But then stopped.
I looked over my shoulder, realizing I'd forgotten the dead bolt. Striking the doorframe, it had bounced the door open, and now it swung in the wind, creaking a little, just as it must have done on the night Harry Brightman had gone.
4
I didn't tell May.
She was already frightened and now that I suspected she had reason to be, there was no point in alarming her further. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the real importance of what had happened concerned me, not her. Up to this point, I'd been a rather reluctant good Samaritan. And of course that still might be my position, Brightman, after all, was a rich man, he lived in a rich neighborhood, and perhaps I'd only interrupted a burglar. On the other hand? It was this "other hand" that now gave me a twinge of guilt. If Brightman's disappearance was more than inconsiderate? if it had a darker side then conceivably his concern about May's adoption might be linked to it. I still didn't see how, but the next morning, really for the first time, I began taking the whole business seriously.
I worked fast. Once upon a time I'd been a fair reporter, and information had been my bread and butter. When you're just starting out, you obtain it by the exercise of certain skills? later on, you simply use contacts. That's what I needed now, and I began searching for them at the main branch of the Toronto Public Library, first with The New York Times Index, then in a microfilm reader. There I learned that adoption, if not exactly front-page news, had become something of a social issue in the late seventies. Procedures were being questioned; adopted children were demanding the right to know their "birth" parents; various organizations were agitating. I read through a dozen stories, mainly concerned with the United States, but one compared American practices with those in other countries, including Canada. I'd never heard of the writer, but of course I know a dozen people on the Times. Phoning from May's place, I quickly discovered that my man was now staffing at CBS and tracked him down there. As expected, he was happy to help now I was one of his contacts. To get his paragraph on Canada, he told me, he'd spoken with a woman at the Toronto Globe & Mail named Eileen Rogers. I called the Globe, and it was my lucky day: Miss Rogers knew my name, or pretended to, she'd done a three-part feature on "Adoption in Canada," and she didn't have a date for lunch. We went to a restaurant in a small hotel off Bloor Street, not far from where May and I had been walking the previous night. It was quiet, pleasant, elegant; a courtyard had been glassed in, and ad men and TV types padded their paunches and expense accounts as the pale October sun filtered down through the roof. Eileen Rogers fitted the place well enough. She was a real type the young, tough, ambitious lady reporter who'd worked her way up from the women's page to the political columns and was now scanning the wider horizon beyond. That horizon, I expected, extended south of the border, for she was curious about all those Canadians who've made it big in the American media Peter Jennings, Morley Safer, Robin MacNeil, a dozen others. I gave her some hints and names, but mostly, of course, she was earning the right to drop my name, which was fine, because in return she gave me a top-class briefing on Canadian adoption law and procedures. In Canada, she said, adoption was under provincial jurisdiction, just as, in the United States, the field belonged to the individual states. Most of the provinces (again, like most of the states) had established official or semi-official bodies to handle the whole business: they were usually styled Children's Aid Societies here, but differed little from the "adoption agencies" in the United States. She didn't think much of them on either side of the border.
"It's disgusting, actually. They have a sort of monopoly on infant misery and all they care about is maintaining their power. They've built up huge empires, bureaucracies, programs, funding from here, funding from there. Doing that series, I learned to loathe social workers."
I sipped white wine, forked salad. "How does all this affect me? if I'm trying to track down someone's parents?"
"Oh, you run right up against the basis of the whole system."
"Which is?"
"Secrecy. Absolute, sacrosanct, legalized secrecy. Once a mother signs over her baby she loses all rights to it and the kid loses all its rights as well. Neither of them can ever find out about the other. That's the basis of the Societies' power: they get complete control. It's all rationalized adoptive parents mustn't be haunted by the specter of the birth mother returning but it's all bullshit. They threw it out the window in the U.K. with no ill effects, and in some countries it's never been true. Finland, for instance."
According to her, if May had been adopted through a Children's Aid Society in her case, it would be the Society in the province of Nova Scotia there was only one way to find out who the birth mother was: an inside contact. She hinted that under the right circumstances she might be forthcoming, but I held off on that. Just possibly, there was another way. Most adoptions were handled by the Children's Aid Societies, but private adoptions, arranged through lawyers and doctors, still existed.
"The agencies hate them, of course, but lawyers make money from them also sacrosanct and in some cases they're just more convenient all round. It makes it easier for the rich to hide their kids' indiscretions, and then there's the sort of case where the parents are wiped out in a car crash and a relative picks up the children."
"So the lawyer would be the key, then?"
"Yeah. If you could get him to talk."
It was around three by the time I got back to May's house and told her the gist of what I'd found out.
"So it's going to be very hard," she said, "if I was adopted through one of these Societies?"
"Yes, but I think this girl knows some people inside the system, at least in Ontario. That would be a big help."
"You won't get in trouble?"
"Don't worry. It would be easier, though, if we knew whether or not you were adopted privately."
"All I know is what I told you. I was adopted in 1940, in Halifax."
"But your father must have a lawyer?"
"Of course. His name is Stewart Cadogan. I don't much like him."
"Do they go back that far, to 1940?"
"Probably. He's old enough."
"He'd probably know anyway. Phone him and find out. If he says you were adopted privately, make an appointment and we'll go see him."
We were in the kitchen again, drinking coffee. Now May glanced quickly down at the table. "If you don't mind if you need to see him I'd rather you went by yourself. As I say, I don't like him. We never get along."
Her fear I felt it flicker again. "May? you're sure that's everything you know you realize there's no point holding anything back?"
She reached up with both hands, combing her fingers back through her hair, but then she smiled and her voice was calm. "You have to understand, I don't care if you know. If there's something to know if he has something to tell you I don't mind your finding out. But / don't want to? not unless I absolutely have to."