Cassandra had thought it made perfect sense, and when the book was published, Annie’s passages were often the ones cited in the reviews. Yet Annie was the one person who would never speak to the press, no matter how much she was pursued. ‘I owed you my story,’ she told her stepdaughter. ‘But I don’t owe it to anyone else.’ Five years later—her words translated into twenty-eight languages, her likeness, in one of the frontispiece photos, having traveled to countries that Annie herself had never heard of—Annie was dead from ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-nine. Cassandra had worried her father would be one of those men who begin ailing upon their wife’s death, especially given that she was so much younger. But, while he had a thousand minor complaints, he remained robust. Too robust, according to the administration at the retirement community where he now lived. Cassandra was going to have to make nice with the director on her next visit there and she was dreading that visit. But for now, she had to go to the library.
Cassandra had to endure a tedious explanation of how things worked—where to find the reels, how to load them, how to print, where to return the reels when finished—before she was allowed to take a spin on the microfiche machines. Orientation done, she began yanking out the drawers of boxed reels, feeling as if she were at the beginning of a scavenger hunt. Calliope’s life as a headline had coincided with the merger of the city’s last two newspapers, the Beacon and the Light, which meant there was only one newspaper to study, but it was still more than she had anticipated. Various Internet searches had narrowed down the year for Cassandra, but not the month of the precipitating incident, and the newspaper’s pay archive didn’t go back that far. She would have to start at January and trudge through all of 1988. But the snippet of film she had seen on CNN had clearly been from a cold, wintry month—there had been a bare tree in the background.
It took her a while to establish an efficient yet comprehensive way of searching—checking the front page, then zipping ahead to the local section, pushing the machine full speed to the gap between editions and starting over. The smell and the movement made her nauseous. Should she have hired someone for this dreary task? But she had never paid anyone to do her own work. Besides, she liked immersing herself in microfiche, which she had used to research parts of her first book. She just wished she could recapture the giddy ignorance of those days, the joy in writing without expectation, the smallness of her daydreams.
She found Calliope lurking at the end of March, which must have gone out like a lion that year. Yes, in fact, the weather was part of the story. February had been full of ice storms. At least, that was the excuse offered by a social worker, Marlee Dupont, charged with checking up on the child: Roads had been impassable, especially in Calliope’s West Baltimore neighborhood, always last to be plowed. The social worker had called, but the phone had been shut off. That explained why one month had gone by without a visit; the second month was never really explained. When the social worker finally did arrive at the apartment on Lemmon Street, all she found was Calliope.
‘Where’s your baby?’ she asked, according to the article.
‘I can’t tell you,’ Calliope said.
It was, more or less, all she would say for the next seven years.
When had the legal defense, the Fifth Amendment, first been introduced? It was hard to tell because reporters had come to the story from a distance, too, after much had happened. It wasn’t even clear why Callie was under the social worker’s supervision. Cassandra jumped ahead to the resolution, finding more detail in the stories about Callie’s release, almost seven years to the day later. She began jotting down a timeline in her Moleskine notebook. March 1988: Social worker discovers Calliope’s three-month-old baby is missing. So, working backward, December 1987: Calliope’s son Donntay is born. A previous child, also a boy, had been taken from Callie for neglect, but the department, citing her privacy rights, refused to say anything else, other than that this incident was not the reason a social worker had been assigned to Donntay upon his birth.
A previous child had been taken. That detail had been missing from the television report, and it was given only scant attention here. Calliope’s parental rights had been terminated seven years earlier. That child would have to be—quick calculation—twenty-seven. How tantalizing. What had become of that child? Was that part of Callie’s story? Should it be? Cassandra had researched 1980s adoption as part of The Painted Garden and knew that various groups began pushing for greater openness in adoption in the nineties. But that wouldn’t affect Callie’s first son. He would be able to find his mother only if they signed up for a mutual registry.
Images on microfiche tend to be grainy, especially when printed out, but Cassandra pressed the button anyway, capturing the 1988 photo of Callie when she was first jailed for contempt. Calliope’s face was hard, her eyes hollow, and the cords in her neck looked almost painful. Yet, even in a shapeless winter coat, there was the suggestion of a striking figure, a model’s figure. Drugs? Cassandra had heard somewhere that heroin users have killer bodies, that drug abuse gives them raging metabolisms that never stop, even if they clean up. Callie’s eyes were downcast in the photo, but her lawyer, holding her by the arm, looked straight into the camera. That was the woman who had yet to return Cassandra’s calls, an unanticipated development. These days, everyone returned Cassandra’s calls. True, she hadn’t been able to find anyone who would help her contact the retired police detective who had worked the case, but those people had at least had the courtesy and professionalism to pick up the phone.
Studying the younger version of the lawyer, she found herself projecting all sorts of qualities on her. Bulldoggish. Homely. Cruel, but accurate. What was it like to be an ugly woman? Cassandra, like every woman she knew, was full of self-doubt about her own appearance, had several moments every day when she was disappointed by the face she saw in the mirror. The older she got, the more she felt that way. Yet she also knew, on some level, that she would never be described as ugly. What would that be like? Obviously, she wouldn’t enjoy it, although—this just occurred to her—physical attractiveness didn’t seem to have much to do with whether women were paired or single. The plain women she knew seemed to do better relationship-wise. There had been some faux-economic explanation of this recently, an appalling bit of pop journalism that had boiled down to the usual advice: You’re not getting any younger, so you better take what you can get.
Cassandra, a two-time loser at matrimony, had no interest in getting back into the pool, especially after her second husband’s attempt to break their prenup. That was pure blackmail, and it had worked: She had given him more than he deserved in the hope that he wouldn’t gossip about her. She still liked men—she had a married lover, in fact, someone ideal, who required almost no attention—but she had no use for marriage. Her father was right: Marriage had nothing to do with romance. The end of her first marriage had been truly tragic—her college sweetheart, undone by demons he had hid all those years, destroying them both financially. The second one had been a mistake, plain and simple, and her account of it had been a cautionary tale that boiled down to this: If, on the eve of your wedding, you wonder if you are making a terrible mistake—you are.
She inserted the 1995 reel, the one that held the story of Callie’s release, interested to see if the photo could reveal anything about the experience of seven years in jail. Funny, Callie was coming out of jail about the same time Cassandra started writing. In the second photograph, Callie actually looked better physically, but her expression was incredibly sad. To Cassandra’s eyes, this was not a woman who felt vindicated. But then—why would she? Callie, upon her release, was still a woman believed to have killed her child and to have evaded justice on what many would call a technicality, a trick.
The homely lawyer was gone, replaced by a man. A strikingly handsome man. He seemed happy, at least—not out-and-out grinning, but allowing a tight smile that showed the hint of a dimple. Reginald Barr—the name was dimly familiar. Tisha had been Tisha Barr and she had a little brother, but he was known as Candy, in part because he was sweet, just a total charmer. But there was another, more peculiar