Loreen blinked several times and then slowly reached out to Doris, her palm up. “Yeah. I’ll be your friend.”
But Doris wasn’t about hand squeezes. She got up and wrapped the miniature woman in one of her hugs. Jeff had to put an end to this affectionate gesture or risk Loreen ending up with a few broken ribs. Time for the jigsaw puzzle, I thought, hoping Loreen had forgotten her question. Knowing about the GPS device, knowing I may have been tailed to her house, would make her feel like she’d sat down in a bear trap.
Loreen did seem to forget, and after only an hour of puzzling, something we discovered Jeff’s sister was quite good at, Doris wanted to watch The Little Mermaid again. She abruptly left us for the DVD player. I guessed her attention span was limited. I’d have to get used to that.
With Doris occupied, I took Loreen’s gun from my purse, unloaded it and handed her the weapon and the ammo. “Thanks.”
Loreen put everything in her own bag. She looked tired, but I had been patiently waiting for a chance to finish questioning her about Christine and hoped she didn’t fade on me. Jeff offered her a drink, and while the two of them broke into a bottle of Scotch, I had a Shiner Bock. Hard liquor isn’t for me, and I usually have beer only at Astros games, but I’d forgotten to pick up wine when I did the shopping.
“Loreen, you’ve been so helpful, but I need to pick your brain a little more,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I gotta call in sick for tomorrow first. Believe me, that won’t make my boss happy.” She gulped her Scotch. “Phone?”
“On the kitchen wall,” Jeff said.
She left us to make her call, and Jeff leaned close. “She’s scared for the wrong reasons, thinks her ex-pimp is the biggest threat. Get that GPS box to DeShay in the morning.”
Loreen came back to the table. “Guess who’s fired if she’s not at work day after tomorrow?” She took another long swallow of her drink. “Why in hell did I ever write that letter?”
“Because you wanted to right a wrong,” I said. “Usually that ends up paying off in the end.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not seeing any nice payoff about now.”
“You can still help Christine’s kids,” I said. “On the drive back here I was thinking about who Christine could have met who had the money to buy her baby-because the cash she had for Vegas could have been payment. You’ve said no one at Rhoda’s seemed like a good candidate, but what about the people you two cleaned for?”
“Some of them were rich, yeah.”
“Longtime customers?”
Loreen rested her elbow on the table and held her head with her hand. “I think so.” She was sounding more tired by the second. “She had this list. Tuesday regulars, Wednesday regulars. She never worked on Fridays or the weekend. Those were her drinking days, and no one interfered with that.”
“You remember any of these people?” I asked.
“Everyone we cleaned for worked in the daytime. They left a key and we usually didn’t see them.”
“How did you know where to go and when? The list?” I asked.
“Christine kept a notebook with phone numbers, too. I remember because I saw these doodles in there, and I asked Christy if she’d drawn them. She said yeah. She drew people’s faces. Even me. I asked her for the page, but she said she had stuff she needed on the back side. She drew me another one later but I lost it.”
I thought about the boxes moved out to storage the day of the demolition. Had Emma thrown away this notebook along with the photographs she’d mentioned? “You’re sure you never met any of the clients?”
“I was helping with more houses by ninety-two, and every now and then someone was home sick or… Wait. There was this one lady who quit working when she was so pregnant she could hardly walk. I did see her. Vacuumed right around her for three weeks in a row.”
My heart sped up, and I was thinking how long it had taken me to get this one morsel of information, something Loreen had no way of knowing might be important enough to pull everything together.
Jeff knew its importance, though, because he said, “Do you remember if you cleaned for this woman around the same time that Christine was pregnant?”
Loreen looked thoughtful. “She coulda been pregnant, too, now that I think about it. And you know, Christy never took me with her if she went back there, so I never saw that lady’s baby. You think the kid under the house belonged to that woman we cleaned for?”
“Could be,” I said.
“And maybe Christy did something to that kid so she could sell her own baby to that lady?” Loreen shook her head vigorously. “I wasn’t there if she did that. You better make sure the cops know-”
“Chill, Loreen,” I said. “I don’t think you had anything to do with the baby or you never would have written that letter to Reality Check.”
“Yeah. That’s right,” she said, nodding. “But why didn’t the woman send Christy to jail if she hurt their kid? That’s what any normal person woulda done. I went to jail plenty of times for a lot less than that.”
“We don’t know if Christine hurt any baby,” I said.
Jeff nodded his agreement. “Your friend and this woman could have made a baby deal for reasons we haven’t yet figured out, and Christine agreed to keep the secret. Then later she decided to earn some extra money to continue to keep that secret.”
“Oh, yeah. She’d do that. She was always looking for the big jackpot that never came.” Loreen closed her eyes briefly, then pointed past me. “I’m sorry, but I need to do what she’s doing.”
I turned and saw Doris lying on the floor in front of the TV. She was sound asleep.
“Take the bedroom,” Jeff said.
“I’m not gonna argue,” Loreen answered. She picked up the overnight bag she’d left near the hall entrance and left us alone.
Jeff took out several sticks of Big Red, then offered me the pack. I accepted, needing to rid my mouth of the taste of beer.
After he’d chewed his gum for several seconds, he said, “Tell DeShay everything you’ve learned tomorrow. I doubt this notebook is still around, but you said they stored everything from the house, and a search is worth a shot. Maybe Christine kept names as well as phone numbers.”
“And I could find out if any of those people in the notebook had a baby around the same time as Christine by checking birth records from that year.”
“Good circumstantial evidence, but that won’t promise a happy reunion for your client. A lot can happen in fifteen years.”
I put my hand behind his neck and pulled him close so our lips were almost touching. “You are such a pessimist, you probably never put anything away for a rainy day, ’cause you’re always expecting a drought.”
He smiled, and we were about ready to exchange gum when my cell rang.
I saw from the caller ID that it was Aunt Caroline, and groaned.
“Bet I know who that is.” Jeff picked up our glasses and headed for the kitchen.
“Better answer or she’ll fill up my voice mail box.” I opened the phone and said hello.
“Abby, where are you?” she said.
“Um… someplace.”
“I know that much. But you’re not at home, because I’ve driven by three times. You need to get over here now.”
“It’s late. What can I do for you?” I asked.
“I have something of dire importance to share with you. Please come over.”
Everything with her is always of dire importance, but I tried to sound nice when I said, “Can we do this in the morning?”
She was silent for a good ten seconds, and I knew I’d pissed her off. “If you don’t care about your sister ruining her life, then fine.”
“What are you talking about?” But, of course, this had to be about Clint Roark.
“This man she’s seeing is not who he says he is, and I have proof.”
She’d hired a detective to follow Jeff when I first started dating him, and this sounded like she was up to her old tricks. “If you’re talking about the man’s ex-wife and son, Kate knows about them.”