She handed me a piece of ivory paper: a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Birth Certificate, Suffolk County, for Christina Andrea English, DOB 08/04/93.
I handed it to Angie.
“Similar age,” she said.
I nodded. “Christina English would be a year older.”
We were thinking the same thing. Angie laid the birth certificate beside her laptop and her fingers danced across the keyboard.
“How did Amanda react when you told her you’d found this?” I asked Bea.
“She stopped calling. Then she disappeared.”
“So you started calling Helene.”
“And demanding answers. You’re fucking right I did.”
“Good for you,” Angie said. “I wish I’d been with you.”
I said, “So you called Helene?”
She nodded. “A bunch. And left several angry messages.”
“Which Helene saved,” Angie said, “and brought before a judge.”
Beatrice nodded. “Exactly.”
“And you’re sure Amanda is not at the Foxboro house.”
“Positive.”
“Why?”
“Because I staked it out for three days.”
“Staked it out.” I grinned. “With a restraining order on you. Damn. You’re hardcore, Bea.”
She shrugged. “Whoever the police talked to, it wasn’t Amanda.”
Angie looked up from the computer for a second, her fingers still hitting the keys. “No local grammar school records on Christina English. No social. No hospital records.”
“What’s this mean?” Bea asked.
“It means Christina English could have moved out of state. Or—”
“I got it,” Angie said. “DOD 9/16/93.”
“—she’s dead,” I finished.
“Car crash,” Angie said. “Wallingford, Connecticut. Both parents deceased same date.”
Bea looked at us, confused.
Angie said, “Amanda was trying to assume Christina En-glish’s identity, Bea. You interrupted. There’s no Massachusetts death certificate on file. There might be a Connecticut death certificate—I’d have to dig deeper—but there’s a solid chance someone could pretend to be Christina English and the state would never be the wiser. You could get a social security card, forge an employment history, and someday, if you felt like it, fake an injury at your nonexistent job and collect state disability.”
“Or,” I said, “she could wrack up six figures on multiple credit cards in a thirty-day period and never pay them off because, well, she doesn’t exist.”
“So either Amanda’s working for Helene and Kenny in a fraud operation . . .” Angie said.
“Or she’s trying to become someone else.”
“But then she’d never get the two million the city owes her next year.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Though,” Angie said, “just because she assumes a new identity doesn’t mean she forfeits her authentic one.”
“But I intercepted the birth certificate,” Bea said, “so she can’t be anyone but herself anymore. Right?”
“Well, the Christina English identity is probably done for,” I said.
“But?”
“But,” Angie said, “it’s like avatars in computer games. She could have several if she’s really smart. Is Amanda really smart?”
“Off the charts,” Bea said.
We sat in silence for a minute. I caught Bea staring at the photo of Gabriella. We’d taken it last autumn. Gabby sat in a pile of leaves, arms stretched wide as if posing for the top of a trophy, her megawatt smile as big as the leaf pile. A million pictures just like it adorned mantels and credenzas and buffet tables and the tops of TVs across the globe. Bea kept staring at it, falling into it.
“Such a great age,” she said. “Four, five. Everything’s wonder and change.”
I couldn’t meet my wife’s eyes.
“I’ll take a look,” I said.
Angie gave me a smile bigger than Suffolk County.
Bea reached her hands across the table. I took them. They were warm from the coffee cup.
“You’ll find her again.”
“I said I’ll take a look, Bea.”
The gaze she fixed on me was evangelical. “You’ll find her again.”
I didn’t say anything. But Angie did.
“We will, Bea. No matter what.”
• • •
After she left, we sat in the living room and I looked at the photo of Bea and Amanda in my lap. It had been taken a year ago at a K of C function hall. They stood in front of a wood-paneled wall. Bea looked at Amanda and love poured out of her like a flashlight beam. Amanda looked right at the camera. Her smile was hard, her gaze was hard, her jaw slightly skewed to the right. Her once-blond hair was a cherry brown. She wore it long and straight. She was small and slim and wore a gray Newbury Comics T-shirt, a navy blue Red Sox warm-up jacket, and a pair of dark blue jeans. Her slightly crooked nose was sprayed with a light dusting of freckles, and her green eyes were very small. She had thin lips, sharp cheekbones, a squared-off chin. There was so much going on in her eyes that I knew the picture could not do her justice. Her face probably changed thirty times in fifteen minutes. Never quite beautiful but never less than arresting.
“Whew,” Angie said. “That kid is no kid anymore.”
“I know.” I closed my eyes for a second.
“What’d you expect?” she said. “Helene for a mother? If Amanda avoids rehab until her twentieth birthday, she’s a raging success.”
“Why am I doing this again?” I asked.
“Because you’re good.”
“I’m not this good,” I said.
She kissed my earlobe. “When your daughter asks what you stand for, don’t you want to be able to answer her?”
“That’d be nice,” I said. “It would. But this recession, this depression, this whatever the fuck—it’s real, honey. And it’s not going away.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “It is. Someday. But where you stand, right here, right now? That’s forever.” She turned on the couch, brought her legs up and held them by the ankles. “I’ll join you for a couple-three days. That’d be fun.”
“Fun. How you going to—?”
“PR owes me for last summer when I watched the Beast. She’ll watch Gabby while I gallivant with you for a couple days.”
The Beast was the son of Angie’s friend Peggy Rose—or PR. Gavin Rose was five years old and, to the best of my knowledge, never slept and never stopped breaking shit. He also enjoyed screaming for no good reason. His parents thought it was cute. When PR’s second child was born last year, the birth coincided with the death of her mother-in-law, which is how Angie and I ended up with the Beast for five of the longest days known to man.
“She does owe us,” I said.
“Yes, she does.” She looked at her watch. “Too late to call now, but I’ll try her in the morning. You can check back in during the afternoon, see if you got a partner.”
“It’s sweet of you,” I said, “but it’s not going to bring in any more money. And that’s what we need. I could find day labor. There’s always ways to scoop up, I dunno, something. The docks? I could unload cars from the ships over in Southie. I could . . .” I stopped talking, hating the desperation I heard in my own voice. I leaned back on the couch and watched wet snow spit against the window. It eddied under the street lamps and swirled along the telephone lines. I looked over at my wife. “We could go broke.”
“It’ll take you a couple days, a week tops. And if, in that time, Duhamel-Standiford calls and offers you another case, you walk away. But for now, you try to find Amanda.”
“Soup-kitchen broke.”
“Then we eat soup,” Angie said.
U
ntil three weeks ago, Amanda McCready had attended the Caroline Howard Gilman School for Girls. The Gilman was tucked on a side street just off Memorial Drive in Cambridgeport, a few oar pulls up the Charles River from MIT. It had started out as a high school for daughters of the upper crust. Its 1843 mission statement proclaimed, “A necessity in confounding times, the Caroline Howard Gilman School for Girls will turn your daughter into a young lady of impeccable manners. When her husband takes her hand in marriage, he will shake yours in thanks for providing him with a wife of unparalleled breeding and substance.”
The Gilman had changed a bit since 1843. It still catered to the wealthy, but its student body had become known less for their manners than for their lack of them. Now, if you had the money and connections to send a child to the Winsor or St. Paul’s but the child had a history of either significant underachievement or, worse, behavioral problems—you sent her to the Gilman.
“We don’t like being characterized, however charitably, as a ‘therapeutic’ school,” the principal, Mai Nghiem, told me as she led me to her office. “We’d prefer to think we’re the last outpost before that option. A good number of our young women will go on to Ivies or the Seven Sisters; their journeys are just a bit less traditional than those of some of their counterparts. And because we do get results, we get healthy funding, which allows us to enroll intelligent young women from less privileged backgrounds.”
“Like Amanda McCready.”
Mai Nghiem nodded and led me into her office. She was in her mid-thirties, a small woman with long, straight hair so black it was nearly blue. She moved as if the floor beneath her feet was softer and smoother than the floor beneath mine. She wore an ivory off-the-shoulder blouse over a black skirt and pointed me to a seat as she walked behind her desk. When Beatrice had called her at home last night to arrange this appointment, she’d been reluctant, but as I knew from personal experience, Beatrice could wear reluctance down pretty quick.
“Beatrice is the mother Amanda should have had,” Mai Nghiem said. “Woman’s a saint.”
“Preaching to the choir.”
“I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’m going to have to multitask during this conversation.” Mai Nghiem scowled at her computer screen and tapped a couple of keys.
“Not a problem,” I said.
“Amanda’s mother called us and said Amanda’d be out of school a couple of weeks because she’d gone to visit her father.”
“I wasn’t aware she knew her father.”
Mai’s dark eyes left the screen for a moment, a grim smile on her face. “She doesn’t. Helene’s story was BS, but unless a parent has shown violent proclivities toward a child—
and
we’ve documented those proclivities—there’s not a lot we can do but take them at their word.”
“Do you think Amanda could have run away?”
She gave it some thought and shook her head. “This is not a kid who runs away,” she said. “This is a kid who wins awards and more awards and gets a scholarship to a great school. And flourishes.”
“So she flourished here.”
“On an academic level, absolutely.”
“On a nonacademic level?”
Her eyes went back to the screen and she blasted out a few sentences on the keyboard using only one hand. “What do you need to know?”
“Everything. Anything.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Sounds like she was a practical kid.”
“Very.”
“Rational?”
“Exceptionally.”
“Hobbies?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Hobbies. Things she liked to do besides be rational all the time.”
She hit
RETURN
and sat back for a moment. She tapped a pen on her desk and looked up at the ceiling. “She liked dogs.”
“Dogs.”
“Any kind, any shape. She volunteered at Animal Rescue in East Cambridge. An act of community service is a prerequisite for graduation.”
“What about the pressure to fit in? She’s a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. The girls here drive Daddy’s Lex. She doesn’t even get Daddy’s bus pass.”
She nodded. “Her freshman year, I seem to remember, some of the girls got a little cruel. They taunted her about her lack of jewelry, her clothes.”
“Her clothes.”
“They were perfectly acceptable, don’t get me wrong. But they were from Gap or Aéropostale, not Nordstrom or Barneys. Her sunglasses were Polaroids you’d buy at CVS. Her classmates wore Maui Jim and D&G. Amanda’s bag was Old Navy . . .”
“The other girls had Gucci.”
She smiled and shook her head. “More like Fendi or Marc Jacobs, maybe Juicy Couture. Gucci skews a bit older.”
“How tragically unhip of me.”
Another smile. “That’s the thing—
we
can joke about it. To us, it’s silly. To fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls, though?”
“Life and death.”
“Pretty much.”
I thought of Gabby. Was this the world I was raising her for?
She said, “But then the harassment just stopped.”
“Just stopped.”
Another nod. “Amanda’s one of those rare kids who truly doesn’t seem to care what you think. Compliment her or criticize her, you get the same even gaze coming back at you. I wonder if the other girls got tired of throwing paint at her when none of it would stick.” A bell rang and she looked out her window for a moment as a dozen teenage girls flowed past. “You know, I misspoke at the outset.”
“How so?”
“I said Amanda wouldn’t run away and I believe that she wouldn’t
physically
run away. But . . . well, she was, in another sense, running away all the time. That’s what brought her here. That’s what got her straight A’s. She was putting more distance between herself and her mother every day of her life. Are you aware that Amanda orchestrated her own admission to this school?”
I shook my head.
“She applied, she filled out the financial aid forms, even applied for some rare and rather obscure federal grants. She started doing all her prep work in the seventh grade. Her mother never had a clue.”
“That could be Helene’s epitaph.”
She gave Helene’s name a soft roll of her eyes. “When I met with Amanda and her mother for the first time, Helene was actually annoyed. Here was her daughter, set to attend a reasonably prestigious prep school on full financial aid, and Helene looked around this office and said, ‘Public school was good enough for me.’ ”
“Sure, she’s a poster child for Boston public schools, ol’ Helene is.”
Mai Nghiem smiled. “Financial aid, scholarships—they cover just about everything if you know how to look for the applicable ones, and Amanda did. Tuition, books, covered. But never fees. And fees add up. Amanda paid hers every term in cash. I remember one year, forty dollars of it was paid in coins she’d earned from a tip jar at a doughnut shop. I’ve met few students in my career who were given less by their parents yet worked so hard you knew nothing would stop them.”
“But something has derailed her. At least recently.”
“That’s what troubles me. She was going to Harvard. On a full ride. Or Yale. Brown. Take your pick. Now, unless she comes back real quick, and erases three weeks of missed exams, missed papers, gets her GPA all the way back up to above-flawless, where’s she going to go?” Another shake of her head. “She didn’t run.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate.”
She nodded. “Because now you have to assume she was taken. Again.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Again.”
An incoming mail message dinged on her computer and she glanced at the screen, gave whatever she saw there an almost imperceptible head shake. She looked back at me. “I grew up in Dorchester, you know. Just off the Ave. In between Savin Hill and Fields Corner.”
“Not far from where I grew up.”
“I know.” She tapped the keyboard a couple of times and sat back. “I was a junior at Mount Holyoke when you found her the first time. I was obsessed with the case. I used to hurry back to my dorm to see the six o’clock news every night. We all thought she was dead, that whole long winter and into the spring.”
“I remember,” I said, wishing I didn’t.
“And then—wow—you found her. All those months later. And you brought her home.”
“And what’d you think?”
“About what you did?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You did the right thing,” she said.
“Oh.” I almost smiled in gratitude.
She met my eyes. “But you were still wrong.”
• • •
At Amanda’s locker, I stared at textbooks that were stacked tallest to shortest, the edges of their spines precisely aligned to the edge of the shelf. A Red Sox jersey hung from a hook on the door, dark blue with red piping, a red 19 on the back. Otherwise, nothing. No pictures taped to the door, no decals on the wall, no array of lip gloss or bracelets.
“So she likes dogs and the Red Sox,” I said.
“Why do you say the Red Sox?” Mai asked.
“She’s wearing a Sox warm-up jacket in a photo I have.”
“I’ve seen her wear this jersey a lot. Sometimes a T-shirt. And I’ve seen the warm-up jacket. But
I’m
a fan, you know? I can talk till I’m blue about the farm system and the logic—or lack thereof—behind Theo’s latest trade, et cetera.”
I smiled. “Me, too.”
“Amanda, though? Couldn’t. I tried to engage her half a dozen times until I realized, looking in her eyes one day, that she couldn’t name the starting rotation. She couldn’t tell you how many seasons Wakefield was with the team or even how many games out of first they were this week.”
“So a fair-weather fan?”
“Worse,” she said, “a fashion fan. She liked wearing the colors. That’s all.”
“The heathen,” I said.
• • •
“She was the perfect student,” Stephanie Tyler said. “I mean, per-fect.” Miss Tyler taught AP European History. She was about twenty-eight. She had ash-blond hair cut in a bob and not a strand of it out of place. She had the look of someone used to being tended to. “She never spoke out of turn and always came to class prepared. You never caught her tweeting or texting in class, playing video games on her BlackBerry or what-have-you.”
“She had a BlackBerry?”
She gave it some thought. “Amanda, no, come to think of it. She had a regular old cell. But you’d be amazed how many of these girls have BlackBerrys. Freshmen, too. Some have cell phones
and
BlackBerrys. The juniors and seniors drive BMW 5 series and
Jaguars
.” The outrage made her lean forward, as if we were conspiring. “High school’s a whole new world, don’t you find?”
I kept my face noncommittal. I wasn’t sure if high school was much different than it had ever been; only the accessories were.
“So Amanda . . .”
“Per-fect,” Miss Tyler said again. “Showed up every day, answered when called upon, usually correctly, went home at day’s end, and prepared for tomorrow. You can’t ask for more.”
“Any friends?”
“Just Sophie.”
“Sophie?” I said.
“Sophie Corliss. Her father’s the local fitness guy? Brian Corliss. He gives advice on the Channel 5 news sometimes.”
I shook my head. “I only watch
The Daily Show
.”
“So how do you get your news?”
“I read it.”
“Right,” she said with a sudden glazing of the eyes. “Anyway, a lot of people know who he is.”
“Uh, okay,” I said. “And his daughter?”
“Sophie. She and Amanda were like twins.”
“They looked alike?”
Stephanie Tyler cocked her head slightly. “No, but I had to remind myself who was who. Isn’t that strange? Amanda was shorter and fairer-skinned, Sophie was darker and much taller, but I had to keep remembering those differences.”
“So they were tight.”
“Since first period, first day, freshman year.”
“What did they bond over?”
“They were both iconoclasts, though with Sophie, I think it was more a matter of fashion than nature. It was like . . . Amanda’s an outsider because she doesn’t know any other way to be, which makes other kids respect her. Sophie, though, she chose to define herself as an outsider, which makes her . . .”
“A poseur,” I said.
“A bit, yeah.”
“So other kids respected Amanda.”
Miss Tyler nodded.
“Did they like her?”
“No one
disliked
her.”
“But.”
“But no one really knew her either. I mean, other than Sophie. At least, no one I can think of. That kid’s an island.”
• • •
“Great student,” Tom Dannal said. Dannal taught AP Macroeconomics but looked like the football coach. “One in a million, really. Everything we say we want our kids to be, you know? Polite, focused, smart as a whip. Never acted up or gave anyone a minute’s trouble.”