Chapter 12

WE WERE SITTING at Walter Maysfield’s kitchen table, eating bowls of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. He’d remembered that had been my favorite when I was a child.

“Junie and I wanted to adopt you,” he said, “but the g-d state wouldn’t let us. Said we were too old. Instead, they put you in a foster place. Do you remember any of that?”

Too well. Old anger seared my insides. I nodded.

“I checked up on where you were. When I saw how bad it was, I got you outta there, pronto.” His tone was grim. “As sheriff, I knew where a couple of bodies were buried . . . Not the right bodies to make ’em let us keep you, but I had enough dirt on a certain judge to close down the foster house, put that foul woman in jail, and get you into St. Claire’s.”

I told Bobby, “That’s the Catholic boarding school where I lived from first grade until I went to college,”

Walter Maysfield asked me, “Do you remember Sister Ellen Elizabeth?”

“Oh, yes, I do. She was wonderful!” I explained to Bobby, “Sister Ellen Elizabeth was the head of St. Claire’s. From the moment I got there she took an interest in me. She encouraged me to study, and to think of making an exciting future. When she died in my senior year, it was devastating.”

“Was for me, too,” the sheriff said softly. “Ellie was my sister.”

“Sister? Do you mean she counseled you, or something?”

“No, she was my real sister.” His face split into a smile that was full of love. “My sister—the sister. We heard that joke on the old M.A.S.H. TV show—got a big kick outta that one.”

“You were her brother . . . Was that how you arranged my scholarship to St. Claire’s?”

When Walter Maysfield hesitated, Bobby spoke. “You didn’t go on a scholarship. The sheriff paid your tuition, all twelve years of it.” He turned to Maysfield. “While I was tracking you down, I managed to get into Morgan’s school records. You couldn’t adopt her, but you gave her your last name, and her education.”

I was stunned. “I don’t know what to say . . . I’d like to repay you—”

“Don’t even think about that!” His tone was so stern it shocked me. Then it softened. “I wanted to do it. An’ you made me proud.” He beckoned with one big, rough hand. “Come on into the living room.”

Walter Maysfield’s apartment was a clean and comfortable four-room arrangement at the rear of the building on the ground floor. No view of the lake, but through sliding glass doors his living room opened onto a private patio, complete with a covered barbecue grill and an old-fashioned porch swing.

He gestured toward several scrapbooks spread out on a wooden coffee table in front of a big, deep sofa. “Take a look,” he said gruffly. “Both of you.”

Bobby and I sat down on the floor in front of the coffee table, our backs against the sofa. I picked up the first scrapbook, and opened it so that Bobby could see, too.

Walter Maysfield (or, more likely, his wife) had carefully saved copies of the papers I wrote in English classes, all of my report cards and class pictures, articles and pictures in the school newspaper, including the list of college scholarships awarded in my senior year at St. Claire’s.

Our host answered my unspoken question. “Ellie—Sister Ellen Elizabeth—gave us all that.”

The biggest surprise was a small article from the Newark Star-Ledger, dated eleven years earlier, now turning yellow behind the plastic page protector. It was a very brief review of a play I wrote at Columbia—the play that was produced for four nights in a fifty-seat theater upstairs over a bowling alley in New Jersey. The reviewer wasn’t wild about the work, but he called the young student play-wright “promising.”

“We came up to New Jersey to see your play,” Walter Maysfield said. “The last night it was on. We thought it was damn good.”

I stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were there? I’d have been so happy to see you.”

He shook his head. “Junie was sick then, with the cancer. She didn’t want you to see her looking so poorly. Was the last trip she made.” He was silent for a moment. I recognized the look of mourning; I’d been in that place.

He cleared his throat and went on. “When Junie passed away, I decided to get in touch with you, see if you needed anything. Went up to the college. Woman in the office wasn’t gonna tell me anything, so I flashed the badge. Amazing how that works. She opened right up an’ told me you’d just married that photographer fella and gone off to Africa.”

“I wish you’d come a few days earlier.”

He smiled, a little shyly, but with unmistakable pride. “I was a pretty good investigator in my day, so I managed to keep track of you a little bit, even though you were half way ’round the globe.”

I opened another of the scrapbooks, and saw that I’d been right when I guessed that Mrs. Maysfield had put the first ones together. Every item in those books had been artistically arranged. In contrast, these clippings had been put onto the scrapbook pages with an eye toward preservation instead of art.

Between the heavy, padded covers were copies of some of Ian’s most famous photographs, and articles about him. A few of them mentioned me as his young wife and protégé. Little ink stars had been drawn next to those references. One story included a picture of Ian and me at one of our campsites in Kenya.

The last scrapbook was filled with articles about Love of My Life, and about me. The most recent ones focused on my involvement in murder cases. I shook my head in wonder at the amount of work represented by these books.

“Every day since you went off to college, an’ then when I read your husband got killed and you came back to America, I bought the New York City papers,” Maysfield said. “When I turned in the old badge an’ moved down here, first thing I did was find where the out-of-town newspaper place was. The Main Street News—across the bridge in Palm Beach. Every morning, rain or shine, I walk the mile over for my papers, have breakfast at Cucina’s—a nice place couple doors down, an’ walk the mile back. The exercise keeps me in good shape.”

“Why didn’t you get in touch with me?”

“You had your own life. I didn’t want to intrude.”

 
WALTER—HE INSISTED I call him Walter—grilled hamburgers for us on his patio barbecue. Bobby and I sliced onions and tomatoes, and set the table in the dining alcove at one end of the living room.

The burgers were delicious. So was the bottle of red wine Walter opened. “To celebrate seeing the little girl again,” he said. “So pretty—an’ famous.”

“Not famous,” I said. “I just work with people who are famous.”

Raising his glass, Bobby said, “To friendship.” The three of us clinked glasses.

During dinner, Walter regaled us with some tales of his days as a West Virginia sheriff.

“I yanked cable TV out of the jail, until I found out there’s a g-d federal court order that requires cable TV for jails! Can you believe that? Well, bein’ a law-abidin’man, I hooked the cable TV right up again—but made sure it only let in the Disney Channel, and the Weather Channel.”

“Why the Weather Channel?” I asked.

He smiled mischievously. “So they’d know how hot it was gonna be if I had to put ’em to work on a chain gang, clearin’ brush out of the drainage canals. When somebody complained, I’d tell ’em, ‘This ain’t the Waldorf Asstoria—you don’ like it here, don’ come back!”

Later, when I was having a third cup of Walter’s excellent coffee, Bobby brought up the proverbial elephant in the room. The reason we were there.

“Sheriff, you said you had something—something you’d only show to Morgan.”

Walter sighed and got up. He crossed the room to a cherrywood cabinet and unlocked it with a small key he took from a chain in his pocket.

“I kept this, in case we got together—if you ever wanted to look.”

Even though I was sure I knew the answer, I managed to ask, “What is it?”

“My police report—about finding you, and . . . the rest. Before I retired, I made a copy of it.”

The file was about half an inch thick, tucked inside an old envelope folder that was closed with a frayed brown string.

“Everything I know is in there. Downsville, West Virginia, wasn’t exactly New York City. We didn’t have computers, or much in the way of technology.” His voice was hard with suppressed anger. “In those days, there was a national registry for missing autos, but not for missing kids. I got some fingerprints in the van, but I wasn’t able to match them then.”

I heard the word, “then.” Bobby did, too. He leaned forward, alert and eager. “So you did get a match.”

“Finally. A few years later, I got a name to go with the prints: Ray Wilson.”

I was gripping the file at both sides. Afraid to know what was in it—and yet desperate to know what was in it.

Walter said, “Keep the file. I made it for you.”

I sat there, frozen, holding on to the file as though in a trance. When it was clear that I wasn’t going to open it, Bobby said, “Let me see.” I didn’t resist when he gently took it out of my hands.

Bobby didn’t open it immediately. Instead, he said, “It’s getting late. Why don’t we go back to the Marriott and get together again tomorrow?”

I looked at my watch, frowning, reluctant to leave this pleasant room, and the man to whom I was sure I owed my life. At least my life as I knew it.

Walter seemed to read my mind. “You could stay here tonight,” he said. “Take the bedroom. Many a night I spend out here on the couch anyway—I sleep real good to the TV.”

“I’d like to do that,” I said.

Bobby stood up, tucked the file under one arm, and pulled the cell phone out of his jacket. “I’ll have Emilio bring your bag back here, then take me to the Marriott.”

Before he could dial, the cell phone in my skirt pocket rang. “Damn!” I muttered. This was one evening I didn’t want to be interrupted.

It was Penny. She was distraught. “Morgan, it’s terrible!”

Fear gripped my insides. “What’s happened?”

“Matt just arrested Nancy—for murder!”