As far as Grace was concerned, her effort for Penny was what any devoted mother would do, but not everyone saw it that way. One misguided friend had recently made an unfortunate remark from which the friendship never fully recovered. She said, speaking in all seriousness, “At least it wasn’t one of your biological children facing a lifetime in prison.”
Grace didn’t know how to respond. She didn’t give birth to Penny, that was true, but DNA was hardly the only way to encode parental love. The stability and love Grace and Arthur gave Penny had transformed this cherished child’s life—and theirs in the process. Thinking of her family seated around the dinner table—Jack, Ryan, Penny, and Arthur, all together—gave Grace a deep sense of satisfaction, a knowledge that her family had become complete out of choice and love.
Giving birth is a single act, but parenting was the culmination of thousands of acts, large and small, done selflessly each day. It was the sum total of those experiences that had cemented an indelible bond, one that blurred the lines between parenting a biological child and an adopted one. To that friend, Grace had said simply she would do for Penny exactly what she’d do for Jack and Ryan, because she didn’t think of Penny as her adopted child. She was her daughter.
The archival research had been a demoralizing exercise, so when her cell phone rang, Grace allowed herself to feel a tickle of hope that Jack’s efforts had been more fruitful. It isn’t easy digging up information on somebody, especially without formal training in the craft of detection, but Jack could be as doggedly determined as Grace （and Arthur） when it came to solving a problem.
The problem he’d set out to address was learning all he could about the victim, Rachel Boyd. She’d never been a priority until this moment, because until a few days ago, Penny’s guilt was never in doubt. Now they needed to learn everything they could about Rachel in order to figure out why someone other than Penny might have wanted her dead.
“Got some intel, Mom,” he said excitedly.
The only information Grace had on Penny’s birth mother was what had been in the news （both when Penny was first found and again after Rachel’s death） and what the lawyers had told her. She lived in Lynn, the same city where she grew up. She was a known drug user. She had been arrested before Penny was born, charged with drug trafficking, but was acquitted in court. Four years later she got arrested again after she abandoned Penny in the park, when she was charged with child endangerment and the courts took away her parental rights. She pled out, then got probation on the condition she attend drug treatment. She lived in Rhode Island for a time, but moved back to Lynn for reasons unknown. She had rented the bottom unit of a multifamily home, which is where she was murdered.
Grace didn’t know much about Rachel’s employment history or her family background, but since dissociative identity disorders aren’t hereditary, she hadn’t made it a priority to find out. Besides, trying to get that sort of detail would have involved hiring a private investigator to track down Rachel or asking Attorney Navarro to dig it up, both of which would cost money Grace didn’t have.
Enter Jack, who had experience with things like doxing—which he had explained was using the Internet to reveal and discover personal information.
“What did you find out?”
“For starters, I got the name of the bar where she worked back then,” Jack said into the phone. “That wasn’t in the papers.” Grace rose creakily from the dusty floor of the cramped little room. Food wrappers littered the wastebasket and a musty odor perfumed the air.
“What’s the name?” asked Grace.
“Lucky Dog,” he said.
“Fantastic,” Grace exclaimed. “Someone there has to know something about Rachel’s past. Maybe they’d seen some sort of abuse, who knows? Great work, Jack. How’d you get all that information?”
There was a lengthy pause.
“Yeah, better we don’t go there,” Jack said.
From what Grace knew of doxing, it had a malicious end in mind, and frequently hackers were the ones who did the dirty work. Perhaps Jack had a friend in the computer science department at Emerson who had put his or her specialized skills to the test. In this case, Grace felt comfortable that the end justified the means, whatever those were, and the fact that her son had discovered something of potential value, an entry point into Rachel’s past, lifted her sagging spirits. She had high hopes this single lead would uncover truths about Penny’s past.