Chapter 1
BY THE TIME I BROUGHT COFFEE INTO THE LIVING ROOM, Alan had removed the baby’s outer layer of pink blankets. I took a look inside the carrier as I set the cup down on a side table. I don’t know much about babies at the moment. I’m sure I’ll know a lot more three months from now when my new grandson is expected to arrive on the scene. In the meantime it occurred to me that the baby in my living room appeared to be very new. So what was Alan Dale doing driving solo up and down the I-5 corridor with a newborn infant in tow?
“What’s her name again?” I asked as I sat down. “And how old is she?”
“Athena,” he answered, “Athena Marie, and she’s six weeks old—six weeks tomorrow. She just got out of Children’s Hospital yesterday.”
The natural follow-up question would have been “Where’s her mommy?” but something—some newfound restraint that never used to be part of my conversational makeup—kept me from going there.
“How’s Jasmine these days?” I asked instead.
He shook his head miserably, looking as distraught as anyone I’d ever seen. “I lost her,” he said simply.
The word “lost,” used in that context, generally means one of two things. Either Jasmine had done Alan wrong and had taken off on him or else she had died. The utter defeat and desolation in his demeanor hinted at the latter.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Hep C,” he said bleakly.
And that said it all. Hepatitis C, an often-fatal liver infection, can be contracted any number of ways, including by reusing dirty needles, but it can also come about due to serious drinking. I’ve been sober for years now, but there was plenty of serious drinking in my past. When they started advertising that new hep C treatment on TV a couple of years ago, I went to see my doc and got tested—“an ounce of prevention,” as Mel had called it. When I came up clear, we both felt as though we’d dodged a bullet. I knew that Jasmine Day had been deep into drugs back in the late seventies, a time when things like HIV and hep C weren’t even a blip on the radar for most people. I hadn’t a doubt in the world that she’d been an IV drug user back then and that hep C had been lying in wait, ready to spring on her, years and years after she quit using.
“When?” I asked.
“A little over ten years ago,” he said.
“There are medications for that now,” I offered.
He nodded. “I know. They were coming then, too, but by the time Jasmine tried to get in to one of the human trials, it was already too late for her. She was sick for a long time, in and out of the hospital. No insurance, of course, so we ended up losing pretty much everything, including the house. If it hadn’t been for Jasmine’s mom, I would have been up shit creek.”
“I’m so sorry to hear about this,” I said. “But what’s the deal here, Alan? Why do you need a PI?”
“It’s about my daughter,” he told me, “Jasmine’s and my daughter. Her name is Naomi—Naomi Louise Dale.”
Knowing that hep C can be transmitted from mother to child, I hated asking the next question, but I did it anyway. “What about Naomi?” I asked. “Does she have hep C, too?”
Alan shrugged and slumped in his chair. “Maybe,” he said darkly, and then, after a pause, he added, “Make that probably. She might have inherited it from her mother, but she’s also been into drugs big time for years, so she could very well have contracted it on her own. At the time Jasmine was diagnosed, we tried to encourage Naomi to get tested, but by then she wasn’t listening to a word we said. I doubt she took our advice.”
“I take it Naomi is Athena’s mother?”
Alan nodded, and his reply made me wonder, if that was the case, why was baby Athena riding all over hell and gone with Alan rather than with her mother? And if Naomi had come down with hepatitis C . . .
“If Naomi has hep C,” I asked, “what about Athena?”
“I worried about that, too,” Alan admitted. “Given the family history, I asked Athena’s doc at Children’s to test her. He says she’s clear.”
“Thank God for that,” I murmured. “So what’s the story, then, Alan? Why exactly did you come looking for me?”
“Naomi’s gone missing,” he answered. “I’m hoping you can find her.”
“She went missing somewhere around here?”
“Yes,” he said. “She disappeared in Seattle.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“When Naomi was admitted to Harborview in late January to have the baby, she listed her grandmother, Helen Gibbons, as her next of kin.”
“Helen is Jasmine’s mother?”
Alan nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Helen is my mother-in-law. After Naomi disappeared, the hospital called Helen, and she called me.”
“You’re saying Naomi disappeared from the hospital?”
“Yes, right after giving birth, she got dressed and walked out before anyone realized she was gone.”
“And left Athena behind?”
“Abandoned her at the hospital,” Alan corrected. “At the time Naomi took off, Athena was locked up in Harborview Medical Center’s neonatal unit because she was both premature and underweight. She was also addicted to methadone. As I said, the hospital called Helen, and she called me. I quit my job—I was working a bus-and-truck show in Cincinnati at the time—and caught the next plane out. By the time I got here, Harborview had already transferred Athena over to Children’s. I’ve been with her ever since.”
“On your own?”
“Yes, on my own,” he said with a hopeless shrug. “Who else is there? Helen has health issues that make it no longer feasible for her to fly. I’ve had a room at the Silver Cloud in Seattle’s University District for over a month now, but I haven’t spent much time there. It’s expensive as all hell, and I wouldn’t be able to cover it if Helen weren’t willing to help. But it’s close to the hospital. While Athena was an inpatient, I generally stopped by the hotel just long enough to grab a shower and eat some breakfast. Most nights I spent in the nursery at the hospital—holding her, rocking her. She was hooked on methadone at birth and had to go through withdrawal.” He shuddered, remembering. “It was horrible,” he managed at last, choking on the words as he spoke. “How a mother could do that to her own baby—feed her that kind of poison—is more than I can understand!”
Alan broke off then. I sat there in the silence trying to figure out where I fit into this unfolding family drama. Was he searching for his missing daughter in hopes of affecting some kind of reconciliation with her, or was he concerned that Naomi had landed in hot water, and he was here hoping to bail her out of it?
“Methadone is what they use to help get addicts off drugs,” I said at last. “Maybe Naomi was trying to get clean.”
“I doubt it,” Alan said. “The thing is, now that Athena has been released from the hospital, I’ll have to locate someplace less expensive for us to stay until we get things sorted out.”
“What things?” I asked.
“If I hadn’t shown up, Athena would have gone straight from the hospital into foster care,” Alan explained. “I’m petitioning to be appointed her legal guardian, but that takes time. I’ve been appointed her temporary guardian for the next thirty days, but achieving legal-guardian status can take up to a year. I’m not even allowed to leave town with her until all of that is settled, and that’s why I have to find Naomi now. The only way to shortcut the process is for Naomi to go before a judge and voluntarily relinquish her parental rights. I won’t be able to take Athena home to Jasper with me until that happens.”