Where is the Baby?

by Charlotte Vale-Allen

  ‘Did you read that piece in the Times a couple of months ago?’ she asked him. ‘It was about the New Jersey state Division of Youth and Family Services searching for eighty children missing from care. The governor has ordered them to search for almost three hundred kids, Brian. Three hundred! I just read an article about more kids missing in Florida. We trust the system to look after children taken into care and they lose them! All over the country, state agencies have no idea of the whereabouts of kids they’ve taken into the system. It’s scary, but it could work for us.’

  ’It’s bad, and yes it could,’ he agreed.

  ‘I have to do what’s right for baby Jill. I’m going to rescue her if it’s the last thing I do,’ she vowed, her eyes on Brian’s. ‘But putting her into the hands of DCF . . .’ She shivered and closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘I will help you,’ Brian promised. ‘And we’ll make damned good and sure that all the i’s are dotted and the t’s get crossed. If it’s the last thing I do, I will make sure nothing goes wrong. This baby will not wind up in the system.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

  Tally sat on her heels and surveyed the garden, deeply satisfied by its perfection. The weeds vanquished for the moment, the soil dark, rich, and moist around the flowers in the large, irregularly shaped bed that curved from the front porch around to the rear of the house. Her first summer in residence, she’d planted bushes alongside the driveway, with lilies of the valley hiding among the hostas on the near side of the property that came right up to the boxwoods rimming the porch.

  Having spent her early years in San Francisco where expansive gardens were all but non-existent, broken by long stretches of time spent with her grandmother in Nevada where plantings consisted primarily of succulents, she loved the wild-seeming arrangement of flowers in the big bed. The outrageous shapes and colors – the bluebells and wild anemones, hollyhocks and trilliums, bleeding heart and jacob’s ladder – constituted a glorious riot that cheered her even in dreary wet weather. Keeping her garden weeded, watered and nourished gave her a pleasure so intense it felt slightly illicit.

  The vegetable patch at the back of the house provided a different sort of pleasure. It also produced far more food than she could consume. So, from the beginning she’d taken to giving Hay the overages for The Farm. And when he’d become head chef almost twelve years earlier, he began creating dishes that were very well received: lightly steamed, still-crisp green beans mixed with Reggiano parmesan and slivers of red onion in virgin olive oil; sautéed tomatoes, fresh basil leaves and walnuts with a splash of balsamic vinegar; a warm new potato salad with bits of crisp bacon, fresh dill and home-made mayonnaise; grilled coins of zucchini with a hint of garlic, topped with a sprinkling of home-made vinaigrette; leaf salads of different varieties with custom dressings. The food was frequently mentioned as one of the attractions of The Farm, now officially a rehab of renown.

  Tally was always the first to taste the recipes he created, and she’d taken to noting the details of their preparation in a notebook she kept solely for that purpose, and taking photographs of the final products. And although Hay couldn’t believe it would ever come to fruition, she was more than halfway through the creation of a cookbook that would, when completed, bear his name.

  She acquired a digital camera and spent the winter that year he became head chef going to twice-weekly classes on Photoshop and page layout up in Great Barrington. She got into the habit of taking advantage of the long drive to stop on her way home at Guido’s for exotic cheeses, out-of-season imported vegetables, and fresh fish or local meat or free-range chicken. A couple of nights a week, Hay would turn The Farm kitchen over to his sous-chefs and head home to Tally’s to prepare dinner for the two of them. And on weekends, except for the Saturday night roast-beef commitment, they usually invited Tyler and Mae to join them for a meal and Faith, too, if she was available.

  Tyler had been captivated by the elegant redhead on sight, when Tally had taken him to dinner at Chez Mae a few days after they’d flown home together from the west coast. He’d stayed at the bed-and-breakfast for several months while he looked at houses. And with typical wit, Mae had observed over breakfast one morning that winter, ‘It’s a good thing there’s only you and Tally. This could get to be an expensive tradition, family members staying here for months while they shop around for houses and then get them fixed up. Mind you, I do enjoy the company. There’s rarely more than a few nights booked in the winter, except for an occasional couple or two visiting someone at The Farm. The rest of the time, I’m rattling around in here thinking it’s about time for me to sell up. I’m getting too old to be up at five thirty in the morning to make breakfast for guests and then somehow manage to hold a conversation while it gets eaten. I’m naturally inclined to be on the surly side first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed that. But don’t say a word if you don’t feel like it,’ Tyler had said with a smile. ‘I will just enjoy looking at you.’

  ‘You’re awfully good for a gal’s ego, I must say.’

  She had finally sold the big six-bedroom house a few years earlier to an enthusiastic young couple who didn’t have a clue about how much work was involved in running a B and B, and she agreed to move with Tyler into the charming little house he’d bought just beyond Kent Falls. They were a fine match, comfortable, conversational and warm. With goodhearted, expansive Mae at his side, Tyler’s long-stunted growth accelerated and he caught up with the man Tally believed he’d always been meant to be. She and her father almost never spoke of his deceased wife, but when he did, Tyler always referred to her as ‘the late, unlamented Ivory.’

  On her knees admiring the garden, Tally realized she was happy. She liked her life. Her father and the wonderful Mae were only a few miles away. There were shopkeepers, people in town who knew her by sight and greeted her warmly. Hay and Faith were fixtures in her life. Via computer she kept in touch with former warden Donna Hughes who’d retired to Las Cruces with her sister and bred Basenjis; with Warren and Alexis, now living in a villa in Mexico to which they were always inviting her; and sometimes by email with Faith when her schedule had her on the run and prevented her from visiting for a week or two.

  Tally’s world was far less fraught than it had been when she was young and her primary source of love and consolation had been with her grandmother at the ranch. Shockingly, she was now four years older than Annalise had been when she’d died. Twenty years before, when Warden Hughes had told her not to look back, Tally would never have believed she’d get to be fifty-seven years old and actually content with her life. When she’d left Warren at the airport and got behind the wheel of that Mercedes, nothing seemed to matter – especially not her life. She’d felt as if she were headed to the end of the universe and would simply drive right off the edge when she got to it. Instead, because of an oddly designed highway and dreadful traffic, she drove into Connecticut. And here she still was, with people she loved, whose entrance into her life and ongoing presence had redeemed her.

  The telephone rang and with a last admiring look at the garden, she got up to go inside to answer. Mental note: buy a cell phone. She hated the idea of appearing to be one of those people who seemed congenitally unable to be separated from their little phones, but it was absurd to have to drop whatever she was doing and hurry inside to answer every time the telephone rang.

  TWENTY

  ‘The house is a furnished rental,’ Brian was saying early Monday morning over the remains of breakfast in a restaurant close to Faith’s office. ‘According to the landlord, who let us in while Brown was out, the guy’s only been there a couple of months. Brown said the mother had died in childbirth. So, naturally, the landlord felt sorry for the guy and he didn’t check Brown’s references the way he normally would have, especially with somebody calling himself John Brown. He figured a widower with a baby, why give him a hard time over what was probably his real name? So Mr Brown moved in with the baby and not a whole
lot else.

  ‘Four of us exercised the search warrant and discovered that Mr Brown has a little soundproofed “studio” in the basement where he can broadcast his activities to order, live online. I’m not going to go into the details of what we found down there. It’d turn your stomach. Once we take this creep tomorrow, everything’s going to be confiscated, and the Feds will keep the Internet connection live while they try to track down the subscribers to Mr Brown’s pay-to-view site and any other persons of interest.’ Brian rolled his eyes and blew out his breath, then took a swallow of his coffee.

  ‘Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, given all the incriminating stuff we found,’ he continued. ‘I’m kind of amazed he’s managed to get by for as long as he has, because little Jill is not the first baby he’s apparently had in his possession. Based on what we found, she’s only the most recent of possibly three infants, maybe more. We didn’t have much time to go through the place thoroughly but we did come up with more than enough to send this guy away for a minimum of twenty-five years without parole. With multiple counts of crimes against children, he’ll probably get a few hundred years, which means life. We don’t want to spook him into going on the run, so a lot of stuff was photographed but nothing was moved and nobody’s going near him until he brings the baby back in this morning for her appointment. Everything’s set.’

  ‘I’m so nervous, Brian. What if he doesn’t show?’

  ‘We’ve got his plate number from the landlord. If Mr Brown doesn’t keep his appointment we’ll allow him fifteen minutes’ leeway before we issue an Amber Alert for the missing baby. If we have to, we’ve got a judge on standby who’ll declare her a ward of the court to legitimize our issuing the alert. Brown won’t get far. One way or another, he’s going down. Easier and faster if he shows up.’

  ‘What do you think happened to the other babies?’ she asked, jittery and chilled.

  ‘We’ll try to find out but there’s almost nothing to go on. Most of what we found was photos and videotapes. There wasn’t much of anything on baby Jill; just a couple of circled names in an address book with arrows pointing to the word “baby” in another circle. One’s a woman in West Virginia with a long sheet for drug offenses who’s definitely of interest and another one, similar profile, in Pennsylvania. At first glance, it looks as if Mr Brown is in the business of buying babies for cash from addicts, which seems to be the case with Jill. No birth certificate, no records except a recent inoculation card but with a different baby’s name, from a doctor in Virginia. Indicators pointing all over the map. We’ll be talking to that Virginia doctor this morning, to see if he has anything to provide us with DNA.’

  Faith listened, wondering how Brown had come to bring the baby to her. She couldn’t help thinking it was purely a random choice but, with luck, if their plan worked, one that would be of significant value to Jill in the long term.

  ‘Every single item of the baby’s stuff is pre-used,’ Brian was saying. ‘The clothes are a mishmash of shapes and sizes. Everything’s old and pretty beat-up, quick grabs from the Goodwill or Sally Ann. No crib. She sleeps in an old Pack ’n Play.’ He made a face and took another swallow of his coffee. ‘He’s set up to hit the road on very short notice. We got an ID on his prints right away, but it’s going to be a while before we get results on his DNA samples. The good part is there are wants out on him, so the arrest is a sure thing. The bad part is they’re mostly for out-of-state traffic violations, the most serious being a charge of reckless driving, doing seventy-seven in a thirty-five residential zone. The rest are a boatload of unpaid parking tickets and two lesser speeding citations. Still, combined, it’s enough to bring him in and hold him ’til we get all the results back from the lab.’

  Every extra bit of detail he provided, combined with the smell of her uneaten scrambled eggs, added to the cramping in her belly and the headache gathering strength at the back of her neck. She could too easily visualize the squalor in which baby Jill was being kept. And she could feel again the grit of the garbage caking the thin layer of carpet beneath her bare feet, could almost smell the funk of dirty bodies. Her fingers knew every inch of the interior of that van; her nose knew the reek of the mound of unwashed laundry that was her bed. She could hear the tinny music that played night and day on the portable radio taped to the dashboard. And suddenly, arbitrarily, she remembered the time the interior of the van went silent and Wolf looked everywhere but couldn’t find any batteries.

  Without warning, Toadman’s fist shot out and smashed into Wolf’s face. A thin whining noise emerged from his mouth as his hands tented over his nose. “go into that 7-eleven over there and buy some fuckin’ batteries!” Toadman screamed. Reaching past Wolf, he threw open the passenger door and shoved Wolf out into the road. Scared Toadman might hit her too, Humaby crawled under the pile of laundry at the back of the van and curled into a knot, hoping they’d forget she was there. She concentrated so hard on not making any sound that she fell asleep. When she awakened the radio was playing again and they were driving on a highway, Wolf and Toadman talking as if nothing had happened. A big Band-Aid ran across Wolf’s swollen nose; his eyes all red-purple.

  Brian had long ago told her that during their interrogations, neither of the men could remember where they were when they snatched the baby they called Humaby. They thought it could’ve been California, or maybe Louisiana, but it might’ve been Indiana. And they thought she was maybe two years old when they took her. They’d had her for three years. Both men were consistent on that point, especially Wolf because he’d just turned fourteen when he saw Toadman come running back to the van carrying the baby.

  Toadman got sentenced to five hundred and twenty-seven years in prison for a hundred and twenty-one counts of kidnapping, false imprisonment, lewd conduct, sodomy, rape, oral copulation and assault. Wolf hadn’t been as crazy and dangerous as Toadman. Sometimes when Toadman wasn’t around Wolf had talked to her, told her things, like how to be polite to people and call them Miss and Mister, and the names of things like TV sets or tractor-trailers or food like pizza or burgers, and not to be scared of policemen. Wolf never hurt her the way Toadman did and if Toadman said she was bad and didn’t give her any food, Wolf would sometimes sneak some to her when Toadman wasn’t looking. If Toadman burned her with cigarettes, Wolf would take an ice cube out of his cup of Coke, wrap it in a napkin and show her how to hold it on the burn. And because Toadman had kidnapped Wolf, too, when he was seven years old, Wolf’s original sentence of a hundred and ten years was reduced to twenty-five. He served eleven years before being paroled in 1985. After completing his parole, he vanished.

  ‘The Lazarus parents never stopped bemoaning the fact that I didn’t attend the trial,’ she said quietly. ‘Did I ever tell you that?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure you did.’ Brian made a face.

  ‘I was recuperating from surgery,’ she reminded him, ‘and his parents actually tried to persuade Stefan to take me to court. But Monica said she’d report him to the police for child endangerment if he did that. I never saw her so angry, before or after.’

  ‘She did phone the chief,’ Brian told her. ‘He promised her he’d arrest every one of them if they brought you anywhere near the courtroom.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. She was sweet, Monica.’

  ‘She cared about you.’

  ‘I know.’ She was silent for a moment, then said, ‘They were furious that I never saw the tapes or photographs so they couldn’t get my reactions to any of that.’

  ‘Jesus! What the hell was wrong with those people?’

  ‘They were heartless,’ she said flatly. ‘They never for a moment let me forget a bit of it. They made me feel as if everything that happened to me was my own fault; they made me wish I was dead. And Stefan didn’t help me until I staged a scene he couldn’t ignore so I could escape from that overdecorated house of horrors. He’s come a long way in the past twenty years, once he also got away from his parents. He’s recognizably human since he g
ave up his practice and began teaching. I’ve audited a couple of his personality study classes and he’s actually a great teacher.’

  ‘Good to know that,’ Brian said neutrally, never a fan of Stefan Lazarus. ‘As for that other stuff, the captain and I made sure no one would ever see any of that evidence. After the case was closed, he and I took all of it down to the basement at the station house and put it into the furnace. Probably broke a dozen laws but we knew there was no chance of an appeal for that Toadman scum. So now,’ he said, following the course of her thinking, ‘once we take Mr So-called Brown into custody and see to it that he gets put away for a good long time, we’ll burn every last bit of media in his possession. We won’t be able to do anything about the stuff that’s already out there: the Web and hard-core kiddy porn purveyors, but no one will ever know who that baby was. We’ll do everything we can to protect little Jill.’

  ‘She has Chlamydia,’ she told him. ‘Also symptoms of thrush. This baby is in a lot of pain. She needs treatment, and soon.’

  ‘That means Brown is a walking disease factory.’

  ‘At the very least,’ Faith said angrily. ‘I want him dead.’ She vented her feelings and then, as had only happened a few times in her life, she broke into tears. Chagrined at this display of weakness, she pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Brian.’

  ‘Don’t be, honey. There’s no shame in tears.’

  ‘I’m a wreck,’ she told him. ‘My hands won’t stop shaking and I’ve got a headache the size of Rhode Island.’

  He chuckled and reached across to place his hand over hers. ‘I love you to pieces, kiddo. I loved you the first minute I saw you.’