hers, too. When a squad car showed up, the cops on the scene figured out she was in labor. They’re the ones who summoned the ambulance. The EMT didn’t know what she was on at the time, but he told me she was high as a kite. He said they dropped her off at Harborview at eleven forty-five the night of January twenty-third.”
“And Athena was born a while after that,” I concluded.
“Any luck getting a line on the missing mama?” Al asked.
“Not so far,” I replied. “I found out where Naomi used to live and got a line on who the likely father might be, but I have no clue about what became of her after she left the hospital.”
“How’s the baby doing?” Al wanted to know.
“As far as I can tell, the baby’s doing fine. It’s her grandfather I’m worried about. The poor guy is in his sixties and has worn himself down to a nub looking after a newborn on his own. I’m letting them stay at my Seattle condo for the time being, until he can get the parental-rights thing handled. And I’ve hired someone to come in and take over some of the baby-tending duties so he can have a moment to himself—maybe even take a nap.”
“I remember how that worked,” Al said. “The wife and I had two kids under the age of three, and I don’t think either Jan or I got more than an hour’s worth of sleep at a time, and that was with two of us looking after them. I can’t imagine surviving looking after a newborn all on my own, especially not as old as I am now. Let me know if there’s anything more I can do to help.”
“You already have helped,” I told him. “Thanks for that.”
My order came up. To spare Lucy any kind of temptation, I loaded the food in the trunk for what turned out to be an excruciatingly slow trip home. My first choice for getting back to Belltown Terrace from West Seattle has always been Highway 99 to the two-level roadway called the Alaskan Way Viaduct, where I exit at Columbia and then make my way northward to Belltown through downtown Seattle. The local traffic planners, an oxymoron if ever there was one, have decided in their infinite wisdom that the sixty-year-old viaduct has to go, and in a year or thereabouts it’ll be torn down. So whenever I drive that way now, it’s with an advanced case of separation anxiety. On this trip my sense of unease was exacerbated by my singular lack of progress on the case.
If anything, my afternoon chat with Hilda Tanner had elicited a lot of information, none of it helpful to my client. If anything, it had made things worse. Now instead of needing to locate one missing person, I needed to locate two—Alan’s daughter, Naomi, and her AWOL boyfriend or maybe spouse, Petey Mayfield. I suspected him of being Athena’s supposedly “unknown” father. Once he was located, and if a DNA match revealed him to be her biological father, then Alan would need both Naomi and Petey to relinquish their parental rights. Good luck with that! They sure as hell didn’t seem to be taking much responsibility at the moment!
Driving north on Fourth Avenue, between Stewart and Bell, there’s a point during that stretch of street when suddenly the futuristic centerpiece of the Seattle’s World Fair, the Space Needle, materializes right there in front of you. It’s one of those deals where, because of surrounding buildings, now you see it, now you don’t. That day in the traffic barely inching northward, seeing the Space Needle suddenly appear sent me down a rabbit hole of memory.
I graduated from Ballard High School in 1962. Commercial fishing was a way of life in Ballard back then, and most of my friends spent their summers working with the fishing fleet on family boats—boats that belonged to their fathers or their uncles—and they made tons of money doing so. I tried fishing once and was sent home in disgrace with a nearly fatal case of seasickness. So that summer after graduation, when all my pals took to sea, I went to work at the World’s Fair as a groundskeeper. I worked the late shift, and when the monorail cars finished their last runs of the evening, one of my jobs involved cleaning them.
The whole time I was growing up, I loved bubble gum. That one summer of cleaning those cars cured