half as startled as he was as he stepped around the easel and saw what she’d been working on. He’d expected something like the idyllic summer scene he’d seen in the gallery downstairs. The two paintings were so different no one would have believed they were done by the same artist.
He stared at the disturbing scene on the canvas, feeling ice-cold inside. He didn’t need to ask what the painting depicted. It could have been the birth of Satan, it was so foreboding and sinister. Three horrible creatures with misshapen grotesque faces and dark gowns huddled at the end of a bed waiting expectantly for the birth.
While he couldn’t see the patient’s face in the painting, he could feel her pain and confusion—and fear in the angle of her body, the disarray of her wild dark curly hair and the grasping fingers of the one hand reaching toward the ghouls at the end of the bed, toward her baby.
The painting was powerful and compelling, and seized at something deep inside him. Sweet heaven.
“We need to talk,” he said, even more convinced of that after seeing what she’d been painting.
She nodded and washed her paintbrush, the liquid in the jar turning dark and murky as she worked. He watched her methodically put the brush away, wipe her hands on the smock, then take it off.
“Why did you wait so long to start looking for your baby?” he asked.
She looked up, her eyes the same color as the Montana winter sky behind her. “Mr. Rawlins—”
“Slade.”
“Slade.” She seemed to savor his name in her mouth for a moment as if she’d tasted it before, then, frowning, continued as she led him into the living room. “I believed that my baby had been stillborn. I had no reason not to.” She waited for him to sit, then perched on the edge of a chair, her hands in her lap. “I woke in a hospital. The nurse told me. I thought at first that my belief that the stillborn wasn’t my baby was nothing more than denial. It wasn’t until I started having these memories—if that’s really what they are—” She shook her head. “Before that, I just assumed my sister-in-law was right. That my grief over losing the baby was causing my…confusion about the birth.”
Sister-in-law? “You’re married?” he asked, unable to hide his surprise—or dismay.
She shook her head. “Widowed. My husband died a year ago.” She looked away. “Are you going to take my case, Mr. Rawlins?”
He didn’t correct her. He was still mulling over the fact that she’d had a husband. And the man had died a year ago. Just before Slade had met her? He felt as if she’d sucker punched him. “There are a few things I need to know.” That was putting it mildly.
“I will tell you everything I can.”
An odd answer, he thought, all things considered. “I’ll need you to agree to an examination by a doctor.”
“To prove that I recently delivered a baby.”
He nodded.
She didn’t seem offended. “What else?”
“I’ll need the name of your doctor during your pregnancy, and I’ll want to talk to the doctor at the hospital who allegedly delivered your baby.”
“I didn’t have a doctor during my pregnancy. I was seeing a midwife.”
He lifted a brow at her. She didn’t seem like the midwife type. “Was that your idea?”
She flushed. “Actually, my sister-in-law suggested her. The woman is highly regarded as one of the top midwives in the country. Her name is Maria Perez. She just happened to have bought a place near here and was on a sabbatical. I was very lucky to get her.”
He stared at her. Something in the way she said it caught his attention. It almost sounded rehearsed. And too convenient. “You have her number then?”
Holly came up with the number from memory. He wasn’t sure why that surprised him either.
“Something else. Why did you drive fifty miles over a mountain pass in a blizzard on Christmas Eve to hire a private investigator?”
“I went to Dry Creek to the last-minute-shoppers art festival at the fairgrounds to look for promising new artists for my gallery. I go every year.”
Again, the lines sounded rehearsed. Or as if they weren’t her own. Was the art festival where she’d been last year before she’d come stumbling out of the snow and into his headlights?
“Although, this year I almost didn’t go,” she added with a frown, a clear afterthought.
“So why did you?”
She shook her head. “My sister-in-law thought it would be the best thing for me.”
He wondered about this sister-in-law who knew so much. “And do you hire a private investigator every year?” he asked, the sarcasm wasted on her.
“Of course not. I never intended to hire anyone. I was driving by and I saw your sign through the snow and—” She looked up at him and shook her head. “I don’t know why I came to you. I just had this sudden need to know the truth and there you were.”
“No matter what that truth is?” he had to ask.
“No matter what you discover,” she said, but he heard a slight hesitation in her words. She sounded scared and unsure. He couldn’t blame her. He felt the same way.
He went for the big one. “What about the father of your baby?”
“I don’t see what that has to do—”
“If your baby really was stolen, the father of the baby seems the prime suspect.”
It was clear she’d already thought of this. She nodded. “I…” She licked her lips and swallowed. “I don’t…”
“You don’t know who the father of your baby is?”
“I know what you must be thinking.”
He doubted that. “Surely, you have some idea or can at least narrow it down.”
“Are you familiar with alcoholic blackouts?”
He stared at her. “You’re an alcoholic?” The only thing he’d ever seen her drink was cola.
“Let’s just say I don’t remember getting pregnant and leave it at that for now.”
He studied her for a long moment. Was it possible he knew more about the conception of their baby than she did? “When can you see a doctor?”
Relief washed over her features at his change of subject. “The sooner the better,” she said.
“No problem. I think I can get you an appointment this afternoon.” Dr. Fred Delaney had delivered both Slade and Shelley and had been a friend of the family for years. He would make time for this, Slade knew. Dr. Delaney was also on his list of people to talk to about his mother. “Is that too soon?”
“No.” She rose as he got to his feet.
He considered telling her about the two of them. That after doing the math, he figured the baby had to be his. But first he had to know if there really had been a baby.
He started to leave and stopped. “Last night, when you came to see me at my office…”
“Christmas Eve,” she said, then waited for him to go on.
“There was a Santa bell-ringer in front of my building. Maybe you saw him?”
She shook her head, frowning as if wondering what that had to do with anything.
“I think he had my office staked out. I saw him on a cell phone as you were leaving. I think he’d been waiting for you.” He saw her pale, her hand trembling as she grasped the back of the chair he’d been sitting in for support.
“Then