Baby Be Mine Read Free

committed by some unknown perpetrator? Was she disturbed enough to become convinced of her own falsehoods? Or did she know what she had done?
    Is it possible that she beat the plowshares of fantasy into the sword of truth as mile after mile passed beneath her wheels? Or did she instead spend the time plotting and planning her actions to ensure each move was designed to help her get away with murder and retain her stolen prize? Was she self-deluded or was she self-aware?
    Whatever she believed, that stark afternoon, at 5:15, she called her husband from the parking lot of Long John Silver’s on Southwest Sixth Avenue. She told him that she’d gone to Topeka to do some shopping. Much to her surprise, she said, she went into labor right in the middle of running her errands. She said she’d rushed to the Birth & Women’s Center where their beautiful daughter was born.
    The man had believed his wife when she told him she was pregnant. He believed her now. He thought he was the father of a newborn baby girl. In his first marriage he’d had three boys. This baby was his first daughter. He was ecstatic. Excitement rippled through his voice as he called to his wife’s children from a previous marriage. Only two of the four were at home at the time—a ninth-grader and a senior in high school. He related the good news from their mother. All three of them piled into his pickup and headed north.
    The woman sat in her car awaiting her family’s arrival at Long John Silver’s and picked up her cell phone. She jabbed in the number of the minister at the church whereshe and her husband were married. Was it a sign of remorse or regret? No, it was merely another step in the perpetuation of the big lie. It was as if the more people shared in her fantasy of the birth of the baby, the more she believed it herself.
    She told the preacher about the labor pains that took her by surprise and that as soon as her husband got to Topeka, she and the baby would be heading home. And said she would bring her new daughter by soon.
    Grinning from ear to ear, her husband pulled into the parking lot. He and his two passengers clambered out of the truck. He rushed to his wife’s side and helped her and the baby settle into the cab of the pickup and then climbed in beside them. Love beamed from his eyes. Love for his daughter. Love for his wife. The two older kids hopped into their mother’s car and the high school senior drove, following her father’s truck down Highway 75 and State Route 31 to their home in Melvern, Kansas.
    This late in December, the sun set by 5 P.M. The mini-caravan drove in darkness down the highway. Traveling south from Topeka, there was no need to pass through the town center of Melvern where Garry’s Bar & Grill was the solitary lively venue on Main Street. They approached South Adams Road from the opposite direction.
    In the night unlit by streetlights, barren trees stretched eerie branches to the sky in the glare of the headlights. In the pickup truck, the woman clutched the false proof of her fertility to her chest.
    At home, the senior used her cell phone to capture images of her mother and the baby she believed was her half-sister. The husband used an RCA camcorder to record the homecoming on videotape and a digital camera preserved the moment in a computer-ready format.
    When the initial excitement died down, the woman prepared a makeshift bed for the infant and settled her in for the night. The woman then sat down at her computer and emailed the youngest of her three daughters, who now livedwith a family friend in Alabama because of the irreconcilable differences she had with her mother. To the email announcing the birth, the counterfeit new mother attached a photo of her new baby, Abigail.

3
    A few blocks away from the crime scene in Skidmore, Reverend Harold Hamon, the minister at Skidmore Christian Church, sat at his kitchen table addressing Christmas cards. The day his