She rushes on, her voice shaky. “I didn’t know any of this until a year ago. I spent most of my life in foster homes. I wanted to know where I’d come from. Who my birth parents were. I didn’t have anybody—”

“Jenny, slow down.” I hold up my hands. “I’m going to listen, okay? Just calm down and tell me your story.”

She looks frozen, like a strip of film stopped in mid-motion. The relief in her eyes is heartbreaking. If she wasn’t so caught up in her own emotions, she might realize that after seeing that birth certificate, it would take a winch to pull me out of her apartment. Already thoughts that haven’t meshed for twenty years are falling into place. Livy was pregnant our senior year. Or the summer following it, rather. And she carried the child to term. That is why she disappeared. I guess the assumptions I made about female reproductive biology in 1978 were about as accurate as my judgments of Livy’s true nature.

“Pour the tea,” I say dazedly. “That’ll calm you down.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Okay . . . you said you wanted to find out who your birth parents were. How did you go about doing that?”

“Well, like I said, it was a private adoption, which is big business in Louisiana, if you don’t know. It took a lot of work, but I finally learned the name of the lawyer who handled the adoption. Clayton Lacour, from New Orleans. I did some checking on him, and I found out he was well connected. Mafia connected. I was afraid that if I just walked in and asked, Lacour wouldn’t tell me anything about my birth parents. All the law required was that he ask my mother whether or not she wanted to be found by me. And I was pretty sure that whoever she was, she wouldn’t be too happy about me showing up on her doorstep after twenty years.”

Jenny’s voice is leveling out; the act of telling her story has distracted her from the fears bubbling inside her.

“I’d been around a little. I knew the street. So instead of marching in and asking my questions, I applied for a job at Lacour’s office. P.A., gofer, answering the phone, whatever. I dressed like a college girl—a loose one—and I made sure Lacour saw me when I went in. He practically licked me from head to toe. Took me into his office for a personal interview and hired me on the spot.”

Jenny would have made a good D.A.’s investigator.