Officer Johnathan Cummings. He and his partner, Ernie Cowessess, actually found me on the beat one day when I was less than a month old. I was lying in dirty rags next to my mother’s body in an alley. Drug overdose,” she explained. “They believed she was a teenage runaway living on the streets in Toronto. They never knew for sure. They didn’t find any ID on her, or anything else that could tell them who she was or where she came from. Nothing to tell them my name or birth date either. There was no way for them to contact her family to come and get me.”
“I’m sorry,” Mac said solemnly.
“Don’t be,” she said at once. “It worked out for me. I mean, if she was a runaway there was probably a reason for it, so I may have been better off not being found by her family,” she pointed out, because that was what she’d told herself for years. CJ knew kids didn’t always run away because of problems at home. Sometimes it was the child who was the problem, or sometimes they were running away because of being bullied at school, or because they felt like a failure, or . . . there were myriad reasons. It wasn’t always bad parents. But it made her feel better to think she might have been lucky to land where she had. Besides, she actually had enjoyed a really good childhood in the end. She’d had parents who had loved her and whom she’d loved. She’d been lucky.
Determined to convince Mac of that, she explained, “When I was found I was malnourished and sickly. They took me straight to the hospital. The doctors there guessed that I was about two and a half weeks old, which gave them a rough birth date, which ended up being my legal birth date in the end when they couldn’t find out who I was.”
When Mac nodded encouragingly, she continued, “I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks with that birth date and the name Baby Jane Doe. During that time, the police tried to find out my mother’s identity, and if there was any family who could take me in—my grandparents, etc. I guess they put the story on the news and everything. They had a sketch done of my mother, and took pictures of me that ran with the stories, hoping that someone would recognize one of us, but—” she shrugged “—no one ever came forward and they never figured it out. I guess they even tried questioning other runaways and shelters and stuff, but nothing came of it.”
“So you went into the foster care system,” Mac said solemnly.
CJ nodded. “I was placed in a home with several other foster kids at first, but the man who would become my father kept track of me and checked on me regularly. Good thing he did too, because apparently there was some problem with the people I was first placed with. No one ever told me what the problem was, but Johnathan Cummings raised a stink about it and then he and my mother—his wife, Marge—ended up fostering me themselves.”
“And they adopted you and gave you their last name, and your father’s partner’s name as your first name,” Mac said with a smile.
She wasn’t surprised that he’d guess that. Her last name was Cummings, after all, but CJ shook her head. “No. The care worker gave me the last name Cummings while I was still in the hospital.”
“What?” Mac exclaimed with surprise.
CJ nodded. “They had to get me a birth certificate and whatnot to put me in the system. She didn’t want me to be stuck with Jane Doe, so she gave me the names of the officers who had found me.”
“Cowessess Jane Cummings,” he murmured her name. “Cowessess is an interesting name.”
“It’s Ojibway; my father’s partner was Native American,” CJ explained, and then smiled wryly as she added, “I guess the care worker thought Cowessess Jane Cummings made a better name than Cummings Jane Cowessess.”
Mac looked dubious. “She obviously didn’t know a thing about kids if she thought either version would pass muster.”
“Yeah,” she said on a slight laugh. “Having the first name Cowessess caused me no end of misery at school as a kid. But Cummings as a first name would have been just as bad.”
“No doubt,” Mac said sympathetically, and then pondered, “I wonder why she didn’t just name you Jane Cowessess Cummings instead?”
CJ shrugged. She’d often wondered that