Kate graduated from high school and worked her way through community college, which led to news reporter jobs in Syracuse, New York, for a short time before she went to California. She was still pretty green working on the crime desk at the San Francisco Star when she fell for a cop. It was after she got pregnant that she learned he was married.
Kate was crushed.
How could he lie to her? How could she be so stupid?
Shed confided to a reporter friend that she wanted to keep her baby but needed to leave the city. She got a job with the Repository in Canton, where she had Grace at age twenty-three.
Kate thrived on the papers crime beat where she was honored for tracking down a fugitive killer. While her work was shut out for a Pulitzer and other national prizes, she did win a regional award for journalistic investigative excellence. But the glory didnt last.
One day after several years, Kate was called into the office of Ed Brant, her managing editor. He removed his glasses and said her job, along with a dozen others, was gone. It was a dark time for her but Kate did the best she could. She searched everywhere but news jobs were drying up.
Weeks then months passed. She waitressed while applying for public relations positions with corporations. She got one in Canton that lasted three weeks. Kate just did not fit in.
She was a reporter. Period.
Things got dire. Kate was juggling bills when she learned that Newslead, the worldwide wire service, had an opening in its Dallas bureau.
Kates application got her a teleconference phone interview with Chuck Laneer and Dorothea Pick in Dallas, and a human resources woman in New York. A week later, Chuck called Kate back. Shed made the short list. He invited her to a three-week internship at the bureau with two other candidates. The strongest candidate would get the full-time job at the bureau. It paid nearly double what shed earned at the Repository, and came with great benefits.
Kate arranged for Grace to stay with her friend Heather Baines, whose daughter, Aubrey, went to school with Grace. It tore at Kate to leave Grace for three weeks, but she had to do it for both of them. Shed promised theyd talk on Skype every day. Kate loaded up her Chevy then made the twelve-hundred-mile drive to Dallas in just over two days. She stayed in cheap motels and ate fast food to save money.
The trip was a lonely one, and at this moment, in the shower, Kate longed to be in Ohio. She ached to be home watching a movie on the sofa with Grace, something funny, something happy, because the days tragedies were overwhelming.
Kate stepped from the shower, toweled off then brushed her teeth and her hair. She put on her pajamas, killed the lights then got into bed, exhausted. She reached for her phone. The screen glowed in the dark as she studied her favorite picture of Grace.
Id die if I lost you.
Id die if I lost you.
Then she cued up her photo of Jenna Cooper amid the horror, searching for her baby, her words replaying, I had him but I let him go. Oh God, its my fault!
Kate knew this anguish, this guilt. Shed felt it throughout her whole life, after shed let Vanessa slip away in the river.
As she looked out her hotel window at the buildings and the highways twinkling in the night, she was overwhelmed with self-reproach, for Vanessa, for leaving Grace, for being in this room while people out there were enduring so much loss and pain.
Kate stared hard at her photo of Jenna Cooper.
Like you, I can only imagine whats going through your mind.
Was her baby dead? Was he hurt, buried under debris? Did someone find him and take him to a hospital?
Kate continued looking at Jennas picture.
Ill help you find the truth.
11
Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas
The next morning, across the city, in Room 16 of the Dreamaway Motor Inn, the TV glowed in the predawn darkness.
The window shades were drawn, blocking the neon sign flashing Vacancy out front. The rooms air reeked of cigarettes and stale beer as Remy Toxton sat at the edge of the bed teasing her spiky red hair while watching coverage of the disaster.
Dallas stations showed the storms aftermath and interviews with shell-shocked survivors in neighborhoods that had been hit hard. When the report went to the flea market, Remy, still a little shaky, concentrated on it until she was satisfied that no threat had surfaced from what shed done.
This is going to work out for us, babe, she said.
Mason Varno, Remys boyfriend, was standing shirtless in his sweatpants at the window. Hed gently moved the shade to watch the parking lot while rubbing his lips and constantly checking his cell phone for messages. They had service here. Remy threw him a look over her shoulder, loving how his muscles rippled under his prison tattoos, loving that he was her man, flaws and all.
No one was perfect. Mason didnt talk much. He had a lot on his mind.
So did Remy.
Theyd been through hell lately, but now their dreams were within their grasp. They were going to get enough money to get a place along the Oregon coast and start their new life, the real life they both deserved. It was going to happen. They were beating the odds, and now Remy believed that they could overcome anything.
Even a dead baby?
Yes. No. I dont know.
An alarm bell went off in her skull, her brain convulsed. She held her head to keep it from splitting open and took deep breaths.
Stop thinking about that! Its in the past! Leave it there!
Her jaw tensed as she counted backward from one hundred until she recovered.
Okay, okay.
She was all right.
Just one of her little spells.
She turned back to the TV.
We were so lucky to get out with nothing but a few scrapes.
Its all meant to be.
The newswoman was talking about the number of dead, missing, injured, homeless, and where tornado victims could get help. The screen showed a graphic with information and websites on locations across the Metroplex for emergency shelters providing medical services, food, water, clothing, trauma support and other aid.
This was important. Remy took notes, got her laptop and resumed checking the locations for shelters and medical help. Then she searched online news sites focusing on reports about the flea market, scanning them for one thing.
Nothing surfaced in the stream of stories until a certain picture blurred past. Remy went back to a photograph of a woman holding an empty, beat-up stroller and a child standing with her before the devastation. The cutline read: Jenna Cooper holds her daughter, Cassie, and the empty stroller of her five-month-old son, Caleb, who is missing after a tornado destroyed the Saddle Up Center where scores of people were killed.
The article with the picture was by Newslead, the wire service. The section on Jenna Cooper was only a few short paragraphs. Remy scrutinized every word.
Among the tragic stories emerging from the Saddle Up Center is that of Jenna Cooper, who lost her five-month-old baby, Caleb, when the tornado hit.
I had him, but I couldnt hold on.
Coopers baby vanished in the fury along with a man and a woman, the two strangers whod helped Cooper, her son, and daughter, Cassie, to what they believed was a safe corner of the center.
Officials have listed Caleb as missing, acknowledging that the baby couldve been located and taken to a hospital. There is also fear that Caleb, along with the people whod helped his mother, could be among the injured or dead still buried under debris.
Ill keep searching for him until I find him, Cooper said.
Remy glared at Jenna Coopers picture.
Thats right, keep searching, like the fool you are. I went to that market looking for someone like you. You werent fit to be his mother. Im sending him to a better place.
Hey, are you going to do something about that? Mason asked.
Remy had been so absorbed by her work shed been oblivious to the crying from the far side of the room. She closed her eyes and sighed. Then she looked at her laptop.
Mason, read this article while I take care of him.
Massaging her temples Remy went to the area where shed taken extra blankets, towels and sheets to fashion a crib on the floor where Caleb Cooper was stirring. He was a beautiful baby, she thought, still wearing his blue-and-white-striped romper with the tiny elephant. She blinked at the small bloodstains near the neck of the fabric. Now he was turning his little bandaged head, opening his mouth, bringing his tiny fist to it and making sucking motions.
Hungry again?
Remy went to the kitchenette and prepared a fresh bottle of formula. As it warmed, she thought of how things had gone at the market. It was her determination that had led her to the right baby. Theyd hunted the previous nights in vain at a mall and the bus depot before Remy had considered a flea market, where right off shed found a suitable candidate. Shed stalked the mother, talked with her, winning her trust so she could do what she had to do.
And the tornado?
It was scary. But it was a godsend.
As the winds waned after it had destroyed the Saddle Up Center, Remy saw that the mother and daughter werent moving. Remy was stiff and pinned under some wood, but she was okay. She took the stroller with the baby. It was hanging upside down but the baby was strapped in. Mason had a cut on his arm and a bruised left leg. She screamed at him to dig them out. The baby was bleeding. She soon tossed the stroller because it was useless in the mess. With Remy carrying the baby in her arms and Mason limping, they hurried through the wreckage, seeing bodies everywhere.
It was gruesome.
Mason stopped to check on a few. To help, he said, but he was taking cash and credit cards from dead people. They aint going to need it, he said. They continued on to the far end of the market and their pickup truck, hoping it was still there and still working. They found it with a broken side window, a spiderweb fracture on the upper right corner of the windshield, and the rear left quarter was crumpled, but otherwise it had survived undamaged.
Now, in the motel room, the babys crying was getting louder.
Shut that kid up! Mason barked at her from the computer.
You shut up! What do you think Im doing? His bottles not ready.
Remy had been prepared for the baby.
Days earlier shed bought the essentials: formula, the ready-to-use kind, rice cereal, applesauce, diapers, wipes and hair dye. But driving away from the destruction at the flea market shed worried about the babys little wound on his forehead. She got Mason to stop at a drugstore for bandages and disinfectant.