And Now She's Gone(98)

The mortician’s signature was the last piece of information listed on the death certificate.

Hollow inside, Gray pulled her phone out of her bag and found the picture of the woman she’d been searching for, the Mary Ann with the Vogue cheekbones. “Do you know her?”

Ruth and Walter stared at the photograph. He shook his head. “This the woman who says she’s our daughter?”

Gray nodded.

Walter extinguished the cigarette on the thick sole of his boot. “We don’t know her.” He pointed in the direction of the grave marker. “But that’s our daughter right over there. That’s Elyse Lorraine Miller, and she’s dead.”

Gray told them the story about a doctor, a dog, birth certificates, and insurance policies.

Anguish washed over Ruth and she crumpled into her husband’s arms.

Walter waggled his head as his eyes blurred with tears. “Indignity after indignity,” he said, then buried his face in his hands.

Gray’s legs felt like soggy tissue paper as she stood there watching the weeping couple and understanding the horror of all that Isabel Lincoln had wrought. “I’ll do my best and alert the authorities.” That’s all she could offer them.

Gray climbed back behind the wheel of the Chevrolet Cruze and watched the Millers’ Hyundai slowly wind its way back to the entrance. Then she stared at the endless green interrupted by tombs, gravestones, and mourners. There were butterflies. There was sadness. And decay—there was that, too.

Isabel Lincoln was Elyse Lorraine Miller, but not really, since the real Elyse Lorraine Miller, born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 12, 1973, had died more than forty years ago.

So who was “Isabel” before the legal name change? Before she’d stolen the identity of a two-year-old drowning victim? It had been 1975. The age of computers hadn’t fully arrived at state governments, and public records hadn’t been digitized back then. A toddler had drowned, the coroner had said, “Fine,” the funeral home director had signed and issued the death certificate.

Ghosting. Isabel Lincoln had claimed an existing identity—Elyse Miller—and had obtained a Social Security card. Since Alabama and California didn’t share information, neither state agency had cross-checked to see if there’d been a death certificate issued for a black child in Alabama. And because the real Elyse Miller had been a baby, she’d had no credit history.

Like cons around the world, this con had found the chink in a state bureaucracy’s armor, requesting an out-of-state birth certificate for a baby born in 1973, drowned in 1975, someone with no credit history and who hadn’t been issued a Social Security card because, back then, Social Security cards weren’t automatically issued to newborns.

Isabel Lincoln had started a whole new life using a life that had barely begun.

“If she wasn’t Isabel at birth, and if she wasn’t Elyse Miller at birth…”

Then who the hell was she?

The car’s interior had grown sticky and hot. Gray rolled down all four windows and a breeze rolled through. Outside, a crew of ladies dressed in Mardi Gras colors strolled arm in arm toward a parked Escalade. Someone was humming “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

Gray returned to Elyse Miller’s Facebook page and that last message to Tommy Hampton, from his sister Myracle, on March 26, just months ago. You are missed.

In her latest Facebook post, Myracle Hampton sported fuchsia hair and enough gold to finance an Ivy League education. Beneath “About,” she’d posted that she worked as a parking enforcement officer in Oakland. There were selfies of her in uniform and hat, standing at her little white Prius on streets throughout the Bay Area. She’d listed her phone number, and on the second ring, she answered. Her simple hello spoke of a century of smoking unfiltered cigarettes chased by shots of Hennessy. And now it sounded like she stood at the busiest intersection in all of Oakland.

Gray gave Myracle Hampton an abbreviated version of the Isabel Lincoln–Elyse Miller story. How Gray had flown to Alabama and discovered that the real Elyse Miller was dead—and had been dead more than she’d been alive.

“So you’re saying,” Myracle Hampton said, “that bitch is still leaving victims behind.”

“You think she killed Tommy?” Gray asked.

She snorted. “Hell yeah, she killed Tommy, and the cops think so, too. He was in that hotel room for three days. Three! Days! That bitch stole his watch, stole his phone, stole cash he had taken out of the ATM. She’d used a fake name to reserve the room, too. Janet Jackson. Are you fucking kidding me? Ain’t nobody suspect nothing?”

“May I send you a picture?” Gray asked. “I just wanna confirm that we’re talking about the same woman.”

Seconds later, Myracle Hampton said, “Uh-huh. That’s her. Tell me where she at. We can end this real quick.”

“Yeah. See. That’s the problem. I’m looking for her, but I can’t find her. It doesn’t seem like she and Tommy dated long.”

“I ain’t never met her face-to-face,” the woman said. “All Tommy told me was that he couldn’t make my daughter’s birthday party cuz he was meeting some girl named Elyse at the Best Western. He was always doin’ shit like that. Never thought it would get him killed, though. Stabbed, maybe. But dead? Nuh-uh.”