The Book of Cold Cases(74)

Beth went back to her cell in silence and started reading Moby-Dick again.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX


October 2017





SHEA


The envelope from Ransom Wells was a treasure trove of information. Michael and I couldn’t process it all sitting at the table at the diner where I’d met him after work.

“I need my laptop,” Michael had said. “I have to verify this.”

That was how we ended up here, at his apartment. Just the two of us, alone. I was breaking another one of my rules, but it didn’t matter. I had to be here, going through this file.

Everything about Michael’s apartment said divorced guy who moved out in a hurry. The sofa was secondhand, definitely bought after the move, but the TV was big and new—he’d brought that with him. His fridge was full, but he didn’t have very many dishes. There were unopened boxes stacked against one wall, but there was artwork that he’d chosen over the sofa, a large framed print of the ocean taken from the top of the bluffs, the seabirds wheeling in the sky, the whitecaps breaking in an endless beautiful pattern. On one of the end tables was a framed photo of Michael in police uniform, standing with two men who looked almost exactly like him, obviously his father and his uncle.

“Ignore the mess,” he said sheepishly when he saw me looking around. He walked to a crowded, well-used desk in the corner—Ikea, likely bought and put together in haste—and picked up a laptop, bringing it over to the sofa.

“It’s fine,” I said, meaning it. “I’ve lived this mess.”

His eyebrows rose. “Meaning?”

“You brought your favorite things when you moved out,” I said. I pointed. “The family photos, the TV, the ocean print. Your work computer. You left everything else.”

“She picked out our sofa, and I always hated it,” he said, speaking my language. “So now I have this. The ocean print is a photo I took myself. I’m no photographer, and I don’t even have the best camera, but I lucked out that day. I’ve always just really liked that picture. My ex never understood why I spent the money getting it enlarged and framed. So, yeah, I took it with me.”

I got that. There was a lot of talk about the psychological effects of divorce, about the emotions and the heartbreak, but no one ever talked about the things. How you had to go through every item you owned, even in your head, and figure out whether it was really something that was yours or not. How you had to pack your things, move your things, haul your things. Throw out your things. Van and I had sold our house, which meant we’d had to empty every closet, every room, one by one, decide what was going to happen to every potted plant and picture frame. It had been excruciating, so exquisitely painful and drawn-out that I never wanted to do it again.

I was living with Winston Purrchill, and that was enough for me.

Still, I was very aware that I was alone with Michael. He was wearing dark jeans, a T-shirt that had a faded Rolling Stones logo on it, and a long leather jacket in a style that at one time had been referred to as a car coat. I’d always pictured him in my mind with a retro look, and it turned out he really had it. And—I had to admit it—I liked it.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked, oblivious to how tongue-tied I was. He put his laptop on the coffee table and took his coat off.

“No, thanks.” I sat on the sofa, next to him but with a few feet of space between us. I was still wearing my scrub top and my sweater, though I slid my coat off. “Let’s start with the birth certificate,” I said.

That was the first gift Ransom Wells had given us: Lily’s birth certificate. According to the certificate, Lily’s name was Lillian Knowles, and she was born in January of 1952. Her mother was Mariana Pattinson, age nineteen. Her father was unknown.

“Knowles,” Michael said, waking up his laptop and beginning to work. “That’s the name they gave Mariana’s baby. They didn’t give Lily Mariana’s maiden name, likely because they didn’t want her publicly connected to the family. But where did Knowles come from?”

We found the name further back in the family tree; it was Mariana’s grandmother’s maiden name. So Lily started life without being given her mother’s name, or her father’s, either.

Lily had spent her life in foster care. The records were sealed—even to Ransom Wells—but there was a one-page summary from a report made in 1969, when Lily was moved from one family to another. Hostile behavior, the report listed laconically under the heading “Notes.” The reason for the transfer was only listed as suicide of family member.

I wanted to shake the truth out of whoever had written those four words and nothing else. Suicide of family member? Lily would have been seventeen in 1969—the year after she’d come to visit Beth with bruises on her face. The next year, when Beth had asked what happened to her foster family, Lily had said, Bad things.

Maybe those bad things had really been suicide. Maybe they had been murder. If murder, was this unnamed family member Lily’s first victim? Or was the first victim David, the groundskeeper?

“I have more questions than answers,” I said to Michael as I handed him the paper. “This is going to drive me crazy.”

“Tell me about it,” Michael said. “Read this.”

It was a newspaper clipping from 1975. A man named Lawrence Gage had been shot in his bedroom in Phoenix, Arizona, in an apparent home invasion. Gage was divorced, and he was in bed alone. The intruder came through a screen door, killed Gage, and took some cash and valuables. No one could think of any enemies Gage, a retiree, could have had. The crime was especially distressing because Gage was shot in the face.