“Do you think she’ll be all right?” Belinda says. “I was telling her about this other set of earrings I wanted to give her. Real pretty ones, with little bitty freshwater pearls.”
“Hey, can you get someone to fetch our baby from the nursery for us?” I ask Lois Belcher, eager to see my baby again. For all the thrill of seeing Tully’s money, I’d rather lay my eyes on Anne Elise. “Please bring us our baby. Someone took her to the nursery. Can you get her for us?”
Lois Belcher shoots me a quizzical look. “She’s in the nursery? I thought—”
“Yes, bring my baby to me,” Laurel says. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. “I bet she’ll be hungry again.”
Something’s not quite right in Lois Belcher’s expression. She tilts her head as if momentarily lost in thought. “Okeydokey. Let me go get her for you,” she says, going toward the door. “I’ll bring her back in a jiffy.”
I watch her as she leaves the room. As soon as she’s in the hallway, the speed of her footsteps quickens. Laurel, too, senses something’s amiss. Tully drums his fingers against a nightstand and then a table and then Laurel’s bed railing. A thin, jittery man pokes his head into the room. He’s no doctor, just someone from the hospital’s housekeeping staff. He rolls a bucket into the room and mops away the dirty boot prints from the floor. We watch him dip the mop into his bucket and wring it dry, the dirty water sloshing around in his bucket as he rolls it from one end of the room to the other.
“Damn. Someone sure had messy feet,” Tully says.
“You’re telling me,” the housekeeper says, leaning on his mop. He looks to be about seventeen, maybe the same age as the gift shop cashier downstairs. He pulls a bandana from his back pocket and wipes his forehead. “I cleaned tracks all up and down the hallway. They went all the way to the elevator.”
“Thank you. Thank you for cleaning,” I say.
“Anytime,” the housekeeper says.
We watch the housekeeper roll the bucket out of the room. And then we look at each other, each of us wondering why no one has returned with Anne Elise. Laurel moans. Minutes pass. A tedium that’s not to my liking enters into our unspoken conversation. I stretch out my arms, look at my wristwatch, and feign surprise at how late it’s become.
“Oh my gosh! I just remembered I’m supposed to call one of my clients and update him on the precious metals market.”
“You and your calls,” Laurel says, shaking her head.
“Hey, a man’s gotta work, right?”
To this, Tully says, “Right on, man.”
And with that, I’m out in the hallway and at the pay phone in the waiting area again, dialing the number that’s on the business card Larry Simpkins gave me yesterday.
“Hey. Remember me?” I say when Larry Simpkins answers. “I’m the guy from last night who said he was going to call you.”
Simpkins remembers all right. “I’ve been waiting by my phone. I thought you were never going to call.”
“Well, I’m calling right now. Let’s talk.”
“No can do,” Simpkins said. “Another client just stepped into my office. Let’s make it in an hour. Is that okay? And let’s do it face-to-face. Come down to my office. You have the address, right?”
I look at the business card. “Sure do.”
As we hang up, I feel sorry for whoever has parked himself or herself on a chair in Simpkins’s office. In a few minutes, after Simpkins unveils the bundle of black-and-white photos documenting the spouse’s infidelity, the customer’s life will be torn asunder. Sacred “for better or worse till death do us part” vows render a cruel mockery. Simpkins is a merchant of despair, a ruiner of lives. But as I dwell on Simpkins’s perniciousness, I’m hit cold with the realization that it was probably through Simpkins that Trish first learned of my affair. What must she have thought when Simpkins opened up his dossier file and handed her a picture of me and Laurel? She must have been gutted. Just thinking about it makes me regret everything. She must have stumbled out of his office and felt like killing Laurel. Or killing me. Or killing herself.
What’s strange is that so far Simpkins has given no indication he recognizes me from his earlier investigations. Is he that unobservant? Or were his pictures of Laurel and me so blurry that he couldn’t get a good read on me?
Downstairs, I stop off at the gift shop again, but though the two-for-one candy sale sign remains in the window, the salesgirl’s less enthusiastic to see me this second time. She bites her lip, apologizes, and tells me she can’t sell me any more candy bars.
“That’s okay,” I say. “Today’s your lucky day.”
“Huh?”
I reach into Tully’s lunch sack and place a hundred-dollar bill into her startled hands. She probably doesn’t earn so much money in a week. “When the gods of good fortune smile upon you, never be afraid to let a little of your luck rub off on total strangers. Spread the karma far and wide. What comes around, goes around. That’s what I always say.”
Chapter Nineteen
TRISH
My whole body is electrified as I walk through the sunlit hospital lobby with Anne Elise under my coat. Everything is jittery and wonderful. No one gives me a second look. I know the difference between right and wrong, but I’m stunned how easy it is to steal a newborn. Everything is pleasantly warm, the sunlight pouring into the lobby through the huge windows and skylight, dappling the terra-cotta tile floor. Nothing seems amiss. Nurses rush across the lobby, responding to an emergency on one of the upper floors, and an elderly lady sits alone on a bench by the coffee kiosk saying a rosary to herself. I’m a pampered-looking woman of a certain age whom no one would suspect of felonious intent. There’s a burbling fountain half-surrounded by potted palms and enough greenery to make anyone forget it’s the dead of winter. People walk with trepidation to the information desk, bracing themselves for the in-patient procedures that will be performed upon them. Others inquire on the status of convalescing relatives. In the atrium, a glass door opens to let me outside, and when I step through it, I’m amazed no alarms go off, no flashing lights or klaxons alerting the world to my theft.
Halfway to the car, I look over my shoulder, expecting security officers to burst out of the hospital and chase after me. Wind whips icy snowflakes against my cheeks. The siren of an approaching ambulance catches my attention. No plausible reason exists for how or why someone might innocently abscond with another woman’s baby, and yet it’s already too late to turn back. I fumble for my car keys, open the door to my Mercedes.