On the Doorstep

She slowly withdrew her finger from the baby’s mouth and shuffled to the door, reluctant to hand over her little charge but resigned to doing what was right.

“Goodbye, little one.” As she passed through the entry to the front porch, she placed a kiss on his fuzzy blond head. A single tear broke through her defenses and inched down her cheek.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“His name’s Gabriel.”

Detective Zach Fletcher couldn’t help being curious when Pilar’s head came up with a snap at his announcement. With five years under his belt as a beat cop and then another four years as a Chestnut Grove Police Department detective, Zach had developed a sixth sense about guilt, and Miss Estes had it written all over her. Only it didn’t make sense because she’d been the one to report the crime. What did she have to feel guilty about?

Zach was grateful for Pilar’s suspicious reaction because it distracted him from the ghosts of the past hovering in his thoughts. The whole scene felt like a cruel déjà vu, and he wasn’t ready to return there. He wondered if he ever would be.

Did Pilar worry he thought the baby was hers? He almost smiled at the thought. Even if he hadn’t seen Pilar at Chestnut Grove Community Church most Sundays for the last two years, he would have recognized that someone with a figure as slender as hers couldn’t have been pregnant recently. And only the worst detective would have linked the fair-skinned, light-haired infant with Pilar, who had olive skin, dramatic dark eyes and long black hair, due to her Puerto Rican heritage.

“How did you beat the ambulance here?” She glanced at his car, which was parked up the street near hers. Instead of waiting for his answer, she crouched to retrieve the thick blanket from the basket and wrapped it lightly over the baby.

“I was on my way to work, caught the call on the police radio. I live close by.” He chose not to mention that he couldn’t have kept away if he’d been ordered to, that he had this overwhelming need to make a difference this time when he’d failed so miserably before.

“When will the ambulance arrive?”

“In a few minutes.”

He checked down the street and hoped he was right. When he glanced back at Pilar, he caught her watching him with a strange expression. Was it wariness? Or curiosity?

Pilar looked away, but Zach continued to study her, for investigative purposes only. She was dressed in what he would describe as one of her trademark outfits: a ruffled, feminine blouse and a pair of tailored black slacks. Though she usually wore skirts to church, the theme was the same. It wasn’t just her choice of clothes that made her look tall. She was at least five-seven in stocking feet.

Others might have been surprised that he could give such detail about a woman he didn’t know well, or that he was noticing even more specifics about her now—such as her open-toe shoes and dark painted toenails—but Zach considered it his job to remember details.

What he noticed at that moment was how natural Pilar appeared, swaying with a baby she’d just discovered, literally, on the doorstep. The infant looked so comfortable sleeping there, as if this morning was like any other instead of one that would change his life.

She wrapped the blanket tightly over the baby, though she shivered herself. He was tempted to drape his herringbone sport jacket over her shoulders but worried it might offend her or make her more skittish. Her skin appeared to be the only thing keeping her from shattering into dozens of pieces.

Her uncharacteristic vulnerability surprised him. The Pilar Estes he’d observed at church had always seemed so strong, so independent. Her life and her family, all active members at their church, had appeared too perfect for the two of them to ever be friends. He’d experienced too-perfect at home and knew now what a fallacy it was.

But Zach recognized the importance of keeping a careful distance from case witnesses. He couldn’t worry about Pilar right now when his focus needed to be on this new case and the abandoned infant. When he stepped closer to get a better look at the baby, he tried not to notice that Pilar took an automatic step back.

“He had a rough morning, but our little guy doesn’t look too worse for the wear,” he said, keeping the conversation light. “God was watching out for him.”

The sides of Pilar’s mouth pulled up at that. “How did you know the baby’s name was Gabriel?”

“There was a note.”

She seemed to accept that and didn’t even ask to see it. “He probably wasn’t outside too long. The mother even knew enough to swaddle him tightly so he wouldn’t be able to move and maybe be smothered in the blankets.”

Zach ignored the hitch in his throat and said a quick prayer of thanksgiving over the mother’s insight. The situation could have been a lot uglier. “It wasn’t an average person who abandoned this baby.” He pointed to the blanket. “Isn’t that cashmere?”

Pilar traced her finger along the stitched edge and nodded. “The basket’s nice, too.” She studied it for several seconds, her gaze following the intricate weaving and designs. “Maybe even an heirloom.”

The wheels in Zach’s brain started spinning. Clearly, the mother wasn’t destitute, so what had brought her to this point? Maybe she was a wealthy, married woman who’d become pregnant from an illicit affair. He doubted that idea, as other socialites would have noticed her pregnancy during charity guild meetings and country club parties.

Maybe the mother had postpartum depression, or she was a pregnant teen with a pair of furious parents, just like Jasmine. He shook the thought away and tried to guess what the baby’s mother looked like. His hands perspired with the effort. Every time he imagined a blond woman with either blue or brown eyes, the image would transform into a wavy-haired brunette with the cutest dimples and blue eyes similar to his own.

No, he couldn’t think about his sister here. Not now. He didn’t want to see that pair of caskets again, one white and impossibly small, and he didn’t want to wonder again how he might have helped if he’d only known Jasmine’s secret sooner. This time could be different. This time he could help prevent a crisis from becoming a tragedy.

“Hey, look at this.” Pilar spoke just above a whisper, waving a hand for him to draw closer.

She showed him the label on Gabriel’s blue sleeper. He shrugged, no fashion aficionado. He took plenty of ribbing at the station for his wardrobe choices.

Pilar pointed to the label again. “That’s definitely not Ralph Lauren. The receiving blanket, too. I could buy both of those for ten dollars together at any of the local discount stores. Why would a mother who could afford cashmere choose these?”

“Maybe she couldn’t.” Could the blanket and basket have been products of a larceny? “I’ll check back at the station to see if there were any recent B and E’s—ah, breaking and entering cases—that might be related.”

As if they’d called to coordinate their arrivals, the patrol car and the ambulance arrived at almost the same time from opposite directions. All the noise awakened the baby, who cried out the moment his blue eyes opened. Two emergency medical technicians emerged from the ambulance, and Pilar rushed over to them. Zach conferred for a few minutes with Officer Steve Merritt before the junior officer turned the case over to him.

After he was gone, Zach scanned the crime scene for more clues. The suspect certainly had left enough to make him wonder if she wanted to be caught. Was abandoning her child a way of crying for help? He wouldn’t know until he found her, but he wanted to be that help if she needed it.

Though he tried to focus on the crime scene alone, something kept drawing his attention back to the ambulance where Pilar stood. This time she wasn’t paying attention to him at all. She only had eyes for the baby who was giving the EMT hearing damage as he tried to get a heart rate.

Zach figured from the baby’s healthy cry that he was going to be fine, but Pilar’s expression was stark and anguished. Was that just her empathy for the baby who had lost a mother that morning?

For a few sick seconds, Zach was jealous of that baby. He wondered how it would feel to be the recipient of Pilar’s empathy or her compassion. Then he grabbed hold of his wayward thoughts. He didn’t need anyone to care about him. People who cared got hurt, felt losses so profoundly that their hearts seemed to have been riddled with bullets.

Though he didn’t need it himself, Zach still valued the kind of compassionate care Pilar brought to her work. As a police officer, he’d seen far too few people who truly cared for their fellow human beings. The children of Tiny Blessings Adoption Agency were fortunate to have someone like Pilar on their side.

Chapter Two

Pilar took several long, deep breaths as she waited for her world to stop spinning. The knowledge that the baby appeared healthy wasn’t enough to slow this Tilt-A-Whirl she’d been riding on and couldn’t get off. If she looked up the word “surreal” in the dictionary, she would find a photograph of this scene outside the Tiny Blessings building. She would see flashing lights and uniformed emergency workers and a crying baby.

And she would see the man she’d secretly mooned over for the last two years standing not ten feet away from her and still looking past her as if she was invisible. Obviously, the crisis hadn’t changed anything.

She’d been overwhelmed enough just discovering the abandoned child, but that was before Zach’s deep voice had rolled into her ears and jolted her pulse. He was so out of context away from the church that it had taken her a few seconds to get her bearings. Not that she wouldn’t have recognized his voice anywhere, as many times as she’d overheard him talking with church friends and had wished he’d been laughing with her instead.

She glanced at him over her shoulder, careful not to get caught staring again. She’d been humiliated enough the first time. He looked so strong and proficient, taking charge of the scene and offering direction to the young uniformed police officer standing next to him. Usually the one to volunteer to head projects, Pilar felt relieved to leave the situation in Zach’s capable hands.

The wind was whipping through his wavy brown hair, forcing him to shove it out of his eyes. He wore his hair a tad longer than the current extreme styles, so it fell low across his forehead and curled the tiniest bit at his nape. Zach marched to his own fashion drummer, as well, even now looking endearingly rumpled in his sport jacket matched with a pair of khaki slacks that had never known a knife crease.

When she’d already watched him longer than she should have, Zach glanced back at her. The most startling pair of cornflower-blue eyes in, well, the history of cornflower-blue eyes, trapped her in their examining stare. Her breath hitched, and goose bumps appeared on her forearms, but she couldn’t look away.

At first he didn’t, either—his eyes wide. What did he see when he looked at her? Just another witness to interview? A case number? A day on the job? She hoped he didn’t see her yearning. She’d hidden it so well before just as all secret crushes should be carefully guarded, but her resistance was down this morning, her self-protection compromised. She exhaled when he finally looked back at his fellow police officer, but she felt oddly disappointed.

A hearty laugh pulled Pilar back to the commotion next to the ambulance.

“This one’s got a pair of lungs on him,” said one of the EMTs.

The other one laughed with him. “He’s just offended that you’re poking at him. I would be, too.”

“You take him. I’ll call in his vitals.” Before the second guy could protest, the first was off with the radio.

Gabriel continued to wail, his face becoming reddish-purple and his feet beating against the blanket. She couldn’t help smiling at him. He’d been dealt a tough blow that morning, but he was a fighter. He was going to be okay. She just knew it.