Bringing Maddie Home

She volunteered here on a regular basis, typically spending every Sunday afternoon and one weeknight evening just hanging out and talking to the girls. Girls were housed separately from guys, although the two buildings were linked by a courtyard and a shared kitchen and dining room.

Nell also came weekly to represent the Seattle Public Library, maintaining a shelf of books in each of the two buildings and filling special requests when she could. She’d packed other shelves with books that were weeded from the library collection, donated, or picked up at garage sales. Many of the kids who came in here weren’t readers and never would be. Others thought they weren’t but got seduced. Some laboriously studied for their high school equivalency exams, or to catch up with school—if they could be convinced to care.

What she loved most was encouraging reading for the pure joy of it. These were kids who hadn’t had much joy in their lives. She, like many of the other adults who worked and volunteered here, knew the bewilderment and fear and anger they felt. When she’d been where they were, books were her salvation. They’d offered her the world, filled her emptiness. Now she had a mission, one she never tried to disguise. Josef gave guitar lessons, Dex organized soccer games, Chloe taught computer skills. They all had something different to offer.

A couple of girls poked heads out into the hall, saw who was here and retreated in disinterest. Nell had already noticed two newcomers in the living room, neither moving from their seats, both watching the excitement with confusion. One was a black girl with her head shaved. Long skinny arms wrapped herself in a hug that was painful to see. The other girl was white, overweight and suffering from acne. Nell caught a glimpse of needle tracks on the inside of one elbow.

She smiled at both of them. “I’m Nell Smith. Otherwise known as the book lady. I bring library books regularly.”

“DVDs, too,” one of the girls said, already delving into today’s section. Her lip curled. “Sense and Sensibility? Really?”

“Try it. Guaranteed.”

There were a lot of rolled eyes. She grinned.

“Nell,” said a voice behind her. “Good. You’re here.”

She turned with a smile to greet Roberta Charles, the director, principal fund-raiser, cook and loving arms of SafeHold. Roberta had two other people with her today, though, one of whom sent a flash of dismay through Nell. He held a giant camera on one shoulder. A TV camera. He was already assessing the room, the shabby furniture, the excited clump of girls. Nell.

“Ah...I’ll get out of your way,” she said. “Just let me grab the books that have to go back.”

“No, no!” Roberta said. “You’re one of my best volunteers. Linda Capshaw is here from KING-5 to do a feature on us. She’s hoping to talk to staff and volunteers as well as some of the kids.”

Nell was okay with talking. The idea of chatting about what they accomplished here at SafeHold didn’t bother her; she’d done it before. It was the camera that spooked her. She was being idiotic; what difference would it make anymore if her face should appear somewhere? Probably none. Which didn’t keep her heart from pumping alarm through her bloodstream in quick spurts.

“Sure,” she agreed. “Not on camera, though. I’m shy.”

“I’m not.” Aliyah struck a pose, one skinny hip cocked. Giggling, three or four of the other girls flung arms around each other and tried to look sexy.

These, Nell knew, were the ones who weren’t hiding from anyone. The ones with no family to care that they’d gone missing. A few of the others were melting away or ducking heads to hide behind lank hair. Nell wished she didn’t have her own hair bundled on the back of her head. She’d have hidden behind it, too.

The camera was rolling. She turned her back and quickly put out the new books and piled the ones ready to go back into her plastic crate.

“Requests?” she asked.

Clarity, a shy thirteen-year-old who had arrived pregnant—too pregnant for abortion to be an option—and was awaiting foster care placement, leaned close and whispered, “Can you bring something about adoption?”

“Of course I will.” For a moment, forgetting the visitors, Nell smiled at the girl. “A lot of what’s written is for adopters, not birth mothers, but it would still give you some guidance. I’ll see if I can find some stuff written by kids who were adopted, too.” She took the chance of giving Clarity a quick hug. Thin arms encircled her in return. Nell’s eyes stung for a moment as tenderness and pity flooded her. God. What if she’d gotten pregnant back then?

Some flicker of movement pulled her back to the moment, and she took a suspicious look at the cameraman. He was currently half-turned away from her, sweeping the room, not seeming to pay attention. Respecting her wishes? How likely was that? But she could hope. Her fault for having left herself vulnerable for a minute.

The KING-5 woman looked vaguely familiar to Nell. Or maybe she was just a type: blond, exquisitely groomed, wearing a royal blue suit. “Do you have time to talk right now?” she asked.

“Just for a minute. I do have to get back to the library.” Under Roberta’s approving eye, she joined the women. It was fantastic that SafeHold was getting some publicity. Desperately needed donations always followed. But, while there were many things she’d do for these kids, appearing on air wasn’t one of them. The only picture she allowed to be snapped of her was for her driver’s license. Unavoidable, and barely resembling her anyway.

“SafeHold,” she told Linda Capshaw, who’d asked for permission to record her voice, “offers these kids hope in so many forms. Many practical, of course.” She elaborated, concluding with, “Sometimes, all we offer is sanctuary. We have at least one girl here right now who won’t accept anything else.” She carefully avoided glancing toward Katya. “But every so often, she shows up and has a couple of weeks here, where she knows she’s safe, where she gets enough to eat, where people are kind and nonjudgmental to her. Some of these kids have been abused and simple kindness means everything to them. Others need windows opened to give them glimpses of chances they never dreamed were there for them.”

“How did you become involved?” the blonde asked, sounding genuinely interested, although it was hard to tell for sure. Getting people to open up was, after all, her most essential job skill.

Nell took a deep breath. This was always hard to say. “I was a teenage runaway. Not in Seattle, somewhere else. I’d rather not say where. But I lived on the streets for over two years. A local shelter was my salvation. When I moved to Seattle and read about SafeHold in the Times, I called immediately. What’s that been?” She glanced at Roberta, even though she knew to the day when she’d first walked in the door. “Five years ago?”

The director nodded. “Just about, I think.”

“I work for Seattle Public Library, too. As a technician, not a librarian. I don’t have a master’s degree. But because of my involvement here, I’m the one who brings books, DVDs, whatever, weekly.”

They chatted for another ten or fifteen minutes, Nell keeping a wary eye out for the cameraman. Then she made her excuses and left, sooner than she would have liked to go. Usually she’d have made the effort to sit down and talk to the new residents, find out who, if anyone, was missing since Sunday. But she’d be back Thursday evening—soon enough.

Yes, she told herself while she loaded the crate of books and DVDs into the back of her old Ford, she was a coward. What else was new? It was smart not to take chances, that was all. She hadn’t grown up in Seattle, she knew that much, but she had no idea how widely local stations were broadcast. And her face...well, it hadn’t changed that much since she had first found herself alone and scared, on the streets, knowing that worse than starving, worse than having to sell her body, worse than anything, was the possibility of being seen by someone who knew her.

She was someone entirely different now. She’d created a life out of whole cloth, starting with nothing. But unless she someday had the money for plastic surgery, she couldn’t do anything about her face, and that hadn’t changed.

Nell almost laughed as she got behind the wheel and started the windshield wipers to combat the autumn drizzle. As if she’d want to be on camera anyway! There was a lot she didn’t know about who she’d been, but she had no doubt at all that she’d always been shy. Whatever dreams she’d had, being on television wouldn’t have been one of them. No one changed that much.

* * *

COLIN SPRAWLED ON the king-size hotel bed and reached for the remote control. He’d like to find something mindless. His brain was on overload after a day of listening to speakers talk about new technology undergoing trials in various police departments around the world. He was glad he’d come; knowing what was out there was worthwhile, but most of this was beyond the scope of his relatively small department.

He was to have dinner with Cait and a boyfriend who was apparently serious. Either that, or she was bringing the guy as a sort of screen, because she didn’t want to have to make conversation with her brother for two hours. Because of her work schedule they weren’t meeting until seven-thirty. Yawning as he flipped through channels, Colin realized he’d have to be careful not to nod off. He’d made the drive late last night and gotten up early to have breakfast with a group of other police chiefs and captains from agencies the size of Angel Butte, which had just over a hundred officers.

The news caught his eye. Some damn idiot had driven the wrong way onto I-5 in the middle of the night—blood-alcohol level sky-high. Killed a forty-two-year-old woman driving home from her job at Sea-Tac Airport.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

There was a news flash: “Coming up, join Linda Capshaw for a visit to a shelter for runaway teens.” Then commercials. Colin left the station on, given that he’d been thinking about runaways a hell of a lot the past few weeks. Every major city and many minor ones had similar shelters, but he was interested in seeing what this one offered. Did they keep kids on their radar in any meaningful way? Did they see to it that the teens got dental care, which might mean X-rays?

Duane and the two detectives had gotten nowhere in their attempts to identify the latest bones that had appeared when the tree roots were pulled up. It had turned out that Klamath County also had an unidentified teenage girl, found two years ago; the body had been too decomposed for them to lift fingerprints, and they hadn’t turned up a dental match. Given that the bodies found at Angel Butte and Deschutes County had both turned out to be teenage runaways that had likely passed through Portland, Colin wanted to check with shelters there. Just a couple of days ago, Duane’s team had found a fragment of the upper jaw, with yet another dental filling, which meant that they could identify this kid for sure, and maybe the Crook County one, if they could find dental records. It was a long shot, but worth pursuing.

He had to wait through another report before his patience was rewarded when a perky blonde smiled and said, “Welcome to SafeHold. Yes, there are a number of shelters for teenagers in the Puget Sound area, but word on the street is that SafeHold is the place to go for real help.”

The camera panned a room in which teenage boys lounged on shabby furniture, ignoring the fact that they were being filmed. Then came a talking head, Roberta Charles, who was the director. The brief snippet was mostly the inspiring stuff, about how kids went there for sanctuary. Then, as the camera moved on to showing a group of girls in what appeared to be a modern dance class, followed by boys playing one-on-one basketball in what looked like an old school yard, another woman’s voice said, “SafeHold offers these kids hope in so many forms. Many practical, of course. Some kids go from here to group homes, drug treatment or foster care.” A man wearing a stethoscope was seen talking to a boy whose face was turned from the camera. “They get desperately needed medical care.” An earnest older woman sat at a table with a girl, the two poring over an open textbook as the voice continued. “They’re encouraged to resume schooling and get tutoring to help them succeed. Legal aid is available for those in trouble with the law.” A handcuffed kid was being placed in the back of a patrol car. Then back to the shelter: some girls hammed for the camera in another shabby rec room, a flickering TV in the background. The blonde journalist said, “Dedicated volunteers like Nell Smith, popularly known here as ‘the book lady,’ mean everything to these lost children.” Her back to the camera, a young woman was piling books into a bright red plastic crate. The next moment, she was talking to a girl who looked too damn young to be in a runaway shelter, too slight even to have begun to menstruate. And, sweet Jesus, she was pregnant. Colin should have been past being shockable, but he wasn’t. Linda Capshaw was speaking again, as the camera lingered on a touching moment, the young woman hugging the pregnant girl. There was only a glimpse of their faces, one he’d have missed if he’d yawned at the wrong moment, but he felt as if he’d been jolted by a Taser.

Cursing, he lunged upright and stared at the TV, which had gone back to the studio, where trite bantering led to a weather report. His heart slammed in his chest and his nerve endings buzzed.

Was he was going completely nuts? God knew he’d been thinking about Maddie Dubeau more than was healthy these past weeks. But damn, damn, damn, that woman looked like her. Still thin, cheekbones still high and sharp, chin pointy. He wasn’t sure about the freckles, it had gone so fast, but her eyes were brown, her hair was the same color as when she was a kid.

He let an expletive escape. He couldn’t be mistaken. He couldn’t.

But this woman’s name wasn’t Maddie or anything like it. Nell Smith. He closed his eyes and saw her, smile warming as she wrapped her arms around the girl, eyes momentarily closing and her expression softening into something achingly gentle.

How could this Nell Smith be his Maddie Dubeau? It made no sense; this hadn’t been a case of a parent abducting a child and raising her under a different identity. Maddie had been fifteen, not five. You couldn’t persuade a fifteen-year-old that all her memories of who she’d been were false. And Maddie hadn’t been a runaway. If she was alive, why wouldn’t she have gotten help, called her parents? Found her way home?

The local news had segued into national, making him remember that he had to leave—now—or he’d be late getting together with his sister. Who hadn’t sounded that excited about seeing him.

He didn’t know why he kept trying, and was no longer in the mood. It had been two years since he’d seen her, and that time they’d had lunch. She’d been rushed, claiming she had to get back to work. His brilliant, pretty sister. Maybe he should let Cait go, along with his mother.

But he considered her his only family, and he was a stubborn man. He turned off the television reluctantly, wishing he had a way to replay that short clip. He reminded himself there wasn’t anything he could do about locating Nell Smith tonight, and he’d been looking forward to seeing Cait. One thing at a time, he told himself. He already knew that he wouldn’t be attending day two of the technology symposium tomorrow. He’d be visiting a runaway shelter.

Taking the elevator down to the parking garage below the hotel, Colin thought about coming right out and asking why Cait was so uninterested in having any meaningful relationship with him, her only sibling. But he knew he wouldn’t do it. Her answer might be too honest. Too final.