“Oh, yes. I sent them regular monthly remittances. I have my old cancelled checks to prove it. Thank God I kept them.”
“And the child?” Mason asked.
“A year later,” she said, “when my own affairs were in order, I went to the home to get her out. And what do you think I found?”
“That she wasn’t there?” Mason asked.
“Exactly. They’d sold that baby for a thousand dollars. Think of it, Mr. Mason! Sold her just as you’d sell a horse or a dog or a used automobile.”
“What was their explanation?”
“Oh, they were frightfully sorry. They claimed it had been a mistake. At first they said I hadn’t paid them a cent. And then I confronted them with the cancelled checks — and they tried every means on earth to get those checks from me. I made a lot of trouble. The district attorney took it up, and The Hidden Home Welfare Society simply dissolved and vanished into nothing. I learned later what those places do. Whenever there’s trouble, they simply move to some other state, give themselves another name, and begin all over again.”
“But surely,” Mason said, “their records would show what became of this child.”
“They did, but the Home wouldn’t admit it. They lied about those records. I should have hired a lawyer and gone right into court, but in place of that I started making complaints to the authorities, and I suppose they were dilatory. You know how public officials can be at times. The district attorney was taking his vacation, and he stalled me along. I went back to New York and waited to hear from him. He wrote me a letter and seemed very pleased with himself. He said that thanks to my efforts, The Hidden Home Welfare Society had been put out of existence, that there had been previous complaints, and that I was to be congratulated on having saved my checks and all that sort of stuff.
“I went right back down to Louisiana and told him that wasn’t what I wanted, that I wanted the child. He said I’d have to engage private counsel, that his office was concerned with the broader aspects of the case. Think of it! The ‘broader aspects of the case.’ I could have choked him.”