Assuming, of course, that anyone was looking.
Forcing an impassive expression, Ellie returned her attention to the man still positioned in front of the front door. With thinning, chrome-colored hair and a glittering diamond on his manicured pinkie, the statesmanlike gentleman exuded an air of distinguished confidence and regarded Ellie with something akin to sympathy.
- A small advantage. Ellie took it, gazing hopefully into eyes reflecting the same silvery sheen as neat brows curved above them. “Please, can you at least tell me where am I?”
“That’s not your concern.” A melancholy tone, an air of resignation, as if responding to a role he found distasteful but sadly necessary.
Still, his empathetic eyes made him the closest thing to an ally Ellie had, so she focused her attention on him. “Am I a prisoner?”
It was Marjorie who replied. “Of course not, dear. You are our guest.”
The crisp response iced air, sent a chill down Ellie’s spine. She glanced over her shoulder, saw what she’d expected in the woman’s frigid gaze. “It’s my understanding that guests are allowed to come and go as they please,” Ellie replied.
A grim twitch of crimson lips. “And where would you go?” the woman asked with deceptive courtesy. “Would you force a helpless infant to spend the night on a filthy park bench, a cardboard box in an alley filled with winos and junkies? That sounds like child abuse to me, Ms. Malone. Child abuse is a crime.”
“So is kidnapping.” With her knees shaking so hard she feared they’d buckle, Ellie confronted the diamond-pinkie man who continued to block the front door. “You don’t want to be an accessory to this, I can see it in your eyes. Please help me, help us.” Her voice cracked as she hugged Daniel to her breast.
The man wavered, slipped a glance past her shoulder as if seeking a clue from the icy blonde at the base of the stairs, then met Ellie’s frantic gaze with one of sad resignation. “There are no illegalities here. We offered you transportation. You accepted and accompanied us of your own free will.”
“I was misled.” Her voice cracked. She fought to steady it. “You brought me here under false pretenses.”
“We made no representations false or otherwise. You have absolutely no basis for either civil litigation or criminal complaint.”
“That sounds like lawyer talk to me.” When he offered no reply, Ellie confronted him directly. “Are you an attorney?”
He hesitated. “I am.”
“Then you should know better.”
Clearly unhappy about the situation, his tone softened from crisply professional to compassionate. “I understand your concern, Ms. Malone, but sadly, the discomfort to which you’ve been subjected has been necessitated by circumstance.”
“What circumstance?”
“All will be explained in due time,” he assured her, then was distracted as his sandy-haired companion returned. The two men conferred briefly before the returning man nodded curtly and left through the front door.
A perfumed breeze brushed past Ellie as Marjorie Mackenzie moved to confer with the attorney. They whispered a moment, casting an occasional rueful glance toward the frightened, unwilling houseguest, and coming to apparent agreement just as the first man reentered the foyer carrying Ellie’s backpack and duffel.
“Of course,” Marjorie murmured, scraping Ellie with a faux-bright hostess smile. “You must be exhausted, poor thing, and famished. We’ll have the cook prepare you a meal.”
Before Ellie could refuse, Daniel began to wriggle and fuss. She shifted him in her arms, shushing him softly.
Marjorie’s eyes lit like neon. “He’s awake.” She hurried across the slick foyer as fast as her stiletto heels would allow, gasped in delight as he focused his tiny eyes on her. “Oh, how sweet, how utterly adorable. He has your eyes, doesn’t he? Rather exotically shaped and quite handsome.”
Something in Marjorie’s wistful tone kept Ellie from backing away. Instead, she studied the woman’s luminous eyes, was struck by their instantaneous transformation from glacial to glowing.
“Oh, look at his tiny hands. How perfect they are.” Clearly entranced, Marjorie reached out a smooth, crimson-tipped finger as if to stroke the flexing baby fists. She hesitated, raised a questioning glance. “May I touch him?” .
For reasons Ellie couldn’t begin to fathom, she allowed it, and was deeply affected by the exquisite wonder in the woman’s expression as she caressed the infant’s delicate arm.
“I had no idea baby skin was so soft, like freshly opened rose petals.” Daniel chose that moment to yawn, which sent Marjorie into a frenzy of delighted laughter. “Oh, my! That was a big one! Did you hear the precious little squeak he made?” She laughed again, looked up with surprise and such genuine jubilance that Ellie found herself smiling back. “He seems so healthy . and happy,” Marjorie cooed. “And look at those adorable fat cheeks. He must eat very well.”
“Daniel has always had a good appetite.”
“Of course, he would,” the woman gushed, hesitantly touching the silken fur on his bare scalp. “Culinary expertise runs in the family. Stanton has always been quite the gourmet. Look! I do believe he has Stanton’s mouth, don’t you think? Yes, yes, I’m sure of it.”
At the mention of her ex-lover, Ellie’s stomach tightened. She licked her chafed lips, took a wobbly step backward, reinforced her wariness. Throughout her ordeal, Ellie had been vaguely aware that a major player in this sad drama had yet to make an appearance.
As much as she’d dreaded facing Stanton Mackenzie, she now realized that he represented her last hope. If she could plead her case directly, perhaps she could convince him how detrimental separating a child from its mother would be. After all, she and Stanton had been close once. Before they’d become lovers, they had been friends, close friends. Friends sharing thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, even some secrets, although clearly not all.
Ellie’s gaze settled on the wife Stanton had never mentioned. Although the man she remembered had always been arrogant and somewhat self-indulgent, he had also been reasonable, logical and basically well-intentioned. The man for whom Ellie had once cared deeply would never sanction what was happening now. He’d certainly had his faults, a lot of them, but he’d never been deliberately cruel, and he’d have never condoned any behavior that could result in physical or emotional harm to a child.
In her panicked mind, Ellie found herself rationalizing the cruelty of Stanton’s initial betrayal by reminding herself that he loved children. She went a step further by presuming the discovery that his wife couldn’t provide children must have been a bitter disappointment, bitter enough to muffle his conscience and corrupt an already duplicitous nature with an act so vile, so diabolically immoral that the man Ellie had known could never have conceived it.
At least, not on his own.
Marjorie Mackenzie’s rapt fascination with her husband’s child gave Ellie pause. The woman was beyond enamored; her eyes glowed with the reverence of one worshipping a small god. For the first time, Ellie wondered if Stanton also might have been a victim, the willing pawn of a wife so desperate for children that no crime was too sinister, no circumstance too heinous in pursuit of her maternal goal.
It was all speculation, of course, with no proof beyond the chilling adulation in eyes capable of shifting from reverent to frigid in the space of a single heartbeat.
Ellie stepped back, held Daniel beyond reach. The woman’s smile faded, her gaze cooled. A sick heaviness settled in the pit of Ellie’s stomach, although she forced a light, conversational tone. “I’d like to speak with Stanton now.”
The chill drained from Marjorie’s eyes, replaced by an emotion that Ellie couldn’t quite identify. “Of course. This way, please.” Pivoting sharply, she glided toward the stairs, mounting them with practised sophistication so that the swishing hem of her flowing silk gown drew attention to well-turned ankles and shapely calves. She paused where the staircase curved, glanced down to see that Ellie had made no mo
ve to follow. “I thought you wished to see my husband.”
Ellie tightened her grip on Daniel. “Where is he?”
“Waiting for his son,” Marjorie replied quietly. She spoke softly, with polished calm, but her gaze reflected a turbulence of emotion so profound it defied description. It could have been sadness; it could have been madness.
Whatever her shuttered gaze concealed, Ellie instinctively knew there were answers at the top of those stairs, answers to questions that had haunted her for months, answers that would change the course of her life—and Daniel’s—forever.
The woman was adamant, impatient, clearly annoyed. Samuel didn’t care. After two days of futile searching, he’d finally connected with the deputy who’d escorted Ellie and Daniel from the cabin and wasn’t about to hang up the telephone just because a harried floor nurse with the girth of a sumo wrestler had chosen that moment to take his blood pressure.
Shifting the receiver to his right hand, he flung his left arm out to pacify the frustrated woman, then returned to his conversation with Deputy Shaeffer. “Look, Deputy, I’ve already discovered that the custody case was dismissed months ago, as was the failure to appear warrant, but you told the chopper pilot that you had orders to escort Miss Malone and her son back to Sacramento. What I want to know is who gave you those orders, and under what authority were they issued?”
A faint rustling filtered through the wire. “I’m not in a position to reveal that information.”
.Samuel’s knuckles whitened around the receiver. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before, from your boss and his boss, and just about everyone else involved in this dirty little scheme. The thing is, Deputy, no one has seen or heard from Ellie and her baby since you handed them over to those goons at the airport. If anything happens to either of them, heads will roll, and yours is going to be first on the block.”
There was a startled hiss, as if the deputy had sucked a sharp breath. “No one has seen them since they left the airport?”
Samuel didn’t reply. He couldn’t. A boiling terror throbbed just below the surface. Shaeffer had been his last hope of finding Ellie and Daniel, and clearly the bewildered deputy didn’t have a clue where they were.
After having pulled every string he could get his hands on, besieging every contact he’d ever made on the job, Samuel managed to have a squad car check the Mackenzie residence only to discover the home was vacant except for a servant who’d informed the officers the Mackenzies had left a few days earlier, ostensibly for an extended European vacation.
Now there were no clues, no sightings, no leads to follow. Ellie and Daniel seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.
A frantic voice dragged Samuel’s attention back to the telephone. “I was just supposed to escort them back,” Shaeffer was saying. “That’s all. I’m so far out of the loop I don’t even know where the rope is tied.”
“Tell it to the grand jury,” Samuel snapped. “Because I’m going straight to the district attorney, the justice department. Hell, I’ll go to the White House if I have to, whatever it takes to find Ellie and her son, and frankly I don’t much care who ends up being the scapegoat when this mess makes front page news.”
Clearly shaken, Shaeffer’s tone mellowed from belligerent to contrite. “Look, I was told my boss got a call from his boss who got a call from someone with serious political clout.” The deputy lowered his voice. “I don’t know the whys and wherefores, but it seems that the lady had some folks in very high places looking for her. My job was simply to escort her back to Executive Airport and turn her over.”
“Turn her over to wh—”
“Mr. Evans, please!” The aggravated nurse yanked his arm flat, skewered him with a hard stare.
He ignored her, shifted the phone. “The men in suits who put her in the dark sedan, who were they?”
“I don’t know their names, but—” Shaeffer’s whisper echoed as if he’d cupped his hand around the mouthpiece “—the car had Capitol tags.”
Samuel blinked in comprehension. Capitol tags. A legislative vehicle. Ellie wasn’t kidding when she’d said that Mackenzie knew all the right people. He swore under his breath, pounded a fist on the mattress as the nurse was trying to inflate the pressure cuff.
“Mr. Evans!” Using hands the size of meat hooks, she ripped off the cuff, glaring at him. “I have other patients.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, wishing she’d attend to those other patients and leave him alone. .
The frustrated woman readjusted the pressure cuff muttering to herself, nodded at the stripe-suited young woman who’d just entered to remove Samuel’s untouched supper tray. “Might as well take it,” the nurse growled to the startled aide. “Mr. Evans here has been so danged busy flapping his mouth there’s no time to use it for anything else.”
As Samuel returned to his phone conversation, the nurse suddenly stuffed a thermometer in his mouth. He spit it out, gave her a frigid stare. “Look, just leave everything. I’ll take my own vitals and update the damned chart when I’m done here.”
She snatched the thermometer off the bedclothes, folded arms the size of small boulders. “I suppose you want to take your own blood sample, too.”
“Sure, whatever.” He turned his back on her. “Did either of the men who took Ms. Malone mention where they were going, or who they were working for? Did you note the license plate number? Can you tell me anything, anything at all?”
“Well...” The deputy paused as if glancing around to ensure he wouldn’t be overheard. “You didn’t hear this from me, but scuttlebutt is that one of them is a muckety-muck in the governor’s reelection campaign.”
“The governor?” Everything fell into place like a line of kicked dominoes when Samuel recalled Ellie mentioning that Mackenzie’s brother-in-law worked in the governor’s office. “Listen, Shaeffer, I think I know where Ellie and Daniel are being held. Send a unit over to—Ouch!” He yanked his stinging arm away as the smug nurse laid a hypodermic aside. “What the hell was that?”
“You need rest.” She plucked the phone from his limp hand, hung it up looking quite pleased with herself. “Doctor prescribed a stronger sedative.”
“No, wait—” The room was spinning darkly.
“Next time your lady friend calls, I’m going to tell her what a cranky boy you’ve been,” the nurse said cheerfully. “Now, let’s try our blood pressure again, shall we?”
“Lady friend?” Samuel fought the encroaching dizziness, grasped at the nurse’s nimble fingers. “Someone has been calling?”
“Twice a day since you arrived. Never asks to speak with you, never leaves her name, but she certainly sounds concerned about you.”
Ellie. It had to have been Ellie. “Call police...trace call...” The sedative grabbed him by the throat, choking him into unconsciousness. “Stop...you don’t... understand...”
A relieved chuckle. “Nightie-night, Mr. Evans.”
It was the last thing Samuel heard as he drifted into a stuporous slumber.
The night sky was clear, peaceful, awash with thousands of twinkling stars nested in a stellar cradle. Beyond the isolated window through which Ellie gazed, a glittering neon shawl, sewn with freeway ribbons of crimson and white, wrapped the city’s shoulders. The city wore plaid, she realized, a luminescent version of the flannel shirts Samuel favored.
Samuel. God, she missed him. Her fingers flexed over the nightstand phone before she withdrew them. He was sleeping now, or so the floor nurse had told her an hour ago. The same nurse had also reassured Ellie that Samuel’s condition continued to improve. He might be released this weekend.
She smiled, thinking that he must be going stir-crazy. Samuel hated to be sick, hated to be constricted by circumstance. During the weariest days of their confinement, when storms had raged for days on end and the knotty-pine walls seemed more prison than sanctuary, Samuel had prowled the cabin like a caged animal.
At the time, Ellie’s own sense of peace and contentment prevented he
r from understanding how trapped he must have felt. She understood it now. She understood everything now. She even understood herself.
Too bad that the knowledge had come too late. Too late for her, too late for Samuel. Certainly too late for Stanton.
If only she’d known—
Cutting off the wish with a sigh, Ellie turned from the window of the plushly appointed lace-and-silk room she’d occupied since she’d arrived three nights ago, when the gray-suited men had whisked her off in a dark sedan, and turned her entire world upside down.
If onlys were useless. Ellie knew that. Wishing didn’t change the way things were, and blame had no power to heal. It wouldn’t bring back the past, recreate the time she’d wasted running from reality, running from herself. Fear of confrontation had created both redemption and ruin, a life of refusals leading to destruction and bitter loss.
If only she’d known.
But she hadn’t known, hadn’t given herself the chance to know, because she’d followed the only course of action she’d understood at the time, behaved as she always had when confronted by a problem. She’d fled without considering the reasons behind Stanton’s desperation or the dire consequence of avoiding that which she could not, would not understand.
Ellie knew the truth now, understood everything. Everything except how to live with the pain. And the loss.
And the guilt.
“Strip those pants off, mister. I want your butt bare, and I want it in bed.”
Huffing and hopping, Samuel shoved a foot into the denim tube, yanked, zipped, scraped the scowling nurse with a look. “You took my phone.”
“You weren’t getting enough rest.”
As if to prove her right, Samuel staggered back a step, sat on the edge of the bed, winded and wheezing. He took a strained breath, reached behind his head in a vain attempt to unfasten the hospital gown tied at his nape. Panting, he gave up, eyed the tank of a woman blocking his only exit. “I’m checking myself out.”
Baby In His Cradle Page 19
