LITMIR.BIZ

      K ELLY HEARD THE CRIES before she spotted the woman. She sat on a park bench adjacent to a deserted playground, a baby in her arms.

      The gray clouds, heavy with the threat of rain, had kept the regulars away. No children scampered up the stairs to the clubhouse or swung from the swings. There was just the lone woman and the baby.

      “Shut up!” The woman’s voice, rich with frustration, carried on the breeze. “I can’t take it anymore! Why won’t you stop crying?”

      Kelly didn’t hesitate. She veered from the path, toward the playground, walking at a fast clip. “Excuse me, but can I help?”

      The woman turned around. She was an attractive brunette about Kelly’s age with tears streaking down her cheeks. Lines of strain bracketed her mouth and creased her forehead.

      “Oh, yes.” She stood up and held out the baby. “Could you hold him for just a minute?”

      It was a baby boy about three or four months old with blue eyes and light-blond hair, his face red from crying. Kelly’s heart melted. She held out her arms for the baby. “Sure.”

      The sky darkened and thunder rumbled, followed by loud voices, one male, one female.

      “Where do you want to go to dinner?”

      “That Italian place on the corner looked good.”

      Kelly frowned, trying to figure out what the man and woman were doing in the park. Where had they come from? And why couldn’t she see them? For that matter, where was the baby and the woman who couldn’t stand his crying? What had happened to the park? All she saw now was blackness.

      Realization dawned, and her eyes snapped open. She wasn’t in a park in Wenona at all, but in a room with the shades pulled down, lying on a feather mattress.

      She’d been dreaming about stumbling across Amanda and Corey—no, not Corey. The kidnapped baby’s real name was Eric—on that fateful day she’d tried to help out a stranger. If the dream had continued, she would have seen herself agreeing to babysit for a few hours until Amanda pulled herself together.

      A dream. It had only been a dream. As she struggled to come more fully awake, she dredged up the past few hours.

      Wandering through Indigo Springs looking for a room, which had proved to be a tough task with the Fourth of July just three days away.

      Checking into a room she really couldn’t afford at the Blue Stream Bed-and-Breakfast.

      Phoning her home answering machine to discover Spencer Yates was still trying to work out a deal with the DA and the judge had scheduled a preliminary hearing nine days from today.

      Falling asleep on top of the comforter.

      The noise she’d heard hadn’t been thunder but some of the other guests descending the wooden stairs outside her room. But it shouldn’t be dinnertime yet. Amanda had lain down around four-thirty, setting the alarm on her cell phone to wake her up at five-thirty so she had time to get ready and eat something before meeting Chase Bradford.

      She turned her head, catching a glimpse of the time on the bedside clock: seven-fifteen.

      She bolted to a sitting position, shoving the hair back from her face, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.

      The alarm must not have gone off.

      She dashed for the bathroom, grateful that the room came with a private one, splashed water on her face and peered at herself in the mirror. With smudges of mascara under her eyes, her clothes wrinkled and her hair sticking up in all directions, she looked a fright, like the kind of crazy woman who might actually snatch a baby.

      It wasn’t the kind of image she should present to Chase Bradford.

      She turned on the shower and stripped out of her clothes. She hated being late for the meeting, but she could call him from the phone in the hall once she was presentable. She’d shown Chase’s business card to the desk clerk who’d checked her in so she already had directions.

      The talkative clerk knew Chase because she volunteered in the church nursery during Sunday services and he had a little boy he sometimes left there. The clerk knew Mandy, the boy’s mother, less well but had let it slip that Mandy had moved in with Chase when she got pregnant.

      Fighting a ridiculous wave of disappointment that Chase was either married or at the very least romantically involved with Mandy, she stepped into the shower. She wasn’t sure why it mattered except that Chase had seemed solid and dependable, the kind of man who’d see through a woman like Amanda.

      But she was jumping ahead of herself. She wasn’t yet sure that Amanda and Mandy were the same woman. She’d assumed Amanda was childless because it seemed far-fetched that a mother would kidnap a baby. But then nothing about the devastating events of the past few days made sense. If Chase was involved with the woman who’d perpetrated the crime, that would be good news. Surely he’d have some ideas about where she might have gone.

      As the water streamed down on Kelly and grew cold, a chilling question occurred to her. If Kelly was on the right track and Chase found out the real reason Kelly was searching for Amanda/Mandy, which woman would he be more likely to believe was guilty of kidnapping?

      The woman who was mother to his son, or a complete stranger?