“How long did it take you to have her? I know sometimes it can take a really long time.”
“Oh, not that long.” The woman glanced at her husband, who continued to sit in silence.
“Were you scared?”
“Scared?” the mother asked.
“About the pain, I mean,” Shelly explained.
“I think I’d be scared.”
“A little,” the woman said.
“Do you nurse her?” Shelly asked.
“I… at first.” The woman glanced at her husband again, as if he might know the answer to these questions.
“How old was she when you stopped nursing her?” Shelly asked.
“I think we’d better get back to the house.” The young man suddenly spoke to his wife.
“Good idea.” There was a look of relief on the wife’s face, and Shelly realized their abrupt departure was to get away from her. She had asked too many questions. Too many personal questions. It was a bad habit of hers.
“No, no.” She jumped to her feet.
“It’s still a beautiful day. Still early. I think you all should stay here, but
“Bye, now.”
Shelly waved.
“Bye-bye, Anna.” She walked away from them quickly, a bit embarrassed over her behavior. She’d made them nervous. They probably thought she was a crazy child abuser. They had it so wrong.
She could never harm a child, especially not a baby as beautiful as Anna.
She felt again that aching inside her, that longing that had been with her for quite a while now. How she wanted a baby of her own! And with any luck, she would have one soon: her period was late.
Jxory sat on his front porch, waiting for Grace. They were :
going to an early movie, then out to dinner. He’d suggested he come down to Rodanthe for this outing, but as he might have predicted, she said she would prefer to drive up to Kill Devil Hills. He finally asked her why she never wanted him to come to Rodanthe, and she sounded surprised by the question.
“I don’t have anything against you coming down here,” she said.
“It’s just that I love to get out. And I know you’d rather not be that far from Zack.”
He’d spent the last couple of hours on the Internet, trying to find information on those two young women who’d disappeared from North Carolina and Virginia twenty-two years ago. He tracked down some old newspaper articles, but they didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.
“Hi, Rory!”
He looked next door to see Jill walking toward her car. He waved, and Jill changed direction, heading toward him. She climbed the steps to his porch and sat down.
“I heard you and Zack had a great time on the dunes,” she said, slipping her sunglasses onto her head, where her thick, silver hair held them snugly in place.
“Yeah, we did.” The afternoon had been, for want of a better term, a bonding experience. No doubt about it. Of course, there had been no time for heavy conversation, which had made life easier for Zack.
Instead, there had been shared concentration on the task at hand and
the plea Summer Child 209
sure of reliving every moment of the class afterward. “We mioht even do it again,” he said to Jill. “My son was on the phone to his dad last night, begging him to take him hang gliding,” Jill said.
“See what you started?”
Rory smiled, pleased. He’d finally done something right.
“So when are you going to talk to me about what I think happened the morning Shelly was born?” Jill asked.
“How about now?” he said.
“I’m waiting for a friend, but we can talk until she shows up.”
“Well, I don’t know that I can add anything new to what you’ve already heard,” Jill said.
“I’ve always felt sure that Shelly was Cindy’s baby. I think the only reason we don’t know that for certain was that the police didn’t have enough evidence to examine her. But I remembered seeing her a couple of days before Shelly was born and she was wearing a loose shirt over her shorts. That wasn’t her style of dress, in case you don’t remember.”
“I remember,” Rory said.
“But” -this had been gnawing at him “—Cindy spent a lot of summers down here after Shelly was born. Don’t you think it would have come out somehow? Wouldn’t she have shown some special interest in her?”
“But she did,” Jill said.
