Twin Threat Christmas

by Rachelle Mccalla

  Alyssa opened her eyes but didn’t take them off the baby. She stared at his face in silence for a moment. The little boy’s eyes watched her in wonder. She offered the baby a tentative smile.

  He returned a smile that was equally unsure.

  The two seemed to appraise one another.

  No, this wasn’t a meeting of two familiars, but a first-time introduction. Chris could feel it, would testify to it under oath if he was ever called to do so.

  Alyssa didn’t take her eyes off the baby. Her smile grew. “A DNA test will say this is my son.”

  TWO

  Alyssa stared at the baby, her thoughts racing. A DNA test. Yes, of course. She and her sister had shared a rare mutual thrill when they’d learned in biology class that as identical twins, their DNA was the same. Genetically, Alyssa could pass for Vanessa, and vice versa, not that they’d had any reason back then to use that knowledge for any purpose.

  That discovery had come mere weeks before a far more tragic occurrence. Vanessa had gone to work, as usual, at The Flaming Pheasant restaurant near the interstate. Alyssa had heard her car pull away from the house where they lived with their grandfather, just as she’d heard her sister leave for work so many dozens of other times. But she’d never heard her return.

  Vanessa had been missing for eight years. She’d been declared legally dead, and Alyssa had relinquished all hope of ever seeing her again.

  But if, as the words scrawled on the baby’s T-shirt claimed, a DNA test would prove Alyssa was the little boy’s mother, it could only mean one thing.

  The baby was her identical twin sister’s son.

  Vanessa was alive.

  * * *

  Chris stared at Alyssa, who refused to look at him, much less meet his eyes.

  He didn’t like being lied to. Unfortunately, as a police officer, he got lied to a lot—so much so that he’d developed an acute sensitivity to lying, a sort of built-in lie detector that sent the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end whenever someone tried to pull one over on him.

  And those hairs were all prickling straight out now.

  He doubted Alyssa had ever seen this baby before, certainly not recently. Just as he was nearly positive she hadn’t given birth any time in the past year.

  He took a step back and considered his next move. The dispatcher had sent him to investigate claims of hooligans, stolen statues and a suspicious crying sound. And he still hoped to get a look around, to learn if his drug-smuggling suspicions were justified. But the woman in front of him was, at best, emotionally volatile. He knew from experience that trying to get between a mother and her baby was as dangerous with humans as it was with bears and wolves.

  Not only was she probably lying to him, but there was every chance the woman in front of him was crazy, too. He’d have to proceed with caution if he expected to stick around long enough to investigate anything.

  * * *

  Alyssa gazed at the baby’s face in pure wonderment. Yes, she could see the resemblance clearly now, to her baby pictures as well as her sister’s. There was every chance this little person was her own flesh and blood, but how had he ended up in her manger?

  When Vanessa had disappeared eight years before, there had been plenty of theories about what might have happened to her. Some suggested she’d run away—but Alyssa doubted that. No matter how difficult things were in their nontraditional household, twin teenage girls being raised by their grandfather, Vanessa hadn’t been that unhappy. A little morose at times. And she’d grown increasingly distant from Alyssa, but they still shared important things.

  Vanessa wouldn’t have run away, not without her car or her favorite things, which Alyssa still kept in a trunk in their bedroom. She wouldn’t have left without any sort of goodbye.

  Which meant she may have been kidnapped. The Flaming Pheasant restaurant was on the interstate. People came and went on a regular basis. Anyone could have scooped up her sister and carried her off, but the odd thing was that there’d been no sign of her since. If she was still alive, wouldn’t she have tried to escape?

  It was that very question that had led Alyssa to request that her sister be declared legally dead—that and the fact that her grandfather’s will had left everything to the two of them, and Alyssa hadn’t been able to do anything with the property as long as it was tied up with her sister.

  But if Vanessa had a baby, that meant she wasn’t dead—or at least hadn’t been dead until recently. Even the message on the baby’s shirt, hastily scrawled though it was, appeared to be written in Vanessa’s handwriting. So her sister had to be alive.

  But surely she had to be in some kind of trouble to run off without showing her face, leaving her baby behind.

  Alyssa made up her mind quickly. She didn’t know what was happening, with her sister or the baby. But she knew one thing for certain: her sister had left the child for her on purpose, had composed the message on the baby’s shirt specifically so Alyssa would be able to pass the child off as her own.

  If Vanessa wasn’t dead, she had to have a good reason for leaving her child behind, for sneaking away in silence in the first place.

  What kind of reason?

  Surely only a matter of life or death.

  Alyssa hugged the baby close, grateful that he’d stopped crying and seemed comforted by being held on her lap, even if he seemed determined to yank a chunk of her hair out of her head. Vanessa clearly wanted to keep the baby safe, maybe even hidden.

  Which meant Alyssa needed to get rid of the police officer in her yard as quickly as possible. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to the child’s presence. Just as she began to wonder how to get rid of him quickly, the officer spoke.

  “You called 911 to report suspicious activity. Do you want me to have a look around?”

  “No!” Alyssa nearly yelped. Then, since the police officer looked startled, she tried to make her voice sound casual. “That’s really not necessary. Everything’s okay, I guess. Sorry to bother you.”

  The policeman stared at her with slightly narrowed eyes, and Alyssa returned his look. She’d been so distracted by the baby, she hadn’t really noticed anything about him. Now she realized he was youngish, maybe even still in his twenties, not much older than she was. Standing above her as she sat on the edge of the manger, he seemed impossibly tall and broad-shouldered, intimidatingly so. She might have considered him handsome if he hadn’t been glaring at her so warily, his posture indicating he had no intention of going anywhere yet.

  Fear trickled through her veins, more acutely now than when she’d dialed 911. Too late, she wished she hadn’t called at all. Sure, it would have been nice to catch the hooligans who’d been stealing the concrete lambs from beside Baby Jesus’s manger, but obviously, this baby wasn’t related to her missing concrete statues.

  Now she needed to be rid of the policeman. The baby on her lap whimpered, and, fearing he might be about to cry again, she bounced her knee.

  He burst into a loud sob.

  Alyssa looked down at the child, wishing he’d calm down so she could deal with the police officer. But the baby was only getting started. His cries grew in volume, and his face began to turn red.

  “Shh,” she soothed near his ear, but his cries were so loud, she doubted he could hear her.

  “Are you sure this is your baby?” the policeman asked.

  Alyssa bit her lip and looked down at the red-faced tyke, wishing she knew how to calm him or what to say. What had Vanessa been thinking, leaving the baby without any words of instruction, without even showing her face? Did her sister need her to pass the child off as her own? What would happen if she admitted the truth?

  “He’s my—” Alyssa started, struggling to be heard above the child’s incessant wailing. She glanced up at the officer’s withering glare.

  He
didn’t believe her, did he?

  And wasn’t it illegal to lie to a police officer, even if, technically, a DNA test would conclude she was the baby’s mother? Never mind that she hadn’t really lied. And her sister had started it. She certainly couldn’t take the deception any further.

  The man crouched down to her level again and extended his arms toward the child. Alyssa looked at the wailing baby and then at the officer.

  “You’re not going to take him away from me—”

  “I’m just offering to hold him until he calms down.” The man had to nearly shout to be heard over the baby’s angry cries.

  Alyssa handed the child over, wondering if perhaps the infant knew she had no clue how to care for a baby. Perhaps he could sense her inexperience and was instinctively concerned for his own well-being.

  The officer held the baby against his shoulder and patted his back while bouncing ever so slowly up and down.

  The baby’s cries stilled. He burped, looked a little startled and then smiled.

  Alyssa felt more than a little frustrated. Her sister maybe wasn’t dead after all, had left her a nephew she didn’t know she had and now the baby liked the policeman more than he liked her. “How did you do that?”

  “It sounded like a gassy cry. You probably dislodged an air pocket when you bounced him on your knee, and it was causing him pain. The bobbing helps the bubbles rise. It relieves the pain and makes him happy again.” The man made an expression that was more of a kind smile than a satisfied smirk.

  Alyssa tried to decide whether the officer could be trusted. Smiling now, the guy looked deceptively nice. Even handsome. Not that she was at all noticing.

  No, she needed to get rid of the policeman and take the baby inside, out of sight. Maybe she should go into hiding. The policeman had to go.

  But he had managed to calm the baby. She had to give him points for that. And she couldn’t lie to him—not only did it go against her principles, but it would surely get her into trouble.

  “So...” The officer raised an eyebrow and gave her a conspiratorial half grin that raised a dimple on one cheek.

  Okay, so the man was sincerely good-looking.

  “Whose baby is this, really?”

  Alyssa opened her mouth and tried to think how to form a response.

  The officer spoke first. “I don’t believe he’s yours. You don’t seem to know him, and he doesn’t seem to know you.”

  “I think he may be my sister’s baby.”

  “Your sister?”

  Was it her imagination, or did the policeman go a little pale?

  * * *

  Chris stared at Alyssa, unsure what to make of her words. It had been several years since her twin sister had gone missing, but Chris still recalled the basics of the case. The twins had lived in the little cottage behind the statuary yard, together with their grandfather. They had no other family that he’d ever heard of.

  “What sister?” Chris asked, continuing to slowly bounce up and down, keeping the child soothed with the motion.

  Alyssa looked up at him uncertainly, and Chris saw it clearly now, the resemblance to her attractive twin sister. Alyssa was older than the dated photo on all the missing-person posters, but the resemblance was still unmistakable. Vanessa’s eyebrows had been plucked into slender arches, while Alyssa’s were natural. And while Vanessa’s eyes and lashes had stood out due to the makeup she wore, Alyssa’s eyes were still warm and brown and pretty. Her whole face was very pretty.

  It took him a little by surprise, because he’d driven past so many times, watched her working in her grubby jeans and stained work shirts, her hair always pulled back efficiently in a ponytail. It had never occurred to him that close-up she might be perfectly attractive.

  But even more than her physical attractiveness, Chris was struck by the uncertainty in her expression, the pursed-lip pensiveness. She was clearly weighing whether she ought to trust him.

  Funny, he’d been asking himself the same question about her.

  She began pensively, “I was born with an identical twin sister. We share the same DNA.”

  Chris stopped bobbing. Time seemed to still as he stared at Alyssa, seeing the face of her sister from the missing-person posters, seeing time swirl between them. Vanessa Jackson had been declared legally dead long before, way too long ago to have a baby as young as the child he held in his arms. Unless...

  “Your sister, Vanessa?” Chris figured he must have misunderstood. He had to have misunderstood. If Vanessa had a child, that meant she was still alive or had been alive recently. It meant she was still out there, even though they’d never found her. It meant the case that had been closed when she was declared legally dead ought, by rights, to be opened again.

  It meant he’d failed—failed to find Vanessa, filed the case away in the wrong drawer, closed the search while she was still out there to be found.

  But Alyssa’s face brightened, however slightly. “You’ve heard of her?”

  Heard of her? He’d prayed for her safe return. Words seemed insufficient to explain how he knew her, since he’d never actually met her. But he knew details about her life and disappearance, more details than he knew about plenty of other people he called his friends. He nodded. “She went missing—”

  “Eight years ago.”

  “Eight years ago,” Chris repeated, remembering. He’d been on the force just over eight years, ever since he’d graduated from the law-enforcement academy. Vanessa’s disappearance had been his first big case. “But she was declared—” he dropped his voice to a whisper, unwilling to speak the words too loudly in the presence of the child, even if the baby was too young to understand “—legally dead.”

  “I know.” Alyssa’s face pinched tight for a moment, as though she was fighting back tears or some awful memory. She reached for the baby and drew his jacket to the side so the hastily scrawled message showed clearly. “But if a DNA test would prove this is my child, what other explanation is there? Identical twins share the same DNA. I don’t have a child. If he carries my DNA—”

  Chris thought of another possibility, however slim. “You’ve never sold your eggs, for example, to a fertility clinic?”

  “No. And I’ve never...” She looked uncomfortable. “I’ve never had a child. Or been pregnant.”

  “Right.” Chris cleared his throat. “Nobody ever figured out what happened to your sister, did they?”

  “There was never any sign of her. One of the cooks saw her walk out the rear employee door of The Flaming Pheasant. That was the last time she was seen.” Alyssa extended one hand toward the baby, who grasped her finger.

  “So she was declared dead based on—”

  “Based on the fact she’d been gone so long, with no sign of her ever turning up anywhere, and foul play suspected in her disappearance.” Alyssa bit her lip again and looked from the baby’s face to Chris and back again. She let out a long breath. “I still suspect foul play. Not just in her disappearance, but—” She shook her head. When she glanced up at him again, her eyes were moist. “She always wanted to be a mom. Always. She dreamed of it. I always wanted to run the statuary business. We used to joke that she got the mothering gene and I didn’t—even though we share genes, obviously. But for her to leave her baby with me—” Alyssa shuddered.

  “The foul play,” Chris suggested, his voice purposely soft, not wanting to disturb the baby or Alyssa, “whoever took her. You think they’re still—”

  “They’re still controlling her, or holding her prisoner or whatever it is. Maybe she escaped just long enough to hand off the baby? She wouldn’t be parted from her son unless his life was in danger. And hers, I suppose. Why else would she go eight years without letting me know she was alive, unless she had no other choice?”

  Chris watched the woman wrestle with all the horrible
possibilities and wished he had something reassuring to tell her. But he could still hardly wrap his head around the idea. Was Vanessa Jackson still alive? And she’d left her son in her sister’s manger? It seemed a bit crazy, but Chris had to admit, the little tyke in his arms bore a strong resemblance to his aunt. And Vanessa’s body had never been found, so it was technically possible she was still alive, no matter what the legal record said.

  His mind now made up, Chris was ready to take the next step toward finding Vanessa Jackson. He may have failed her before, but if she was still out there, he could find her. “We need to file a report about this baby and get your sister’s case reopened.”

  Alyssa took a sudden step back and looked up at him as though he’d slapped her. “No. That’s the last thing we should do.”

  THREE

  Just as she’d been about to start trusting him, Alyssa was reminded that this police officer, no matter how charming his smile, was a stranger, an unknown entity. And just like the incompetent officers who’d failed to find her sister eight years ago, even going so far as to suggest she and her grandfather had pushed Vanessa to run away, this man was more likely to hurt than help her.

  She’d also thought of something else. Surely her sister knew better than to leave the baby with her without any instructions. Vanessa had always been the twin who was good with kids—Alyssa had been better with cement mix. Like the note on the baby’s shirt, perhaps Vanessa had left more instructions. Alyssa just needed to find them. She could check the car seat, the diaper bag, the rest of the baby’s clothes.

  And really, she needed to get the kid indoors. Not only was the evening growing dark and cooling off, but if Vanessa had left the baby there to hide him, Alyssa wouldn’t be doing her sister any favors, either, standing outside in plain sight from the road.

  “I’ll take him.” She held out her hands toward the baby, whom the officer still held upright in his arms. “I need to get him inside.”