Hush Little Baby (17 page)

Kit’s giggles dried up.

Ed Bing was rabid. He was a mad dog. There would be froth around his mouth.

Cinda spit right back, “We don’t have your stupid fifty K,” she said in a hot raging whisper.

“Well, I’ve got the baby; I’ve got the camera you wanted so much; and I’ve got the little girl who took the pictures. You bring the fifty K and we’re set.”

E
D HAS MUFFIN
, THOUGHT KIT
.

That’s impossible! But where is Rowen? Where is Dusty? How could this have happened?

Muffin
with Ed, a mad dog ready to bite.

Cinda got out of the car for the rest of the conversation with Ed, and Kit could not hear what they said to each other, only that Cinda was crying with rage. Then she and Burt had another short conference, Burt kissed the tip of his wife’s nose, and they got into their separate cars.

Cinda drove away first, followed by her husband. They drove neatly and carefully, so as not to attract attention. A shiny new sports utility vehicle driven by a woman like Cinda was just right for this neighborhood, though; she belonged. Nobody would notice them.

Ed doesn’t want a nine-year-old, thought Kit. He wants cash. He’s put himself in a position where he has to have that money. But he’s not going to get it. And Muffin and Sam are in his hands.

She remembered those hands. Fat-fingered, swollen, with those heavy, yellow split nails.

Cinda had driven out of Seven Hills. Kit had not seen the knife. If Cinda had it, she’d set it down when Kit was giggling doggy-style. Kit could not base her decisions on a knife that might not be there, that Cinda might not be able to reach.

“Cinda. If you’re worried about jail now, what kind of jail is it going to be if Ed has snatched a nine-year-old?”

“He wouldn’t do that,” said Cinda. Cinda was shaking. Her hands on the wheel, her chin around her mouth … her entire body was jittering.

“He has done that. We just heard him say so. He has Muffin.” Kit lifted boxes off herself, balancing them on the wide deep dashboard, gripped the armrest, and eased an inch of herself onto the seat. “She’s a little girl, Cinda, you met her. She’s no wider than a bookmark. And she’s somebody else’s kid! This is kidnapping, Cinda! Sam — you could maybe talk your way out of that, because some of the time you did have the mother’s permission. But you don’t have Muffin’s mother’s permission.”

“She’ll be fine,” said Cinda. The Jeep seemed to drive without her, steadying itself against her unsteady hands.

“We have to call the police, Cinda, so they can go and get Muffin and Sam safely back. You heard Ed’s voice. He wants his fifty thousand so much that he is not sane.”

Cinda threw her car phone out the window.

Okay, thought Kit, so we won’t call the police. She said, “Cinda, how about we go where Ed is waiting and pay him the rest of his money?”

“We don’t
have
the fifty thousand,” Cinda screamed in fear and fury. “Besides, we paid him the first ten. He’s lying. It’s forty thousand.”

They drove on. Kit wondered where they were going. Did Cinda have a plan? Had she and Burt thought of a place to go, an intelligent thing to do? Were they meeting Ed, with or without the forty or fifty K? Or were they on the run now, shrugging about the fates of Muffin and Sam? “Where is Ed?” asked Kit.

“Forget it. I’m not telling you anything.”

Kit located her confessional voice. Her voice that blamed herself. Kit did not often use this voice, but of course she heard it all the time on talk shows. “I’ve been so stupid today,” she said sorrowfully. “It started with Dusty. Dusty never changes. She’s stupid all the way through, and even though I know that, today I believed she was different. So I did stupid things. I did a hundred stupid things. And I don’t know how come Muffin’s older brother isn’t with Muffin, but whatever happened makes Rowen stupid, too. Now we have a chance to get smart, Cinda, and we have to take it.”

“I am smart!” wailed Cinda. “Don’t you bracket me with Dusty! I’m
brilliant.
Burt and I are smarter than anybody. Out in Silicon Valley, in all those new software companies, people are becoming millionaires every day just because they showed up at the right time! And Burt and I are
smarter
than they are, and yet we couldn’t get ahead. So we came up with the most brilliant plan.” She actually turned toward Kit with a smile. “You see,” said Cinda. “Burt and I created a
masterpiece.
I wrote the programs. Very, very sophisticated programming.” Cinda nodded with genuine pride. “The way it worked was, and of course I’m simplifying this for you, the stupid customer would stand there getting mad at technology for not giving him his hundred dollars in twenties, and meanwhile, we lift all his bank card information.” She was driving easily now, enjoying the tasks of the road: the signaling, lane changing, mirror checking. “We put fake ATMs in six states!” she bragged. “Then Dusty and I would go to real ATMs and take cash out of the accounts.”

Kit imagined Cinda’s mind exploring once again the programming that had made this scam possible. But Cinda would not refer to it as a scam. Cinda would not admit she was nothing but a purse snatcher, a wallet lifter. Cinda would not picture some poor exhausted woman in her sixties who’d worked all day on her feet at a tough job, and went to the ATM to get cash for groceries — and her account was empty.

You are a common thief, thought Kit.

This was the woman who would have brought up Sam!

Careful not to use the
police
word, Kit said, “But the authorities caught on?”

“Yes! We were so close. Everything was running perfectly. But the other day, we got to our best mall, with the highest traffic, and the police had our ATM staked out.” She shook her head. “We spotted them, of course. They’re not very smart.”

“And the house where we brought the baby — you were leaving it?”

“We looked for that house for so long! It was such a nice house.” Cinda seemed pleased by house-hunting memories, like an ordinary woman who’d been comparing kitchens. “It’s close to several states. We can hit Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts in only a two-hour drive. I even checked the schools in that district, they’re excellent, and then Dusty and Ed panicked because we weren’t recovering as much cash as we expected to. You should never work with stupid people. They just don’t understand that when a business is beginning, there are glitches. We would have paid them eventually.”

Kit made noises of sympathy. Cinda and Burt would have had to pay Dusty and Ed eventually, or eventually Dusty and Ed would have turned them in.

Or maybe not!

What was Dusty’s role in this?

Kit heard her father’s description again:
Dusty’s a manipulative woman, extraordinarily selfish.

If Dusty had been going with Cinda to use the victim’s bank cards, Dusty was a common thief, too. Kit thought Dusty would have found it rather entertaining, like shopping; and would have regarded the card owners as no more important than the dolls on her shelf. What mattered was Dusty’s space, and Dusty’s self.

Dusty had probably treated this as her own delightful
Wheel of Fortune,
without considering that one of these spins, she might lose a turn. Well, they had lost. Big-time.

And Muffin and Sam?

Had they also lost?

How was she going to save them?

Cinda maneuvered through traffic, passing fast and efficiently, darting from lane to lane. Wherever she was going, she was going to get there fast.

Kit felt her way through the arithmetic of Cinda’s sophisticated programming. In elementary school Kit had loved word problems, and their little arithmetic people who were real to Kit, and whose lives she used to worry about. (If Josh and Suzette are going to Grandmother’s house, and it’s 75 miles away, and Josh drives 25 miles an hour and Suzette drives 50 miles an hour, and they both leave at 1:30, when will each child arrive at Grandmother’s?) Clearly, Josh was weird. No teenage boy under any circumstance drove 25 miles an hour. No teenage boy would permit his sister Suzette to get there first. Poor Grandmother would have to stand in the door wringing her hands, wondering if Josh had had an accident.

She had to get Cinda bragging again. Had to get Cinda talking again. Every word of information she could glean might help her find out where Ed had Sam and Muffin.

“But Cinda,” said Kit, multiplying in her head, “it must have cost a fortune to manufacture a fake ATM so perfect in appearance that nobody questioned it! You had to pay to have it designed and machined and shipped. It must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the scheme up and going. You must have spent months on it when you weren’t earning a salary. And phone lines and I don’t even know enough to know what else. Say you already spent two hundred thousand dollars, and you get a hundred each time you steal; you’d have to hit real ATMs with your fake cards
two thousand times
just to get back the money you already spent! If you did ten a day, it would take you two hundred days. And every single time you faked it, you’d be committing a crime and somebody might spot you. Your luck isn’t going to hold two thousand times in a row!”

Cinda gave her a junior high school glare; as if Cinda were not thirty, but fourteen. It was eerie to see a kid’s sneer on a face twice Kit’s age.

I’m telling her she’s stupid, thought Kit, when the thing that matters most to Cinda is being smart. “However,” said Kit quickly, “I’m sure that once the glitches worked out you would make a fortune. And then you decided you wanted a baby. So you’d have this sweet little family —”

Kit could not keep this up. It wasn’t a sweet little family. It was two criminals with a jealousy problem who’d purchased a newborn the way they were purchasing a life — in a shady underhanded way that hadn’t worked.

They were at an enormous intersection: many lanes, each with its arrow and an array of gas stations that also sold tacos and doughnuts and charcoal briquettes and had enough pumps for a dozen cars.

Cinda came to a full stop.

I can get out, thought Kit. Walk over to that gas station, where there are ten people there to keep me safe, pick up the phone, and call 911.

But then Cinda and Burt will meet Ed without me, and I won’t be there for Muffin and Sam.

Kit could hit Cinda over the head with one of the heavier boxes. Or slam the gear into park and yank out the keys.

But then nobody would go meet Ed.

Ed … as desperate for his fifty K as an addict for his needle.

Ed … alone with Muffin and Sam.

In the dark of the car, Muffin could not quite see the baby, but he was warm and soft in her arms. He was too quiet, as if he were too tired to cry anymore. Muffin knew instinctively that a baby should never be that tired. A baby should not give up saying how hungry he is.

Sam the Baby was giving up.

He was a very little guy, and he needed more than he was getting.

And Ed on the phone was yelling that he wanted his fifty K.

At first Muffin did not know what K was. In a few sentences she figured out that it was money. “You bring me that fifty K or else!” screamed Ed into the phone.

Or else.

Or else what?

Or else, what happens to Sam and me?

Rowen was running.

He had had to run laps, of course, a jillion times, for warm-ups or for punishment for most teams he’d been on. But running itself did not interest him. Now he ran over potholes, ruts, and piles of gravel and unexpected projecting stones. He ran in complete darkness.

In the distance, a dog howled, and right away another dog howled, closer. A night bird shrieked, and there was a whuffing near his head, and a sort of grunt. The leaves did not rustle, but jostled and clapped. Branches scraped bark.

His running felt so fast that he kept thinking he would catch up to Ed’s car. But of course he would never catch up to Ed’s car. His little sister, and a stranger’s little baby boy, were vanishing.

Had vanished.

His goal was the main road, but once he reached the main road, it wasn’t one. Twisting and narrow, it just didn’t have traffic. When he’d driven here, he hadn’t particularly noticed the pavement itself, but now he saw it had crumbled at the edges, that weeds had worked through cracks. He wasn’t going to flag down a rescue because there weren’t going to be cars.

His ankle, which he had refused to think about, was throbbing again.

He had to reach the next road, and maybe even the road after that, near Route 80, near that convenience store, and every step he took, no matter how fast he took it, no matter how long his stride, was only the tiniest fraction of what Ed could do.

A car did approach, and Rowen stopped in the road, waving his arms wildly, but the driver leaned on the horn, skidded around him, and never slowed at all.

Row wouldn’t have stopped, either, for some strange boy in the road in the middle of the night. Who knew what maniacs were around?

I know what maniacs are around, thought Rowen. And my sister’s with one of them.

“There!” said Muffin to Ed. “Stop there. At that store. We have to get Sam milk. He’s very very hungry.”

The big old Caddy kept right on going. “He stopped crying, that’s all I care about,” said Ed. Ed’s voice was too big. It had swollen, like his hands, like his temper.

“He has to have supper. You have to stop. And diapers, we need diapers. We can’t just use a sweater.”

Ed looked in her direction. His eyes felt all stare-y, as if they weren’t going right. She was glad it was dark and she could not really see him. “It’s your cousin, this baby,” said Muffin. “Your cousin Dusty had a baby, so this is a numbered cousin. I have some of those. He’s your second cousin or your third cousin. I forget how it works. And he needs his milk, your cousin. So you stop the car and buy the milk.”

Ed grinned and she saw that he was missing teeth, and she wondered if he would go to the dentist with some of his fifty K, because he looked bad with those gaps in his mouth. “You’re a pretty sturdy kid for nine years old,” said Ed.

Muffin had been thinking the same thing, and was proud. She
was
a sturdy kid for nine. It wasn’t as little as everybody thought. Nine could take care of a baby. Muffin had made a decision not to think about how her head hurt. She had decided to think only about Sam. “Sam is not sturdy,” she reminded Ed. “He’s all folded over and sickish. He needs his milk.”