What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(55)

“This call came like a jolt of electricity. It shocked me. Is it true? Do you know who I am? Can you tell me?”

Tracy had come armed with photographs of Lisa Childress’s family . . . her mother and her father, her husband Larry, and of course Anita. She’d also come with news articles of Lisa Childress’s disappearance, and articles that Lisa had worked on during her final days at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. But how much should she tell a woman who didn’t seem to remember any of it? How much pain would that cause Melissa Childs, and hadn’t she suffered enough?

Could Tracy somehow be that jolt of electricity that shocked the woman’s brain or heart beyond repair? Slowly, she said to herself.

Start slowly and see how she handles the information provided.

“I can . . . some of it. The better question, Melissa, is how much do you want to know and how fast do you want to know it? I guess what I’m asking is how much do you think you can handle, after all these years?”

Childs seemed to consider the question. Her gaze moved from Tracy to the tabletop and back again. “You have to understand . . . I have no concept of who I am . . . So I have no concept of what my dreams, my aspirations, or my goals were. I didn’t even understand the holidays. I’d never had a Halloween or a Christmas. I’d never carved a pumpkin and I didn’t know who Santa Claus was. I’d never been to Mass . . . didn’t know what it was or if I was religious. That first Thanksgiving I had my first bite of roast turkey.” She shook her head. “I can remember one of those first nights in the hospital, looking out the window and seeing all those lights in the sky, and I had no idea what they were. I saw the moon, but I had no idea what I was looking at. If I could make it through those days, I can make it through whatever you tell me. I don’t think I can be any more terrified than I was then. I think you should just start, Detective, and I’ll let you know when it becomes too much.”

Tracy opened her file and took out the pictures of Childress at various ages. The photographs included a driver’s license. Tracy also provided the copy of the Social Security card bearing Childress’s name and her signature. She slid them across the table one at a time. “Your maiden name is Lisa Janet Siegler,” she said.

“You were born January 18, 1965.”

“Did you say ‘1965’?” Childs looked up at Tracy, but she appeared to be doing math in her head. “I’m fifty-five then? Not fifty-three?” She looked to Davis. “How do you like that, Mark? I’ve lost two years just sitting here at the table.”

Davis offered a wistful smile.

Tracy slid over two photographs of Childress’s parents as they looked in 1995. “That’s your mom, Beverly Siegler.”

Childs picked up the photograph and considered it. Tracy had expected perhaps a tear or two, but Childs viewed the photograph as if viewing someone else’s photo album, polite but not invested.

“That’s my mum?”

“Yes,” Tracy said handing her a more current picture.

Childs considered the second photograph. “I look like her, don’t I? Around the eyes I mean. Is she alive, my mum?”

“She is. She’s in her eighties now. She was one of the first female cardiac surgeons in the United States.”

Childs’s eyes widened and she gave a hint of a smile. “Was she really?”

“She was,” Tracy said, but Childs didn’t ask anything further.

She studied the picture as if viewing a stranger. Tracy handed Childs a picture of her father. “This is your father, Archibald Siegler.”

Childs considered it. “What did he do?”

“He wrote novels.”

“Really? Anything I would have read?”

“I don’t know,” Tracy said. She felt a depression settling in, wondering if she was somehow setting up Anita and Beverly for more pain. She would bring home a woman who didn’t know them as her mother or as her daughter. They would just be people.

“I didn’t inherit much of his genes, then. I can’t write a lick. I’m much better with numbers.”

“Actually, I’ll get to that in a minute.”

Tracy pointed to a more recent photo of Childress’s father. “This was your father later in life. He’s passed away, I’m afraid.”

“Do you know what from?” Childress asked, again seemingly without any emotional attachment.

“I don’t,” Tracy said. She thought of those many nights she had spent in her one-bedroom apartment, poring over her sister Sarah’s file after their father had taken his life and her mother had become a recluse in Cedar Grove, thinking perhaps that finding Sarah might help Tracy to find the young woman she had once been and provide a sense of belonging. She had no one to love, no real family, not the one she had known. She had only her job and her obsession. She simply survived, until she met and fell in love with Dan, and Daniella was born. She wondered if Childs had survived because she didn’t know what she had missed, and Tracy wondered how she would react when that curtain raised, and she realized she was both a daughter and a mother.

“But you had more in common with him than you think,” Tracy said.

“Did I, now?”

Tracy handed Childs the articles from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The woman took them tentatively. Tracy detected no reaction when Childs scanned the headlines or the byline, no expression of recollection. She looked over the articles, then back to Tracy. “Lisa Childress? Is this me?”