by Lynn Bohart
“What? No,” I shook my head. “I refuse to believe Libby is involved in anything. She’s not like that.”
“Julia,” April said, putting a hand on my forearm, “We don’t know anything for sure. We’re all just speculating.”
Rudy had come over and sat on the arm of the sofa. “Yes, but if we don’t believe in coincidences, then we have to accept the possibility that Libby could be involved.”
Rudy nodded at me, making me see the logic.
“I think US could stand for ultrasound,” Doe blurted out, still looking at the sheet.
We all looked at her in surprise and then down at the paper.
“Of course,” I said. “I just naturally thought it meant the United States. But it could mean ultrasound. And the numbers below that are the dates they had the test. So, someone is keeping track of their pregnancies. And then the Bs and Gs in the next column indicate whether it’s a boy or a girl. But what about these over here? They look like more abbreviations.”
I pointed to where there was a column with things like M/M T.P., M/M A.L., M/M C.R. followed by a five digit number. Everyone studied it for a minute. Finally, it was Blair who spoke up again.
“The people who are getting the babies and their zip codes,” she said solemnly. “The M and M stands for Mr. and Mrs.”
I stared at Blair like she was a genius.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. “It’s real. This is all real.”
I pulled a throw over my legs as I began to shiver.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We tried calling both Detective Abrams and Franks before going to bed, but couldn’t reach either one, so we left messages. There was nothing else to do that night, so everyone headed to their rooms. It was almost midnight when my head finally hit the pillow. I was exhausted and fell asleep almost immediately. Several hours later, a distant ringing once again pulled me from an awkward dream. I pried my eyes open and reached over and answered my cell phone, which I’d left next to the bed.
“Mrs. Applegate!” a hushed voice said. “Please, you can come?”
I raised myself up onto one elbow. “What? Who is this?”
“It’s Rosa, Mrs. Applegate. Please, you can come?”
I shook my head to get rid of the cobwebs and the pain medication. It sounded like Rosa, albeit a little garbled.
“Um…Rosa, where are you?”
“I…they moved me to that other shelter. I’m all alone.”
Rosa began to cry and mumble something. I sat up on the edge of the bed.
“Okay, they took you to Enumclaw. Are you having labor pains?”
“No. Baby no come, yet. Not for many days. I just…I just feel so alone. I understand if you no want to come.”
I was up now, rummaging through a drawer, looking for my jeans with my one good eye. “That’s okay, Rosa, I’ll come. I’m sure everything is fine. Like I said, they often take the pregnant women to the Enumclaw shelter because it’s so close to the hospital. But I believe you, Rosa, about what you heard. I’ll come be with you now, and then I’ll have someone come and sit with you twenty-four hours a day until your baby comes, if I have to. No one is going to take your baby. Okay?”
“Okay. Si, Mrs. Applegate.”
“I can be there in about an hour. Watch for me, okay?”
“Yes, Mrs. Applegate. Thank you,” she said, sniffling.
“Do you need anything?”
“Uh…they forget toothpaste and no shampoo.”
“I can bring you those things. You hang tight.”
“I will watch for you. Thank you, Mrs. Applegate.”
She hung up, and I struggled to get dressed. My body was sore and I had trouble finding things. Then I snuck into the corridor, making sure the dogs stayed behind. We kept small bottles of shampoo and tubes of toothpaste for guests in a cupboard behind the registration desk. I tiptoed past the library, where Officer Barnes was stretched out in a chair, snoring. Then, as quietly as possible I hurried to the registration desk and opened the cupboard and grabbed what I needed. I was just about to return to my apartment, when a sharp voice stopped me.
“Where the heck are you going?”
I spun around to find Blair standing in the breakfast room with a chicken leg in her hand.
“It’s like four a.m. or something,” she said.
I stopped like a guilty teenager.
“Actually, it’s three a.m.. I have to go out for a while,” I said in a whisper.
“What? Where?”
“Rosa called,” I said quietly, putting a finger to my lips. “They’ve moved her, and she wants me to bring her a few things.”
“And you’re not calling the police?”
“She’s okay—she’s just lonely,” I said, gesturing for her to keep her voice down. “They’ve just moved her to the shelter in Enumclaw. They move the pregnant women up there when they’re close to giving birth so they’ll be near the hospital. Her baby isn’t due for a couple of weeks.”
“You’re not going anywhere without me,” she said, throwing the chicken bone into a wastebasket.
I eyed the wastebasket. “Really? I have dogs.”
Blair scowled and reached over and picked up the wastebasket.
“Listen, Blair,” I said. “I can do this. You stay here.”
She threw out a shapely hip and placed her hand on it.
“Really?” she said, mimicking me. “What are you going to drive?”
“I…” and then I remembered I didn’t have a car.
“I’ll take a taxi, Bub,” Ahab murmured from under his cover.
“I’ll drive the van,” I whispered, drawing her back down the hallway toward my apartment.
“With one eye,” she said scornfully.
I turned to her, looking at her through my good eye. “Okay, maybe you’re right.”
“Damn right I’m right. C’mon. Let’s go.”
Before I could stop her, she stomped through the door to my apartment, put the wastebasket on the counter, and headed down the hallway to the guest bedroom, where she was staying. I threw the chicken bone away, and a minute or two later, she was dressed in jeans and tennis shoes and carrying her coat and purse over one arm. Blair was close to 5’ 8” tall in heels, but in the tennis shoes, we were much closer in height. Without her makeup, she looked a lot younger and I realized how naturally pretty she really was.
“What are you driving tonight?” I asked with a nervous edge to my voice.
She gave me a mischievous smile. “The Porsche.”
My heart skipped a beat. Knowing that we’d have most of the roads to ourselves at this time of the morning wasn’t as comforting as you might think. But I didn’t have much choice. I’d be on the road with an amateur race car driver.
Blair threw the shoulder strap of her purse over her shoulder, and we snuck out the side door to avoid Officer Barnes.
We took I-405 south on the eastside of the lake until we got to Renton; there we left the freeway. Since Blair was traveling at roughly the speed of light, we thought it would be safer and less likely that we’d run into police or highway patrol on the back roads. The Seattle area was home to an entire landscape of bedroom communities, and we traveled east, following the Cedar River all the way up into the foothills and Maple Valley, a town of 22,000. Here drivers can make a choice to keep going to Enumclaw, or turn west and drop down into the city of Kent.
We headed towards Enumclaw and very quickly left Maple Valley’s few lights behind. At this time of the morning, we were alone on the highway. Blair reached out to turn on the radio, when I took a chance.
“So, Mr. Billings is in Vancouver on business,” I said.
“Yep,” she said with a nod, retracting her hand. “He’s thinking of buying a dealership down there.”
“His first name is Jacob, isn’t it?”
She snuck a suspicious glance my way. “Yeah. Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve just always wondered why you call him Mr. Billings, that�
��s all.”
“How long have you and the others been scheming to ask me that?”
“Oh, no scheming,” I said with a smile. “I really did just wonder.”
I tried to seem nonchalant, but in truth I was hoping that by engaging her in conversation, she might slow down a bit. My insides were beginning to feel like a milkshake as she took corners at full speed.
“Jeez, I thought you guys had guessed that a long time ago,” she said, pulling her foot off the accelerator to allow the little car to slow down. “I met Jacob when I was in Billings, Montana four years ago, visiting my mother. He was there to visit one of his rancher buddies. We hit it off and one thing led to another, and…,” she smiled coquettishly. “Anyway,” she said with a shrug, “I nicknamed his…uh…his…you know….”
I snapped my head around to look at her.
“What?” I almost choked. “You mean like…oh my God…like, ‘Oh, hey, Honey, can Mr. Billings come out and play?’” I said in a fake sexy voice.
She nodded with a smirk. “You know he was separated from his wife back then, but he was still married. So when we got back to Seattle, I’d call him at the dealership and leave a message that I was looking forward to seeing Mr. Billings that night. Or having lunch with Mr. Billings the next day. Afterwards, it just seemed to stick.”
“Oh, dear,” I said, erupting in laughter. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at Mr. Billings the same way ever again.”
“I know. Isn’t it funny how things like that happen?” she said, chuckling. “I’ve had pet names for several of my other…you know, but I would never utter those nicknames out loud.”
That sent us into a new round of laughter.
Within a few miles, we slowed through the speed trap in Black Diamond and then sailed down a sloping curve to a small valley where Jones Lake glistened in the moonlight. We climbed up the other side until the car’s headlights illuminated a sign telling us we were approaching the Green River Gorge. The Green River, now famous because of the Green River Killer, flows down from the Cascades through a gorge, where the steep cliffs rise some 300 feet above the river bed.
We dropped down to the darkened bridge that spanned the deep crevice below, and I glanced at my watch. We’d been on the road for thirty-seven minutes, a record by anyone’s standards. If I hadn’t already digested my dinner, I might have been wearing it, given Blair’s propensity for taking curves at high speeds. I also realized I couldn’t feel the fingers on my right hand anymore because they were wrapped so tightly around the armrest.
As we came up the other side of the gorge, the road leveled out in a valley rimmed by the dark outline of mountains. We were coming into Enumclaw and began to pass farm houses and barns that appeared only as black silhouettes in the dark. We coasted into the residential part of town where the road began to twist and turn until it took us right into downtown Enumclaw.
Enumclaw is a small, western-style town tucked into the foothills of the lower Cascades. I know my way around the area only because Angela had belonged to a 4H dog club back when she was in middle school, and the club had shown the dogs at the King County Fairgrounds there.
I had Blair turn left on Griffen Street, and we glided past darkened stores and shops until I told her to turn left, and we found the shelter at the end of a short dead-end street.
We pulled into the parking lot at 3:45 a.m. The shelter was a single-level building that looked more like a prison camp than a women’s shelter. Only a single lamppost shed light onto the front walkway, leaving much of the entrance in shadow.
We got out and followed the path to the entrance, feeling the crisp mountain air nip at our skin. I pulled a wool scarf tight around my neck to ward off the cold, and then pressed the buzzer, knowing it would take the night manager a few minutes to roll out of bed and come to the door. A minute later, there was a crackle on the intercom.
“Yeah?” someone said with a growl.
“We’re here to see Rosa,” I said.
“Rosa who?”
“Rosa Cordero. She came in tonight. She’s very pregnant and is nervous about the delivery. She asked me to bring her a few things.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a volunteer with the shelter in Ballard,” I said, feeling like they might want to consider offering this woman some customer service training. “My name is Julia Applegate. I have my ID.” I searched my purse and pulled out my picture ID.
“Just a minute,” she said impatiently.
She pushed a button and a buzzer sounded. The door unlatched and she opened the door a crack. I handed her my ID, and she peered at it with a scowl on her face.
“I’m not sure who you’re talkin’ about,” she said, “but come on in.”
She let us in and turned and strode toward the office. She was wearing baggy sweat pants, an old sweat shirt, and slippers. Her hair stuck out at odd angles, and she was hunched at the shoulders.
“I just came on at midnight,” she said over her shoulder.
We followed her up the hallway and turned right into a small office where three desks were crammed up against one another and piled high with papers and file folders. She went to a chalk board on the far wall that had been divided into twelve numbered squares. In the middle of each square was a hook. Most of the hooks were empty and had names written under them, meaning the room had a resident in it, and the resident had the key. But two rooms were empty, and the key still hung on the hook. There was no Cordero written anywhere on the board.
“Hmmm,” she muttered. “Doesn’t look like she’s here.”
“But she just called me and said that she was.”
The woman looked sideways at me over her glasses. Then I remembered how awful I looked and I dropped my chin.
“Somebody beat you up?” she asked.
“No. I was in an accident” I told her. “Anyway, Rosa said they brought her here.”
“Let me check the computer,” she said with a huff.
She went over to a laptop that sat on one of the desks and typed something onto the keyboard. Then she scanned the screen.
“If she was here, she’s already gone,” she said.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I don’t see that she was ever checked in. You said she was pregnant. Maybe they took her right over to the hospital. But let me check one more thing. If she came in and left quickly, maybe they just dropped her belongings and didn’t get her checked in. I’ll check the two empty rooms.”
She got up and left the office.
Blair followed her to the door and watched her disappear down the hallway. Then she turned to me.
“She could use a little etiquette training. Not to mention a perm.”
“No kidding.”
I glanced around the room, anxious to get to the hospital if that’s where they’d taken Rosa. But my heart stopped when I heard the faint sound of “Rock Around the Clock.” It was coming from somewhere in the office.
“What the heck is that?” Blair demanded.
We both looked for the source of the sound and followed it to a desk at the far side of the room. In the bottom drawer was my mother’s God-awful pink phone, along with a red scarf I had seen Rosa wear. I quickly reached in and grabbed the phone. As I drew it out, I flipped it open, hoping the charge had held. But the moment I opened it, it stopped ringing and went dead.
“Nope, nothing there,” the night manager said, rounding the corner into the office.
I whipped around and dropped the phone into my pocket.
“I guess you’ll just have to run up to the hospital and see if she’s there.”
Blair was staring at me curiously, but I began moving past the other woman and into the hallway.
“Well, thanks so much. We’ll see if we can find her up there.”
We left the building and turned towards the car.
“Okay, spill,” Blair said, as we hurried down the sidewalk. “What was all that about with the phone?”
My heart was thumping so hard, I had to take a deep breath to quiet my nerves. I stopped when we got to the car.
“It’s mine,” I said, exhaling.
“What is?” Blair said, with her hand on the car door.
“The phone,” I said. “It was my mother’s. I gave it to Rosa this morning so she could call me if she got into trouble.”
Blair’s eyes grew wide. “So Rosa was here!”
“Yes,” I said, getting into the car. “Let’s go!”
Blair jumped in and started the engine.
“Do you know where the hospital is?” she asked me.
“Yes, it’s back the way we came. We passed it on the way here.”
“Okay,” she said, twirling the steering wheel and backing out of the parking space. “Just tell me where to turn.”
She sped out of the parking lot and we retraced our route. A few minutes later, we were pulling into the parking lot of Enumclaw General Hospital. I directed Blair to the ER. Finding out if Rosa was there wouldn’t be easy since hospitals don’t give out patient information. But I told Blair to just follow my lead. A minute later, we rushed into the waiting room.
“Has Rosa Cordero come in yet?” I nearly shouted as I ran to the reception window. “She’s about to deliver.”
The girl at the desk looked up in alarm, her eyes opening wide at my appearance.
“I was in an accident today,” I said, hoping I could use my appearance to my advantage. “I couldn’t get here until now,” I said, gesturing to my eye. “I hope I haven’t missed her delivery.”
“No one has come in tonight except a kid with a sprained ankle,” she said cautiously.
“But she must have,” I said in a strained voice. “She was staying at the shelter and they said she was brought over here. She called me and needs to know I’m here. It’s important,” I gushed, leaning over the counter.
The girl backed up a little. “Well, she’s not here. They may have taken her to Valley Medical Center. They do that if they think there’s going to be any complications.”
I began to wring my hands as if the strain was too much for me. “Well maybe she was admitted? Could you check? Please?”