Until You Loved Me (Silver Springs #3)(96)

“Once you’ve gone through it, you’ll see how impressive it is that Jones figured it out. There’s not a lot in there to indicate Matisson was involved. As many times as I read that file, I never thought twice about him.”

Hudson had been on the phone for almost two hours, long enough for her to take a cursory glance at most of the documents. So far, all she’d found about Matisson was a one-paragraph statement that contained no information she considered particularly interesting. “So how did Samuel Jones connect him to your abandonment?”

Hudson took the chair next to her. “He made a list of all the people who were in the area that day and researched each one. Started with those who were viewed as persons of interest by the police—the neighbor down the street whose daughter had already had two abortions and the dog walker who’d gotten a woman pregnant and tried to run her over so his wife wouldn’t find out. But those came to nothing, just like they had for the investigating detective. So he moved on to other people, even the obscure ones. Tried to figure out what had happened to every person who’d ever been contacted about the case.”

“That’s a lot of work.”

“I paid a lot for it.”

“How long did it take him?”

“Three, four months.”

She picked up Matisson’s statement. “So once he stumbled on Cort, who was in the neighborhood that day, he did a background check?”

“Basically. Told me he ran across a newspaper article indicating there was a guy connected to my case who stood trial about the time I started at New Horizons for sexually abusing his daughter when she was only a teenager.”

“And he figured a guy like that might be the type of person who’d abandon a baby.”

“He told me that’s what made him dig deeper.”

Ellie brought her laptop close. Sure enough, when she typed Cort Matisson’s name into a search engine and sifted through the links that corresponded to people with a similar name on Facebook, she found a newspaper article from The Arizona Republic. The article covered Julia’s complaints against her father and included a quote in which she mentioned her stillborn baby.

“Nice work.” She couldn’t help being impressed with Samuel Jones. The link was fairly obscure and yet he’d connected Cort to the neighborhood and an unwanted child.

But then Ellie read Julia’s quote more carefully.

I had a baby when I was only sixteen. The baby was his, no question. I’d never been with anyone else. He was freaky jealous of any boy who showed any interest in me. Anyway, all the police have to do is find where he buried my child, and DNA will do the rest. Doesn’t matter that it’s been fifteen years. You can get DNA from bones, you know. I’ve seen it on TV.

At first, Ellie was so wrapped up in the tragedy of those words and what Julia had been through that she didn’t realize the dates were off. But just before she clicked on to the next article, it occurred to her. The article had been published fifteen years ago in November. If Julia had her baby fifteen years before that, the child would be thirty now. Hudson was thirty-two.

Could Julia have been speaking in general terms?

It wasn’t as if she’d mentioned a date...

“What’s wrong?” Hudson asked.

Ellie blinked and straightened to ease her aching back. “Nothing.” Surely Julia wasn’t being specific when she made that statement...

“Are you ready to give up yet?” Hudson waved at all the documents she’d spread out on the table.

“No. This is important.”

“The only thing that’s important is the DNA test.”

“Julia needs to take one, too. Maybe she isn’t really Cort’s daughter. Or you’re not really her son. Have you heard back from Jones? Will Matisson respect your demands?”

“Hasn’t called yet.” He stretched his neck in one direction, then the other. “For all we know, Cort’s already talking to People magazine, trying to sell his story for more than a million.”

The knot of worry that sat beneath Ellie’s breastbone grew tighter. She hoped that wasn’t the case. “Even though he’ll go to prison if he admits he left a baby to die?”

“With that kind of money, life inside would probably be better than what he’s known on the outside.”

“Would you rather just pay him off?”

He scratched his head. “If it meant I’d never hear from him again.”

“But...”

“I’m afraid he’d only be back on my doorstep after he blows through it.”

She let her breath seep out. “That’s what I’m afraid of, too. It’s hard to wait, but I don’t think we have any other choice.”

He nodded as he stood. “There’s no easy way out.”

*

During the next few hours, until Hudson left to have dinner with Bruiser in LA, Ellie couldn’t stop thinking about Julia’s statement in that newspaper article. Fifteen was a nice round number; it could’ve been a quick approximation. A lot of people talked in round numbers. But wouldn’t a grieving mother know exactly how long it’d been since she lost her child?

Ellie felt most mothers would’ve used terms more like “Seventeen years, two months and thirteen days ago, I had a child...”