Майкл Коннелли - Fair Warning

“I told her to stay out of the bars,” Regina said. “But she couldn’t keep away — even after the arrests and rehab.”

It was an incongruous response. I was talking about her daughter being stalked and she fixated on her daughter’s drug and alcohol issues.

“I am not saying one thing had anything to do with the other,” I said. “I don’t think the police know yet either. But I know she had arrests and had been to rehab. Is that what you mean about her going to bars?”

“She was always going out, meeting strangers...,” Regina said. “All the way back to high school. Her father told her it could end this way — he warned her — but she didn’t listen. She didn’t seem to care. She was boy crazy from the start.”

Regina seemed to stare off into the distance when she spoke. Boy crazy seemed like an innocent term but, clearly, she was seeing a memory of her daughter as a young woman. An unpleasant memory in which there was upset and rancor.

“Was Tina ever married?” I asked.

“No, never,” Regina said. “She said she never wanted to be tied down by one man. My husband used to joke that she saved him a bundle by never getting married. But she was our only child and I always wished I had gotten to plan her wedding. It never happened. She was always looking for something she felt no man she met could provide.... What that was, I never knew.”

I remembered the post I had seen on Tina’s social media.

“I saw on her Instagram that she said she found her sister,” I said. “A half sister. But she’s not your daughter?”

Regina’s face changed and I knew I had hit on something bad in her life.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Regina said.

“I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?” I asked. “What happened?”

“All these people, they are so interested in that stuff. Where they come from. Are they Swedish, are they Indian. They don’t know what they’re playing with. It’s like that privacy thing you mentioned. Some secrets are meant to stay secret.”

“The half sister was a secret?”

“Tina sent her DNA in and then next thing she does is tell us she’s got a half sister out in Naperville. She... I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“You can tell me off the record. It will never go into a story but if it helps me understand your daughter and what she was interested in, it could be important. Do you know why she sent her DNA in for analysis? Was she look—”

“Who knows? That’s what people do, right? It’s quick. It’s cheap. She had friends that were doing it, finding their heritage.”

I had not submitted my DNA to any of the genetic-analytics sites but I knew people who had and therefore knew generally how it worked. Your DNA went through a genetic data bank that returned matches to other customers of the site, along with the percentage of shared DNA. Higher percentages meant a closer relationship — from distant cousins to direct siblings.

“She found her half sister. I saw the photo of them. Naperville — that’s near Chicago, right?”

I needed to keep her talking about something she didn’t want to talk about. Easy questions got easy answers and kept the words coming.

“Yes,” Regina said. “I grew up there. Went to high school there.”

She paused and looked at me and I realized she needed me to tell the story. It was always amazing to me when people opened up. I was a stranger but they knew I was a reporter, a recorder of history. I had found many times when reporting tragedies that those left behind wanted to reach out through their grief to talk and set down some sort of record of the lost loved one. Women more than men. They had a sense of duty to the lost one. Sometimes they needed only a little prodding.

“You had a baby,” I said.

She nodded.

“And Tina didn’t know,” I said.

“Nobody knew,” she said. “It was a girl. I gave her up. I was too young. And then later I met my husband and we started a family. Tina. And then she grew up and sent her DNA in to one of those places. And she had done it, too. The girl. She knew she was adopted and was looking for connections. They connected through the DNA site and that’s what destroyed our family.”

“Tina’s father didn’t know...”

“I didn’t tell him at first and then it was too late. It was supposed to be my secret. But then the world changes and your own DNA can unlock everything and secrets aren’t secrets anymore.”

I once had an editor named Foley who said that sometimes the best question is the one not asked. I waited. I didn’t feel I had to ask the next question.

“My husband left,” Regina said. “It wasn’t that I’d had the baby. It was that I didn’t tell him. He said our marriage was built on a lie. That was four months ago. Christina didn’t know. Her father and I agreed not to put that guilt on her. She would have blamed herself.”

Regina had been holding a clot of tissues in her hands and now used them to dry her eyes and wipe her nose.

“Tina went back to Chicago to meet her half sister,” I said, hoping to spark more revelations from the broken woman.

“Tina was such a sweet girl,” Regina said. “She wanted to reunite us. She thought it was a good thing. She didn’t know what was going on with her father and me. But I told her no, I couldn’t see the girl. Not now. And she was very upset with me.”

She shook her head and continued.

“Funny how life is,” she said. “Everything’s good, everything’s fine. You think your secrets are safe. Then something comes along and it all just goes away. Everything changes.”

It would only be a detail in the story but I asked what genetics site Christina had submitted her DNA to.

“It was GT23,” Regina said. “I remember because it only cost twenty-three dollars. So much grief for just twenty-three dollars.”

I knew about GT23. It was one of the more recent entries into the DNA testing-and-analytics business. The upstart company was attempting to take control of the billion-dollar industry by dramatically undercutting the pricing of the competition. It had an advertising campaign based on the promise of DNA analytics accessible to the masses. Its slogan was DNA You Can Afford! The 23 in its name stood for the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in a human cell as well as the price of its basic kit: a full DNA and heredity report for twenty-three dollars.

Regina started to cry full-on then. Her knot of tissues was falling apart. I told her I would get her more and got up. I started looking for a restroom.

Something told me that while the emergence of the half sister in Tina’s life was important, this was not the angle of the story that led to the cyberstalking. This was just one spoke in the wheel of Tina’s life, although it was one that brought about profound changes to those close to her. But the stalking had to have come from another angle and I was guessing that was her lifestyle.

I found a restroom, pulled open a steel container holding a cardboard box of tissues, and took the whole thing back out to the lobby alcove.

Regina was gone.

I looked around and she was nowhere to be seen. I checked the couch where she had been sitting. No purse, no wad of tissue.

“Sorry, I had to go to the bathroom.”

I turned around and it was her. She returned to the couch. She looked like she had washed her face. I put the box of tissues down next to her and returned to the chair I had been sitting in to her left.

“I’m sorry to make you go through all of this,” I said. “I didn’t know when I asked the question that it would bring up this difficult stuff.”

“No, it’s okay,” Regina said. “It’s kind of therapeutic in a way. To talk about it, get it out. You know?”