The Stranger's Sin

Wandering through Indigo Springs looking for a room, which had proved to be a tough task with the Fourth of July just three days away.

Checking into a room she really couldn’t afford at the Blue Stream Bed-and-Breakfast.

Phoning her home answering machine to discover Spencer Yates was still trying to work out a deal with the DA and the judge had scheduled a preliminary hearing nine days from today.

Falling asleep on top of the comforter.

The noise she’d heard hadn’t been thunder but some of the other guests descending the wooden stairs outside her room. But it shouldn’t be dinnertime yet. Amanda had lain down around four-thirty, setting the alarm on her cell phone to wake her up at five-thirty so she had time to get ready and eat something before meeting Chase Bradford.

She turned her head, catching a glimpse of the time on the bedside clock: seven-fifteen.

She bolted to a sitting position, shoving the hair back from her face, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.

The alarm must not have gone off.

She dashed for the bathroom, grateful that the room came with a private one, splashed water on her face and peered at herself in the mirror. With smudges of mascara under her eyes, her clothes wrinkled and her hair sticking up in all directions, she looked a fright, like the kind of crazy woman who might actually snatch a baby.

It wasn’t the kind of image she should present to Chase Bradford.

She turned on the shower and stripped out of her clothes. She hated being late for the meeting, but she could call him from the phone in the hall once she was presentable. She’d shown Chase’s business card to the desk clerk who’d checked her in so she already had directions.

The talkative clerk knew Chase because she volunteered in the church nursery during Sunday services and he had a little boy he sometimes left there. The clerk knew Mandy, the boy’s mother, less well but had let it slip that Mandy had moved in with Chase when she got pregnant.

Fighting a ridiculous wave of disappointment that Chase was either married or at the very least romantically involved with Mandy, she stepped into the shower. She wasn’t sure why it mattered except that Chase had seemed solid and dependable, the kind of man who’d see through a woman like Amanda.

But she was jumping ahead of herself. She wasn’t yet sure that Amanda and Mandy were the same woman. She’d assumed Amanda was childless because it seemed far-fetched that a mother would kidnap a baby. But then nothing about the devastating events of the past few days made sense. If Chase was involved with the woman who’d perpetrated the crime, that would be good news. Surely he’d have some ideas about where she might have gone.

As the water streamed down on Kelly and grew cold, a chilling question occurred to her. If Kelly was on the right track and Chase found out the real reason Kelly was searching for Amanda/Mandy, which woman would he be more likely to believe was guilty of kidnapping?

The woman who was mother to his son, or a complete stranger?

C HASE’S FATHER PACED TO the bay window that overlooked the street and peered into the twilight, a journey he’d been taking with increasing regularity.

“She’s already an hour late.” He stated a fact of which Chase was only too aware. “Think she stood you up?”

“It’s starting to look that way,” Chase admitted, internally kicking himself for the way he’d handled his first meeting with Kelly Delaney. He’d sensed she wasn’t being completely honest but had failed to ask where in town she was staying. Tracking her down wouldn’t be that difficult—if she was still in Indigo Springs.

It had been pure bad luck to get called away on that nuisance-black-bear call before he got any useful information but he hadn’t anticipated her not showing.

Any woman who’d go to the trouble of drawing a sketch and showing it around town had seemed a good bet to follow through on her search.

“Maybe she figured out she was looking for a different woman,” his father theorized.

Chase shook his head. “I don’t think so, Dad. She has a necklace I remember Mandy wearing. Although I’ve got to admit it seems strange for her to go to all this trouble to give it back.”

“Not so strange. Some people are good Samaritans. She could be one of them.” His father’s voice caught on the last word and he groaned, his face turning pale.

“Dad, are you all right?” Chase asked. His father hadn’t seemed well all night, but had waved off Chase’s earlier concerns, claiming he’d overdone the yard work.

His father swallowed, seemed to take stock of himself, then nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. Must have been a cramp. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Ba, Ba,” Toby cried, distracting Chase from his father’s problem. The baby sat on the floor in the middle of the room, his face creased with delight as he patted a large colorful ball. The ball rolled away. He giggled, crawling after it as fast as his chubby knees would carry him.

“You almost got it, bud,” Chase’s father called, seeming like his old self again. “Keep on going.”

Toby reached the ball and batted at it, only to have it roll farther away. He laughed wildly, with Chase and his father joining in.

It was a simple moment, not unlike a thousand others since Toby had come to live with them.

It brought home how much Chase needed to find Mandy so he could get legal custody of the boy he already loved as a son. He shouldn’t have made the mistake of assuming Kelly Delaney was as desperate to locate her as he was.

The doorbell rang, surprising them both. His father had kept such a close watch on the window, he would have seen headlights had a car pulled up.

Figuring their caller was most likely a neighbor, Chase went to the door and pulled it open.

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 of 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.”

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