Pieces of Perfect (One Perfect Summer: Novella)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The air-conditioner chugged, struggling to combat the heat and humidity of a Florida summer, as Lorelei Cipriano set her purse on her lap and took the chair the private investigator offered her.

“What can I do for you?” Leon Rutledge, a heavyset man in his fifties, asked as he rounded his desk to take his own seat.

Lorelei had been saving for months to be able to hire him.

She knew this would be an expensive endeavor, but she was prepared to spend the money now that she had it.

The DNA test she’d taken a couple of years ago had connected her with two half-sisters she hadn’t even known about, so she’d prepared herself in other ways, too.

Who knew what she’d find? Reagan and Serenity had turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

They’d helped her figure out who she was and where she’d come from.

But there were still so many blanks to fill in.

“I’m hoping you can discover who killed my adoptive mother. ”

His eyebrows, which had hairs going every which way, slid up, wrinkling his forehead. “The police have been no help?”

“I’m talking about something that happened thirty-four years ago.”

“That isn’t going to make my job any easier.”

“Exactly.” But she was counting on him to finally put her mind at ease. At the very least, she had to do all she could for the poor woman who’d adopted her and tried to give her a home. “The case is very cold, and the police claim they’ve done everything they can.”

His chair squeaked as he rocked back. “They could be telling the truth. Have you considered that?”

“There has to be more out there,” she insisted.

“She deserves to have someone try harder.” And who was going to make that happen if not her?

No one else seemed to be concerned. Lorelei found that heartbreaking—that a woman, her adoptive mother, could be killed and discarded like trash without her death causing so much as a ripple in the world at large. Either then or now...

He rubbed the shiny pate of his bald head. “Tell me what you know so far.”

Lorelei shifted uncomfortably on the leather seat. “It might help if I begin by telling you a little about me.”

“Great place to start,” he agreed.

“From what I’ve been able to dig up, I’m the daughter of a Catholic priest,” she told him.

“Your father…left the priesthood?”

“No. I’m betting my biological mother wasn’t even of age when he slept with her, which is why he’s spent the last twenty years in the Mississippi State Penitentiary.”

“Interesting.”

“It’s quite a legacy, right?”

“Have you tried to contact him?”

“No.” Although she lived in Florida, she’d considered going to “Parchman Farm,” as they called it, and paying him a visit. She’d looked at the logistics several times and almost bought a plane ticket. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it.

First of all, she had no idea if he’d tell her what he knew.

Even if he could remember her biological mother, it was possible he’d never met her adoptive mother.

She also had no way of knowing if whatever he said would be true and didn’t want to allow him to mess with her mind.

She was almost as afraid he’d tell the truth as she was that he’d lie.

Did she have other siblings out there somewhere?

Besides Reagan and Serenity? If so, how many?

Sitting forward again, Mr. Rutledge leaned his meaty elbows on the desk. “Go on,” he said. “You have my full attention.”

She clasped her hands around her purse. Her story was convoluted, and she wanted to make sure she explained it as clearly and succinctly as possible.

“His name’s Bernard Greenstone. He was Father Greenstone when he impregnated three young women—three that we know of; there could be more—in the parishes over which he presided. ”

He winced. “Parishes…plural?”

“Yes. He’d get a girl in trouble, there’d be complaints about his behavior and the church would pay her and her family off, arrange for the child to be adopted and move him somewhere else.”

“Where it would happen again.”

He was guessing, but judging by his fatalistic tone, he understood that behavior like Greenstone’s typically didn’t change. “Yes.”

“Seems I’ve seen that in a movie.”

“We all have. That was how the Catholic Church dealt with problem priests back then.”

“So…are you saying you think he killed your mother?”

“If my adoption was handled the same way as my two sisters’, then no.

In that case, he would have no way of knowing my mother.

But we can’t say for sure how mine was handled.

It could’ve happened differently. Maybe Sarah did know Greenstone and my biological mother—she was a member of the parish, too—and he wanted to keep her from testifying against him. ”

“You have two sisters who were also adopted?”

“Yes. Let me back up. He impregnated one young woman in the Bay Area, who had a girl named Serenity. He impregnated another young woman in Cincinnati, who had a girl named Reagan. They’re my two sisters, and they were born only months apart.

I was born two years after Reagan, in Mississippi, where the church moved him next.

There, I was adopted by a couple by the name of Mitch and Sarah Ryan.

” She sighed before continuing, “Everything might’ve ended well at that point… ”

“Except…”

“Only a year or so after the adoption, their marriage fell apart, and Mitch went back to Canada, where he was originally from.” Lorelei shook her head. “As far as I know, we never heard from him again.”

“And Sarah…”

“Was murdered.”

His frown made his chin look like a wooden puppet’s. “Tell me what you know about that.”

“When she split with Mitch, Sarah took me and moved to Florida, where I was found alone on a busy street in downtown Orlando at only two years old. I’m assuming whoever murdered her dropped me off in some random location—or let me out when he went to dispose of her body, and I wandered around until someone picked me up off the highway. ”

“No one came forward when you were found? It didn’t make the papers?”

“It did. But my mother’s remains didn’t turn up until four years later.”

“Surely someone reported her missing.”

“I don’t think she was in Orlando long enough for anyone to even realize she should be around.”

“What about her family? Someone had to have missed her.”

“I’m guessing she didn’t have much familial support.

Otherwise, her disappearance would’ve been reported.

Anyway, by the time her body was discovered, there was nothing left but bones.

Her purse was nearby, and they were able to use her driver’s license, which was barely legible by this point, to identify her.

But I’d already been put in the foster care system by then, and they never connected the child who’d been picked up off the busy street with the woman who was murdered and dumped in the swamp. ”

“The killer left her purse with her body? That doesn’t seem very smart.”

“He must’ve felt safe, even if they identified the body. Or he was frightened and in too much of a hurry. It could even be that she was in such a remote location, he didn’t expect her body to be found.”

The air-conditioner finally switched off, meaning they no longer had to compete with the sound. “How do you know as much as you do?” he asked.

“Serenity’s father hired a P.I. who pieced that much together a couple of years ago.”

“This P.I. couldn’t find anything else?”

“Maybe he would have—that was just the low-hanging fruit—but I couldn’t expect Serenity’s father to continue paying him indefinitely, and I was going through a divorce at the time and couldn’t afford him myself. So…we left it there.”

“And now you’re hoping I’ll dig deeper.”

“Yes.”

His calloused fingers began to twirl a pen. “You realize what a long shot this is, don’t you? Are you sure you want to invest in something that may never provide the answers you need?”

“I spent a lot of time doing research so I could find the best P.I. in Florida.”

He straightened the placard with his name. “Don’t tell me you think that’s me.”

“I read an article about how you specialize in helping people who’ve been adopted locate their birth families—about how hard you worked to connect one man, who needed a bone marrow transplant, with his biological relatives. You saved his life.”

“I got lucky,” he said. “I found the needle in the haystack.”

Lorelei had to blink back tears. She’d daydreamed about unraveling the mystery of her early life for as long as she could remember.

Spending the summer in Lake Tahoe a couple of years ago, getting to know her half-sisters—two women she’d never previously met—had only made that desire more acute.

“Do you think you can find another one?”

His chest lifted as he drew a deep breath, putting even more strain on the buttons of his shirt. “I can’t make any promises,” he said. “But…I’ll do my best.”