“Some chamomile would be great.”
“I envy Leo getting out of this house.” Chelsea set the steaming mug in front of Emma, then closed and locked the side door. “I wish there was something I could do . . . some activity that would bring us closer to finding Annie.”
Facing the living room, Emma saw the empty bassinette and changing table. Someone had tidied up, stacking Annabelle’s squishy blocks in her bucket seat. The room seemed lonely and neglected, like a flashing VACANCY sign. She felt a new surge of regret over the way she had snapped at her sister earlier.
“I almost forgot.” Emma handed over the paper bag she’d been clutching. “I come bearing gifts.”
Chelsea opened the bag and held the brown plastic container close. “My new Nebula prescription. Thanks. Now I’ll be extra happy.” She put it on the counter. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Relieved. Still hoping that everything’s okay with the baby.” She had given Chelsea the doctor’s good news over the phone, walking that tightrope between not wanting to boast and not wanting to withhold information from her sister and best friend.
“Do the doctors have any sense of what caused it?”
“They’re just saying it was spotting, but I’m nervous about going back to school. With a high-risk pregnancy, working might be too much for me. Jake and I talked about it, and since money’s not an issue, he wants me to give notice.”
“Just quit? Can’t you get medical leave?”
“I probably could, but that seems greedy when I have no intention of going back to work after the baby is born. The medical benefits from the firm are really good. So, yeah, I might just quit.”
“Don’t you think you’ll miss it?” Chelsea dipped the tea bag in her own mug. “I feel like I made a mistake giving up my job, but there’s no going back.”
“I’ll miss my students. But I’m excited about changing things up. We’re both excited about the baby, and we’re thinking of some other changes, too. Jake got an offer to move to the firm’s office in Chicago.”
“What? When did that happen?”
“A few days ago.” With all that was going on, Emma hadn’t been planning to spill the beans, but she never could keep a secret from her sister.
“And . . . is he going to accept? Are you guys moving to Chicago?”
Emma laced her hands around the warm mug. “We’re actually talking about it. It might be fun to live in a different place. I’ve heard great things about Chicago, and it would be an adventure for the two of us—for our little family.”
“Wow.” Chelsea hung her head.
“I’m sorry, honey. This is the last thing you need to hear right now.”
“No, don’t try to coddle me. I’ve been so out of it, so stuck in the black hole; I might not have heard it if you’d told me two weeks ago. I just want to be happy for you, but I can’t pull together happy right now.”
“There’ll be time for that later.”
“Good, because you deserve an adventure, Emma. You’ve put up with so much crap from me. I talked to Dr. Chin today, and she thinks that treatment will help me. I’m going to get better. I’m going to be a good mother for Annie. I really will.”
The unspoken hope hung in the air: Annie’s safe return.
Emma pushed her mug aside and reached for her sister’s hand. “Honey, you already are a good mother. And with a little help, you’re going to be a great one.”
Chapter 29
When Leo returned from combing the neighborhood, he didn’t offer much of a report, and Chelsea didn’t press him. She hadn’t expected much from the “search party,” but sometimes just the act of doing something constructive made more sense than sitting around deconstructing mistakes you’ve made.
When the last of the volunteers left, Chelsea showed Leo what she and Emma had accomplished while he was gone: Internet research on infant abduction.
“I don’t know why we didn’t look online this morning,” she told Leo. “My mind was still so fuzzy.”
But not anymore. For the first time in months, Chelsea felt alert and sharp. Trauma had brought the world into focus for her, and as she sat sorting through Internet facts with Leo, she couldn’t get information fast enough.
The accounts were riveting.
One Christmas Eve, a woman who claimed to be visiting her sister in a maternity ward befriended a mother who had just given birth. The visitor convinced her that she would keep an eye on the woman’s baby while she took a shower. She promptly made off with the infant.
More than half of the infant abduction cases took place right in the mother’s hospital room. In so many instances, a woman pretending to be a nurse snatched a baby from a hospital maternity ward and walked right out with it. Sometimes the baby was hidden in a purse or a gym bag; other times the woman just walked out with the baby in her arms, as if it were her own.
In one case the infant’s grandmother abducted the baby from the hospital, convinced that her daughter was incapable of raising a child on her own. In another case, a woman solicited information from pregnant women, pretending to be looking for models for a maternity calendar.
Scrolling down on the computer, Leo read aloud the case of a new mom in Virginia who had narrowly missed having her child abducted by a woman posing as a hospital worker.
“ ‘Still tired from sleep-deprivation and delivery, new mom Marie Onish received a phone call in her hospital room saying that she had won a new mother luncheon. A few minutes later, Alice Butler appeared in her room with a bunch of balloons, saying that the lunch and free gifts were waiting for her in the hospital cafeteria. She was told to go downstairs, find the chair with the balloons on it, and she would be met by another hospital staffer. Onish was not suspicious when this staff person offered to watch her baby while she went downstairs to claim her prizes.’ ”
Leo paused. “Why would anyone go for that?”
But Chelsea understood the woman’s confusion over who was who in the hospital. “When you’re in a hospital, countless people come through your room—technicians, doctors, nurses, and aides. I remember being on painkillers and wondering what they were all doing in my room. I couldn’t tell a doctor from an aide. Could you?”
“I remember your doctor, but I wasn’t really paying attention to the staff. I was all about Annie.”
“Exactly.”
“ ‘When Onish got to the cafeteria,’ ” Leo continued reading, “ ‘she found a chair with a balloon attached, but no representative was there to greet her. She waited for a few minutes, then returned upstairs, where she found a jumble of staff personnel as well as police officers in the hall outside her room. The hospital’s electronic security system had been triggered when Butler cut off the infant’s ankle bracelet. Hospital staff found Butler headed down the hall with the baby, already dressed in street clothes. Butler was charged with felony abduction of a child.
“ ‘ “I couldn’t comprehend what was going on until the cop showed me my baby’s ankle bracelet,” Onish said. “That was when I started to cry.” ’ ”
As Leo read on, Chelsea could see it all.
The empty steel-and-plastic cafeteria chair with balloons bobbing.
The strange clothes on the baby.
The towering charge nurse.
The ankle bracelet, snipped in a crisp cut.
But in this case, the thief had been caught before she got far.
“They caught her,” Chelsea said aloud. “They snagged that deluded woman before she got too far. Why couldn’t we be so lucky?”
“But they usually do catch abductors. It says here that most infants are safely recovered within a week.”
“A week is a long time.” Time had slowed. Moments stretched into painful memories and sickening plunges into guilt. “And what will happen to Annabelle while this stranger is taking care of her?”
“I know. It feels disgusting.” Leo clicked to another screen. “In the profile, it says that most infant abductors prove themselves to
be capable caretakers. Some of them even take childcare classes.”
“What’s the profile again?”
“Most of them are female, overweight, and either married or living with a partner.” Leo scratched the stubble on his chin. “Who do we know that fits that profile? Just about every female friend of ours.”
“Isn’t it weird that they’re overweight? Every woman I know thinks she’s overweight, but some of them just say that because they’re not model skinny. Emma and I have the baby weight. Sasha’s in good shape, but she’s always complaining that her booty’s way too big. How about Jennifer?”
“I haven’t seen her for at least a year.”
“That’s the safe answer.”
“Louise Pickler could stand to lose a few.”
“Really. Is that a beer belly or has she been expecting for the past few years?”
Leo rubbed his eyes and let out a groan. “It’s funny but it’s not.”
“I know.” Chelsea tugged the zipper of her hoodie up and down. “Emma and I read an article about one of the baby snatchers. She was so delusional, she wore a pillow to make everyone believe she was pregnant. She convinced her boyfriend that sex could hurt the baby, so they started sleeping in separate rooms. She even had him drive her to the gynecologist every week. They said she would walk in the entrance, go out the back, and take a cab home. These women jump through hoops to stage a ruse.”
“And who do we know that could be faking a pregnancy?”
“The only pregnant woman I know is Emma.”
Funny how that came right out. Emma wasn’t delusional, but she did have the perfect setup. She and Jake could take the baby to Chicago and no one would ever know it wasn’t theirs.
But Emma would never steal my baby. Even when I begged her to take it, she declined.
“A few months ago, it seemed like you were around pregnant women all the time,” Leo said.
“That’s true. The women in my prenatal swim class. All those women at the doctor’s office. The new moms in the maternity ward . . .” Had one of those women been faking it? “What if someone used the class to find someone like me? To target me and my baby?”
“What a frightening and brilliant theory.” Leo closed the laptop and moved to the couch. “We need to talk to Detective Santos about it.” He squeezed in behind her and slipped his arms around her.
Chelsea rested against him, loving the support of his solid chest, his strong embrace. Often over the past few months she had longed for a quiet moment to cuddle with Leo this way; now it seemed like a hollow consolation prize.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been mad at you for not remembering. For letting someone come in here and take her. But I know that’s not how it happened. I know it’s not your fault.”
“You have a right to be upset with me. I’m mad at myself. I keep wondering how I could have slept through it all. I mean, since Annie was born, I’ve been in a constant state of exhaustion, but I never failed to wake up when she was crying.”
“That’s true. You never slept through a feeding.”
“Except for the times you gave her a bottle.”
“That’s different. You still woke up. You knew what was going on.”
“Maybe I was drugged. I want to believe that there was something in those muffins.”
“When will Detective Santos have the lab results back?” he asked.
“It can take a week, but she put a rush on it. Not that it matters. It won’t get Annie back to us.”
“But it will tell us more about the type of criminal mind we’re dealing with.”
Once again she concentrated on the details of last night, trying to sort through them as if they were trinkets in a cluttered drawer. Emma’s phone call. The muffins. The overwhelming weariness. The decision to stay downstairs. The same coins of memory glimmered, taunting her against a backdrop of velvet darkness.
“I’m sorry, Chels.” His chin nuzzled one ear. “I should have been here.”
“You had the convention. You’re trying to be the breadwinner and take care of Annie and me. It’s a lot, Leo. I know that. Do you know my sister calls you St. Leo?”
“A smart girl, that Emma.” Leo eased away for a moment to reach for the remote and turn on the television. “It’s time for the eleven o’clock news. Let’s see how they’re covering our story.”
He switched from one major network to the other, trying to catch each newscast’s coverage of Annabelle’s abduction.
Chelsea felt like she was watching someone else’s life unfold. Had it been only this morning that she’d woken up in the predawn stillness and found the house empty?
The reporter introduced their story, and there was the photo of her daughter under the caption: Kidnapped! “They got the pictures on,” she observed. The sight of that gummy grin let down her milk, and she shifted in Leo’s arms, pulling the front of her hoodie away from her body.
“Annabee.” Leo didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
It was odd to be in the center of the storm and watch the winds blowing around you from a distant lens. When the report ended, she went upstairs to pump. As she showered in the downstairs bathroom, she remembered that the plumber was supposed to fix the valve tomorrow.
Tomorrow was miles away.
She slipped on her last clean nightgown and her robe, though sleep didn’t seem like an option tonight.
Leo was still at the computer. “I talked to Grace Santos.”
“Any news?” she asked as she labeled the breast milk and tucked it into the fridge.
“Nothing on her end. I told her your idea about maybe being targeted by someone you met in one of those pregnancy groups. She says it’s worth exploring.”
“I wonder if the YMCA still has a list of people registered for past classes.” She went over to him. “Are you hacking into the Y’s computers?” He had said he was going to clear up his e-mail, but when she looked over his shoulder, he was Googling a name from a list.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking out our pediatrician and neighbors.”
“What do you think you’ll find?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of them had a weird, overweight cousin who has promised a baby to her husband.”
She leaned over him, massaging his shoulders.
“The pediatrician’s office is a good idea, but there are so many receptionists there, I can’t get them straight.” The image of a soft, doughy woman came to mind. Not in the pediatrician’s office, but in Dr. Volmer’s office. “There’s a woman in the ob-gyn’s office who made a huge fuss over Annabelle. Val something. I’ll have to find out her last name.”
Just then the doorbell rang.
Leo straightened with a jolt and went to the door. Chelsea belted her robe and held her breath. It had to be news about Annie.
It was their babysitter, Eleni Zika. She blinked in the porch light, her eyes as round and shiny as quarters.
“Oh . . . the appointment.” Chelsea swallowed hard. “You got my text, right? About canceling this afternoon?”
“I did. I need to talk to you.” Standing there, without the dark kohl under her eyes, without feathers hanging from her hair, without a ring through her nose, Eleni looked her age—just a teenage girl.
“Come in.” Leo held the door for her.
Eleni stepped over the threshold, her black-polished fingers quivering. “I saw the news report online. I recognized your house in the picture. And then . . . then I got a call from this detective who said they needed me to come in for fingerprinting.”
Was that why she was shaking? Because she thought she was a suspect?
“It’s not what you think,” Chelsea said. “They want to have your fingerprints on file to eliminate them, that’s all. We know you were here this week; of course your fingerprints will be on things.”
“It’s not that.” Eleni’s hand trembled as she swiped at the tears that streaked down her cheeks. “I mean, I’m sorry about Annabelle. I
’m really sorry. But I didn’t know. I didn’t think he would do anything. I really didn’t believe it.”
Leo looked down at her, tilting his head. “What are you talking about?”
“My boyfriend, Krispy. I heard him talking about how much he could make selling babies on the black market. I think he took Annabelle.”
Chapter 30
Grace drove over to the house as soon as she got the call. “You go,” Chris told her. “I’ll keep plugging away here.” She had e-mailed him the remainder of her list, and headed out.
It was late, but then she was planning to work through the night, or at least until she’d run checks on all the names on her list. She had already hooked up Matt to stay with the Larsens for the second night in a row. A double bonus, as far as he was concerned.
“You behave, okay?” she’d warned him. “No staying up late. It’s a school night.”
“I’m aware,” he said, sounding far more mature than his twelve years. Until, in the next breath, he told Ethan Larsen that he’d just made a “bonehead move” on the computer game they were immersed in.
“And turn that off when Mrs. Larsen tells you to,” Grace added.
“Mama-dish, you know I will.”
He was a good boy, her Matt, but twelve going on thirteen was that age when things began to change for a kid. Adolescence was a tough time. Sometimes angelic children fell away to drugs or booze or violent rebellion. She’d seen a lot of that, tracking down teenage runaways. Grace didn’t want to lose her son that way.
Sitting in Chelsea and Leo’s living room, waiting while their babysitter composed herself, Grace wondered if Eleni Zika’s parents felt connected to their daughter. Did they worry that her black fingernails and piercings and dark makeup were a sign of a deep unrest inside? Or were they confident that the goth look was a phase she would work through?
“Take a deep breath,” Grace said gently. “I always forget to breathe when I’m crying.”
The girl pressed a ball of tissues to her eyes and nodded.
Seated beside the girl on the sofa, Chelsea wound and unwound the belt of her robe around her fingers. Leo leaned against the rolltop desk, though he had the look of a tiger ready to pounce. Grace was glad they had called her when the girl showed up at their door.
All She Ever Wanted Page 19
