“No, but she heard some of it,” Lauren said. “Our voices got loud and we talked about it later on.”
“What was their response to you at that point?”
“He was still going off about their rights and I finally told him there’d be no relationship and if he pursued it any further, we’d be far more aggressive in asking the FBI to pursue a case against them.” She paused. “He clammed up after that, at the suggestion of his wife.”
I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “Wow. Okay.”
“Yeah,” Lauren said and I could picture her frowning. “So then we left and Elizabeth asked about it. If she was going to have a relationship with them. I said no. And she went ballistic.”
I sighed. “How?”
“Just telling me how unfair it was, that she should have a say in it, that she thought it was crap that we’re telling her everything she has to do,” Lauren said.
“And you said?”
“Nothing really. I let her get it out. She finally ran out of gas and hasn’t spoken to me since. She’s in the shower again.”
I leaned back in the sofa. Maybe I’d been wrong in encouraging them to go to Minnesota. It didn’t seem to be doing anyone any good. “I’m sorry.”
“I just don’t know what to do with her, Joe,” she said, obviously frustrated. “I feel like everything I’m doing is wrong and I’m just making it worse.”
“What were her reasons for wanting a relationship with them?”
She sighed. “That she liked them. She said she doesn’t think it’s their fault. They didn’t know about someone taking her, they just wanted a child. That she had a good life until she found out she was supposedly adopted.” She paused. “She loves them, Joe. I despise saying that, but she does.”
I despised hearing it, but if there was a silver lining in place, it was that they’d obviously been decent parents to Elizabeth while she lived with them. I still doubted that you could just walk into a hotel room and pay for a child and not know that something was wrong with the set up, but I’d met families desperate enough to find their own children that they could talk themselves into anything, even if the rest of the world rolled its eyes.
“Maybe we need to reconsider then,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Not anything major,” I explained. “But maybe saying she can’t have a relationship with them isn’t…realistic.”
“So, what? She spends half the year with us and half with them?”
“Stop. You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Well, what exactly do you mean?” she said, and I could picture her pacing around the hotel room, her anger finding fuel. “These people had no right to keep Elizabeth. None. And I don’t give a shit if they fed and clothed her and drove her wherever she needed to go. Because that was supposed to be my job. But I got cheated out of it because she somehow landed with them. I was dead serious when I threatened them with the FBI. I’ll make their lives miserable.” She paused. “There is no way I’m giving them another minute with her. I want my time.”
“It’s not just about us,” I said.
“I don’t give a shit, Joe,” she said. “I really don’t. They aren’t her parents. They aren’t her relatives. They don’t deserve anything and I’m not sacrificing my time with our daughter to give them any more time with her. They don’t get to play step-parents or aunts and uncles or whatever they’ve got in their heads that they think they’re entitled to. They can go to hell for all I care.”
I waited a moment, hoping she might cool off. “Okay. But what about what Elizabeth wants?”
“She doesn’t know what she wants, Joe,” she said, pleading with me to understand, to come over to her side. “She’s confused and I get that. Her life’s been turned upside down. But giving her permission to spend time with these people is like letting her pick and choose a family down the block as her new family.”
“No, it’s not, Lauren,” I said, frowning. “It’s the exact opposite of that. Until about a week ago, she thought they were her parents. She was attached to them. And she thought we were dead.”
“She’ll let it go,” Lauren said, her voice dropping. “It’ll just take time. When she’s able to shake the trauma off, she’ll remember us as her parents. Before all this happened.”
“Maybe. But you don’t know that. And even if she does come to terms with that, it doesn’t mean she won’t want some connection with the Corzines. I mean, she’ll be eighteen soon enough and then it won’t matter what we want.”
The line buzzed.
I waited.
“Well, until then, I’m saying no,” Lauren said.
She hung up before I could respond.
TWENTY SEVEN
I tried calling back once, but it went to voicemail and I knew Lauren was done with me for the night. That was probably a good thing because I didn’t see us getting on the same page any time soon and it was just going to create more animosity between us, which wasn’t going to be good for anyone.
As I lay awake, unable to sleep because I couldn’t turn my brain off, I couldn’t decide what was right. I believed what I’d told Lauren about Elizabeth’s connection to the Corzine family. She had clearly been treated well by them and, at some point, she’d accepted that she was their daughter. Lauren and I may not have been comfortable hearing that but it was the truth and, until she’d found the phony adoption papers, she’d believed that to be the truth. They’d wanted a child, gotten one and treated her like their own daughter.
But it was the way they’d gotten her that was still biting at me. No matter how they’d treated Elizabeth, they’d still flown to another city, paid an exorbitant sum and picked up their adopted daughter in a hotel room with no other adults around. No one in their right mind would find that acceptable’ every rational adult I knew would question the circumstances behind it. And no matter how long they’d had Elizabeth, they had to have always been worrying that someone was going to come knocking on their door. Desperation will make people do funny things, but it doesn’t change the concept of right and wrong. The Corzines had to have known that something wasn’t right and I wasn’t okay with the fact that they’d lived with the lie for so long.
I wrestled with those thoughts for most of the night, unable to convince myself that one outweighed the other, and all I ended up with for all my thinking was a sleepless night.
I pushed myself out of bed at daybreak, brewed a full pot of coffee and forced myself to think about other things as I opened my computer. I had money in my accounts, a product of a nomadic decade and having lived so sparsely in the years since I’d left Coronado. I’d never charged exorbitant fees for my services as a private investigator, but my clients paid me well. And I lived well below my means. But it wasn’t going to last me forever. At some point, I was going to have to make a decision as to what I wanted to do. Did I want to continue the investigating and become official? Or did I want to find something that offered some stability, a regular paycheck and wouldn’t chew my guts up?
On paper, it seemed like an easy decision. Find a job, have regular hours, deposit paycheck. But I wondered if that would be enough for me. I wasn’t going to go back to being a cop. That ship had both sailed and sunk. So I wasn’t sure what exactly I would look for.
But as I sipped my coffee and paged through the emails sent to me by people looking for their kids, I realized there was a certain pull. I was good at helping people. I could find their kids, even if the end result wasn’t always pretty. I could give them closure. I’d learned how to do it and do it well. I knew the tricks, I knew the questions to answer, I knew where to look. And by looking at the emails, I knew how desperate people were.
A ten-year-old boy in North Dakota.
A seventeen-year-old girl in New York.
A forty-year-old father in Florida.
A twelve-year-old girl in Kentucky.
Each of the emails was heartfelt, genuine, wrenching. Sent by people who’d had their lives shredded, just like mine. They didn’t have any answers and they felt helpless. They’d found my name because I’d helped others and they now clung to the hope that I’d be the one to get them the answers they needed and wanted.