The Stranger's Sin Page 3

  It didn’t dawn on her how hungry she was until she swallowed the first mouthful. The last thing she’d eaten was a package of cheese crackers from a vending machine. When had that been? This morning? Last night?

  She truly didn’t remember. Driving her own car to Indigo Springs had seemed too risky, so the Tuesday morning after her Monday arraignment she’d set out for the bus station. Using cash she’d withdrawn from her modest savings account, she’d taken a series of buses. What would have been a five-hour trip had stretched to eighteen, with Kelly trying to catch snatches of sleep during the long night of transfers and layovers.

  It occurred to her that by covering her tracks she was acting like a guilty woman. At the very least, she’d violated the terms of her bail, but she didn’t see how the authorities would know she was gone until she failed to show up for her preliminary hearing, whenever that was. Spencer Yates, if he suspected she’d left the state, should be bound by attorney-client privilege not to tell.

  In any event, she couldn’t go back to Wenona until she found Amanda, and that might take a while. Nobody who’d seen the sketch had inspired even a glimmer of hope, with the exception of the construction worker with the great smile.

  It turned out he hadn’t recognized Amanda, either, which wasn’t surprising. He’d been supervising the construction of a new wing of town hall, his attention divided between a crew putting up drywall and a desperate woman shoving a sketch at him.

  She gazed down at her bowl, stunned that it was already empty. Weariness set in from her nearly sleepless night, weighing down her very bones. She needed to summon the energy to pick up the backpack she’d stuffed full of clothes and leave the ice-cream shop. She had only a few more businesses to canvas. Once she did, she’d have to tax her tired brain to come up with a new strategy.

  She supposed she could make copies of the sketch and hand them out on the street, but she’d have to include contact information, something she was reluctant to do because she couldn’t shake the feeling the authorities would be looking for her.

  The jingling of the bell on the door announcing the arrival of a new customer added to the general hubbub. Kelly looked up, expecting more tourists in search of an afternoon snack.

  A tall man in a policeman’s uniform entered the shop. He ignored the ice-cream counter, his gaze sweeping the shop and zeroing in on Kelly. The breath in her chest froze, as cold as the ice cream she’d just eaten. She told herself to remain calm, and reminded herself she’d only left Wenona yesterday. The law couldn’t possibly have found her already. Even her attorney couldn’t be sure she was gone.

  The cop played havoc with her rationale, striding directly for her. Her heart stampeded, and she felt like she might pass out.

  The penalty for violating the conditions of bail was an immediate return to jail. She imagined herself behind bars, heard the sound of a cell door slamming shut, felt the weight of panic crushing her chest.

  He stopped at her table and loomed over her, blotting out her view of everything but him. “I need to talk to you.”

  Battling her growing dread, she tipped her chin, fervently reminding herself she was innocent. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The corners of the cop’s mouth dipped slightly. “I didn’t say you did.”

  “Then why…” She stopped in midquestion, belatedly realizing his uniform of a short-sleeved khaki shirt and dark pants was decidedly different than those worn by the New York policemen who’d arrested her. “You’re not a cop, are you?”

  “No,” he said.

  She squinted, making out the words on his silver badge. Wildlife Conservation Officer it read. Another term for forest ranger.

  Relief saturated her limbs, making them weak. Her brain started to function with more clarity. Even in the unlikely event the cops in New York knew she’d left the state, this was Pennsylvania. If this man had been a cop, he wouldn’t be on the lookout for her.

  “Would it matter if I was a cop?” He had an aggressively masculine face with a square jaw, lean cheeks and an outdoorsman’s tan. Short, thick brown hair, lightened by the sun, sprang back from a widow’s peak above assessing brown eyes. She guessed he wasn’t yet thirty.

  “No. No. Of course not.” She bit her lip to stop from issuing another denial. She tried to smile but felt her lips quiver. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  He gestured to the sketch on the tabletop. “That,” he said. “Can I sit down?”

  “Yes, of course.” She felt like she was on a roller coaster, having survived one plunge only to be ascending another incline, praying this one wasn’t too tall to climb. She turned the sketch around so that it faced him. “Do you know her?”

  He picked up the paper, his expression giving away nothing. She wondered who had told him about the sketch. Her guess was the construction worker, who’d probably known more than he was telling.

  “I might,” he said. “What’s her name?”

  “Amanda Smith.”

  He gave no indication he recognized the name. “Why are you looking for her?”

  “I have something she’d want back.” She unzipped an outer pocket of her backpack and pulled out a necklace. Fake gemstones of jade, lapis and ruby hung from a thick gold herringbone chain that looked just like fourteen-karat gold. “It’s costume jewelry, but it’s vintage. This one’s exceptionally pretty.”

  “Did she give it to you?” he asked.

  “Oh, no. I don’t know her nearly well enough for that. In fact, I don’t know her at all.” She was letting his direct gaze disconcert her, and as a result she was almost babbling. She made herself stop.

  “Then how did you know to come to Indigo Springs?” he asked.

  She regrouped, calling to mind the story she’d concocted on the bus. “She mentioned the town after we shared a table at a really crowded coffee shop. After she left, I found the necklace. The clasp is broken.”

  Only the last part was true. She’d found the necklace in the kidnapped baby’s carrier and theorized the baby had tugged it loose. She wasn’t sure whether the necklace belonged to Amanda or the kidnapped baby’s mother, but it provided a convenient cover story.

  “Where was this coffee shop?” the forest ranger asked.

  The other people who’d heard the story had taken it at face value, asking few follow-up questions. She groped for an answer that would be general enough.

  “Upstate New York.”

  “Really?” He put down the sketch, rested his forearms on the table and leaned forward, his eyes still fastened on hers. “So you drove all the way to Pennsylvania from upstate New York to return a piece of costume jewelry?”

  Stated that way, her story sounded ridiculous and unbelievable. She clasped her hands, feeling sweat on her palms. She made sure to meet his eyes so he wouldn’t know for certain that she was lying. “Oh, no. I happened to be passing through.”

  “With a sketch?”

  She bit her lower lip so the truth wouldn’t come tumbling out. Her intuition told her the forest ranger could be trusted, but her instincts had failed her in a catastrophic way when she’d run across Amanda and the baby. It wasn’t difficult to understood why the cops had a hard time believing she’d agreed to babysit for a stranger.

  This man was as much an unknown as Amanda had been. She didn’t need to justify herself. Kelly tapped the sketch with her index finger. “Do you know her or don’t you?”

  “Not as a brunette, as a redhead.” He straightened but kept watching her just as closely. “I have some photos of her I can show you.”

  Adrenaline coursed through Kelly. It made sense that a woman who kidnapped a child might also disguise her appearance. She couldn’t keep the eagerness from her voice. “Where is she now?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said.

  A static-filled voice suddenly came over his two-way radio. He pulled the device from his belt, uttering a quick, “Excuse me. I have to take this.”

  The ma
n at the other end of the line said something about a black bear rooting through garbage at a campsite. The forest ranger listened, nodding, frustration chasing across his features. He signed off.

  “We’ll have to continue this later,” he said. “Are you staying in town?”

  Now that she’d stumbled across a lead, she would be. “Yes. When can you meet me?”

  He glanced at the clock on the wall, which showed it was already past three. “How about seven o’clock? My place. I’ll show you those photos.”

  He reached into his wallet, pulled out a card and handed it to her. Chase Bradford. Pennsylvania Game Commission. “That’s my home address and telephone number. Do you have a card? A number where I can reach you?”

  She didn’t dare give him her cell-phone number and she hadn’t yet checked into a hotel. It seemed likely that a forest ranger would have contacts in the law-enforcement community with access to information databases. He had no reason to investigate her now, but she needed to think ahead and be smart.

  “I don’t have a cell phone,” she lied, “but I’ll be at your house at seven.”

  He appeared reluctant to leave her, but she sensed he was a man who didn’t shirk his duties. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Kelly,” she answered automatically before her newfound sense of self-preservation kicked in. “Kelly Delaney.”

  “Where are you from, Kelly?”

  Kelly Carmichael was from Wenona, New York. Kelly Delaney, who happened to be a college friend who shared her first name and had also majored in education, wasn’t. She dredged up the name of her friend’s hometown from the Christmas cards they still exchanged. “Schenectady.”

  If the forest ranger got suspicious and had a friend run Kelly Delaney’s name, he wouldn’t find anything to sound alarm bells.

  “I’ll see you tonight, Kelly Delaney.”

  After he left the shop, her shoulders drooped and she cradled her head in her hands. She prayed that Chase Bradford would have information that would lead her to Amanda.

  Because now, in the eyes of the law, Kelly wasn’t only an accused criminal.

  She was a fugitive with an alias.

  KELLY HEARD THE CRIES before she spotted the woman. She sat on a park bench adjacent to a deserted playground, a baby in her arms.

  The gray clouds, heavy with the threat of rain, had kept the regulars away. No children scampered up the stairs to the clubhouse or swung from the swings. There was just the lone woman and the baby.

  “Shut up!” The woman’s voice, rich with frustration, carried on the breeze. “I can’t take it anymore! Why won’t you stop crying?”

  Kelly didn’t hesitate. She veered from the path, toward the playground, walking at a fast clip. “Excuse me, but can I help?”

  The woman turned around. She was an attractive brunette about Kelly’s age with tears streaking down her cheeks. Lines of strain bracketed her mouth and creased her forehead.

  “Oh, yes.” She stood up and held out the baby. “Could you hold him for just a minute?”

  It was a baby boy about three or four months old with blue eyes and light-blond hair, his face red from crying. Kelly’s heart melted. She held out her arms for the baby. “Sure.”

  The sky darkened and thunder rumbled, followed by loud voices, one male, one female.

  “Where do you want to go to dinner?”

  “That Italian place on the corner looked good.”

  Kelly frowned, trying to figure out what the man and woman were doing in the park. Where had they come from? And why couldn’t she see them? For that matter, where was the baby and the woman who couldn’t stand his crying? What had happened to the park? All she saw now was blackness.

  Realization dawned, and her eyes snapped open. She wasn’t in a park in Wenona at all, but in a room with the shades pulled down, lying on a feather mattress.

  She’d been dreaming about stumbling across Amanda and Corey—no, not Corey. The kidnapped baby’s real name was Eric—on that fateful day she’d tried to help out a stranger. If the dream had continued, she would have seen herself agreeing to babysit for a few hours until Amanda pulled herself together.

  A dream. It had only been a dream. As she struggled to come more fully awake, she dredged up the past few hours.

  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?

  CHASE’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 anticipate
d 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.