CHAPTER FIVE

The statement came from so far out in left field that it took me a moment to formulate a response. “Why would you think that?” I finally asked.

“Because my mother was at Berkeley then.”

“So were thousands of other people.”

“But not—” She broke off, looking at her watch. “Dammit! It’s a long story, and I don’t’ have much time.”

“Why don’t you start telling me now. I can wait around for the rest as long as necessary.”

“All right.” She swiveled back toward the mirror and fussed nervously with her hair. “As I said before, I was born in January of nineteen sixty-five. Out of wedlock.” She paused, looking at me in the mirror, as if she was waiting for some reaction. When she didn’t get one, she went on. “My mother’s name was Jenny Ruhl. She was a campus radical, heavily into the protest movement. Or so I found out later.”

“You never knew her?”

Goodhue turned toward me again, backlit by the glow from the bare frosted bulbs around the mirror. It softened the planes and curves of her face and she appeared even younger. When she spoke, her voice was not as crisp and self-assured as before.

“Oh, I knew her. I can even remember her—some. But I’m getting ahead of my story. Anyway, my mother had me on January seventeenth. My father was listed as ‘unknown’ on my birth certificate. My mother came from a well-to-do Orange County family; I guess a lot of the so-called revolutionaries had affluent, conservative backgrounds. For whatever reason, she never let her people know about me. Instead, she used the allowance they sent her to farm me out to an older couple here in San Francisco who ran a little day-care center and took in kids whose parents couldn’t care for them—foster kids from the welfare department, as well as others like me. Ben and Nilla Goodhue. They—”

There was a knock at the door. A woman’s voice called, “Jess, you’re due on the set. Hurry up!”

Goodhue started. “Jesus, I almost missed the spot! I’ve got to get my ass upstairs on the double. Do you mind staying here—they don’t like strangers on the set.”

“Sure, I’ll wait.”

After she left the minutes passed slowly. I shifted on the wicker chair—which had grown uncomfortable—and tried to fit Goodhue’s claim that Hilderly might have been her father into what I already knew. I supposed it was possible that Hilderly had fathered her and written her into his will in a too-late attack of conscience. But that didn’t explain the bequest to Tom Grant. And what about Heikkinen and Taylor? Other children he failed to acknowledge? Could any young man have been that prolific—even in the sexually free sixties?

When Goodhue came back, her forehead was beaded with moisture. She mopped it with a tissue and set about repairing her makeup. “I’ve never been that late,” she said. “Never. Slid into the chair with only five seconds to spare.”

“I shouldn’t have let you lose track of time.”

“Not your fault. Look, I have maybe ten more minutes, then I’ve got to get down to the newsroom and go over the scripts with my co-anchor. Where was I?”

“Ben and Nilla Goodhue.”

“Right.” The mention of their names banished her preoccupation with the time. A gentle, reminiscent expression stole over her features, and she set down the mascara wand she was using.

“Ben and Nilla. Great people. Loving people. He was English, proper as could be, except when he was rolling around on the rug with us kids. She was Swedish—the Nilla was short for Gunnilla—and she could warm up a room just with her smile. They lived in the Portola district. It was nice there back then—solid working class, a good ethnic mix. Lots of Italian delis and soul-food places and little corner markets. People had vegetable gardens; the man next door to us kept chickens. It’s not like that anymore; there’s a lot of gang violence, spillover from Bayview and Visitacion Valley—” She broke off and picked up the mascara wand again, as if she’d suddenly reminded herself of the shortness of time.

“Anyway,” she went on, “that’s where I grew up, in this big house on a corner lot with anywhere from two to six other kids. They came and went. I stayed.”

“Did your mother visit you?”

“Occasionally, until I was four. I remember her as pretty, but not very warm. When she held me, I always felt she was afraid she might drop and break me. After she left, I would sit on Ben’s or Nilla’s lap for a long time. I couldn’t understand why, if she was my mother, she didn’t hold me the way they did.

“What about your father?” Did your mother ever talk about him?”

“No, but he visited me once. I was maybe three and a half, close to four. I hoped—or maybe I just imagine I hoped—that they were going to take me away to live with them soon, but then he never came again.”

“Can you describe him?”

She shook her head. “I can’t. Over the years I’ve tried to picture him, but it’s all cloudy. The only impression I have is that he might have been from the Southwest, because he wore a string tie. I remember sitting on his lap and playing with it, clicking the little metal ends on the strings together.”

I made a mental note to find out where Hilderly had originally came from. “You say your mother came to see you until you were around four. What happened then?”

As she’d spoken of her childhood, Goodhue’s face had become animated. Now it was as if someone had turned a switch and put out a light. She set down the mascara wand and moved to perch on the edge of the other chair. “She . . . died.”

“How?”

“She . . . I didn’t know this until a long time after. Nilla and Ben just told me she’d had to go away, but that I shouldn’t worry because she loved me and would always be thinking about me. After that they didn’t seem to want to talk about her and frankly, she’d been such a small part of my life that I sort of forgot her. But when I was in sixth grade, I heard a couple of the neighbor kids talking—older kids, who had lived there all their lives. What happened was she got into trouble—something to do with the war protests—and then she killed herself.”

I felt a stab of sympathy for the sixth grader who had found out an ugly fact in an unpleasant way. “What kind of trouble?”

Goodhue shook her head. “The kids only heard part of the story—picked up snatches of conversation, the way kids to. What they told me was that my mother went out to Ocean Beach one night and shot herself in the head. Ben and Nilla freaked out when they saw it on the news. I went to them with the story, hoping it wasn’t true, but they wouldn’t talk about it. That was the only time they let me down. Years later, after they were both dead and I didn’t feel that I was betraying either of them, I hired an investigator to find out the whole story. He verbally confirmed that it had happened like the kids said it had, and wrote up a report. But—this is the weird part—you know what I did?”

“What?”

“I burned the damned thing without reading it. After all those years of wondering and all the money I’d spent on the investigator, I just didn’t want to know.”

Reputable investigators, however, kept copies of their reports on file for quite some time. “Do you recall the name of the person you hired?”

“Not offhand, but I’m sure it’s somewhere in my records.”

“I’d like it, if it’s not too much trouble to locate it.”

Goodhue looked somewhat apprehensive. “Why? Do you need it to establish my claim to the inheritance?”

Given the fact that Hilderly had assumed Hank would know who she was, plus the fact that her name was a relatively unusual one, I felt it safe to assume she was the right Jess Goodhue. Still, I replied cautiously, “It would help. And it might also help me to understand why Hilderly wrote the kind of will he did.”

“Why is that important to you?”

I hesitated, then opted for the answer that I sensed Goodhue—as a newswoman—would understand. “I’m a truth seeker. I need to know.”

She nodded. “You’re like me. I’ll look for the name tomorrow, and let you know.”

She still seemed oblivious to the amount of time that was passing, so I pressed on with my questioning while I could. “After your mother . . . died, what happened to you?”

“Nothing. I stayed on with Ben and Nilla. I was there unofficially; the welfare department had no idea I existed. Neither did my mother’s family, and my father obviously didn’t care. Ben and Nilla raised me as their own. I took their name. Ben died when I was fifteen, just keeled over of a stroke at the breakfast table. That about killed Nilla, too. She withdrew, closed the day-care center, stopped taking in kids. Finally I was all she had.”

“There had never been much money. Without what the welfare department paid for the foster kids, things were rough. I left school at sixteen so I could support Nilla. Got a girl-Friday job at a stationery supply company, and they trained me as a secretary. Nilla died when I was eighteen—it was her heart, in more ways than one. I left my job at the stationery company, and the Portola district. Moved downtown and got a job as a secretary here at KSTS. After a year and a half, I convinced them to let me try my hand as a writer. The field reporting came along pretty quick. And now here I am.” She flung her arms out, as if to embrace the shabby dressing room, the entire studio, her successful life. But to me she looked like the little girl whose mother had been pretty but not very warm, reaching out for the surrogate parents who knew how to hold a child.

I said, “Jess, tell me this: do you want to know if Perry Hilderly is your father?”

Her hands locked together again, and she compressed her lips. After a moment she said, ‘You know, I do. At first, after Nilla died, I was wild to find out about my parents. I contacted my mother’s family in Southern California, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with me, wouldn’t even believe I was Jenny Ruhl’s daughter, claimed my birth certificate was a fake. It was after that that I hired the detective. But then—well, I told you what I did with the report.”

“Why is it different now?”

“Because Perry Hilderly left me money. A lot of money. That must mean something.”

I wasn’t sure. At least not that it meant all the good things she was obviously imagining. Guilt at deeds left undone, I’ve found, does not necessarily imply love for the wronged party.

Goodhue must have sensed my doubt, because she stood abruptly. “Look, I’ve got to get down to the newsroom. I’ll look for that detective’s name, give you a call.”

I handed her one of my cards. She pocketed it, checked her makeup a final time, and led me out of the dressing room. On the way downstairs I asked if there was a phone I might use, and Goodhue directed me to one at the unoccupied desk in the newsroom. I called All Souls, found Hank was still there, and reported my day’s findings.

“Damned curious,” he said when I finished. “It doesn’t quite fit with what I know of Perry. I can’t see him abandoning his own child.”

“Did you break the news to his former wife about the sons not getting their inheritance?”

“Yes. She didn’t seem very upset. Apparently she and her new husband are quite well off. She was happy about the personal stuff, though—said what you did about it being nice for the boys, who will have something to remember Perry by.”

“I’d like to talk with her. If anyone might know about Hilderly’s past, she’s the one. Will you give me her new name and number?”

“Sure.” There was a pause, and then he read off the information to me. “You’re not planning on going out to Danville tonight?”

“If she’ll see me.”

Hank was silent.

“Oh, Lord, your dinner party for Anne-Marie! I almost forgot.”

“Look, don’t worry about that. Go see Judy Fleming and come by my place later. But just be sure to come.”

“I will, I promise. Is Rae around?”

“She left about fifteen minutes ago. Asked me to tell you she’s turned up something on Heikkinen; she’ll talk to you about it tonight.”

“Okay. Keep some chili warm for me.” I hung up and placed a credit card call to Judy Fleming, the former Mrs. Hilderly, in the exclusive East Bay development of Blackhawk. She was cordial and agreed to see me if I didn’t mind driving over there in rush-hour traffic. I said I’d be at her house as soon as possible.

As I crossed the newsroom toward the hallway, I glanced at Goodhue’s cubicle. The anchorwoman was again seated at her desk, next to her co-anchor, Les Gates. Gates, whom I recognized from countless newscasts, was expounding on a script that lay in front of them. Goodhue nodded and responded, but her expression was distracted. When I passed the cubicle, she looked up, and I felt her gaze upon me all the way to the door.