The Family Way (Molly Murphy, #12)

Sarah pulled me out of the stream of the crowd. “Ah, here we are,” she said, stopping at a dark entryway. “It’s on the second floor. Are you able to make it up the stairs, Molly?”


“Yes, of course.” I peered up a long, narrow flight of stairs, then added, “I’m not quite an invalid, you know.”

Up we went. I found it more of an effort than I had expected and that long dark stair seemed to go on forever, but I tried not to let Sarah see that I was out of breath and perspiring by the time she tapped on a dark wood door and then ushered me inside.

I had been to employment agencies myself when I was first looking for work in the city. They all seemed to have been staffed by haughty dragons of women, but the white-haired, soft-faced lady behind the desk could not have been nicer. She listened to my request then nodded. “You’ll be wanting someone who has experience with babies then. Most of the girls we see don’t have much of a clue. Oh, to be sure they’ve helped look after siblings, but their ideas on safety and cleanliness leave much to be desired. So let me give the matter some thought. How soon would you want the girl?”

“There’s no hurry,” I said. “I want someone who’ll be just right. I’d rather wait.”

“Of course you would.”

“So did you already place Hettie Black, Mrs. Hartmann?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, yes. Snapped up instantly. She would have been good,” Mrs. Hartmann said. She had me write down my name and address. “I’ll have a note sent to you the moment I find a suitable girl,” she said.

We were about to leave when it occurred to me that Mrs. Hartmann was the perfect person to ask about Maureen O’Byrne.

“You keep a list of past clients, presumably?” I started to say when there came a scream from the street below.

“My baby! Someone has taken my baby!”





Three

We rushed over to the window. Below us we could see a young woman, fair-haired and attired in the usual white shirtwaist and cotton skirt of the Lower East Side, looking around desperately, her light eyes wide with terror.

“My baby!” She screamed again. “She was here. In her carriage. I left her for a second while I went into the butcher’s and now she’s gone.”

Instantly there was chaos as the crowd closed in around her. We didn’t wait a second longer but went down the stairs as fast as we could, then were caught up in the crowd and swept across the street to the young woman. She was gesturing to a battered baby carriage that was now empty, apart from a crudely made cloth rabbit and one knitted bootie.

Older women had already come to her side to calm her screams. One of the nuns we had seen was first to reach her, patting her shoulder with a comforting meaty hand. “Don’t fret, my dear,” she said in a strong Irish accent. “Perhaps someone from your family picked the baby up. Perhaps she was crying and one of your other children is carrying her around.”

“I don’t have other children. She’s my only child.” Her eyes continued to dart up and down the street. “Who can have done this? Where have they taken her? My baby. Somebody find my baby for me.”

I felt a wave of terror, of almost physical sickness, come over me and as if in response my own baby gave an almighty kick. I clutched at a lamppost to steady myself. Sarah had gone ahead of me, pushing through to the center of the little group. “Somebody go and find the constable,” she said. “And you children—spread out. Go and look to see if you spot anybody running away with a baby. They can’t have gone too far with her.”

“Does anyone have smelling salts?” the nun demanded. “This poor woman is about to pass out.”

Sarah rummaged in her delicate little purse and produced hers. The nun proceeded to wave them under the woman’s nose. For once I could almost have used them myself. But I got a grip on myself and stepped forward. “Did anybody see a person near the baby carriage? Did anyone see someone carrying a baby away?”

Heads were shaken.

“You see people carrying babies all the time,” a small girl answered. She spoke with a trace of Italian accent and had the black hair and big dark eyes that betrayed her ancestry and the fact that this quarter was known as Little Italy. She looked no older than seven or eight but she herself had a squirming toddler on her hip. “We have to take the babies out and look after them so mother can clean up the apartment. Stop it, Guido,” she added as the toddler wriggled even harder. “You’re not getting down.”

The woman was no longer screaming but sobbing, her thin body shaking with great gulps.

“It’s another of those kidnappings they’re talking about,” a woman next to me muttered.

I turned to ask her what she meant when the crowd parted and two constables pushed their way toward the distraught woman.