The Forgiven

by Amanda Stevens

  Tess shook her head. “I asked her, but she wouldn’t say. I know now that I should have pressed her for a name, but at the time...I was just so desperate to find Emily. And now Willa is dead, and she can’t tell us.” Willa Banks had died of a heart attack the night Tess had rescued her daughter. She’d very nearly gone to her grave guarding her fifteen-year-old secret.

  “Evidently, the other woman’s baby died the night the tornadoes hit,” Tess said. “And there you were, Naomi. Young and unmarried, with two healthy baby girls. How could you care for one baby, let alone two? That’s how she rationalized it, I guess.”

  Naomi said nothing, but anger flared inside her. Young or not, she would have found a way to take care of her babies. She would have loved them and sheltered them, and if necessary, she would have given her life for them. She was their mother, not some stranger. Not some woman Willa Banks had deemed more fit.

  As if sensing Naomi’s turmoil, Tess said carefully, “Willa watched you from afar for years knowing all the while what she’d done to you. When she heard about Sadie’s disappearance, something snapped. The guilt must have finally consumed her. She couldn’t accept that both your children had been taken from you. I think over the years she became more and more confused, and that’s why she took Emily ten years later, on the anniversary of Sadie’s abduction. In her mind, it was Sadie, not Emily, she saw on the playground that day. She thought she’d finally found a way to atone for her sins. She couldn’t give you back the baby that she helped take from you, but she could bring Sadie home to you.”

  “That one woman could do so much damage,” Jared Spencer muttered darkly.

  Tess took Jared’s hand, drawing it to her cheek. The tenderness that passed between them made Naomi painfully aware of the emptiness inside her own heart. There you were, Naomi. Young and unmarried.

  The fact that Clay Willis had decided to leave town on graduation night and join the army instead of marrying her had probably been a blessing in disguise, Naomi had long ago decided. And when she’d heard a few years later that he’d been killed in a helicopter crash overseas, she’d grieved for her daughters’ father, not for her first love. Anything she’d felt for Clay Willis had died on the night he’d left town.

  But there had been moments when she had to admit that having someone in her life, someone to lean on, might have helped her through the hard times, might have kept her from hitting rock bottom when Sadie had gone missing.

  She was thirty-three years old and she’d lost two children. Two. Sometimes even now her despair threatened to overwhelm her. But Naomi had found the strength to go on because she’d had a purpose.

  For ten years, her search for Sadie had been her whole life, the faint hope that she would someday find her daughter and bring her back home her only salvation. With the discovery of the remains in Grover County, that hope had been diminished.

  But now Naomi had learned that her other child had been alive all this time, that she was out there somewhere.

  And if it took her another ten years, Naomi knew that she would find her.

  * * *

  “CAN YOU HELP ME find her?” In the light from the dash, Naomi saw a frown flicker across Michael Donnelly’s brow as she spoke. He’d driven her home after they’d left Tess’s house, and as he pulled to the curb, she said anxiously, “Well, can you?”

  He cut the engine and turned to face her, resting his arm across the back of the seat. “I told you last week I could help you, but let me remind you again that we’re operating on the secondhand confession of a dead woman. I don’t have to spell out the legal ramifications of such hearsay.”

  “I don’t care about the legalities,” Naomi blurted. “I just want to find my daughter.”

  Donnelly’s frown deepened. “If I’m going to help you, I want you to be fully aware of all the pitfalls. If Willa Banks was out of her mind toward the end, it’s possible she made all this up. It’s also possible she was a very shrewd woman. She could have concocted this whole elaborate story in order to save her own hide. An insanity plea would have kept her out of federal prison for kidnapping.”

  “I don’t think you believe that any more than I do,” Naomi said impatiently. “The fact that the story is so elaborate is what makes it so believable. Nobody could make up something like this.”

  “You might be surprised,” Donnelly muttered.

  Naomi shoved back her short, dark hair. “Look, you wanted to hear Tess Campbell’s story for yourself, and you did. She repeated exactly what I told you when I first came to see you last week. Willa Banks helped steal my baby, and she kept it a secret for fifteen years. The guilt ate away at her until she finally went off the deep end. So much so that ten years after my other daughter was kidnapped, Willa tried to repent by taking little Emily Campbell to replace her. It’s complicated, yes. Crazy, yes. But in some twisted way, it all makes sense.”

  “Maybe because you want it to,” Donnelly suggested. “You lost two children. A baby fifteen years ago, another child ten years ago. No one would blame you for grasping at straws here.”

  Heat flashed through Naomi as her gaze on him narrowed. “I’m not paying you to psychoanalyze my motives, Mr. Donnelly. I’m paying you to find my daughter. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Locate missing persons?”

  “And supposing I do find her for you, Miss Cross? Have you given any thought to the consequences?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Naomi turned to stare out the window. She knew exactly what he was getting at.

  “Assuming everything Willa Banks said was true. Assuming your baby was stolen from you fifteen years ago. She won’t know you now,” Donnelly warned in a low voice. “You’ll be nothing more than a stranger to her. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. The kid won’t appreciate having her whole world ripped apart, and it’s a good bet, she’ll blame you for doing it.”

  Pain welled inside Naomi’s heart. “I don’t want to hurt her. I wouldn’t hurt her for anything in the world. But I have to find her. I have to make sure she’s all right.”

  “No matter the cost? Because any way you handle this, someone is going to get hurt,” Donnelly predicted grimly. “Someone always gets hurt in cases like this.”

  Naomi balled her hands into fists. “She’s my baby! I gave birth to her, and then someone stole her from me. I have a right to find her. I have a right to make sure she’s okay, that she’s being taken care of. Can’t you understand that?”

  Donnelly’s gaze met hers in the darkened car. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I can understand it. I have three daughters of my own.”

  “Then you’ll help me?”

  He reached over the back of the seat and clicked open the latches on his briefcase. “I already have.”

  Naomi’s anger faded. She stared at him in shock. “You mean...oh, my God.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “You’ve found her, haven’t you?”

  When he nodded, Naomi suddenly felt at a complete loss. She’d searched for Sadie for ten years. Ten exhaustive years. Now, after only a matter of days, she was about to learn the whereabouts of another daughter she’d thought dead for fifteen years.

  She drew in a long breath, trying to slow the adrenaline pounding through her bloodstream.

  Donnelly pulled a folder from his briefcase and switched on the reading light in the car. “Piecing together what happened that night hasn’t been easy,” he said. “As you can imagine, the hospital records are a mess.”

  Naomi nodded. “I’m sure they are. The hospital suffered extensive damage from the second tornado. All the patients were evacuated as quickly as possible that night and moved to the county hospital. But the staff at both facilities were overwhelmed by the sheer number of casualties.” How easy it must have been, in the pandemonium and hysteria, to switch two babies—one alive and one dead—and no one ever the wiser. Until now.

  “You and another woman who’d also given birth at Eden Memorial were admitted to County hospital sometime just before midnight,” Donnelly
said. “I tracked down one of the nurses on duty at County that night, and she remembers that you were both rushed into ICU. The other woman suffered from a head injury she’d sustained during the storm, and you’d lost a lot of blood during delivery.”

  “And the babies?” Naomi asked in a near whisper.

  “Baby Cross arrived at County sometime after you did, but the other baby, listed as Baby Doe at Eden Memorial, was taken to the neonatal unit at St. Mary’s in Memphis.”

  “Baby Doe?” Naomi hadn’t realized how fast her heart was racing, but suddenly she was short of breath. She could hardly speak. She wondered fleetingly if this was all a dream, if she would wake up shortly to find that both her daughters were still lost to her forever.

  “They didn’t yet know the mother’s name.” Donnelly glanced down at the open folder he’d placed on the seat between them. “Evidently she showed up during the storm in hard labor and was rushed to delivery without being processed. She suffered a concussion when part of the roof collapsed, and it was only later, after she’d been moved to County, that someone gave the admittance desk her name, Aubree DeWitt, and a New Orleans address for her. The next day, in the midst of all the confusion, arrangements were made to have her and the baby transported to a New Orleans hospital.”

  “You couldn’t find out who’d given her name to the admittance desk?”

  “No one remembered, but it’s not surprising, considering everything they had to deal with in the aftermath of the storms.”

  “You said she was unconscious when she was moved to County. Is it possible she didn’t know her baby had died that night?”

  Donnelly shrugged. “It’s possible she never knew. But it’s irrelevant now because she’s dead.”

  Naomi glanced up. “Dead? When...how?”

  “She was murdered ten years ago.”

  Naomi gasped in shock. “What about the child?”

  “She wasn’t harmed. I don’t have a lot of the details, but I spoke with a cop I know in New Orleans. He remembered the case vaguely, but he seemed to recall that Aubree and her husband were estranged at the time of the murder. DeWitt worked for a big oil company, and his job took him out of the country quite a lot. After Aubree’s death, her parents tried to get custody of the child, but apparently, DeWitt was able to pull some strings, and after the funeral, he took the little girl back to London with him.”

  “You mean they don’t even live in this country?” Naomi asked in alarm.

  “No, you’re in luck there,” Donnelly said. “A few months ago, DeWitt was transferred back to New Orleans.”

  They were in New Orleans, Naomi thought. In a matter of hours, she could see her daughter.

  Sela...

  She turned to Donnelly anxiously. “What did they name her?”

  “The child? Taryn. Taryn Josephine DeWitt. Would you like to see a picture of her?”

  “A picture...” If possible, Naomi’s heart pounded even harder. She watched, speechless, as he took a photograph from the folder and handed it to her.

  The picture had been shot from a distance with a telephoto lens that gave it a slightly grainy quality. And to make matters worse, the girl’s face was partially obscured by a curtain of long, dark hair as she hurried through the gates of what looked to be a private school somewhere in New Orleans. A nun had been captured in the background, and her disapproving gaze in the girl’s direction seemed to portend a boatload of trouble. Naomi immediately understood why. Taryn DeWitt was a knockout.

  Tall and slender, with a lithe body already hinting at the womanly curves that would come all too soon, she’d tried to hurry the maturing process by using heavy makeup—eyes rimmed with black liner, lips thickly glossed. She’d rolled the plaid skirt of her school uniform to a shocking length, displaying long, coltish legs that would turn the heads of not just boys, but men twice her age. No wonder the nun in the background looked so worried.

  Naomi felt an unsettling somewhere deep inside her. As she studied the photograph, she experienced not so much as a quiver of recognition. Was this the right girl? Surely, even under all that heavy makeup, there would be some resemblance, no matter how slight, to Sadie.

  Ten years was a long time, Naomi reminded herself. Sadie had disappeared when she was five, and Naomi had always remembered her just the way she’d looked on that fateful day when she’d gone off happily to school. Naomi had expected—wanted—to see that same child, that same innocence in the face of Taryn DeWitt.

  But Taryn was no longer a child, and any resemblance to her twin sister, Sadie, had been obliterated by the years. And perhaps by her environment. She’d lost her mother at a very early age, and that alone would have changed her.

  And her father? What kind of man was Alex DeWitt? What kind of home had he provided for his daughter?

  For my daughter, Naomi thought with uncharacteristic bitterness. Had he known? Was he the one who had coerced Willa Banks into stealing Naomi’s baby?

  She started to pass the picture back to Donnelly, but stopped, her hand trembling. She’d seen something...

  There!

  Naomi sucked in a sharp breath. The girl had a tiny dimple at the right corner of her mouth. Barely visible in the photo, but unmistakable. The same dimple that had charmed Naomi in Clay Willis. The same dimple that she’d kissed each night before Sadie went to sleep.

  “It is her,” Naomi said in breathless wonder. “She is my daughter. Sadie’s sister.”

  “You sound pretty certain of that.”

  “I am. Oh, I am.” Flattening the picture against her heart, Naomi closed her eyes. “I don’t think I really believed she could still be alive until this very moment.”

  “Miss Cross—”

  She ignored the warning tone in Donnelly’s voice, and leaned over to briefly put her hand on his. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you.”

  “Your gratitude may be premature,” he said in that same deliberate voice. “However you decide to handle this, I urge you to proceed with caution.”

  Naomi frowned. “What do you mean?”

  His gaze on her darkened. “I can tell by the look on your face that your first instinct is to rush to New Orleans and demand to have your daughter returned to you. I advise against such action. For one thing, proving what I’ve just told you in a court of law is going to be extremely difficult. The hospital records from that night are so chaotic they might not even be allowed as evidence. I’ve had to rely mainly on witnesses’ memories to piece together what little information we’ve amassed so far, and given the traumatic circumstances of that evening, their testimony could easily be discounted. Unless you can somehow persuade Alex DeWitt to allow his daughter to undergo a DNA test, odds are you won’t have a legal leg to stand on.”

  “Then what do you suggest I do?” Naomi asked with an edge of desperation.

  “You could let the police handle it.”

  She shook her head. “I have a sister in law enforcement, Mr. Donnelly. I know how long these things can take, even if Abby was still here to pull strings for me. I’ve already missed out on fifteen years of my daughter’s life. I’m not going to wait for a police investigation that could drag on for months, or even years. I’d rather take my chances with Alex DeWitt.”

  “Then there’s something else you should know.”

  “What is it?”

  “Aubree DeWitt’s murder was never solved, and according to my source, there are some people in New Orleans who still point the finger at her husband. Evidently, Alex DeWitt became a very wealthy man upon his wife’s death. Not to mention the fact that he gained sole custody of their daughter.”

  A cold finger of fear traced up Naomi’s spine. “What are you saying, Mr. Donnelly?”

  “I don’t know if Alex DeWitt was involved in his wife’s murder or not. No one does. But I can tell you this. A man who kills once, even in passion, usually finds it much easier to kill a second time if he feels threatened.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Mr. DeWi
tt?”

  The man seated behind the wide desk glanced up as his secretary called out his name, and Naomi, standing just behind the woman, felt the impact of his gaze all the way across the vast room. Her breath lodged in her throat, and it took her a moment to gather her wobbly poise.

  Then, before she lost her nerve, she brushed passed the secretary and strode into Alex DeWitt’s office, trying not to let the sumptuous surroundings intimidate her. She barely let herself notice the thickness of the gray carpeting that muted her footsteps, the mammoth granite desk piled high with folders and stacks of computer printouts, the floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls that offered an impressive view of the city.

  What she did notice, what she couldn’t help noticing, was the man who sat behind that cold, imposing desk. Slowly he rose to his feet.

  “I’m sorry for the...intrusion.” She faltered, her gaze slipping unexpectedly over the elegant lines of his suit, the rigid bearing with which he held himself. “But...I have to speak to you at once. It’s a matter of—”

  His eyebrows rose before she could finish her urgent pronouncement, and Naomi had the immediate impression that here was a man who wouldn’t respond favorably to melodrama. She would have to present her case in a measured and straightforward manner. She would have to use all her self-control to get him to see reason.

  And if he didn’t, if he refused to grant the DNA test she’d come to ask for, then Naomi was fully prepared to take more drastic measures. What those measure were, exactly, she didn’t yet know. But she was willing to bet that Alex DeWitt, in all his years of wheeling and dealing in the oil industry, had yet to encounter the kind of ferocity a mother could call forth when battling for her child.

  Then again, maybe he had. Maybe that was why Aubree DeWitt had died ten years ago. “Evidently, Alex DeWitt became a very wealthy man upon his wife’s death. Not to mention the fact that he gained sole custody of his daughter.”

  Apprehension prickled the back of Naomi’s neck. Maybe Michael Donnelly had been right. Maybe she should have left the matter to the police.