THE BABY WAS GONE.
Only a blanket and a pacifier remained in the crib. Jamie stood there, clutching her own baby to her chest, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, thoughts racing frantically through her mind. She was aware that she had only seconds to convince herself that what she was seeing was true and to act on that knowledge.
She reached down and pushed the blanket aside-just to make sure.
It was like the morning that she found her grandmother dead. Jamie had felt as though there must be some other explanation for her grandmother’s lifeless body. Anything but death. Jamie had even tried to lift Granny’s head and place a pill between her lips. Then to shake her awake. To make it not be so.
That was how she felt now. She wanted to do something that could reverse the reality of what she was seeing.
Sounds came through the open window-a distant siren, a train whistle, the slam of a door. Normal sounds that belied that reality.
If her neighbor’s baby was truly gone, it would mean that once again her life had been irreversibly changed.
But was there some other explanation? Had Lynette come in the night to take her baby home? Jamie looked at the door-her apartment’s only door. The security chain was still engaged.
Even though her neighbor’s baby was only two months old and could not climb, could not walk, could not even crawl, Jamie-still holding Billy in her arms-dropped to her knees and, with a fervent, whispered prayer, looked under the baby bed.
She scrambled back to her feet and, laying her cheek against the top of Billy’s head, took a deep breath and willed her pounding heart to slow down. Perhaps there was a logical explanation. She was overlooking something. Sometimes her keys weren’t in her purse, and she would look everywhere for them only to realize they had been in the purse all along.
She ran her hands over the baby bed and shook the blanket.
The bed was definitely empty.
She forced herself to look out the open window, half expecting to see a small broken body on the ground three floors below.
Nothing was lying there.
She looked up and down the alley. Everything seemed so normal. It was just an ordinary-but-somewhat-seedy neighborhood near downtown Oklahoma City where she had come to put hundreds of miles between her and a ranch in the Texas Panhandle. To start over.
Jamie thought of all the other nights when her Billy had been the baby sleeping in the bed near the open window. How could it have been done? She doubted if an ordinary ladder could reach the third-floor window. Had someone lowered himself from the roof? Or crawled along the ledge? But still disbelief clouded her senses. Perhaps she had only dreamed that Lynette dropped her baby by last night. Just as she sometimes dreamed that her grandmother was still alive.
But Lynette’s polka-dotted diaper bag was still on the coffee table.
A sob escaped from Jamie’s throat. She closed her eyes and begged God to protect Lynette’s baby.
Billy was whimpering. She needed to change him. Needed to nurse him.
She pressed her lips to Billy’s forehead. They were one creature, she and her baby. There was no line between where she ended and he began. Love for him coursed through her veins. She would do anything to keep him. She would rather die than lose him.
Whoever had taken Lynette’s baby had made a terrible mistake. The baby that person meant to take was Billy.
“Oh, God, Lynette, I am so sorry,” Jamie whispered, imagining the anguish that Lynette would go through. “So sorry,” she said again.
She looked around the two-room apartment she had called home for more than a month now. If her neighbor’s baby was truly gone, she and Billy were no longer safe here.
Maybe they had never been safe here. Maybe it had only been a matter of time until they were found.
She would have to leave. Now. Everything had changed. Everything!