by Irene Brand
“The world’s like that, isn’t it?” Jane chuckled. “Well, people have been dropping by gifts to Destiny’s own child in a manger, but from the size of these boxes I’d say it’s other stuff besides gold, frank-incense and myrrh.”
Allison turned to stare at the stack of gifts in the corner, her eyes going wide. “Thank you for contacting me. I’ll take everything to her foster family when I meet them at the hearing later.”
The CHINS detention hearing. The words had a finality to them that Brock hadn’t felt when Allison had first explained the intake process to him. He studied her now, wondering what she was thinking. She’d tried so hard to avoid this, to keep Joy from becoming part of the welfare system that she’d dedicated her life to and yet understood its failings. She would be so disappointed when the time came for the hearing. Already, he was disappointed enough for the both of them—and for Joy.
“Deputy Chandler, could you take the call on line two?” Jane called from the radio room.
Allison met his gaze, her own appearing hopeful. Did she still believe that the baby’s mother would come through in the end and that her belief in people would be affirmed? Strange, he almost wished he could have a faith like that—in humanity and in God. He reached for the phone, hoping himself.
“What is it, Brock? Did she turn herself in?” Even as she asked the question, Allison already knew that wasn’t it. She wanted to believe, and yet she was beginning not to be so sure. She didn’t want to become as jaded as Brock, but she wondered if it was too late to prevent it.
Brock shook his head at her question, but already he was pushing back from his desk, his hands moving to the thick belt at his waist where he manually checked his gun and other equipment.
“It wasn’t her. But we finally have a lead.”
“What is it? Did the fingerprints bring up something?”
He frowned. “No, it’s a hotel. It could be where the mother was staying. Somebody left a car seat in one of the rooms. One of the workers said he thinks he remembers a baby crying in that room.”
“Why didn’t they tell you that when you checked with all the hotels earlier?”
“This is a dive outside town. Clear Air. Or Clear Way or something. You know, the place with weekly rates instead of daily ones. I guess crying babies aren’t so uncommon there.”
“I know the place.” Allison knew better than anyone that poorer areas didn’t hold the market on child abuse, but she’d visited this motel for an investigation. “It’s called the Clear View Motel, but it doesn’t have a clear view of anything except the road out of town.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Anyway, the maid went in to check the room—they only clean the rooms between guests. The girl had paid ahead and never checked out, so they didn’t find the cast-off car seat until an hour ago.”
Brock stepped over to a coatrack and pulled on his heavy sheriff’s department jacket. “The manager said we were lucky the maid got sick of being with her family and came in to clean on Christmas Day.” The side of his mouth pulled up when he turned back to her.
“If that family was getting along, we might not have gotten the clue until after New Year’s Day,” she said.
He studied her a few seconds, probably to see if she was joking, and then chuckled with her. “Either way, their discovery came too late. The mother could have skipped town right after the live nativity the other night.”
“You’re still going, right?”
“I’m still going.”
Of course, he had to go. He had to do his job, just as she had to do hers, earlier that day and later at the hearing. But she didn’t want him to leave any more than she wanted to get back in her own car and return to that depressing, empty house.
“Do you want me to help you out with those?” Brock didn’t wait for an answer before stacking the packages in his arms.
“Thanks.” She gathered a stack and turned back to him.
“It’s going to take a second trip.”
She nodded, wishing it could be a dozen instead of just two—anything to keep him with her a little longer. As it was, they had everything packed in her trunk and back seat far sooner than she would have liked.
“Well, I’ve got to get to the Clear View. I guess I’ll see you—”
Allison shook her head to stop him. She knew what he was going to say—that he’d see her at the hearing. He didn’t even have to be there, but she’d expected he would come. For Joy. Maybe even for her.
Still, she didn’t even want to think about the hearing, let alone go to it. Worse than that, she didn’t want to spend the next several hours at her house alone, waiting for the hearing she didn’t want to attend. There had to be some way to stay busy and to stay away from the mausoleum she used to call home.
The idea that struck her then was like a gift from God—so simple, yet ingenious.
“Brock, you and I have both had jobs to do ever since Joy showed up in that manger.”
“And your point is?” he asked when she didn’t make one.
“My point is we both ultimately want the same thing for Joy—a safe home where she is loved.”
Brock lifted an eyebrow, being generous by not pointing out that his goal also was to see the baby’s mother behind bars.
“Well, the key to meeting our mutual goal is to find Joy’s mother. Even if she wants to begin the Termination of Parental Rights process, we need to locate her.”
He looked at her as if she was daft and spoke to her the way he would a child. “That’s why I’m following up on this lead. To find the mother.”
“I know you’re doing your best, Brock. But I have an idea to make the search even better. Since we both need to find Joy’s mom, I suggest that we combine our efforts.”
“What are you saying?”
“I want us to team up, so we can find Joy’s mother together.”
Chapter Seven
Brock wondered if there were any other languages he could have said “Absolutely not” in and if any of them would have made a difference to Allison once she had her mind made up that he needed her help in this investigation. He guessed there were no others, at least none that would have changed her mind.
Even now as he stood in the abandoned hotel room with its threadbare sheets and scent of a recent insecticide spraying, he could still see her determination as clearly as when she’d announced her crazy idea of joining him. He’d fought a valiant fight at first, speaking of regulations and lawsuits and everything else he could pull from his debate arsenal. But then she’d turned her miserable expression on him, telling him she couldn’t go back to that cold, empty house. He hadn’t stood a chance.
“Joy and her mom probably stayed here.”
Allison said the words without any judgment in her voice, but they condemned him anyway. She’d been right that first night when she’d reminded him they didn’t know how desperate the mother’s situation was. Pretty desperate, as far as he could tell.
“Not a four-star hotel, anyway.”
“Not even one star,” she concluded.
When Allison stepped to the bureau and started opening the drawers that swayed sideways from their broken tracks, Brock was glad he’d done at least one thing right tonight. He doubted, though, that having the forethought to make her wear latex gloves to eliminate her fingerprints would lessen his colossal mistake of letting her come.
“She didn’t leave any clothes behind, for her or the baby,” she said as she closed the second drawer.
“She probably didn’t have much.”
His comment must have surprised her as much as it had him because she turned and met his gaze too long, until he looked away. What had she thought before, that he didn’t have a heart? She just didn’t understand. He didn’t have the luxury of pitying the suspect in his investigation, of wondering if the woman might have deserted her child to protect her from living this life.
Remember that I love you. The mother’s words on that note troubled him just as they had when
they’d first found it. If that mother had wanted better for her child, could it mean that just possibly, his own mother had left for his benefit? No, he would never believe that. Madeline didn’t have an unselfish bone in her body. He’d been a burden she’d unloaded without ever looking back.
For several seconds he stared at the outdated and stained car seat in the corner where a casualty of extermination efforts also lay, its six legs up in the air. Joy’s mother might have been trying to do that right thing, but the way she’d gone about it was a crime. His job was to enforce the laws, not to weigh in with his opinion on whether or not they were properly merciful. No matter how much they wished it otherwise, few people were ever on the receiving end of mercy.
Allison, who had slipped into the tiny bathroom a few minutes before, popped her head out. “Brock, do you know if the maid actually cleaned the room or just opened it up to clean it and found the car seat?”
He lifted his own gloved hand from where he was tracing a finger though a trail of dust likely far older than Joy. “The manager said she started to clean but stopped when she found the car seat. Why do you ask?”
“Come look at this.”
The mildew-filled scent caught him as he stepped to the bathroom doorway. Black lines of it covered the grout on sections of crumbling tile.
She pointed to the trash basket. “Most people leave some sort of waste behind—tissues, cotton balls, something. She had a baby in this room, and yet there aren’t any soiled diapers.”
“So she might have emptied her own trash. Or the maid might have done it.”
“Either way, we don’t have a lot to go on. You can learn a lot about a person by the things she throws away.”
Brock couldn’t help grinning. “Been watching a lot of crime investigation shows lately?”
She shrugged and smiled back. “They’re interesting.”
“We don’t even know how long she’s been gone.” Even he could hear the frustration in his voice. “The desk clerk couldn’t remember for sure which day he’d heard the crying. And if the guest was our suspect, she might have cruised out of here right after she dropped off the baby. If so, she’d be long gone by now.”
“Or maybe not,” she said softly, but her wary expression showed she wasn’t holding out much hope.
Because the room suddenly felt too quiet, too close, both returned to their individual observations. He had to give Joy’s mom credit. She’d been neat, and she hadn’t left anything behind that wouldn’t require a specially trained crime scene investigator to find it.
For a long time, Brock and Allison worked companionably in the small space, neither breaking the silence with unnecessary words. Whether it was a mistake or not to have done it, he was glad he’d brought her along to keep him company today. It was Christmas, after all. He didn’t want to be alone, either, as he searched for clues.
Not that they were really accomplishing anything by being here or could even know for sure that Joy had been in that car seat, though his gut told him that the baby from this room and the child in the manger were one in the same. Did Allison realize like he did that they were no closer to locating Baby Doe’s mother than they were the moment they realized something was fishy about those swaddling clothes?
“You haven’t failed her, you know.” He wished he could have stopped them, but the words seemed just to fall from his lips of their own accord.
Allison jerked her head and turned back to him, her eyes too shiny. “I just thought—”
“That she would come back?” Another day he might have said, “I told you so.” Any woman who’d managed to vanish like that wouldn’t reappear and call it all a big misunderstanding. He’d known that truth, but still Allison had kept hoping. Brock hated knowing that she wouldn’t believe anymore. He wished he could make it right for her, restore her faith.
And suddenly he was saying ridiculous things for no other reason than that he had to try. For her sake. “We still have a few hours until the hearing. I doubt we’re going to find anything else here. Let’s go back to the department and look over the case file again. Maybe there’s something we’ve missed.”
Because she was nodding enthusiastically, he kept on going, each word feeling like more of a lie than the last. But this was worse than just fooling her with words she wanted to believe. He was fooling himself, as well. He wanted to believe it, too.
“We’ll check with the hospitals again. Maybe they’ve found a patient’s record that they overlooked before. We’ll check with state police for anyone picked up for hitchhiking from the area.”
Allison rushed over to the door, speaking over her shoulder as she went. “Somebody must have seen her. We just haven’t asked the right people yet.”
No, they hadn’t asked the right people. But he and the other deputies had canvassed the town, asking everyone they could think of—gas station attendants, truck drivers, convenience store clerks—if they’d seen anyone out of the ordinary. Someone who might meet the general description of the woman witnesses saw the night of the live nativity.
The quiet descended again as Allison waited at the door and Brock took one last look around the hotel room.
“Brock, tell me about when your parents deserted you.”
His sharp intake of breath stung his lungs, but he forced himself to at least appear relaxed. “They didn’t desert me. Roy and Clara Chandler, both of them, were with me every minute I’d let them, until the days they died.”
“You know what I mean. Tell me about Madeline and…I don’t think you said his name.”
Brock’s heart squeezed, and not just because Allison had remembered his birth mother’s name. He’d carried all of this pain inside an awfully long time. It was heavy. He didn’t want to carry it anymore.
“I don’t even know his name, but Madeline Jeffries, I won’t forget that. She liked me to call her Madeline in public. Not Mom. Not Mommy. Those words put a dent in her social life.”
“I’m so sorry—”
But he waved a hand to interrupt her. He’d started telling this in the same way a freight train started moving—slowly, reluctantly. Now there didn’t seem to be anything he could do to stop it all from rolling forward, even if he was acting both the role of tiny boy balancing on the railroad tracks and the engineer trying desperately to avoid a catastrophe.
“We used to play this game where I pretended in front of her friends that I was her neighbor’s kid, and she was only watching me. If I pretended well and went right to bed, I’d get candy in the morning.”
“But you loved her.”
Because she didn’t say it as a question, he didn’t bother trying to deny it. “When it was just the two of us at home, she’d let me curl her long hair around my fingers. She even let me call her Mommy then.”
“So what happened?”
“One day, she dropped me off at the day-care center, kissed me goodbye and never came back.”
Though he hadn’t been watching her until then, Brock looked up, expecting to see pity in her eyes. Instead, she approached him slowly and took his hand in hers. Her eyes glistened with tears, and a few spilled over.
Brock had to force himself to remain still when his instinct was to gather her into his arms, comforting her and, for once, allowing another human to console him. He tried to chuckle as he gently pulled his hand away, but it came out sounding strange to his ears.
“Come on, it’s not a sad story. I couldn’t have had better parents than Roy and Clara. He coached soccer. She taught my Sunday school class.”
Instead of commenting on his quick segue from his scars, she smiled. “I’m so glad they were there for you.”
“They taught me about God’s love and lived their entire lives being living examples of it.”
Allison opened her mouth, and then she snapped it shut. He could guess what she was about to ask.
“Oh, sorry about my comments the other night. The ones about God. As you can tell, the whole abandonment issue hits close to home.”<
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“I understand.”
Brock sensed that she did understand, more than just the excuse for his verbal attacks. As he followed her to the door and reached around her to open it, he hoped she would also understand that he couldn’t dwell on his past now, not if they were going to find the missing clue that would lead them to Joy’s mother.
The suspect, though, had disappeared into thin air. They were attempting to pluck her back out of that air. The clock was ticking until the detention hearing. For Allison—and especially for Joy—he had to try.
In the light of day, the stable just looked like a rustic lean-to with a bunch of hay bales and a wooden trough in it. But as Allison drew in a lungful of the crisp air that announced Indiana’s white Christmas would be arriving a day or so too late, she could envision it all. David fidgeting with his Joseph hat. Her pillow belly falling out. The choir guys in their Wise Men’s robes.
Because she wanted to keep her gaze from returning again and again to the manger bed, she concentrated on the hay scent that wafted in her nostrils. The memory of the pony’s neigh, so out of place and yet not, tickled her ears. She heard the choir…heard the cry.
And Brock was there, appearing like a bright light out of the darkened crowd.
He’d done the same thing in her life, coming so quickly into focus while the rest of her life before him remained a blur. As terrifying as not knowing was, she didn’t want the blur back for anything in the world.
“Why do you think she did it?”
She jerked her head to look at Brock as he again scanned the area where they’d found the diaper bag and the Baby Jesus doll, as if the scene would somehow speak to him and provide the answers that had eluded them.
“You mean why she abandoned the baby?”
“Yeah, in your professional opinion.”
She slowly shook her head. “I don’t know. There can be all kinds of extenuating circumstances, plenty of stress factors. If she would only come forward, we could look at all of the stressors affecting her.”