Free Tell Me Who I Am by Marcia Muller Page A

rid of the rest. And in the back of Mom’s closet off her bedroom, I found this box.” She pulled it from the tote bag she’d set on the floor beside the chair. It was a small box, about the size replacement checks from your bank come in.
    But, as I remembered all too vividly, the size of those life-altering boxes doesn’t matter.
    Years before, when my father died, his will had stipulated that I be the one to clear out his possessions from the famed McCone garage—a structure so crammed with junk that no car had fit there in at least twenty years. Pa had probably been depending on my nosy inclinations when he wrote the will, because there I’d uncovered a box containing all sorts of official documents—including my own adoption papers. For all my life I’d been a dark, strong-featured child in a family of blond Scotch-Irish siblings; my parents had told me I was a “throwback” to distant Indian relatives. But something about that explanation had never felt right. There was just enough information in those papers to allow me to locate my birth parents and other relatives, as well as tell me I was a full-blooded member of the Shoshone tribe. Now I had two families whom I liked and connected with on a more or less regular basis. But not all such boxes contain pleasurable information.
    “May I open this?” I asked Debra Judson as she handed hers to me.
    “Please do.”
    It contained the usual items parents save: a certificate from Sparrow Lake Hospital in Colusa County, California, giving the birth date of a female child named Pamela Stanton as twenty-two years ago last August 17, parents Rodney and Carol Stanton. A few photographs of a crawling infant and a toddling preschooler, smiling in all of them. And a number of news clippings from a paper called the Colusa Express , yellowed and tattered as if they’d been unfolded and read many times.
    When I came to the clippings I looked up at Debra Judson and she nodded for me to go on reading.
          SPARROW LAKE TODDLER MISSING
    SEARCH FOR STANTON TODDLER INTENSIFIED
    UNSEASONAL RAIN HAMPERS SEARCH FOR CHILD
          SEARCH FOR MISSING STANTON CHILD SCALED BACK
    PAMELA STANTON FEARED DEAD
    There were other items, the usual notices that a child has disappeared and the authorities are still searching for her or him, but which essentially mean that they believe the victim is dead and that the case has been back-burnered.
    “That birth date on the certificate,” Debra Judson said, “is not mine. Neither is the name of the hospital nor those of my parents.” She reached into her tote bag. “These documents, which have been available to me my whole life, state who I am.”
    She handed me a manila envelope. In it was her birth certificate, showing she’d been born to Dennis and Marla Judson twenty-two years ago at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. There were also photographs showing a child as she matured to a teenager and then to a young woman. Report cards from schools in the city of her birth. Clippings attesting to her proficiency in soccer at Dondero High School. A high school diploma; she’d graduated with honors, and the seals and ribbons indicating her excellence were still attached, if a bit faded. There were letters and postcards, presumably from friends and relatives, boyfriends too. And two acceptances from small but excellent state colleges.
    She saw me studying the acceptance notices. “I didn’t get to go. They came about the time Dad was killed. Mom needed me.”
    “All these papers indicate you had a fairly happy, successful life until your parents died.”
    “Yeah, I did.”
    “And you say that you’ve been left financially secure.”
    “I have.”
    “Then why not let go of this other information? For all you know, it may have nothing to do with you.”
    “Do you really think so, Ms. McCone?”
    The odd, coppery flares of anger in her eyes were stronger now. I met them with my own gaze, felt an anger that I’d thought I’d