She's Not There (31 page)

Caroline shook her head. “I can't. You open it.”

“You're sure? Hunter?” Peggy asked.

“You do it.”

Peggy tore open the envelope and removed the single sheet of paper. She scanned the page, then looked up at Caroline, her eyes filling with tears.

Caroline felt her entire body go numb. She knew that if the reporters waiting outside could see her right now, they would undoubtedly describe a seemingly calm, self-possessed woman with impeccable posture and an expressionless demeanor instead of a woman on the verge of total collapse, her stiffness the result of every fiber in her being struggling to keep her upright and in one piece. They wouldn't understand that if she were to release the breath she was holding tight inside her lungs it would rush out of her like air from a balloon, and she would twist violently off into space, gutted and empty.

She glanced from Peggy to Hunter to Michelle to the young girl who might or might not be Samantha. Ever since Lili's first phone call, Caroline had been cautioning herself not to get emotionally invested. She'd warned herself against letting her desire get the better of her common sense. But all that resolve had gone out the window the moment Lili appeared on her doorstep, and it had vanished altogether over the course of the last few days. Facts might be facts, but one of those facts was that she'd fallen in love. Emotions had firmly trumped common sense. One and one no longer made two. Even if the DNA tests proved conclusively that Lili was not her daughter, Caroline wasn't sure she could survive her loss.

So she stood silent, her body rigid and ramrod straight, her face a placid mask, waiting for Peggy to speak.

T
hey were sitting on her bed, wrapped in each other's arms, watching the eleven o'clock news and trying to come to terms with everything that had happened since Peggy had torn open that sealed white envelope and changed their lives forever.

“Oh, God,” Peggy had said, her eyes shooting from Caroline to Lili and then back to Caroline.

“What? Tell me.”

“She's yours. She's Samantha.”

What followed was a chorus of gasps, as tears of relief mixed with cries of disbelief. Shocked voices overlapped; bodies swayed, rocked, clung together, before ultimately collapsing under the sheer weight of those four words.

“I don't believe it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Is it really true?”

“Let me see that.”

“It can't be. There must be some mistake.”

“It's here in black and white. Look for yourselves. There's no doubt.”

“Oh, my God.”

“It's you. It's really you.”

“I don't believe it.”

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Are you absolutely positive?”

“My baby. My beautiful baby.”

And then the voice of reality. As usual, Michelle's: “What do we do now?”

They'd called the police. The police promptly notified the FBI. They'd all come running, their arrival triggering a frenzy among the reporters still gathered outside.

“My name is Greg Fisher. I'm with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the agent had informed the assembled media, standing outside Caroline's front door several hours later. “There has been a new development in the case of missing child Samantha Shipley. Please bear with us. We'll be holding a press conference at noon tomorrow. In the meantime, we ask that the family's privacy be respected.”

Caroline had relayed to the authorities the events of the last several weeks—that she'd received a phone call from a girl calling herself Lili who lived in Calgary with her widowed mother and two younger brothers, that Lili harbored suspicions that she was really Samantha, that a dubious Caroline had flown to Calgary to meet her but Lili had failed to show, that last week she'd turned up on Caroline's doorstep, that they'd gone for DNA testing, that Beth Hollister had flown in from Calgary yesterday to take Lili home but Lili had refused to go and Beth had returned to Canada alone, that the tests had provided proof positive that Lili was indeed Samantha, the daughter who'd been stolen from her crib in Mexico some fifteen years earlier.

“She's yours,” Peggy had said. “She's Samantha.”

She's mine,
Caroline had been repeating silently all day.
She's really mine.

The FBI verified the results with the lab, then notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP had, in turn, informed the Calgary police, who'd quickly arrested Beth Hollister and brought her in for questioning.

She'd been protesting her innocence ever since, even when confronted by the young girl she'd insisted so vehemently was hers. Caroline was still replaying their conversation in her head hours after the fact.

“How could you?” Lili had demanded of Beth when Greg Fisher finally allowed them to speak, their conversation relayed over speakerphone in her kitchen for Caroline, Hunter, and Michelle to hear.

“I didn't know. I swear,” Beth replied tearfully.

“You swore you were my mother,” Lili reminded her.

“I
am
your mother.”

“You swore you gave birth to me. I asked you—how many times did I ask you?—if I was adopted. You said no.”

“Because that's what your father insisted I tell you. Because he said it was better for all of us that way.”

“Because he knew the truth.”

“I don't know. I don't know.”

“You
do
know. Stop lying to me.”

Piece by piece, the truth slowly emerged: Beth and her husband had been trying unsuccessfully for years to have children of their own; one day Tim had come home with the news that he'd arranged for the private adoption of a toddler, an adoption that could come through at any time; they were living in Portugal when the adoption was supposedly finalized; her husband had immediately flown to the States to pick up their little girl, a child whose mother had purportedly abandoned her.

Lili was incredulous. “You weren't even a little suspicious? A mother just happens to abandon her two-year-old daughter at the exact same time another two-year-old mysteriously vanishes from her crib in Mexico? The timing doesn't seem more than a little convenient? You actually believed it was a coincidence?”

“I didn't know anything about what happened in Mexico.”

“It was all over the media. All over the world. How could you not know?”

“We were living in Portugal. I didn't speak Portuguese. I didn't read the international papers. We didn't even own a TV. I was pretty isolated. Your father brought home this beautiful little girl and assured me everything was legal. I had no reason to doubt him. He had all the necessary documents…”

“But at some point, you had to become suspicious,” Greg Fisher had said from his seat at the kitchen table, his voice stopping just short of a sneer.

“I guess I knew something wasn't right,” Beth admitted reluctantly. “But it's amazing how you can fool yourself when you want to. I wanted to believe that my husband wasn't lying, so I did. I wanted to believe that he hadn't…”

“…stolen me from my crib in Mexico?”

“He didn't do that,” Beth said with unexpected vehemence. “He was never in Mexico.”

“Then he was working with someone who was,” Greg Fisher said matter-of-factly. “Can you tell us who that might have been?”

Caroline's body tensed as Hunter leaned forward in his chair.

“I have no idea. Tim knew a lot of people…through his business. I'm ashamed to say they weren't all reputable.”

“So at some point you
did
suspect I might be Samantha?” Lili interjected.

“Not until much later. We were living in Italy. I saw a newscast. I think it was the five-year anniversary of the kidnapping. They showed pictures of Samantha. It was pretty obvious. I panicked. I confronted your father, begged him to tell me the truth. He told me I was being ridiculous and to stop talking crazy, that talk like that would only arouse unfounded suspicions and we could end up losing you, even though he swore up and down you weren't Samantha. What choice did I have but to believe him?”

“Of course, since your husband passed away last year, we have only your word for all of this,” the agent said. “Very convenient for you, under the circumstances, being able to put all the blame on a man who's no longer here to defend himself.”

A muffled sob could be heard on the other end of the line.

“What made you return to the States?” Fisher asked.

“A combination of things. Tim's business…the boys…”

“You had two sons by then.”

“Yes. Once we had Lili, I had no problem at all getting pregnant. Ironic, isn't it?”

“I'm sure the fact that ten years had passed was also a factor in your decision to come back. You assumed you were safe.”

“I assumed my husband was telling me the truth.”

“Is that why we moved to Canada?” Lili broke in, her voice an accusation. “Is that why we were homeschooled? Is that why we didn't have a computer, why our access to television was limited, why we moved every time we started making friends? Because you assumed Dad was telling the truth?”

“We arranged our whole lives around you. We did everything we could to protect you.”

“To protect
yourselves,
you mean.”

It was at this point that Caroline intervened in the questioning. “Why come to San Diego? You knew we'd gone for DNA testing. You knew what the results would show. Why would you keep insisting…?”

“Because believe it or not, I was still clinging to the hope that Lili
wasn't
Samantha. And I thought if I could just get her to come home with me, she would put this silliness aside, and that even if the tests showed she
was
your biological child that it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't be enough to undo the fifteen years I spent raising her, loving her…I love you so much, Lili.”

There was a second of silence.

“My name is Samantha.”

A cry shot from Beth's lips like a bullet, traveling through the phone wires to pierce Caroline's heart. In spite of everything, for a moment she felt genuinely sorry for Beth. She knew what it was like to lose a child.

“Of course the minute I saw you with your parents and sister, I knew who you were,” Beth continued. “Which just made me all the more desperate.”

“What made you stay in Calgary?” Greg Fisher asked. “You could have taken your sons and disappeared. You had a lot of practice, and you had to know the police would be coming after you.”

“Where would I go? How could I leave if there was even the slightest chance I might get my little girl back?”

The question lingered in the air even after the phone call ended.

“What's going to happen to her?” Lili asked. “Will she go to jail?”

“I don't know,” Greg Fisher said. “Obviously, this is only the start of our investigation, and while I'm confident the Canadian authorities will cooperate thoroughly, it's been fifteen years, and we have no proof she's lying. We'll keep looking into things, of course. Maybe we'll eventually find out the whole truth of what took place that night. I'd certainly like to be there if and when that happens.”

Hunter shook his head. “So we lose a child, our daughter loses a sister, our marriage falls apart, our lives are virtually destroyed, all because this woman wanted a baby and purposely ignored all evidence as to who that baby really was. And she gets away with it because it's been fifteen years, her husband is dead, and there's no proof she's lying.”

“What matters is that we have Samantha back,” Caroline said simply.

And suddenly she and Hunter were in each other's arms and he was sobbing on her shoulder. “I'm so sorry, Caroline. I'm so terribly, terribly sorry.”

“I know.”

“For everything.”

“I know. Me, too.” They cried together, Hunter's tears wet against her cheek. For an instant, the years fell away. A miracle had brought their daughter back to them. Maybe another miracle could make them a real family again, albeit an extended one. She hugged him tight, inhaled his clean, soapy scent.

It was a scent she recognized all too well.

Caroline pulled out of his arms, understanding that he hadn't been in meetings when they'd tried to reach him earlier.
Some things never change,
she thought sadly.
No matter how many years pass.

“What do we tell the reporters?” Michelle asked.

“Let me take care of that,” Fisher volunteered. “I'll see you guys tomorrow.” He handed Caroline his card. “Don't hesitate to get in touch with me anytime.”

“Thank you.”

Caroline's mother and brother arrived a short time after the police and federal agents had cleared out. “Samantha, darling,” Mary cried, brushing past Michelle and enfolding the young girl in her tight embrace. “I knew it. Didn't I say right away it was you? Welcome home, darling. We have so much catching up to do.”

“Hey,” Steve said, inching forward. “What am I—chopped liver? Come on, sweetheart,” he said, beckoning Samantha into his open arms. “Come to your Uncle Stevie.”

A strangled cry escaped Michelle's lips as Steve hugged his long-lost niece.

“Don't be jealous, Micki,” her grandmother said. “It doesn't become you.”

“Mother, for God's sake,” Caroline said. “This is hardly the time.”

“She's no longer an only child,” Mary argued. “She'll have to get used to it sooner or later.”