The Stranger's Sin

by Darlene Gardner

  Kelly Delaney stood there like an answer to a prayer.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I took a nap and fell asleep. I would have called but somebody was using the phone at the B and B.”

  She looked like a different woman than she had at the ice-cream shop. That woman had seemed exhausted, her face pale and her shirt so wrinkled it appeared as though she’d slept in it.

  This woman wore slim-fitting blue capris and a darker blue short-sleeved shirt. She had thick, shining brown hair and a certain vitality in her face. He’d thought earlier she resembled Mandy, but now he saw her face possessed a sweetness that Mandy’s lacked. Her hazel eyes were a little bigger and wider set, her brows thinner, her nose smaller with a tiny bump in the center.

  He stepped back, playing it cool, trying not to let on how relieved he was to see her. “Come on in.”

  He went to shut the door behind her, noticing there was no car in the driveway or at the curb. First no cell phone. Now no car? “Where’s your car?” he asked.

  “I walked,” she said.

  “From town?” Chase and his father lived outside the Indigo Springs city limits where houses were set back from a two-lane road on an acre of land or more.

  “It wasn’t far,” she said.

  It was a mile and a half, about a thirty-minute walk, most without the benefit of sidewalks. An easy distance for the hikers who regularly descended on Indigo Springs, but she wasn’t wearing hiking shoes.

  “Do you have a car?”

  “Back home.” She cleared her throat before she said, “I took the bus to Indigo Springs. It made more sense than driving, what with the wear and tear on my car and the high price of gas.”

  Yet she’d been able to afford a night in a bed-and-breakfast during the height of tourist season.

  Toby let out a loud, baby laugh, drawing their attention. He’d balanced his torso on the ball, which rocked back and forth.

  “That must be your son,” Kelly said, an assumption Chase didn’t correct. In all the ways that counted, he was Toby’s father. She walked into the house, following the laugh as though Toby was a tiny Pied Piper. “He’s precious! How old is he?”

  “Twelve months,” Chase said.

  She clapped her hands and smiled at the baby. “You are such a cutie.”

  “Thank you,” his father said.

  Her head turned sharply, her eyes sparkling when she spotted his dad. “I meant the baby, but you’re not so bad, either.”

  His father still looked a little pale, but he laughed and extended his hand. “I’m Charlie Bradford, Chase’s father.”

  “I’m Kelly,” she said as they shook, then added almost as an afterthought, “Delaney.”

  “Nice to meet you, Kelly Delaney.”

  “What’s your grandson’s name?”

  “Toby.” His father didn’t correct her misconception, either, but then he’d probably started thinking of himself as Toby’s grandfather soon after Mandy moved in. Mandy had certainly treated him that way, leaving him alone with Toby for large chunks of time.

  “Hi, Toby,” she said brightly.

  The baby turned at the sound of his name, gurgling out a greeting.

  “You sure are a handsome devil, but that’s not surprising.” Kelly slanted his father a teasing look. “We’ve already established good looks run in the family.”

  His father beamed, his chest puffing out. Chase looked on in wonder. In the space of minutes, Kelly Delaney had managed to charm both his father and his baby. She might have captivated Chase, too, if he hadn’t noticed how nervous she’d been at the ice-cream parlor. Something about her reactions had been off, something that warned him to beware.

  “I hear you’re going to help us find Mandy,” his father announced. Obviously no internal warning system was cautioning him to beware. “Can you believe a mother could leave her baby the way she did, especially when Chase was so good to her? I told Chase she—”

  “I haven’t told Kelly about Mandy yet, Dad.” Chase cut off his father in midsentence. “I wanted to show her the photos first.”

  “Of course,” his father said, but he sounded puzzled.

  Chase went to pick up the photographs he’d left on a side table while his father moved to cut off Toby, who was crawling toward the kitchen. Chase theorized the baby hadn’t yet taken his first step because he was such a champion crawler.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” His father bent down, grimacing as though movement was difficult, then he swung the boy into the air. He wrinkled his nose. “No wonder he’s so happy. I think his diaper’s loaded.”

  “I can change him, Dad,” Chase offered. Although he was reluctant to leave his father alone with Kelly, he was more disinclined to take advantage of his father.

  “No, I’ll do it,” his father said. “It makes sense to give him his bath now. You two have things to talk about.”

  His father left the room. Was his gait a bit slower than normal? Toby grinned at them over Chase’s father’s shoulder. “Bye-bye,” the baby called.

  “Bye-bye.” Kelly waved, then waited until the pair was out of sight before she said, “Your dad’s wonderful with him. You’re lucky to have him.”

  “He tells me that all the time,” Chase said. “It wouldn’t be so annoying if he wasn’t right.”

  He expected her to smile but she seemed suddenly tense and he realized she was staring at the photos he held. He wondered why she cared so much about finding Mandy. Could it really be because of something as simple as returning a lost necklace?

  “Here you go.” He handed her the photos, watching her carefully as she examined them. There were two of them, both shot by a neighbor at a backyard cookout. In the first, he and Mandy sat beside each other at a picnic table, their bodies not touching. The second photo was of Mandy and Toby. Mandy wasn’t smiling in that one, either.

  “It’s her. It’s Amanda,” she cried, the relief evident not only in her voice but in her posture. “Her hair color’s different but it’s definitely her. Look at the necklace she’s wearing in this photo. It’s different than the one I have, but it’s a similar style.”

  “She has a thing for jewelry,” Chase said. “The necklace you have was one of her favorites.”

  She lifted her head to gape at him. “You recognized the necklace?”

  “Yes,” he confirmed.

  “I don’t understand. Why show me the photos if you were sure Amanda and your wife are the same woman?”

  “She’s not my wife,” he corrected. “And I showed you the photos so you could be sure, too. I don’t want you to hold anything back when you tell me where you met her and what she said to you.”

  “Did she leave you?”

  He wouldn’t have stated it quite that way, but he wasn’t about to confide the complicated nature of his relationship with Mandy, not when large parts of Kelly’s story didn’t track. But he had to tell her something to get her to open up.

  “She left almost three weeks ago,” he said. “Aside from a message on my cell phone saying she couldn’t stand living here any longer, I haven’t heard from her.”

  “Why would she leave Toby behind?”

  “She didn’t much like being a mother, either,” he replied truthfully, but he’d said enough. It was his turn to ask the questions. “You said you met her at a coffee shop in upstate New York. Where exactly?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. “Schenectady.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last Saturday,” she said. “Like I told you, it was crowded. There was an empty seat at my table, and she asked if she could take it.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing important. She seemed…frazzled. Nervous. She made a remark about not liking Schenectady any more than Indigo Springs. I got the impression she was passing through town.”

  Passing through. It was the same expression Kelly had used to explain what she was doing in Indigo Springs, which brought them to the most far-fetched part o
f her story. It had nagged at Chase all afternoon, because it just didn’t compute.

  “That’s quite a coincidence that you ended up in Indigo Springs a week later,” he said. “How did you happen to be in Pennsylvania?”

  Another hesitation. “I was visiting friends. In Scranton.” The geography only made a vague sense, which she seemed to realize. “I decided to take a detour.”

  Chase mentally reviewed her story. She was hundreds of miles from home, showing around a sketch of a woman who was essentially a stranger to return a necklace that wasn’t worth much more than a hundred dollars.

  Although she’d answered all his questions, there had been long pauses before some of her replies as though she was thinking about what to say.

  Chase wasn’t buying her story, but he couldn’t think of a single reason for her to lie. Before the night was over, he intended to unravel the puzzle.

  The heavy sound of footsteps interrupted his thoughts. His father stumbled into the family room, his face gray, clutching at his chest.

  “I put Toby…in his crib,” he said haltingly.

  Chase forgot about Kelly Delaney and her lies and sprang to his feet. He crossed the room to his father’s side, his own chest seizing with worry. “Dad? What’s wrong?”

  “I think…I’m having…a heart attack.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHASE HAD ALWAYS BEEN GOOD in a crisis, but his mind rebelled. This couldn’t be happening to his father, who always seemed so hale and hearty. So invincible. Yet his father’s eyes were shut in obvious pain, his hand covering his heart, his face contorted with fear.

  The same way Chase’s mother had looked before she died.

  Chase’s mind flashed back nine months to the visit he’d paid to his parents while he was training to be a conservation officer. His father had gone to the grocery store to pick up milk. His mother had seemed overly quiet as she and Chase watched a Seinfeld rerun. She’d complained of not feeling well, then collapsed in the armchair, the canned laughter on television an incongruous backdrop.

  No! his mind screamed. He couldn’t lose his father that way, too.

  He should have seen the warning signs. Earlier today his father had dismissed his back pain as a by-product of too much yard work. He hadn’t mentioned his chest, but his discomfort had been obvious. Why hadn’t Chase put it together?

  “I’ll call 911 and get them to send an ambulance.” Kelly’s voice, full of authority.

  “No!” Chase stopped her before she reached a phone. He’d summoned an ambulance during his mother’s attack, and she’d died before the EMTs had reached the house. “There’s no time. I can get him to a hospital quicker myself.”

  He put his arm around his staggering father to support him, trying to figure out how best to get him into his Jeep. He’d left the vehicle in the garage, the door to which was off the kitchen.

  “Where are your car keys?” Kelly asked.

  It took him a moment to retrieve the information from his scrambled brain. “Hanging from a hook on the side of the refrigerator.”

  She rushed toward the kitchen, calling over her shoulder. “Do you have any aspirin?”

  Of course. Aspirin thinned the blood, lessening the size of blood clots. He should have thought of that.

  “In the long, thin cabinet on the left.”

  Chase’s father was breathing laboriously, leaning heavily on him as they continued walking toward the kitchen.

  “Chest hurts,” he choked out.

  “Hang in there, Dad,” Chase said, fighting rising panic.

  But then Kelly was there, meeting them with a glass of water in one hand, a single aspirin in the other, ordering his father to chew instead of swallowing because she’d read somewhere that chewing got the aspirin into the blood stream faster.

  She stood by while his father crunched the aspirin, then guided the glass to his lips with a sure, steady hand. “Don’t drink too much. Great. That’s great.”

  She was on the move again, opening the door that led from the house to the garage, handing Chase his keys, flipping the switch that operated the automatic garage door, helping Chase situate his father in the Jeep.

  Acting as if she was part of the family instead of a relative stranger.

  Toby, he thought.

  He couldn’t leave Toby with a woman he’d just met. A woman he’d convinced himself not ten minutes ago was lying.

  “I need to take Toby with me,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about Toby,” she said. “I’ll stay here with him.”

  “But—”

  “Listen to me,” she interrupted in that same calm, authoritative voice. “You need to get your father to a hospital. I promise I’ll take good care of your son.”

  Her eyes bored into his, clear and convincing. His father groaned, the sound causing pain to Chase’s own heart.

  “If it’ll ease your mind, call a neighbor while you’re on your way,” she suggested. “But you need to go. Right now!”

  She was right. It was vital to get a heart-attack victim to a hospital as quickly as possible. Doctors could administer drugs that broke up clots, stopping the heart attack in progress and limiting damage. Chase made a snap decision, the only one he could make.

  “Okay, I’m going.” He rushed around to the driver’s side of the Jeep and got in.

  His father was slumped in the seat, secured by the seat belt that Kelly had already fastened.

  “Kelly’s a good woman,” his father muttered out the side of his mouth. “Toby’ll be fine.”

  The fate of his father was less certain. His face was frighteningly pale. Chase turned the key in the ignition, mentally reviewing the winding route to the nearest hospital, figuring out how fast he dared drive to give doctors the best chance to save his father.

  The trip passed in a blur, with Chase dividing his attention between the road and his father. It seemed an eternity before he pulled up to the emergency room.

  Incredibly his father was able to walk into the hospital under his own power, with minimal help from Chase. The E.R. staff didn’t take any chances when Chase reported his father was suffering from chest pain. The nurses hustled him into a wheelchair and transported him into an examining room.

  Somebody asked Chase to move his pickup from the emergency-room entrance. When he returned to the waiting room, an admissions clerk summoned him to her cubicle and instructed him to fill out paperwork.

  Only then did Chase have time to phone Judy Allen, the mother of three who lived a few doors down, to ask her to check on Toby and Kelly. He got a return call an hour later, shortly after the E.R. doctor informed him they were running tests on his father.

  “Kelly has everything under control. She was putting Toby to sleep when I got here, and we’re just sitting here talking,” his neighbor told him. “How’s your father?”

  Chase didn’t find out the answer for another hour, a diagnosis his father was still marveling over much later as they drove home through the dark night, traveling at a much lower rate of speed.

  “Heartburn,” his father repeated. “Can you believe it was only heartburn?”

  “Now that I know you had chili for lunch, yes,” Chase said. “I should have asked what you’d had to eat, but the back pain threw me. That’s a warning sign.”

  “In this case, it was only a sign that I’d been working in the yard,” his father groused.

  “Hindsight,” Chase said, as he pulled the Jeep into the garage. “Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

  The house was silent, the peace almost absolute, suggesting that no one was awake. Chase put a finger to his lips and peeked into the family room.

  Kelly was asleep on the coach, one hand resting on a slightly flushed cheek, still wearing her tennis shoes. Judy was gone.

  “She’s asleep,” he whispered to his father.

  “This old fool needs to get some sleep, too,” his father said. “But better an old fool than a dead fool.”

  His eyes moistening at
the thought that his father could have met the same end as his mother, Chase impulsively embraced the other man. “Good night, Dad,” he whispered.

  “Good night, son.” His father clapped him on the back, his voice as unsteady as Chase’s.

  After his father went upstairs, Chase quietly approached the sofa. Kelly’s face looked even sweeter in sleep, her lashes sweeping her cheeks, her lips slightly parted as she breathed in and out softly.

  He gently removed her shoes, then straightened. She stirred, rearranging herself into a more comfortable position. He held himself immobile, reluctant to make a sound that would wake her. He’d check on Toby next, but he already knew with a soul-deep certainty that the baby was fine.

  The irony struck him even as he watched her sleep.

  A few hours ago he didn’t trust she’d told him the truth about Mandy, but he’d trusted her with something infinitely more precious.

  Toby.

  His desperation to find Mandy had driven his suspicion but his gut made the decision to accept what Kelly had told him at face value.

  What possible reason could she have to lie anyway?

  KELLY AWAKENED THURSDAY morning to the sounds of a baby’s giggles, followed by a man’s deep laughter.

  Unlike the previous afternoon when she’d woken up disoriented after dreaming of Mandy and the kidnapped baby, she knew instantly where she was. She’d fallen asleep on the sofa while waiting for Chase Bradford and his father to return from the hospital.

  She remembered her eyelids growing heavy while she puzzled over why a woman who left behind a baby as darling as Toby would resort to kidnapping. Thinking she’d rest for just a little while, she’d closed her eyes. Now it was morning.

  “Here comes the train,” she heard Chase say. “Choo choo choo choo. Open the tunnel.”

  She swung her legs off the sofa and got to her bare feet. Had someone taken off her shoes? She put them on, then found a bathroom where she smoothed her hair and clothes the best she could before following the voices to the kitchen.

  “Good job, buddy.” Chase sat in front of Toby’s high chair, a small bowl of oatmeal in front of him.