had happened to her. What had happened to me.
The third story had run the following Monday, November 12. The day of the funeral. Several neighbors and family friends were quoted. But it was the photograph that made me gasp. A grainy but large photo, showing a young couple, arms around each other’s waists, standing beside a backyard barbecue grill. The man had tongs in one hand and a grin on his face. He looked pleasant. I did not recognize him. But her. God, her. I felt the dizzying sensation of looking into a trick mirror. The kind you find in the dressing rooms of discount stores that reflect you either ten pounds lighter or ten pounds heavier than your true self and distort your features just enough that you appear both recognizably yourself and disconcertingly foreign.
Or perhaps that is too cryptic a description. The simple fact is, she looked just like me. Her hair was different—darker than mine, and sculpted into Charlie’s Angels wings, which would have been the rage back then. She might have been a few inches shorter, too, although it was hard to tell. The eyes, though. The lips, the smile. Identical. The curves, too, on display in a tube top and bell-bottom jeans. You could show this photo to any of my friends today, and at first glance their only questions would be why I was dressed for a seventies theme party, and who was the guy beside me flipping burgers.
I reached up and touched the screen. “I’ve never seen them before,” I whispered.
“She looks like you. Or I guess, you look like her. You really do.”
I began to cry. Quietly at first and then great, wrenching sobs. I had perhaps not believed it until that moment. There is a difference between knowing something in your mind and knowing it in your heart. I had by now seen my original birth certificate, and the MRI and the X-ray. But they had not packed the visceral punch of staring at a face nearly identical to my own. My mother. My flesh and blood, undeniable, her eyes smiling up at me for the first time in more than thirty years.
? ? ?
JESSICA HUSTLED ME into a conference room down the hall and brought coffee. It was scalding and carried the saccharine whiff of artificial sweetener, but I drank it anyway. I blew my nose on a paper napkin.
“You okay now?”
“Yes. Sorry. I didn’t intend to start blubbering.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I wasn’t prepared for that photo.”
“How could you be? How could anyone? I can’t imagine.”
Jessica patted my leg and told me to sit tight for a minute. When she reappeared, she was carrying several printed sheets of paper. The archived articles.
“There was only one more.” She handed them to me. “From a few days after the funeral. Odds and ends about the investigation, how a suspect had been questioned and released. They don’t give his name. And there’s a little more about you. They don’t give your name, either. It just talks about how the daughter was injured in the shooting, and how she was still recovering.”
I flipped through the stack.
“Maybe read them later?” she asked gently. She had been gracious, but clearly she needed to get back to work.
“Sure. It’s just—it’s not much, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I know they weren’t famous or rich or anything. But four short articles? That doesn’t seem like much. Wouldn’t this have been a pretty sensational crime? A handsome couple and their cute toddler, shot in cold blood in their own home? In a nice neighborhood? I’m surprised there wasn’t more coverage.”
Jessica considered this. “Bear in mind the police would have wanted to keep a lid on how much information they gave out. Anything that gets in the paper can tip off the perpetrator. That’s always the way. Reporters tend to know a lot more than they’re allowed to print. And look at the date.” She tapped a blue fingernail against the top printout. “Nineteen seventy-nine. They were dealing with, like, two dozen murders a month back then. Atlanta was the murder capital of the country.”
“Really?” I had no idea.
“Oh, yeah. You must remember the Atlanta child murders. The bodies of children kept turning up in the woods, then in the river. Awful stuff. We did a big anniversary feature reminding people about it, right after I started working here. When was that?” She counted on her fingers. “Four years ago. Right. And the story was pegged to the thirtieth anniversary. So there you go! Nineteen seventy-nine.”