The Wrong Side of Goodbye(22)

Everything seemed in order and he reminded his daughter once again not to sleep with any windows open. He then hugged her and kissed the top of her head before leaving.

“Make sure there’s water in the dog bowl,” he said.

“Right now it’s dry.”

“Yes, Dad,” she said in that tone she had.

“Otherwise it doesn’t sell it.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“Good. I’ll pick up a couple Beware of Dog signs at Home Depot and bring them down next time.”

“Dad.”

“Okay, I’m going.”

He gave her another hug and headed back to his car. He had not seen any of the roommates during his brief stop-off. He wondered about this but didn’t ask for fear Maddie would accuse him of invading the privacy of the other girls. She had already told him once before that his questions about them bordered on being creepy.

Once he got in the car he wrote a note to himself about the Beware of Dog signs and then put the key into the ignition.

The traffic had thinned by the time he headed north for home. He felt good about the accomplishments of the day, including having dinner with his daughter. The next morning he would work on narrowing the search for Vibiana Duarte and Whitney Vance’s child. The child’s name had to be somewhere in the stack of birth certificates on the seat next to him.

There was something comforting about making progress on the Vance case, but a low-grade dread was building inside of him about the Screen Cutter. Something told him that the stalking rapist was watching another victim and preparing for his next assault. There was a clock ticking up in San Fernando. He was sure of it.





9

In the morning Bosch made coffee and had it out on the rear deck, where he sat at the picnic table with the copies of the birth certificates he had printed the day before. He studied the names and dates on the documents but quickly came to the conclusion that he had nothing with which to narrow the focus. None of the certificates were dated in a timely way. Each was issued at least three days after the birth and this precluded him from looking at delayed issuance as an indicator of adoption. He decided his best bet was to somehow go through St. Helen’s.

He knew this would be a difficult path. Privacy laws governing adoptions were difficult to break through, even with a badge and authority. He considered calling his client Vance and asking if he wanted to get a lawyer involved in a request to open up the adoption records regarding the child born to Vibiana Duarte but he decided it was a nonstarter. That move would most likely announce Vance’s plans to the world and he had been vehement about secrecy.

Bosch remembered the Times story on St. Helen’s and went inside to get his laptop so he could finish reading it. He brought the stack of birth certificates inside so they wouldn’t blow away and paper the canyon below his house.

The Times story recounted the transformation of St. Helen’s from a place where mother and child were quickly separated when adoption occurred, to a place in more recent decades where many mothers kept their children after birth and were counseled on returning to society with them. The social stigma of unwed pregnancy in the 1950s gave way to the acceptance of the 1990s, and St. Helen’s had a number of successful programs designed to keep fledgling families together.

The story then branched out to a section containing quotes from women who had been clients of St. Helen’s saying how their lives were saved by the maternity center that took them in when they were banished in embarrassment by their own families. There were no negative voices here. No interviews with women who felt betrayed by a society that literally snatched their children away from them and gave them to strangers.

The final anecdote of the story drew Bosch’s rapt attention as he realized it gave his investigation a new angle. It began with a number of quotes from a seventy-two-year-old woman who had come to St. Helen’s in 1950 to bear a child and then stayed for the next fifty years.

Abigail Turnbull was only fourteen when she was left with a suitcase on the front steps of St. Helen’s. She was three months pregnant and this deeply humiliated her fervently religious parents. They abandoned her. Her boyfriend abandoned her. And she had nowhere else to go.

She had her child at St. Helen’s and gave her up for adoption, spending less than an hour with the infant girl in her arms. But she had nowhere to go afterward. No one in her family wanted her back. She was allowed to stay on at St. Helen’s and was given menial jobs like mopping floors and doing laundry. Over the years, however, she attended night school and eventually earned both high school and college degrees. She became a social worker at St. Helen’s, counseling those who had been in her position and staying until her retirement, a half century in all.

Turnbull gave the keynote speech at the one-hundred-year celebration and in it she recounted a story that she said showed how her dedication to St. Helen’s paid off in immeasurable ways.

“One day I was in the staff lounge and one of our girls came in with a message that there was a woman at the entrance lobby who had come because she was tracing her own adoption. She wanted answers about where she had come from. Her parents had told her she was born here at St. Helen’s. So I met with her and right away a strange feeling came over me. It was her voice, her eyes—I felt as though I knew her. I asked her what her birthday was and she said April 9, 1950, and then I knew, I knew she was my child. I put my arms around her and everything went away. All my pain, every regret I ever had. And I knew it was a miracle and that was why God had kept me at St. Helen’s.”