The Stranger's Sin

by Darlene Gardner

  That’s where the counseling came in. Both her lawyer and the DA obviously thought she had a mental problem and couldn’t be trusted around children.

  Her prospects of ever being hired to teach again, already dim, grew bleaker.

  She gasped aloud as something else occurred to her.

  Because of her infertility, she’d always assumed she’d adopt a child someday. With a conviction and her questionable mental health as black marks against her, what reputable agency would approve her to be an adoptive mother?

  “Kelly!”

  Charlie’s voice penetrated the closed door of the second-floor bedroom where Kelly had retreated to make her phone call. She got unsteadily to her feet, put her cell phone back inside her purse and opened the door.

  Chase had left at dawn to patrol his territory for illegal hunting and fishing activity, and she and Charlie were alone in the house with Toby. Charlie didn’t sound particularly distressed, but he could need her.

  “Kelly!” Charlie called again when she reached the top of the stairs.

  She cleared the thickness from her throat.

  “I’m coming, Charlie,” she called.

  He appeared at the bottom of the steps before she completed her descent. “Oh, good. There you are,” he said.

  “What do you need?”

  “A loaf of bread and some gravy mix. I put on that roast for dinner before I checked if we had everything.” Charlie had started defrosting the roast yesterday, claiming it was coming to the end of its freezer life.

  It was the kind of easily solved problem that popped up in the course of a day. In a microcosm, it represented the reason Kelly found living with the Brad-fords so alluring.

  Life here was just so darn normal.

  For a woman facing a prison sentence that would strip her of her career and possibly the chance to be a mother, normal was intoxicating.

  “I’d be happy to go to the grocery store for you,” Kelly offered.

  “I’d rather you keep an eye on Toby and the roast, if that’s okay. He’s in the family room.”

  It was more than okay, she thought a few minutes later while she was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Toby and his building blocks.

  She loved spending time with him. The only thing better would be if Chase could join them.

  His work schedule had been so full they’d barely spent any time together since the fireworks display Saturday night, but she liked what she had seen of him.

  Singing off-key in a duet with a character on Sesame Street with Toby in his arms.

  Insisting he be the one who changed Toby’s diaper before he rushed off to work this morning.

  Leaving them both with a kiss.

  “There’s another block over there,” she told Toby, pointing to a bright-red one under a Queen Anne armchair.

  Toby crawled over to the block on chubby knees. He was such a champion crawler that she thought it was why he hadn’t yet taken his first step.

  She’d miss his first step, she realized. His first step and his first sentence and his first night in a big-boy bed.

  She wasn’t making any headway finding Mandy while sitting in the Bradford family room, no matter how attached she was getting to the trio of males who shared it with her.

  A few days ago she’d decided against taking a trip to Harrisburg because Chase had already covered that ground. With her options running low, it was time to reconsider. She could recanvas the bar where he’d met Mandy and the hotel where the other woman had lived in case he’d missed something. This time she could ask if the name Mandy Johnson was familiar.

  Toby suddenly started to whimper.

  “What’s wrong, Toby?” she asked, gathering the little boy into her arms.

  He screwed up his face, in obvious discomfort. He felt a little warm even though Charlie had lowered the setting on the air conditioner to counteract the heat from the oven.

  Ten minutes later, Toby was wailing as she walked him around the house. She’d also identified the source of his distress—he was teething.

  “I’ll get something to make it better, sweetheart,” she told him.

  She found baby aspirin and gel to rub on his sore gums, but neither of them helped. Then she remembered a tactic to get him to calm down that Chase had shared.

  “C’mon, little guy,” she said, heading for the door. “We’re going outside.”

  CHASE LEFT HIS JEEP in the driveway, even though he could see through the row of small windows lining the top of the panel door that the one-car garage was empty of his father’s car.

  He’d spent the day like a nomad, constantly on the move as he patrolled his territory for illegal fishing activity, but his mind kept returning to one place.

  Home.

  Even though he hadn’t grown up there, he’d started thinking of the Cape Cod on Elm Street as home almost as soon as his parents had relocated. His mother’s death had rendered the place merely a house, but the people who filled it were slowly transforming it into a home once again.

  His father, whose health had checked out just fine at the doctor’s office to Chase’s tremendous relief.

  Toby, whom he loved without reservation.

  And Kelly, who…well, he wasn’t ready to put a label on what he felt for her.

  He’d been so busy at work both today and yesterday that they hadn’t made any progress in their search for Mandy. They needed to put their heads together and come up with a firm plan.

  Not tonight, though. Tonight he planned to enjoy the company of his three favorite people. He walked quickly toward the house, then stopped suddenly. A dull, steady noise rang in his ears.

  Trying to identify the source, he surveyed the immediate vicinity. But no, the noise wasn’t coming from outside. It was emanating from…the house?

  He hurried toward the entrance, the noise growing incrementally louder with each step he took. He tried the doorknob, found it unlocked and yanked open the door.

  A shrill mechanical scream assaulted his ears. The smoke alarm!

  At the end of the short hallway that led to the kitchen, a haze of smoke wafted in the air.

  Oh, God, no!

  Heart pounding and adrenaline surging, he raced toward the kitchen.

  “Kelly!” he screamed. “Toby!”

  He braced himself to get assaulted with a wall of heat, dreading the sight of flames licking at the walls, of Toby and Kelly unresponsive on the floor.

  But he saw no fire, only smoke.

  It curled toward the ceiling in thin gray puffs, its origin the oven. His eyes stinging from the smoke, he hurried over and turned it off. He pulled on the thick oven mitt beside the sink, then yanked open the oven door and hauled out a shallow pan. Inside was a beef roast, overcooked but not burned, swimming in bubbling juices.

  He put the pan on the counter and bent down, finally identifying the cause of the smoke. The juices had spilled over the side of the pan and splashed on the heating element.

  Luckily it wasn’t true that where there was smoke, there was fire.

  He drew in a relieved breath, the smoke immediately clogging his lungs and making him cough.

  He flicked the switch that turned on the oven fan, then located the still-shrieking smoke alarm, jerking out the batteries.

  Returning to the kitchen, he spotted an unopened package of baby spinach beside an empty salad bowl. Kelly had obviously been in the middle of preparing dinner, but then where was she?

  “Kelly!” he called, his voice less frantic.

  She didn’t answer, which seemed strange. Where would she have gone when there was a roast in the oven, especially since his father seemed to have taken the car?

  His mind still on the puzzle, he moved to open the kitchen window that overlooked the backyard. There, dashing through the sprinkler that was set to switch on automatically in the early evening, was Kelly. She held Toby securely in her arms.

  He opened the window, barely noticing the clean, sweet air that streamed into the h
ouse, his attention focused on the woman and the baby.

  They were a good distance away, which was probably why she hadn’t heard the alarm. Chase saw the white flash of her teeth. He could tell Toby was also smiling by the way the little boy waved his arms. They were both drenched.

  Amid the smoke and the smell of overdone beef, something inside him softened, radiating from his heart until his chest felt full.

  He finished opening the rest of the windows on the first floor, enabling a cross breeze to flow through the house. Then he went into the backyard, still transfixed by the sight of woman and baby.

  Kelly was making another pass under the sprinkler, singing loudly and off tune about raindrops falling on their heads. Toby’s giggles were so infectious Chase felt his lips curve upward. Kelly looked up, a broader smile wreathing her face.

  “Look, Toby,” she said. “Look who it is.”

  Toby stopped giggling. Stretching out his arms, his mouth still open in a charming grin, he said, “Da-da.”

  Time seemed to freeze.

  Chase noticed little things. The drops of water in Toby’s hair. Kelly’s slim, sure hands at the baby’s waist as she half lifted him toward Chase. The happy sparkle in Toby’s eyes.

  The moment burned into his memory as surely as if he’d taken a photograph, Chase reached for the little boy he thought of as his son.

  Toby came willingly, flapping his arms with delight as though he were still playing in the sprinkler.

  “Da-da,” he said again.

  Chase’s throat felt thick, rendering him momentarily speechless.

  “That’s the first time he’s called you that,” Kelly stated.

  Chase cleared the thickness from his throat. “You can tell, huh?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “How you doin’ today, sport?” he asked Toby, although the answer seemed fairly obvious. Chase would be doing great, too, if he’d spent the day with Kelly.

  The little boy patted his own head.

  “He’s telling you the raindrops were falling on his head,” Kelly translated.

  “Yeah, I saw that,” Chase said.

  “I wanted to take his mind off his t-e-e-t-h.” Kelly spelled out the last word. “More of them must be coming in because he was crying something awful.”

  “We have some gel in the medicine cabinet that’s supposed to help,” Chase said.

  “He was already in full cry when I tried that so I brought him outside to distract him. The sprinkler came on, and the next thing I knew we were running through it.” Kelly pushed her wet hair back from her face as she relayed the story. Her T-shirt clung to her curves very nicely. “It seemed to work.”

  “How long ago was that?” Chase asked.

  “Maybe a half hour. Not long after your father went to the grocery store. I told him…” Her voice trailed off and she smacked her head. “The pot roast! I told him I’d watch the pot roast but I totally forgot.”

  She hurried toward the house, with Chase following. “Kelly! Wait! There’s something you should know before you go into the house.”

  She turned around, her expression pained. “I ruined it, didn’t I?”

  “Almost, but that’s not it. Some juices got on the heating element so the house is pretty smoky.”

  She cradled her head with both hands. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have left the house with something in the oven. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I do.” He closed the distance between them. “You were thinking of a way to get Toby to stop crying, and you did that.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No buts.” Balancing Toby with one arm, he reached out with the other and covered her lips with two of his fingers. “The house is smoky, but so what. There’s no harm done.”

  “Yeah, but no self-respecting cook would have let that happen. I guess the secret’s out that I’m terrible in the kitchen.”

  “You’re wonderful with Toby, and that’s far more important.” Chase lifted the boy in the air, relishing his immediate baby giggles. “Isn’t that right, Toby? Isn’t Kelly the best?”

  They waited a few more minutes for the smoke to clear, then went into the house, working in tandem to rescue the edible parts of the roast.

  The rest of the evening didn’t play out exactly as Chase had envisioned, but it was close enough. His father was strangely subdued during dinner, something so out of character that Chase did something he’d sworn he’d never do.

  “You’re actually suggesting we play charades?” Charlie asked. His father paid little mind to the fact that it was a party game, better played with a group of people. Whenever they had a guest in the house, even it if was only a single guest, Charlie tried to get up a game.

  Chase always resisted, partly because the game was corny but mostly because his father was a spectacularly lousy player.

  “Yeah,” Chase said. “But if you make a big deal of it, I might change my mind.”

  At the threat, his father leaped to his feet. As always, he insisted on going first. Ten long minutes later, he collapsed against the sofa cushions.

  “How could you guess Babe when the answer was King Kong?” his father asked Kelly, his voice laced with mock exasperation.

  “They’re both movie titles,” Kelly said, giggling. Toby, who was sitting on her lap, giggled, too.

  “Yeah, but King Kong’s a big ape,” his father said, sounding put out. “Babe is a little pig.”

  “You indicated it was something fat.”

  “Not fat. Big. An ape can be big and not be fat. A pig is always fat. There’s a real distinction. How could you get them mixed up?”

  Kelly’s giggles turned to full-fledged laughter, and she wiped at her eyes. Chase smiled, enjoying the affectionate interplay between the two. Kelly belonged here, just like his father, just like Toby. She’d told him earlier that she loved Indigo Springs. Maybe he could persuade her to stay.

  “Look at it from my standpoint,” Kelly said. “You described an ape the same way you would a pig.”

  The phone rang, interrupting their mock argument. Chase was closest so he rose from his seat beside Kelly and picked up the portable receiver on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “This is Helene Heffinger.” The jewelry-maker’s voice came over the line, so unexpected it was jarring. He covered the mouthpiece, walking quickly out of the living room and away from the noise. “It turns out I did have that phone number you wanted.”

  A sense of foreboding swept over him, although he wasn’t sure why. “Do you have a name?”

  “Of course I have a name,” she said testily. “I wouldn’t have the phone number if I didn’t have a name, too.”

  “What is it?” Chase prodded.

  “Jasper Johnson.”

  Johnson. The same last name that allegedly belonged to Mandy.

  While Heffinger gave him the rest of the information, Chase watched his father, Kelly and Toby, all of whom where still laughing. For them, nothing had changed.

  But in the space of a phone call, Chase’s entire world had been upended.

  Mandy had always maintained she didn’t know who had fathered Toby. She also claimed she’d never been married. Those statements could still be true but it struck Chase as too big a coincidence that Mandy shared a last name with the man who’d bought her the necklace.

  On the day Toby had called him Da-da for the first time, Helene Heffinger might have just provided Chase with information that could lead him to the baby’s biological father.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  GO-KARTS WHIZZED AROUND a serpentine track Tuesday night, mostly driven by male teens too young to hold drivers’ licenses.

  Kelly spotted only one couple in line, the female half of the pair a petite blonde who was dwarfed by her tall, brawny boyfriend. They held hands, their eyes mostly on each other rather than the noisy machines circling the track.

  If she tried hard enough, Kelly supposed she could pretend she and Chase had driven an hour to the Allentown tra
ck known as Scooters in search of a fun, unusual date. But she was too old for fairy tales, even though she’d been living one for the past few days in the company of the Bradford men.

  She’d made a step in the right direction this morning by moving out of Chase’s house and back into the Blue Stream Bed-and-Breakfast. Now it was time to bring her search for Mandy back to the forefront, where it belonged. She was running out of time and money. No matter what happened tonight, she needed to stop fooling herself that she and Chase were a normal couple.

  She needed to harden herself against falling in love with him.

  “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” she asked him.

  They were standing outside a chain-link fence that looked over the track, just steps from the small building where customers paid admission and teenagers played video games.

  “Pretty sure,” he said. “I kept getting the answering machine when I called the number Heffinger gave me, but Scooters is definitely the right place. Heffinger remembered that Jasper Johnson worked as a go-kart attendant.”

  “That doesn’t mean he still works here,” she said.

  “True, but it’s time we caught a break.”

  He took a few deep breaths as though he was steeling himself, too, but she knew his private battle had everything to do with Toby. “Are you ready to do this?”

  She put a hand on his arm to detain him. “You know, Jasper Johnson may not be Toby’s father.”

  Chase had put forth his suspicion about Toby’s parentage when he’d gotten off the phone last night, but since then had shied away from discussing the issue. His sigh was audible even over the track noise. “I guess it’s pretty obvious I’ve been worried about that.”

  “I’ve become attuned to the Bradford men over the past few days,” she said. “When something’s bothering you, you clam up. Your dad jokes around.”

  “My dad always jokes around,” he remarked.

  “Not so much now that he and Teresa are having trouble.”

  “What do you mean having trouble?”

  “They’re involved, aren’t they?”