in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and your body but not your heart. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.
Loving my ex-boyfriend Zack was, I think, looking back, a decision. He was handsome, funny, he displayed the characteristics most women found desirable in a mate. I liked him. He was close to my family. I
The way he looked at me in that moment, I could tell he was there, too, in the same mighty rush. He saw me, the shimmering essence of me beneath my skin. I felt recognized. And I was so grateful, because I’m not sure I would have even recognized myself at this point. I knew who I was; don’t get me wrong. I just didn’t know what to call her anymore. Maybe that’s all love really is, just seeing each other. Seeing beyond the names and all the external things we use to define and label ourselves. It didn’t matter if he was Harley or Jake, if I was Ridley or Jessie. Maybe it never had.
He stood then and pulled me to him, pressed his mouth to mine. In a minute, we were devouring each other. There was more to say but there were no more words, just this ravenous physical need. I made him take me upstairs to his apartment; I couldn’t relax in mine with all of my ghosts hanging around watching. And in the gray nothing of his apartment we disappeared into an ocean of warmth and pleasure, giving everything and asking for nothing, but finding ourselves sated just the same.
twenty
The next morning, he made me Sunday breakfast, pancakes with strawberry jam since he was out of syrup, and rich, strong cups of coffee. We ate in bed and I filled him in on the day before. It didn’t seem possible that it hadn’t even been forty-eight hours since I’d watched Christian Luna die. I told him about Detective Salvo, Madame Maria, and what I’d found at the library.
“Detective Salvo’s partner came to have a little chat with me and wound up taking me down to the Ninth Precinct,” Jake said. “I wasn’t as cooperative as you were, I guess. But they had to let me go after a couple of hours. I had the feeling they would have liked to hold on to me longer. Anyway, they impounded my car.”
“He told me they’d talked to you.”
“When?”
“I called Salvo to tell him about the missing kids in Hackettstown.”
“Why did you do that?” he asked, and for a second I thought I heard something more than curiosity in his voice. Was it worry?
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, considering the answer. I wasn’t really sure myself. “I felt like I needed an ally.” Then I added, “I wasn’t sure who I could trust.”
He nodded. “I know,” he said quietly. “I’d lied to you. You weren’t sure you could trust me. I’m sorry for that.”
I shook my head dismissively. It didn’t matter anymore.
“What did he say? About the kids?” Jake asked after another minute.
“Nothing. Just told me he’d look into it, I think more to placate me than anything. Told me to give up my new career as private investigator and come home.”
“That’s not bad advice.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Jake,” I said after some more coffee and a few bites of pancake. “What happened when you tried to look for your family?”
I wasn’t sure if this was an okay question to ask, but I was operating under a new policy of saying exactly what I was thinking, and it had been nagging at me since we’d made love the night before. He’d fallen asleep and I’d lain awake thinking about what he’d told me earlier. I remembered what Detective Salvo had said, his exact words that Jake had been “abandoned into the system.” Jake had told me that he remembered his mother, nothing more.
He stopped chewing and didn’t look at me right away. He shrugged. “I looked more or less nonstop from the time I got my PI license up until Arnie died. Like I said, it was one of his big things. He thought I needed to solve the mystery of my past before I could build a future. Maybe, if I’m honest with myself, it’s the whole reason I became a PI.”
“And…”
“I’m not much closer than I was five years ago,” he said with a shrug. He cleared our empty plates off the bed and took them into the kitchen. I let him go and didn’t follow, in case he was looking for some space from the question. He came back and sat beside me and continued.
“They say she left me without any documents, no birth certificate, no vaccination records. If I told you I didn’t believe that, that I remembered being loved by the woman whose face I still see in my mind, that I don’t believe I was abandoned like that, would you think it was just a little kid’s fantasy?”
I shook my head. His eyes were bright and he was looking at me hard. I could see that it was important to him that I give him my faith. And I could do that honestly. “I wouldn’t think that, no. I’d tell you to follow your gut. Sometimes it’s the only thing we can trust.”
He nodded and looked away from me. “Arnie did a lot for me on the sly. That’s how I got access to my juvenile record, could see how they labeled me early on in the system that made me undesirable to couples looking to adopt. Not that the odds were good, anyway. I was too old; people want infants.”
“Where were you found?” I asked, thinking that would be a logical place to start the search.
“There’s no record of that,” he said. “My intake file was lost.”
It seemed pretty grim—no parent names, no birth records. I thought of his password, “quidam.” It made sense to me now.
“Anyway,” he said, slapping his hands down on his legs as he stood. “This is my ongoing crusade and we have more pressing things to worry about right now, mainly
“Our crusades are eerily similar,” I noted, trying and failing to keep the sadness out of my voice.
“Indeed they are,” he agreed. “Except people I talk to aren’t being assassinated and I’m not being menaced by a skinhead.”
We laughed then. Like people laugh at funerals, letting off some steam, aware that there’s nothing to laugh about at all.
Jake and I spent the rest of the day trying to locate the parents of the missing children in Hackettstown, using the same story I’d used to get Madame Maria to talk to me. I sat on Jake’s couch with a Morris County phone book, one in a collection of phone books he had in his closet for his work as a PI, and his telephone. He sat at his computer and used the Internet, called on some of his police contacts using his cell phone. By the end of the day, we’d learned through family members and newspaper and police reports that except for one, they were all dead.
Jake was able to find much of the information we sought on the Internet archives of a couple of different Jersey papers, the
Sheila Murray, mother of Pamela, who was nine months old when she was abducted, died in 1975 in a DUI wreck for which she was responsible. Three years after the unsolved abduction of her only child, she ran a red light and collided with another vehicle carrying three teenage girls, all of whom also died at the scene. According to articles written after Pamela was snatched from her crib while Sheila slept, Sheila apparently hadn’t been sure of Pamela’s paternity and was raising the child alone.
“Dead end,” said Jake after we’d exhausted both papers of their articles on Sheila and Pamela Murray.
“Literally,” I said.
Michael Reynolds, father of Charlie, who was three when he went missing, had been left to raise his son alone when his wife, Adele, died from injuries incurred in a fight at a local bar. The article we found in the
