“Dr. Jones” had departed, collecting his fee in cash as previously agreed upon and promising to stop by tomorrow to look in on Virginia. By then the babies would be gone, not that Dr. Jones would care one way or the other. He had been contracted to provide medical services to Virginia Ayers during the delivery, and that was all. The infants were not a part of that contract and thus not Dr. Jones’s concern.
Virginia had refused to hold either of the babies when offered. She simply moaned softly and rolled onto her side, refusing to answer Robert’s questions, refusing even to meet his eyes. Eventually she had slipped into a restless slumber.
The doorbell rang and Robert sat up with a start, shocked to discover he too had fallen asleep. How he had managed that feat while holding two newborn babies he did not know, but he felt fortunate not to have dropped either of them. “Christ,” he mumbled disgustedly, “maybe it’s a good thing we have to give them away.” Then he glanced at his children and immediately changed his mind.
He stood and turned toward the front of the house, stopping to glance at Virginia before leaving the room. He was surprised to see her staring steadily back at him. “It’s time,” Robert said simply, and she nodded. “Would you like to…”
“No,” she interrupted. “I don’t want to say good-bye to them. I can’t bear to do it. I’m sorry to put this on you, my love, but could you please handle this?”
Robert looked at the floor and scuffed the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “Of course.”
He left the bedroom and trudged through the small house. He thought he now knew how an inmate might feel making the walk to the gas chamber. He stopped and took a deep, shaking breath. Opened the door. On the landing stood a stranger dressed head to toe in black. Black watch cap, black trench coat, black trousers and shoes. The man even wore a solid black necktie over a black Oxford shirt.
The stranger eyed Robert for a long moment, not speaking. Then he inclined his head at the babies. “Are they ready?”
Robert nodded. “Come in,” he said.
The stranger—Robert didn’t know his name and didn’t want to know—entered without another word. Next to the door sat a small duffel bag, packed earlier in the evening. Inside it were two outfits for each infant, a small supply of diapers and baby formula, and a pair of blankets, all items that had been agreed upon weeks ago.
Robert picked up the bag and handed it to the stranger, who hesitated a moment. It seemed as though the man wanted to say something, but decided against it. The stranger shrugged and carried the bag to a car idling at the end of the driveway. He dumped the bag into the trunk.
A darkness unlike anything he had ever felt filled Robert’s heart. He had never seen the man in black before and knew he would never see him again. He knew nothing about the stranger, only that he was to hand over his two children, his own flesh and blood, to the man and allow the man to disappear with them forever.
He couldn’t do it.
He wouldn’t do it.
CHAPTER 11
Cait leaned back in her seat and tried to relax as the half-empty airplane carved the sky northbound over the Atlantic coast. Kevin dozed next to her, as did most of the other passengers on the late-night flight, but Cait was far too keyed up to sleep. She was on her way—hopefully—to meet her biological mother, and it was all she could think about.
After a lifetime of wondering where she came from and who she was, and having resigned herself years ago to never learning her personal history, the speed with which the investigator, Arlen Hirschberg, had uncovered the clues to her past was astonishing. It took less than a week for Hirschberg to determine that she had been born June 15, 1983, in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, to a young couple named Robert and Virginia Ayers.
There was no record of the birth in any of the local hospitals—not surprising, Hirschberg said, given the Ayers’s subsequent release of the infant into the illegal baby market—so it was reasonable to assume she had been born inside the Ayers home. Tiny Caitlyn had spent just a few hours in her birthplace before being spirited away in the middle of the night by a nameless representative of a faceless black market adoption ring.
She had been raised by a young married couple living outside Tampa and had grown up on the west coast of Florida, wondering Why? every time she thought about her biological parents. It was not that she didn’t love and appreciate her adoptive family. Margery and Walt Connelly had showered her with love and attention, raising a strong and caring young woman. To Caitlyn, they would always be her real parents, and both had gone to their graves knowing how much they were loved by their only child.
But none of that changed the fact that Caitlyn Connelly needed to plug the hole she felt in her heart every time one of her friends would say something like, “Oh, my grandfather came over from Verona, Italy, in 1935, and started his own plumbing business.” Caitlyn wanted—needed—to be able to relate her own family history. She wanted—needed—to understand where her own grandfather had come from and what he had done for work. Was he a plumber, carpenter, doctor, lawyer?
For all of the excitement she felt as the airplane hummed its way north, though, Cait knew there was every possibility this trip would end in disappointment. Arlen Hirschberg had contacted Cait’s birth mother, Virginia Ayers, now widowed and in ill health, living in her longtime home outside Boston, and the woman had flatly refused to see her daughter. According to the investigator, she was shocked at being tracked down after all this time and had seemed somehow frightened at the prospect of meeting her now thirty-year-old child.
Caitlyn knew how she felt. The idea of seeing the woman who had given her up so long ago caused a snake made of nerves and fear to twist through her belly, and she knew that snake would never slither away as long as the questions she had been carrying around for so long remained unasked.
So, despite the fact that Virginia Ayers had turned down Hirschberg’s request for a face-to-face meeting, Cait and Kevin bought the cheapest red-eye tickets they could find to Boston, determined to see the woman in person and convince her to share just a few minutes of her time.
Cait didn’t intend to bully the woman. She just had to know.
She gazed out the tiny window, watching the lights blink on the tips of the wings as they swayed hypnotically, buffeted by the wind resistance created by an aluminum tube shooting through the air at hundreds of miles per hour. Cait tried to imagine the circumstances that might have forced her mother to abandon her. Her fantasy had always been of a young teen, pregnant and terrified, the father unwilling or unable to support her, hiding her pregnancy in shame and then ridding herself of her baby immediately following its birth.
But she knew now that fantasy was far from accurate. Hirschberg said she had been born to a married couple. Maybe there was mental illness involved—that certainly seemed possible, given the existence of the Flickers Cait had experienced her entire life—or maybe her parents had been on the run, fleeing some unknown threat, unwilling to subject their newborn baby to the danger in their lives.