Page 10 of The Guests on South Battery
I nearly wept with joy as I opened the bag and smelled the lovely aroma of handmade doughnuts and all that wonderful sugar. He started to speak, but I held up my hand and then took a sip of coffee before pulling out a purple doughnut. We both waited in reverent silence for a moment while I took my first bite.
“Thank you. That is simply amazing,” I finally managed to say after thoroughly savoring the fluffy pastry, followed by the strangest urge to smoke a cigarette. I met his eyes. “The maple bacon doughnut is yours,” I said. “But you’re going to have to fight me for the second purple goat.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I need all my fingers for my job, so you just take whatever you want.”
I took another bite, then settled back into my chair, cradling my coffee and feeling absurdly content.
“You look beautiful,” he said. “Motherhood definitely agrees with you.”
Coming from any other man besides my husband, I might have felt uncomfortable. Even though I knew Thomas had been interested in me before Jack staked his claim, our relationship was now firmly in the friend zone. He’d even attended our wedding, and I’d promised—with Jack’s blessing—to use my sixth sense to help him with any of his cold cases. He’d called a few times in the past year, but I’d been reluctant to disturb the domestic peace I’d fought so hard for, telling him I just wasn’t ready. I wondered if this favor from him meant I’d have to reciprocate whether I was ready to or not.
My cheeks flushed. “Thank you. I feel good now that the twins are sleeping through the night and I can get a full night’s sleep. I just wish all my clothes hadn’t shrunk—I’m a little tired of wearing my maternity clothes.”
He choked on his bite of doughnut and I slid a glass of water in his direction. After waiting a full minute before speaking, he said, “I have that information you asked me for about Jayne Smith. I must admit that when you first told me her name I thought it must be some kind of alias, but that seems to be her real name—although she added the Y in her early twenties. There is no birth certificate on file owing to the fact that she was deposited on the steps of a church in Birmingham and turned over to foster care shortly afterward. The creative minds in the child welfare system must have given her the name.”
He grimaced and I felt like crying. It seemed the motherhood hormones that had started in the first month of pregnancy liked to linger much longer than nine months. I supposed they were responsible for my desire now to cry during Humane Society commercials or after seeing Facebook posts showing baby animals that Nola liked to show me. I thought of the woman I’d met in my office and couldn’t reconcilewhat I knew about her with the heartbreaking image of a baby being left on church steps.
“That’s so sad. So she has no idea who her parents are?” I took a large bite of the purple goat doughnut, hoping it would push down the lump in my throat. My mother had left me when I was six, and I’d been raised by an alcoholic father. For my entire childhood, I’d felt abandoned, but at least I’d known who my people were, had known the house on Legare where generations of my mother’s family had lived. And I’d always had my grandmother, who’d loved me unconditionally. It seemed unfathomable to have no history, no prologue to the story of your life.
“No. I did a little digging into Button Pinckney, too, since it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that she might have had a baby and secretly gave it up. Lucky for us, Ms. Pinckney was very active in various social clubs, so her photo appears in the society pages pretty much every month during the year Jayne was born—apparently not pregnant and with no gaps in time. In addition, she was her sister-in-law’s companion after her niece’s long illness and death, and, according to everyone who knew Button, never left her side.”
“So she’s just a generous philanthropist who decided to give her entire estate to a deserving orphan.”
“Apparently. And Jayne certainly fits that description, considering how she started out. It’s really incredible that she turned out as well as she did. She was a straight-A student, never got into trouble, and although she had a succession of foster parents, they all had good things to say about her.”
“But she was never adopted.”
Thomas shook his head. “Sadly, no. She came close several times, but it always fell through.”
“Does the paperwork mention why?” I took a long drink of my coffee, unable to forget the image of a small baby abandoned on the steps of a church. I wanted to think that it was because I was a mother now, with my own small babies who needed me. But there was something else, too. Something I couldn’t identify.
His eyes met mine. “This is where it really gets interesting. Every single one of the foster families said practically the same thing: that she was a wonderful child but in the end wasn’t adoptable because”—he paused and opened a manila folder on the corner of the table to riffle through several pages before pulling one to the top—“things always seemed to happen around her. Little ‘disturbances.’” Thomas made little quote marks with his fingers. He looked down at the page and continued reading. “She was never named as the exact cause, but all events seemed to occur when she was in the vicinity, making her guilty by association.”
I sat back in my seat. “That’s odd.”
“Yep. And there’s one more thing I think you might find interesting.” He paused, drumming his fingers on top of the folder as if trying to decide how much he should say.
“Tell me everything,” I said. “If she’ll be watching my children, I need to know all of it.”
“True.” He took a deep breath. “She’s afraid of the dark. Has to have all the lights on when she sleeps.”
“Many children are. She didn’t outgrow it?”
After a brief pause, he said, “Apparently not. I got the references from her last two employers sent over, and it’s mentioned in both reports. Which are all glowing, by the way. The first called her ‘Mary Poppins’ and considered having another baby just to keep her with their family now that their other children are too old for a nanny.”
I perked up. “Which is the important part—that she’s a good nanny. I’m okay with her keeping the lights on in her room all night. That’s pretty minor, really.” I took a long sip of my coffee, thinking. “Anything more specific about those ‘disturbances’?”
“No, but from everything I read, I’ve gathered that it was regular occurrences of breakages—lamps, dishes, that kind of thing.”
“So she’s a little clumsy,” I said, feeling relieved. “As long as she’s never dropped a child, of course.”
“Nope, nothing like that. As I said, her former employers can’t say enough good things about her. Heck, just reading these reports makesmewant to have children just so I can hire her.”
He reached for his wallet to place a generous tip on the table before standing and pulling my chair back for me. “How’s the real estate business these days?”
“Hopping, I’m happy to say,” I said as he helped me into my coat. “Made it easy to step back into my job.”
“So no time to help with any cold cases, huh?”
