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When I told him where to go, he shook his head. “And I had such high hopes we could still be friends,” he said.

“Just get there,” I told him, getting into the car and fastening my seat belt. I hadn’t ever ridden with Fernandez, but I suspected it would be a bumpy ride.

The lot at Conejo Community Chapel looked nearly deserted. Even Pastor George’s parking spot was empty. Ray pulled up close to the church and looked at me. “Are you sure about this?”

“Not certain, but it just feels right. Let’s go in and see.”

The door to the hallway between the church itself and the classrooms was unlocked. In the hallway bright children’s drawings of mangers and shepherds and angels festooned with glitter lined the walls, reminding me of what season it was. My throat tightened as I walked toward the church, silently praying that my intuition was right.

“I don’t think—” Ray began when I grabbed his arm to silence him. Maybe he couldn’t hear it, but I could hear the high, thin wail of a very young baby and it seemed to be coming from the sanctuary. As a mother I’d have to say that no matter how long it’s been since you’ve heard that sound it demands your attention when you hear it again. How anybody can ignore that urgency is beyond my understanding.

When I pushed open the back door of the sanctuary it was easy to hear that it was truly a baby crying that I’d heard. From down the hallway I could convince myself that it might be an older child somewhere with his or her mom, but in this large open space the sound was unmistakable. Standing in the center aisle between the rows of chairs was Lucy Perez, holding a blanket-wrapped bundle. Even though it was what I’d hoped for, the sight stunned me enough to root me to the spot for over a minute, watching her awkwardly jiggle the wailing newborn.

“We don’t want to startle her,” Ray said in a voice not much louder than a whisper. I nodded, walking up the aisle quietly.

A few feet up I called Lucy’s name just loudly enough for her to hear me over the infant’s cries. She turned to me, and her dark eyes appeared clouded with confusion. “Hi. You’re Candace’s mom’s friend.”

“That’s right. My name’s Gracie Lee. Who do you have there?” Lucy still wore her usual somewhat-shapeless velour sweats, but now she looked more slender than she had the last time I saw her.

“I don’t know her name. I’m not even sure where she came from. Estella took me home with her because I was real sick. Once I got to her house I felt worse. My back hurt and I had a tummy ache and I felt like throwing up.”

That all sounded like a bad case of the flu or a normal course of labor. I tried to keep my voice level while I talked to Lucy, who wasn’t paying any attention to Ray standing at the back doors of the sanctuary. “Then what happened?”

“She gave me something that made me…sleepy.” Lucy looked like that wasn’t really the word to describe what she’d felt. She wasn’t quite weaving on her feet, but she didn’t look far from it. “What day is it?”

“Wednesday.” She looked ready to wilt and I had to do something. “Do you want to hand the baby to me? Maybe I can get her to stop crying.”

The baby in my arms was very new. Red and wrinkled with eyes squinched tightly shut as she cried, she couldn’t be more than a day old. She had good healthy lungs, though. “How did you get here, Lucy?”

“I walked. Estella’s house is close to here.”

I marveled at her ability to get from one place to another drugged and in such difficult circumstances. “So what made you take a walk with the baby?”

Lucy looked as if she was still piecing that together for herself. “I woke up and nobody was there except me. And this baby. That was a problem.”

“Yes, I guess it was. So you decided to find somebody to help you with the problem?” My jiggling the infant wasn’t having a real calming effect on her. I thought of the baby as “her” because Lucy said she was. The wails were a little quieter now, but definitely not stopped.

“Sort of.” Lucy had a faint smile that made her look even more otherworldly than she had before. “I thought about what Candace said. I remembered about Jesus and problems, so I took her here. Maybe Jesus can help find her mommy.”

The baby latched on to the knuckle I stroked across her tiny mouth, quieting while she sucked furiously. The pressure was incredible and stirred something deep inside me. “Lucy, this may be hard for you to understand, but I think this is
your
baby.”

Her eyes got huge. “I can’t have a baby. I’m not married. Only married people have babies.”

Something more dawned on me then. “Is that why you said you were like Candace and couldn’t have babies? Because you aren’t married?”

She still looked hazy, but she nodded in answer. “Sure. Frank was married. He could have a baby. Do you think because he was married and he did stuff to me I could have this baby?”

This wasn’t the time to go into the complexities of all this with Lucy, but I had to give her some answer.

“That could be what happened.” The baby started to wail again and I knew we needed help that Jesus couldn’t provide alone. Ray must have recognized that, too, because it was only a few minutes before I saw my second ambulance crew of the day.

One of the paramedics that responded looked familiar to me. Her dark blue shirt said “Anna” on the front, and I was pretty sure she’d been on at least one of the runs that had taken me from Edna’s house to the nearest hospital last spring. While the ambulance units didn’t carry baby formula as a matter of procedure, they did apparently carry glucose solution and soon the baby was working on a bottle of that.

I tried to explain what I knew to Anna and her partner in as quiet a voice as possible. The other crewman, whose shirt said “Dave” on the front and EMT on the back, had talked Lucy into lying on a gurney they’d rolled into the sanctuary. Ray’s 911 call had apparently gotten a little garbled and these two responded to what they thought was a birth happening in the Conejo Community Chapel sanctuary.

Anna looked relieved that she didn’t have to help deliver a baby. She seemed at a loss listening to Lucy.

“Estella always tells me when she goes someplace. But today I woke up and she was gone. And there was this baby.” She looked down at the bottle Anna had given her and the blanket-wrapped babe in her arms sucking at the bottle. “Gracie Lee said I might be her mommy. Do you think that’s true?”

This presented another challenge for Anna. “It sure looks like it. Don’t you remember having her?”

“I don’t remember anything after yesterday afternoon. Estella said I was real sick. She gave me stuff that made me sleepy. I kind of remember hurting a lot.” Lucy paused to watch the baby, then looked up again.

“Do you know where Matt is? He called me at my house and said he got out of jail. But then Estella took me with her and he didn’t call anymore, and he didn’t come visit me.”

Ray sighed. “Maybe we can find your sister and Matt for you. Before that, I think you need to go to the hospital so they can see how sick you are.” He patted her shoulder farthest from the baby and looked over at Anna. “Okay, she’s all yours now. I’ll call in later to see how she is.”

“Fine. I think she’s basically all right but we’ll leave the final decision on that to the docs.” Anna called to her partner and they carefully started the process of getting Lucy and the baby into the ambulance.

As they rolled down the main aisle of the church, Helen came into the sanctuary. “What on earth is happening here? We just got back from lunch and there’s an ambulance in the parking lot.”

“Do you want to tell her, or should I? Either way we’ve both got plenty to do.”

Ray smiled for the first time this afternoon. “You tell her and I’ll go get in my car. Somebody has to call Estella and follow that ambulance to the hospital.”

Halfway through explaining the convoluted afternoon to Helen, interrupted by Pastor George coming in and needing explanation as well, I realized I needed a favor from one of them. My car was still on the street in front of Frank Collins’s house. And I needed to get home to have Christmas with Ben. He would never believe how I spent my afternoon.

B
en and I ended up having carryout pizza for our Christmas celebration dinner and opened our presents about eleven that evening. He reacted every bit as badly to my stories of the afternoon as I expected him to. “Are you sure I can leave you on your own and go to Tennessee?” he asked after I told him what happened, sounding more like the parent than the college kid. It made me glad I hadn’t talked to my mother yet.

“I’m sure. All the excitement is over now and I won’t get into any more trouble. If you like I’ll call and check in with you every afternoon at three.”

He grinned at me then. “You don’t need to do that, Mom. You can just e-mail every day and report. I’m bringing my laptop and Dad has a wireless network.”

“Good thing. If he didn’t those phone bills from Memphis to Newbury Park would add up in a week’s time.” He didn’t bother arguing with me on that point. Maybe the kid really is maturing.

LAX the next morning was an absolute zoo. It’s what I expected the week before Christmas, but
expecting
that kind of mass of humanity and experiencing it are two different things. I insisted on finding a space in the parking garage and walking Ben as far into the terminal as possible, which wasn’t very far. He used one of the self-serve machines to get his boarding pass, shouldered his luggage and there he was, ready to go through security. I wondered how he could really pack for a week in a backpack and a small duffel, but he had been old enough to manage his own packing for quite a few years now, so I didn’t ask.

The lump in my throat from hugging him goodbye and watching him go lasted at least back to the 101. That’s saying something, because the interchange of the 405 freeway and the 101 is a place where I’ve never seen a clear stretch of road, even the time I drove it at two in the morning. Los Angeles’s love affair with cars means there is
always
traffic on the major roadways.

Things thinned out considerably when I got closer to Rancho Conejo. By the time I crossed the Ventura County line I could go fifty miles an hour instead of crawling at twenty. When I had almost reached the exit to turn off for home my cell phone rang. “You up for lunch at
Mi Familia?
” a familiar voice asked. “I want to talk about yesterday some more.”

“Sure, as long as you agree to keep your word about not hitting me with charges,” I told Fernandez.

“Gracie Lee, have I ever lied to you?”

“Depends on what you call lying. You certainly haven’t told the full truth every time we’ve talked.”

There was a sigh on the other end of the phone. “Let’s postpone that argument until we’re face-to-face. Eleven forty-five okay? I want to beat the rush.”

I agreed on the time and went home to touch up my makeup and add a light cotton Christmas sweater over my jeans and shirt. Driving Ben to LAX and lunching with Ray Fernandez required two rather different “looks” as far as I was concerned.

I pulled into the restaurant parking lot next to Ray’s unmarked unit. Since he was just getting out of the car I couldn’t be accused of being late. He looked sharp as ever in his workday uniform of white shirt, jeans and a sport coat. Today he’d even added a tie that looked as Christmas oriented as I could expect from him. It featured the Grinch, of course.

He insisted on picking up the tab for lunch. “We can call this one departmental business as long as we don’t go wild.” I wasn’t sure how one would go wild at
Mi Familia
with the average lunch running about six bucks. That was what my cheese enchilada special ran, and Ray’s carnitas burrito was about the same.

“Think the department will pop for an orange soda, too? I don’t want to push the limit.”

“Definitely. You could even have the high-end one imported from Mexico in a glass bottle.” His smile was positively lupine today. It was a look that made me glad that I was on the right side of this man of the law.

We settled at a table and waited for Luis to call our order. While we waited we caught each other up on the last twenty-four hours. “Tell me you didn’t file charges against Estella Perez.” Personally I thought she had enough problems facing her without legal trouble, but I wasn’t sure how the system would look at her actions.

“No charges, but she’ll probably be up for disciplinary action at the hospital. She may have ‘borrowed’ some of the supplies she used to deliver Lucy’s baby. And if nothing else, she acted in a highly unethical manner the way she did things.”

“How long had she known Lucy was pregnant? And what did she use to sedate her so that she didn’t remember anything but still had a healthy baby?”

“She figured out her sister’s condition a while ago, and didn’t tell her because she didn’t think Lucy could handle the information. I think Estella wanted the baby so much herself that she decided to keep things quiet until the baby was born. Maybe she even thought she could get away with this and somehow present the baby as one she’d adopted or something.” Ray looked puzzled by that.

“Some women want a child so badly they’ll do anything to get one.” I thought of the sorrow in Lexy’s voice when she told her stories at Christian Friends. While she wouldn’t do what Estella had done, she would certainly go to great lengths to have a baby. “So what about the drugs?”

Luis called out that our food was ready and Ray stood up to go get the tray. “She tried to explain it to me, but I don’t have a lot of medical knowledge,” he said over his shoulder. “Apparently it’s a modern version of something called ‘twilight sleep.’ She said my mother could probably explain it.”

“Anybody your mom’s age, or mine, could explain it,” I told him when he came back with the laden tray. “The old stuff was morphine and something else that took away pain, but most of all made you forget all about it afterward. I’ve heard of dentists using something like it now for phobic patients.” I didn’t add that I came close to falling in that category myself and that’s why I knew about the stuff. No reason to share my deepest secrets with the homicide detective, even if he was buying me lunch.

We ate in silence for a few minutes. Then I couldn’t resist asking a few more. “How are Lucy and the baby doing? And what about Matt? I’m sure charges were dropped against him, but does he even
know
that yet?”

“Lucy’s good. They’re keeping her and her daughter in the hospital another day or two, mainly to give her some parent education. I talked to somebody from Children and Family Services who seems to think that with a lot of support she could keep the baby. If she and Estella could come to an understanding, the two of them would do a fine job together raising her.”

I tried not to huff. “Either I’ve got to stop asking more than one question at once or you’ve got to get better with answers. Which is it going to be?”

“It better be you with the questions, because I’m so used to keeping my answers to myself that retraining me now would be near impossible.” The man had such a charming demeanor when he wanted to.

“Is Matt going to be okay? And will he get charged for driving without a license?”

“Once he’s all right physically, he’ll face some moving violation stuff. We’ll try to keep it as light as possible but we can’t ignore it totally. Of course if he’d told me about the scooter in the first place I probably wouldn’t have liked him for the murder for so long. The way he was acting, I figured I had a contract killer on my hands.”

“So you suspected Tracy of killing her husband?”

“I couldn’t rule her out,” Ray said. “She had the most to gain from having him dead. He was a bad, dishonest businessman and a lousy husband. With him gone, she profited financially
and
got rid of a guy her family had hated for years. I still thought Matt pulled the trigger for her, though.”

“What changed your mind?” With Ray doing a lot of the talking I had managed to polish off most of my lunch. I was beginning to think that maybe this time I’d spring for dessert.

“A couple things put me on another path. There’s no proof anywhere that Matt Seavers has any money outside his job on the plumbing crew. And one of the unidentified prints on the inside of the portable facility where Collins was found matched a partial on the gun, and both belong to Tracy Collins.”

“She could argue that she’d touched the gun another time, since her husband owned it, but I’ve never seen her at the job site.”

“Exactly. She’s lawyered up for now and we won’t be getting any more information out of her. I hope she will confess and plea bargain down for the sake of her kids and not go through a trial, but who knows. She supposedly did all this for them, and now her husband’s mother and one of her own brothers will squabble for years over custody while she’s behind bars.”

It was a sad situation to think of, and it pretty much killed my appetite for dessert. When we finished lunch and got ready to leave, I saw a sign on the back wall that said the restaurant would be open at 7:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve so that people could pick up tamales.

“Do you get yours here?” I asked, motioning to the sign. “I’ve been really tempted to learn how to make them. It’s such a California thing.”

“Yeah and it takes a small army. No, I don’t buy tamales at Christmas. I go to my mother’s house Christmas Eve and she’d skin me alive if I ate tamales anywhere but at her table.”

“Do you think she’d welcome an extra pair of hands in the small army?”

Ray threw back his head in laughter. “You have got to be kidding. I wouldn’t bring a woman into that lion’s den on Christmas Eve unless we had dated at least six months. Even then, I’d have to be sure she could hold her own almost anywhere.”

He gave me a speculative look as we left the restaurant. “Now I could see you holding your own, even in my mother’s kitchen. Do you think if we started going out now we could talk about tamales next Christmas?”

The thought of what that meant made me stop dead in the parking lot. “Only if we talked about a lot of other things first. Like our coming to an understanding on issues of faith, because I won’t get serious about another man who isn’t a Christian.” After the pain I’d already had in my life from relationships, I didn’t want more pain of a type I could avoid.

He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me closer. There was still space between us, but it had just narrowed considerably. “Gracie Lee, you know that even a week ago I would have turned that down flat. But I’ve seen what your faith and your trust or intuition or whatever you want to call it, can actually do. And I’m willing to at least give it a deeper look.”

“So do you want to go to church with me Christmas Eve?” I always pushed this man’s limits. Why should now be any different?

“Not this time. I really do have to spend the evening at my mom’s on pain of death. How about the Sunday after Christmas?”

“You’ve got a deal.” I meant it whole-heartedly. I just didn’t expect him to seal our deal with a kiss. It was brief, the kind of first kiss I’d expect from somebody standing in a parking lot with people coming and going. But brief didn’t mean that it wasn’t also mighty fine. Playing back that kiss in my head had me grinning like a fool the rest of the day.

Christmas Eve services at Conejo Community Chapel fulfilled all my expectations. I hadn’t been here last year for this season and this year I was more than ready for Christmas to come. For a lot of reasons I avoided the kid-heavy services early in the evening, although watching six-year-olds go off like skyrockets from Christmas excitement did have its appeal. Tonight I wanted something a little more quiet and thoughtful.

For me the most meaningful service at Christmas is held late at night, with carols and candlelight, so that’s the one I chose. My memories of Granny Jo’s church in Missouri make me want peace at Christmas and maybe a dusting of snow. Actually, I’m fine without the snow as long as I get the peace.

Before setting out for church I’d talked to Ben. It must have been midnight in Memphis when he called, but it didn’t surprise me he was up and wanted to talk. We’d e-mailed and instant messaged back and forth more than once, but hadn’t really talked to each other since he left California. “So how’s the weather? Did you get a white Christmas?”

“Only if you count ice storms. It’s really cool to drive on if you’re in a parking lot, though. Dad’s SUV can do donuts like you wouldn’t believe.” There was a pause while Ben considered what he’d just told me. “We were all wearing our seat belts, though.”

Great. As if that was supposed to calm me down a whole bunch. Still, it was Christmas and I wasn’t going to nag at him. “So, how is the somebody Dad wanted you to meet?”

“Okay. I think she’s awful young for him. She might be thirty, maybe, but not any older. And I hate to tell you this, but he gave her a ring tonight at dinner.”

Oh, boy. Hal had gone through several semi-serious relationships since our divorce over fifteen years ago, but never remarried. “Wow. Sounds like big stuff.”

“But wait, there’s more.” Ben sounded like those awful pitchmen on late-night TV. “How would you feel about Dad moving to California?”

“Where in California?” It’s a big state. There might be room for both of us given enough distance.

“Hmm. Where would somebody live who was going to UC-Santa Barbara? I think that’s where Nicole said her school program is.”

“Santa Barbara?” I tried not to sound as ill as I suddenly felt. “That’s only forty miles north of here.” And housing prices there meant I could look forward to being in the same county with my ex-husband and his beautiful, young fiancée. I knew Hal well enough to know that not only would she be young, but she’d be beautiful as well. He wouldn’t have things any other way.

My first thoughts were unpleasant, but I held my tongue. Again, this was Christmas and I was talking to my son. For him this might be good news, having his parents close enough that visiting Dad didn’t mean a cross-country flight.

“So how’s Cai Li?” It felt like time to change the subject.

“Okay. Did you already go to church tonight?”