“That’s the only way the Wishner sisters roll.”
“Are they treating you well?” their mom asked hesitantly.
“Like royalty,” Mallory deadpanned. It broke the tension. They all laughed. Probably a little too long and a bit too heartily for the level of the joke, but it felt good.
Kelsey didn’t want to waste this precious call on chitchat, though. “The bigger question is, are you okay? Are you still being held? How much trouble are you in?”
“Don’t worry about us.” Ed sounded resolute and reassuring—his standard doctor voice. “We always knew this day might come. I think we’ll be released any day now. Everyone finally believes we didn’t do it.”
“What did you do? Exactly?”
“We were medical missionaries. We were going to save the world. But we decided to save you, instead.” Cybill said it with pride.
While grateful for her life with them, it set off alarm bells to Kelsey that they’d “saved” her. From what?
Mallory shot her an equally worried look. “Um, that sounds ominous. A baby princess doesn’t need saving. The setup here’s pretty sweet.”
“We were in a makeshift clinic in Ethiopia. Long days, treating so many people who’d never had any medical care. It was exhausting and invigorating and we thought we’d found our calling. We’d left Mallory at home with your grandparents, and were thinking of sending for her so we could stay indefinitely.”
This was nuts. Their parents had never mentioned being missionaries. They never went anywhere, never took vacations, and basically worked to convince their girls that the big, bad world was far too dangerous to ever be explored.
Ed took up the telling. “We went into the bush one day, and when we came back to our tent, there you were on our bed. Swaddled up, sleeping. There was a note pinned to your blanket. It said, ‘We know who you are. We’ll be watching you. Take good care of the baby. Tell no one, or you all die.’”
Mallory circled her hands, as if trying to pull details out. “That’s it? No signature? No explanation?”
She’d wanted answers. Instead, her parents only provided more questions. Too frustrated to sit still, Kelsey got up to pace around the Oriental rug in shades of pink and lilac in the middle of the floor. “Someone threatened you into keeping me safe? What kind of weird villain does that? Why kidnap me and not ask for ransom, but just give me away?”
Ed gave a long, deep sigh. “As we’ve said to multiple police agencies, we don’t know. The best guess is that at least two people kidnapped you. One of them had second thoughts. Giving you back would’ve meant getting caught, so they gave you to us.”
They made it sound so black and white. Kelsey did not find it so. Who just keeps a random baby that shows up like a pillow mint? “Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“We couldn’t. It said they’d be watching. And were they just watching us, or Mallory back home, too? Our only choice was to obey the note, which wasn’t a hardship. This mission was going to be our last chance to make a difference, or so we thought. Mal was unplanned—it seemed fitting that our second baby was, too.”
Mallory plucked a letter opener topped with the shape of a gold peacock and tapped it against the blotter. “How do you smuggle a baby out of a country? And into America?”
“Well, this was before nine-eleven. Security was more lax. We told the head of the mission that your mom had a medical emergency and had to return to the states ASAP. He agreed to help.”
Kelsey wanted to jump through the phone and shake her dad into spilling everything twice as fast. Through gritted teeth, she asked, “Help you do what?”
“Get out. The whole trip was a NGO, and the family who headed it was very wealthy. When they heard your mom needed immediate surgery, they sent their private plane to take us home. At the airport, we claimed you’d been born in the bush, and that’s why you weren’t on our passports. It was simple, really.”
“We stayed with your grandparents in Vermont for a few weeks,” Cybill added. “Told them we’d adopted you in Africa when both your parents died on safari.”
“Really? They believed something so…movie of the week-ish?”
“They were delighted with their new grandbaby. Meanwhile, we found the clinic in Michigan where we could start fresh. Where nobody knew us, and they’d believe that you and Mallory were our children.”
Mallory snagged the hem of Kelsey’s skirt on her fourth circuit of the run, pulling her back to the desk. “But what about the news? A royal baby was kidnapped. That was probably the lead story, every day, for quite some time. You never wondered if that explained the baby that appeared in your tent?”
There was another long silence. Dad liked his word to be accepted, no questions asked.
“From what we’ve been told, you were kidnapped two weeks before being left with us. We didn’t see any news while working at the clinic—the generator was only for use treating patients. Once we were back home, we were a bit frazzled dealing with a new baby and making sure Mallory adjusted to instantly becoming a sister. Since she was only thirteen months older, her capacity to understand being forced to share us, and everything else, was pushed to the limit.”
Kelsey shoved at her sister, grinning. They’d heard plenty of stories over the years about Mal throwing tantrums for six months straight before accepting Kelsey as a permanent fixture in her life.
“The only truly illegal thing we did was make a fake birth certificate. Your dad went into his old hospital and fudged the records so we could get one for you. We’ve been upfront about that.”
It explained so much. Why they never traveled. Why they didn’t want their daughters to move anywhere, let alone to Manhattan.
“No one ever contacted you again?”
“No, but we never stopped worrying.” More voices blurred in the background. “Oh, we have to go, girls. We love you!”
The line went dead. Mallory shook her head. “That fixed…nothing.”
“Nope.” Kelsey had never believed for a moment that her parents had engineered the kidnapping. She hadn’t needed that reassurance. Some great big “aha” explanation would’ve been nice, though. “But it felt good to talk to them. Really good.”
“It did. Will you thank King Julian for me for making it happen?”
“Absolutely.” And how odd was that? Her dad pulling strings so she could talk to her other dad? Odd and complicated and it left her unsettled, feeling vaguely disloyal to both sets of parents. Was that how the rest of her life would feel—no matter which country she called home? Would she have to choose between them to find any peace?