Beautiful Lies

“Let’s just say you’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

We stood there for I don’t know how long, looking down into the river of traffic rushing beneath us, the smell of exhaust rising, feeling black and gritty in my throat. Neither one of us said a word. My fears and questions were a coil of razor wire between us. We might get through them, but it was going to hurt like hell.

We found a diner on Montague Street in Brooklyn. We’d walked there in silence. He had a lot to say, I know, and I had so many questions, but it was understood between us that we needed to find someplace safe and quiet to talk. He wore a sweatshirt with a hood over his head and the bill of a baseball cap covered his eyes. I kept my distance and walked quickly. With the sun coming up, I felt as if we were both exposed and needed to get inside.

We slid into a red leather booth and ordered coffee. We were quiet, not looking at each other. Neither one of us was sure where to start, I think.

“How did you find me?” I asked. “Right now, I mean.”

“I was watching the studio from Tompkins Square.”

I nodded. “You knew I’d come looking for you?”

“I didn’t know. I hoped.”

More silence.

“I went to see Zack,” I said after a minute.

“Yeah? Why did you go there?”

“Where else was there for me to go?” I shrugged. “I thought because he knew my father, he could help me see things more clearly.”

“But?”

“But…he tried to make me believe I had imagined all of this. His mother was there, too. And then I realized.”

“Realized what?

“Project Rescue. That whatever it is, they’re part of it.”

He nodded as though he already knew it, which he probably did. I reached into my pocket, withdrew the copy of Charlie’s birth certificate and the photograph of Charlie, Adele, and Michael. I placed them on the table, slid it over to him.

“You’re Charlie, aren’t you?” I said quietly.

How did I come up with this? While I’d been on the phone with Detective Salvo, I’d been looking at the birth certificate and noticed that Charlie’s birthday was July 4, 1969. The first night I’d met Jake, I’d wanted to know his sign; he told me Cancer. I looked at the fuzzy picture of the toddler on the pony and I couldn’t be sure then that it was him. But something about his face on the bridge had made me think of the photograph again. And my subconscious had been shifting around pieces of the puzzle. I wasn’t surprised when he nodded, looking down at the items in front of him. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so. Or I was once, anyway.”

“What happened?”

“I still don’t know exactly. I don’t know how I wound up abandoned in the system. All I know is that Charlie was kidnapped from his home when he was three years old. What happened from there is still unclear.”

“But you were right about your mother. She loved you.”

“She tried to abandon me.”

“But she came back for you. She was young and scared. Her husband was a junkie. It doesn’t mean she didn’t love you.”

He gave a shrug and a halfhearted nod. God, aren’t we all just little kids who so badly need to know that we were loved by our parents?

“And you found your grandmother. Why didn’t you tell her?”

Another shrug as he looked into his cup of coffee, which he turned between his palms.

“I don’t understand,” I said when he didn’t respond. “Isn’t that what you were looking for? Your family?”

“I thought so,” he said. “But when I found Linda McNaughton…I don’t know. It didn’t seem right. The boy she loved was so long gone. Her daughter, too. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. I thought I’d go back when I figured out what had happened to me. I still don’t know.”

We were quiet for a minute. Then he said, “There’s only one person left who knows what happened to both of us for sure. Why and how we were taken, what happened from there.”

“Who?”

“Your father. He was the attending physician for all four of the children that went missing that year. And who knows how many others.”

“There are others?”

“I think there are many, many others.”

“Project Rescue…” I said, more thinking aloud than anything. I couldn’t see the connection between what had happened to Charlie, Jessie, and the others and Uncle Max’s organization, but I knew there was one, like you know an island connects to the ocean floor though it may be miles below the surface of the sea.

“That’s why you sought me out?”

He released a long breath and looked at me. “To be honest, I was kind of at a dead end when I saw you on the cover of the Post. I’d seen Dr. Hauser and I knew about your father. But I didn’t know how to get close to him. It’s not like I could just walk up to him and ask about Project Rescue. Then Arnie died. All my other efforts to find out about the organization failed. And I was just lost for a while, grieving, walking around like a zombie, working on some cases to bring in money.

“Then I saw your picture in the paper. You looked so much like the picture of Teresa Stone from the Record, I had to wonder. I mean, it was jarring. I thought I was losing my mind, becoming so desperate for a lead, so obsessed with this quest that I was seeing things that weren’t there. Then I read that you were Benjamin Jones’s daughter and it just felt like fate. I thought by getting to know you I could find a way closer to your father.”

“So you used me, basically.”

He reached for my hand and I didn’t pull it away.

“It started out that way, Ridley. But…” He didn’t finish his sentence and I was glad, because I didn’t want to hear how he’d never expected to have feelings for me. I think on a cellular level I knew what had happened between us. Words would just make it less than what it was.

“So if you’re Charlie and I’m Jessie, what about the other two children who went missing that year? Who are they?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to track them down. These kids all disappeared. I mean, take yourself, for example. You have a different name and a different Social Security number. There’s a birth certificate in the name of Ridley Jones. It’s the same with me; I have a birth certificate for Harley Jacobsen. Charlie, Brian, Pamela, and Jessie don’t even exist anymore. Most of their biological parents are dead.”

It didn’t seem strange to be talking about Charlie and Jessie in the third person. Neither one of us, I think, quite identified yet with the missing children. I didn’t feel as though I had ever been Jessie. She was someone whose fate was intimately connected to mine, someone whose story I needed to unravel before I could understand what had happened to me. By the way Jake was talking, it seemed as though he felt the same way.

“I still don’t understand. These children were taken from their homes and somehow wound up in other homes with different names and Social Security numbers. Why? And how could this have happened?”

“A network of very powerful people with a lot of money and a lot of influence,” he said without any hesitation, as if he’d been thinking about it for a while. “The level of organization and corruption it would take to accomplish it is nothing short of astounding.”

“But why?” I asked again. “Why would anyone do this?”

“When I first started looking into this, it was just about me, what had happened to me. At first I thought it was some kind of black-market thing. I thought, Okay, kids were abandoned at the Project Rescue sites, many of them probably left without birth certificates, Social Security numbers. There has to be a system in place for getting abandoned children new identities, right? Maybe the healthy Caucasian children were snatched from the system somehow and sold to wealthy people who wanted children but couldn’t conceive.”