life’s work to find him. Because nobody’s going to get away with making Callie unhappy.”
He squeezed her hand as she stared at him. “Except me. Let’s go.”
She didn’t say anything to him until they were outside. “That was some closing speech, Graystone.”
“You liked it?”
“Pretty effective. I haven’t thought much about being unhappy. Mad, determined, confused, but not unhappy.”
“But you are.”
“Doesn’t seem like the most important thing, in the big scheme.”
“I made you unhappy. That’s something I’ve thought about quite a bit over the last year.”
“We made each other unhappy.”
He put a hand under her chin, turned her face to his. “Maybe we did. But I know one thing for damn sure. I was happier with you than I was without you.”
Thoughts tumbled together in her head, refused to make sense. “Damnit, Jake,” was all she could say.
“Figured you should know. Being a smart woman you’ll be able to conclude I prefer being happy to unhappy. So I’m going to get you back.”
“I’m not a . . . a yo-yo.”
“A yo-yo comes back, if you’ve got the right hand-eye coordination. You’re no toy, Dunbrook. You’re work. Now, do you want to stand here on the sidewalk in Atlanta discussing my future happiness?”
“No, I don’t.”
“We can hang around, try to give this guy another push—or let him simmer. Braves are in town. We might be able to catch a game. Or we can go back north and back to work.”
“What’s this? You’re not going to tell me what I’m supposed to do?”
He winced. “I’m trying to cut down on that. How’m I doing?”
“Actually, not too bad.” She gave in to impulse, touched his face, then immediately turned away to stare back at Richard Carlyle’s office. “He said he hadn’t seen his father in over fifteen years, but his first instinct was to stand up for him.”
“It is instinct—cultural, societal, familial. Close ranks against the outsider.”
“I don’t believe he doesn’t know where his father is. Maybe he doesn’t have the exact address stored in his head, but he has to know how to get to him. If we push, his instinct would be to barricade, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably. Following that, to either confront his father with the information we just put in his hands, or to warn him.”
“We don’t have to worry about the warning, because Carlyle already knows we’re looking. I’m sure of that. Let’s give him a few days. I say we go back to work, on the site and on the list of names Suzanne gave me.”
“I guess that shoots any chance of a suite at the Ritz here, and my fantasy of getting you drunk and naked.”
“Pretty much.” Maybe she was an idiot, she thought, but she, too, was happier with him than she was without him. “But you can buy me a drink at the airport bar and make sexual innuendos.”
“If that’s the best I can do, let’s find a cab and get started.”
You’re back.” Bill McDowell trotted up to Callie the minute he arrived at the dig. His young, earnest face was still shiny from its morning scrub.
Callie grunted as she looked through the dumpy level to the surveyor’s staff West Virginia Frannie held. “We were only gone a day, Bill.”
“Yeah, I know, but nobody was sure when you’d be back. I had a dentist appointment first thing this morning or I’d’ve been here sooner.”
“Um-hmm. How’d it go?”
“Good. Great. No problems. You’ve got really nice teeth.”
She managed to swallow the chuckle. “Thanks.” She noted the height on the staff that gave her vertical distance. “Next point, Frannie.”
Jake had been right, again, about the couple from West Virginia. Frannie was skinny, silly and obsessed with Chuck, but willing to follow instructions.
And unlike Bill, didn’t breathe down her neck and continually ask questions.
She rotated the movable telescope until she focused on the new position, took the second reading. All the while Bill hovered behind her.
She could smell his aftershave, the lacing of bug repellant and a whiff of Listerine.
“I found potsherds yesterday,” he told her. “I got the photographs if you want to see. I took Polaroids for my own records. Dory took the others. Hey, Dory! How’s it going?”
“Hi, Bill. Any cavities?”
“Nah. Anyway . . . um, Callie?”
“Huh?”
“I wrote up the report last night. They’re really cool—the potsherds. Digger said they were probably from a cooking pot. They were scribed and everything.”
“That’s good.” She noted down the measurements. “That’s got it, Frannie. Thanks.” She began scribbling the calculations on her clipboard, and spoke absently to Bill. “Stick with the same location today, see what else you turn up.”
“I was kind of hoping I could work with you.”
“Maybe later.”
“Well, okay. Sure. Anyway, this is all so much cooler than I thought it was going to be. I mean, it takes forever, but then bam! you get something and it’s great. But whenever you need a hand, I could work with you over there.” He gestured toward the area marked off for the cemetery. “With the bones. I figure I can learn more in one day with you than a month with anybody else.”
She reminded herself she was here to teach as well as dig. Enlightenment was as essential as discovery. “We’ll see about it tomorrow.”
“Awesome.”
He jogged off to get his trowel.
“You know, you can get a rash having your butt kissed that much,” Jake commented.
“Shut up. He’s just eager. You’re going to want to have one of your beauty-pageant contestants start another triangulation. Sonya, probably. Dory could work with her.”
“I’ve already set them up.” He gestured to where the two women were working with measuring tapes and a plumb line. “Starting next week, we’re only going to have Sonya on weekends. She starts classes full-time.”
“What about Dory?”
“She’s arranging a sabbatical. She doesn’t want to leave the dig. Chuck and Frannie are staying on. Matt, too. For the time being anyway. You couldn’t drag Bill away with a team of mules. We’re going to lose a couple of the itinerants, the undergrads. Leo’s working on replacements.”
“If we’re going to be shorthanded, let’s keep those hands busy while we’ve got them.”
They separated, Jake to work on what they’d termed “the hut area,” and Callie back to the cemetery.
She could work there with the pulse of Digger’s rock music, the chatter of the planning team, the trill of birds in the trees at her back. She could work in her own bubble of silence where those sounds simply pressed against the edges of her concentration.
She had the moist ground under her fingers, and the music of it sliding from her trowel into her spoil bucket. She had the sun on her back and the occasional brush of breeze to cool it.
She used trowel and brush and probe, painstakingly excavating the distant past, and her mind carefully turned over the known elements of her own.
William Blakely, Suzanne Cullen’s obstetrician, retired twelve years after delivering her of a healthy baby girl. Seven pounds, one ounce. He died of prostate cancer fourteen years later, survived by his wife, who had been both his office manager and his nurse, and their three children.
Blakely’s receptionist during the period in question had also retired, but had moved out of the area.
She intended to visit the widow, find more on the receptionist as soon as possible.
She’d track down the delivery-room nurse who’d assisted Suzanne through both of her labors. And the roommate she’d had during her hospital stay.
The pediatrician Suzanne had used continued to practice. She’d be going to see him as well.
It was a kind of triangulation, she thought. Each one of those names was a kind of p
oint on the feature of her past. She would mark them, measure them, plot them. And somehow, she’d form the grid that began to give her the picture of what lay beneath it all.
Meticulously, she brushed the soil from the jawbone of a skull. “Who were you?” she wondered aloud.
She started to reach for her camera, glanced over when it wasn’t there.
“I’ve got it.” Dory crouched down, framed in the skull. “I’ve been elected to pick up lunch.” She rose, moved to another position to take another series of pictures from a different angle. “My name is Dory, and I’ll be your server today. What’ll you have?”
“I could go for one of those meatball subs, extra sauce and cheese. Bag of chips—see if they’ve got sour cream and onion.”
“How do you eat like that and stay slim? I even look at a bag of potato chips, I gain five pounds.” Dory lowered the camera. “I hate women like you. I’m having yogurt—for a change.”
She put the camera down to take the notebook out of her back pocket and scribble down Callie’s order.
“You need money?”
“No, the kitty’s still flush. Speaking of which, we’re trying to get a poker game together for tonight. Interested?”
“Yeah, but I’ve got to work.”
“Everybody needs some downtime. You haven’t taken a night off since I started on the dig. And when you’re not on-site, you’re traveling. In and out of Atlanta yesterday, a day in the lab last week—”
“How’d you know I went to Atlanta?”
Dory flinched at the snap in Callie’s voice. “Rosie mentioned it. She said you and Jake had to fly to Atlanta on business. Sorry. I didn’t mean to step in anything.”
“You didn’t step in anything. Look, I’ll ante up if I get the chance, but I’ve got some legwork on an alternate project that’s taking time.”
“Sure. We can always come up with an extra chair.” Dory got to her feet, brushed off her knees, then nodded toward the skull. “I bet he didn’t have many meatball subs for lunch.”
“Not likely.”
“Something to be said for progress,” Dory said, then walked to her car.
Callie waited until she was gone, then boosted out of the hole. She gestured to Rosie, wandered over to the cooler.
“What’s up?” Rosie asked her.
“Did you mention to anyone that I was in Atlanta yesterday?”
Rosie pulled a jug of Gatorade with her name on it out of the cooler. “Probably.” She took a long drink. “Yeah, your not-so-secret admirer was pretty bummed when you weren’t here. I told him you had some business south and would be back in a day or two. I might’ve told someone else. Was it a secret mission or something?”
“No.” She rolled her shoulder. “Just jumpy, I guess.” She frowned over to where Bill worked. “Has he asked you anything else about me?”
“Yeah, he asks. What you like to do in your free time. If you’ve got a boyfriend.”
“A boyfriend? Give me a break.”
“He shoots sulky and territorial glares at Jake when he’s absolutely sure Jake’s not looking. And gooey ones at you.”
“He’s twelve.”
“Twenty-four and counting. Come on, Callie.” Rosie gave her a friendly elbow in the ribs. “It’s sweet. Be nice to him.”
“I’m nice to him.”
But it made her think about perceptions, about team dynamics and gossip. So she decided to go after the next pieces of her puzzle without Jake.
Lorna Blakely had steel-gray hair, wore bifocals and housed four cats. She kept the screen door locked and peered suspiciously through it while the cats complained and circled around her.
“I don’t know any Dunbrooks.”
“No, ma’am. You don’t know me.” The Hagerstown neighborhood seemed quiet, settled and peaceful. Callie wondered why the woman would be so paranoid and why she’d believe a locked screen would stop anyone from breaking in. “I’d like to speak with you about one of your husband’s patients. Suzanne Cullen.”
“My husband’s dead.”
“Yes, ma’am. He was Suzanne Cullen’s doctor. He delivered both her babies. Do you remember her?”
“Of course I remember her. I’m not senile. She lives down the south of the county and got famous for her baking. She was a nice young woman, had pretty babies. One got kidnapped. Terrible thing.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”
“You the police? That must’ve been thirty years ago. Talked to the police back then.”
“No, I’m not the police.” How much, Callie wondered, could she trust her instincts, her judgment? They both told her that this tiny, suspicious woman with her bevy of cats wasn’t the type to black-market the babies her husband had spent his life bringing into the world. “Mrs. Blakely, I’m the baby who was kidnapped. I’m Suzanne Cullen’s daughter.”
“Why the devil didn’t you say so in the first place?” Lorna flipped off the lock, pushed open the screen. “How’s your mama? Didn’t hear they’d found you. Don’t listen to the news much. Haven’t since Wil’m passed.”
“I just recently found out about the connection. If I could ask you some questions it might help me figure out what really happened.”
“Don’t this beat all.” Lorna shook her head and scattered a couple of silver hairpins. “Just like something from that America’s Most Wanted or some such thing. Guess you better sit down.”
She led the way into a small living room coordinated to within an inch of its life with matching maple tables, two identical china lamps, a sofa and chair out of the same pink and blue floral print.
Lorna took the chair, propped her feet on a matching ottoman. When Callie sat on the sofa, cats leaped into her lap. “Don’t mind them. They don’t get much company. Suzanne’s little girl, after all this time. Isn’t that something? You got the look of her, now that I think about it. Good breeder,” she added. “Breezed through both of those pregnancies. Strong, healthy girl, just about broke your heart to see how she went sickly after she lost that baby.”
“You worked with your husband.”
“Sure I did. Worked with him for twenty-two years.”
“Would you remember, when he was treating Suzanne through that pregnancy, if there was anyone who asked questions about her, seemed overly interested in her?”
“The police asked questions back when it happened. Wasn’t a thing we could tell them. Wil’m, he was heartsick over it. That man loved his babies.”
“What about the other people who worked in your husband’s office back then?”
“Had a receptionist, another nurse. Hallie, she was with us ten years. No eleven. Eleven years.”
“Hallie was the other nurse. What about Karen Younger, the receptionist?”
“Moved here from the city. D.C. Worked for us six years or so, then her husband he got transferred down to Texas somewhere. Got a Christmas card from her every year. Always said she missed Dr. Wil’m. She was a good girl. Billy delivered her second baby, a boy. Worked for us another two years before they moved away.”
“Do you know where in Texas?”
“ ’Course I do. Didn’t I say I wasn’t senile? Houston. Got two grandchildren now.”
“I wonder if I could have her address, and Hallie’s? To contact them in case they remember anything.”
“Don’t know what they’d remember now they didn’t remember then. Some stranger snatched you up. That’s what happened. That’s how people can be.”
“There were people at the hospital, too. People who knew your husband, who knew Suzanne had a baby. Orderlies, nurses, other doctors. One of the delivery-room nurses was with Suzanne for both deliveries. Would you remember her name?”
Lorna puffed out her cheeks. “Might’ve been Mary Stern, or