Rita Herron - The Missing Twin

Caleb sighed. “I’m sorry. Tell me about the delivery.”

Grief welled inside Madelyn. “The night I went into labor, I had a car accident,” Madelyn began. “I was going to the store when a car sideswiped me. I lost control and careened into a ditch.” She knotted her hands. “My water broke and I went into labor.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. “What happened to the driver?”

Anger surged through Madelyn at the reminder. “He left the scene.”

Caleb’s big body tensed. “He didn’t stop to see if you were okay or call an ambulance?”

“No.” Madelyn rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “And the police never caught him.” Not that they’d looked very hard. And she hadn’t seen the vehicle so she hadn’t been able to give them a description of it or the driver.

Caleb’s expression darkened. “So the accident triggered your labor?”

Madelyn nodded.

“Were you injured anywhere else?”

She shrugged. “Some bruises and contusions. I lost consciousness and the doctor said I was hemorrhaging, so he did an emergency C-section and took the babies.”

Caleb’s jaw clenched. “You weren’t awake during the delivery?”

“No,” Madelyn said, fidgeting.

“But you held the babies when you regained conscious ness?”

“I was out for a couple of hours. When I came to, I got to hold Sara for a minute. She’d been in ICU, being monitored.” Madelyn ran a hand through her hair. “But Cissy… No, I never held her. Dr. Emery said…she was deformed, stillborn, that it was better that I not remember her that way.”

Caleb arched a thick, black brow. “So you never actually saw your other baby?”

“No…” Emotions welled in her throat. She tried to steel herself against them, but memories of that night crashed around her. The fear, the disorientation, the joy, the loss… “I…was so distraught, so grief-stricken that the doctor sedated me.” She wiped at a tear slipping down her cheek. “Besides I…I believed Dr. Emery. Then there was Sara, and she was so beautiful and tiny, and I was so glad she’d survived. And she needed me….”

Caleb’s silence made her rethink that night, and questions nagged at her. If she hadn’t seen Cissy, maybe she hadn’t died or been deformed at all.

“Did the medical examiner perform an autopsy on the baby?” Caleb asked.

“No.” Tears burned the backs of her eyelids. “I…didn’t want it. Didn’t want to put her through it.”

Although maybe she should have insisted. Then she’d have proof that her baby hadn’t survived, and she’d know exactly what had been wrong with her.

Sara’s insistence that she saw Cissy in her visions taunted her. If Dr. Emery had lied to other people, perhaps he’d lied to her. “We have to talk to Dr. Emery and force him to tell me the truth about Cissy.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Caleb said quietly. “Dr. Emery hanged himself the day after he was arrested.”

A desolate feeling engulfed Madelyn. “If he’s dead, how will we ever learn the truth?”

Caleb’s intense gaze settled on her. “Trust me. We’ll find the truth.”

“Then you’ll investigate?”

“Yes.” He gestured toward the conference room and pushed open the door to where Sara was drawing.

The childlike sketch showed Sara and her twin sister displaying their birthmarks. A second picture revealed a greenhouse full of sunflowers, and a tire swing hanging from a big tree in the yard.

Sara had also drawn an ugly, hairy, monsterlike man with jagged teeth and pawlike hands. “That’s the meanie gonna hurt Cissy and her mommy,” Sara said.

She turned her big, green eyes toward Caleb. “Will you stop him, Mister?”

ANXIETY KNOTTED CALEB’S shoulders. How could he say no to this innocent little girl? She seemed so terrified….

But if he promised to save her sister and this woman and failed, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. Not after failing Mara and his own son.

Hell, he was getting way ahead of himself. First, he had to determine if Cissy Andrews was actually alive.

The fact that Sara truly believed that she was real was obvious. But he couldn’t dismiss the shrinks’ theories, either. Not yet.

Gage glanced at the sketch, then at him as if silently asking his opinion.

He gave him a noncommittal look. “We need access to Emery’s records.”

“Afraid that’s not going to happen,” Gage said. “He destroyed them before he killed himself.”

Damn. So they had no records, and he couldn’t push a dead man for answers. His visions didn’t work that way.

“What about the lawyer who handled the adoptions?” Caleb asked. “Wasn’t his name Mansfield?”

“Yeah. The sheriff brought him in for questioning. He’s facing charges, but his case is still pending, so he was released on bail.”

“Then we look at his records,” Caleb said.

“D.A. already confiscated them,” Gage said. “And she’s not sharing. Not with privacy issues and the legal and moral rights regarding adoptions.”

Caleb stewed over that problem. They didn’t work for the cops or have to follow the rules. If he knew where those records were, he’d find a way to search them.

But talking to Mansfield would be faster.

First, there was something else that had to be done. Something that would be painful for Madelyn. But a task that was necessary in order to verify whether or not that grave held a baby.

“Madelyn,” he said in a voice low enough not to reach Sara’s ears. “We need to exhume the casket you buried.”

Grief flickered in her eyes as she glanced at Sara who was madly coloring another picture of her and Cissy. This time they were holding hands, dancing in the middle of a sea of sunflowers.

“All right,” Madelyn said firmly. “If it’ll help us learn the truth, then let’s do it as soon as possible.”

MADELYN PICTURED THE Lost Angels section at Sanctuary Gardens where they’d held Cissy’s memorial service in her mind and nausea flooded her. Still, with the questions Caleb had raised, Sara’s nightmares, and the revelations about Dr. Emery, she wouldn’t rest until she knew if Cissy was really buried in that grave.

Compassion darkened Caleb’s eyes. “Okay. We’ll get the ball rolling.”

Madelyn nodded, gripping her emotions with a firm hand. For so long she had accepted that Cissy was dead that it was hard for her to wrap her mind around the fact that she might have survived. That she might be living somewhere with another family. That a physician would actually deceive his patients and sell their babies.

But the doctor’s arrest was proof of the possibility, creating doubts, and she had to investigate or she would always wonder.

Sara ran to her, waving her drawing, her ponytail bobbing. “Look, Mommy, Cissy’s gonna be so happy when we brings her home with us. She loves sunflowers. They’re all around her.”

“The sunflowers are beautiful,” Madelyn said, her heart aching as worry knotted her insides. Was it true that twins were only half of a whole? What if they didn’t find out Cissy was alive and bring her home? How would Sara take the news?

Would she be able to move on and finally be happy?

Sara tugged at Madelyn’s hand. “We gots to hurry, Mommy.”

Madelyn stroked Sara’s hair away from her forehead. “Sweetheart, that’s why we’re here. Caleb—Mr. Walker—is going to investigate and find out why you’re seeing these scary things.”

Sara angled her face toward Caleb. “Thank you for ’vestigatin’, Mister.”

Madelyn smiled in spite of her turmoil because, after all, Sara was a charmer. Caleb knelt and extended his hand to Sara, and Madelyn couldn’t help but notice how strong and calloused and tanned his fingers were, how masculine.