Janice Johnson - Open Secret

Ms. Chauvin hadn’t been specific about why she needed an investigator, only that she was seeking a missing person. That could be anyone from a deadbeat ex-husband who was five years behind on his child support payments to a birth mother if she was adopted. He was doing a big business these days in adult adoptees looking for their birth parents as well as the reverse—parents, mostly mothers, looking for the kids they’d given up.

He went down the short hall to the waiting room. The nervous looking guy with a receding hairline and big patches of sweat under his arms had to be waiting for Mark’s partner. As far away from him as she could get and hidden behind a magazine was a woman.

“Ms. Chauvin?”

“Yes.” The magazine dropped and she sprang to her feet as if jerked upright by a puppeteer. “I…thank you.”

“I’m Mark Kincaid.” He held out his hand.

She shook, her hand dainty but callused in unusual places. “You’re the owner?”

“That’s right.” He gestured toward his office. “Come on back, and we’ll talk about why you’re here.”

She bit her lip, cast a longing glance at the door to the street, took a big breath and nodded. “Thank you.”

She walked ahead of him, giving him a chance to appraise her. No chic suit or scarlet-painted mouth, but otherwise she was intriguingly close to his fantasy. Suzanne Chauvin was a very pretty woman who looked as French as her name sounded. Her dark hair was indeed gathered at her nape, if not in a more elegant twist. She might be as old as thirty, if he was any judge, but still as delicate as fine porcelain. She wore a simple dress and sensible pumps and clutched a tote bag as if she thought a purse snatcher lurked in the doorway to the records room.

“Can I get you some tea or coffee?” he asked when she went to one of the two chairs facing his desk, hesitated, then sat, perched noncommittally on the edge.

She gave a tight shake of her head.

He settled into his own comfortable leather chair behind his desk. “What can I do for you, Ms. Chauvin?”

Her fingers worked the straps of the tote as if she were trying to knit them. “You were recommended to me as someone who specializes in finding missing persons.”

“That’s right.” He leaned back.

“I need to find my brother and sister. I…seem to have failed on my own.”

His interest waned. This sounded like a twenty minute job. Unless someone was trying real hard to stay hidden, they weren’t difficult to find in this day of internet databases. Borrow money, marry, divorce, have a child, vote, register a car or boat, pay taxes, join a hobby organization, all were like waving a red flag and saying, Here I am. Hell, stub your toe and you’d appear somewhere.

He nodded gravely and picked up a pen, poising it over a ruled yellow pad of paper. “How long ago did you lose touch?”

“Twenty-five years and four months ago.”

Surprised, he leaned back again. “But you can’t be more than…” He cleared his throat. “Late twenties?”

“I’m thirty-one years old, Mr. Kincaid.”

“So you were six.” Had her parents divorced and divvied up the kids? He knew it happened.

“Yes.” She hesitated. “This is…difficult for me. Finding them has been a personal quest. I don’t know if I’m comfortable handing it over to someone else.”

“Someone you don’t even know,” he diagnosed.

She nodded.

“That’s a decision only you can make. If I can help by answering questions, I will.”

“No, I…” Ms. Chauvin gave a small, twisted smile. “You do come highly recommended. And I’ve failed. Maybe that’s what I hate to admit.”

“Tell me the story,” he said. “And then what you’ve tried.”

“Our parents died in a car accident when I was six. I’m the oldest,” she explained. “Lucien, my brother, was three, Linette just a baby. Six months old. The only family left was an aunt and uncle who already had two kids of their own. They didn’t feel they could add three more children to their family. Or afford to feed them.”

He nodded.

“So they kept me, since I was the oldest and more aware of what was happening to us. They believed that Linette and Lucien would adjust more easily to new parents.”

God. He imagined the scene when a social worker arrived to take away the two younger children. Six-year-old Suzanne’s bewilderment and dawning understanding. He saw the car pulling away, the three-year-old’s tearstained face framed in the window. He could almost hear the girl’s hysterical cry, see her running after the car.

Suppressing a shudder, he said, “That must have been very difficult. For you, and for your aunt and uncle.”

“It was…heartbreaking.” She looked at him, but without seeing him. “I was the big sister. Mom always said, ‘Take care of your brother and sister.’ I was so proud that I was big enough to be trusted to take care of them.”

The things people did to their children with the best of intentions. He’d bet that mother would have given anything to take those words back, if she could have seen into the future. She’d doubtless never imagined herself and her husband both being snatched away, leaving a little girl who would have been in first grade believing that she should have been big and strong enough to hold on to her little brother and sister and somehow take care of them.

“Linette was asleep when they took her away. But Lucien kept asking why I wasn’t coming.” Her eyes swam with tears. “I was so scared, and so grateful I didn’t have to go away with strangers, too. And I felt horribly guilty because I was so relieved they’d chosen me.”

He swore.

She started, as if remembering he was there. “It was awful,” she said simply, wiping her eyes with her fingertips. “I swore that someday I’d find them. But then the years went by, and somehow I never did.”

“What made you decide the time had come?”

“I got a divorce three years ago. I’m not very close to my aunt and uncle, and I felt so alone.” She gave a small laugh. “That sounds pathetic. I’m sorry! It’s not as if I don’t have friends, but… I don’t know. I was left with this huge chasm inside. I felt empty.”

Uh-oh. Unrealistic expectations always scared him. Adoptees invariably believed that finding their birth mothers would somehow make them feel whole. It was common to imagine scenarios rather like those in a romance novel. The adoptee believed that the moment he saw this woman, his mother, he’d recognize her, on the most fundamental level. The connection would be magical. All the hurt would be erased, difficulties in trusting people, in finding intimacy, would be healed.

On the one hand, he did believe the seeking and finding were healthy steps for an adoptee or a birth parent. Even if the relationship ultimately went nowhere, disappointment could provide closure. If he didn’t believe that, he wouldn’t help.

But no stranger, blood relative or not, could fill the emptiness this woman felt inside herself. And it wasn’t fair of her to ask anyone else to do that, or to feel hurt and angry when they couldn’t or didn’t even want to try.

“Let me ask you a few things,” he said.

She started to open the tote. “I have notes…”

“Not that. Not yet. It’s you that concerns me.” When she looked at him, startled, he told her, “I’ve been doing this for some years now. First you need to know that sometimes I don’t find the person I’m looking for. The trail is just too cold. Most of the time I do. But what I find isn’t always what the seeker is hoping for.”

She opened her mouth, but he shook his head.

“No, let me finish. A couple of years ago, I was hired by a woman who’d given up her baby boy when she was sixteen. Her parents and everyone else convinced her he’d have a better life with a stable family. I was able to trace him. The adoptive father had abused him. He’d died in that adoptive home six months after she signed the adoption papers.”