“Boston Strong,” called the stoutest of the old men. They all clinked smeary glasses at the TV.
“On the house,” said the bartender, pouring me what looked like at least a triple. He turned around to grin at the stout old man. “Hey, hey, here we go! Whaddya say, Marty? I think Ortiz and the boys may be going for a swim!” The caravan of amphibious duck boats had turned off the street to take a victory lap in the Charles River.
I sipped my whiskey and watched the men watch the Red Sox. Such simple things can produce such joy. Tomorrow I would have to think about what Verlin Snow had told me. About Ethan Sinclare, about Sadie Rawson and Boone, about what it all meant. Tonight, I allowed myself to sit in a dark bar with a bunch of happy old men, and to believe that the world might be a decent place after all.
PART FIVE
Washington
Forty-four
* * *
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2013
I felt fine the next day.
It helped that the clocks had changed during the night, buying everyone an extra hour in bed. Or perhaps I was still drunk. Seven shots of rye and I had slept like a baby, my best night’s sleep in weeks. On the plane home I popped two Advil, to relax my neck muscles (liver failure, here I come), and devoured both the Boston Globe and the New York Times. It had been weeks since I’d focused on the news. Politicians who I didn’t even know were sick had died, the United Nations was warning of genocide in the Central African Republic, Twitter was about to go public, Amy Tan had a new book out. I read the headlines with the curiosity of someone who has been at sea for weeks or recently woken from a coma; I had missed whole cycles of scandal and redemption.
At home on Q Street, three pieces of mail had been shoved through my letter slot. Pottery Barn, undaunted by my failure to purchase anything, ever, had delivered a fat pre-Christmas catalog. “Let the Holiday Magic Begin!” it trilled, above a photo of a perfect stocking, hung above a perfect fire, glowing beside a perfect cream sofa and a perfect-looking cocktail.
There were also two letters. The first, a handwritten note from Alexandra James: Lovely to meet a fellow P.P. addict. Hope your recovery continues. Let me know when I can buy you coffee. She had enclosed another business card.
The second letter was from a manager at SunTrust. We had exchanged e-mails and phone calls, after I rang to inquire about tracing the savings account and safe-deposit box that were mentioned in Boone and Sadie Rawson’s wills. The manager had asked me to forward copies of the wills, and of their death certificates. Also, my adoption papers and birth certificate. For good measure I threw in printouts of Leland Brett’s two stories in the Journal-Constitution. They explained more succinctly than I possibly could why I was suddenly interested in bank accounts that had sat inactive for thirty-four years.
The reply letter that I now held in my hands apologized for having no information on the safe-deposit box. In accordance with the Disposition of Unclaimed Property Act, the box had been drilled after seven years. The entire contents had then been turned over to the state. No bank records survived, nothing to indicate what the driller might have found. I was invited to contact the Georgia Department of Revenue, unclaimed property division, for further information. Here was a handy link to their website.
Tracking the savings account, meanwhile, had taken some effort. The account number that I’d provided didn’t match anything in the computer, and files that old had not been digitized. But a retired clerk had been brought in to go through boxes. They were organized by branch, and my birth parents, unhelpfully, had not frequented the Trust Company closest to their house. Their account had been registered at a branch south of the city, out near the airport; Boone must have found it convenient to hit the drive-through teller on his way to and from work.
I was kindly requested to submit for verification the originals of all the photocopied documents that I’d sent. The manager apologized, again, for the inconvenience. He trusted that I understood, given the length of time that had elapsed and the amount of money involved. I blinked, held the paper farther away, then closer, checking and double--checking the digits and the decimal point.
Sitting in a dormant Trust Company account, opened under the names Boone W. Smith and Sadie R. Smith, was quite a significant sum of money.
Forty-five
* * *
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2013
The executor of my birth parents’ estate was dead.
This news tidbit came courtesy of an e-mail from Jessica Yeo, which I read in the kitchen, perched on the countertop in pajamas and slippers, sipping my morning mug of Darjeeling. I had done a quick search online for Everett A. Sutherland, after his name turned up in Sadie Rawson’s and Boone’s wills, but hadn’t found much. My dad had also professed ignorance, said he’d never looked into the Smiths’ estate.
“You’re a lawyer,” I had pressed him. “Weren’t you curious about the legal loose ends?”
“No,” Dad had answered firmly. “We wanted a clean break from the past. We confirmed, of course, that no guardian had been named for you, that there was no legally enforceable relationship with any biological kin. But as for the question of an inheritance”—he had pronounced the word with distaste—“darling, your mother and I were more than capable of providing for you. There was no need to paw around after their money.”