to me now. “You were there that morning I came to pick up Pearl. I made you carry the baby, because you looked too small to handle the dog.”
And she must have been there the night before, too, when Rafe dropped off Pearl, because she’d asked me about him. Whether he was my husband.
I’d told her yes, he was, and had refrained from adding that he was ‘mine, all mine.’
Not that I’d been worried. It was hardly the first time some woman had taken a fancy to Rafe because he was handsome, and sexy, and liked to flirt.
“What happened?” I asked. “You haven’t been following him around since then, have you? The videos just started a few days ago.”
She glanced my way again. “I was there the other night. In downtown. When that horrible policeman had that poor boy down on the ground and was trying to kill him.”
Grimaldi opened her mouth, and Rafe did, too. In the end, both of them thought better of speaking.
“Curtis is fine,” I said. “Nothing happened to him.”
“Because he came.” She shot a glance at Rafe, and if I hadn’t already been chilled to the bone from this woman stealing my baby, that look would have done it. It wasn’t just attraction, or even some sort of twisted love. It was obsession, pure and simple. I recognized it, because I’d seen it before.
On Elspeth Caulfield’s face.
“But it wasn’t you who took the video that night,” I said, trying to get her attention back on me. Watching him point that gun at her probably wasn’t doing her psyche any good, when she was halfway around the bend already. And while I had no problem with nudging her the rest of the way if the opportunity arose, I didn’t want to do it while she was holding Carrie.
She shot me another look. “No. I saw it the next morning, and I thought if she could do it, so could I. And because I knew where he worked, I went there and waited for him.”
“And the other night you followed us to Beulah’s Meat’n Three.”
She nodded. “You didn’t even notice me. I sat at the counter, and I filmed you, and when the owner carried the baby past, I took a picture of her, too.”
“‘She looks just like her daddy,’” I quoted, while my stomach did a sort of unpleasant, soggy flip.
She didn’t recognize the quote from her post, or if she did, she didn’t comment on it. Instead she looked down at Carrie, and a sliver of that obsessive light came back into her eyes. “Yes.”
“You can’t have her,” I said. It wasn’t conscious, and might not have been the psychologically best thing to say. To be honest, I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about anything at all. “She’s mine.”
I’m not sure she even heard me. She did hear Rafe. He shifted his hands just slightly on the gun, which he held in both hands, up at chest level and pointed at her, very businesslike. Her eyes focused on the movement, which was probably what he expected her to do. “Put the baby down,” he told her. “Step away from her.”
The girl—I didn’t even know her name; if she’d had a name badge pinned to those scrubs she’d worn to bring Pearl out of the vet clinic last month, I hadn’t noticed—hesitated.
“I’d prefer not to hurt you,” Rafe added, “but you’ve got my daughter. And I’m not letting you walk away with her.”
There wasn’t much chance of that. Between the crowd in the French doors, and the people thronging behind David at the corner of the house, and Rafe and Grimaldi with their guns drawn, and me, there wasn’t anywhere for her to go.
I’m not sure she realized that, though. She glanced from side to side, and then back at Rafe. “I love you,” she told him.
I have no idea whether she meant them as her last words or not. She might have, because a second later she threw the carrier with the baby to the left—toward me—and stood alone.
To be honest, it wasn’t much of a throw. Carrie was more than four months old, and weighed around fourteen pounds. Add five pounds or so for the seat, and she was shifting twenty. And as I’ve mentioned before, she wasn’t a big girl. She’d also been standing there holding the seat for a while, so she was probably tired. The combined weight of seat and baby wears on the arm after a while, and