The Homecoming Read online

  Ten

  Nick chattered all the way home about the fish. Sydney was grateful that all she had to do was mutter the occasional “Oh, yeah?” and he kept right on going. Tears ran down her face behind the large dark sunglasses she’d donned.

  What was she going to do? She’d been trying to steel herself for this eventuality since the day she’d begun to suspect that Nick might be a kidnapped child. But knowing she had someone else’s son and being confronted with the reality were two very different things.

  Could she really give up her child?

  How could she not? He wasn’t hers. He was Danny’s. He’d been stolen from Danny, and the kidnapping had had tragic results for Danny and his wife. Nick was all that Danny had left. How could she not return him?

  She should have tried harder to find out exactly where Nick had come from. She’d suspected from early on that he wasn’t Margo’s. Why hadn’t she gone to the authorities? Why had she waited after she learned Margo was dead?

  Because she’d already become so attached to the grinning, blue-eyed toddler that she couldn’t bear to lose him. She’d been very afraid that he would be returned to someone who didn’t deserve him. Someone who wouldn’t ensure that his heart condition received the very best repair available, someone who wouldn’t cuddle him and sing to him at bedtime or delight in his growing vocabulary and budding intellect. She’d had bad dreams about crack addicts, drug dealers, prostitutes. The reality couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  At the house, she managed to pull herself together. She made dinner and got Nick bathed and in bed.

  And then she forced herself to pick up the telephone and call her parents. It wasn’t fair to Danny to delay telling Nick about his life. And she had to tell her family before that.

  Her mother cried. Her father blustered.

  “But surely you can fight this in court! They can’t just take your child away from you—”

  “He’s not my child, Daddy,” she said patiently, although uttering the words aloud nearly broke her tenuous grip on her self-control. “This poor man has spent four years believing his son was dead. His wife killed herself because she couldn’t face living without him. How could I possibly deny him a chance at happiness again?”

  There was a tense silence on the other end of the line. Then her father spoke again. “Ah, Sydney Leigh. My thoughtful, caring girl. You always did have a heart bigger than all the rest of us put together. You’re right.”

  “Yes,” her mother said. “It may break our hearts, but it’s the right thing to do.” Her voice broke, but she quickly controlled it. “Honey, would you like us to tell Stu and Shelly?”

  “Oh, Mom, would you?” Sydney wasn’t even going to pretend not to accept; she started to cry again. “I’m not sure I can repeat this again and again. I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Of course,” her mother said. “We’ll do anything we can to make this easier for you. Do you want us to come down?”

  She thought about it. Her parents loved Nick and not spending these last days with him would be difficult for them. But Danny and Nick needed time to get to know each other. That would be difficult with other people around. “Not right now,” she said cautiously. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have more details. I may need you a little later.”

  But as Sydney hung up the phone, she knew there wasn’t going to be any way to make any aspect of the situation more bearable. Crying on her mother’s shoulder wasn’t going to make this hurt fade.

  She’d barely set down the handset when the phone rang again. Checking the caller ID, she saw an unfamiliar number, but no name listed with it. She clicked on the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Sydney. It’s Danny.” He sounded nervous and uncertain. “I was wondering if you and Nick would like to go to the zoo tomorrow. I thought it might be a good way for him to get more comfortable around me.”

  She nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her. “Sure. That’s a good idea. Where shall we meet you?”

  “How about I pick you up?”

  “Okay. Do you have a pencil? I can give you directions.”

  There was a pause. “I already know where you live.”

  Oh. Right. Sometimes she actually forgot that the man had so much money he was practically green. He probably had had her investigated in detail the moment he left the doctor’s office today. “All right, then,” she said quietly. “We’ll see you tomorrow. Around nine?”

  “Fine. And Sydney?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to rush Nick into anything. The last thing he needs is more upheaval in his life.”

  But you’re going to take him away from the only mother he remembers! How can that not “upheave” his life? Drawing a deep breath, she suppressed the visceral response. “Thank you. We’ll be waiting.”

  When she told Nick the next morning that they were going to the zoo that day, he was ecstatic. The doorbell rang promptly at nine and he raced to answer it. But as the door swung open, Nick stopped dancing around and simply stared.

  On their porch stoop was a giant skunk. At least five feet tall, it was suspended in the air by a pair of muscular male arms wrapped around its furry body.

  “Wow!” Nick wasn’t speechless for long. “Izzat for me?”

  “Nicholas!” Sydney gave him a stern stare. “Where are your manners?”

  “Sorry, Mommy.” He stepped back. “You can come in.”

  Sydney snorted, shaking her head.

  Danny set the skunk down and straightened, smiling tentatively. “Good morning.”

  “Hello,” she said. “That’s, um, interesting.”

  “Isn’t it?” He looked down at Nick. “So who do you think this skunk is for?”

  Nick glanced at his mother, not about to commit another courtesy error. “I don’t know. For Mommy?”

  Danny raised an eyebrow. “Do you think she’d like it?”

  A crafty gleam lit the little boy’s eyes. “Mommies like flowers and candy,” he said hopefully.

  Danny laughed. “They do, don’t they? Well, then, I guess you’ll just have to take this skunk.”

  “Yay!” Nick leaped forward and pounced on the skunk. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  “Mr. Crosby,” Sydney prompted.

  “Thank you, Mr. Crosby,” Nick parroted.

  Sydney said, “Why don’t we put that in your room until we get back from the zoo?”

  But as she reached for the enormous toy, Nick grabbed it by its striped tail and began to haul it down the hallway. “I can do it myself.”

  “Okay.” Sydney shrugged and spread her hands, smiling at Danny. “He can do everything himself these days, if you listen to him tell it.”

  Danny smiled again, but she caught the wistful quality. “He’s so grown up.”

  “He starts kindergarten in the fall,” she said, picking up the caps she’d gotten out for Nick and herself, the water bottles and the backpack in which she’d packed a picnic lunch.

  “This is going to take some adjustment,” he confessed. “In my head, he’s stuck at one year old. It’s hard to process that this is the same little guy whose belly I used to tickle.”

  “Not if you touch his belly now,” she offered, trying not to let herself think about the past. “He’s horrifically ticklish right there.”

  Nick came clattering back toward them again, halting further conversation. “Let’s go to the zoo!”

  Nick sang along with Veggie Tales the whole way to the zoo. She supposed that was a good thing, since neither she nor Danny appeared to have much to say. She’d shown him how to buckle Nick’s car seat into the rental car he was driving, and again he looked rueful. “I’ve got a lot to learn.”

  The Oregon Zoo was only ten minutes from downtown Portland. It had been renovated just a few years earlier and Nick had several favorite exhibits.

  “Dollars to dimes says he’ll go for the penguins,” she said as they entered
the main gate.

  The Peruvian penguins fascinated Nick for some reason. He could stand for hours watching them waddle around awkwardly on land, only to dive into the water and swim like wild black bullets. As she’d predicted, they were soon standing watching the penguins. There was a bench a few feet away. “We can sit over there,” she said to Danny. “I guarantee our feet will be a lot happier at the end of the day if we grab every chance we can find to sit down.”

  “Not like five-year-old feet?” he asked, smiling as he watched his son.

  “Most definitely not.” She settled herself on the bench and shucked off the backpack. After a moment’s hesitation, she decided she might as well tackle one of the issues that was worrying her most. “Have you thought about his name?” she asked Danny, carefully not looking at him. “If you want to call him Noah again, we’ll have to get him used to it.”

  “I did think about that last night,” he admitted. “Along with about a hundred million other things.” His voice was low. “Noah was Felicia’s choice. I’m not particularly attached to it. And I’m afraid that changing his name would be difficult for him. Changing his last name will be enough of an adjustment.”

  “True.” She fought to keep her voice steady. “When are you planning on taking him?”

  There was a taut silence. She watched her son avidly taking in the penguins’ antics, trying to blank out the thought of Nick leaving.

  “Sydney.” Danny’s hand came down over hers in her lap and she realized she’d made nail-shaped crescents on the back of her left hand. “I’m in no hurry to whisk him away. He needs time to get used to this change. So do we.”

  She nodded, blinking fiercely behind the sunglasses she’d donned. “We need to tell him soon.”

  Danny nodded. “I called a child psychologist yesterday and made an appointment to talk to her about how to handle that. Would you like to go with me?”

  She finally looked at him, touched by the thoughtfulness behind the action. “What a good idea. I would love to.”

  “It’s tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

  She made a face. “I have to go back to work tomorrow. But under the circumstances, I’m pretty sure my boss will let me take the time off.”

  “How did your family take it?”

  She heaved a sigh. “About like you’d expect. Badly.”

  Danny winced. “God, I wish—”

  “So do I,” she interrupted. “But this is just the way it happened.” She sighed. “I spent a lot of time last night wishing I had tried harder to find out who he really was four years ago.”

  Danny squeezed her hands again with his much larger one. “I’m sure you never could have imagined anything as crazy as this. Let’s stop looking back and just look forward.”

  “All right.” But she wasn’t sure why. All she had to look forward to was an empty house.

  “Who keeps Nick while you work?” he asked, removing his hand.

  “A lady on the next floor,” she said. “He goes to a private preschool two days a week also.”

  “I was thinking…would it be possible for me to baby-sit while you’re working? It would be a great way for the two of us to get to know each other.”

  “You?” She couldn’t resist the startled laugh. It seemed ridiculous to expect a member of one of the city’s wealthiest families to act as her baby-sitter. “I suppose so. If you really want to.”

  “I want to,” he said firmly.

  Just then Nick came tearing across the macadam to the bench. “Can we go see the blowhole now, Mommy?”

  Danny said, “The what?” and Nick grinned. Danny grinned back at him.

  “It’s near the sea lion cove,” she said. “It’s a natural rock formation that shoots ocean water into the air every so often.”

  Both Danny and Nick turned their faces to her, still smiling. Two sets of identical blue eyes, two stubborn chins with an irresistible cleft. Two heads of blond hair, though Danny’s wasn’t the white-blond that his son’s was.

  It was shocking to see how very much the man and boy resembled each other, and she simply stared at the two of them, lost in the moment.

  My God, she thought. How could anyone doubt that these two are father and son?

  “Have a seat,” Terrence Logan said to the private investigator, showing him to one of the wing chairs in the formal room where the Logan family received guests. Terrence and his wife, Leslie, took the loveseat directly across from their visitor. “You have a report for us?”

  The man nodded. He laid a thick folder on the glass-topped table between them. “I interviewed your son first. For the sake of clarity I’m going to refer to him as Everett Baker. He was very helpful. From there I was able to track backward almost to the date he was kidnapped.”

  Leslie made a small, stifled sound, but she gripped her hands tightly together in her lap and pressed her lips together.

  “I believe you already know the basic events,” the man said. “What I’ve done is gone back and filled in the spaces as much as possible. I went to his old schools, neighbors, in the few cases any could be located. Even a hospital in Dayton where he was treated for a broken bone when he was eleven.”

  “Abuse?” Leslie almost whispered the word.

  The man shook his head. “I don’t know. Nothing could be proved, and the couple moved before a social worker could investigate. Twenty years ago it wasn’t nearly as easy to locate people as it is today.”

  “So, who were they?” Terrence leaned forward. “And why did they take our son?”

  “Lester and Jolene Baker were the names of the couple who took him. Those were their real names and at no time did I find any evidence that they used false identities. They first settled in Cleveland with the boy, but they moved frequently. Over the next decade, they moved back and forth at least a dozen times between Ohio, Michigan and Indiana. Everett was enrolled in school in most of those places but his attendance record was spotty and when they moved, the teachers usually had no warning. He just wouldn’t show up one day and weeks later they might get a request for his records from the receiving school in the new home area.”

  “How could they enroll him in school without his birth certificate?” Terrence asked. “Did they forge one?”

  The investigator shook his head. “No. They had a birth certificate. What no one ever realized was that they also had a death certificate. The Bakers had a son the same year your son Robbie was born. He was named Everett, but he died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome a few months after birth.” The man cleared his throat. “At least, that’s what your son was told. He says that over the years he came to suspect that Mrs. Baker may have accidentally killed the child. Apparently she wasn’t the most stable person in the world.”

  Leslie shuddered and put a hand to her throat. Terrence’s face was frozen into a carefully blank expression, but he reached over and put an arm around his wife’s shoulders.

  The P.I. looked back down at the notes he’d extracted from the folder. “When Everett—your son—was sixteen, Lester Baker abandoned the family. Everett intended to run away as well, but his mother—”

  “She was not his mother,” Leslie said in a steely voice at odds with her usual gentle demeanor.

  “Right.” The P.I. continued, correcting himself. “Mrs. Baker attempted suicide. She was hospitalized and apparently Everett never felt he could leave her again. He finished high school and got a job, then put himself through a community college by taking classes at night for the next six years. When he got his degree, he got a job in Missouri and both he and Mrs. Baker moved to St. Louis. She died there in 2001. She had liver cancer. Before she died, Everett found the death certificate I mentioned earlier among her things. Of course, that led him to suspect he wasn’t her son. When he confronted her, she told him the whole story.”

  “Four years ago? But why didn’t he look for us then?” Leslie asked.

  “He did, after a fashion,” the P.I. replied. “After Mrs. Baker’s death, he moved to Portland,
where he got a job in the accounting department of Children’s Connection, which he had learned you were deeply involved with.”

  “So close…” Terrence murmured. “Four years wasted.”

  “Mr. Logan, Mrs. Logan, I don’t believe Everett felt he could approach you at that point. He’d done research on you and your family. He knew you’d buried a child you believed was him, and that you’d had other children. He has an enormous amount of guilt—”

  “Guilt? Whatever for?” Leslie asked.

  “He believes he let you down. He thinks he should have tried harder to get away the day he was taken, and that he should have been smart enough to avoid being snatched at all. He can’t forgive himself for forgetting his past.”

  “He was six,” Terrence said forcefully. “Just a little boy. We never blamed him in any way.”

  “I know that,” the man said. “But you must understand. Your son was raised by two people who were verbally abusive, at the very least. From things I read in some of the school reports, I suspect it went further than that, though he’s never confirmed it. Initially, I believe he was brainwashed. They told him you didn’t want him back. For some time he felt that you’d quit on him. Now that this all has come out, he feels as if he quit on you.”

  “That couldn’t be more wrong,” Leslie said softly. “I want to tell him that myself.”

  “So how did he get mixed up in this trouble?” Terrence asked.

  The private investigator glanced at his notes again. “In Portland, Everett was approached by a man named Charlie Prescott—”

  “The one who was killed recently.”

  “Yes. Prescott already had kidnapping plans in mind, as well as other things, and I believe he recruited Everett because he seemed like an easy mark. Your son was moved around too much to make friends during his formative years. He was—still is—almost painfully withdrawn with most people. He was lonely. Prescott offered him something that must have been irresistible—friendship.”