She managed, if not quite a smile, at least a friendly expression. “Hello, I’m Milla Edge. We spoke on the phone last night. This is James Diaz.”
“I’m Lee Winborn, and this is my wife, Rhonda,” Lee said, automatically reaching out to shake her hand, then Diaz’s. Lee’s hands were strong and slightly rough; he liked playing golf, fishing, occasionally hunting. He had coached Justin—Zack’s—T-ball team, and helped coach his PeeWee football team. He was forty-four, eleven years older than Milla, a vital man with a few sun wrinkles at the corners of his blue eyes and no visible gray in his dark blond hair.
Rhonda was average height, her pale blond hair cut in a chic style, her makeup tasteful. She was slim, dressed in tailored trousers and a pretty French blue sweater that reflected color into her gray eyes. With their coloring, Milla thought, no one would suspect Justin wasn’t their natural son unless they told. Zack. She had to remember his name was now Zack.
“Come in,” Lee said, his voice nervous. He and his wife stepped back, and he gestured Milla and Diaz inside. Rhonda reached out and took his hand, lacing her fingers with his as if she needed his strength.
They went into the living room, which had the comfortable, lived-in feeling that meant they actually used it. There was a cozy fire going in the gas-log fireplace. There were shelves that held a number of books, children’s mixed in with adult fiction, as well as the small mementos a family collected over the years: a starfish, a signed baseball in a Plexiglas box, photos and boxes and—
Photos. Milla looked around, and held a moan inside. Pictures of Justin as a fat baby, with one tiny white tooth gleaming as he laughed, his blond hair sticking straight up like a dandelion. She saw his chubby little feet, the fat dimpled hands, the rosy cheeks. There was one of him crawling, wearing nothing but a diaper. Another of him as an adorable toddler, holding a plastic baseball bat like a club; at the beach, with his little shovel and pail, wearing a small red baseball cap. A birthday party. What had to be his first day of school, beaming proudly as he clutched his little backpack. Missing his two front teeth, and wearing such a wide, mischievous grin that she almost whimpered. Her baby, and she had missed all of this. There he was in his T-ball uniform, looking fierce now as he held his bat the way he’d seen the big boys do. Another picture showed him in his football uniform, with his helmet threatening to completely obscure his face. He was so little, and so vital, so happy.
There were his school pictures, and other studio photographs that were more posed. Another was of him at perhaps one year, clutching a teddy bear that showed signs of severe wear. Sitting on a little John Deere tractor, gripping the steering wheel hard and pretending he was driving. She could just hear him making motor sounds.
“That’s Zack,” Rhonda said nervously, noticing how Milla was staring at all the photographs. “I know we went overboard taking pictures of him, but—” She broke off and bit her lip.
“Please, let’s sit down,” Lee said, indicating Milla and Diaz should take the two occasional chairs, while he and Rhonda sat side by side on the couch. “Tell us what this is all about. I don’t mind telling you neither of us slept a wink last night, worrying that something has gone wrong. We can’t think what, but—well, we’re worried.”
Milla set the briefcase down by her feet and took a deep breath, clasping her hands together. She had tried practicing what she would say, but the words never seemed right, so she fell back on the story she had told so many times, to so many audiences. But this time, she had an ending to the story.
“My ex-husband is a surgeon,” she said, “a real Doogie Howser.” She managed a tiny smile, thinking of David. “Eleven years ago, he and some other doctors took a sabbatical to work at a small rural clinic in Mexico. I had just learned I was pregnant when we went, but the team included an obstetrician I trusted, so we kept to our original plan and our son, Justin, was born in Mexico. I was at the village market one day when he was six weeks old, and two men grabbed him from me and ran. I had been stabbed in the back and nearly bled to death; by the time I recovered, there was no trace of our baby.”
Rhonda reached out and grabbed Lee’s hand again. “That’s awful,” she said, looking sick. Perhaps she was identifying with Milla as a mother, or perhaps she had a premonition.
“I looked for him anyway. I couldn’t give up, when I didn’t know what had happened to him. So many stolen babies are smuggled out of Mexico in car trunks, in the heat of the day, and a lot of them die. I couldn’t stop looking until I knew for certain what happened to Justin, if he died, if . . .” She stopped and swallowed.
“My husband and I divorced a year after Justin was stolen. A lot of marriages break up after a child dies or is lost. The divorce was mostly my fault—no, all my fault, because I wasn’t interested in being David’s wife. I was too busy searching for Justin. Along the way I founded an organization of mostly volunteers, all over the country, who mobilize to help search whenever someone gets lost, or drive the highways during an Amber Alert. We look for runaways that the police don’t have the money or the manpower to devote to the case. We—” She was going into her regular speech, she realized. She took another deep breath.
“Enough about that. The short of it is, all of this time I kept looking for Justin, for clues to who had taken him, what had happened to him. Just recently, with Mr. Diaz’s help, the smuggling ring was broken and we found paperwork that allowed us to trace the stolen children.”