Justine glanced around her. It still seemed like she was hearing babies crying!
She saw it then. The straw laundry basket on the flat concrete porch, the tottery little head wavering just above the rim.
Running the last few steps to the porch, Justine knelt beside the basket. A loud gasp rushed past her lips. There wasn’t just one baby sitting on the fuzzy blue blanket, there were two! A girl in pink, with bright red hair, and a boy in blue, with slightly darker auburn hair. Their features were almost identical, right down to the green of their eyes.
Dear God, twins! Where had they come from?
Quickly she scanned the area back over her shoulder. There were no strange vehicles parked nearby, no one to be seen. Did her sisters or aunt not know the babies were out here?
She looked back down at the twins, her face still mirroring the shock of finding them. “Where did you two come from?”
Distracted by Justine’s voice, the babies suddenly stopped their fussing and stared, wide-eyed, at her. After a moment, the boy stuck out his lower lip and the girl began waving her arms in the air.
“Yeah, I know,” Justine said. “You can’t talk yet. You’re not old enough.”
Quickly she picked up the basket of babies and carried it into the house. “Aunt Kitty! Rose! Chloe! Is anyone home?”
No one answered as Justine carried the heavy load into the kitchen and placed it carefully on the long Formica table.
With one hand still on the basket, Justine glanced at the refrigerator door, where notes were usually left, beneath an array of colorful magnets. A tiny square of paper dangled beneath a banana.
Charlie and I have gone to the grocery store in Ruidoso. Be back before dark. Love, Aunt Kitty
Justine groaned. It was nearly two hours before dark. That meant it would probably be at least an hour before her son and aunt returned home. As for her sisters, she doubted either of them would show up any sooner. Since their father’s death six weeks ago, which had left them in dire financial straits, both Rose and Chloe had taken to doing the work of the wranglers they’d been forced to let go.
“Well,” Justine said to the twins. “Looks like it’s just you and me, kids. What are we gonna do?”
Now that the two had an audience, the twins didn’t seem too perturbed at being confined to a laundry basket. Thankful for small favors, Justine thrust her hands through her thick red hair and tried to calm her racing mind.
Of course, she’d heard of babies being left on doorsteps in books or movies. But that was fiction. That didn’t happen in Hondo, New Mexico. And certainly not to Justine Murdock.
What should she do now? What did a person do when she found deserted babies on her porch? she wondered wildly. And they were obviously deserted. No one was knocking at the door or calling on the telephone to claim them.
A thought suddenly struck her, and she quickly made a search around and under the babies for a note, or any sort of clue. The only things she found were two bottles and two pacifiers, wrapped in several disposable diapers. The bottles were filled, and the formula was still cool, as though the bottles had only been taken out of the refrigerator a short time ago.
Her nursing instincts kicking in, Justine picked up the boy, gave him a quick inspection, then did the same with the girl.
They were both plump, the boy a little more so than the girl. Their skin was clear and pink, their eyes were bright. Both babies appeared to be perfectly normal and healthy.
Satisfied with her examinations, Justine set the twins facing each other in the basket, then stepped back and studied them thoughtfully. From what she could remember from her own son, and from the babies she saw in the medical clinic, she would guess the twins to be somewhere around five months old. Neither one had any teeth, yet they could both sit up without any props.
Try as she might, Justine couldn’t remember any of their friends or neighbors in the area having twins in the past six months. Nor could she remember twins of this age visiting the clinic at any time. Did that mean they weren’t from around here? If so, why would anyone bring them to the Bar M?
Maybe her aunt or sisters would have some idea, but Justine doubted it. She figured the three women were going to be just as flabbergasted to find the twins here as she’d been.
You know you’re going to have to call the sheriff, a voice said inside her head. Whoever had left the babies had committed a crime. Technically, the law needed to be advised and an investigation started. But calling the sheriff was the last thing on earth that Justine wanted to do.
Her legs suddenly wobbly, Justine pulled out a chair from the table and sat down. The babies stared at her, gooed and banged their little fists against the sides of the basket.
Justine smiled at their sweet round faces, while inside her stomach churned sickly. More than five years had passed since she saw or talked to Roy Pardee, the sheriff of Lincoln County. And during the year and a half that she’d been back home in Hondo, she’d carefully avoided any contact with the man. He was a part of her past that she wanted to keep in the past.
But now she had two strange babies on her hands, and he needed to know about them before the trail from where they came from turned cold. Dear God, could she face him again? Could she look at him and pretend that nothing had ever happened between them?
The questions made her hands tremble, but when she looked at the two helpless children, her jaw set with determination. She wasn’t an innocent twenty-year-old anymore. She was a mother, a nurse, a strong, grown woman. Someone had dumped two precious humans, and they deserved her help. Roy Pardee be damned!
Before she could lose her courage, Justine went over to the wall phone, located at the end of a row of cabinets, and punched the number listed for the Lincoln County sheriff.
A female dispatcher answered on the first ring, and Justine quickly gave the woman her name and address and went on to explain the problem.
“If you’ll hold a moment, Ms. Murdock, I’ll see how quickly someone can get out there,” she told Justine, then went off the line. Seconds later, she returned. “Sheriff Pardee will be right there, Ms. Murdock.”
In spite of all her earlier bravado, Justine felt as if the wind had been knocked from her. “Oh, it isn’t necessary to send him. Any deputy will do.”
The dispatcher must have considered Justine’s suggestion strange. She paused for long seconds, then said, “In a case like this, Sheriff Pardee would rather see things first-hand.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Justine said, glad the woman couldn’t see her red face. “Then I’ll be here waiting for him.”
The woman thanked her, then hung up. Justine placed the receiver back on its cradle, then groaned loudly. “I’ll be waiting for him,” she repeated with a snort, then turned and looked at the twins. “What am I saying? I won’t be waiting for him. I’ll simply be here—ready to talk to…whoever shows up. But I won’t wait on Roy Pardee. Not even for you,” she added to the babies.
As soon as the words were out, the girl began to cry. Justine quickly went over and lifted the baby into her arms.
“It’s all right, honey girl,” she said in a soothing voice. “Not all men are like Roy Pardee. Besides, when you grow up, you’ll be a lot smarter than I was. You’ve got an intelligent little face. I can already tell you’ll know to steer clear of men who walk with a swagger and wear a badge in place of a heart.”
The trip from Carrizozo, where the sheriff’s department was located, to the Bar M was a bit over forty miles. She figured she had thirty minutes or more before Roy arrived. She used part of the time to make a quilt pallet on the living room floor for the babies.
While the twins rolled and stretched on their new bed, Justine peered out the windows, toward the corrals and barns, in hopes of catching a glimpse of Chloe or Rose. If there had ever been a time she needed