"Feeling a little skittish?"

"No!" Jackie said. "It's just that…I'm different from the others here."

"Because you're black?" Adele looked genuinely puzzled. Race wasn't supposed to be a factor, not in the Inter-faith Center, not in utopian Columbia. It was impolite to even remark on its existence.

"You kept talking about looking for one's parents. I'm not looking for my mother. I was…I am…a mother."

Adele picked up Jackie's hand. Tess was surprised that Jackie let a stranger touch her. She expected her to snatch her hand back and tuck it under her. But she let Adele hold her hand, while Adele talked to her in a soothing voice, so much softer now, but still as casual and light as it had been during the presentation.

"You were a young one, weren't you? Sixteen? Seventeen?"

"Eighteen," Tess answered when Jackie said nothing. "She's thirty-one now."

"Well, you're right, we don't see as many mothers as we do kids. And we don't see a lot of mothers your age. But that's a good thing, see? Each year, the trail gets a little colder. Did you give birth here in Maryland?"

Jackie nodded, staring into her lap.

"Which part, which jurisdiction?"

"Baltimore, in the city."

"Did you go through a church agency, a private or the state?"

"Private. It was a little office on Saratoga Street."

"You remember a name?" Adele's voice had gotten softer and softer, as if Jackie were a scared, wounded animal she was trying to lure from a hiding place.

"Something Alternatives."

"Okay, Something Alternatives on Saratoga Street. Now I bet you don't think that sounds like much, but I'm going to call Jeff over, and you'll be surprised at what he does with a little piece of information like that." She addressed herself to Tess, as if Jackie were her ward. "Jeff knows Baltimore. I'm more oriented to the Washington suburbs."

She walked over to a thin man with a narrow face and intense brown eyes. If Tess had been noticing such things these days, she would have thought him handsome, but she wasn't noticing such things. Adele and Jeff separated from the group, talking to each other in low, urgent voices. Tess thought she heard a muttered "Jesus Christ," then their voices dropped again. After several minutes, both walked over to where she and Jackie sat. Tess knew from their faces that things weren't quite so easy as Adele had thought.

"It's kind of a good news, bad news situation," Jeff said. "Yes, I know the place. Family Planning Alternatives. It advertised in the yellow pages, pretending to offer a full range of services, from contraceptives to abortions. But they were funded by a radical anti-abortion group. They did some adoptions, but their real purpose was to scare women out of abortions by giving them a lot of misinformation. The state shut them down five years ago."

"What does that mean for me?" Faced with a problem, Jackie was no longer passive. She was a self-made businesswoman again, impatient with all obstacles.

"It means you can't do what we normally advise in this situation, which is to return to the agency and see if you can convince them to offer any leads," Adele said. "And since they've disbanded, it will be virtually impossible to find the people who worked there, much less the records. It's a setback, but it's not the end of the world."

Tess extended her pinkie finger, so the nail was poking into the side of Jackie's thigh. She kept her nails quite short, but there was enough there to dig a little bit. Remember, that's what you have me for. I found you. I can find a lot of people who are hard to find.

"So where do I start?" Jackie demanded. "If I can't begin with them, where do I begin?"

"With your own memories," Jeff said. "Agencies often give a little information to mothers, to ease their minds. They've even been known to send out paperwork that reveals information they're not supposed to have. One of our clients got her birth mother's surname on a form the hospital routed to her by mistake."

"They told me my baby's adopted father was a doctor," Jackie began hopefully.

"Shit." Adele shook her head sorrowfully. "I'm sorry, honey, but they tell almost every girl that. It's one of the clichés of the trade."

Jackie looked as if she might cry. Tess dug her nail a little harder into her leg, signaling her to gain control, to have a little faith in the person she was paying.

"This agency," Tess said. "When it went down, did it end with a bang or a whimper?"

"What are you to her?" Adele asked. Not hostile, just a little curious. Tess wondered if she assumed they were lovers.

"A friend," Jackie said, before Tess could reply. It was as good a cover story as any.

"There were a few newspaper and television stories, nothing huge," Jeff said. "I think I've got a file on them back in my office. But there aren't any names that I recall. The clients were protected, the owners of the agency disappeared, along with all their files."

"But I bet there was a little flurry of action down in Annapolis, right? Probably some attempt to draft legislation to prevent this from happening again. Some tearful testimony-distraught clients, maybe a repentant employee or two?"

Jeff looked at Tess as if she were a psychic. "Yeah, that's exactly what happened, only the bill never made it out of committee. How could you know that?"

"Because if some politician can't make a little hay out of someone else's tragedy, what's the point of being a politician?" Tess turned to Jackie. "They keep files on bill testimony, and who testifies, even if the bill goes nowhere. By tomorrow, we'll have a list of names to play with."

"This is more than a scavenger hunt, you know," Adele said earnestly. "This isn't just about finding something and shouting ‘Eureka!' You're setting some up some mighty big dominoes, and you don't know how they're going to fall. You really should keep working with us."

Jackie reached into her purse, took out her checkbook and a pen-a Mont Blanc, of course-and wrote Maryland Adoption Rights a check for $250. "Thank you for your assistance," she said. "I'll worry about those dominoes after they fall. Meanwhile-"

Adele looked at her hopefully.

"Could I get a receipt for that, for my tax records?"

Chapter 13

It was just after nine Tuesday morning when Tess left the highway and began working her way north on a narrow country road. The thirty-minute drive to Penfield School had passed quickly, thanks to the woman on the radio explaining a vast government conspiracy, in which all new cars were equipped with computer chips that would allow the federal government to shut them down anywhere, any time. Tess tried to figure out how this would work exactly. If the government disabled her car right now, for example, what would they do with it, or her?

Talk radio, the more paranoid the better, was Tess's entertainment of choice as of late. The cacophony of voices was pretty good company. Unfortunately, the shows where the hosts really seethed were becoming harder to find, replaced by garden-variety blustering conservatives and apologetic liberals who hit the same notes over and over. At the other end of the dial, as well as the spectrum, earnest NPR was the high-fiber cereal of radio: Tess would start liking it, remember it was so good for her, and recoil.

Now a caller was wondering if these new, smaller satellite dishes were really part of a government surveillance program. "Of course they are," the host assured him, going on to explain how pay-per-view events allowed the White House to bug your home. Tess was so engrossed in the details of this elaborate scheme that she almost missed the turnoff to the Penfield School.

It was a balancing act, working for two clients. Jackie had assumed she would head straight to Annapolis this morning, but she had promised Beale to interview Salamon Hawkings. To arrange the meeting, she had called Penfield yesterday, telling the headmaster careful not-quite lies: She was an alumna from Washington College (absolutely true), she was interested in helping the school recruit a more diverse student body (true, not that she'd actually do anything about it), and she had heard Salamon Hawkings was a promising young student, an award-winning public speaker (true). The headmaster had hemmed and hawed, but finally agreed she could meet with Salamon this morning, during his study period.