The Stranger's Sin

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.”

CHAPTER FOUR

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—”