Only Child

presence.

“It’s all there,” she said, finally. If lugging all those boxes had tired her, she kept it off her face. Her breathing was as regular as if she’d never left the couch. “The first one is everything that was in the newspapers, and everything I got from the police. The others are all...Vonni. From her baby stuff to just before...”

“I—”

“The reason they’re like that,” she interrupted, “is because of...what happened. I always kept Vonni’s...everything. Every report card, every note from school, every doctor’s visit...I always took pictures, too. But I didn’t have them in this...this filing system, before. I was trying to help the police. They had so many questions, they kept coming back and back and back. Finally, I put this all together for them. But it wasn’t what they were interested in, I guess.”

“They wanted to know about her boyfriends, right?”

“Yes.”

“And yours?”

“Yes.” No reaction, flat.

“Her teachers? School friends?”

“Yes.”

“Her computer?”

“Oh yes.”

“Drugs? Parties? Gangs?”

“Of course,” she said, a tiny vein of sarcasm pulsing in her voice.

“And they drew a blank with all of that?”

“That? There were no drugs. There were no gangs.”

“They said this? Or you just know from your own—?”

“I said it. They didn’t believe it. They didn’t say so, not out loud. But I could tell. After a...while, after a while, though, they believed it.”

“And they apologized for—?”

“Be serious,” she said.

She didn’t offer me so much as a glass of water. Just sat there watching me go through the files, one at a time. I wanted to start at the latest ones and work backwards, but I could sense that would sever the single frayed thread between us.

I tried to engage her in conversation as I worked. Several times. All I got for my efforts was monosyllables. And when I suggested that I could maybe take the files with me, return them later, I got a look that would have scared a scorpion.

Okay.

The birth certificate was strangely impersonal.

I’d seen New York birth certificates from the Fifties. They were a lot richer in detail, and a lot less socially correct. They used to give you the time of birth, the number of children “previously born alive” to the mother, the race and occupation of the parents...even where they lived. But I thought that even the little bit of information on this one might open a door, if I could just engage the mother....

“I thought her name would be spelled differently,” I said.

“Vonni’s name?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought it was...a reference to Giovanni.”

“Yes, that’s right. But I spelled it the way it should be pronounced, so her friends wouldn’t get it wrong. Or her teachers, when they called on her in class. Vonni might not have felt comfortable correcting people all the time, just gone along with whatever they called her. When she was little, I mean. I didn’t want that. I mean, if I spelled it like ‘Vanni,’ they’d all think they should say it like ‘Vanna’ with a ‘y.’ Vanny. Then she’d have no connection to her father at all. No child would want that, would they?”

“No,” I assured her, “they wouldn’t.” Thinking of my own birth certificate. The one that said “Baby Boy Burke.” Time of birth: 3:03 a.m. If I ever wanted my first name to link me to my father, I’d have to change it to “Unknown.”

I kept looking. A color photo marked “5/13/91” on the back showed a pretty, slightly chubby little girl, more darkly complected than her mother, with long wavy hair. The child had almond eyes, and a smile you could arc-weld with.

If an activity existed on this earth Vonni hadn’t been exposed to, I’d never heard of it. Piano lessons, T-ball, dance, karate, gymnastics, soccer, glee club, drama society.

Only the last one had gone the distance, though. At the very end of the “Activities” file, there was a program for the school play for her junior year. Under “Cast,” I found:

Amanda...........Vonni B. Greene

The play was scheduled for the night of May 23. They’d found the girl’s body the day before.

The files looked like raw data. It didn’t seem like any of it had been sanitized by a loving parent’s hand, but I still had to ask.

“Ms. Greene, I apologize if this question offends you in any way. I hope you understand why I’m asking. This material, it shows an almost...idyllic life. I wonder if there was any other...”

“You and the police,” she said, an ugly little twist to her upper lip.

I didn’t say anything.

“This is everything,” she said. “I’m so sorry Vonni wasn’t having an affair with a married man. Or smoking crack. Or running with a gang.”

“All right.”

“Is it? Are you satisfied, sir? Are you going to tell Giovanni I ‘cooperated’? I’m sure he’ll be asking you about that.”

“Ms. Greene, anything you share with me is privileged.”

“What does that mean, privileged?”

“It means two things,” I said, keeping the volume down, but putting some weight into my voice. “One, you have no obligation to share anything with me, and I’m well aware of that. So whatever I might learn from you is a privilege. Not a right, a privilege. A privilege I would respect. Two, anything you say to me stays with me. It’s a privileged communication, just as if you spoke it to a priest.”

“You’re no priest.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not a lawyer or a doctor or a social worker or anything the law would prohibit me from repeating what you tell me. I’m just a man. But what I am is a man of my word.”

“You say so.”

“Yes. I say so.”

“That’s all you have, your word?”

“That’s all anyone has. Question is, how good is it.”

“That is the question. How would I find the answer?”

“Watch me,” I told her. “Watch me close.”

“Why should I do it?” the pudgy-faced guy asked me. He was wearing a rumpled white shirt under wide red suspenders, a battered dark-brown fedora tipped back on his head. A cigar that wasn’t from the same hemisphere as Havana was planted in the corner of his mouth. Dressing the part.

“I’m not asking you to do anything,” I told him. “Like I said, all I want is the assignment. On spec. You’re a journalist, right? Your whole operation, it’s about investigative reporting. That’s what I’ll be doing.”