Your fingers cramp on the phone.
The now-familiar taut male voice, slightly out of breath, says, "Yes, Dr. Adams speaking."
"It's me again. I called you at your office today. About the Redwood Point Clinic. About nineteen thirty-eight."
"You son of a – "
"Don't hang up this time, doctor. All you have to do is answer my questions, and I'll leave you alone."
"There are laws against harassment."
"Believe me, I know all about the law. I practice it in Chicago."
"Then you're not licensed in California. So you can't intimidate me by – "
"Doctor, why are you so defensive? Why would questions about that clinic make you nervous?"
"I don't have to talk to you."
"But you make it seem you're hiding something if you don't."
You hear the doctor swallow. "Why do you… I had nothing to do with that clinic. My father died ten years ago. Can't you leave the past alone?"
"Not my past, I can't," you insist. "Your father signed my birth certificate at Redwood Point in nineteen thirty-eight. There are things I need to know."
The doctor hesitates. "All right. Such as?"
"Black-market adoptions." Hearing the doctor inhale, you continue. "I think your father put the wrong information on my birth certificate. I think he never recorded my biological mother's name and instead put down the names of the couple who adopted me. That's why there isn't a sealed birth certificate listing my actual mother's name. The adoption was never legally sanctioned, so there wasn't any need to amend the erroneous birth certificate on file at the courthouse."
"Jesus," the doctor says.
"Am I right?"
"How the hell would I know? I was just a kid when my father closed the clinic and left Redwood Point in the early forties. If you were illegally adopted, it wouldn't have anything to do with me."
"Exactly. And your father's dead, so he can't be prosecuted. Besides, the statute of limitations would have protected him, and anyway it happened so long ago, who would care? Except me. But doctor, you're nervous about my questions. That makes it obvious you know something. Certainly you can't be charged for something your father did. So what would it hurt if you tell me what you know?"
The doctor's throat sounds dry. "My father's memory."
"Ah," you say. "Yes, his reputation. Look, I'm not interested in spreading scandal and ruining anybody, dead or alive. All I want is the truth. About me. Who was my mother? Do I have a brother or a sister somewhere? Was I adopted?"
"So much money."
"What?" You clutch the phone harder.
"When my father closed the clinic and left Redwood Point, he had so much money. I was just a kid, but even I knew he couldn't have earned a small fortune merely delivering babies at a resort. And there were always so many babies. I remember him walking up to the nursery every morning. And then it burned down. And the next thing, he closed the clinic and bought a mansion in San Francisco and never worked again."
"The nursery?"
"The building on the ridge above town. Big, with all kinds of chimneys and gables."
"Victorian?"
"Yes. And that's where the pregnant women lived."
You shiver. Your chest feels encased with ice.
"My father always called it the nursery. I remember him smiling when he said it. Why pick on him?" the doctor asks. "All he did was deliver babies. And he did it well. If someone paid him lots of money to put false information on birth certificates, which I don't even know if he did – "
"But you suspect."
"Yes. God damn it, that's what I suspect," Dr. Adams admits. "But I can't prove it, and I never asked. It's the Gunthers you should blame! They ran the nursery! Anyway if the babies got loving parents, and if the adopting couples finally got the children they desperately wanted, what's the harm? Who got hurt? Leave the past alone!"
For a moment, you have trouble speaking. "Thank you, Doctor. I appreciate your honesty. I have only one more question."
"Get on with it. I want to finish this."
"The Gunthers. The people who ran the nursery."
"A husband and wife. I don't recall their first names."
"Have you any idea what happened to them?"
"After the nursery burned down? God only knows," Dr. Adams says.
"And what about June Engle, the nurse who assisted your father?"
"You said you had only one more question." The doctor breathes sharply. "Never mind, I'll answer if you promise to leave me alone. June Engle was born and raised in Redwood Point. When we moved away, she said she was staying behind. It could be she's still there."
"If she's still alive." Chilled again, you set down the phone.
The same as last night, a baby cries in the room next to yours. You pace and phone Rebecca. You're as good as can be expected, you say. You don't know when you'll be home, you say. You hang up the phone and try to sleep. Apprehension jerks you awake.
The morning is overcast, as gray as your thoughts. After checking out of the hotel, you follow the desk clerk's directions to Cape Verde's public library. A disturbing hour of research later, under a thickening gloomy sky, you drive back to Redwood Point.
From the highway along the cliff, the town looks even bleaker. You steer down the bumpy road, reach the ramshackle boarded-up hotel, and park your rented car. Through weeds that cling to your pantlegs, you walk beyond the hotel's once-splendid porch, find eroded stone steps that angle up a slope, and climb to the barren ridge above the town.
Barren with one exception: the charred timbers and flame-scorched toppled walls of the peaked, gabled, Victorian structure that Dr. Adams had called the nursery. That word makes you feel as if an icy needle has pierced your heart. The clouds hang deeper, darker. A chill wind makes you hug your chest. The nursery. And in nineteen forty-one… you learned from old newspapers on microfilm at the Cape Verde library… thirteen women died here, burned to death, incinerated – their corpses grotesquely blackened and crisped – in a massive blaze, the cause of which the authorities were never able to determine.
Thirteen women. Exclusively women. You want to shout in outrage. And were they pregnant? And were there also… Sickened, imagining their screams of fright, their wails for help, their shrieks of indescribable agony, you sense so repressive an atmosphere about this ruin that you stumble back as if shoved. With wavering legs that you barely control, you manage your way down the unsteady stone slabs. Lurching through the clinging weeds below the slope, you stumble past the repulsive ruins of the hotel to reach your car, where you lean against its hood and try not to vomit, sweating despite the increasingly bitter wind.
The nursery, you think.
Dear God.
The Redwood Bar is no different than when you left it. Chief Kitrick and his friends again play cards at the far right corner table. The haze of cigarette smoke again dims the light above them. The waiter stands behind the bar on your left, the antique nautical instruments gleaming on a shelf behind him. But your compulsion directs you toward the wrinkled, faded photographs on the wall to your right.
This time, you study them without innocence. You see a yellowed image of the peaked, gabled nursery. You narrow your gaze toward small details that you failed to give importance the first time you saw these photographs. Several woman, diminished because the cameraman took a long shot of the large Victorian building, sit on a lawn that's bordered by flower gardens, their backs to a windowed brick wall of the… your mind balks… the nursery.
Each of the women – young! so young! – holds an infant in her lap. The women smile so sweetly. Are they acting? Were they forced to smile?