Page 2 of Pieces of Perfect
“If my adoption was handled the same way as my two sisters’, then no. In that case, he would have no way of knowing my mother. But we can’t say for sure how mine was handled. It could’ve happened differently. Maybe Sarah did know Greenstone and my biological mother—she was a memberof the parish, too—and he wanted to keep her from testifying against him.”
“You have two sisters who were also adopted?”
“Yes. Let me back up. He impregnated one young woman in the Bay Area, who had a girl named Serenity. He impregnated another young woman in Cincinnati, who had a girl named Reagan. They’re my two sisters, and they were born only months apart. I was born two years after Reagan, in Mississippi, where the church moved him next. There, I was adopted by a couple by the name of Mitch and Sarah Ryan.” She sighed before continuing, “Everything might’ve ended well at that point…”
“Except…”
“Only a year or so after the adoption, their marriage fell apart, and Mitch went back to Canada, where he was originally from.” Lorelei shook her head. “As far as I know, we never heard from him again.”
“And Sarah…”
“Was murdered.”
His frown made his chin look like a wooden puppet’s. “Tell me what you know about that.”
“When she split with Mitch, Sarah took me and moved to Florida, where I was found alone on a busy street in downtown Orlando at only two years old. I’m assuming whoever murdered her dropped me off in some random location—or let me out when he went to dispose of her body, and I wandered around until someone picked me up off the highway.”
“No one came forward when you were found? It didn’t make the papers?”
“It did. But my mother’s remains didn’t turn up until four years later.”
“Surely someone reported her missing.”
“I don’t think she was in Orlando long enough for anyone to even realize she should be around.”
“What about her family? Someone had to have missed her.”
“I’m guessing she didn’t have much familial support. Otherwise, her disappearance would’ve been reported. Anyway, by the time her body was discovered, there was nothing left but bones. Her purse was nearby, and they were able to use her driver’s license, which was barely legible by this point, to identify her. But I’d already been put in the foster care system by then, and they never connected the child who’d been picked up off the busy street with the woman who was murdered and dumped in the swamp.”
“The killer left her purse with her body? That doesn’t seem very smart.”
“He must’ve felt safe, even if they identified the body. Or he was frightened and in too much of a hurry. It could even be that she was in such a remote location, he didn’t expect her body to be found.”
The air-conditioner finally switched off, meaning they no longer had to compete with the sound. “How do you know as much as you do?” he asked.
“Serenity’s father hired a P.I. who pieced that much together a couple of years ago.”
“This P.I. couldn’t find anything else?”
“Maybe he would have—that was just the low-hanging fruit—but I couldn’t expect Serenity’s father to continue paying him indefinitely, and I was going through a divorce at the time and couldn’t afford him myself. So…we left it there.”
“And now you’re hoping I’ll dig deeper.”
“Yes.”
His calloused fingers began to twirl a pen. “You realize what a long shot this is, don’t you? Are you sure you want to invest in something that may never provide the answers you need?”
“I spent a lot of time doing research so I could find the best P.I. in Florida.”
He straightened the placard with his name. “Don’t tell me you think that’s me.”
“I read an article about how you specialize in helping people who’ve been adopted locate their birth families—about how hard you worked to connect one man, who needed a bone marrow transplant, with his biological relatives. You saved his life.”
“I got lucky,” he said. “I found the needle in the haystack.”
Lorelei had to blink back tears. She’d daydreamed about unraveling the mystery of her early life for as long as she could remember. Spending the summer in Lake Tahoe a couple of years ago, getting to know her half-sisters—two women she’d never previously met—had only made that desire more acute. “Do you think you can find another one?”
His chest lifted as he drew a deep breath, putting even more strain on the buttons of his shirt. “I can’t make any promises,” he said. “But…I’ll do my best.”
