"I'm here because I'm smart," Sal said, slapping his book shut. "The others were dumb motherfuckers, but I knew enough to want to get out, even if it meant going to a sorry-ass school like this. Now excuse me, but second period is about to begin. I don't have time for shit I don't get graded on."
He left the room, taking the Kipling with him.
"You see?" Pearson said. "Any mention of Luther Beale sets him off. Trauma like that never goes away. Now please leave and be prepared to be arrested if you come back."
As it often happened, Tess was in her car and well on her way to Annapolis before she realized what she should have said in reply. It wasn't Beale's name that upset Sal, or even Donnie Moore's. It was the mention of the other children, Treasure, Destiny, and Eldon.
The legislature was long out of session, but Annapolis was busy, swarming with tourists drawn by its over-the-top quaintness. Apparently, the Gap and Banana Republic became much more exotic when fronting on narrow, cobblestone streets. Tess pulled into the public garage off Main Street, although it always hurt her to pay for parking-hence, those two tickets-and walked up the hill to the Senate office building.
She had never covered the General Assembly as a reporter, but she knew the basic civics lesson of how a bill became law. Jeff from Adoption Rights had told her that the failed bill targeting operations such as Family Planning Alternatives was Senate Bill 319, offered by a senator from Carroll County, a once-rural area now considered part of the Baltimore metro area. Tess had found it odd someone from outside the city had sponsored the bill, especially an old pro-lifer like this senator. There must be a wounded constituent somewhere in the mix. If the committee files proved useless, she could always check with the senator's office and see what kind of material he had kept. But changing the law apparently hadn't been all that important to the senator. Over the past five years, he had never attempted to reintroduce the bill.
Tess walked into the empty Senate building and climbed the broad double staircase to the third floor. The secretary who handed Tess the file seemed almost grateful for any distraction.
"What are you trying to find, anyway?" she asked.
"Looking for some folks who testified on this bill, see if they can give me any leads on the adoption agency that inspired it all." Tess pulled out the sign-in sheet that was put out before each hearing. In order to testify, one had to sign in. The list for SB 319 had just five names: the senator himself, someone from the Department of Human Resources, the state agency that oversaw all adoptions, a couple, Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson of Baltimore, and a woman, Willa Mott. The senator and DHR had filed written versions of their testimony, but there was nothing in the file from the Wilsons or Willa Mott.
"Is this everything?" Tess asked.
"If that's all there is, that's all there is. You know, I've been in this office for ten years and I've got a good memory for most of the controversial stuff that comes through, but I don't remember this one at all. What's the big deal?"
"No big deal, but I'd like to find the people who testified. I just wish I knew what they said, or where they fit into the whole debate."
The secretary shrugged. "There's always the tapes."
"Tapes?"
"Senate records every committee hearing. If you know the date and the time-and it's right there, so you do-you can go over to Legislative Reference and listen on a pair of headsets, just like it was an old radio show. Only even more boring, if you know what I mean."
"Can I do that right now?"
"Sure. But I feel sorry for someone who can't think of something better to do on a nice June day than listen to one of our hearings. Whyn't you go down to the dock, have a meal at one of the seafood places? There's this one place that serves the best crab dip. And if you're on expense account, the Cafe Normandy does a real good rockfish."
Tess, trying not to shudder too visibly at the idea of crab dip or rockfish, thanked the woman and headed across the street to Legislative Reference.
Although tempted to fast-forward through the testimony, she listened dutifully to the entire tape. The senator's dull, rambling introduction, with all its little formalities, the agency's defensive posturing-DHR didn't seem to have anything against the bill, it just wanted to make clear it was not to blame for aberrations such as Family Planning Alternatives.
The law itself, as described, was trivial, requiring that such services disclose in their advertising whether they provided abortions. The pro-lifer senator seemed to be trying a preemptive strike, offering a weak, ineffective bill that would keep the government from scrutinizing other agencies that might be pulling the kind of bait-and-switch Family Planning Alternatives had tried: luring women in with promises of abortions, then using all sorts of propaganda to talk them out of the procedure. (One woman, for example, had been told an abortion halved her probability of ever becoming pregnant again and increased her risk of gynecological cancers tenfold.)
The testimony droned on and on. Tess almost nodded off, then the tenor of the voices changed and she snapped to, rewinding the tape.
The Wilsons were a couple who had started an adoption through Family Planning, then broken off the relationship because they had been disturbed by a worker's offer of a steep discount if they would take a biracial, disabled child. "It was like she was running a tag sale, wasn't it, Mike?" the woman appealed to her husband. "‘Would you take a baby like that if we knocked a thousand dollars off the fees? How about two thousand? What if the baby isn't disabled, just biracial?'"
Again, Tess stopped the tape and played it back. Yes, the woman definitely said Mike, despite the fact that she and her husband had signed in as Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson. Unless the woman tripped up again on the tape, and gave their full names or hometown, finding them would be impossible.
Willa Mott, according to her testimony, had been a worker at the agency for ten years and now ran a day-care center in Westminster, the senator's home county. Bingo! Tess thought, writing down the name. Assuming the woman hadn't moved out of state, she'd be easy enough to find, with a name like that. In a nervous, thin voice that suited her spinsterish name, she described the scare tactics her former employers had used, and how she had finally leaked the story to a local television station. A clerical worker, she had sat in on most of the interviews and seen the files on every client.
"Why did you wait so long before telling anyone what was happening?" one of the committee members asked.
Willa Mott stuttered from nervousness. "I myself do not believe in abortion, because of my religious pr-pr-pr-principles. I thought it was right to counsel young women against it. But I began to see that they were hurting the women who came in, and some of them just went someplace else, anyway. It didn't seem Christian to me, what they were doing. I and one of the clients called a television reporter. I didn't go on camera-they shot me in the dark, with one of those machines that makes your voice sound funny. But before the report even aired, my supervisors closed the office and disappeared. I showed up for work one day and the place was locked."
Another senator, a woman, asked a question: "The adoptions they arranged-were those legal and aboveboard?"
"Oh my goodness, yes. If they could have just kept doing that, without trying to coerce the women who came to see them, I would have been proud to work there. But they had a cause, you know? They honestly believed in what they were doing."
The testimony ended there and before Tess knew it, she was listening to a debate over a different bill, something about the state's private adoption laws. She turned her headset in and walked outside, blinking in the bright sun on Lawyers Mall, the square at the center of the State House complex. Tourists were gathered around the statue of Thurgood Marshall, snapping pictures, posing alongside the bronze version of the Supreme Court justice as if he were one of those life-size cutouts of the president or a popular sports figure.