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“Oh no. You’re going to tell that story again?”
“What story?” asked Frost.
“How I almost died as a baby.”
“Well, it’s true,” said Julianne. “She was born almost a month early.” Julianne pointed to the bookshelf, to the photograph of Amy as a black-haired infant, so impossibly tiny she looked like a doll nestled in her mother’s arms. “It was a small hospital in Vermont, and they weren’t sure she would make it. But my daughter pulled through. By the skin of her teeth, maybe, but Amy pulled through.” She looked at Jane. “I know what it’s like to almost lose my baby. So no, it’s not too soon to be alarmed.”
This Jane understood. When you have a child, you also grow new nerve endings that sense the slightest vibration of danger, ofanything that’s not quite right. Julianne was feeling that now, and so was Jane, even though she had no evidence of a real threat. Just a man in a raincoat who’d been too friendly. Who’d been waiting at precisely the right time and place where a murdered woman’s friends would be gathering.
It wasn’t enough to make a cop saythis is important, this means something. But a mother doesn’t need evidence to know when something is wrong.
“If you see this man again, Amy, call me. Anytime, day or night.” Jane took out a business card with her cell phone number. Amy stared at the card as if it were coated in poison, as if accepting it meant accepting the danger was real.
Her mother took the card instead. “We will,” she said.
It was Julianne who walked with them out of the study and ushered them out the front door. On the porch, Julianne closed the door behind them, so her daughter wouldn’t hear what she said to them next.
“I know you don’t want to scare Amy, but you scaredme.”
“There may be nothing at all to worry about,” said Jane. “We just want you and Dr. Antrim to keep your eyes open. And if you get any more calls from that phone number, get a name.”
“I will.”
Jane and Frost started down the porch steps and suddenly Jane stopped and looked back at Julianne. “Dr. Antrim isn’t Amy’s biological father, is he?”
Julianne paused, clearly taken aback by the question. “No. I married Mike when Amy was ten years old.”
“May I ask who her father is?”
“Why on earth do you want to know?”
“She said the man at the cemetery seemed familiar, and I wondered if—”
“I left him when Amy was eight years old. Trust me, that man in the video wasn’t him.”
“Just out of curiosity, where is her father now?”
“I don’t know.” Julianne’s mouth tightened in disgust and she looked away. “And I don’t care.”
