mother was Monaghan, you wouldn't be Jewish?'
'I'd be exactly what I am, a nonbelieving mongrel, but I wouldn't qualify for citizenship in Israel.' Tess pulled her lips back in a gum-baring grin. 'Any seeds?'
'One, up near the pointy tooth. No, other side. You got it.'
'Let's go meet Willa Mott.'
H. L. Mencken, never a loose man with a compliment, had described Carroll County as one of the most beautiful places in Maryland. In some undeveloped pockets, you could still see the soft hills and long, tapering views that had inspired him. The older towns-Westminster, New Windsor, Union Mills-had the nineteenth-century red brick houses, more like the old German and Mennonite homesteads on the Pennsylvania side of the Mason- Dixon line. It was a place out of a time. Then you rounded a curve in the highway and found a seventies-ugly development hugging the land like a family of jealous trolls, determined to keep anything beautiful at bay.
Willa Mott lived in one of the oldest, ugliest subdivisions south of Westminster. A faded sign in the front yard advertised 'Apple Orchard Daycare,' but the only tree Tess could see was an ailanthus that no one had tried to chop down until it was too late. The bastard tree had struggled through a crack near the driveway and was now a spindly twelve feet.
'The kids are watching a video,' Willa Mott said, opening the door before they were up the walk. 'So we have exactly eighty-eight minutes. Although they sometimes like me to sing along with the hunchback.'
It was hard to imagine Willa Mott singing, or doing anything vaguely joyful. She looked just as Tess had imagined her while listening to the taped testimony: a plain woman of little distinction. She wore a denim skirt, polyester white blouse, and navy cardigan. Her hair was a dull brown, her eyes a duller brown. The only color in her face was her nose, red with a summer cold. She found a tissue and blew the way children do, one side, then the other.
'Allergies,' she said. 'The pollen count is 150 today.'
'Is that high?' Tess asked.
'Terribly. But I guess you didn't come here to talk about my sinuses.' She squinted at Jackie. 'I can't say as I remember you. But I guess you've changed some, since back then. Do you recognize me?'
'I think so. Maybe.' But Tess could tell Jackie was lying, especially to herself. In her yearning, she was prone to say what she hoped was the right answer, even if it wasn't true.
'Jackie came to the agency thirteen years ago, under the name of Susan King. She would have been just a teenager then, not much more than eighteen. Does that help?'
'Not really. We saw a lot of young girls. Gosh, is that real gold?'
Willa was looking at Jackie's hands, clenched almost as if she was praying, and the watch on her left wrist. Ornate, with diamond chips encircling the face, it was an unusual piece, but not, in Tess's opinion, so unusual as to distract from the topic at hand.
'This? Yes, I suppose it is.'
'I like old things like that,' Willa said. 'There's an antique pin in a consignment shop, down in Sykesville. I've had my eye on it and as soon as I get a little bit ahead, I think I'm going to get it. I thought maybe with my tax refund check, but that always seems to be spent before it comes, doesn't it?'
Tess looked around the small split-level house. Life as a daycare center was hard on any home-juice stains along the baseboard, sticky handprints on the wall, grimy traffic patterns worn into the carpet were to be expected. But even without the toddlers' decorating touches, Willa Mott's house would have looked tired and run- down. Judging by the noise, there were five, maybe six kids in the next room. Willa Mott pulled down six hundred, maybe nine hundred dollars a week. Tess didn't know exactly what daycare cost, come to think of it. Not subsistence wages, but not a lot of money left over for antique pins.
'When I called yesterday, Ms. Mott, did I mention that it's customary to pay people for their time? I mean, I understand we're keeping you from your work and I wouldn't want you to think we didn't value that.'
'Miss Mott,' Willa corrected with a nervous laugh. 'And goodness, I don't think I could take money, not when I can't be much help. Although-' she studied Jackie's face. 'You're thinner than you were, aren't you? That's why I didn't recognize you at first. You're so much thinner.'
'Of course I'm thinner,' Jackie said. 'I was pregnant when I came to the agency.'
'No, it's not just that. Your face was fuller then, and you had big glasses, which you kind of hid behind. You looked a lot older than you were, didn't you? Yes, it's coming back to me now.'
Tess remembered the photo that Jackie had brought her when she thought Jackie was Mary Browne and the photo was her missing sister, Susan King. Willa was right, or making an uncanny guess. Jackie had been heavier as a teenager, and the weight had made her look older than she was.
There was a loud thud in the next room, then a childish wail. 'Miss Mott! Miss Mott-Brady says I look like Quasimodo.'
'Chrissie looks like Quasimodo. Chrissie looks like Quasimodo.' All the children were chanting it now.
'Excuse me,' Willa said. 'I think I'll go give them some juice packs I have in the big freezer, out in the garage. That might help to keep them quiet.'
As soon as she was gone, Jackie poked Tess in the calf with the toe of her high heel.
'Give her some money.'
'She said she didn't want anything.'
'She's full of shit. Everyone needs money. You stopped at a cash machine on the way out here. It's all part of my tab, right? Give her some money.'
Willa came back from the garage and passed through the room with her arms full of juice packs. Distributing them caused much whining and shouting, then another brief ruckus about who had the best flavor. She ran back to the garage for another grape one. Almost ten minutes had passed by the time she returned to the living room.
'Yes, now I'm remembering,' Willa said, as if there had been no break in their conversation at all. 'There was something about the father of your baby, too, something unusual there, but I can't remember quite what it was.'
'The father of my baby's not important,' Jackie said. 'I know who the father was. I want to know who adopted my girl.'
Willa furrowed her brow and pressed her lips together, making a great show of thinking hard. Tess half- expected her to hunch forward, chin in hand, as if sculpted by Rodin. Eventually, she did just that. Sighing, Tess pulled her billfold from her knapsack and dropped a twenty-dollar bill in Willa Mott's lap.
'Oh goodness. I don't want you to think I'm doing this for money.' Tess dropped another twenty, then a ten in Willa's lap. She dropped her business card, while she was at it. Willa waited a beat, in case any more bills were going to fall, then folded the ones that were there and put them in the pocket of her cardigan, along with Tess's business card. Preferably not the pocket with the wadded-up tissues, Tess hoped, although she really didn't care if Willa Mott ended up blowing her nose on a twenty.
'Really, I don't know so very much. You had a baby girl, right? I think the adoptive father may have been an executive at one of those plants out in Hunt Valley. Could have been McCormick, Noxell, the quarry. One of those places. I remember he made real good money. You had to make good money to adopt a baby from us, it cost more'n ten thousand dollars. His wife was a schoolteacher, but she was going to stay home when they got a baby. The name was kinda common. Johnson or Johnston. They wanted a girl, and they were going to name her Caitlin.'
Jackie looked skeptical. 'How did you remember all that, all of a sudden?'
'Oh, I remember all the girls who came through, to tell you the truth. It just takes a little time to jog my memory is all, to hook up the face with the circumstances.'
'If I took off this watch and handed it to you, would you remember anything more?'
Willa Mott looked truly affronted. 'I'm grateful you compensated me for my time today, but the money didn't have anything to do with my remembering. It took me a minute there to connect you with the way you used to be, that's all. You know, when you were fat.'
'I was
A child's shriek. 'Miss Mott! Miss Mott! Cal keeps poking me with his shoe.'
'Am not,' a boy's voice retorted.
