Unintended Consequences - By Marti Green Page 0,51

my own,” she’d said. And she did travel. Her first trip had been to New York, to visit Sunny. From there, she and Nancy flew to Paris. It had always been her dream to tour the Louvre, walk down the Champs Elysee, ride an elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower. “It was everything I’d imagined,” she told Sunny on her return. “Don’t wait to travel until you’re old, like me. Do it while you’re young.” She and Nancy had taken more trips after that, but the trip to Paris had remained special to her.

Sunny wondered if her mother would have begun traveling earlier in her life if she hadn’t had her daughter to take care of. She’d been an older mother when she finally gave birth to Sunny, almost 40. The parents of Sunny’s friends were still in their forties when their children went off to college, young enough to enjoy the freedom that brought. As Sunny walked through the house and fingered the knickknacks her mother had brought home from her travels, she wondered whether she had ever regretted being held down by a child. But as soon as the thought passed through her mind, it evaporated. Sunny knew that she had been the center of her parents’ world, that they had loved every moment of their lives. Her mother had set aside her dream of traveling for something she cherished even more: her daughter. How fortunate I was. She settled onto the couch and looked at Eric and Rachel. She had postponed her own dream of becoming a nurse in favor of motherhood. As she watched her daughter snuggle in her father’s lap, Sunny knew with certainty that she didn’t regret her decision.

CHAPTER

18

Damn bureaucracies! Tommy had spent more than a week being shuffled from one agency to another and he’d gotten zilch. He’d hoped he wouldn’t need to make a trip to Minnesota, but he’d gotten nowhere fast with the phone. Tomorrow he’d hoof it out there. Spring had finally arrived in New York. The incessant rain had stopped, the sun shone, and the golf course beckoned. He’d checked the weather forecast for Rochester, Minnesota, and it stunk. Wet and cold.

All his efforts had led to a state of gridlock as bad as anything that gripped Manhattan streets during rush hours. No movement forward, just sitting at his desk and twiddling his thumbs. Earlier that morning he’d gotten a call from the lab doing the testing on the note left tucked under his car’s windshield wipers. The good news: The paper had yielded distinct fingerprints. The bad news: no match for them could be found in any of the databases.

Tommy wondered how Dani and Melanie were doing with their motion. There were only three ways to have certainty in this case: exhume the body and find out definitively whether the child was Angelina Calhoun, find a record of her death in Minnesota, or find Angelina Calhoun, alive and well. That would be something, he thought, if she were still alive.

This case bothered him and not just because it involved a child. He’d been so convinced that this guy had handed them a load of baloney. Now he had doubts. Even if Calhoun had told the truth—and this was a big if—wasn’t he still guilty of something? It must be a crime to abandon a sick child. Maybe if he hadn’t, he would have found some way to get her medical treatment. Maybe she would have lived. And then there was that damned note on his car. What the hell was that about? There’d been no more nasty missives since he’d been back.

He looked at his watch and saw that it was after one o’clock. He sauntered to Bruce’s office and stuck his head in. “Want to grab some lunch?”

Bruce looked at the clock on the wall and then at the papers strewn over his desk. “I probably shouldn’t, but yeah, let’s go. The weather’s too nice to sit inside all day.”

As they waited for the elevator, Tommy asked, “You ever miss not having kids?”

“Sometimes. When I’m at my sister’s and her kids are running all over the place, all laughing and happy, I miss being a part of that.”

“I know what you mean. It’s great when they’re young like that. You know, watching them at Little League and soccer, tumbling around on the floor with them, all that stuff. You can’t believe how fast that changes. One day they’re dependent on you for everything and the