Undercover Babies Read online

  Or alive and kicking somewhere up ahead…

  “ANYTHING LOOK familiar?” Mac asked.

  Grace had been both expecting and dreading this question. As she peered out the car window and took in the sights of Miami, she had to admit nothing struck a familiar chord.

  Not the faded blue skies or miles of white, sandy beaches. Not the pastel buildings or hoards of people walking down the sidewalks. Not the skateboarders, the vagrants, the tropical shirts, the shoppers, the sidewalk diners. Not the smells of spicy food, the palm trees rustling in the slight breeze, the afternoon light slanting across the pavement.

  Nothing.

  But it felt right.

  Feelings weren’t enough, however. She was sick of feelings. She wanted clear-cut pictures, irrefutable proof. “No,” she said, striving to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon and they’d been driving without a break since leaving the mall. Mac’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but she was well aware of how often he checked the traffic behind. She was also aware of how often his gaze drifted to her, how often it lingered a heartbeat, and she wondered if it was because she looked so different or if it was something more.

  How could he have feelings for her that went further than mere physical attraction when she felt so invisible?

  She made herself look away.

  She didn’t want to, though. She wanted to stare at him. As they rolled closer to a possible conclusion, she was afraid she was about to lose him.

  She’d chosen a long skirt to hide the scabs on her knee, a long-sleeved blouse to cover the fading bruises on her arms. Mac looked sophisticated and sexy as all get-out in linen slacks and a bronze shirt. She’d chosen his clothes as he didn’t seem to know how to shop for anything other than blue jeans and gray suits.

  Mac drove directly to L’Hippocampe, finding it on a side street after admitting he’d memorized directions on the Internet while he waited for her. The shop was narrow, with gilded gold lettering on the door and an arrow directing patrons to a small parking lot in the rear.

  They got out of the car and walked around to the front, Grace gripping to her chest the small brown bag that held the beautiful bra on which she pinned all her hopes for an easy resolution to this nightmare.

  The air was warm and redolent with the aromas of the nearby sea. They could hear laughter and music in the distance.

  He had his hand on the door. She felt a tornado of apprehension rip through her body and put her hand over his. “Mac, wait. What if you’re right? What if no one in here knows me? Then it’s all over.”

  “No, it’s not all over,” Mac said.

  “What would we do next?”

  “If they don’t know you in here, we’ll find a place where we can watch our backs and wait for your old pal Elvis to show up,” he said.

  “Or wait in a dark alley for a limping, bleeding former kidnapper to wander across our path?”

  “Exactly,” he said, and surprised her by leaning down and brushing her lips with his. “Don’t put all your eggs in this one basket,” he murmured against her cheek. “It’s a long shot. It’s always been a long shot. Too many variables. Too many conjectures. We aren’t without a plan B.”

  “Plan B,” she repeated.

  He straightened up and grinned. He had such a nice grin. Even with the sunglasses, she could see the way it crinkled the skin at the corners of his eyes.

  “There’s always a plan B, baby,” he said softly. And with that, he opened the door.

  Stepping into L’Hippocampe was like stepping into a very ritzy lady’s boudoir, all done in gold and white, with draping fabrics reflected over and over again in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Grace found the place strangely comforting and wondered if she’d ever before walked through the front door.

  The carpet was deep and plush, the dainty French provincial furniture stained white with gold embellishments. There was no visual clue as to what the store actually sold.

  As the front door silently closed behind them, a wall of dark gold curtains in the back parted. A woman wearing a white suit and a discreet smile appeared. With her upswept colorless hair and multiple strands of oversized pearls circling her long neck, she looked dated, but as elegant and as ageless as the room. Both the woman and the boutique were jarring notes of antiquated civility, especially as they existed only a block from the wild, vibrant world of Miami Beach.

  “Good day, Mrs. Priestly,” the woman said. “How nice to see you.”

  Mrs. Priestly!

  A name, handed out casually, just like that.

  Mrs. Priestly…

  A sharp intake of breath from Mac, a stuttered, “You…you know me?” from Grace, whose knees sagged as Mac’s grip on her arm tightened.

  The woman came to a stop a few feet in front of her. “Of course I know you. You’re Katrina Priestly.” A gentle smile curved her lips as her voice softened. “How are you?”

  Her tone was oddly solicitous, but the comment itself was offered in such a restrained way that Grace didn’t know what to make of it. Struggling to keep her head on straight, she stammered, “I’m fine…I…”

  Words failed her. A blizzard began howling through her mind. She glanced up at Mac. He’d taken off his sunglasses and looked as shocked as she felt by this woman’s offhanded gift of her identity. He recovered quicker, however, and said, “Mrs. Priestly wasn’t sure you’d recall her. It’s been a while since she’s been here.”

  The saleswoman shook her head. “No, not so long. She was here a few weeks ago. Maybe three months. That’s all.”

  “Are you sure?” Mac persisted.

  “Please,” the woman said, gesturing to the two chairs fronting a desk. Mac guided Grace into one of the chairs and took the other as the saleswoman seated herself behind the desk. She opened a drawer and withdrew what appeared to be a large ledger.

  The woman opened the book and leafed through the pages until she uttered a soft exclamation of success and turned the book so they could see the entry.

  October 2: Mrs. Katrina Priestly, four 66-01, one 66-06, one dozen 66-26.

  “Is this some kind of code?” Mac asked.

  “It means Mrs. Priestly bought four of our neutral brassieres, one black and one dozen panties. It says here they were shipped on November 1.”

  Grace opened the paper bag and brought out the bra. After a cursory inspection, the saleswoman said, “It’s one of ours, though I can’t be certain if it’s from this order or the one before. May I ask what’s going on? Does this have anything to do with the…accident?”

  Mac started to speak, but Grace cut in. “The accident? What accident?”

  The saleswoman’s expression mutated from sympathetic to alarmed.

  “Mrs. Priestly is confused—” Mac said, his voice dropping as he apparently searched for a good explanation.

  The saleswoman provided it herself. “Oh, my. I didn’t realize you were aboard the plane, too.” She patted Grace’s hand and added, “Please let me say again how shocked we all were. Your husband seemed such a dashing young man. Is there anything we can do for you? Anything I can do?”

  Grace couldn’t have uttered a word if her life depended on it. A wave of nausea washed through her body. Her head felt like exploding. She heard Mac’s voice and made out a few words.

  “—so you can see that Mrs. Priestly is having a rough time right now. Would you please write down the last address you have for her?”

  “Of course,” the saleswoman said, producing a small card and copying information from a different book. Grace stared at the woman’s hand as she wrote, trying to concentrate. Her heart felt like it was up around her tonsils. She could barely breathe. She stood abruptly and almost fell over. Mac grabbed her arm and steadied her.

  The saleswoman’s gaze flickered between the two of them again. At last, she said, “I lost my own husband a year ago. I understand how…difficult…this must be for you. I’m terribly sorry.”

>   Flashes exploded in Grace’s head like muffled fireworks. She stared at Mac and the saleswoman without clearly hearing either one of them. Their mouths moved, their eyes cast her sympathetic glances. She had to do something, she had to faint or run away—do something, anything to escape the storm in her head.

  Darting frantic glances around the room, she saw her reflection here, there and everywhere, so many times, so many blond women, so many dazed blue eyes.

  One moment, she was standing there, and the next, she was on the sidewalk, the brilliant sun blinding her, leaning against the rough bark of a palm tree. Memories banged against each other. Nothing made sense.

  She felt two warm hands grip her shoulders. She turned to collapse against Mac.

  “Grace,” he whispered against her hair.

  She shook her head. Grace wasn’t right. Nothing was right.

  Next thing she knew, she was sitting in the car, Mac leaning over her, fastening her seat belt.

  She felt so odd. Lowering her head into her hands, she closed her eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Mac said, but she knew he was wrong.

  Nothing was okay.

  MAC SAT BEHIND the wheel for a few moments, unsure of his next move. Grace wouldn’t meet his gaze; in fact, her head remained buried in her hands and she was ominously still.

  Her husband had been dead a little more than two months. She must still be reeling with grief, he thought, a stab of jealousy hitting him square between the eyes. He’d expected to feel jealous of a living man, but of a dead one? How futile was that?

  He finally got out of the car and turned on his phone as he walked a distance away. It took a couple of calls to reach Aunt Beatrice’s doctor, George Handerly, the man Aunt Beatrice had introduced to Grace as her accountant, the doctor who had taken a blood sample from Grace and had it analyzed.

  The doctor spent the first few moments relating the results of Grace’s drug tests. He rattled off substances easily available on streets across the nation, from Miami to Billington. The drugs were so ordinary that knowing their names was of no help. There was no way of knowing if they’d been self-ad-ministered or forced upon her, but their presence did explain Grace’s initial confusion and overriding fatigue.

  But not her memory loss.

  The doctor said he’d examined Grace when he took the sample and that it had appeared to him that she had suffered a blunt trauma to the head sometime before. But not a terrible one, and he was perplexed why she had amnesia.

  Unless it was hysterical amnesia or caused by drugs they hadn’t tested for…

  Mac related Grace’s reaction to the saleswoman’s disclosures. He wanted to know if he should take Grace to a hospital. He also told the doctor that the saleswoman had provided a few additional facts about Grace after she left the store. If she didn’t recall them on her own, should he tell them to her?

  “Don’t barrage her with facts. And given how paranoid she seems to be of doctors, I’d skip the hospital for now. You said you know where she lives?”

  Mac glanced at the paper the woman inside the store had used to write down Grace’s last known address. “I think so,” he said.

  “Take her there,” the doctor said. “Maybe her husband or her family will be available to help her through this. Ideally, she has a doctor you can consult. Take her home.”

  “Her husband is dead,” Mac said.

  “Just take her home,” the doctor repeated.

  Mac clicked off his phone with a heavy heart.

  Grace’s husband had died in a single-engine plane crash almost two months before. The saleswoman wasn’t sure of every fact, just that Daniel Priestly had died way before Christmas.

  In other words, Grace’s memory of her husband leaning over her, threatening her with a needle, didn’t seem to have anything to do with her current plight. Maybe his sudden death explained what sent her off the deep end though.

  Was there a deep end?

  How could he know for sure? The drug angle was fuzzy. Grace ending up a thousand miles from home was suspicious. He still couldn’t swear Michael Wardman’s death was connected to Grace. Even the would-be Macon abduction might have been motivated by the simple desire to take Grace back to Florida—not to harm her but to return her.

  With a knife at her throat?

  But hadn’t Elvis told her someone or something called B.O. wanted her back home?

  As he slid back into the car, he looked over at her. She was staring straight ahead, hands folded in her lap. When he just sat there, she finally turned to face him. Whatever makeup she’d applied in the salon that morning had done an admirable job of holding up to her tears.

  “I’m remembering things,” she said, pain flashing in her eyes.

  “What kind of things…Katrina?”

  “Kate,” she said softly. “Call me Kate. Danny is dead. In a plane crash, before Thanksgiving.”

  He watched the tears stream down her cheeks and felt a new flash of jealousy. He wasn’t proud of it, it was just there.

  Her eyes suddenly grew wide. “My babies,” she cried, grabbing for her seat belt. Fumbling with the buckle, she added, “Mac, start the car. Now, please. I don’t have one child, I have two. Twins. Oh, my God. Where are they? Who’s looking after them? Please, Mac, hurry.”

  The memory of her children seemed to have come out of the blue, sudden and violent. Her distress was contagious. He knew Boward Key was south of Key Largo, and as he wound his way through traffic toward Highway 1, he couldn’t help but wonder what kind of situation he and Grace were about to encounter.

  “Hurry,” she pleaded, sitting forward and straining against her shoulder harness.

  Chapter Nine

  Images rolled through Kate’s head like the reels in a slot machine, the kind with three spools and three windows. So far, just the images of her children had coalesced. Danny’s face was a blur. She couldn’t seem to line up the three matching parts; they kept jangling to a stop a little off-kilter.

  On the other hand, every mile they traveled revealed more familiar scenery. Miami, the crowded streets, the sun and palms giving way to Florida Bay, gulls, tidal flats, mangrove trees—it all began to feel like home.

  “Why don’t you try talking about things as they pop into your mind?” Mac suggested. “Maybe if you kind of start at the beginning, I can get a handle on what’s happened to you before we get down there.”

  “All you have to do is find my babies,” she said with a steely coldness to her voice that surprised even her.

  “Tell me about them,” Mac said.

  She spared him an impatient glance. He was driving as quickly as he could; he was only trying to prepare himself. Clasping her hands together, she said, “Their names are Charlie and Harry and they look alike. Except to me, they don’t. They’re eighteen months old. They’re cute and clever and energetic and noisy and oh, I don’t know, what is it you want me to tell you? They’re my babies. They’re my reason for living.”

  “Calm down,” he said softly. “Tell me about their dad.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “For instance, where did you meet him?” Mac persisted.

  And in that instant, the tumblers aligned and Danny’s face appeared in her head. The memory of their first meeting came back with a clarity that momentarily startled her. They hadn’t been close when he died, but the moment when she first met him was fresh in her mind in a way it hadn’t been for a long time.

  And she knew she wouldn’t tell most of it to Mac.

  “Try,” he coaxed.

  She found other faces lurking in her mind now. “I have a brother named Tom,” she said.

  Mac had obviously expected details about her husband. He said, “Well, okay, that’s a start.”

  “Tom and my dad own a string of car washes in Oregon. I always thought that was funny because they say all it ever does is rain up there, so why do they need car washes?”

  He cracked a smile. “What about your mother?”

  “
They divorced when I was very little. I lived with Mom and her new husband in San Francisco, Tom was older. He wanted to go with Dad. I left home at eighteen.”

  “That’s young,” he said.

  “Well, my stepdad had a temper. After one particularly hairy fight, I just moved out.”

  What she’d done was run away after her stepfather got a little too friendly and her mother refused to believe it. And, truth be known, she’d been barely seventeen, not eighteen.

  “Where did you move to?” Mac asked.

  She shrugged. “Here and there.”

  “Are you purposely being vague?” Mac asked, sparing her a quick glance.

  “It’s still fuzzy,” she lied.

  She cast him an under-the-eyelash look and thought about explaining what it had been like after leaving home, damn near penniless with few skills on which to draw. She’d flitted here and there, she’d made some questionable liaisons, she’d gritted her teeth and taken care of herself.

  Mac would understand. He wouldn’t jump to erroneous conclusions about her like Danny had. He’d be sympathetic. He’d listen.

  Wouldn’t he?

  What if he doesn’t? a niggling voice squeaked. What if he decides you aren’t worth helping? How will you get your babies back? How can you risk that?

  She pressed her fingers against her temples as other memories began to float to the surface. They left her mouth dry.

  “What about Danny?” Mac said.

  For a second, she relived the moment she’d looked into Danny’s eyes and fallen in love. At least, that’s what she’d thought she’d fallen into.

  Mac said, “Where did you meet him?”

  “At work,” she said truthfully enough. “I was a…waitress. He came in and one thing led to another. We got married three weeks later.”

  Mac whistled.

  “I thought I’d found the love of my life,” she explained.

  “And what about him?”

  “Danny was looking for a way to rebel against his father. A few weeks later, I was pregnant. And sixteen months after the twins were born, Danny’s plane crashed.”