Sins of the Mother Read online

  “So, my friend,” he continued, “tell me what you couldn’t tell your bartender this evening.”

  Caitlin kicked her boots off and onto the floor. Judging from the series of thumps, she’d knocked over one of her many stacks of books. “Maya Aronson is dead.”

  “I see.” Scott said nothing else for a bit.

  Caitlin reached for the plastic cup on her bedside table. Sadly, no water remained from the previous night. She tossed the cup toward her bedroom door. If she tripped on it later, she’d have to take it to the kitchen, which meant she’d probably wash it. “Did you hear what I said—”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he interrupted, all sincerity. Scott was one of the few people who’d known that Caitlin’s mother was still alive—or had been. “Tell me what happened.”

  She gave him the limited details: a woman’s body had been found in a remote forest near the Oregon coast, and associated documentation—the sheriff had been vague about the meaning of the term—indicated that the deceased had a daughter named Caitlin Bergman.

  “So you’ve reached the stage,” Scott said. “No more parents.”

  Caitlin sighed. “No family at all, which is fine by me. Less disappointment all around.”

  “Bullshit.” The man rarely swore outside his poetry.

  If they’d have been in the same room, she’d have mimed clutching pearls. “Oh my, Professor Canton, such language.”

  “Family is what you make it, young lady. Don’t have blood relations? Consult a list of people who answer the phone before the sunrise.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “There’s your friend Mary, Mike Roman, Lakshmi—if you’d let her get close—”

  His list continued and included some names she didn’t remember ever mentioning to him. Not bad for someone she didn’t pay.

  “You’re right, Scott, obviously, but you know what I mean. Now there’s no one on earth who knows who my father is.”

  “Matthew Bergman was your father.”

  “Adopted.”

  “So what?”

  “I still want to know—” Caitlin started, looking around the mess of her room and settling on a bookshelf where the cover of a mass-market paperback held together with rubber bands and tape showed a boy and a girl walking through the woods. “You don’t get it. You’re not adopted.”

  He laughed, but his tone carried a fair amount of fire. “White people are always talking about their lineage. You know, large subsets of American society were forced to make do without the benefit of a well-documented family tree.”

  “Fair point, but I still want to know who my birth father was.”

  “Not where your birth mother’s been for all these years?”

  Caitlin bit a jagged corner off the nail of her ring finger. “Well—”

  “Or why she gave you up for adoption in the first place?”

  She spit the bit of nail toward her window. “I mean, I guess I’d be interested … sort of.”

  Scott laughed again, this time clearly back to his smiling self. “If only you knew someone who had investigative skills.”

  Caitlin rolled her neck and shoulders. Her head hit the wall above her headboard with a thud. “It’s not a great time to go up to Nowhere, Oregon. A reporter who’s not on call is almost the same as a reporter who isn’t needed anymore. I shouldn’t be leaving work.”

  “Oh my darling,” Scott started—one of the few men Caitlin would allow to call her darling, honey, or angel. “How good at your job do you think you’ll be if the need to understand your mother—”

  “I don’t need to understand my mother—”

  “Then don’t try,” he continued, “but it might feel good to tell her how you feel face-to-face, even if she can’t reply. You won’t be able to do that once the body is returned to the dust from whence it came.”

  Caitlin smiled at the idea of finally launching into the speech she’d rehearsed every year on her birthday. Neither rum nor weed had helped, but fifteen minutes on the phone with Scott had her convinced she was ready for bed, or at least motivated to change clothes and find a toothbrush. “I don’t care what anyone says, Scott, you’re pretty good at this.”

  “I try. Maybe take a friend along in case it gets emotional. How’s your noble Roman?”

  “Mike? He’s off the radar. Well, in Mexico for a bit. I don’t expect him soon.”

  “Perhaps young Lakshmi?”

  “I’ve got this,” Caitlin said, less bothered by the idea of Lakshmi tagging along than by how the young woman might view her mentor after hearing the torrent of obscenities she’d held back since birth. “All by myself.”

  “Of course you do. Call me when you get there.”

  Less than a minute after hanging up, Caitlin emailed Stan Lawton that she’d be gone over the weekend due to a family emergency. The next day, she paid way too much to fly into Portland, Oregon, rented a car, then drove south for three hours down the 5 freeway before turning onto a state road that wound along the Coquille River. She passed clumps of trailer homes and cinder-block churches scattered around tiny towns named more for function than vanity—Tenmile, Remote, Bridge—before arriving in the city of Coquille, the county seat of Coos County, Oregon.

  CHAPTER

  6

  CAITLIN HAD SPENT forty-three years wondering if she’d recognize her own features in her birth mother’s face. Would they share the same brown eyes, detached earlobes, or narrow lips? Had Mama Maya been responsible for her inability to roll her tongue or sit cross-legged? She ventured another look at the remains on the medical examiner’s table, exposed only from the neck up, but saw nothing familiar. Jagged white chunks jutted from the distorted remnants of a mouth at unnatural angles.

  “What happened to her teeth?” Caitlin said, her voice raised to compete with the whir of high-speed exhaust fans. The room smelled clinical, but hints of decomposition sneaked past the Vicks VapoRub she’d dabbed into each nostril. “Half are gone, and the rest … did something—”

  “Probably knocked out with a rock,” Sheriff Martin answered. The stocky fifty-year-old with the barrel chest carried himself like a bulldog, but his full gray goatee gave her the impression of a standoffish bear, wise and wary from surviving more than a few scrapes.

  Caitlin looked past the sheriff and the corpse to the medical examiner, a box-dyed blonde near her own age who hadn’t said a word since they’d entered the room. “Shouldn’t there be bruising around the lips and the nose, then?”

  The woman’s latex gloves brushed against her scrubs with the forceful crossing of her arms. “Is she one of them, Boz? You know how I feel.”

  Caitlin had met the pair only fifteen minutes ago but could tell they had history. “One of what? A reporter? I cannot tell a lie. I am indeed an agent of the press.”

  The woman ignored her. “I won’t help one of those dogs.”

  Martin held up a hand. “Leslie, if you can’t maintain a professional—”

  “Maintain this.” The examiner left the room, the door swishing softly behind her loud exit.

  Martin turned back to Caitlin. “Sorry about that. People around here aren’t exactly comfortable with your mother’s religious group.”

  Caitlin laughed. “You don’t have Jews in Oregon?”

  The sheriff blinked twice, started to say something, then stopped. Caitlin wasn’t sure if his awkward reaction meant confusion or embarrassment. He jumped back in before she could decide.

  “I understand it may be difficult, but do you recognize this person as your mother, Miss Bergman?”

  Caitlin took another glance. The dead woman’s hair, gray and beyond shoulder length, looked naturally straight like her own, but what did hair matter?

  “Sorry, can’t say.”

  He took the answer like he’d seen it coming. “How about tattoos or distinguishing marks?”

  “She should have a pink clover-shaped birthmark on the back of her arm.”

  A long sigh escaped
the sheriff’s lips. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  He walked out the same door the medical examiner had taken.

  Alone, Caitlin reached into her bag and pulled out the Bitch Book, a crumbling paperback whose real title, She Taught Me to Fly, she’d abandoned in her teens. Year after year she’d transformed the once-sappy coming-of-age tale into a journal of every word she’d ever wanted to say, scream, or punch at her mother, leaving a pulpy mess of multicolored pen strokes and torn pages behind. Peeling a rubber band off the well-worn cover, she ignored the slight tremble in her fingers and flipped to the page she’d dog-eared on her thirteenth birthday. She didn’t need to read the words scribbled in blue pen between the lines of the publisher’s original text. The angry cursive scrawl still came to her in dreams, but the moment required a formal presentation.

  Or always had in her mind.

  Now she wasn’t even sure that the dead woman was Maya Aronson. She contemplated a peek under the beige drop cloth. Instead, her eyes drifted down to the only other exposed bit of skin: the feet.

  The days of toe tags, gone. Someone had wrapped a plastic label, similar to a luggage tag, around the woman’s ankle.

  UD-0004.

  Caitlin deciphered the code easily enough: the year’s fourth Unidentified Decedent.

  The door swung open and the medical examiner burst back into the room, followed by the sheriff.

  “Not that it matters,” she said, holding up her gloved hands, “but which side is the hemangioma on?”

  Caitlin tucked the Bitch Book back into her satchel. “Hemangioma?”

  The ME slipped her hands under the drop cloth. “Birthmark.”

  “The right,” Caitlin said. “Why wouldn’t it matter?”

  Rather than answering, the ME shifted the body, exposing the bare backside.

  “You could have warned the woman, Leslie.” Martin stepped in front of Caitlin’s view. “This body was found in the woods. Only a few days ago, but animals, insects, and weather—”

  “I get it,” Caitlin said, brushing him aside with confidence, then immediately wishing she hadn’t. Patches of skin were missing from both of the dead woman’s upper arms and lower back, and not from surgical precision. Any remnant of the cloverlike blotch of pink Caitlin had expected to see had been scraped to the bone. A quick rush of bile flooded her mouth. She swallowed hard and looked down toward the woman’s waist, stopping at the hands. Neither had fingertips past the knuckles.

  She stepped back, turned away, and took two quick breaths. “Wow, I get it now.”

  “Get what?” Martin said. “Is this your mother, Miss Bergman?”

  Caitlin faced the man with a smile on her face. “I have no idea. I also have no idea why you called me. You obviously don’t know this woman’s name. So why did I fly from Los Angeles to Oregon to look at this dead body?”

  CHAPTER

  7

  CAITLIN TOOK A Kleenex from the sheriff’s receptionist and blew the menthol from her nose. The medical examiner, district attorney, and sheriff’s department shared the same building, so the walk hadn’t taken long enough to get the smell of formaldehyde and decomposition out of her nostrils, or the sight of the poor woman’s face out of her mind.

  Sheriff Martin, a few steps ahead, waited by the open door to his office. “You mind the smell of pine?”

  Caitlin looked around the department and saw a handful of deputies at desks, all looking up from their work. “Who doesn’t like pine?” she said with a smile, entering his office and taking a chair.

  Martin closed the door behind him, pulled a lighter from his pocket, and lit the kind of candle-in-a-jar the mall stores sold during the holidays. The pine worked on the scent in Caitlin’s nose, but the image in her mind lingered. To clear it, she focused on the two flags displayed in frames on the wall behind the sheriff. She recognized Oregon’s state flag but had never seen the other: a green rectangle with a gold circle and black lettering spelling out THE GREAT SEAL OF STATE OF JEFFERSON around two black Xs.

  Caitlin pointed to the second flag. “Tell me about the State of Jefferson.”

  Martin let a small chuckle escape and took the chair behind his desk. “Technically, you’re in it right now.”

  “As in?”

  “It’s a long story that has nothing to do with the reason you’re here, but I’ll give you the short version. In 1941, there was a movement to try to make a new state out of Northern California and Southern Oregon. They had some traction, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the whole thing fell apart.”

  Caitlin thought of the story going up in place of her homelessness piece in Los Angeles. “So the movement’s over?”

  Martin shifted his head to the side. “Now it’s more of a feeling the people around here share. We’re too far from Salem and Sacramento to get any attention, and we don’t have a lot in common with the folks in Portland or San Francisco.”

  Caitlin laughed. “Or Los Angeles, I’m guessing.”

  Martin moved some papers away from his computer keyboard, knocking over a stack of glossy flyers. “That flag is just a gag the boys gave me. Now, about the body you were unable to identify.”

  “What’s a ‘dog,’ Sheriff? I’m guessing your medical examiner wasn’t talking about man’s best friend.”

  “Call me Boz. Everyone around here does.”

  He held up one of the fallen flyers, showing his smiling face under the words Re-elect Boz Martin, the Patriot’s Sheriff.

  “Okay, Boz. What’s a ‘dog’?”

  “Sorry about that, but Leslie’s got a reason. Her daughter Lily went off with the Daughters of God two years ago, hence the ‘Dogs.’ They’re also known as the Dayans.”

  “So they’re a religious group?”

  “They’re a damned cult. Coos County has the same problems everybody else in Oregon deals with. We’ve got opioids, meth, spousal abuse, and drunk driving, but the Daughters of God are this area’s local oddity. They moved here in the nineties, bought a bunch of overlogged land in the hills, and basically stayed up there. Unless they’ve pissed somebody off, most people don’t even know they’re here.”

  Caitlin remembered the tag and barcode around the woman’s ankle. “And you think this dead woman was a member?”

  “I have no idea, but ever since Leslie’s daughter left her, she leans that way on any Jane Doe. We won’t know until we make a positive ID, but the decedent was in her midsixties, and no woman of that age is missing within the surrounding counties. Does that match your mother’s age?”

  Caitlin double-checked the math in her head. “Maya should be sixty-five, but why do you think it’s her? When we talked on the phone, you mentioned associated documentation.”

  Martin looked over at the door like someone might interrupt them, then leaned in. “We found a key.”

  “With the body?”

  He glanced toward the exit again, then in the opposite direction toward the window looking out into the parking lot, before finally settling on his hands. He wasn’t afraid of being interrupted. He was afraid of the words he had to say.

  “In the body.”

  Caitlin slid onto the edge of her seat. “Inside the body?”

  The sheriff looked up, embarrassed but able to meet her eyes. “Rectum.”

  Caitlin let a single, harsh laugh escape. “Nearly killed him.”

  Martin’s eyes opened a mile.

  “Or should I say her,” Caitlin continued. “Nearly wrecked her. Of course, then the joke doesn’t work, does it? Nearly wrecked ’im?”

  The man’s mouth drooped a bit, unsure which way to curl. Not everyone got her sense of humor.

  “It’s a coping mechanism,” she said, snapping her fingers, then folding her hands in her lap. “Please continue. What did this keister key open?”

  “A safety deposit box in a bank in Coos Bay.”

  “And what was in the safety deposit box?”

  Martin scratched his temple. “Now that’s where it gets wei
rd.”

  “Weirder than a key in the butt?”

  Again, the sheriff’s face didn’t know how to react. Caitlin wasn’t sure she did either.

  She sat up straight and aimed for professional. “Again, sorry. I know a woman is dead here, and this is obviously a tragedy. I’m dealing with something complicated. Actually, everything to do with my mother is complicated. I’ll save my shtick for my therapist.”

  She cleared her throat and waved him on. Five seconds to a lifetime later, he continued.

  “We know which bank it corresponds to, and the bank knows which box it opens. Your name is the only designated beneficiary, and you’re listed as daughter.”

  That explained why he’d called her in the first place but not much else. “Well, you don’t need me to open it. You got a search warrant and drilled it open, right?”

  “Without a positive ID of this woman’s body, we can’t serve a warrant on the box. The owner’s name matches a bank account but was from a fake ID. That is to say, it was opened more than two decades ago using what appeared to be a valid California driver’s license, before they’d added the scannable magnetic stripe.”

  Caitlin sat back in her chair. That didn’t sound quite right. “But I can open it?”

  The sheriff nodded. “Because you’re a beneficiary.”

  Another objection wanted to step forward, but Caitlin held back. Judging from the omission of any of this information over their original phone call, she could tell the sheriff wanted her there for a reason he wasn’t ready to share. Of course, she’d failed to mention that she had no idea if she’d be able to identify Maya Aronson, dead or alive. They were both fishing. Time to see who had bigger bait. “What was the name on the account?”

  “Sharon Sugar.”

  The name landed in Caitlin’s stomach like a mouthful of worms. “That was her stage name.”

  “Her what?”

  She reached into her bag. “My birth mother, Maya Aronson, gave me up for adoption in her twenties to follow an illustrious career in the adult entertainment industry, where she performed all kinds of acts under a stage name, most often Sharon Sugar. This would have been in the late seventies, early eighties.”