The Stranger's Sin

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.

K ELLY 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?

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.