The Lady from the Black Lagoon by Mallory O'Meara

Author:Mallory O'Meara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2018-12-20T20:21:01+00:00

8

The Beauty and the Beast

I was starting to run out of resources and places to look for traces of Milicent. I had no idea what the rest of her life looked like. So, I decided to go in the other direction completely—I’d look for traces of her death. At least, I assumed it would be her death. At this point, she would be over one hundred years old if she was still alive. I needed to start reverse engineering her life: start from the end of it and work backward. It was something solid I could lean on. There aren’t many constants in life, but this was one.

It was time to go and look up her death certificate.

As soon as morning rush hour ebbed slightly, I made the drive to the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office. Pulling into the parking lot, I took in another constant in life—gargantuan and slow-moving lines at government buildings. This I prepared for. There were not one but two books in my purse.

Over the course of the hour and a half I waited in line, I was caught off guard by the realization that I didn’t actually know if I could look up her death certificate. I didn’t know if random people were allowed to do that. Because, make no mistake, in the eyes of the law, I was a random person. I had no familial connection to Milicent. I’m as pale as a nervous ghost and my last name is O’Meara. I’m about as far from an Italian goddess as an actual potato. I was pretty sure that my tattoo of her didn’t count as a blood connection, either.

I didn’t even know how to ask this stuff. “Uh, hi, can you tell me is this person dead or not?” probably wasn’t the way to lead that conversation, especially if I was trying to convince them I wasn’t a random creep.

But I had been in line for so long that I was a now legal resident of the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office, so I decided to stick it out. When I finally stepped up to the small and grungy window, I blurted out my request to the exhausted woman sitting on the other side.

“Hi, I’m trying to find the death certificate or I guess any kind of certificate but mostly death certificate for this woman I’m writing a book about but I’m not related to her I hope it’s okay I don’t know if it’s allowed but anything you could tell me would be great oh man thank you so much!”

I inhaled and smiled. Instead of kicking me out, the woman ended up being far more kind and patient than she needed to be. She looked up “Milicent Patrick” for me, tapping away on the kind of cumbersome and thunderous keyboard that now resides solely in government facilities and community colleges.

“Hmm, no death certificate exists under that name.”

With an apologetic look to the hordes of people waiting behind me in line, I gave her all the combinations of names I could think of.

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