The Stranger's Sin (5 page)

“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.”

C
HASE 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?

K
ELLY AWAKENED
T
HURSDAY
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.

Toby rapped his hands on the pull-down tray, his face and bib surprisingly free of food splatter. The choo-choo had a good engineer.

“Let’s try an airplane. Scratch that. Too ordinary. How ’bout a flying saucer? Your mouth can be a black hole. Open up.” Chase made believe the spoon was flying, then started humming the theme to
X-Files.

Kelly laughed aloud.

Chase swung his head around, grinning when he spotted her watching them, yesterday’s suspicion nowhere in sight. He was already dressed in his ranger’s uniform, the light-khaki color of the shirt bringing out the tan of his skin. Funny how she hadn’t noticed what a handsome man he was until this moment.

“We’ve got company, bud. Could be the government. There could be trouble if she reports a UFO sighting.” His spoon was still hovering above Toby’s mouth. “Quick. Open up. Get rid of the evidence.”

Toby might have been obeying Chase or he might have been smiling with his mouth open. Either way, Chase put the spoon in his mouth and the oatmeal—er, the UFO—disappeared.

“Way to go, Toby!” Chase raised his palm, parting
his middle and ring fingers in the Vulcan salute from the old
Star Trek
shows. Toby clapped with glee.

“Doesn’t that mean live long and prosper?” Kelly asked.

“Not in this case,” Chase said. “In this case it means Toby just kicked some baby butt. Didn’t you, sport?”

The baby laughed louder, making it impossible not to join in. With Chase’s face creased in a smile and laugh lines showing around his eyes, he barely resembled the man who’d questioned her with such fervor the night before. Her inability to understand Mandy deepened. The woman hadn’t left only her baby, she’d left Chase.

“I hope you slept okay,” he said.

“I did,” she said, surprised it was true. Since her arrest, a good night’s sleep had been an elusive commodity. “But you should have woken me when you got back.”

“I tried,” he said, “but you couldn’t hear me over your snores.”

Horrified, she put a hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know I snored.”

“You don’t,” he said, laughing. “In fact, you hardly make a sound. But you should have seen your face when you thought you did.”

Toby joined Chase’s laughter, although he couldn’t possibly have understood the trick Chase had played.

“You think that’s funny, do you, Toby?” She ruffled the boy’s blond head. “Don’t tell anyone, but I do, too.”

“Whew. That’s a relief.” Chase wiped a hand across
his brow. “I’d hate to insult the woman who did me such a huge favor.”

“It was nothing,” she said.

“It was most definitely something. You stayed with Toby so I could get my dad to the hospital.”

“Your neighbor told me it was heartburn,” she said. He’d phoned the house when the results of the EKG had come back, explaining that his father’s heart had checked out fine.

“We didn’t know that at the time,” he said. “If it had been a heart attack, you might have saved his life. You were great. I panicked.”

“You didn’t panic.”

“I did.” He blew breath out his nose, his jaw clenching. After a few moments, he said, “My mom died of a heart attack not even a year ago. When I saw him standing there, clutching his chest…Well, all I could think was how much I didn’t want to lose him.”

Her own heart softened at the sorrow that laced his words. “I’m sorry about your mother, but you would have done fine even if I hadn’t been here.”

“Probably.” He met her eyes. “But I’m glad you were here.”

Toby cried out something incomprehensible, but made it understood he was less than pleased that he’d ceased to be the center of attention.

“Easy there, sport.” Chase bent over and undid Toby’s bib, smiling when the baby stroked his cheek. To Kelly, he said, “Could you watch him for a minute? I’ll wake my dad, then drive you back to town on my way to work.”

“Please, don’t,” she said, stopping him in his tracks. “Your father had a rough night. He could use more sleep. I’ll stay with Toby until he wakes up.”

He frowned, obviously reluctant to agree. Why shouldn’t he be distrustful? Kelly asked herself. He clearly hadn’t believed her story about the necklace. Despite what had happened last night, she was still a stranger.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. Of course you don’t want to leave Toby with me.”

“That’s not—”

“I should apologize for sending your neighbor home last night,” she interrupted. “But she was so tired she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and she needs to get up early with her youngest. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“I didn’t,” he said.

“Of course we’re nearly strangers and…” She trailed off as his denial penetrated her brain. “Do you mean that? Were you really okay with me sending your neighbor home last night?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay with you staying with Toby now, too. I just don’t want to take advantage of you.”

“You wouldn’t be,” she refuted. “Really. I’d like to stay with him.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you are.”

He picked up his car keys, kissed Toby on top of the head and grinned at her. “Of course I’m sure. What did you think? That I’d be afraid you’d run off with him?”

“No,” she managed to choke out, imagining how he’d react if he knew the charges she was facing. “Of course not.”