A Woman With A Mystery

“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” he suggested. “Like with your name.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said with obvious embarrassment. She kneaded nervously at her purse and he could tell she was having more than second thoughts about coming here.

He gave her a smile. “Take your time.”

Her answering smile was like bright sunlight on snow. Dazzling. And it had the same effect on him it had had a year ago.

“My name is Holly Barrows. I’m an artist. I live in Pinedale.”

Pinedale? Just fifty miles over a mountain pass from here. Had she really been that close all these months? “How long have you lived there?” he had to ask.

“All my life.”

So is that what had happened? Her memory had returned last year and she’d just gone home? It seemed a little too simple given that she’d been so convinced someone was trying to kill her. Not to mention that she’d stolen his money and case files—then apparently forgotten him. And Christmas past.

“Please go on,” he encouraged.

“When I gave birth….” she said, the words seeming to come hard. “…I have little memory of the delivery. I think I was drugged.”

“You gave birth in Pinedale?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know where it was, just that it wasn’t a normal hospital. I think the room was soundproofed and the doctors…” She looked away. Her hands trembled. “When I woke, I was in County Hospital. I was told that my baby was stillborn. I don’t know how I got there. But I keep remembering hearing my baby cry. When I asked to see my baby at the hospital—” She stopped, seeming to be fighting to compose herself. “—I knew the infant they gave me wasn’t mine.”

He stared at her in shock. “The hospital let you see your stillborn baby?”

“See it, hold it, name it,” she said in that same blank, distant voice. “So the mother knows it’s really gone.”

Sweet heaven. He couldn’t imagine. “What made you think the baby wasn’t yours if you never saw it right after the birth?”

She shook her head. “A mother knows her own baby.”

He wondered if that was true. “What is it you think happened to your baby, presuming you’re right and the baby was born alive at this other place?” Then replaced with a dead one? How plausible was that?

“I know how insane it sounds, but I keep having these flashes of memory. My baby was alive. Someone stole it.”

Someone? The same someone she’d thought was trying to kill her a year ago?

She was wasting his time. It was obvious he wasn’t going to get his money—or his case files—back. Nor any explanation, let alone satisfaction, for the heartache she’d caused him. She was a nutcase. A beautiful, desirable nutcase.

She fumbled to open her purse.

The movement should have concerned him. She might be going for a weapon. As crazy as she was, she might shoot him. But the way her hands shook, she wouldn’t have been able to hit the broad side of a barn even if she pulled a howitzer from the bag.

She tugged out a tissue and wiped her eyes.

He’d heard enough, but still, he had to ask. “Why would someone want to take your baby?”

She glanced up, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know. I just have this feeling that this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. That there have been other babies they’ve stolen.”

She was worse than he’d thought.

He rubbed a hand over his face, remembering something she’d said. “During the delivery, you mentioned the doctors. You saw them then?”

She shook her head, one glistening tear making a path down her perfectly rounded cheek. “Not their faces.” She seemed to hesitate as if what she was about to say could be any worse than what she’d already told him. “They wore masks.”

“Masks? You mean surgical masks?”

“Halloween masks with hideous monster faces.” She avoided his gaze as she rooted around in her purse again. “I will pay you whatever you want to prove that I’m not crazy and to get my baby back.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. And to think he used to fantasize about finding her. “When was this anyway?”

“Five weeks ago.”

He nodded distractedly, wondering why it had taken her five weeks.

When he opened his eyes, she had the checkbook in her hand, her expression filled with hopefulness as she looked up at him again.

Sweet heaven. He couldn’t believe that a part of him would gladly leap on his noble steed and ride off to battle evil for this damsel in distress yet again. Except that she’d punctured a hell of a hole in his armor the last time around. She’d gone straight for his heart, and he wasn’t apt to forget it, no matter how desirable, how beautiful or how crazy and in need of help she was this time around.

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said, getting to his feet.

Slowly, she lowered her gaze to her lap. He watched her put the checkbook back into her purse and rise from the chair.

“I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” she said without looking at him.

He watched her walk to the door and thought he should at least suggest she seek medical help. Did she know a good psychiatrist?

But he let her go. She was either a crackpot, or a con artist. Her name probably wasn’t even Holly Barrows.

He listened as her boot heels tapped down the stairs, and he waited for the sound of the door closing on the street below, before he picked up his beer bottle and went to the window again.

It had stopped snowing, the sky dark, the air cold against the glass. He watched her hurry to a newer SUV parked at the curb. Out of habit, he jotted down her license-plate number when her brake lights flashed on.

Why had she come to him with this latest ludicrous story? Hadn’t she gotten what she’d come for the last time?

She pulled out into the street, and he had to fight the urge to run after her.

As he started to turn from the window, he caught a movement on the sidewalk below and looked down. The Santa bell-ringer no longer had his pot. Or his bell. He was looking after the retreating Holly Barrows and talking hurriedly into a cell phone.

Slade felt a jolt as the Santa glanced up toward his office window. The look was brief, but enough. Slade swore and scrambled around his desk and out of the office. He launched himself down the stairs, nearly falling on the wet steps, his mind racing faster than his feet, and burst through the door to the sidewalk.

The Santa was gone—except for his red hat and white fake beard lying on the pavement.

The quiet snowy darkness settled over Slade as he stared down the now-empty street. He’d seen the Santa’s alarmed expression when he’d looked up and spotted Slade at the window, recalled the agitated way the man had been talking into the cell phone.

Worry clutched at him the way Holly Barrows had clutched at her purse. Sweet heaven, could she have been telling the truth this time? More important, had she been telling the truth a year ago when she’d thought someone was trying to kill her?

Suddenly a thought lodged like a stake in his heart. If she wasn’t crazy, if Holly Barrows really had been pregnant and had delivered a baby five weeks ago, then— If nothing else, he’d always been good at math.