When fate delivered a chance to give her what she wanted so much, and to do what looked like a good deed in the process, Sam had grabbed it—baby blanket, warm baby, and all. And now his heart felt sick as she yelled toward the back of the house, “Eric, sweetie, your dad and I are going for a run, and I’m going to beat him as usual! Don’t go play next door without leaving us a note, okay?”
“Duh, Mom!” their son yelled back. “Go, Dad!”
“We love you!” Sam called with an aching heart. “Go over to the neighbors’ now, so we don’t have to worry about you!” He waited a moment. “Eric? Yes?”
“Okay, parental unit!”
He nodded, turning toward his wife.
“New running duds?” he asked.
She pirouetted in front of him. “You like?”
“Nice on you. Where’s your old gray hoodie?”
“In the trash, where it should have been long ago.”
“What about those navy sweatpants you love?”
“Out with the hoodie! Too many holes. You ready?”
She jogged past him and was down the front walk before he got the door closed and locked. As he turned toward her, he thought, They’re going to take Eric away. They’re going to tell him the truth about how he came to be, and how he came to be with us. He’s going to be thrown into the path of those terrible people. I’m going to prison for kidnapping a baby. She’s going to prison for killing his mother, who was dying anyway.
He heard himself making excuses for Cassity.
“Let’s run by the river,” he said as he caught up to her.
Night was falling, and soon there would be long, dark spaces between the streetlights.
He couldn’t allow these terrible fates to happen; and most of all, he couldn’t allow Eric to know the truth about himself and his birth family. Even to be left alone in the world would be better than knowing all the horrible things he might otherwise have learned about both of his families.
Sam’s cell phone rang. He nearly ignored it, but the long habit of being a doctor awaiting the birth of babies made him stop and turn it on while Cassity jogged in place by his side.
“Doc? It’s that cop again. Are you near a computer? I want to send that surveillance video to you and have you see if it looks like any of these people on her list.”
“Detective, I haven’t met them all.”
“You’ve met more of them than I have.”
“Okay. Right now?”
“Yeah. Right now, if you don’t mind. Or even if you do.”
“Wait?” Sam asked his wife.
She nodded, continuing to jog in place.
By the time Sam reached his computer, the e-mail was already there in his inbox. He clicked the video into action and watched while his heart felt as if it was hammering within every cell of his body, as if it might hammer so hard that it could beat him to death.
The quality was poor, but one thing was clear.
The figure in the hoodie and jogging pants was slouching against the wall of a building, with his hands pressed between his body and the wall and his left foot propped against it.
Sam didn’t collapse with relief while the detective was still on the phone with him. But when they hung up, he sank down onto the carpet, crossed his arms over his knees, put his face on his arms, and sobbed into them.
His wife came in, saw him, and ran to him, putting her arms around him. “What? Oh, Sam, honey, what?”
“It was the boyfriend. Priss’s boyfriend killed her.”
His wife collapsed into him, weeping, too.
“Oh, thank God it wasn’t you, Sam.”
A week passed before he could tell her the whole truth that he learned from the detective: Priss broke up with her boyfriend when he became scarily possessive and jealous, her sister told the police, and then Sydney pushed him further and further down that path. To turn him against Priscilla and toward herself, she told him about Priss’s former boyfriends, increasing the numbers to spice up the story, claiming that one or two were still in her sister’s life while Priss was seeing him. Then, to light the final fuse to his wounded ego and growing rage, she said: “And I’ll bet she never even told you she had a baby with another man.”
NANCY PICKARD’s short stories have won Anthony, Agatha, Barry, Macavity, and American Short Story awards and have been featured in many “year’s best” anthologies. She has been an Edgar Award finalist for her short fiction and for three of her eighteen novels. She has served on the national board of directors of MWA and is a founding member and former president of Sisters in Crime. She lives near Kansas City, where she is working on a novel and percolating future short stories. Her favorite short story is “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway, because it says everything that needs to be said and evokes deep feeling and understanding, and it does all that (in her opinion) in clean, well-lighted sentences.
DAMAGE CONTROL
Thomas H. Cook