Moonlight Mile Part 11

" 'Hara.s.s' is okay. Sometimes I like hara.s.sing Helene." She smiled. "I had talked to Amanda. She's a good kid. Hard, you know? Way older than her years, but good."

I thought of the four-year-old I'd returned to that house. Now she was "hard." Now she was "way older than her years."

"Amanda asked me to check the mail at the old place, just some stuff that the PO forgot to forward. They do that all the time. So I went by there and it was mostly junk mail." She reached into her purse. "Except for this."

She handed me a piece of ivory paper: a Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts 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 f.u.c.king 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. d.a.m.n. 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 a.s.sume Christina En-glish's ident.i.ty, Bea. You interrupted. There's no Ma.s.sachusetts 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 a.s.sumes a new ident.i.ty 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 ident.i.ty 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 f.u.c.k-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 s.h.i.t. 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.

Chapter Ten.

Until 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 princ.i.p.al, 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 mult.i.task 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 doc.u.mented those proclivities-there's not a lot we can do but take them at their word." we've doc.u.mented 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?"