When I Found You Read Free Page B

clarity certainly wasn’t helping him now.
    “I’m not sure I know what you’re referring to, actually,” he said.
    “Well, the headline in the paper this morning, of course. I know you must have seen it. Everybody’s buzzing about it. Already I’ve gotten calls from my friend Elsie and my manicurist, and it’s barely nine A.M. It isn’t often something so momentous happens around here.”
    “I’m guessing,” Nathan said, “that the headline you’re referring to was about the abandoned newborn. So then, yes. It was me.”
    “Oh, Nathan. I just knew it.”
    A cold feeling gripped his stomach. “What else did the article say? I left the house this morning without benefit of coffee or the morning paper.”
    “Oh, I have it around here somewhere. What did I do with it?”
    She began to bustle. Or, at least, Nathan decided that bustling would be a good word to describe her actions. She wore a dark-navy shirtwaist dress, mid-calf length, with an attractive woven leather belt. As if she were going off to a front-office job in a good firm, rather than just opening the door for her bookkeeper. Her thick hair was pulled into a loose bun.
    He sat on the couch, wishing she had caught his hint about the coffee. And also wishing the tight feeling in his stomach would ease.
    “Did it say anything about custody? That is, did it indicate who would get custody? If the baby has family, I mean? That is, if his mother is never found.”
    She had bustled off into the kitchen, but now her head appeared from around the door jamb. “Oh, but she
was
found. I thought you knew. Now I know I grabbed it and took it to the phone with me when Elsie called. But I don’t see— Oh, here it is.”
    She hurried out into the living room again, extending a folded section of the morning paper in his direction. He accepted it, and dug into his suit coat pocket for his reading glasses. Noting that his hand trembled ever so slightly.
    He skimmed as quickly as he could, in search of the most relevant information. The part that would settle his stomach. Or not.
    The baby’s eighteen-year-old mother, a Miss Lenora Bates, had been located. That comprised the bulk of the article. She had attempted to cross a state line with her boyfriend, Richard A. Ford, presumably the child’s father, but had instead ended up in an emergency room, hemorrhaging. She and Ford had both been arrested, though not yet arraigned, and it was still under consideration, at the district attorney’s office, what charges should be brought. She might face charges of reckless endangerment, or reckless disregard for human life. Or she might even be charged with attempted infanticide, or conspiracy to commit infanticide.
    The article also said that the child, if and when he ever recovered enough to leave the hospital, would be given into the custodial care of his grandmother, Mrs. Ertha Bates, mother of the troubled girl.
    The news dropped into the waiting place in Nathan’s stomach and found … nothing.
    The sensation was similar to that of dropping a heavy object into a bottomless well, and then waiting for it to make a sound. The news made no sound. The feeling of aliveness that had opened in Nathan only twenty-four hours earlier, in front of the hospital coffee machine, closed. And that was all.
    It was almost a comfort to have his familiar blankness back.
    He glanced back down at the article.
    In conclusion it noted that the infant had been found in the woods by a man on a duck-hunting outing with his dog.
    Nathan folded up the paper, set it to rest on the end table near the couch, and sat a moment, digesting this new information.
    He thought about lighting a cigarette. An open box of them sat on the coffee table. But he’d gone to the trouble to quit them several years ago, and didn’t fancy going through all that again.
    He shook the urge away.
    Mrs. MacElroy spoke, startling him. “Why the woods? Why not a hospital or an orphanage?”
    “I can’t imagine,” Nathan