LITMIR.BIZ

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Sam started back up the stairs toward her.

      “Hold on, hold on.” Chandra yanked on her jeans and stuffed the end of her flannel nightshirt into the waistband. She slid her feet into wool socks and, after another quick search under the bed, crammed her feet into her boots.

      Her father’s old .22 was tucked into a corner of the closet. She hesitated, grabbed her down jacket, then curled her fingers over the barrel of the Winchester. Better safe than sorry. Maybe the beast was too far gone and she’d have to put it out of its misery. Maybe it was rabid.

       And maybe it’s not a beast at all.

      By the time she and the retriever crept back downstairs, Sam was nearly out of his mind, barking and growling, ready to take on the world. “Slow down,” Chandra ordered, reaching into the pocket of her jacket, feeling the smooth shells for her .22. She slipped two cartridges into the rifle’s cold chamber.

      “Okay, now don’t do anything stupid,” she said to the dog. She considered leaving Sam in the house, for fear that he might be hurt by the wounded, desperate beast, but then again, she felt better with the old dog by her side. If she did stumble upon a lost bear cub, the mother might not be far away or in the best of moods.

      As she opened the door, a blast of cool mountain air rushed into the room, billowing curtains and causing the fire to glow brightly. The night wind seemed to have forgotten the warm breath of summer that still lingered during the days.

      Clouds drifted across the moon like solitary ghosts, casting shadows on the darkened landscape. The crying hadn’t let up. Punctuated by gasps or hiccups, it grew louder as Chandra marched across the gravel and ignored the fear that stiffened her spine. She headed straight for the barn, to the source of the noise.

      The wailing sounded human. But that was insane. She hadn’t heard a baby cry in years…and there were no children for miles. Her dreams must have confused her…and yet…

      She opened the latch, slid the barn door open and followed an anxious Sam inside. A horse whinnied, and the smells of dust and saddle soap and dry hay filled her nostrils. Snapping on the lights with one hand, she clutched the barrel of the gun with the other.

      The horses were nervous. They rustled the straw on the floor of their boxes, snorting and pawing, tossing their dark heads and rolling their eyes as if they, too, were spooked. “It’s all right,” Chandra told them, though she knew that something in the barn was very, very wrong. The crying became louder and fiercer.

      Her throat dry, her rifle held ready, Chandra walked carefully to the end stall, the only empty box. “What the devil…?” Chandra whispered as she spied a shock of black fur—no, hair—a baby’s downy cap of hair! Chandra’s heart nearly stopped, but she flew into action, laying down the gun, unlatching the stall and kneeling beside the small, swaddled bundle of newborn infant.

      The tiny child was bound in a ratty yellow blanket and covered by a tattered army jacket. “Oh, God,” Chandra whispered, picking up the small bundle only to have the piercing screams resume at a higher pitch. Blue-black eyes blinked at the harsh overhead lights, and the infant’s little face was contorted and red from crying. One little fist had been freed from the blankets and now waved in agitation near its cheek. “Oh, God, oh, God.” The baby, all lungs from the sound of it, squealed loudly.

      “Oh, sweetheart, don’t cry,” Chandra murmured, plucking pieces of straw from the child’s hair and holding him close to her breast, trying to be soothing. She scanned the rest of the barn, searching for the mother. “Hey—is anyone here?” Her sweat seemed to freeze on her skin as she listened for a response. “Hey? Anyone? Please, answer me!”

      The only noises in the barn were the horses snorting, the baby hiccupping and crying, Sam’s intermittent growls and Chandra’s own thudding heart. “Shh…shh…” she said, as if the tiny infant could understand her. “We’ll fix you up.”

      A mouse scurried across the floor, slipping into a crack in the barn wall, and Chandra, already nervous, had to bite back her own scream. “Come on,” she whispered to the baby, as she realized the child had probably been abandoned. But who would leave this precious baby all alone? The infant howled more loudly as Chandra tucked it close to her. “Oh, baby, baby,” Chandra murmured. Maternal emotions spurred her to kiss the downy little head while she secretly cursed the woman who had left this beautiful child alone and forsaken. “Who are you?” she whispered against the baby’s dark crown. “And where’s your mama?”

      Wrapping the infant in her own jacket, she glanced around the dusty corners of the barn again, eyeing the hayloft, kicking open the door to the tack room, scanning the corners behind the feed barrels, searching for any signs of the mother. Sam, yelping and jumping at the baby, was no help in locating the woman’s trail. “Hello? Are you here?” she called to anyone listening, but her own voice echoed back from the rafters.

      “Look, if you’re here, come on into the house. Don’t be afraid. Just come in and we’ll talk, okay?”

      No answer.

      “Please, if you can hear me, please come inside!”

      Again, nothing. Just the sigh of the wind outside.

      Great. Well, she’d tried. Whoever had brought the child here was on his or her own. Right now, the most pressing problem was taking proper care of the baby; anything else would have to wait. “Come on, you,” she whispered to the infant again, tightening her hold on the squirming bundle. Ignoring the fretting horses, she slapped off the lights and closed the barn door behind her.

      Once she was back in the cabin, Chandra cradled the child against her while she tossed fresh logs into the wood stove. “We’ll get you warm,” she promised, reaching for the phone and holding the receiver to her ear with her shoulder. She dialed 911, praying that the call would be answered quickly.

      “Emergency,” a dispatcher answered.

      “Yes, this is Chandra Hill, I live on Flaming Moss Road,” she said quickly, then rattled off her address over the baby’s cries. “I discovered an infant in my barn. Newborn, dehydrated possibly, certainly hungry, with a chance of exposure. I—I don’t know who it belongs to…or why it’s here.”

      “We can send an ambulance.”

      “I live twenty miles from town. It’ll be quicker if I meet the ambulance at Alder’s Corner, where the highway intersects Flaming Moss.”

      “Just a minute.” The dispatcher mumbled something to someone else and then was back on the line. “That’s fine. The ambulance will meet you there.”

      “Good. Now, please contact the emergency room of the hospital….” Mechanically, she began to move and think in a way she hadn’t done in years. Placing the child on the couch next to her, she carefully unwrapped the howling infant. Furious and hungry, the baby cried more loudly, his skinny little legs kicking. “It’s a boy…probably two or three days old,” she said, noticing the stump of the umbilical cord. How many infants so like this one had she examined during her short career as a physician? Hundreds. Refusing to let her mind wander into that forbidden territory, she concentrated on the wriggling child and carefully ran her fingers over his thin body. “He’s Caucasian, very hungry, with no visible marks….” Her hands moved expertly over the smooth skin of the newborn, checking muscles and bones, small fingers and toes, legs, neck, spine, buttocks, head…. “Wait a minute…” She flipped the switch of a brighter light and noticed the yellow pallor of the whites of the baby’s eyes. “He appears jaundiced and—” she touched the downy hair again, carefully prodding “—there’s some swelling on the back of his head. Maybe caput succedaneum or cephalhematoma…yes, there’s a slight bleeding from the scalp, and it appears only on the right side of his head. I don’t think it’s serious. The swelling isn’t too large, but you’d better have a pediatrician look him over the minute he gets there.” She continued to examine the infant as if he were her patient, her gaze practiced and sure. “I can’t find anything else, at least not here without medical equipment. Did you

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