“CAN WE TALK about the day you disappeared?” I asked Linda Nesbitt, who a long time ago, used to be Lucy Devlin.
“What is there to talk about?”
“All of it. Did you get on the school bus with the other kids that day? Did you make it to the school? When exactly was it that they took you? What happened after that? Anything and everything.”
“I told you … I can’t remember.”
“Can’t or won’t.”
She shrugged. “Maybe a bit of both. I’ve read up on this kind of stuff recently. Especially since I started talking to you and you started asking me all these questions. They say a person sometimes buries a traumatic incident like this in their subconscious so they don’t have to confront the reality of it. Maybe that’s what I’ve done. Or maybe it’s because I was only eleven years old when it happened. That’s a long time ago. Even the things I do remember as a child from back then aren’t necessarily accurate—they’ve gotten distorted in my memory over the years. How much do you remember about the time you were eleven?”
We were sitting in the living room of Linda Nesbitt’s house in Winchester, Virginia.
I can’t even begin to describe how bizarre it all seemed to be sitting in my grown-up daughter’s home with her and listening to all this.
Pretending the whole time I was nothing more than an objective journalist.
When in reality, I was overwhelmed by my feelings of guilt and regret and sadness over everything that had happened between Lucy and me since I walked away from her so casually on that long-ago day.
Linda Nesbitt had light brown hair, like me. She had brown eyes, like me. She had a face that resembled mine when I was her age, or at least I thought it did. Even the way she talked reminded me of a young Clare Carlson. I could see myself in her. And why not? I was her biological mother. Even though no else knew that, including Linda Nesbitt.
Nearly three decades after giving birth to her—and years after meeting her for the first time, just before she became one of the most famous missing-child cases ever—I’d tracked her down under this different name and to this house in Virginia where she had a husband and a daughter of her own.
But here I was still using my desperate cover story of being there as a journalist—the journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize reporting on the story of her disappearance a long time ago—and not revealing I was her biological mother. I kept telling her I was there because I needed some kind of closure as a reporter; I said I needed answers for her story. That was why I wanted her to talk to me about her past as Lucy Devlin, I told her. Nothing more than that.
I wanted to blurt out the truth to her.
I wanted to tell her about everything I’d done.
I wanted to tell her how much I loved her.
But I didn’t do any of those things.
Instead, I just kept taking notes like a journalist working on a story—not the mother she’d never known.
Because being a journalist was what I was good at.
“Let’s move on to something else besides the actual day of the kidnapping,” I said. “What about before you disappeared? Do you remember anything in New York City?”
“Some things. Mostly fragments. I remember growing up there when I was still Lucy Devlin. I remember my bedroom. I remember the video games I played in that room. I remember a dog next door that I loved to pet. I remember a few of my friends at school. I remember having some good times back then until it all … well, until it wasn’t so good.”
That last line was a helluva understatement. She’d been horribly abused—both physically and emotionally—as a little girl. Things had gotten so bad for her in that house that a self-styled vigilante had snatched her on her way to school that last day in an effort to save her.
The man who did it was now a U.S. senator. Elliott Grayson, a very powerful man in Washington. Grayson was the one I’d made a deal with to bury the story of his involvement in Lucy’s abduction in hopes he’d help me track her down and find her alive the way I had now. It wasn’t an arrangement I was proud of. But he also agreed not to reveal what I was trying to cover up—that I’d hidden the fact Lucy Devlin was my own biological daughter while I was winning a Pulitzer for covering the story of her disappearance. We both desperately wanted to hold on to our secrets.
“Didn’t your new parents—the ones you were placed with—ever tell you anything about how they got you?” I asked. “About your past? About how you had been Lucy Devlin and how your pictures were on milk cartons and you were written about so extensively in the media during those days afterward when the whole world was searching for you?”
“No, they never said anything about it. And I didn’t ask a lot of questions. I loved my new life and I wanted to grow up pretending that I was a normal teenager, I guess. It wasn’t until later, much later, that I began putting the pieces together. And at first those pieces didn’t add up. They didn’t make sense to me. But, when they finally did, I realized that I was Lucy Devlin. The little girl who vanished and all the rest. That’s when I decided to do something about it.”
“You sent an email to your mother, Anne Devlin, two years ago that set everything in motion. Why did you do that?”
“I’m not sure. I suppose I wanted to see what happened. I suppose maybe I wanted some closure, too, just like you. I was right.”
“You didn’t want to be forgotten,” I said, echoing the thought I’d had, which helped me track her down as the writer of the email.
“Something like that.”
It was that event which had eventually led me to find her living in this house in Virginia, all grown up and with a family of her own.
I pointed that out to her.
“There’s one thing I still don’t understand about you doing this,” she said. “Why do you care so much?”
“You were the biggest story of my life,” I said, repeating the story I’d told her that first day one more time. “Whether or not I ever air any of this now, I need to know the real story.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems to me like you have more at stake here than just a big story.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because you seem like a nice person, Clare.”
A nice person? Hell, I was a lot more than that to this woman. She called me “Clare” like I was her friend. I wanted to tell her to call me “Mom.” Maybe one day she will. Maybe one day she’ll finally know the truth about me. Maybe.
This was my third trip to see her. I’d taken the Acela train down to Washington. It was only a three-hour trip from New York so I could go and come back all in the same day. From Washington, I’d rent a car to make the drive to Winchester.
I’d lied to Jack Faron and said that I had a sick family member down here that I had to deal with in order to explain my absence from the offices.
I’d lied to the media consultant, too, when I canceled another one of our meetings with the same excuse—even though I knew I was going to have to deal with him sooner or later.
And now I was lying to my own daughter.
“Are you sure there’s nothing more to this for you?” she asked.
“That’s all.”
“It’s simply a journalistic obsession for you?”
“All about being a reporter.”
Jeez, for a woman who claimed she hated lying, I sure did a lot of it.