Midnight Baby

CHAPTER 17

“Got it?” Mike asked.

“I think so.” I turned my face into the icy wind that whistled down through a pass in the mountains above Virginia Sinclair’s mansion. A slice of moon slipped out from under the heavy clouds, casting long, moving shadows like lumbering giants on the slope. Coyotes on a crag nearby saw the moon and set up a howl. Had the coyotes scared little Hillary? Or had they scared Amy Elizabeth?

Mike’s face was in shadow, too, but I knew the expression without seeing it, jaw set, eyes flashing. Controlled rage.

“The situation has changed,” he said. “My people have to get with the federales in Baja, get them to bring in Elizabeth Ramsdale for a rubber-hose job, have them loosen her up for us. I would like to fly down there to talk to her, but I think we’ll let Ma Bell reach out and touch her. Make that Mamacita Bell. I just hope she’s still there. Right now, I’m going to take you home.”

“What about George?”

“If he’s on his boat, the Coast Guard will find him. If he’s with Elizabeth, I will fly down. Him we’ll just shoot, save the state some grief.”

“You talk tough when you’re upset. But it’s still a good idea.”

I put my cheek against his chest and squeezed my eyes shut. The air was clear and sweet, but I couldn’t seem to get enough of it past the constriction in my chest. “He sold his daughter.”

“Looks that way,” Mike said.

“But did he kill her?” I asked. “Could a father be so depraved?”

“It happens all the time.”

We held on to each other as we walked back to the car. After we had left Mrs. Sinclair’s, I had only made it around the first curve in the road before I lost the double-cheese Bingo Burger we had picked up at a drive-through on the way to Pasadena. I had eaten it before I knew that a burger franchise was the going price for kindergarten-age blondes.

Times had been hard for the Metranos. I had seen where they lived, a lot of little girls packed into tight quarters. A lot of shoes to buy in that family, and food, and doctors, all on the earnings of a coffee-shop waitress. I’m sure there was a sense of desperation. A case could be made for a certain nobility in the gesture of handing over one of the children to a rich family to give her privileges and opportunities her parents could not provide. And giving more to the other four girls as part of the bargain. Grimm’s Fairy Tales stuff again.

The wicked witch in this story was George Metrano’s affair with a craps table. If it had been me, I would not have been able to swallow the bread a deal like that had put on the family table. Maybe that was why George had this compulsion to lose it all. I’m no Freud. I couldn’t explain what he had done. Even thinking about it had made me ill. If he had any human feeling at all, he must have suffered. I only hoped that every waking moment for the last ten years had given him the same torment his wife had suffered when she lost her child. Her torment times ten.

Mike’s city car rattled down the hill. The shocks were shot, the torsion bars worn. All the bouncing and swaying did my queasy stomach no good. I rolled down my window and gulped air, my hair blown back away from my face. I didn’t remember closing my eyes, so it was a surprise when I opened them and found myself in the garage of Mike’s condo. He was in my open car door, gently pulling me by the hand.

“Come on, baby,” he said. “Let’s put you to bed.”

I got out, shaky when I stood up, still half asleep. We went into the condo through the connecting door between the garage and the kitchen and I walked straight to the answering machine on the counter next to Mr. Espresso for messages.

Lyle had called. Everything was fine. My grant administrator still wanted a report. Guido had called to say that he had a picture for us and was driving over to deliver it. If we weren’t home, he would stick it in the front door. Before Guido’s message had clicked off, Mike was on his way to the front door.

I stayed to listen to the rest of the messages. Casey called, bubbling. She had an audition with the Joffrey Ballet. She needed money for new toe shoes.

When Casey hung up, I heard the deadbolt on the front door clunk a second time and Mike came back waving an envelope with “Love, Guido” scrawled across the front.

“You ready to see this?” He slit open the envelope with a steak knife and pulled out a single four-by-six color snapshot. He showed me the face of the man who had slashed Mike’s tires. It was almost cartoonish, this computer-manipulated composite, but the face was whole and recognizable. I had only seen George Metrano once, the afternoon in the morgue with Leslie, but I knew him.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“Afraid so. George Metrano.”

“At least now you know he’s not in Baja with Elizabeth, not if he was in town this afternoon.”

“Damn. It’s so much easier to take out an asshole below the border. We’ll just hope he rabbits when we catch him and we’ll shoot him on the fly, huh?”

“I’ll help you.” My voice sounded thick. “What did he possibly have to gain by killing her?”

“If. If he killed her. Maybe the question is, what did he stand to lose if he didn’t?” Mike rubbed his face wearily, rasping the whiskers on his chin.

I touched his face. “If Mrs. Sinclair was correct and Elizabeth inherits nothing, then who is Randy’s heir?”

“I could make a pretty good guess.”

“Check it out, will you?” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.” He chuckled. “Anything else?”

I looked inside the envelope. “Guido only gave us one print.”

“One’s all we need. It stays with me. You’re retiring.”

“Retiring for the night, you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” He slipped George back into the envelope. “I have to get on the horn and make arrangements. I’ll come tuck you in later.”

“Wake me if I fall asleep,” I said, yawning. I kissed his cheek and headed for the bedroom. I was tired, but I knew I couldn’t sleep; I had seen the face.

Mike had unpacked my duffel, hung up my two clean shirts with his, put my dirty clothes in a pillowcase on the closet floor, lined my shoes up next to his. I had never seen my shoes next to his before. Somehow, the sight touched me.

I fussed a bit, cleared away yesterday’s newspapers from the bed, smoothed the quilt. This would make four nights in a row in the same bed. I liked the number.

With nothing else to do, I brushed my teeth, stripped off my clothes, and ran a hot shower. I was standing with my head against the tile, steamy water pounding on my spine, when Mike opened the shower door.

“We’re waiting for the head shed to work its way through diplomatic channels,” he said. “As soon as the connection is made with the federales, I’m going into the office to make the call.”

“I want to go with you.”

“You can’t. The boss will be there.”

“No fair.” I tried to pout, but I had water pouring in my eyes. The best I could do was squint and puff out my lower lip.

He laughed. “Don’t use all the hot water. I need a shower, too.”

“You can get in here with me.”

“I’d like to, but I wouldn’t be able to hear the phone.”

“Will you scrub my back?”

“Hand me the soap.”

I gave him the soap and my back. He started with my shoulders, massaging with strong fingers slippery with lather. I felt the tight muscles release. It was so delicious and so relaxing it was all I could do to stand upright.

He worked down my back, occasionally letting his hot, soapy hands slip around front, teasing. He circled my waist so his thumbs could work the knots in the small of my back. I was saying bright things like ooh and aah, writhing to direct him. Then he was all of a sudden in the shower with me, in his clothes, his body pressed tight behind me.

His lips nipped along the base of my neck, giving me goose bumps despite the steam billowing around us. He ran his tongue along the back of my ear, followed the stream of water that sluiced over my collarbone and down my breast, where he held his hand like a dam.

I turned around then, and began working on the annoyingly small buttons of his wet shirt. He worked my buttons with amazingly skillful tongue and fingers. I thought suddenly of something Guido had said, about making love to a man as experienced as Mike. I didn’t care where Mike had learned what he knew. As long as he kept doing it. With me.

Around one, the summons came from headquarters. We were dry by then, napping on top of the quilt when the phone jolted us awake. Elizabeth was being held in a Baja jail as a courtesy, but the federales in Cabo San Lucas wouldn’t hold her for very long.

While he dressed, I made Mike coffee and a sandwich and then kissed him goodbye. Very Dolly Domestic. And sweet. Until I had a flash of life with Mike, but without Lyle. Leaving Lyle would be like leaving one’s widowed mother alone. My stomach started to rumble again. I sat in the kitchen and stared back at the red light on Mr. Espresso, hoping for some revelation to come.

At two, when nothing had resolved itself, I slipped into a few more clothes and some shoes and went for a drive, a change of scenery to sort things through.

In the middle of the night, when there isn’t construction going on, the freeways become free ways. Once I realized where I was headed, I was impatient to get there. I pushed the little rental Toyota up to ninety, slowed to maneuver around a slow drunk, then hit the pedal again.

I was in Long Beach in under thirty minutes.

My big regret was that I had never met Randy. Never would. He was the key player in all of this, and I thought it would have been awfully damned interesting to hear what he had to say, an addition to the My Most Memorable Character collection.

From what people had told me, Randy would go to just about any lengths to get his own way. If sheer force of his considerable charm, stubborn will, and cussed determination didn’t work, he used money. Sometimes he used money for bribery, as I believe he had with George Metrano, as he had tried with Lacy. Sometimes he used the threat of withholding money, as he had with his ex-wives, to maintain control.

I keep telling Casey that she should be careful what she wishes for, because her wishes might come true. Apparently no one had ever warned Randy. Or maybe he hadn’t listened very carefully, because what he wished for ended up killing him. Poor Randy.

At two-thirty, all the bars and clubs on Second Street were closed. All the chickies were in for the night. The narrow streets of Naples were deserted. I drove through the alley behind the Ramsdale house, saw no one about, and parked two houses farther down.

When I got out of the car, I had one of Mike’s big, heavy Kel-Lite flashlights in my hand. I had picked it up on my way out of the kitchen.

Mike had told me one time that when he worked street patrol in uniform, back before his hair turned white, the Kel-Lite had been his compliance tool of choice during hand-to-hand brawling. Better than his service revolver as a cudgel. His stories always failed the political correctitude tests. Sometimes their brutality set my back molars on edge. Most of the time, they made me laugh, because I knew there was no malice in anything he had done. Times have changed. Acceptable police practices have changed. So has Mike.

Anyway, I carried the flashlight as a sort of talisman against anything that might be waiting in the dark. I lurked down the alley. If anyone had seen me, and been worried, he or she would have called in to report a burglar. I heard no sirens, so I lurked on.

The back door of the Ramsdale house was heavy oak. I longed for Martha’s key. But I would have had to break into her house to get it. So I broke into the Ramsdales’ instead.

Randy’s study was on Martha’s side of the house. I knew she was gone, so unless I made a big noise, no one was likely to hear me. I used the Kel-Lite on the pane in the French doors closest to the latch. The shattered glass made less noise than I had expected as it fell onto a doormat inside.

I tried the knob. It turned, but the door wouldn’t give. I could see hardware for a floor bolt, so I broke another pane and I could pull up the bolt. The door opened smoothly, finally, and I slipped inside, stepping wide around the glass.

I stepped inside and waited for my heart to stop pounding, a wide spot in the checkerboard of shadows, trying to listen to the house. All was still except for the ticking of a clock somewhere. Relying on my imperfect recollection of the floor plan, I felt my way through the dark and up the stairs to Hillary’s room.

I went straight to her bookcase and used the flashlight only long enough to make sure that I had taken down the right books – the photo album and the yearbook. Then I went back out into the hall. I listened to be sure all was quiet before I went back down.

Thinking it had all been too easy, I pulled the French doors shut behind me and rebolted them. I was so slick, I thought, I could reel in a little extra money as a cat burglar on the side. Send Casey to an Ivy League school if she wanted. Or to London for ballet. I felt more hyped than scared when I came out into the narrow passage between the houses.

I flattened myself against the wall beside a skinny juniper, and looked for trouble. The alley end, where I was headed, was clear. To be cautious, because my dad when he taught me to drive told me always to look both ways in case a comet, or whatever, came shooting up behind me, I looked down to the canal end, too.

On the water, things are always moving: lights, boats, ducks, gulls. What alarmed me was a block of dark stillness against the motion. I froze, tried to focus on it. I was closer to the canal than to the alley. I tried to figure whether I had a big enough head start to make it back to the car if that dark shape decided to chase me. I hated myself for being so anal that I had locked the car – my caution had added two or three seconds to my escape time.

I thought about the alternatives, and chose one. Clutching the books tight against my chest, the Kel-Lite straight in front, I stepped away from the wall and shot the light into the dark.

What I saw was an old wooden dinghy that had been hauled up out of the water. It leaned against one of the support pilings of the Ramsdale dock. Next to it was a can of caulking. Kids, I thought, doing some boat-repair work on a vacant dock.

Feeling relieved, if a bit of a jerk, I switched off the light, quickly reevaluated my future as a burglar, and turned toward the alley.

My dad also taught me to look three times, left right left, before committing to a turn into traffic. I forgot that part at the wrong time.

When I spun back, he was there, blocking the passage to the alley maybe four yards in front of me. I flashed the light on him.

He flinched, raised an arm to shield his eyes.

“Officer Flint,” I shouted in the direction of the shattered French door. “Metrano is here. Have the alley sealed.”

George Metrano smiled, monstrous in the beam of light. “I watched you go in. You were alone.”

“Cops have had the place staked out.”

“No, they haven’t.” He started toward me. “What did you take?”

“Not a goddam thing.” I gripped my booty tighter, and screamed, “Flint, out here, now!”

“Shut up.” He hissed as he lunged, moving fast for a big man.

I ran for the canal. Ivy vines snagged my shoes and ripped up from their roots – I didn’t have time to aim for the artfully placed stepping stones. If I tripped, I knew he would be all over me.

I felt him reach for me, a push of air from behind. I ducked to the side, used my flashlight hand to right myself, and ran on. I didn’t have time to find him back there. I only knew he was too close. My back arched away from him, giving me a few more inches of time.

I came out on the sidewalk, careened around the corner, and headed toward the nearest bridge. I miscalculated my speed at the turn and lost both my footing and my lead. As I scrambled to find solid ground underneath, he dove. And he got me.

Metrano’s huge hand caught me just below the knee, flipped me, and sent me skidding face forward onto the concrete. I kept the books, but lost most of the skin on my knuckles.

He slid his hand up my leg for a better grip. I managed to roll onto my back. I cocked my free foot to flatten his smug face, but he caught it, too. He was on his knees, I was on my butt, struggling to get upright, straining to wrench free as he tried to get over me, dominate me, pin me down. I hate to be pinned. Especially by a guy with a thing for razors. Every time I tried to sit up, he yanked my legs and sent me backward again. One big jerk had sufficient force to knock me on my head hard enough to make my ears ring.

I was plain old mad. On my way up again, I swung the Kel-Lite with everything I had, a well-placed backhand stroke. He was turning to see where the blow was coming from when Kel-Lite and face bones connected. He screamed like something on Wild Kingdom. Warm blood sprayed through the air and hit my face. I retched at the smell of it.

The follow-up shot I gave him didn’t have as much force as the first blow, sufficient to raise a dummy bump on his temple, but not enough to break the skin. It did motivate him to try something else on me. When he moved his hands higher on my calves, looking for a better grip, I found an instant of hesitation to slide through. I snatched one leg free and got some leverage to kick away from his hold. Like a scared bunny, I scooted the hell away.

I felt the wood of the dock under me. He never gave me more than a few inches of lead, but I used them to scramble to my feet. A yard from the edge of the dock, I sprang for the water, a high, off-balance dive. He snatched at my trailing foot. I felt the hard parts of his hand collide with my shoe as the black water rose to meet me.

I coursed down through frigid salt water so dark I could see nothing. I was worried about the bottom, about sharp obstacles among the boat trash that had been dumped into the canal. But I worried about George Metrano more. I felt him hit the water somewhere above me, felt the shock waves generate down from him.

When my dive lost its initial momentum, I pushed myself deeper, groping ahead for debris. My lungs ached, my head throbbed, but I still had the books against my chest. A reflex grip, probably. Not that a photo album was what he was after.

The sharp barnacles on the dock pilings snagged my sleeve, and I reached for them. I wrapped an arm around the piling long enough to kick off my heavy shoes. Then, with the barnacles cutting into my hands like embedded shards of glass, I used the piling to control my rise to the surface.

When I broke through to the still, dark night, I gulped sweet air, got my bearings, and ducked down again, pushing myself beneath the Ramsdale dock. I pressed my face up to the gaps between the planks and managed to find breathable air. I listened for George, but all I could hear was the water lapping around my ears. I was so cold I ached all over. The salt water burned my scraped knuckles, stung my eyes. But I waited.

It is nearly impossible to keep track of time under water.

After what seemed like hours but was probably only a few minutes, I located George. I had lost the flashlight somewhere in my flight. Apparently, George had found it. A shaft of light between the planks hit my eye, so I slid down deeper until it passed overhead.

I couldn’t stay there. So I came up for a last gulp of air, then dove down again through the water, pushing myself deep into Randy Ramsdale’s grave. Around me, the light cut through the water like thrusts of a sword, but I was so close under him that the light passed over me.

I felt my way along the slimy seawall until I came to Martha’s dock. I rose again for air, dove again, and continued along for two more docks.

I passed under a bridge and found moss-covered stone steps that led up to the sidewalk. The steps were too slippery to use, but I hauled myself up by the metal rail. Sheltered, I hoped, by a cluster of potted geraniums, I lay curled into a ball on the rough concrete and filled my lungs, gasping, shaking with cold. Green slime clung to my clothes. I reeked of boat fuel.

I risked raising my head to see over the pots. George was still searching the canal for me. He scuttled down the sidewalk in the opposite direction, knifing the water with his beam again and again. When he headed back my way, I was still out of breath. I knew it was only a matter of moments before he gave up on the water and looked elsewhere, the most obvious place being the alley where I had left the car. I had to be history before George got there.

When he leaned out over the water to follow his light, I snaked across the sidewalk, staying low. I slipped between two houses barefoot, managed to scale a tall wooden gate without rousing the neighborhood, and dropped into the alley. I prised the car keys out of my pocket and held them in one hand, the dripping books in the other, and ran down the alley, leaving a wet trail behind me.

Old George was no dummy. I was just faster. He came out into the alley farther along, running hard, dragging that leg again. I had the key out and ready. I was still shivering, so my hand shook, but I got the key into the lock, me into the car, and the doors locked again before he could touch me.

His face contorted with purple rage, the sinews of his neck pulled taut with the force he used to hurl obscenities at me. I couldn’t understand a word, though the gist was clear enough.

I cranked the ignition and pushed my face up to my window. “Motherfucking child-killer,” I screamed, jamming the car into drive. As I accelerated away, the heavy Kel-Lite crashed through the window behind my head. Shards of glass sprayed around me, a thousand points of treacherous light. Ducking from flying glass, dodging trash cans and parked cars in the alley, I got away clean. All things considered.

I was looking for a phone booth to call the police when I heard the sirens pouring in off Second Street. Always a courteous driver – as Dad taught me – I pulled to the side and let them pass. The cavalry was riding in to handle things. I would handle the details later. The next item of business on my agenda was growing soggier by the second.

At red lights, I slowed enough to see oncoming cars, then blew through the intersections. George would need clean clothes, and I didn’t want to be hiding in his closet should he come home looking for some.

I parked around the corner from the Metranos’ house and jogged to their front door. My clothes were cold and heavy, the pavement hurt my feet. But I had my booty, and my agenda, intact.

I banged on the door, leaned on the bell until Leslie came and turned on the front light. She peered out at me through the living-room drapes. She wore a robe over pajamas, but she didn’t look as if she had been sleeping. Her makeup and hair were waiting for company. Probably George.

“Leslie, let me in,” I said, hoping she could read lips, because I didn’t want to wake up another neighborhood. When she hesitated, I opened the sodden photo album and held it up for her. Perplexed, but with curiosity sufficiently aroused, she opened the door.

“What happened to you?” she asked, clutching her terry bathrobe at the throat.

“Midnight swim,” I said. “Where are the police? I thought you had a guard.”

“They took me to the night deposit, that’s all.”

“Do you have a towel?”

“Of course.” She turned on the inside lights then and let me in. “Just wait here.”

She had left me in a raised, tiled entry that was a sort of launching pad for the step-down living and dining rooms. While I waited, I paced its chilly length.

It appeared that the house was nearly stripped bare. In the dining room, the only furniture was a card table and two folding chairs. But there were indentations in the carpet left by a large table and maybe eight or ten chairs. There had been other furniture, long dents that would conform perhaps to a china cabinet. The living room held only boxes, taped shut and lined up against one wall. I had seen all there was to see before Leslie came back carrying a beach towel.

“Are you moving?” I asked.

“Unless there’s a miracle,” she sighed. “Everything’s gone. We’ll never build back up again. Not this time.”

I handed her the photo album and the yearbook and used the towel on my face and hair, wiped down my feet. Then I took the towel into the dining room and spread it over the card table. Leslie came with me.

“I hope all of the pictures aren’t ruined,” I said, taking the album from her and opening it over the towel. “This is Hillary Ramsdale.”

She pulled up one of the folding chairs, took reading glasses out of her robe pocket, and started with the first page. The pictures were wet but still clear. I knew most of the deterioration would come when they started to dry and the emulsion separated from the paper.

Leslie studied the pictures on the first page. Pried open the second page and studied it, too.

“So?” I asked, impatient, miserably cold.

“The hair is different. Amy didn’t have that scar, or whatever it is, on her chin. But it’s her. You want proof? Go look at my little granddaughter. She could be Amy’s twin.”

“When the coroner’s office called you Saturday, who took the call?”

She frowned. “George did.”

“Where were you?”

“At work. I’m almost always there, trying to hold things together as best I can.”

“Are you going to lose the business as well?” I asked.

She shrugged. “George has been working on a deal. These things take time, though. So until it’s final, we’ve been just hanging on, selling off what we found buyers for, scraping together every nickel we could find.”

“He had gambling debts to pay?”

“Not this time.” There was fierce certainty in her voice. “He swore to me this time it was bad investments, some real estate we couldn’t dump in a bad market. Negative amortization and a high vacancy rate were eating us alive. He knows I would throw him out on the street if he ever placed another bet. I figured that’s why he went out on the boat, to get clean away. When he gets real upset, he tends to want to go place a bet.”

“He didn’t go anywhere,” I said. “I chased him down the street in Belmont Shore this afternoon, and he returned the favor tonight, not fifteen minutes ago.”

She rose, involuntarily like a marionette on a string. “Then where the hell is he?”

“I don’t know. And as long as he isn’t here, I don’t care.” I began pulling pages out of the album and lining them up on the towel so they wouldn’t start sticking together. “Maybe he’s holed up in one of your vacant rentals.”

“Could be.”

I glanced at her. “So, how long has he been working on this deal?”

“Couple of months.”

“Like, since February?”

She thought before she nodded. “About then. He went back East somewhere for a couple of weeks. Around Valentine’s. I remember, because he mailed me a card.”

“Where was he this past Thursday?”

“Thursday? We went down to San Diego for a Bingo Burgers sales meeting, stayed overnight.” She looked over at me. “Is that when the girl died, Thursday?”

“Yes.”

“And you thought George did it?”

I nodded. “Her throat was slashed, just like Randy Ramsdale’s was two months ago. I caught George today slashing my tires.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Sometimes. But not this time.” I sat down on the other folding chair, because my knees shook. I was exhausted. And running out of time.

Leslie was staring at me.

“You told me you didn’t know the Ramsdales,” I said. “But it seems George worked for them for a while. He was working for them up in Pasadena at the time Amy disappeared. Does that ring any bells?”

She shook her head. “George did jobs for a lot of people back then, anything he could pick up. He went around the harbor, the marinas, getting what he could. And he did some handyman work, too. Anything.”

“You don’t remember him working for the Ramsdales?”

“I was pretty busy. Five kids and a job, that kept me occupied, all right.”

“You didn’t see the name on a paycheck?”

“I’m ashamed to say it, but George took his pay in cash so we could get out of paying taxes on it. We just used up every bit of it for essentials. I do remember him working in Pasadena, though. He did some boat work for a man, and the man asked him to come work around his house. The job was supposed to last a couple of months, but our old car conked out and George couldn’t get up there. So they loaned him a real nice little pickup with a camper shell. When he finished the job, they gave him the truck as part of his pay.”

She blinked rapidly, all of a sudden holding back tears. “If they hadn’t given him that truck, we couldn’t have gone up to the mountains that day with Amy.”

I was reminded how thorough Randy was.

Leslie swiped at her nose with the cuff of her robe. “But the name wasn’t Ramsdale,” she said.

“Was it Sinclair?”

The name caught her up short. “Yes, it was. Sinclair. I hadn’t thought about that for a long time.”

“I bet it was tough for George,” I said. “Being out of work and having a big family. Feeling like a failure. That situation can make a lot of tension in the house.”

“Yes, it can,” she agreed, smiling just a little. “‘Course, I always said George was more interested in making babies than raising them. He’s just a big baby himself. I can’t tell you how losing his little girl turned that man around, let him see what was important to him. Everyone always used to tell me George would never be able to hold down a job, never amount to a hill of beans. But I knew he had it in him. Then after Amy was gone, well, he just knuckled down. He sure proved them all wrong.”

“That was a hard way to learn a lesson,” I said. “Losing a child.”

She looked around the empty room, seeming overwhelmed, depressed. Her eyes brimmed again. “I used to think getting thrown out of your house and living on the streets was the worst thing that could happen to people. But I was wrong. I would live on the streets any day to have my baby back for even one minute.”

“Detective Flint tells me results of the DNA comparison tests they did on you and the girl will take another couple of weeks.”

“I don’t need the tests to know the child in these pictures is mine. You know, there hasn’t been a day in the last ten years when every time the phone rings, or someone comes to the door, or I see a blond-headed girl go by, that I don’t think, oh, it’s Amy come back to me. Now I finally do find her, and it’s too late.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.

“I know,” she sighed.

“I have to go,” I said. I stood up and began gathering the album pages together. “I don’t want to be here if George comes back.”

“Why?” She was helping me.

“I don’t want to be the one to tell you.”

“Tell me what? After what I’ve been through in my life, Maggie, there’s not one thing you can say that I can’t handle.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“You’d damn well better finish what you’ve started.”

I stood there, knees knocking harder, imagining footsteps across the tile entry. “I don’t have the sort of evidence a court would ask for – police will take care of that – so you can believe me or not. That’s up to you. I told you how I got involved, trying to find out why a kid got lost. Not Amy, but the girl I knew as Hillary. This is what I believe happened.”

“I want to hear it,” she said, encouraging.

“A rich, spoiled man wanted a child for his wife; she was sick and couldn’t have one of her own. He thought a baby would be too much trouble, so he found a little girl that was already housebroken, knew about please and thank you, and was ready to start school so she wouldn’t be underfoot all day. He paid a lot for her. He dyed her blond hair brown, surgically he gave her a cute dimple in her chin. He called her his own.”

“You’re saying he bought Amy from her kidnappers?”

“How much does a Bingo Burgers franchise cost?”

Leslie didn’t answer. She also did not rise up in righteous denial. Or defense of George. All she said was, “Go on.”

“From there, it gets murky,” I said. “I don’t know everything yet, but the basic equation is: George was in debt and had a daughter, plus Randy was rich and wanted a child, equals George became solvent minus the daughter. The corollary is: George was in debt again, plus Randy was dead and he had a daughter, equals… what? That’s as far as I can go with it. You’re a businesswoman. You must be pretty good at math. That’s why I came here.”

“I think you should go,” she said.

“I think you’re right.” I picked up the pages, left the empty cover on the towel. I padded toward the door.

Leslie was still at the table in the empty room, staring at the empty album.

“Goodbye, Leslie,” I said. “Lock the door after me.”

She looked up. “I know I should hate you for saying all those things.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I could spare you.”

“One thing,” she said. “Can I have one of those pictures?”

I held them out to her. She came to me, both of us standing on the cold tile of the entry in bare feet. With tentative hands, she found the one she wanted, Hillary in a life vest in the bow of a sailboat, smiling, showing missing front teeth.

“It’s just, she looks so much like my granddaughter.”

My hands were too full to hug her, and she probably would have shunned me anyway. She held herself with the same innate dignity that had drawn me to Pisces.

Leslie’s gaze fell on the taped boxes in the living room.

“I meant what I said,” she said, “about living on the street.”

“I have a daughter,” I said. “I know you meant it.”

I drove home in the pre-rush-hour rush, big rigs and kamikaze commuters tearing up asphalt. The heater couldn’t overcome the cold air streaming in through my broken window. I shivered all the way in my wet clothes, the car full of the smell of dead things from the sea despite all the fresh air.

Mike wasn’t back yet when I got in. I spread a towel over his kitchen table and, still quaking with cold, laid out the album again.

I was in the shower, scalding water pounding my spine, when Mike came in. He opened the shower door.

“Jesus, Maggie,” he said. “What are you doing in here all naked again? Some consideration, please. I’m an old white-haired man. Night after night, twice yesterday. You’re going to kill me.”

I laughed or cried, it was hard to tell – my face was already wet. But whichever it was, the release felt good.

I looked up through runnels of shampoo-y water. “Who invited you?” I said.

He showed me the bulge in the front of his slacks. “You did,” he said.