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“But what about the birthmark? Where did that come from?” Nancy was thinking of the tips that had come in over the past four days, stories of other curly-headed girls who had disappeared, then reappeared. One, in the Catonsville library, had her shirt on inside-out when she was found. It must have been Alice, looking for the telltale heart.
“Oh, I made that up. I told Alice that the mark was like a little shadow of her own heart and she should feel happy, knowing that her daughter would always have this shadow heart.”
Helen Ma
In a matter of minutes, a defeated Alice Ma
Once Alice had found the child she believed to be hers, she hid in the bathroom and waited for the baby’s father to come and get them, bringing new clothes. Summoned from his current landscaping job on his cell phone, he had cut his hand badly as he put away his tools, possibly because he could never decide what he feared more, Alice’s love or Alice’s threats. The wound on his hand opened again as he trimmed the girl’s hair with his pruning shears. The blood on the T-shirt was his, and Alice had assumed that DNA testing would show it matched the missing girl’s. She believed the police had found the baby’s father, and thus found her. She still believed it, even now. He had driven her home in plenty of time to meet Sharon for di
“And then what happened?”
“He took her to where he lives, down south, to wait.”
“Wait for what, Alice?” The girl was an endless source of amazement to Nancy. What had she expected, what did she want? A new life, or her old one?
“We were going to prove she was ours, and make them give her back to us. And maybe give us money, too, because it was wrong, what happened to me. Rodrigo was working for the state when we…met. They let me get pregnant, then they took my baby away. I didn’t say they could. I wanted to keep her.”
“Why?”
Alice looked as if she found Nancy stupid beyond belief. “Because she was mine.”
“You said they’re down south. In Maryland? Virginia? Someplace farther still? We need to know where the girl is, Alice.”
She started to answer, but Rosario Bustamante actually placed a hand, loaded with grimy rings, over Alice’s mouth.
“Before she tells you that,” the old lawyer said, “let’s discuss what you’re willing to do for my client, now that she’s cooperating.”
The house in Waldorf was a rental, a shabby one, the kind of place that landlords could foist off on recent immigrants, comfortable in the knowledge they would never complain. Even the legal ones didn’t know their rights, didn’t understand that broken plumbing and lead paint were not things they had to endure. Rodrigo Benitez was in the country legally, but some of his roommates were not, and they fled into the night when the police cars began arriving outside the shack, ru
The old woman stayed, the child in her lap. She did not know why Rodrigo had brought her this child and demanded she care for it. He said it was his daughter, and that the girl’s mother was in trouble. He swore he had done nothing wrong, despite all signs to the contrary-his nervousness, his odd comings and goings over the weekend. Then, yesterday evening, Rodrigo had simply disappeared, and she knew her grandson had lied. He was in trouble, which meant she was in trouble, and it would be only a matter of time before police officers came, screaming questions at her. In the meantime, the child cried for her mother, cried constantly, but little else she said made sense to the abuelita. She tried to comfort her as best she could.
Yet she had promised Rodrigo she would care for the child, no matter what. So when the police arrived, she did just that, holding the girl tightly to her, shaking her head, incapable of making sense even of the halting Spanish spoken by one of the uniformed men. The girl clung back. She was three years old and in the course of four days she had been taken from her mother and brought to a house of strange smells, and now she saw that someone else was going to take her yet again. This unknown place suddenly became desirable, an island of certainty, even if people here spoke mysterious words, full of vowels, and she was given soft, mashed brown food, which looked like pudding but had no sweetness to it. Brittany Little held the old woman, refusing to let go until a blond woman with a round, tired face held out her arms and spoke her name.
“It’s okay, Brittany. Your mom is outside, waiting for you. Come to your mother, Brittany.”
Maveen Little was reunited with her daughter in a patrol car outside the shack in Waldorf. It was a messy, incoherent moment, with the woman more hysterical than grateful, her emotions out of sync from fatigue and worry. Nancy understood how she felt. The child had been found, Tuesday was now Wednesday, but Nancy still had to process Alice’s arrest before she could go home. Still, it had been her decision to drive the fifty-odd miles to Charles County, to see this moment firsthand. She didn’t need Lenhardt to tell her that homicide cops had precious few chances to see their victims alive.
Infante must have been thinking the same thing, for he said: “A few more cases like this, and we’ll be out of business.”
“A few more cases like this,” Nancy said, “and I’m going to get a job at Circuit City.”
Actually, she had never loved her job more than at that moment.
The media relations office would schedule a press conference in the morning, probably in time for the noon television shows. Nancy was already pla
That would feel good, screwing the paper and that girl who had tried to trick her.
Ro
“Mira Jenkins, Beacon-Light,” said the front of the card. On the back, in neat block letters, someone had written. “I really, really need to talk to you. Call me!”
Ro