The Baby's Bodyguard (2 page)

K
elsey gripped Ethan’s arm tighter as he swayed. “Ethan?”

He stared at the phone. She eased it from his cramped fingers and looked at the message.
Your son is alive.

What in the world was going on? “Ethan, why don’t we sit and you can tell me what happened to your son?”

He allowed Kelsey to lead him to the table. As he sat, the baby in her arms reached for him. With only a brief hesitation and something like deep pain settling in lines on his face, he took her. As Janie squirmed, he shifted her until she could lay her head on his shoulder.

Kelsey pushed the Coke toward him. “Okay, talk.”

He met her eyes and to her surprise, she saw a hint of a smile there. “I think you’re the only person who would have the nerve to ask me that. My family won’t. I think they’re afraid I’ll go off the deep end.”

“Is there danger of that?”

He rubbed a slow circle on the baby’s back while he
seemed to be considering the question, and Kelsey’s heart did a lazy flip in her chest.

“I don’t think so.” A rueful smile, then.

She smiled back at him, even though she wanted to cry, because there was courage, and then there was
courage.
He had the real thing. “Why don’t you tell me about Charlie?”

Kelsey watched emotions—anger, fear, grief—travel across his face as he struggled to find the right words.

“I was undercover with the FBI. We were closing the deal with … some really bad people. All we needed was for the money to exchange hands and we could arrest them.” He closed his eyes, almost as if he shut them tight enough he could shut out the memory of that night. “They shouldn’t have been there. They shouldn’t have known the place even existed. I wasn’t anywhere near our hometown.”

“Wait—your wife and son were at the place where the sting was set to happen?”

“Yes.” The pain in that one word was enough to take her breath away.

“She walked across the street, right in front of me, and the restaurant where I was supposed to meet the people I’d been working to bring down … it just blew up. Amy and Charlie were killed in the explosion.” He licked dry lips and took a sip of the Coke she’d opened for him.

“How did she get there?”

“No one was ever able to figure it out. There were some unexplained phone calls on the call log of her cell
phone, but the numbers traced back to burn phones. I left the FBI, but if there were new leads, I’m sure they would have let me know.” The toddler whimpered and roused. Ethan passed her to Kelsey, who lowered her into the crook of her arm and shushed her gently to sleep.

“You must feel like you’ve been living a nightmare that you can’t wake up from.”

His eyes took on a distant stare. The toll the last couple of years had taken on him had definitely been harsh. “You have no idea.”

She did have an idea—not what it was like to lose a wife and child, but she had a very good idea what it was like to lose people you love. Family.

Living nightmares? That she had experienced.

“Ethan, how can you know if the message you got is for real? Is it possible that your son could’ve survived without you knowing?”

It wasn’t possible. He’d watched as the explosion took his wife and child. And the small sliver of hope this message birthed in him only made the pain worse.

“No.” He glanced at her, her question reminding him of her presence. “And I think I might know a way to prove it.”

Ethan strode out the door of the marina shop with the photo in hand, Kelsey trailing behind with the toddler in her arms. The month before Amy and Charlie died, Ethan had been in Mobile for the weekend. A prearranged “business trip,” which really meant a visit home for him.

He’d taken Charlie out for the afternoon to give Amy
a break. The two of them had gone to Kid’s Day in the park. Cops and firefighters put it on so that kids could meet them, see their uniforms and the firefighters in their gear and learn not to be afraid.

At the event, the cops were fingerprinting and photographing kids, making identification kits. He had one made for Charlie. Amy had teased him about it, an ID kit for a six-month-old.

He’d put it away in a drawer and said they would never need it.

Ethan turned down the pier that led to his boat slip. He’d tried renting a house when he first moved back to Sea Breeze, but after everything that had happened, a house was too normal. And he needed the water. He bought his boat three months later.

Climbing on board, he held out a hand. She passed him the diaper bag and then, taking his hand, made the easy jump onto the stern of the boat. In the cabin, he had stowed a small wooden box that held the only pieces of his old life that he’d kept close.

He ran his fingers over the smooth wood. So many nights he took his box out of its storage space and held it. He didn’t have to. He didn’t need mementos to remember his son or his wife. They were engraved on his heart.

It was harder than he’d expected to open it.

“Do you want me to …” Kelsey’s voice trailed off as she caught his expression.

“No, I can do it. It’s just—”

“I get it. You don’t have to explain.” She laid the baby
on the berth and pushed a pillow under the mattress so Janie couldn’t roll off.

He pulled the box closer and lifted the lid. Without allowing himself to think about it, he pulled out a silver baby rattle and the tiny T-shirt that Charlie wore on his first day of life. A pressed flower that his wife had kept from their first date. Other precious bits and pieces of a life gone by. And the fingerprint card and picture he’d made on the last outing he’d had with Charlie.

Laying the handprint beside the fingerprint card, he compared the two. Neither was very precise, considering they’d been done on a six-month-old. But he could see the swirls and arches. His heart began to pound.

They looked like a match, the newer one only slightly larger.

Kelsey pushed him out of the way and pulled the cards where she could see them. “Oh my—
Ethan.
They match.”

He pushed away from the table and paced the dozen steps to the door of the cabin before turning back. “We need to get it verified.”

“SBPD can do that. But I think the place for us to start is with her.” She gestured to the little angel sleeping on Ethan’s bunk. Janie’s diaper-clad booty was hitched up in the air, and her chest rose and fell in even breaths. “If we find out who she is and who led her to you, just maybe that information leads to more information about your son.”

Hope and desperation mixed inside him—the need to believe that it could be true, the desperate wish for something so improbable. He turned to pace the length
of the boat again, but in the small space he quickly ran into Kelsey as she paced the other way.

He leaned against the wall, his stomach in knots. “I don’t know what to think. We can try to trace her using the missing persons database, but something tells me she’s not going to be there.”

“I’ve got to get back to the office.” Kelsey slung the diaper bag over one shoulder and picked the baby up, easily settling her on her shoulder without waking her. With one hand, she dug her cell phone out of the back pocket of her capris. “Put your information in my phone. If I find something I’ll call you. With both of us working on this, something is bound to turn up.”

After finishing out his workday—which was thankfully spent doing mundane work like stopping boats to check for onboard safety equipment—Ethan spent the entire night searching the internet for information. He’d turned the problem around in his head every way he could possibly think of, and still he came up with nothing. From grief to hope to frustration, he’d pretty much run the gamut.

And now, running on little sleep, he wanted to take someone down.

Someone like the criminals who had set this whole thing in motion in the first place. Who stole someone’s child? Someone with no conscience. Someone who bought and sold people as commodities.

He slammed the brush on the surface of his boat and scrubbed. One thing about living on a boat—something
always needed to be cleaned. Maybe it would help him work through some of his anger issues.

“Permission to come aboard, sir?” Kelsey’s voice drifted out from the pier.

“Permission granted, but be prepared to swab the deck.” Ethan reached for the T-shirt behind him on the rail and pulled it over his head.

“Nuh-uh. I’ve lived in Sea Breeze long enough to know better than to get between a man and his boat.”

Despite himself, he laughed, turning to greet her. She was dressed in a simple khaki skirt and a T-shirt, but she had on several long necklaces of brightly colored beads, and Janie had her hands twisted up in them. “I thought she would be in foster care by now.”

“It’s always the goal to get kids placed as quickly as possible.” Kelsey passed Ethan the baby and lightly stepped on board. “Unfortunately, all of our emergency foster care placements were full. We’re on our way to the pediatrician for a checkup.”

Janie grabbed his face and grinned, a half-dozen teeth on the top and bottom shining in her mouth. “She looks pretty happy.”

“I think she’s doing fine. I came by because, as I was looking through her diaper bag this morning, I found this.” She handed him an SD card, the kind that would go in a digital camera. “I don’t know what’s on it, but I thought it might be more evidence. It was sewn into the lining of her bag.”

Ethan stuffed the card into one of the pockets of his cargo shorts, one of the pockets that wasn’t wet from
scrubbing the deck. Janie bounced on his free arm, but as she bounced, her foot got caught in his pocket.

She bounced again, but her foot didn’t come loose. Her face mashed up into a red-faced scowl. A wail came out of her mouth that rivaled the air horn he carried on his boat for emergencies. He hadn’t known she could do that. He looked at Kelsey. “A little help here?”

Kelsey loosened Janie’s foot, but stepped away, leaving him to deal. She dug in the diaper bag. He patted the baby on the back and shushed and—what was that other thing he’d read in the baby book you were supposed to do with crying kids?

His natural calm disappeared as she wailed. It was forever ago that he’d done baby stuff.
Think, Clark. You’ve got this.

He started rocking back and forth. Yeah, that was it,
motion.

It didn’t work, not even for a second.

Janie didn’t stop crying, but she did hiccup and gasp as she cried. Screaming kids made all kinds of crazy noises, but she didn’t sound right. He laid her back on his arm to look at her. Her lips were blue. “Kels—”

Kelsey came up with a sippy cup and a scrap of a blanket from the diaper bag.

“I don’t think that’s it. There’s something wrong with her. She’s blue—look at her hands.” His voice had risen, and he felt something close to panic.

“What?” Kelsey dropped the bag onto the deck. “Let me see.”

Janie hadn’t stopped crying, and her breathing was
fast and shallow—not wheezing, like asthma, but as if she was trying to get more oxygen.

“Call 911.” Ethan might be calm on the outside, but inside he was freaking out.
Oh, Jesus, please protect this little baby.

“Wait just a minute.” Kelsey took Janie from Ethan and held her close, letting her have the blanket, which didn’t really work. She didn’t even notice it. But then she tucked Janie’s legs up, almost against her own little armpits and held her close against her chest, rocking and singing to her—in Russian, he guessed.

Slowly, the baby calmed and began to suck her thumb. Her color returned, not quite pink, but not grayish-blue either. He picked up her little hand. The nails still had a bluish tinge, but the hands weren’t blue. His own heart rate started to return to something resembling normal.

“Russian?”

Kelsey nodded. “I don’t think it’s her language because she doesn’t really respond, but it probably sounds a lot more familiar to her than English.”

He dropped onto a bench seat. “I was afraid she was going to die. How did you know to do that?”

“I didn’t know, not for sure.” She eased to the seat beside him. Janie’s eyes were drifting shut, but her color was good. Crisis averted, for now. “But kids in underdeveloped countries don’t have the kind of medical care we have here, so I’ve seen this before. I think it’s a heart defect.”

“Oh, right—missionary kid. Where was this?” He
watched Janie’s chest rise and fall, not quite ready to assume she was going to be okay.

“Rwanda. There was a little kid there who would be running and playing and then all of a sudden his lips and hands would turn blue and he would gasp for air, just like this. His fix was to stop and squat down and lean forward. It’s a crude treatment, but it works—for a while.” She stood with the baby in her arms. “I think instead of going straight to the pediatrician, I’ll have the pediatrician call Children’s Hospital. She needs to be seen by a specialist.”

He grabbed the diaper bag and sippy cup from the deck and followed her toward her car. “Do you want me to go?”

“We’ll be fine. I’ll keep you posted when I can.”

Seven hours later, Kelsey pulled up at the drive through at Chick-fil-A. She briefly felt guilty about her choice, but just as quickly discarded the thought. She was starving. And she was traumatized.

Janie had been poked, prodded, stuck, ultrasounded, echoed and basically put through every test any of the pediatric cardiologists could think of at the children’s clinic. And every test came back with the same result. She was one sick little baby. The miracle, they said, was that she had lived—and basically thrived—this long. She was small for her age because of the lack of oxygen and nutrients getting to her cells.

And she would have to have surgery as soon as the doctors could arrange it. Normally kids with her
condition would’ve had surgery before they were a year old.

The thought that this little baby might’ve died because no one had gotten her the medical treatment she needed … Kelsey took a deep, cleansing breath and tried not to focus on how angry it made her.

The perky teenager handed Kelsey a bag of yummy chicken and fries and not one but two milk shakes. She figured if she was going to go bug Ethan, she should at least take a food offering.