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Little Girl Lost
Marisa Carroll
Did Faith Carson steal his sister's baby?Hugh Damon is convinced that Faith's daughter is actually his sister Beth's missing baby. Just after Beth gave birth she was in a terrible car accident that caused her to lose her memory. Her newborn infant was never found.Faith, widowed just before the birth, has told everyone she delivered her daughter at home during a devastating storm. Since she was alone, there's no one to confirm–or deny–her story. But there are too many coincidences to allow Hugh to believe her–as much as he finds himself wanting to.He has to admit that Faith is a great mother and that his teenage sister is in no shape to care for a child, but he still wants to know the truth. It's the only thing that might save his sister's sanity….
Hugh stared down at the windows of Faith Carson’s house.
He’d almost given himself away when he’d let his reaction to seeing Beth’s child for the first time get the better of him. Caitlin Carson was Beth’s child—he was convinced of it, although he couldn’t say how he knew.
But according to the law, Faith was Caitlin’s mother. He’d seen a copy of the birth certificate. Everything about it seemed to be in order. Still, he knew his hunch was right. Even though the accident that had killed Jamie and taken Beth’s memory had occurred a hundred miles away, he was sure his sister had been in this place. Here she’d given birth and for some reason, left her child behind.
It was the slightest of hunches that had brought him to Painted Lady Farm. A baby born to a woman alone, during a terrible ice storm. A woman who was a nurse and could have delivered a frightened teenager’s baby. A woman who was also a widow and had, perhaps, despaired of ever having a child of her own—and who might have been desperate enough to risk keeping another woman’s baby.
He didn’t know the details, but nothing he’d learned led him to believe that Faith Carson was a baby snatcher. He was determined to find the truth, but he had to proceed carefully. He wasn’t the only one searching for Beth’s baby.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marisa Carroll is the pen name of the writing team of Carol Wagner and Marian Franz of Deshler, Ohio. The sisters have published over thirty romance novels in the past twenty years and have been the recipients of several industry awards, including Romantic Times Career Achievement Award and a B. Dalton Booksellers’ Award. They have also been finalists for the RWA RITA
Awards and have appeared on numerous bestseller lists, including the USA TODAY list.
Carol and Marian were born and raised in northwestern Ohio. They pursued careers in nursing, X-ray technology and the business community before entering the writing field in 1982. Marian is employed at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Carol is writing full-time.
Little Girl Lost
Marisa Carroll
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
THE CALENDAR SAID it was November, but the scudding gray clouds and lowering sky made it seem as though winter had arrived in southern Ohio. The maples and slippery elms had long ago lost their leaves. The mottled trunks of the sycamores blended into the white and gray of the storm clouds. Only the oaks held stubbornly to their tattered brown leaves, the way she had been holding stubbornly to her grief.
No, not stubbornly, Faith Carson told herself as she trudged along the path that skirted a small lake and ended at a tiny, hidden roadside park bordering her farm. “Surely six months isn’t too long to mourn a dead husband?”
She wasn’t talking to herself, not really. She’d addressed the question to her two-year-old Shetland sheepdog, Addy, trotting at her heels. She’d found Addy at the local animal shelter a few weeks after she’d moved into the echoing old farmhouse that Mark had inherited from his grandparents, and which, until three weeks after his death, Faith had never set foot in. Addy was the only friend Faith had at the moment. The little dog pricked her ears at the question and gave a yip of sympathetic agreement.
Six months. Not nearly long enough when that sorrow was coupled with the aching loss of a child barely conceived. Surely six months was only a beginning. Faith blinked hard to hold back tears as icy raindrops touched her cheeks. She had nothing left in her but a sense of bereavement so deep and unrelenting she sometimes felt as though she had died, too, on that mountain road in Mexico.
They had been vacationing, their first real vacation since their marriage, looking for the remote area where thousands of monarch butterflies came to spend the winter. Mark was a computer programmer whose passion was butterflies. It was a trip he had wanted to take for as long as she had known him. But a washed-out section of road and a blown tire had caused their rented Jeep to roll over.
Somehow, for some reason, her heart had gone on beating when Mark’s had stopped as she held him in her arms and their baby’s life drained away between her legs. A loss like that scarred the heart so much the healing might take six years, or sixty—or never come.
She walked out of the trees just behind the rustic two-sided building that, along with a pair of old-fashioned outhouses and a rusty jungle gym, were the park’s only amenities. An expensive, sporty blue car was parked in the graveled lot at the edge of the small body of water the county had named Sylvan Lake, but that was still known to the locals of Bartonsville, Ohio, as Carson’s Pond. A young couple, the boy’s arms wrapped around the girl, her head resting on his shoulder, sat on one of the picnic tables near the blackened fieldstone fireplace that took up the entire north wall of the building. Faith halted, half-hidden by a huge pine whose low branches brushed the ground, and acted as a windbreak on one side of the small picnic shelter.
She hadn’t expected anyone to be in the park on a day like this, certainly not a pair of amorous teenagers. She took a quick step back, deeper into the shadow of the pine. They hadn’t seen her. She could melt back into the woods, retrace her steps through the frosty grass and be home before the raindrops that were now falling steadily changed to sleet. Addy growled low in her throat.
“Shh.” Faith knelt down to fasten the leash she carried in her pocket to the dog’s collar before Addy could begin barking in earnest. She scooped the small dog into her arms and prepared to depart. The teenagers were absorbed in each other and didn’t look in her direction, but some trick of sound brought their words to her ears.
“Beth, we can’t stay here. There must be a town close by. Maybe it’s big enough for a hospital.”
“If we go to a hospital they’ll call your parents.” The girl cried out, a moan of pain and fear. These weren’t just two moonstruck teenagers making out. Something far more serious than that was going on. Addy whined nervously and squirmed in Faith’s arms. The boy turned his head and stared directly into her eyes.
“Help us,” he said, his face as gray-white as the clouds and the sycamore trees. He was blond, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, seventeen or eighteen at most. A good-looking kid, or would be if he weren’t half-scared to death. “My girlfriend’s having a baby. And I don’t know what to do.”
Faith couldn’t believe her ears, didn’t want to. He couldn’t have said what she thought she had heard.
“Please,” he said, raising his voice so there could be no doubt as he repeated the words. “She’s having a baby. I don’t know what to do.”
Instinctively Faith shook her head. “I don’t, either,” she murmured, but he couldn’t hear her above the moaning of the wind in the trees. And she did know what to do. That was one of the things that made her own loss so hard to bear. She was a nurse. She had the skill and knowledge to help save lives. Once, she had even delivered a baby herself. But that had been five years ago in the hospital emergency room where she’d worked while Mark finished up his graduate studies. She had been young and fearless, then. Now she was not. She hadn’t even set foot in a hospital since three days after her miscarriage.
The girl shifted her position, and Faith took a better look at her, her heart sinking. Her arms were wrapped around her swollen middle, which strained against the fabric of her pale-green sweater. She wasn’t wearing a coat and shivered in the cold air. She was very, very pregnant. Her face was white, her eyes dark with fear. “I—I hurt so badly. I can’t walk.”
Feminine instinct and medical training took over, marching Faith forward on stiff legs. She tied Addy to a sapling at the corner of the shelter and hushed her with a stern warning. The little dog dropped to her belly on the cold ground whimpering with anxiety, sensing the tension in the humans around her, but obedient to Faith’s command.
Faith looked from one terrified young face to the other. “She needs to be taken to the hospital.” She took off her all-weather coat and draped it around the shivering girl’s shoulders. She was wearing the sweatshirt Mark had given her for Christmas the year before, a heavy black one covered front and back with butterflies so she would be warm enough without her coat.
“No!” The girl panted, then bit her lip and groaned, a low, guttural sound. The sound of a woman who was almost ready to give birth. Faith’s heart hammered. This couldn’t be happening. Not today of all days. The day her own child should have been born.
“Your baby is coming, and it shouldn’t be born out here in the cold. I’ll give you directions to the hospital in Bartonsville. When you get there the nurses can notify your families—”
Silvery strands of gossamer-fine hair danced in the cold air as the girl shook her head. “I don’t have a family,” she said defiantly. “Only my brother in Texas.”
“What about you?”
“I—I don’t have any family, either,” he said miserably.
He was lying, but before Faith could call him on it another contraction rippled across the girl’s belly. Less than two minutes had passed since the last one. She had to move quickly or the situation would get out of hand. “I’m Faith Carson. I live just down the road at the bottom of the next hill. What’s your name, honey?”
“Beth.”
“And you are?”
“Jamie.” No surnames. Faith let the omission pass. For the moment there were more pressing matters.
“You’re the baby’s father?”
He nodded, his Adam’s apple working up and down in his throat. “Is Beth going to be okay?”
“She needs expert care. You know that, don’t you?”
“We were looking for a hospital. We got lost. I’m—I’m not used to driving in the country. The road’s go every which way.”
“It’s okay. You’re only a few miles from a good hospital. I’ll give you directions, but you must leave now. Your baby’s going to be born very soon if I don’t miss my guess.”
“How do you know it’s going to be soon?” Beth was gasping for breath, clutching at Jamie’s arm with both hands. He stood beside the table, ramrod straight, breathing almost as hard and fast as the mother-to-be.
Faith sighed. “I’m a nurse,” she said. “I know.”
“First babies take a long time, I’ve heard. This—this only started about an hour ago.”
“Has your water broken?”
For a moment Beth looked puzzled, then nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was at first, then I remembered from health class. It was this morning. Then the cramps started.” She began to sob. “I hurt so bad. I just want to get this thing out of me.” The sobs turned to a groan, and she dropped her hands to the tabletop, lifting herself into a crouch, straining against the contraction.
“Don’t push,” Faith ordered automatically. “Try to breathe through the contraction. Like this.” She made an O with her mouth and panted.
Beth tried, but she was too upset and in too much pain for the exercise to do any good. She cried out and her knees buckled.
Jamie had gone from looking scared to terrified. “Help us. I don’t know what to do. The doctor at the clinic in…back home…told us the baby probably wasn’t due for another three weeks.”
“Have you had regular prenatal care?” Faith asked.
“I—I just went twice. I had a test where they rub a wand over your stomach—”
“A sonogram,” Faith supplied.
“Yes. My baby’s a girl. But they wanted—” Beth broke off what she was about to say. Faith guessed it was that the clinic doctor wanted to notify her family. She was a little thing, and if she wore baggy clothes, like the sweater she had on now, she probably had been able to hide her pregnancy. “If we go to the hospital they’ll take my baby away.” Beth’s eyes sought Faith’s. They were blue Faith noted, as blue as a country sky on a cloudless June day.
“No they won’t. Not unless you want to give the baby up.”
“I want my baby.” Beth bit down hard on her lower lip as another contraction began.
“Beth,” Jamie said, his tone edged with desperation. “We’ve gone over this and over this. We don’t have any money or jobs or a place to live. How can we take care of a baby?”
“Other girls have. I can, too. You don’t have to marry me. You know that, Jamie. Your parents don’t want you to, anyway.”
“I—I just don’t know how we’ll manage—” He broke off as she cried out again. “Do something,” he pleaded to Faith.
“Do you have a cell phone?” she asked.
Jamie wouldn’t quite meet her eyes. “We lost it.”
So much for the easy way out.
Faith took one more look at the car. It was a two-seater. Warmer than the open shelter, certainly, and out of the wind, but with little room to maneuver. If there was a problem with the birth she would be at an even greater disadvantage shoehorned inside it than she was now. Beth moaned again, leaning against her young lover, straining.
“Don’t push,” Faith said sharply. Beth’s labor was progressing rapidly. Even if she left Addy behind and they all squeezed into the car, the baby’s arrival would probably occur before they reached the hospital. “We’re going to have to deliver the baby here,” she said with false calm.
Beth started to cry harder. “I think so, too.”
Faith reached out and touched her fingertips to Beth’s cold cheek. She couldn’t think about her own grief, couldn’t remember that she should be laboring in the same way as this girl, bringing the baby she had longed for so desperately into the world.
“It’s going to be okay.” She swallowed against the familiar lump of sorrow in her throat, made her voice as soothing as she could manage. “I’m going to deliver your baby and Jamie’s going to help.”
“Me?” He swallowed audibly. “I… What can I do?”
“Do you have any blankets in the car? Towels?”
“We have sleeping bags. And I have a couple of clean sweatshirts. Will they do?”
“Yes. We can wrap the baby in them. How about a pair of scissors?”
The last of the color drained out of Jamie’s face as he made the connection. He shook his head. “No scissors.”
“Not even cuticle scissors? A penknife, then.” Faith held on to her composure with both hands. It wouldn’t do to let these two terrified kids see that she was almost as afraid as they were.
“I have a penknife.” Jamie pulled a small one out of his pocket. “It’s sharp.”
“Good. That will do.”
She’d been burning trash earlier that morning so she had matches in her pocket. She could sterilize the blade to cut the umbilical cord. But she would need something to clear the baby’s nose and mouth, and something to tie off the cord. “Do you have any cotton swabs? Dental floss?”
