The Wrong Side of Goodbye(26)

“Remember when your daughter came to St. Helen’s and found you? You called it a miracle. It’s like that. I’m working for a man who wants to find his child, the child he had with Vibiana.”

Bosch could see the anger work into her face and immediately regretted his choice of words.

“It’s not the same,” she said. “He wasn’t forced to give up his baby. He abandoned Vibby and he abandoned his son.”

Bosch quickly tried to repair the damage, but he noted that she had said the child was a boy.

“I know that, Abigail,” he said. “Not the same at all. I know that. But it’s a parent who is looking for his child. He’s old and he’s going to die soon. He has a lot to pass on. It won’t make up for things. Of course not. But is that our call or the son’s call to make? Do we not even allow the son to make that choice?”

She remained quiet while considering Bosch’s words.

“I can’t help you,” she finally said. “I have no idea what happened to that boy after the day they took him.”

“Just, if you can, tell me what you do know,” Bosch said. “I know it’s an awful story, but tell me what happened. If you can. And tell me about Vibby’s son.”

Turnbull cast her eyes down toward the floor. Bosch knew she was seeing the memory and that she was going to tell the story. She reached out both hands and gripped her walker as if reaching for support.

“He was frail, that one,” she began. “Born underweight. We had a rule, no baby could go home until it weighed at least five pounds.”

“What happened?” Bosch asked.

“Well, the couple that was there to take him couldn’t. Not like that. He needed to be healthier and heavier.”

“So the adoption was delayed?”

“Sometimes it happened like that. Delayed. They told Vibby she had to get weight on him. She had to keep him in her room and feed him with her milk. Feed him all the time to get him healthy and get his weight up.”

“How long did that last?”

“A week. Maybe longer. All I know is that Vibby got that time with her baby that nobody else ever got with theirs. That I never got. And then after that week it was time for the switch. The couple came back and the adoption proceeded. They took Vibby’s baby.”

Bosch glumly nodded. The story got worse from every angle.

“What happened to Vibby?” he asked.

“My job back then was in the laundry,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot of money. There were no dryers. We hung everything on the clotheslines in the field behind the kitchen. Before they built the addition there.

“Anyway, the morning after the adoption, I took sheets out to hang and I saw that one of the clotheslines was missing.”

“Vibiana.”

“And then I heard. One of the girls told me. Vibby had hanged herself. She had gone into the bathroom and tied the rope to one of the shower pipes. They found her in there but it was too late. She was dead.”

Turnbull looked down. It was as if she didn’t want to make eye contact with Bosch over such a horrible story.

Bosch was repelled by the tale. It sickened him. But he needed more. He needed to find Vibiana’s son.

“So that was it?” he asked. “The boy was taken and never came back?”

“Once they were gone, they were gone.”

“You remember his name? The name of the couple who adopted him?”

“Vibby called him Dominick. I don’t know if that name stayed with him. They usually didn’t. I called my daughter Sarah. When she came back to me her name was Kathleen.”

Bosch pulled up the stack of birth certificates. He was sure he remembered seeing the name Dominick when he had gone through the documents that morning on the back deck. He started quickly moving through the stack again, looking for the name. When he found it, he studied the full name and date. Dominick Santanello was born on January 31, 1951. But his birth wasn’t registered with the recorder’s office until fifteen days later. He knew the delay was probably caused by the baby’s weight postponing the adoption.

He showed the sheet to Turnbull.

“Is this him?” he asked. “Dominick Santanello?”

“I told you,” Turnbull said. “I only know what she called him.”

“It’s the only birth certificate with Dominick on it from that time period. It’s got to be him. It’s listed as a home birth, which was how they did it back then.”

“Then I guess you found who you’re looking for.”

Bosch glanced at the birth certificate. In the boxes denoting the race of the child, “Hisp.” was checked. The Santanello family’s address was in Oxnard in Ventura County. Luca and Audrey Santanello, both of them twenty-six years old. Luca Santanello’s occupation was listed as appliance salesman.

Bosch noticed that Abigail Turnbull’s hands tightly gripped the aluminum tubes of her walker. Thanks to her, Bosch believed he had found Whitney Vance’s long missing child, but the price had been high. Bosch knew he would carry the story of Vibiana Duarte with him for a long time.





11

Bosch drove west from the Sierra Winds until he hit Laurel Canyon Boulevard and then pointed the car north. It might have been quicker to jump on a freeway but Bosch wanted to take his time and think about the story Abigail Turnbull had told him. He needed to grab something to eat as well and went through an In-N-Out drive-thru.