Tell Me Who I Am by Marcia Muller Read Free Book Online Page B

years ago put to rest.
    “ Do you think so?” she repeated.
    “…No, I don’t.”
    Our mutual anger was understandable. When you enter adulthood thinking you’re a unique person with your own unique history, and all of that individuality is suddenly in jeopardy, you feel as if you’re sinking into quicksand. Nothing to grab on to, no solid ground to rest upon, no one to extend a hand and drag you to safety. For me, my investigator’s skills had provided aid and comfort; now, perhaps, they might do the same for Debra.
    I gave my secretary—one in a sequence of many short-lived employees—the clippings for copying. Then I asked Debra Judson for photographs of her parents; she was prepared for the request, had already had extras made. After she signed a contract and provided a retainer, I sent her back to her hotel—the Stanford Court, proving she hadn’t been left badly off—and read the clippings carefully. Then I turned to the computer.
    The websites I visited fleshed out the story of the Stanton child that had been skimpily covered in the print media. She’d had six older siblings—four boys and two girls, their ages ranging from four to thirteen. Their father, Rodney, worked as a caretaker in a mobile home park near Sparrow Lake in exchange for the rent on their space; their mother, Carol, was a part-time convenience store clerk and occasional waitress, but her poor health and pregnancies—she’d also had two miscarriages after Pamela was born—prevented her from taking regular jobs. The Stantons were described by neighbors who seemed genuinely fond of them as good parents, even though stressed and desperately poor. Abuse was never hinted at.
    On the day over twenty years ago when Pamela disappeared it had rained hard—one of those sudden deluges that used to happen in the pre-drought years of our state. The wet ground should have made it easier to track a child who might have wandered outdoors at the wrong moment, become disoriented or panicked. But the rural sheriff’s department—not summoned until dinnertime, when the mother realized her youngest was missing—could identify no footprints or other telltale traces in the gathering dusk. And by first light the next day, a second storm had obliterated any other possible traces.
    Where had Pamela’s parents been that day? Rodney had driven Carol to a nearby mobile-health unit for tests on her thyroid. Their eldest, thirteen-year-old Jackson, was deputized to look after the younger children, but uncharacteristically he’d gone off with his friends and left the other kids alone. It was a mistake that apparently haunted Jackson to this very day: he’d begun drinking heavily at fourteen and twice attempted suicide.
    The Stantons blamed Jackson for shirking his familial duties, but in actuality they’d put too much responsibility on a young teenager. Had put too much trust in the rest of their brood to obey the rules. Of course the press had labeled the parents with all the sins of our judgmental society, including caring more about themselves and Carol’s perilous health than their children, and being too poor to hire a babysitter. In the face of this castigation, the family had fled farther into the wilderness—northeast to Lassen County on the California/Nevada border—and then scattered.
    I’d need to locate as many of them as I could, probe more into the events of that rainy day. In the meantime, I’d have one of my research staff verify the two sets of documents my client had provided.
      
    The Stanton documents turned out to be originals. But the Judson documents proved false. Debra’s birth certificate was in reality that of a child who had died two days after her birth at the Michigan hospital; it had been requested from the state nearly two years after the baby’s death. It reminded me of the decades-old ploy for obtaining false identification, generally used by college students to verify that they were old enough to drink alcoholic