“Don’t lecture me, Arlene.” It never ended, Agnes thought. Once an older sister, always an older sister.
Agnes wasn’t just younger than Arlene. She was her much younger sister. Their mother had Arlene at the age of twenty, and didn’t get pregnant with Agnes until she was thirty-five. There was one other child, a boy named Henry, a couple of years after Arlene, and then a gulf of thirteen years. Everyone figured Agnes must have been an accident. Surely their parents hadn’t planned to have her. But once they knew she was on the way, they went ahead and had her. The thought of terminating the pregnancy never even occurred to their parents, and not because they were at all religious or were staunchly prolife.
They just figured, What the hell. Let’s have another kid.
Despite having an older brother and sister, Agnes felt as though she were an only child. The age difference meant her siblings had very little to do with her. They were either in or just starting high school when she came along. So they were never playmates, never went to school together. Arlene and Henry, being two years apart, had a bond Agnes could only dream of. She resented it for years, until Henry was killed in a car accident nearly two decades earlier. Only then, it struck Agnes, did Arlene begin to take a greater interest in her.
Well, it was too late by then.
Arlene seemed to believe she had some kind of family monopoly on wisdom. Did she run a hospital? Had she had that kind of responsibility? Had Arlene worked her way up from nothing to oversee a multimillion-dollar budget? And had David ever been the source of worry to Arlene and Don that Marla had been to her and Gill? Marla had been a challenge from the get-go. The teenage years were a nightmare. Sleeping around, drinking, drugs, ignoring school.
Agnes and Gill had figured that once Marla hit her twenties, things would settle down. But troubles remained. Hints of a personality disorder, difficulty recognizing people, mood swings. One doctor thought she might be bipolar. But at least, with her parents’ financial help, she was living independently in a small house of her own, getting the odd job here and there, and then, more recently, this thing where she reviewed businesses on the Internet.
It gave Agnes hope. Maybe, just maybe, Marla was getting her life back on track. So long as there were no setbacks, she might be able to move on to a more conventional kind of job. Agnes would have tried to find her something at the hospital, but after the incident with the baby, that wasn’t possible.
Agnes might be able to pull some strings somewhere. She knew people in this town. The mayor, the head of the chamber of commerce, the police chief. All of them, as it turned out, women. They understood how important it was to help a child find her way in the world.
But then Marla met that boy.
A student, for God’s sake. From Thackeray College. A local boy, the son of, if you could believe it, a landscaper.
And he’d gotten her pregnant.
What had Marla been thinking, getting involved with someone so young, someone who wasn’t even finished with school? Someone who had no prospects, other than to help his father cut lawns and plant shrubs? Agnes had done some checking up on him. A few years ago he’d even been a suspect in the murder of a local lawyer and his family. The boy turned out to be innocent, but you had to wonder, would the police have even looked at him in the first place if there hadn’t been something off about him? He was getting a degree in English or philosophy or something else equally useless.
Yes, Agnes conceded, what had happened with the baby had been tragic for Marla, and she was more than entitled to grieve. She’d needed time to get over her loss, and Agnes believed she herself had been a good mother through this period, helping to get Marla back on her feet. But who could have predicted what Marla would do? That she would sneak into Agnes’s own hospital and kidnap a newborn?
Several months had passed since then, and Agnes now believed Marla was getting better. She was back doing her Internet reviews from home. The next step would be getting her out of the house, out into the world.
But now this.
Marla with another baby.
“Are they at the house?” Agnes asked Arlene.
“Last time I talked to him, yes,” Arlene said. “I think David was wondering whether to call the police.”
“Tell me he has not done that,” Agnes said sternly. “This does not have to be a police matter. We can sort this out. Whatever’s happened, we can deal with it. Did you call Gill?”
“I called the house and left a message. I don’t seem to have his cell phone number.”
Gill, a management consultant who worked from home, had said something about meeting with a client that morning, Agnes recalled.
“Okay, I’m heading over,” she said, and ended the call.
The boardroom door opened and Jack Sturgess emerged. “Is anything the matter, Agnes?”
Her eyes locked briefly on his. “Marla,” she said.