As usual, the food court was a happening sort of place, bustling with men, women, and children, with teens strutting their stuff, showing off for one another and for whoever was on the other end of their cell phones.
I stood in a paralysis of indecision. Salads to the left of me, yogurt to the right. Ichiban, Little Panda, Mickey D’s, and a thousand-and-one varieties of fast food in between. Paul headed off with determination for his monthly cholesterol fix at Steak-Escape, while Emily and I trundled off to see what was being offered on the Chinese buffet. Balancing the food on our trays, we headed back to find a table, catching sight of Paul, who nodded at a vacancy near the escalators that carried movie-goers up to the theaters.
We’d taken only a half dozen steps toward our table when Emily’s voice rasped in my ear. “Mother. Look!” She gestured with her tray. “See that woman over there?”
“Where?” My eyes ping-ponged over the crowd. There were several women in our immediate area, so it was impossible to tell which woman Emily was referring to.
“That one,” she croaked. “The one with the Kiddie Kruzer stroller!”
“Where?” I began, but then I saw what Emily saw. A dark-haired woman about Emily’s age, wearing eyeglasses and a yellow beret, pushing a child in one of the bright red, car-shaped strollers that Westfield management loaned out to mall customers.
“My God, that’s Timmy!” Emily shouted.
“What?” My head snapped around from the woman and her baby to Emily, who stood next to me clutching her tray so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. On the tray, her spicy tofu quivered on its plate, and the ice in her Coca-Cola actually chattered.
As I watched, Emily relaxed her death grip on the tray, and it tumbled end over end, splattering food and drink all over the floor and the Nikes of a teen unfortunate enough to have his legs sprawled in the aisle. Shaking off my restraining hand, she rushed forward.
“Paul!” I yelled, scanning the crowd for my husband. I set my tray down in front of a surprised senior and chased after my daughter.
“Timmy! Timmy!” Emily knocked over chairs, her arms flailing against the sea of humanity that seemed somehow to have closed in around us. “Mother, it’s Timmy!”
When I caught up with her seconds later, Emily was kneeling in front of the stroller. “Timmy, it’s Mommy! Mommy’s here.”
“Ma’am, ma’am,” the child’s mother was saying. “I think you’ve made a mistake.”
The baby in the stroller certainly looked like Timmy, could have been his twin, in fact, except that she was wearing pink overalls and a lace-trimmed shirt. Her mother had drawn the little bit of hair that sprouted from her head into a tiny topknot and secured it there with a beribboned barrette.
“This is Jennifer,” the little girl’s mother said, her voice shaking. “Jenny, can you say hello to the nice lady?” She pulled the stroller toward her protectively.
Emily straightened, her face rigid. “You think a mother doesn’t know her own child? This is Timmy. You took him, and he’s mine.”
The mother, eyes wide and frightened by this nutcase standing in front of her, seemed to be appealing to me for help.
“Emily!” I grabbed my daughter’s arm and held her back until Paul reached us.
“What the hell’s going on here?”
Emily stood her ground. “This woman has kidnapped Timmy, Daddy. She thinks she can fool me just because she dressed him up in little girl’s clothes, but she can’t.”
In the stroller, Jenny said, “Buh buh buh,” waved a nubby rubber rattle in the air, and then began gnawing on it in a way that seemed so familiar that for a few seconds my heart stopped beating altogether.
Could Emily be right?
Paul’s arm snaked around his daughter’s shoulders, his head bent to touch hers. “Emily, you’re upsetting this woman. You’re upsetting her child.”
Jenny, in point of fact, seemed perfectly oblivious to the chaos going on around her, continuing to chew contentedly on her rattle.
“If you’ll excuse me, then,” Jenny’s mother said, giving the stroller a tentative tug in a backward direction. “I need to be going.”
“Not until you give me back Timmy!” Emily surged forward, reaching for the child, but Paul restrained her.
Jenny’s mother backed away, dragging the stroller with her. “Don’t make me call Security,” she snarled.
Paul led Emily to a nearby chair and forced her to sit down on it. She threw her arms across the table, rested her head on them and began to cry, deep wracking sobs that nearly ripped my heart out of my chest.
“Emily.” I knelt on the cool tiles next to my daughter’s chair. “The woman is getting away. Do you want me to grab the baby?”
Paul’s eyebrows shot skyward. “Hannah, are you out of your mind?”
My heart pounding, my breath coming in short gasps as the stroller and the woman in the yellow beret began beating a hasty retreat, I said, “What’s the worst that could happen, Paul? The police come. The child is not Timmy. News at eleven: distraught mother of kidnapped child makes terrible mistake. Apologies all around. Everybody goes home.”
Emily turned her tearstained face to me, her eyes wide, pupils dilated. No telling what she was high on this time.
“Emily, are you sure that’s Timmy?”
“I don’t knooooooow,” Emily howled.
Behind her, her father looked at me pleadingly and mouthed the word pills.
I had been fully prepared to snatch the child and damn the consequences, but without Emily to back me up, I felt my resolve waver.
I glanced from my daughter to Jenny’s mother, who was negotiating a difficult three-point turn between the closely spaced tables and chairs of the food court. As she pushed off in the direction of Greenleaf Grille, the crowd separating us suddenly seemed to thicken. I looked to my left, where the escalator was disgorging a steady stream of moviegoers into the food court. One of the features, perhaps several of them, had just let out, and Jenny’s mother’s yellow beret was rapidly disappearing into the boisterous throng.
“Paul?” I whispered. When I had his full attention, I said, “When she calms down, take Emily into Borders or something. I’ll meet you there.”
Before Paul could reply, I took off, following the woman with the fire-engine-red Kiddie Kruzer that may or may not have contained my grandson as she pushed it up the ramp that led out of the food court. I trailed the yellow beret as it bobbed past CVS, stopped for a few seconds to look into the window of the Disney store, and hurried along to the Gap for Kids.
At Lord and Taylor, I nearly lost it. I stood at the cross aisles, gazing frantically in four directions, before spotting the beret again outside Build-a-Bear. Jenny’s mother was kneeling next to the stroller, pointing out to her daughter a stuffed Easter duck perched on a block in the window. She certainly didn’t look like a woman with something to hide, but I continued to follow her anyway, as she wandered through the linens department of JCPenney. She ditched the stroller at the door and carried Jenny in her arms into the vast wilderness of the parking lot.
I followed at a discreet distance, weaving and ducking between parked cars, keeping one eye on them all the while I was scrabbling blindly in my purse for a pen and a scrap of paper-any paper-to write on.
Jenny’s mother unlocked the door of a white Toyota Corolla, put Jenny into the backseat, fussed for a moment-presumably buckling the child in-then climbed into the car herself and backed out of the parking spot.
As the Toyota approached, I jotted down its license number on the back of a business card some guy named Ed had given me when I considered availing myself of his stump removal service. I stepped aside to let the Toyota pass, staring at the driver’s profile, trying to memorize it. But I didn’t need to memorize it. Just as she turned the corner, I realized with absolutely certainty that I had seen the woman before. But where?