So terrible.
Her mind drifted to the ways, if faced with a similar situation, she might tell Abby apart from another identical dog. Once when Abby was young, Mariska had taken her to be groomed and her baby came back looking like an alien. She’d spent a week running Abby through a battery of tests to make sure it was her. After that ordeal, she’d even taught the Wheaton a special trick to make sure she would always know the difference—
“Hello.”
Charlotte looked up from her thoughts and found the unlucky couple’s next door neighbor staring back at her. A moment earlier he was mowing his lawn. He’d just stopped the engine and now stood wiping his age-speckled brow.
Perfect.
“Hello,” she said, pushing her grin to grow. She wanted to look super-friendly in the hopes of killing two birds with one stone. Sure, she’d wanted to mill around for a bit like a random neighbor walking a dog, searching for Siofra watching the house. But as much as solving the baby-napping crime wasn’t her primary mission, it couldn’t hurt to find out a little more information about the case. It was interesting. There had to be things the police didn’t share with the news, because nothing about the case made sense.
Who trades their own baby for another?
Her best guess was someone had stolen a baby for another couple looking to gain a child by any means possible. Though that didn’t explain the return of a different baby. Did the couple find the first baby lacking and ‘returned it to the store for an exchange,’ so to speak? Did the kidnapper hope returning the first baby to the parents of the second baby would fool them and keep at least one kidnapping undiscovered?
So bizarre.
Charlotte had given the entire situation a lot of thought, and that scenario was the only one that made sense. The idea of someone giving away their own child felt too awful to be a possibility. But to swap one random baby for another...that seemed more likely. Though, she hadn’t found any other local reports of kidnapped babies to support her theory.
The neighbor stooped over a flower bed to pluck a weed and his motion drew Charlotte from her thoughts.
He tossed the weed into his lawn and she could tell he was about to fire-up his lawn mower again.
Say something.
“Hey, did they find their baby?” she asked in a more conspiratorial tone. Since it had already been reported on the news the baby had been swapped, she hoped her question would make him think she was a neighbor and not a lookie-loo.
Heck, I’m not even reading the news. How could I be up to no-good?
The man glanced nervously at the house next door and shook his head. He took a step forward and lowered his voice as well.
“Terrible thing.”
“What?”
“They didn’t get the baby back.”
“What?” asked Charlotte with her best shocked-face. “They didn’t? Why did I think they they did?”
He grimaced. “The police were here all day yesterday. In the end, they were off to get the baby back—”
“Right…”
“—but it wasn’t their baby.”
Cue even-more-shocked face.
“What? I don’t understand.”
I’m an idiot. Please tell me everything.
The man sighed. “It was another baby. Not theirs.”
“The baby they went to get?”
He nodded, looking as grim as a human could.
Charlotte raised her hand to cover her gaping mouth. “You’re kidding. The kidnappers returned a different baby? Who does that?”
The man’s expression lit, as if he’d been waiting all day to share his inside information with someone who hadn’t read the paper. “That’s what my wife said. She talked to Shana, as best she could—the woman was screaming and crying something about a blind baby.”
Charlotte found herself dumbstruck.
A blind baby?
The plot thickens.
Without knowing why, she scooped up Harley and held the dog close to her. “You’re saying someone took their baby and then returned a blind baby to them?”
He nodded. “That’s what my wife thinks. She said it was all very chaotic and she thinks Shana was on some kind of sedative.” He clucked his tongue. “Leaving her baby on the floor for someone to steal it. Irresponsible. I’d leave that woman if I were Carl.”
Charlotte physically recoiled at the man’s lack of sympathy, clutching Harley even tighter. “I’m sure she never dreamed someone would take him.”
He shook his head. “These days you can never be too careful. She should have known better.”
Charlotte took a deep breath.
Now isn’t the time to chastise this guy for his lack of empathy.
“Well it’s just terrible,” she said. “Hey, you didn’t see a woman go in there, did you?”
“A woman? Into Carl’s house? Who?”
Charlotte paused.
Um...
She didn’t exactly know what Siofra looked like at the moment. Before she had to make something up, the old man kept talking.
“I saw a lady cop or two milling around outside while they were waiting for the kidnappers to call.”
Charlotte looked away, thinking.
Could Siofra be masquerading as a cop?
Probably not. Too risky.
“No, I was thinking more of a private investigator. Looks like me a little?”
Probably. Maybe. Hard to tell from an old picture and a dubious family connection.
The man tucked back his chin and eyeballed her. “No. I think I’d remember that.” He grinned with a set of perfect veneers and she felt her skin crawl a little.
Ick.
“Ah. Well. I guess we’d better get going.” She looked at Harley as if the dog had asked her to get a move on.
The neighbor took a step to the right as if he were
