Dance for the Dead Read Free Page A

first I was. It was
different. I was afraid the bad people would get Mona, and then I
would be all alone. But after a while I made some friends, and got
used to it, and I didn’t think about that part much anymore. I
was sad sometimes.”
    “And Mona pretended to be
your mother for over two years?”
    “I guess so.”
    “What else did she do? Did
she still see anybody you knew from Washington?”
    “No. She used to talk on
the phone a lot.”
    “To whom? Jane?”
    “No. Dennis.”
    “Did you ever hear what
she said?”
    “Once in a while, but it
wasn’t really okay. She would go in her bedroom and talk to
him. Sometimes she would tell me what she said.”
    “Then a little over a week
ago something changed, didn’t it?”
    “Yes. Everything.”
    “You found out who you
were, didn’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Excuse me, Mr. Ambrose.”
It was Schoenfeld’s resonant voice again. “Maybe we
should let Timmy tell us exactly what happened in his own words from
here on. I believe you’ve done an admirable job in laying the
groundwork, but now we’re in new territory, and I have no
objection to letting Mr. Phillips speak freely and tell us whatever
he can that will aid in the possible prosecutions.” Of course
not, thought the judge. Schoenfeld could be magnanimous. He had
already established that Timmy was Mr. Phillips, and nothing else
that anyone said or did from there on was of any consequence for
Schoenfeld.
    “Thank you,” said
Ambrose. “Timmy, tell us what happened.”
    “I came home from school,
and Mona was there, and so was Dennis the lawyer, and so was Jane.
Dennis said he had spent two years trying to figure out why anyone
would want to hurt my parents and me, and now he knew.”
    “This was in Chicago?”
    “Yeah,” said Timmy.
“He told me that when my mother died they had special doctors
look at her, and that she had never been to the hospital to have a
baby. He said he got to look at a copy of the birth certificate they
had at my school, and it wasn’t real. He said I wasn’t
adopted. They just drew a picture of a birth certificate and said it
was mine. He said that the reason they did that was because they
loved me very much and had always wanted a little boy.”
    Judge Kramer stopped the tape
and backed it up to listen to the last exchange again. It was a hell
of a way to explain a kidnapping. In spite of everything, he had to
admire Dennis Morgan. After what he had seen, this little boy was
going to be an annuity for the psychiatrists for the next fifty
years. There was no reason to make it worse.
    The tape kept running. “Then
he told you about your other parents?”
    “Yes. Mr. and Mrs.
Phillips. They died when I was one.”
    “And your grandma?”
    “I knew about her already,
but I didn’t know she had died like all my parents. She had
been dead for three years.”
    “Did Mr. Morgan tell you
that she had left you some money?”
    “Yeah. He said that when
Mr. and Mrs. Phillips died she put all the family money in a big pot
and said it could only go to me. And when I was gone she hired a
company to take care of the money and keep looking for me forever.”
    “Did she say what they
were called?”
    “Trusty.”
    Judge Kramer prayed that Ambrose
wasn’t about to drag an eight-year-old on a field trip through
a morass of legal terminology. What could the child possibly know
about trustees and executors?
    “What happened last week
to change that? Did he tell you?”
    “He said that the Trusty
had gotten tired of looking and waiting, and they were going to say I
wasn’t alive anymore. So he called Jane again.”
    “I’m very curious
about this Jane. I understand about Mona. She was your nanny, and she
loved you. The lawyer, Mr. Morgan, was a very close friend of Mona’s,
right?”
    “Yeah. They were going to
get married when the people came and got my parents. Then they
couldn’t because we’d get caught. That was why he looked
so hard to find out where I was really