The Stranger's Sin. Darlene Gardner

tell me where you met her and what she said to you.”

      “Did she leave you?”

      He wouldn’t have stated it quite that way, but he wasn’t about to confide the complicated nature of his relationship with Mandy, not when large parts of Kelly’s story didn’t track. But he had to tell her something to get her to open up.

      “She left almost three weeks ago,” he said. “Aside from a message on my cell phone saying she couldn’t stand living here any longer, I haven’t heard from her.”

      “Why would she leave Toby behind?”

      “She didn’t much like being a mother, either,” he replied truthfully, but he’d said enough. It was his turn to ask the questions. “You said you met her at a coffee shop in upstate New York. Where exactly?”

      She didn’t answer immediately. “Schenectady.”

      “When was this?”

      “Last Saturday,” she said. “Like I told you, it was crowded. There was an empty seat at my table, and she asked if she could take it.”

      “What did you talk about?”

      “Nothing important. She seemed…frazzled. Nervous. She made a remark about not liking Schenectady any more than Indigo Springs. I got the impression she was passing through town.”

       Passing through. It was the same expression Kelly had used to explain what she was doing in Indigo Springs, which brought them to the most far-fetched part of her story. It had nagged at Chase all afternoon, because it just didn’t compute.

      “That’s quite a coincidence that you ended up in Indigo Springs a week later,” he said. “How did you happen to be in Pennsylvania?”

      Another hesitation. “I was visiting friends. In Scranton.” The geography only made a vague sense, which she seemed to realize. “I decided to take a detour.”

      Chase mentally reviewed her story. She was hundreds of miles from home, showing around a sketch of a woman who was essentially a stranger to return a necklace that wasn’t worth much more than a hundred dollars.

      Although she’d answered all his questions, there had been long pauses before some of her replies as though she was thinking about what to say.

      Chase wasn’t buying her story, but he couldn’t think of a single reason for her to lie. Before the night was over, he intended to unravel the puzzle.

      The heavy sound of footsteps interrupted his thoughts. His father stumbled into the family room, his face gray, clutching at his chest.

      “I put Toby…in his crib,” he said haltingly.

      Chase forgot about Kelly Delaney and her lies and sprang to his feet. He crossed the room to his father’s side, his own chest seizing with worry. “Dad? What’s wrong?”

      “I think…I’m having…a heart attack.”